The Sojourner Truth Organization: Notes Toward a History

[This is the text of my remarks for the panel "Islamophobia, Antisemitism and Fascism:  Challenges for Anti-Capitalists" at the Renewing the Anarchist Tradition conference in Vermont earlier this month.  The panel also featured remarks by Rami El-Amine and by my brother, Peter Staudenmaier.  A brief but productive open discussion focused heavily on questions of solidarity.  The panel was an outgrowth of my presentation at the National Conference on Organized Resistance last spring in Washington DC.  Also worth looking at is the exchange between myself and Rami El-Amine in the latest issue of Upping the Anti-.  At some point the panel should be available online as an audio file, and I will link to it here.]

[This is the text of the presentation I gave at the Renewing the Anarchist Tradition Conference last weekend in Vermont.  The discussion afterwards was pretty good, I thought, mostly relating to the various experiences attendees had accumulated over years of working in "multi-racial" or "all-white" or "people of color" projects, organizations, and campaigns, and lessons people had learned as a result.  The session was recorded, and once an audio file appears on the internet, I will offer a link here.]

In early November, I will be participating in the 2007 Renewing the Anarchist Tradition conference in Vermont, sponsored by the Institute for Anarchist Studies.  I will be giving a presentation on "The White Skin Privilege Concept:  From Margin to Center of Revolutionary Politics," and I will be participating in a panel discussion on "Islamophobia, Antisemitism and Fascism:  Challenges for Anti-Capitalists," alongside Rami El-Amine, Andrea Maria, and my brother, Peter Staudenmaier.  Sadly, registration is already closed, so those of you not already planning to attend will have to wait for me to post the text of my presentations here, after the conference is over.

It’s been far far too long since I last posted anything here.  I could offer the usual excuses (children, work, etc.), but instead I’ll try to tell a little story that relates directly to both my current life as a parent and to the history of STO.

Some small number of people out there have probably begun to wonder why I haven’t posted anything here in over two months.  Suffice it to say that it’s been a busy two months:  first we moved, and then on May 14th we welcomed Nicolas William Carlson to the world.  (more…)

This is the text of a talk I gave this past weekend at the National Conference on Organized Resistance in Washington DC.  It’s not necessarily directly relevant to my research on STO, although I do mention the debt the Three Way Fight perspective owes to some of the anti-fascist work done by STO in the late seventies and into the eighties.  Regardless, I thought it would be good to post it up here in hopes of getting critical feedback.  (more…)

My site meter tells me many interesting things about the people who visit this blog.  One thing it tells me fairly often is that people come here having used google or ask.com to search for things like “what is sojourner truth’s contribution to history?”  Often the server from which these visitors originate is a public school district.  Now that February (and with it, Black History Month) has arrived, these sorts of hits are proliferating, and becoming possibly a majority of the (admittedly small number of) visits to my blog.  I can’t help but wonder what these students think when they access “The Legacy for Anarchists” while trying to find out about Sojourner Truth’s legacy.  I guess I hope at least a few of them are interested in what I have to say…

The same people who run the STO Web Archive also maintain a great blog called The Democracy and Hip-Hop Project.  As a casual fan of hip-hop, I am sometimes lost by the references, and I sometimes disagree with the perspectives offered, but I am always challenged by the content of the blog, which is nice.  It forces me to rethink most of my assumptions about culture and revolution.  People should check it out.

A recent piece posted to the blog is a critique of Noel Ignatiev’s pamphlet “Introduction to the United States:  An Autonomist Political History,” written by Lauren Ray, some of whose past writings can be found online at the Palestine Solidarity Review.  Ray criticizes the piece from an interesting perspective, challenging the implicit notion that black struggles – and even black people – are necessarily revolutionary.  I don’t agree with everything she has to say, and I think she’s right to believe that the piece – first written as an internal STO document in 1980 – would have been more nuanced had been written a decade later.  Still, she raises a very interesting question regarding STO’s organizational character.  (more…)

After nearly two years of research, I’ve finally started working on some draft sections of what I hope will become a manuscript for the long (if not hotly) anticipated book.  Of course, my research is ongoing as well (as is my day job, and my parenting responsibilities), which means I have even less time than previously for writing things that get posted here.  So, while I will try to maintain my more or less monthly efforts to update the blog, new posts may become even less frequent in the new year.

At the same time, I wanted to alert people to one of the newer items up over at the STO web archive:  the collection called Fascism in the US?, which gives a good sampling of the group’s thinking on fascism and anti-fascism.  (more…)

Long before I ever encountered STO or learned of the inspiration the group took from CLR James, I was myself deeply influenced by the Greek/French revolutionary theorist Cornelius Castoriadis, who collaborated with James (and Grace Lee Boggs) on the seminal document Facing Reality.  I wrote my undergraduate thesis on Castoriadis, emphasizing his trajectory from revolutionary Marxism to something approaching anarchism.  In that process, I happened upon the following quote, which I still find helpful in framing the distinction between revolution and reform: (more…)