One of my best friends is a very accomplished labor organizer, with years of experience working for teachers and nurses unions; he also has really solid politics, and is one of the handful of people who can make me rethink my assumptions from scratch. I recently sent him a quick note about my STO research, and in passing used the phrase “extra-union organizing,” without giving the term much thought. (more…)
During its first several years of existence, STO followed a straightforward strategy that it called “Industrial Concentration.” When I first encountered this notion many years before I ever heard of STO, it was introduced to me as a movement within the North American New Left “back to the factories” (as opposed to the tendency that went “back to the land”). Another common phrasing was “production work,” as in “point-of-production.” Regardless of the terminology, the general proposition was that members of STO (with a few exceptions) were expected to obtain factory jobs as a central part of their political work. (more…)
Ah, white Skin privilege. Years before I ever heard of the Sojourner Truth Organization, I had heard this term, perhaps initially in some sort of workshop for white people confronting racism. By the time I graduated from college, I was familiar with the journal Race Traitor, whose primary editor I knew was Noel Ignatiev. By the time I met Noel in person a year or two later, I was just becoming aware of the past existence of STO. All of this is fitting, in a way, because probably the single greatest legacy of STO to the white left of the last two decades has been precisely the notion that people who are socially designated as white have specific privileges as a result. (more…)
[I have been asked to give a workshop at the upcoming Montreal Anarchist Bookfair on the topic of STO and its legacy for anarchists. Below is the bulk of the text of my proposal for the workshop, which gives some additional context to my interest in this project.] (more…)
One of the defining elements of STO’s political analysis was the concept of “dual consciousness.” This referred to the notion that working class people (in some formulations, white working class people) held two competing forms of consciousness, essentially a bourgeois and a proletarian consciousness. (more…)
Almost everyone I talk to about my project asks why I have chosen to produce a history of the Sojourner Truth Organization. I offer a slightly different response each time, and here I’ll offer something of a composite of what I’ve said before to others. (more…)
For those of you who have been reading this and have been wondering, what was this group in the first place, I will offer here a very brief, very simplistic sketch of the historical trajectory of STO. It is also partisan in some ways, as I frame the group’s history within a somewhat arbitrary distinction into three eras of the group’s existence. (more…)
I’ve been exploring blog-land lately, beginning with “Sketchy Thoughts” and “What in the Hell…”. Karl and Nate can be thought of as representing different under-examined aspects of my politics: Karl spends more time in the world of inter/nationalism and anti-imperialism than I have in recent years (he is sometimes less critical than I would like for him to be, although his recent post on Nepal was thoughtful and nuanced), while Nate seems like a vision of the person I could have become if I hadn’t turned my back on radical philosophy after I got my BA eleven years ago. Through the links on their sites, I have encountered a funny world of academics and academics-in-training, of reasonably smart Maoists and just-barely-still anarchists. Since I’m already a compulsive reader, this stuff has kept me busy for the last week or so, with no end in sight. It also has made me think that maintaining a blog would be one way to make myself read less and write more. Since I intend to write a book one of these days, I want to get back into form before diving in too deep. (more…)
