The Sojourner Truth Organization: Notes Toward a History

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.

Oh yes, the book.  I’m researching a history of the Sojourner Truth Organization, a revolutionary group based largely in Chicago during the 1970’s and 1980’s.  STO, as it is commonly known, created a small but vibrant political tendency around the concepts of challenging dual consciousness, opposing white supremacy, supporting extra-union organizing in factory settings, defending anti-imperialist and national liberation struggles, and building an internal culture of intellectual rigor and sophistication.  One former member described the group to me as “an organization of revolutionaries who tried to think.” 

I intend for my book to be a political intervention, aimed at anarchists and other revolutionaries, encouraging a rethinking of contemporary theory and strategy by drawing on the experiences and perspectives of a largely forgotten group of revolutionaries.  I’m not interested in what one former member called “sociology” (by which I think he meant depoliticized, academic assessments), but rather in the lessons that can be learned by present-day and future radicals from this particular corner of hidden history.

My research so far has included interviews with almost a dozen former members (with at least as many more hopefully still to come), as well as a comprehensive archival search for materials related to the group.  In this context, I have worked somewhat in tandem with the newly created web archive of STO publications.  I want to straddle several historical approaches:  social history and intellectual history are equally important to me. 

It is perhaps important that I have no formal background in history:  I’m not an academic, and haven’t taken a course in history since my undergraduate days.  In several cases, I suspect that my position outside the academy has been important to my interviewees:  if I had been working on a dissertation, I think some of them never would have agreed to speak with me.  I try not to take inordinate pride in my “outsider” status:  I have an extremely privileged educational background, and I am fortunate to have one of those office jobs that allows me to spend time on projects like this when no one is looking.  Besides, I will undoubtedly get all sorts of things wrong precisely because I haven’t immersed myself in all the relevant historiographic material, because I don’t have any methodological training, and because I lack any institutional support.

Similarly, my background as an anarchist (albeit an anarchist-communist) has served to limit somewhat my familiarity with the canonical texts of Marxism and Leninism that a group like STO depended on.  I read volume 1 of Capital a dozen years ago for a history seminar on Marxism, but I am by no means a Marxologist.  I have spent my time with State and Revolution and the Prison Notebooks, but am far less familiar with CLR James than I should be.  Nor am I familiar with much of the contemporary milieu of Marxist theory:  I’ve read a lot of Harry Cleaver and bits of Negri (though not Empire yet, much less Multitude), but this Ranciere person that Nate keeps talking about is unfamiliar to me.  Interestingly, my knowledge base is out of date in a way that might make it actually more compatible with the study of STO, since I’m more familiar with radical theory from the seventies and eighties than I am with theory today.

In any event, I am starting a blog, so that I can utilize a collective process of discussion to help fill the gaps in my knowledge base; so that I can test some ideas and understandings on a small and knowledgeable audience; so that I can force myself to write down the random thoughts that come unbidden into my mind; so that I can introduce the history of STO to a (slightly) broader audience.  Please let me know what you think.