The Sojourner Truth Organization: Notes Toward a History

[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.]

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This workshop reviews the history and legacy of the Sojourner Truth Organization, a revolutionary group based in the midwestern United States in the 1970’s and 1980’s.  Though STO was avowedly Marxist, anarchists have much to gain from a critical analysis of the group’s trajectory.  We will focus on three aspects of STO’s legacy that speak to the experience of North American anarchists today:  extra-union labor organizing, direct action anti-fascism, and the white-skin privilege analysis.

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The Sojourner Truth Organization was a small, mostly white revolutionary group, based primarily in Chicago and other mid-western cities.  It existed approximately from 1970 until 1985 (and is now largely forgotten).  During that time, STO developed a body of theory and practice that holds significant lessons for anarchists today, despite the group’s self-understanding as a Leninist organization.  STO was proudly unorthodox and essentially anti-authoritarian in its Leninism, and its emphasis on the development of autonomous mass organizations as institutions of dual power has a clear counterpart in contemporary anarchist theory and practice.  The group’s work on extra-union labor organizing, direct action anti-fascism, and especially the challenge to white supremacy and white skin privilege in the white working class, all resonate today with sections of the anarchist movement in North America.  At the same time, contemporary anarchists (both those of us supportive of these three approaches to revolutionary strategy, as well as those opposed to or critical of them) tend to vulgarize and often misunderstand the nuanced political analysis and complex real-world experiences of STO, to the extent that we are aware of them in the first place.  Myths about the group abound (they were Maoists; they were all talk and no action; they were anti-worker or at least anti-white-worker; etc.), and concrete information about the organization’s real history is scarce.  The purpose of this workshop is to explore and clarify the historical trajectory of the group, with an eye to helping improve political analysis and organizing strategy for anarchists and other revolutionaries now and in the future.  Toward this end, I will discuss both the theoretical underpinnings of STO’s work, and the lived experience of that work in factories, communities, and social movements of that time.