Industrial Concentration
April 19, 2006During 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.
The theoretical basis for this was the notion that in the context of industrial production, the proletariat experiences both the exploitation that can produce a desire for revolution, and the “discipline” of the factory, which is the precondition for the possibility of revolution. That is, bosses impose a set of demands on workers – namely, that they work together and work efficiently – as a way to improve the profitability of the labor process, but this very action improves the capability of the workers themselves to run the show. The show in question can be the factory (think, “the boss needs us, we don’t need the boss”) or it can be society as a whole (think, “dictatorship of the proletariat”). In other words, STO believed that the industrial working class was uniquely positioned to spark and provide direction to a communist revolution in North America. One former member of STO refers to this segment of the class as “the Petrograd/Detroit proletariat.”
Petrograd obviously refers to the key role of the industrial working class of that city in the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917. Detroit, on the other hand, represented an example that was much closer to home for a group of revolutionaries in Chicago at the turn of the 1970’s: the experiences of DRUM, ELRUM, and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW). In the late 1960’s black revolutionaries in Detroit developed a political strategy based on organizing workers in auto plants (DRUM stood for Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, ELRUM was for the Eldon Avenue Gear and Axle Plant operated by Chrysler); this organizing happened outside the established union, the United Auto Workers, and often led to direct conflicts with the UAW. [This was the crux of “extra-union” organizing, which was also a priority for STO. More on this soon…] For STO, the lived experience of revolutionaries in Detroit was probably more important in determining their own political theory than the writings of Lenin or even Marx.
Another, somewhat more distant influence was the Italian movement known as “operaismo,” which reflected a similar approach to workplace organizing that was then current in Italy. Especially after the Hot Autumn of 1969, this model was an example to like-minded revolutionaries around the world. Interestingly, “operaismo” was also influenced by the Detroit experience, and members of the LRBW visited Italy more than once, meeting with comrades involved in comparable struggles in the FIAT auto plants of Turin and elsewhere. The most famous former advocate of “operaismo” is Toni Negri, now famous for Empire and Multitude, who seems to have rejected much of the theoretical basis of his former politics. STO had some sort of contact with Negri’s organization at the time, Potere Operaio (Worker’s Power), although the extent of their interaction is not yet clear to me.
During the early years of the 1970’s, when STO was developing its version of industrial concentration, the only other group in the Chicago area that was pursuing a similar strategy was the Communist Party USA. At that time, the October League and the Revolutionary Union were only just beginning to make inroads in the Chicago area, and they had not yet prioritized the sort of production work that STO emphasized. In those years, according to former members, STO was likely to find out about, and was able to intervene in support of, just about every independent shop floor struggle in the Chicago area.
An important distinction in production work was between heavy and light industry. Heavy industry includes steel, auto, auto, and other sectors characterized by massive workforces (US Steel, for instance, employed tens of thousands of people in each of two complexes in the Chicago area) and heavy investment in machinery, equipment, and infrastructure. Light industry, by contrast, takes the form of small factories with less emphasis on the “dead labor” of Capital; one STO member, for example, worked at a factory that employed forty people to produce lard. In general, the workers in heavy industry have stronger unions and receive better pay for less demanding work, while those in light industry are less likely to be unionized, more likely to be women (often immigrants) of color, and have to deal with extremely demanding working conditions. STO had a presence in both sorts of factory, and was in some cases able to build connections between workers in these two different worlds.
By the mid-70’s, however, several factors had combined to turn STO’s strategy away from industrial concentration. First, a significant percentage of STO’s factory-employed membership left the group, for a variety of reasons. Second, the beginnings of what came to be known as “deindustrialization” led to the closure or shrinkage of many factories. Third, groups like the October League were able to recruit members away STO, partly because they were willing to pursue union reform strategy that produced more instant gratification than STO’s independent approach. [Again, more on this soon.] As a result, STO’s political direction changed substantially, as I have noted previously.
