The Sojourner Truth Organization: Notes Toward a History

At this point, I’ve interviewed a dozen former members of STO for this project, asking a mix of questions about their recollections, their present outlook, and other topics.  One question I have asked every interviewee concerns the question of shared cultural touchstones within the organization:  were there common interests (in music, sports, art, literature, whatever) that helped define the organization above and beyond shared politics and a common strategy?

I ask the question as a result of my own experiences coming to politics through anarchism.  Since at least the early 1980’s, anarchism – especially in North America, but also in Europe and much of Latin America – has been identified with a sort of deliberate sub-cultural unity, mostly built around punk rock music and aesthetics.  In my experience, this has been a near-constant feature of just about every anarchist-dominated grouping, project or initiative I have participated in.  It has had both good effects (enhanced affinity and a deeper commitment to solidarity) and bad effects, most notoriously exclusivity and self-marginalization. 

(Of course, there have always been exceptions to this uniformity, which in any event is probably more apparent than substantive when the broad spectrum of anarchists in North America is considered.  I, for example, have never been more than marginally influenced by punk aesthetics (those couple stints with green hair were about it), although I do retain a soft-spot for a lot of older punk music (DK’s, Avengers, Gang of Four, the Clash of course) that allows me to “pass” in some circumstances despite my far-from-punk personal appearance.)

In any event, I have always wondered whether STO held any comparable common cultural framework during its existence.  From reading the published output of the organization, no such shared culture is apparent.  But since this is precisely the sort of lived experience that gets erased in the written record, it seems important to me to ask this kind of question in interviews.  The variety of answers has been intriguing.

Most former members agree that the general answer to my question is “no.”  As one ex-STO’er put it, “What I liked about STO was that there was an explicit renunciation of this sort of thing, with especially [two prominent members] insisting that it must be the political commitment and not the personal affinity that anchored a revolutionary group.”  At the same time, most people I’ve spoken with acknowledge that there were multiple smaller groupings within the organization that shared certain cultural affinities, but as the same former member said, “the affinity grew out of the politics and not vice versa.”  This represents an instructive contrast with the anarchist experience over the two decades since the demise of STO.

Other answers have been similarly insightful.  Some people have pointed to the centrality of cultural issues in the work of CLR James, especially in his writings on topics like cricket and Melville, and have wondered how these aspects were left out of STO’s “Jamesian” approach to politics.  This is especially worrisome since James tied the cultural aspects of working class life more or less directly to the anti-Stalinist politics that inspired STO.

At the same time, other former members have indicated that this sort of concern with “working class culture” resulted in some amusingly mechanical sorts of cultural identifications.  Another former member claims that “there was a certain shit-kicking, Johnny Cash-like, ‘we’re gonna be like workers’ culture.”  This might be seen to represent a not so instructive version of affinity “growing” out of politics.

However, there are other members who think that culture was actually quite important.  One former member in particular highlights music as having been a key aspect of the organization’s internal culture.  People went dancing and some even played music themselves.  Two members of the group took a trip to California in 1978, partly to investigate the newly developing punk music scene in LA and the bay area.  Later, in the early 80’s, the punk milieu was considered by some in STO to be fertile ground for the group’s approach to militant, autonomous, direct action politics.  Seen from this angle, STO’s approach to punk rock wasn’t that different from that of anarchists as far back as the turn to punk made by the British anarcho-pacifists who started the band CRASS around the same time.

In the end, the cultural aspects of STO’s existence remain hard to pin down, and more interviews will hopefully help flesh out the range of perspectives.  Undoubtedly, however, the contradictory answers to my question reflect the contradictions within the organization as much as they represent the tricks of individual memory.