The Sojourner Truth Organization: Notes Toward a History

The same people who run the STO Web Archive also maintain a great blog called The Democracy and Hip-Hop Project.  As a casual fan of hip-hop, I am sometimes lost by the references, and I sometimes disagree with the perspectives offered, but I am always challenged by the content of the blog, which is nice.  It forces me to rethink most of my assumptions about culture and revolution.  People should check it out.

A recent piece posted to the blog is a critique of Noel Ignatiev’s pamphlet “Introduction to the United States:  An Autonomist Political History,” written by Lauren Ray, some of whose past writings can be found online at the Palestine Solidarity Review.  Ray criticizes the piece from an interesting perspective, challenging the implicit notion that black struggles – and even black people – are necessarily revolutionary.  I don’t agree with everything she has to say, and I think she’s right to believe that the piece – first written as an internal STO document in 1980 – would have been more nuanced had been written a decade later.  Still, she raises a very interesting question regarding STO’s organizational character.  To quote from her piece:

“One point on organization. Someone more informed than myself may be able to comment on the following: what was STO’s conception of itself as an organization? Towards the very end of the article it states something to the effect of it having a character of an organization of white people—was that a conscious organizational choice? I know some groups like the White Panther Party [& the Patriot Party if I remember correctly] chose to organize whites only because as white people they felt their duty and only authority was to speak to their white brethren about white supremacy. I bring this up partially because I’ve heard it argued before that there should be black-only and white-only, etc. organizations rather than multiracial organizations, as that will best allow space and security to people of color to rediscover our own strength and leadership and revolutionary potential. That point alone is not invalid, but some folks take it to the extreme to say that any involvement in multiracial organization is a sign of the false consciousness of the people of color involved (because how can we possibly be self-governing leaders around white people whose inherent nature it is to suppress those instincts) and the egotism of white folks (because they won’t give people of color that space to organize autonomously).

I think it’s important to examine and take some direction on this issue from CLR James & Trotsky’s 1939 discussions in Coyoacan, Mexico on black struggle in the U.S. During these discussions, CLR is debating the validity of American Trotskyists advocating black self-determination. He says, well black folks by and large in the U.S. want their freedom and humanity but aren’t dead set on separation from white folks in order to enjoy that freedom. So he says, yes, black-only organizations are ok, brown only, red, yellow, and blue only if people want, but it has to be granted that folks can and must be self-governing and thus their choice to organize in multiracial collectives is as valid as a choice for race/identity based groups. I’m wondering what STO’s take on this was/would’ve been.”

When I first heard about STO a decade ago, it was in the context of their anti-imperialist period, which was more or less ending when Ignatiev (then Ignatin) wrote the essay in question.  During that period, STO was primarily identified with the white anti-imperialist solidarity movement, which lent its support to various revolutionary nationalist movements, including Puerto Rican and New Afrikan independence struggles and the Iranian students’ movement against the Shah.  As such, I initially believed that STO had an explicit self-conception as an all-white organization. 

As my research has proceeded, I’ve learned of a number of people of color (or “third world people,” in the parlance of the day) who were members of STO at various points.  This included two founding members, one a veteran of the Black Panther Party, the other a Mexican communist, both of whom left the group in the first few years.  Several years later, after having expanded to include a small number of non-white members, STO underwent a difficult split in which the entire “third world caucus” left the organization due to a dispute over their autonomy within the group.  After this point (the beginning of 1978), it is my impression that no further members of color joined the group, although as far as I am aware STO never formally adopted any policy establishing itself as all-white.

Having worked over the years in various groups (mostly but not exclusively built around anarchist politics) that have attempted to exist as multi-racial when in fact they were white-dominated, I am well aware of the problems that frequently beset such efforts.  What is interesting to me about STO is that despite their sophisticated analysis of white supremacy and white skin privilege – which I think was far more nuanced than Ray gives them credit for, but that’s another topic – they were never able to resolve these issues in practice.  The result was an ongoing pattern of a white-led group wanting to recruit members of color, but not being able to deal with the real-world repercussions of this desire. 

Ray raises the question of false consciousness on the part of people of color who participate in multi-racial organizations.  Few people in STO, and Ignatin least of all, had much use for the concept of false consciousness, although they did utilize a gramscian conception of dual consciousness, in which workers contain within themselves both bourgeois and proletarian worldviews.  This analysis was most often applied to white workers, with the understanding that a proletarian worldview necessarily implied class unity in opposition to the divisiveness of white supremacy.  As Ray correctly infers, STO was plagued by a tendency “to take an uncritical eye towards (specifically) the black radical tradition or black working class politics.”  But this very fact indicates that the group did not ascribe false consciousness to those people of color who opt to work within multiracial organizations.

As to Ray’s last question, regarding STO’s hypothetical response to the perspective offered by James in his discussion with Trotsky, I think the answer is complicated.  Undoubtedly the group would have agreed with the proposition that self-determination includes the option to work within multiracial organizations.  At the same time, especially during its anti-imperialist period, STO did tend to emphasize support for revolutionary nationalist organizations that excluded whites.  (Not all of these groups were simply separatist, however; the Moviemento de Liberacion Nacional (MLN), for instance, was a joint Puerto Rican and Mexican revolutionary organization.)  STO did encourage, for example, black or Puerto Rican revolutionaries to consider joining black or Puerto Rican organizations, although membership was open to them if they decided that STO reflected their politics better than any of the available alternatives.  

This probably doesn’t constitute the sort of openness to that Ray was presumably hoping for.  From my own perspective, I think the difficulties STO encountered in dealing with these issues represent one of the more unfortunate aspects of the group’s history, but I don’t have a good answer as to how to do better.  The readily available alternatives – traditional “multi-racial” but white-dominated groups like the RCP, and all-white solidarity outfits like Prairie Fire – both suffer from even bigger problems.  I’d like to hear Ray’s take (or that of others) on how these issues can be better resolved by revolutionaries today.