96 Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying (Boston: South End Press, 1998 [1975]), 49–51.
97 Telephone interview with Noel Ignatiev, July 16, 2005.
98 Much of the information that follows comes from Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, “General Introduction,” in Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971).
99 Karl Marx, The German Ideology (1846), Chapter One, Part B. Available online at http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01b.htm (accessed September 15, 2011).
100 See Sojourner Truth Organization, Toward a Revolutionary Party: Ideas on Strategy and Organization (Chicago: STO, 1976 [1971]). Hereafter, TARP. This pamphlet was officially signed by STO, but was largely written by Hamerquist. The full text is available online at http://sojournertruth.net/tarp.html (accessed September 15, 2011).
101 Hamerquist, “Reflections on Organizing” (1970), in Sojourner Truth Organization, Workplace Papers (Chicago: STO, 1980), 11.
102 TARP, 32. Ellipsis in original.
103 See, for example, Ted Allen, “White Supremacy in US History” (1973), in the collection Understanding and Fighting White Supremacy (Chicago: STO, 1976). This text is available online at http://www.sojournertruth.net/whitesupremushist.html (accessed September 15, 2011).
104 V.I. Lenin, What is to be Done? Burning Questions of our Movement (1902), available online at http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/ (accessed September 15, 2011).
105 This is sometimes portrayed as the contrast between the Lenin of What is to be Done? and the Lenin of State and Revolution, which was written in 1917, on the eve of the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia.
106 TARP, 13.
107 For an analysis of the conservative and corrupt character of the North American labor movement at the end of the sixties, see Stanley Aronowitz, False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973).
108 For more on the IWW, see Joyce Kornbluh, ed., Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1998); and Paul Buhle and Nicole Schulman, eds., Wobblies! A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World (New York: Verso, 2005).
109 Noel Ignatin, “Preface,” in Workplace Papers, iii.
110 Author interview with Don Hamerquist, September 14, 2006. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this document has also been lost. For more on the concept of the general strike within a wobbly context, see The General Strike for Industrial Freedom (Chicago: IWW, 1946).
111 See the unsigned Outline History of Sojourner Truth, September 1972, in Detroit Revolutionary Movements Collection, Subseries F, box 15, Reuther Library, Wayne State University. This document is available online at http://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-1/sto.htm (accessed September 15, 2011).
112 Telephone interview with John Strucker, February 5, 2006.
113 Kathy and Lynn, “Organizing in an Electrical Plant in Chicago,” in Collective Works 1, no. 1, October 1974, 11–20. This piece pseudonymously refers to the “AC” plant, and changes the names of STO members and ex-members then working there, in order to protect the then-ongoing organizing efforts. However, the description of the plant and STO’s efforts there clearly match the descriptions offered in interviews with several former STO members, especially John Strucker, February 5, 2006.
114 This information comes largely from my interviews in 2006 with John Strucker, Don Hamerquist (who worked there for a time), and Noel Ignatiev (who never worked there).
115 See the “shop sheets” appendix at the end of Workplace Papers. Noel Ignatiev provided me with photocopies of dozens of additional shop sheets.
116 Hamerquist, “Reflections on Organizing,” 10.
117 Kathy and Lynn, “Organizing in an Electrical Plant in Chicago,” 13.
118 “What We Want,” in Bread and Roses: A Paper by and for Working Women 1, no. 1 (n.d., but late 1970), 2. Amherst College Archives and Special Collections, Bloom Alternative Press Collection. Bread and Roses was also apparently the last publication to be put out under the name “Sojourner Truth Communist Organization.” The May 1971 edition of the Insurgent Worker was attributed simply to the “Sojourner Truth Organization.”
119 See Insurgent Worker Nov–Dec. 1971 on the controls and on Attica, and Insurgent Worker June/July 1972 on Vietnam and GI resistance.
120 In some cases the progression was in the opposite direction: campaigns first, publications second, although in most of the major points of concentration, and certainly at Stewart-Warner, the publications came first. Kathy and Lynn, “Organizing in an Electrical Plant in Chicago.”
121 Talk Back 2, no. 5, February 25, 1974, in author’s possession. Sections of this issue, including documents from the “Filthy Billy” union election campaign, as well as other leaflets STO distributed on shop floors at other factories, are available online at http://sojournertruth.net/shopleaflets.pdf