Socialists Aim for Assembly Seat in Kathy Hochul’s Backyard

The most obvious aspect of that period of class struggle was its massive strike wave. In the years between 1965 and 1975, more strikes occurred in the United States than during any other decade in the country’s history.

During that decade, there was an average of 350 “major” strikes per year; as defined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), major strikes are those consisting of over a thousand workers and lasting one shift or more. In the last reported decade, 2014–2024, such “major strikes” averaged seventeen a year, an almost identical figure for the preceding three decades. As such, in the years 1965–1975, there were twenty times more major strikes annually compared to the yearly average in the subsequent forty years, after neoliberal capitalism’s historic victory over the international working class.

The BLS also used to list the number of strikes it considered minor, those of 999 and fewer workers. From 1965–1975, the number of such smaller strikes varied between four thousand and six thousand per year. This inspiring class struggle of one hundred strikes a week, year in and year out for an entire decade, was not experienced by workers, or even their bosses, as a “minor” occurrence. Unfortunately, it is not possible to compare those figures with the reactionary downturn of the last forty years, because the BLS stopped reporting on minor strikes during the Reagan administration

The high point of strikes was in 1970, with 5,700 strikes by over three million workers. The largest were at General Motors (320,000 workers for sixty-seven days), General Electric (165,000 workers for 102 days), and on the railroads. 1970 was like 1919, 1937, or 1946 — one of the great defining years of working-class history.

Of all the strikes in this period, one-quarter to one-third were wildcats — that is, not called, sanctioned, or protected by the unions but organized by the workers from below. The red year of 1970 had two of the largest and longest wildcat strikes in US history. Two hundred thousand postal workers went out for eight days, with the National Guard being called in to sort the mail, and 110,000 Teamsters, centered in Los Angeles, wildcatted for eight weeks.

There was even one political strike. In 1969 in West Virginia, forty-five thousand coal miners vowed to stay out on strike until the state legislature passed a pension bill for miners suffering from black lung disease. The state legislature capitulated.

But it wasn’t just strikes; there were also contract rejections. Until 1962, no figures were kept on contract rejections, because they were so rare. Only five years later, 14 percent of all contracts were being rejected. This wave of rejections created the state of affairs then called “tripod negotiations,” bargaining between management, the union, and the rank and file. As Vince Meredith, one of the leaders of the rank-and-file group UPSurge, conveyed this idea at the group’s founding conference: “When they come in with an offer, vote it down. They’ll come in with a better one. We negotiate the contract on the picket line.” That was part of the arsenal of union militants at the time.

Workplace grievances tripled in those years as well. In the United Auto Workers (UAW), they exploded, going up by a factor of fifteen. New unions were formed among farmworkers, hospital workers, teachers, and public employees. Successful unionization drives for teachers and public employees often required illegal strikes, breaking laws that banned their right to strike and fighting back against government intervention and arrests. In some major unions in the late ’60s, including steel and electric, the union bureaucracy tried to protect itself against growing dissatisfaction and rank-and-file militancy by dumping some officials seen as too conservative or too close to the bosses.

In the same years, large numbers of local union oppositions also formed; black, brown, and women’s caucuses and more general rank-and-file groups. The IS itself initiated and sustained over thirty-five local rank-and-file groups.

National rank-and-file groups were also active during those years. The most important of these was the Miners for Democracy (MFD), built from the rank-and-file black lung movement and mine safety struggles. MFD won control of the United Mine Workers of America on the national level. But as soon as the new officials entered office, they dissolved the MFD and quickly reverted to the practices of their predecessors. The result was a tremendous learning experience for the IS, with both positive lessons about the potential and necessity of national rank-and-file organizing and a negative one about reliance on reform officials. One decisive lesson for us was that when a rank-and-file caucus wins elections, the ranks have to remain organized and keep their caucus alive in order to control the new officers.

In addition to the MFD, there was also a national caucus in the UAW, the United National Caucus. In steel, there was Steelworkers Fight Back. There was also a new national caucus in the teachers’ union. In all of those caucuses, the IS played some role, a major or minor part of the larger effort, but always significant to us. And there were a few national caucuses that the IS was the major force in launching: the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) and UPSurge in the Teamsters, and United Action in Telephone. The latter effort was the culmination of work begun by seven ISers who industrialized in the telephone industry in New York City.

First, the tight labor market of the 1960s gave workers a strong sense of job security. If you were fired, you could get another job. This was the high point of what the French call “the Thirty Glorious Years,” the postwar boom that was among the largest and longest in capitalist history. With annual growth rates of 6 percent in the mid-1960s, both profits and living standards were rising.

But in 1966, following years of price stability, that “mother of all strikes” — inflation — suddenly emerged and continued to escalate for years. Spiraling prices arose in the context of a labor shortage; unemployment had dropped to 3.5 percent. Except for the wartime years of World War II and the Korean War, the unemployment rate was the lowest of the last century. The employers wanted, needed, demanded, were desperate for more workers.

The labor market opened up jobs for new, young workers, many of whom were influenced by the radical political and social movements of those years. The US working class in the 1960s was the youngest in the last century, with a huge number of workers under the age of twenty-five. At the famously militant Lordstown Auto, the workforce, including many Vietnam vets, had an average age of twenty-four.

Capitalists were compelled to restrain deep-seated, intensely racist and sexist beliefs and their corresponding discriminatory employment practices. They were forced to hire blacks, women, and other minorities, as they had briefly done during World War II. To take one example, the Detroit autoworkers rapidly changed from being a largely white workforce to being 25 percent or more black workers. In some plants, the majority of the workers were black. In the huge Eldon Gear and Axle plant, it was 80 percent.

This tight labor market created a shift in the balance of power, as the working class developed a tremendous awareness of job security. Workers understood how much the company needed and could not replace them. In Detroit, if militant activity led to your being fired, you could always get a job down the street. In some factories, labor shortage was so acute that anything was possible. Local folklore held that there were cases of fired workers going into the same factory hiring hall and getting a job on the next shift.

Job security was one of the underlying influences that contributed to working-class confidence and combativity. For most of the last half-century, workers have lived in apprehension that they were dependent on the company, that you needed them more than they needed you, that they might outsource your job to China or Mexico, and that if you lost your job you would probably be forced to take a worse one, if you could find one at all. These anxieties, created by the ruling-class turn to neoliberalism and globalization, have frightened many workers into compliance with declining, miserable conditions.

By 1968, profit rates had started to fall, a result of renewed international competition. With scarce labor, at first it was impossible for the companies to cut wages. To restore profits the companies used their traditional maneuver: increasing productivity through speedup. Labor peace during the Cold War years had been maintained by “sweetheart deals” between the employers and the union bureaucracy. In return for higher wages and fringe benefits, the union officials traded off control over working conditions and workers’ shop-floor power. The implementation of this class collaboration turned the union bureaucracy into an additional layer of control, policing the workforce.

It’s not surprising, therefore, that a lot of the rank-and-file rebellion from below stemmed from intolerable working conditions, the poor quality of life on the job, and unsafe or dehumanizing conditions on the shop floor, which the union officialdom refused to fight against. Nor should it come as a surprise that the revolt targeted the union bureaucracy as well as the employers.

In 1966, the IS put out a pamphlet called “A New Era of Labor Revolt,” by one of our members, Stan Weir, that quickly became a widely reprinted labor classic. It was the first appreciation on the Left of the emergent working-class upsurge of the mid-1960s, and contained the initial elements of what became the IS’s labor work. Weir argued that the militant CIO unions had degenerated when the rising labor bureaucracy consolidated its control by shifting power out of the shops and into international headquarters. Doing so facilitated labor officials’ ability to trade off the gains that the CIO organizing drive had secured in working conditions and shop-floor organization. Rebellion against the effects of the trade-off arose as guerrilla warfare in the early ’60s, with wildcat strikes over speedup and safety violations. The security provided workers by the labor shortage helped shift the terrain to a more generalized working-class revolt.

Weir proposed that the strategy for militants in the new upsurge was to bring the unions back into the workplace, to restore on-the-job unions in order to fight to “humanize working conditions.” The fight to make work life bearable, required an in-plant, militant leadership. This could be created by rebuilding the activist shop-steward system of the early CIO. We popularized this strategy with the slogan “A steward for every foreman.”

Weir also proposed changing the grievance procedure, which presumed guilt and punishment, unless the union won the grievance, to its opposite. Workers must be presumed innocent unless proven guilty, a basic right of civil society. “Innocent until proven guilty” became the most popular of our demands among the ranks.

This trio of slogans, humanize working conditions; a steward for every foreman; and innocent until proven guilty were essential elements of our rank-and-file strategy to restore workers power at the point of production as the vehicle for class struggle. These ideas still retain all of their cogency for rank-and-file organizing today.

In addition to favorable economic conditions, the emerging movements of the 1960s were also decisive in shaping this rebellion. Movement battles and victories had a transformative effect, leading to a process of class political development among sections of the working class. It began with the struggles of the civil rights and black liberation movements, whose active base was black workers and students. Their effect on consciousness through the 1960s, which went well beyond the black community, was to legitimate dissent; validate courage, bravery, and militancy; support direct action; and to favor changing the system. It raised ideas of freedom now, of ending racism and discrimination, of equality, of struggle and control from below as the path to follow, of participatory democracy, of power to the people. The insurrectionary character of the hundreds of ghetto uprisings opened the road for revolutionary politics and organizations, most notably the Black Panther Party and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers.

These organizations posed revolution not simply as an abstract ideal from the historical past or a vision for a far-off future, but as a reality, and current possibility, and spread revolutionary ideas among young people, students, and workers. Almost the entire generation of leftists believed that revolution would occur in our lifetime. Millions of people, above all young black people, considered themselves revolutionaries, some of whom would take part in the working-class revolt, most dramatically in Detroit.

The largest and most important ghetto uprising, with the obvious character of a working-class rebellion, took place in Detroit in 1967. Seven thousand National Guard and US Army troops were sent in to suppress the rising. Forty-three people were killed. Seventy-two hundred were arrested, the majority members of the United Auto Workers. The UAW bureaucracy became a part of the repression, turning over the Dodge Main and Jefferson Assembly union halls to the National Guard for use as headquarters to crush the uprising with murderous mayhem. The officials made inevitable the coming explosion inside the union.

There was also mass opposition to the Vietnam War, which engulfed all of society. Despite what you read in many middle-class histories of the 1960s — that the working class was for the war and against the student protesters — opposition to the war was greatest inside the working class, notably in Detroit. Dearborn in 1966 was the first city to vote for immediate withdrawal from Vietnam. The campaign was started by John Anderson, the Trotskyist leader of the 1937 sit-down strike at the Cadillac plant in Detroit; Anderson immediately joined the IS when we arrived in Detroit in 1970.

There was more opposition among working-class troops in the army than at the universities. The young working- class soldiers, whose class struggle wrecked the US Army in 1968–1971, were back working in the factories in the early 1970s. They brought with them much of the radical ideas, character, temperament, and guts that they had developed against the officer corps while in the army.

The antiauthoritarian youth culture, that great contribution of the student New Left, was widespread among working-class youth. Though much less overtly political than what existed on the college campuses, working-class and middle-class kids were all for the anti-authority youth rebellion.

It was this climate that gave birth to the movements for liberation: black, women’s, gay, Chicano, Puerto Rican, Native American, among others. Each of these movements brought its ideas, passions, spirit, efforts, and insurgencies into the working class, finding many supporters there. These movements raised the consciousness and moral capacity of millions of workers, lifting them out of the wasteland and cesspool of American capitalist ideas and practices. Liberation became the slogan, the ideal, the enthusiastic hope of a generation that sought to liberate themselves — to lead liberated lives in a liberated country.

The IS, therefore, was not isolated because of our revolutionary ideas and organization. Many workers were tolerant of, and some were broadly sympathetic to, far-left views, even if many were cynical about the possibility of fundamental change or dismissed us as unrealistic idealists. Many young workers, Vietnam vets especially, would say: “Oh, you’re a revolutionary. I’m a revolutionary too. Call me when you set up the barricades.” But unfortunately, not until then. Although radical in their sentiments, they were not engaged in ongoing activity. Often passive, they sporadically exploded. Yet most had no sense of sustaining a resistance movement, of planned, structured struggle or of continuing organization. But some, a militant minority, were setting up the black, brown, women’s, and rank-and-file caucuses in the unions.

There was also a significant international dimension to the rank-and-file revolt, which shaped the politics of the far left, the IS included. It wasn’t solely Vietnam but also the working-class upsurge internationally, in France, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Chile, Argentina, Mexico, India, and elsewhere, coupled with national liberation struggles in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Angola, and Mozambique, among others. We, and much of the revolutionary left, viewed ourselves as the American wing of this international movement; believing that internationally we were living in a prerevolutionary situation, a period in which revolution was possible.

It was the earthshaking explosion of May 1968 in France, with a monthlong general strike and factory occupations by ten million workers, that proved working-class revolution in the advanced capitalist world was possible. This led the revolutionary movement, including the IS, to shift its orientation and base from the universities to the factories.

The IS, unlike some other leftists, had no illusions that the United States itself was in a prerevolutionary situation. But we believed that in those countries that were the weak links of capitalism, revolutionary upheavals were on the agenda, and they would inspire and impact the future of the class struggle and socialist movement at home. There were revolutions in Chile and Portugal, which although unsuccessful had a tremendous influence on our politics. We were particularly inspired by the industrial belts (cordones) of workers’ power in Chile and the workers’ commissions in Portugal, where four hundred factories were under workers’ control. We established relations with the Revolutionary Party of the Proletariat who were leading the struggle for a state based on workers’, soldiers’, and sailors’ councils.

The international situation convinced us that to be true to our politics, we had to prepare for bigger American working-class upsurges, with the project of laying the basis for a revolutionary worker party in the United States based upon this rank-and-file upsurge.

The IS considered its rank-and-file strategy to be the basis for building workers’ power and for applying socialism from below. It was this understanding that led the IS to greater relative success in its labor work than other far-left groups of the period, despite the IS being smaller than some of them. Peaking in 1976 at around five hundred members including our youth group, the IS usually had around three hundred members. Our cadres were extremely serious and dedicated, but most revolutionary groups had similarly dedicated people. Our membership was also highly talented, but our success primarily was due to the politics we brought to the movement — powerful ideas of revolutionary socialism from below, of self-organization, self-emancipation, and workers’ democracy.

Our politics flow from the first principle of revolutionary Marxism: that the emancipation of the working class is the task of the working class itself. This idea had been abandoned by the prevailing left-wing dogmas of the 1960 and ’70s, the peak years of social democracy, on the one hand, and Stalinism and “progressive Third World dictatorships” on the other. We challenged those politics with the IS’s most valuable theoretical contribution, the concept of “socialism from below.” We rejected social democratic reform of capitalism and Stalinist state nationalization as having anything to do with socialism. Both proposed, to paraphrase Hal Draper, handing down a facsimile of socialism to the grateful masses by a ruling elite that is not subject to their control. We rejected all class societies, capitalist and Stalinist, and opposed their two imperialist war camps, summed up in our slogan “Neither Washington nor Moscow, but for the Third Camp of International Socialism.”

We argued that socialism’s true meaning is working-class rule of society through control over production, the economy, and the state, through organs of direct workers’ democracy. To achieve these goals required a working-class socialist revolution. Its outcome would depend on whether the working class had created its own revolutionary party, whose necessity had been proven by the revolutionary struggles of the twentieth century.

The IS and its members were as much a product of the black liberation movement as we were of Trotskyism. The black struggle taught us what it means to be a revolutionary in the United States. We believed that no socialist revolution in the United States was possible without the unity of black and white workers, which can only occur if the working class fights for black liberation. Socialism is the realm of freedom, ending exploitation and oppression, and to get there socialist principles demand an uncompromising fight against all oppression. We did not tolerate, excuse, apologize for, or ignore any oppression, any discrimination. To become fit to rule society, the working class has to free itself of these reactionary ideas, which are the ruling ideas of the capitalist class, its ideology and politics. The IS understood that working-class unity required refusal to subordinate the fight against oppression to the conservative or racist views of backward workers or to the constraints of the union bureaucracy, liberalism, or the Democratic Party. So, right from the start, the IS championed the movements for black, women’s, and gay liberation and supported the agency, self-activity, and self-organization of all oppressed groups.

Unlike many others on the Left, both our contemporaries and predecessors, our members were open revolutionary socialists; we believed in total honesty with the workers with whom we collaborated. We did not hide our politics, our aims and goals, or our perspectives for the rank-and-file movement, despite the red-baiting that often came our way in Cold War America. But inside the working class, the politics of human liberation, of workers’ democracy, are a gift. Our political principles were often the opening for the support we were to find among politically conscious workers.

The IS approach challenged traditional models of union reform caucuses, which focused on union elections and winning union leadership positions. Because we wanted the union returned to the shop floor, we ran for elected shop positions, as stewards and on plant committees. We saw strong shop-floor organization as being integrally linked with the fight to restore the unions to democratic workers’ control.

We argued for class-struggle unionism, for confrontation with the bosses as opposed to the prevailing business unionist ideology of cooperation and class collaboration between unions and employers. We were against labor peace with the bosses and were for a continuous fight against capital, their intolerable working conditions, speedup and lack of safety, their profits, and their dictatorial rule at work. The bosses, the class enemy, were our immediate target; yet bureaucratic union officials who collaborated with them had to be fought for getting in the way of the struggle against management. These ideas were generally in accord with the militant workers we engaged with.

In the IS, we understood the difference between party and class. We never confused socialist political organization with rank-and-file groups, or counterposed them to each other: each has different roles to play. We were forming rank-and-file groups, not party formations, inside the unions. We had the IS, so we didn’t need a second — a weaker facsimile of ourselves or an IS front group.

Rather, we wanted to organize whenever possible in collaboration with the existing militants of our class, from whom we had a lot to learn, even as we also had much to teach. With them, we sought to build broad formations open to workers with diverse political views but united in fighting for class-struggle unionism. In doing so, we sought to activate many new workers into the fight against the bosses.

We usually had little competition from other far-left groups. Our contemporaries typically veered between dual unionism, popular-front “center-left alliances” with union bureaucrats, or front groups masquerading as independent rank-and-file groups, often with a supposed “revolutionary program.” These primitive conceptions were self-destructive, even for such brilliant, inspiring attempts as the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. The League couldn’t decide whether it was a rank-and-file caucus, a dual union, a black nationalist group, a revolutionary party, or a pressure group on the left flank of the Democratic Party. As a result, they split in all five of those directions.

The IS, by contrast, was very clear: our work was inside the trade unions to build a rank-and-file movement and to develop a revolutionary workers’ party out of that. It was these politics that allowed us to be relatively more successful than other left groups.

The IS was the proponent of the rank-and-file strategy in the 1965–1975 upsurge, but we did not invent it. It was formed in the American communist movement, of which we were one heir. Those revolutionary ideas, however, were not easily accessible due to the generational gap in the movement produced by McCarthyism in the 1950s. Our aim to transform ourselves from a revolutionary student current into a part of the working class led us to study and assimilate the successful ideas and practices of our predecessors.

Our rank-and-file strategy originated with the Communist International’s 1920s policy that in countries with a small communist nucleus and a mass labor movement, the road to a revolutionary workers’ party was in forming rank-and-file groups inside the trade unions. That was the thinking behind the Minority Movements in Britain and Australia, and the Trade Union Education League (TUEL) in the United States.

Our starting point was researching the TUEL, which effectively combined shop-floor organizing with rank-and-file campaigns and opposition caucuses in the 1920s. Until we entered industry, we were barely aware of this history. We learned a tremendous amount studying the writings of William Z. Foster, the major Communist Party USA (CPUSA) leader during its revolutionary years. Before he was ruined by Stalinism, Foster was the greatest trade union strategist and tactician produced by the American labor movement.

After the TUEL, we studied the class battles of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) formation with the general strikes, factory occupations, flying pickets, shop-floor actions, and working-class self-organization of the 1930s.The strongest influence on us came from understanding how the Trotskyists functioned in that decade in Minneapolis. Farrell Dobbs’s book Teamster Rebellion was our bible in terms of strategy and tactics. His successive volumes Teamster Power, Teamster Politics, and Teamster Bureaucracy were important in teaching us how revolutionaries should function inside a trade union.

In addition to the 1920s TUEL and 1930s CIO, we were also the political continuation of the Workers’ Party (WP) of the 1940s, the only socialists who supported and took part in the massive wildcat strike wave during World War II. The WP brought those strikes into union politics and organized rank-and-file union caucuses that opposed the no-strike pledge, the war labor boards, the Democratic Party, and the union bureaucracy. We were fortunate in having members who were WP veterans, including Anne Draper and Stan Weir, who had been active in those struggles, and were later joined by some ex–Socialist Workers’ Party trade unionists attracted to our labor work. These experienced unionists helped us to assimilate past lessons as well as adjust them to changed conditions.

We used the same methods forged by our revolutionary forerunners in constructing rank-and-file organizations: industrialization, concentration, and shop-floor newspapers. The first step, industrialization, was for our members to get jobs in unionized workplaces in key industries. Industrialization was first utilized by the 1920s CP, was adopted by the Trotskyists in the 1930s, most effectively in the Minneapolis coal yards, and then carried out by the WP in the war plants during World War II.

Industrialization is often dismissed, ridiculed, or even considered “weird” on the Left. Our defense of industrialization against standard criticisms was that it was not dogma, romantic idealization of workers, narodnik “going to the people” radical social work, or salting for existing union structures. Our aim, like that of our predecessors, was to place trained and dedicated socialist cadre at the sites of working-class life and struggles, as the most effective way to become rank-and-file organizers. We were not workerists; we understood that even brilliant workers required the education and training of a serious cadre organization to become truly successful leaders. Unlike other countries with working-class political parties in which militant workers could be trained, this goal could not be successfully achieved from outside of industry.

We and the other industrializing leftists also had the task of restoring the link between socialism and the working class that had been broken by McCarthyism and the Cold War, a goal that still needs to be achieved today.

Our decision to industrialize in turn led to our policy of concentration. A small organization like the IS can’t do everything; we had to concentrate our forces on a few places where our activity might be effective. Many industrializing groups unfortunately wasted their forces with choices that we tried to avoid. We rejected unorganized, nonunion workplaces; we wanted the strongest union protections as possible. Firing is an unavoidable price of militant action, but we needed to minimize firings with union contract protections, however limited, and to fight to overturn firing through the grievance procedure. We rejected jobs at industries and shops that had the worst conditions and pay. Workers would not stay there for long; neither would our members. We did not want jobs in small shops, where the audience open to socialism would be restricted to a few people.

As such, our plan was to concentrate our members in key unions, with the largest, most militant, best organized workplaces, the most important strategically and politically, with a history of being most open both to rank-and-file organizing and to recruitment to socialism. After long, intense national debate, we settled on auto, steel, and the Teamsters, the heavy battalions of the working class, as well as telephone and teachers, where we already had some members.

Our success could not have occurred without our press, Workers Power, which was written for a factory audience in a clear, accessible, nonsectarian language. It was lively, informative, provocative, and agitational; never condescending, it also included educational articles on socialist politics and theory. All of our members, including the leadership, had workplace sales assignments, usually at shift change, in time to sell to two shifts, incoming and outgoing. Workers Power probably had more shop-floor and in-depth labor struggle news than any other 1970s periodical. But it also had extensive coverage of liberation struggles against racism and sexism as well as serious international coverage of working-class, socialist, anti-imperialist, and national liberation politics.

Key to our work were rank-and-file shop-floor bulletins and industry newspapers. The IS was central, or helpful, to the production of a few dozen every month. Shop-floor bulletins originated in the Communist Party of the 1920s and ’30s but unfortunately since then have been neglected by the Left. IS members were crucial to putting out six monthly newspapers in the Teamsters alone: the Seattle Semi, the Fifth Wheel, From the Horse’s Mouth, the Grapevine, Convoy, and UPSurge. It was an incredible amount of work for our small group, but it’s what made us a recognizable force in some unions. Well-done shop papers can become the main source of information for workers about life in the plant, the company, profits, working conditions, speedup, safety, racism, sexism, grievances, demands, obnoxious foremen, weak union officials, union struggles, meetings, and elections.

These papers contained information that the unions should have provided the members, but, since they didn’t, these bulletins filled a vacuum. Because the shop papers told the plain truth, they became accepted by many workers as their own voice and viewed by them as a real alternative, the opposition to the company, management, and the union bureaucracy. The rank-and-file groups earned enormous credibility, influence, and respect because these publications always put the workers’ interests first and provided the organizational center for an alternative union leadership.

Our view was that the strength of the movement depended on its ability to engage as many workers as possible in activity and struggle, to draw upon their talents, insights, intelligence, experience, and creativity. We were confident that struggle and joint activity would raise class consciousness and deepen the organizational capacity of the rank-and-file movement. It would also convince some workers of the validity of our socialist politics.

We always tried to involve other workers in producing the shop-floor newspaper, writing for it, distributing it — making the paper their voice. In some cases, the editorial boards of the rank-and-file shop paper became the organizing committee of a rank-and-file group. We learned that just as the revolutionary newspaper is the organizer of the revolutionary party, the shop paper is the organizer of the rank-and-file group.

Our aim was to create a tendency inside the unions among an advanced layer of workers, who shared with us a philosophy that the union exists to engage in the class struggle and fight in the interest of the workers and therefore should not collaborate or cooperate with the bosses. This concept of class-struggle unionism can be a bridge to revolutionary ideas.

It is beyond the scope of this essay to record the extensive rank-and-file work of the IS. But a few examples from our high point can give an overview of our efforts. The main industrial priority of the IS was auto, the then largest US industry, focused on Detroit. The lessons we learned industrializing in auto in the early 1970s would later be applied to our work in Teamsters and the steel industry.

The Detroit working class from the 1930s into the ’70s was the most class conscious and militant in the country, so much so that the Left sometimes referred to Detroit as the American Petrograd. One reason for our move to Detroit was to collaborate with the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, whose orientation and work we judged to be the most promising development of the radical struggles of the 1960s. We initially agreed with their trade union strategy, which we called “struggle groups.” We moved our national office, press, leaders, and industrializing comrades to Detroit in August of 1970.

Our optimism was confirmed when we arrived and witnessed wildcat strikes on a daily basis. But our hope to work with the League proved illusory. After only two years of existence, the League was already in precipitous decline, wracked by faction fights and splits and losing much of its base in the factories.

When the League formed in 1968, beginning with the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, racism was an inescapable daily occurrence in the auto shops, where black production workers were supervised by all-white teams of foremen and plant managers, usually racist. White UAW local officials were only marginally better. To subdue the League, the companies made a rapid, sharp turn, hiring black foremen and lower management, including former League members. The UAW leadership adopted an identical strategy.

The Leagues’ black nationalism was inadequate to the task of holding onto its supporters after the rise of black supervisors and union officials. The result was demoralization and a sharp decline of the League’s shop-floor presence. It was demoralizing for us as well, but it forced us to reexamine and change our first union perspectives, which had copied the League’s semi-dual-union practices. The League’s decline led us to a period of intense investigation, discovery, and understanding. Such study culminated in our commitment to resurrect the pioneering work of the socialist left of the 1920s, ’30, and ’40s and the development of our theory and practice of rank-and-file organizing.

Within months of arriving in Detroit, a few comrades were hired — first at Jefferson Assembly, a former League stronghold, where we established a multiracial rank-and-file group, the United Justice Caucus. Within a few years, we had members at more than ten plants in the Detroit area, plus others in Chicago, Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, New Jersey, and Atlanta. In addition to Jefferson Assembly, we helped form caucuses at Mack Stamping, Lynch Road Assembly and Mound Road Engine, Dodge Main, Chevy Gear and Axle, Warren Stamping, Sterling Assembly, Fleetwood, Ford Rouge, Linden Assembly, International Harvester, and a few other shops. But we also wanted a national caucus that could go beyond local issues and conditions, taking up national issues and creating political networks with the black, brown, and women’s caucuses, bringing them together with the shop-floor rank-and-file groups in a unified national opposition.

A United National Caucus (UNC) already existed, formed by skilled tradesmen at the Ford Rouge and the General Motors Tech Center, and had just led the fight against the 1970 UAW contract. The UNC attracted us because of its experienced fighters, organized shop-floor support, and aggressive class program. But the UNC also had severe handicaps; like the skilled trades, it was almost entirely white. The employers’ racist hiring kept the skilled trades, the best jobs, lily white, as a part of their toolkit to divide, weaken, and control their workers. But many tradesmen also wanted to keep that situation, where these best jobs were reserved for their family members, and they shared in the racist ideology used to justify this discrimination. A national opposition that did not challenge that situation would be complicit with racism and incapable of advancing working-class goals and liberation.

One of the outstanding accomplishments of the IS’s industrial work was in overcoming the racial divide among the auto union oppositions and uniting the white skilled tradesmen opposition with black and white production workers in a national opposition caucus committed to a radical anti-racist program. Without the IS autoworkers, this would not have occurred in that period, and we achieved this in the first year of our auto work.

We joined the UNC in 1971, despite its limitations, with the perspective of fighting to win it to our strategy of uniting the racially divided rank-and-file militants. The only way to a serious national opposition was in unity, which could only occur if the UNC campaigned against racism in auto. We won the UNC to this perspective after gaining the support of its two main leaders, both radicals, Art Fox, a Trotskyist, and Pete Kelly, a left Irish nationalist.

The UNC organized a public anti-racist campaign holding a large public conference for autoworkers to adopt a program to fight racism in the industry, the union, and the community, and including the crucial demand to open the skilled trades to black workers. They lost some white tradesmen but created a principled alliance. The UNC then elected Jordan Sims, a black militant, as cochair. Sims, who had been allied with the League, was the leader of the anti-racist insurgency at Eldon Gear and Axle, which had an 80 percent black workforce. The IS was the bridge for creating this united black and white militant caucus inside the UAW that for many years was the chief opposition to the union administration.

In the next few years, the UNC also adopted many of the distinctive ideas that the IS brought into the rank-and-file movement to restore shop-floor unionism. These included Stan Weir’s calls for a steward for every foreman and “innocent until proven guilty” in the grievance procedure. Other demands that we won the UNC to included opening the skilled trades to black and women workers; affirmative action and super seniority for previously discriminated-against groups; and maternity and paternity leave.

We raised political demands too, winning the UNC to such positions as immediate withdrawal from Vietnam, no union funds for Israeli bonds (this was the major way the UAW supported Israel in the 1970s), no class collaboration with capitalist politics, and so on. All of this was in addition to traditional militant demands that we and the UNC supported; thirty for forty (a thirty-hour workweek without cutting forty hours pay), no forced overtime, the right to strike over local grievances, an independent labor party, and all elected officials were to be recallable while none should make more than a skilled tradesman. Many of these demands were traditional demands of militants, but in the mid-’70s they were often identified with the IS because we were generally their most prominent proponents in the labor movement.

Our high point in auto was the summer of ’73, when there were ten simultaneous wildcat strikes underway in UAW plants. Three of them were in Chrysler plants in Detroit, and in two of those three we had members and rank-and-file caucuses we were active in.

The most spectacular wildcat success of the period was at Jefferson Assembly, where two young radical black workers, Larry Carter and Isaac Shorter, worked in the metal shop, which was 80 percent black but was supervised by a racist white foreman. They organized a petition to have him fired, but there was no action by the company or the union. So the two of them chained themselves to the electric power station cage and shut down the assembly line. IS stewards and the United Justice Caucus mobilized 150 fellow workers to surround and protect Carter and Shorter. They then pulled out the whole plant on strike.

Within two shifts, Chrysler capitulated. They fired the foreman and signed an agreement that there would be no reprisals. Carter and Shorter were carried out of the plant in victory to a United Justice Caucus celebration. As Shorter told the Detroit Free Press, “The black workers in this city could control it, but . . .  there’s no such thing as black control. Because it’s not a racial thing, it’s the system, which is a capitalist system. It oppresses all people.”

The other two Chrysler strikes were about health and safety, as were most wildcat strikes. One of these was at Mack Stamping, where we had initiated a large caucus called the Mack Safety Watchdog. When two workers, members of the Progressive Labor Party, were fired over protesting safety issues, we supported them with a sit-down strike. We also set up picket lines around the plant, shutting it down. Doug Fraser, the head of the UAW at Chrysler, mobilized one thousand officials and administration supporters with clubs to crush the strike. Fraser, a few years later, was famously quoted that in America there was a “one-sided class war.” Unfortunately, by then our side in the class war had dramatically weakened because unions led by bureaucrats like Fraser would break workers’ strikes but would not lead them into battle against the capitalist class.

The momentum of the great 1960–1970s auto rebellion was broken in 1974–75 when a major recession occurred, producing the worst unemployment since the 1930s. In Detroit auto plants, between 25 and 50 percent of workers were unemployed in the mass layoffs. Our original belief was that the economic crisis would further radicalize workers. We were wrong. The opposite occurred, as workers returned to work much less willing to fight. The job security of the previous decade was gone, replaced by the fear that if you lost your job, you would not be able to support your family. Militancy, consciousness, organization, and radical sentiment all retreated as workers were much less willing to engage in action that now put their jobs at risk. The companies used this to unleash an employers’ offensive, the prelude to the drive to neoliberalism.

While our rank-and-file caucus work continued for years, sometimes with modest success, we were in a much weaker position than we had been prior to the recession. The three recessions in the years from 1974 to 1982 became the impetus for the successful victory of capital over labor, ending the upsurge and introducing decades of capitalist reaction.

Our greatest union success was in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), when we applied what we had learned in our auto work about the use of contract campaigns to develop rank-and-file organization. Contracts, which only come up for renegotiation every few years, often draw many workers into debates and involvement for securing better wages and conditions. We proposed demands that voiced workers’ concerns and were winnable if we could mobilize the members for combat and in doing so force the IBT to support these demands.

In 1975, the year prior to the upcoming IBT master freight contract, the citywide rank-and-file groups and newspapers in which we were active moved to organize with those Teamsters willing to struggle for a better contract. The plan, which proved successful, was to convince the forces set into motion by the contract campaign to continue the fight by organizing a national rank-and-file caucus.

Our involvement with the IBT had started years earlier when militant Teamsters appealed to leftist students for help in winning a historic wildcat strike. During April–May 1970, 110,000 Teamsters waged a two-month-long nationwide wildcat strike, centered on Los Angeles. The employers in LA fired fourteen thousand of the wildcatting workers who were demanding higher wages, improvements in health and safety, and return of the right to engage in twenty-four-hour strikes over grievances, which had been lost in the previous contract. Compliant capitalist courts gave the bosses the tool to break the strike, an injunction banning Teamster picketing. Workers who continued to picket would be jailed. Insurgent strikers went to the University of California, Los Angeles, and appealed to the students to take the strikers’ places picketing. As students were not covered by the injunction, they were not liable to be jailed.

UCLA students were then taking part in the nationwide student strike over the invasion of Cambodia, the largest student strike in world history. The Cambodia student strike at UCLA was massive, and it didn’t take much for protesting students and protesting Teamsters to see a connection between their struggles and common enemies. The Student Labor Action Committee at UCLA, led by prominent IS cadres, responded by mobilizing hundreds of students to picket against the injunction. The students also publicized the strike, engaging in mass leafleting and writing newspaper articles. This strike support work established solid bonds between the IS and LA Teamsters; it was our entrée into the milieu of Teamster militants.

The LA Teamster strikers were impressive, class-conscious workers, and they embraced IS members for what they felt was our ability, commitment, talents, and courage. We convinced them to form a national rank-and-file group, Teamster United Rank and File (TURF). Founded in 1971, TURF unfortunately fell apart quickly as these Teamster militants were challenged both by internal power struggles and by opportunists who joined the group only to run for union office. This collapse was a decisive learning lesson: even the best militant workers cannot turn into effective, sophisticated political cadres overnight. Like everyone else, workers need political education and practical training in order to lead others effectively and handle challenging problems as they arise. This lesson was part of our rationale for industrializing IS cadres.

The LA Teamsters connected us with Teamsters in the Bay Area who published a newspaper, the Fifth Wheel. A few IS comrades then began assisting them by writing some articles and editing, publishing, and distributing the paper. This became the model for our first steps in Teamster work. We started connecting with Teamsters by putting out citywide Teamster newspapers as the tool for presenting the concrete issues, making contacts, and starting rank-and-file groups. We soon were a key part of putting out citywide rank-and-filers’ papers in Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh.

Had we not been approached by the LA strikers, we could have missed out on the IBT. We might have shared the common views of many on the Left, who cautioned activists to stay away from the Teamsters’ union because of the difficulties inherent in organizing there. The IBT was, at that time, worse than most other unions: more politically and socially reactionary, undemocratic, corrupt, gangster-ridden, Mafia-connected, and violent, with beatings and even murder of opponents. Our Teamster members had to take precautions, including being armed, to protect themselves as they carried out opposition work in this mobbed-up union.

Working with Teamsters, however, we quickly discovered that corruption and violence was only one side of the story. As workers, Teamsters retained more shop-floor power and involvement than in any other industrial union. The balance of power in trucking tilted in labor’s direction, with the nation’s largest union organized against mostly small, local employers. The result was the continuation in many companies of on-the-job unionism, with greater control over working conditions. In many small shops, workplace union reps were full-time workers, laboring alongside their peers with the same pay and conditions. Significantly, the Teamsters’ then-recent history and experience included the right to strike for twenty-four hours over grievances, but working conditions were deteriorating, and that right had been given up in the most recent contract.

We were the only left-wingers to seriously industrialize into the Teamsters union during these years. While we met a few other radicals, no other groups joined in Teamster work as competitors, despite the Left’s awareness of the success we were having. The Left had been absent from the IBT for decades and was seemingly unaware of the shop-floor militancy and on-the-job unionism that had managed to survive, despite the union’s corrupt, gangster bureaucracy.

As we engaged in our Teamster work, a decline in working conditions in the freight industry as well as long-simmering discontent at United Parcel Service (UPS) were the impetus for the successful contract campaigns that resulted in the creation of national rank-and-file oppositions.

In August 1975, a national meeting of rank-and-file caucuses in the Teamsters’ union, along with other oppositionists, established Teamsters for a Decent Contract (TDC). TDC distributed thousands of flyers, scattered its newspapers on trucks, met and talked to workers in coffee shops and at truck stops, and organized meetings at barns and in dozens of cities, all to promote their contract proposals. The TDC pushed hard for popular demands centered on the return of the right to the twenty-four-hour strike over grievances and an unlimited cost-of-living-allowance clause. The first public appearance of the TDC, which gained it national attention, was a demonstration held at union headquarters in Washington, DC. There TDC demanded that Teamster President Frank Fitzsimmons hold the line for a strong contract, promoting that goal with the slogan “Use the Power of the Union.”

The members responded enthusiastically to the TDC demonstration and demands, and the movement started to grow rapidly. The TDC then pressed for a strike over the master freight contract, over which there had never been a national strike. It received an enormous response from the ranks. Hundreds came out to TDC meetings in Los Angeles, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and many other cities. TDC called rallies in March 1976 under the slogan “Prepare to Strike.” There was a fantastic turnout to these rallies: five hundred Teamsters in the Bay Area, five hundred in Los Angeles, two thousand in Detroit. The TDC then put out the call: “No Contract. No Work.”

When the contract expired on April 1, 1976, the union officialdom did . . .  nothing. So TDC set up picket lines in Detroit and called the workers out on strike. Under this pressure, the union made the strike official within a few hours. Fitzsimmons was forced to call the first national master freight strike in Teamster history.

This was one of the few strikes that IS workers and their allies were instrumental in calling. The four-day strike was a success and was followed by another successful two-day wildcat in Detroit.

The master freight agreement did not cover the United Parcel Service. UPS lacked a national contract and was instead broken up under a series of regional contracts. The most important for UPS workers was the thirteen-state Midwest contract, followed by the East and West Coast contracts. At the founding meeting of the TDC, given that UPS was excluded from the master freight contract, ISers working at UPS set up a subcommittee of TDC to work on UPS contracts. It turned out to be incredibly timely: in the following year they led a spectacular insurgency and formed their own rank-and-file organization, UPSurge.

UPSurge quickly became one of the largest, most active sectors of the workers’ uprising and of the IS rank-and-file strategy. We started with only a few comrades working at UPS, one or two in each of eight cities, a majority of whom were inexperienced new hires. Our largest concentration was a half-dozen members at UPS in Cleveland. Their work was strengthened by the local IS branch, as Cleveland also served as the national headquarters of our Teamster work.

One of the outstanding features of UPSurge, usually ignored, was that in the male-dominated IBT and UPS, the core leadership of UPSurge was made up of IS women working in Cleveland, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and LA. UPSurge’s primary national leader, ISer Anne Mackie, was a local driver in Cleveland and the editor of UPSurge, the group’s national paper.

The leadership role of IS women in UPSurge confirmed our decision to industrialize women comrades in the most important industries, which still had traditionally male-dominated workforces. We were confident that our women comrades would be able to take leading roles in the most important insurgencies, while simultaneously bringing questions of women’s liberation into those struggles. Outside of the IS, most other left-industrializing efforts sent women into traditional women’s jobs, where pay and working conditions were worse, and where unions, if they existed at all, were weaker and less militant, in industries that were not the centers of this period of revolt.

To help support UPSurge nationally, IS members regularly sold Workers Power at UPS hubs, which every week contained stories about the Teamsters and UPS struggles. We also made new contacts for UPSurge by helping to distribute its paper. The response we received was not only unexpected but mind-blowing. These were our strongest WP paper sales of all the worksites we sold at. At UPS, we met the largest number of workers sympathetic to left culture. Even more astounding was the fact that at a few UPS hubs, groups of workers would demonstrate on the job by wearing Workers Power T-shirts to work.

In September 1975, UPSurge appeared as a national rank-and-file newspaper, and the paper quickly became the organizing tool that launched the rank-and-file group. UPSurge printed four thousand copies of its first issue, which sold out. In October, the print run was six thousand copies, in November, ten thousand, and in December, fifteen thousand: every time they sold out.

Three guidelines were key to our successful UPSurge efforts. First was collaborating with the existing UPS militants, the most important group of whom we had not known before the contract campaign. This group contacted us after seeing the first issue of UPSurge. We established an alliance with these militant stewards based in Louisville, Kentucky. They were led by Vince Meredith, who had the best organized shop floor in the country and a prototypical local union from below. Vince put UPSurge in contact with the 1973 UPS wildcat strikers and their established shop steward networks. Meredith was a hero to many UPS workers, and he gave UPSurge legitimacy and credibility with existing activists. The IS contributions to this partnership were the newspaper and the nucleus of a national organization that had the potential to fight for a nationwide UPS contract. Doing so would help workers overcome local isolation and the pitting of city local unions against one another.

The second key to our success was UPSurge’s understanding of the distinctive consciousness of many UPS workers. They were young, shared the radical attitudes of the period, and hated the company passionately. Theirs was a contract campaign against an authoritarian company, despised overseers, and brutal working conditions. UPS enforced a series of rules that were reactionary, sexist, racist, and restrictions on personal freedom. All while the company spied on its workers. UPS was a hellhole, so workers welcomed the contract campaign as the way to improve conditions and strike a blow against “the Big Brown Machine” (so named because of the color of the uniforms and shoes that drivers were forced to wear).

Additionally, there was an immediate issue that further intensified the contract battle. UPS was then the pioneer in shifting full-time workers to part-time positions. In response, the most important demands UPSurge raised were for full pay and benefits for part-time workers; that part-time work should be phased out; and that all part-time workers should have the option to work full-time if they so chose. These demands were raised again years later by the IBT in the great UPS strike of 1997, carried out under the reform leadership of Ron Carey.

The final key to our success was in providing the opportunity and means for UPS workers to build on their instinctive, spontaneous drive to self-organization. The first meeting to set up UPSurge as a national organization was called for the night of January 31, 1976, in Indianapolis. The blowout meeting was a success: 650 workers showed up, most from the Midwest. They heard speeches from Anne Mackie, Ken Paff of the TDC, and Vince Meredith. The meeting set up the national UPSurge organization, with a steering committee and adoption of demands for the Midwest contract campaign.

UPSurge then started to build local organizations, which took off like wildfire. In Chicago, for example, the following occurred over the course of eight weeks: the first biweekly meeting had ten people, the second had thirty, the third drew eighty, and the fourth two hundred. In one city after another — Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, St Louis, and even places like Kansas City, Minneapolis, and others where the IS had no members — one hundred to two hundred people were showing up for UPSurge’s inaugural meetings. At the Detroit center, 450 UPS workers turned up for the first UPSurge meeting.

UPSurge’s plan was to prepare people for a strike. Those already on board would work on convincing their workmates and mobilizing them for local union meetings. We sought to win the locals’ support by getting them to endorse UPSurge’s contract demands and strike call. UPSurge won many local union meeting votes overwhelmingly — too easily in fact. When the bureaucracy capitulated and rolled over, we thought it was weak and wasn’t going to give us much trouble. That was a huge mistake. It was a lot stronger than we thought, and we were to pay a heavy price for this mistake.

The IBT called a Midwest UPS strike that went on for two weeks. The union then settled for the master freight agreement, to which the company would have happily agreed even without a strike. For the bureaucracy, the only purpose of the strike had been a way for the workers to let off steam. The UPSurge steering committee met the night of the strike settlement and called for a wildcat strike.

The wildcat took place in eight cities, but it was crushed in a day. There were court injunctions, and federal marshals and the National Guard were brought in alongside local police. The IBT declared that it would not defend fired strikers. The workers were pitted against UPS, the biggest company in the country; the IBT, which was the biggest union; and the federal government with its courts and armed police power of the state. Most of the workers were inexperienced and totally unprepared for the gravity of this situation — as were we. The high unemployment of the 1974–75 recession, the largest economic crisis since the 1930s, made workers fearful of losing their jobs. The defeated wildcat was a severe setback. Perhaps it could have been overcome eventually, but it came on the heels of the employers’ offensive that inaugurated neoliberalism. We didn’t know at the time, but we were entering a totally different period. The trade union struggle was about to be devastated for decades to come.

On June 5, 1976, TDC and UPSurge members came together and voted to form a national rank-and-file group, Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU). At its founding convention in September 1976, TDU members voted to form a nationwide organization with local chapters, including Teamsters from all industries the union covered, in addition to already active truck drivers and dock workers. The TDU constitution declared that its aim was to build “a national, unified movement of rank-and-file Teamsters that is organized to fight for rank-and-file rights on the job and in the union.” The new organization drew up a “Rank-and-File Bill of Rights” with a set of demands strongly influenced by the IS: direct election of union officers, majority rule on contract votes, a fair grievance procedure with “innocent until proven guilty” provisions, no multiple salaries for union officials, an end to race and sex discrimination, and more.

The IS had been set up in 1969 by the Independent Socialist Clubs as an almost all-white student organization with the project of building a revolutionary workers’ party. It took a few years of education, disagreements, and factional struggle to develop an effective trade union strategy. It didn’t come easily, and we made plenty of mistakes along the way. Despite this, we had an extremely healthy and democratic internal political life, unusual on the revolutionary left, that allowed us to debate and correct mistakes, to mature and make real contributions to class-struggle unionism. It is a record, however modest, that we can be proud of.

We started to build a trade union cadre, organizing caucuses, producing shop papers, running and electing members and allies as stewards and to shop committees. Between 1974 and 1977, we were involved in the two Teamsters’ strikes, the formation of two national rank-and-file groups, and the Edward Sadlowski Steelworkers Fight Back campaign. In the 1975 recession, we connected workers across industrial lines to form a national rank-and-file coalition against unemployment that organized a large, impressive demonstration at the AFL-CIO confab. In February 1979, we began to publish Labor Notes, which originally was a column in Workers Power, as a vehicle to overcome fragmented trade union consciousness, provide information and political analysis, help develop communication between union militants, and build a national network of union activists.

Our relative success in trade union work changed the IS. From 1973 to 1976, the IS was growing, doubling our membership, and raising our profile both within the labor movement and on the Left. Six small local groups joined the IS: independent labor-oriented collectives, a black socialist collective, and two youth collectives that formed the Red Tide. The Red Tide grew into a majority-black working-class organization. We were involved in bussing struggles to integrate schools and fights in defense of prisoners, most notably but not limited to the Free Gary Tyler campaign. We were active in occupational health and safety groups, the Coalition of Labor Union Women, Union Wage, and local union women’s caucuses, particularly with the first women hired in the Steelworkers union.

We also did an inspiring amount of international work, with particular emphasis on the Portuguese Revolution and national liberation movements in southern Africa. For the first time, we were recruiting primarily from inside the working class, rank-and-file workers, including women, black and brown workers, and some amazing mass shop-floor leaders. They were joining not just because of our trade union work, of which some were leaders, but because of our revolutionary Marxist politics, which they embraced. We thought we were really on our way.

But unfortunately, within a year or two the working-class upsurge was over. From 1974 to 1982, there were three devastating recessions. The employers’ offensive — which involved a restructuring of American capitalism — began in 1975. There was no longer any job security for industrial workers. Two-thirds of steelworkers were permanently laid off, while the industry continued producing as much steel as before. Many auto plants shut down, and many of our members lost their jobs. With the recessions came attacks on unionism, the destruction of trade union militancy, and the end of the radical period. There was a huge shift to the right, an international phenomenon not confined to the United States. Neoliberalism triumphed everywhere, together with globalization under American domination. With the end of the working-class upsurge, the IS and the international revolutionary Marxist left declined precipitously.

Today the political, economic, international, and imperialist situations are experiencing major difficulties once again, with an aggressive right on the offensive and the first tentative signs of a small left revival. The one thing that hasn’t changed over the intervening years is capitalism’s relentless attacks on the working class. These lay the basis for resistance and class struggle. A new working-class upsurge, when it develops, cannot be a repeat of the 1960s and ’70s: it will be a different working class, under different conditions and with different consciousness. Yet as in the past, we can confidently state that the coming revolution will be a proletarian revolution, or there will not be a revolution.

There are important lessons we can apply from the successes and mistakes of revolutionary trade union work, from the Communist Party of the 1920s to the 1965–1975 upsurge, including the IS experience. Under the right circumstances, an upsurge of working-class struggle can open the road to revival, radicalization, and the formation of rank-and file-movements. In turn, such movements can serve as the launching pad for a mass working-class party that will organize the working class for its emancipation and that of all humanity.