A reply to Joel Geier’s “When Socialists Joined the Rank-and-File Upsurge”
The 1970s still looms large in the imagination of the dwindling numbers of veterans of the New Left in the United States. The generational shift from campus activism and labor support work in the latter years of the Vietnam War to “industrializing” in the big factories, assembly plants, and mills was an important political development. Inspired by the strike waves and rebellion in the trade unions, thousands of former students, many of whom were members of a bewildering array of competing Stalinist, Maoist, and Trotskyist groups, including the International Socialists (IS), sought to build revolutionary parties in the U.S. working class.
Yet, despite the enthusiasm and political commitment of many talented people, this political project was a failure. By the late 1970s, the rank-and-file rebellion was over, and the “party-building” projects of many groups had collapsed and disintegrated, in many cases with great regrets, anger, and bitterness among people who only a few years earlier had been committed comrades. There are many lessons for today for from this era, both good and bad, but to mine the past requires honesty, sometimes brutal honesty to assess what happened and why, and what were the political consequences.
This is an important question because the current generation of young radicals are interested in the 1970s and what it means to be a socialist and workplace activist today. This is where Joel Geier’s “When Socialists Joined the Rank-and-File Upsurge” recently published in Jacobin fails. This is not to say that readers won’t get something out of Joel’s article. He is very good at capturing the broad sweep of history from the 1950s onward and how that impacted an emerging generation of revolutionary Marxists radicalized by the Civil Rights and Vietnam Anti-War Movements. But that very approach also covers up the huge political mistakes and perspectives that blew up the IS, and in other cases, he is just plain wrong.
Lightly sprinkled into the “big picture” analysis are a handful of statements about the IS, of which Geier was a leading member, that paint an incomplete, if not misleading, picture of the organization’s politics and practices in the 1970s. Joel’s argument is that the IS did amazing work, but that work was cut short by the decline in the labor movement, an employers’ offensive, and the start of a rightward shift in US politics:
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.
The problem with this analysis is not that it is wrong about the retreat of the labor movement, or that the IS declined precipitously; what it leaves out is what the IS thought about the class struggle, its own role in it, and the impact of these factors on the IS. “On our way” to what exactly? What Joel fails to mention is that the IS predicted not only a continued upward swing of rank-and-file militancy, but that this small group would become a workers’ party capable of leading the coming revolution.
At its 1976 national convention, the IS adopted a document heralding a turn in the organization written by its then-National Organizer Glenn Wolfe titled, “Toward a Workers’ Combat Organization: The Bolshevization of the IS.” Wolfe argued that in a predicted mass workers’ upsurge it would be “objectively possible to make a revolution.” To take advantage of this opportunity, the IS must begin immediately lay down the foundation of a mass working-class revolutionary party and transform the IS into a “workers’ combat organization” in a period of a few years. It would do so by engaging in agitational “mass work,” and by initiating and building rank and file movements in what it considered key areas of union concentration in US industry. All this was going to be built by a group of mostly ex-students of barely 250 people. Even if the working-class upsurge had not come to an end, as it did, this perspective was seriously out of touch with reality, both in terms of the state of the class struggle and what such a tiny group could accomplish.
Some of the issues that we raise in this article were raised at the time within the IS. In 1976, a group of about 75 members calling itself the Left Faction* formed. They wrote in one document,
The tasks of revolutionaries today is to take advantage of what actually exists, to build on the real struggles of the working class, not to pretend to plan the development of the struggle by choosing the three or four priority industries. Our task in the IS today is not to replace the present priorities with new ones, whether white collar, hospitals, or whatever. We must prepare ourselves to intervene, to “give a lead,” in the struggles to come… Preparing ourselves politically and organizationally, however, is not the same thing as trying to substitute ourselves for such explosions.
The Left faction was expelled at the 1977 IS national convention. A report on the convention by the IS Executive Committee written in the March issue of Workers’ Power compared the members of the Left Faction to scabs (strikebreakers) during a strike.
None of this can be found in Joel’s article. Readers are left to conclude that the IS did everything right, only to be let down by the working class. He has completely left out the fact that the IS broke its teeth on a vastly overblown, triumphalist perspective.
To achieve this new goal, the organization moved its national center to Detroit and became hyper-centralized. The hot-housed, and futile, efforts to create a “workers’ combat organization” led to burnout, members quitting, and a revolving door of worker recruits. Gay Semel, who spent some time as National Secretary of the IS, in a published birthday celebration of Joel Geier’s 70th birthday, recalled “traveling around the country feeling more like the national shrink than the National Secretary.”
In the labor work, IS members tended to “liquidate” themselves into the trade union movement, at best keeping their socialist politics in their back pockets, and at worst, dropping them altogether. The use of Workers’ Power newspaper fell by the wayside. The result was depoliticization and demoralization of the members.
As a 1979 document, “Why we leave the International Socialists” confirms this assessment:
The IS is sliding rightward, politically, particularly in the wake of its increasingly conservatized unionists. Some of the industrial radicals want to support Democrats. Some increasingly subordinate themselves to certain “reform” labor leaders. Some believe that openly raising socialist ideas in rank-and-file organizations is tantamount to abusing those organizations. And an increasing number see little need for a socialist organization at all.
This adaptation to doing simple trade union reform work would later bear fruit in the form of Labor Notes (once a column in Workers’ Power) and in the way Teamsters for a Democratic Union developed. These became assiduous in policing leftists from involvement in their conferences; the latter developed into a trade union reform campaign rather than a militant rank and file organization capable of acting independently of the trade union leadership, which had been the IS’s original “rank and file” perspective.
Why is all this of any importance? Some knowledge of this history helps us to understand why, for example, TDU has evolved today even further rightward — and has now become a defender of the current Trumpist leadership of the Teamsters under Sean O’Brien. It didn’t emerge out of nothing.
But it’s also important in what it teaches us about how to build socialist organizations. How can socialists both maintain and build an organization based on revolutionary politics while also keeping a sense of realism about current possibilities — without falling into either overblown triumphalism (or sectarian isolation from actual movements) on the one side, or conservative adaptation to what exists on the other.
- Members of the Left Faction went on to form the International Socialist Organization (ISO), of which the two authors of this article (and later, Joel Geier) were members.
- Almost all the I.S. documents from the 1960s through the early 1980are available here: https://likembe.net/Documents/IS/IS%20Documents.html
Joe Allen
Joe Allen is a former Teamster and the author of Vietnam: The Last War the U.S. Lost, People Wasn’t Made to Burn: A True Story of Race, Murder, and Justice in Chicago, and The Package King: A Rank and File History of United Parcel Service. He has written for Jacobin, Socialist Worker, Tempest and elsewhere.
Paul D'Amato is the author of The Meaning of Marxism and was the editor of the International Socialist Review. He is the author of numerous articles on a wide array of topics.
