WINTER 2025
ISSUE 1

₁ Editors: One connection between the civil rights movement and a particular strand of US syndicalism can be traced through Don West, Myles Horton, and Highlander Folk School. West and Horton cut their teeth organizing workers and Highlander served as a movement incubator for unionization drives across the South.

₂ Happily, Radical America is digitized via Brown University, and easily viewable on the Web. So is Cultural Correspondence.

₃ Paul Buhle and Mike Alewitz, Insurgent Images: The Agitprop Murals of Mike Alewitz (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002).

₄ Paul Buhle, “The End of the Craftsmen’s Era: The Brown & Sharpe Strike, a Journalist’s Report from 1982” in From the Knights of Labor to the New World Order: Essays on Labor and Culture (London: Routledge, 1997).

₅ I would like to, for the same reasons, connect Cultural Correspondence and some of its contents, interviews with artists of underground comix, with the series of graphic novels that I would bring together from 2005 onward. Wobblies!, still one of the best, offered a logical beginning. Readers interested in GNs will find for themselves other examples, but I could point to Red Rosa (about Rosa Luxemburg) or Under the Banner of King Death (aka, the real story of eighteenth-century pirates) as apt examples.

Comics by Pete Wagner and Mike Konopacki. Cultural Correspondence no. 9 (1979): 80.

It is useful, I hope, to return to the origins of what I like to call “Syndicalism” – never a popular word on the Left in the United States before Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and then vanishing from the vocabulary again. Doing so helps identify unique strains touching my own generational experience and a wider influence little understood. The term brings together several, seemingly distinct, phenomena: The movement toward direct action at workplaces, an iconoclastic cultural radicalism, a countersociety with its own terminology and ethnic and international links. In its own way, syndicalism redrew the lines between economic and political struggle.

Nothing observable in the civil rights movement, as that social movement touched down all too briefly in the Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, of my teen years, looked like syndicalism.¹ But the literary expressions and lifestyle of the Beat generation certainly did. One could find, in any college town and the larger urban areas (that is to say, Chicago), paperbacks by Beats including Diane DiPrima, whose grandfather was a prominent Italian-American anarchist, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who pointedly carried anarchist publications in City Lights Books.

Buried in the Beats, and sometimes invisible unless someone like Gary Snyder announced his spiritual affiliation, was something about the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and anarchism, the attitude more than the elucidation. The Folk Song Club on campus at many universities offered a kind of musical Wobblyism in the tracks of Woody Guthrie and some of his devotees.

The curious experience of seeing the weekly The People on the streets of San Francisco (where I headed, age 18, on a nine month adventure, Summer 1963) led me to study classes and for some months, membership in the Socialist Labor Party (SLP). The rest of the Left was more or less invisible, and the Red Scare had banished other papers from the newstands, even though these had street presence in Berkeley. Other prospective New Leftists, including future SDS leaders such as Carl Davidson, also read The People and even took the “Socialist Study Class” by mail order.

The SLP was, as in Franklin Rosemont’s phrase, “tractarian,” which is to say the main activity involved handing out illustrated leaflets and running candidates for office in some states, which also generated one definite activity: collecting signatures to get on the ballot. In their lectures, SLP speakers still used the oil-cloth Wobbly-style chart, familiarly and humorously called “Father Haggerty’s Wheel of Fortune,” because it described visually how the future society would operate. No State, no politics as such, only self-governing industrial councils. This was the SLP faith, minus the culture, music, and association with hobo jingles that made the Wobblies so colorful.

By the time I had left the SLP, resigning and being expelled almost simultaneously, the first whiff of the antiwar movement had begun to reach college towns. By the Summer of 1965, the “community organizing” vision of social transformation had faded, the antiwar movement was coming fast, and at Fall registration, suddenly SDS had a local membership.

The emergence of a wide and intriguing perspective, “Student Syndicalism,” articulated mainly by Davidson, owed something integral to the student unionists in Quebec as much to the two years that Greg Calvert had spent in France in the early 1960s. In any case, it seemed to suit SDS perfectly. Civil rights veterans in the leadership felt madly frustrated by the lack of coherence (Jane Adams, coming in and out of the leadership, proposed the membership be abolished so that SDS could become a staff organization like SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), and could not see the charm of this sentiment. But many of us instinctively found it suitable. Each chapter would decide on its own priorities, its own approach.

I had already made the syndicalist connection that would prove vital in many ways. August 1966 saw the Clear Lake, Iowa, SDS convention, and there, on the back tables with other leftwing publications given away to attendees, was Speak Out, published by Marty Glaberman, C.L.R. James’ chief disciple. Thanks to Marty and his other contributors, the stories of struggles from below in unions as well as factories, the socialist view of the civil rights struggle, and so on, became clearer to me. I felt honored to become a contributor.

By Spring 1967, I had published a first, crude issue of Radical America (with a document by Daniel De Leon at the end), and sent it out to select SDS chapters, thanks to the new internal education program in SDS. The second issue appeared in Madison in September, and had a Wobbly drawing on the cover. The print shop consisted of one printer, a dues-paying Wobbly who doubled as the leader of the SDS chapter and also pretty soon the foremost figure in the struggle to create a Teaching Assistant Association – the opening salvo of grad student unionism in the United States. Wobblyism had no logical boundaries, and the vibrant underground newspaper, Connections, appeared from the same office.

My Radical America experience lasted six or seven years but it would always remain crucial to how I thought about things and related to a fair number of the people in touch with me for decades afterward. What I consider the special approach within the syndicalist tradition was reflected there from the beginning. It was very New Left in its eclecticism and its resistance to the waves of Maoism that swept over activist circles after 1970, and it was linked always, somehow, to memories of a Marxism outside of “party” channels.

Most intriguing in these years would be the nexus of C.L.R. James and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, encompassing the wide view of Pan-Africanism, history, culture and sports. Some of this had to do specifically with the specialness of Detroit, historically both “colonized” and misunderstood (or underestimated) by the Old Left. James and his devotees, steeped in Marxist wisdom, if amazingly ignorant about the history of the IWW, offered a view of working class life outside of the existing Left. Fredy Perlman, the Yugoslavian immigrant and erstwhile Marxist amid the scene – also the printer of Radical America for several precious years – epitomized and articulated a renewed syndicalist spirit. We do not appreciate yet, I think, how much James Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs added on their own account, and how much more might have been counted through their influence on Malcolm X, cut short by the assassination.

It would be difficult, on a larger scale, to reconstruct the optimism of this historical moment, in one particular and definitively Marxist sense. The Cold War years seemed to have ended the popularity of Marxist ideas, especially about the working class and the workplace. By 1967, we could see an ongoing transformation of the working class, and not only in the United States, becoming more diverse in every way, offering new inroads for militancy and challenging union leadership. The Underground Press, that so dramatically changed the role of journalism, grew up side by side.

My own most direct and vivid strike experience, the successful strike of the Teaching Assistants Association at the University of Wisconsin in 1970, could be described as “syndicalist” because an affiliation with a national union (eventually the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) came some time later. The strike at UW took place against the background of the antiwar movement and a succession of student strikes there, from the Fall of 1967 onward. Undergraduate involvement would be key to all these strikes, but it could also be said that the distinctiveness of that time – unlike today – was such that teaching assistants suffered few sanctions for striking, and retribution against striking students who completed papers and took exams was also limited. The President of the university was a notably left-leaning historian.

The strike began on March 15, 1970 and lasted 24 days. In the previous year, the university had agreed to recognize the union, but not to bargain over pay, job security, and other issues. This time, pressure continued to build, and with student demands for participation in their education, the picket-lines held strong, especially in the Liberal Arts, if not on the Engineering campus. Student demands, as the strike ended, met only a nominal university pledge for continuing discussions and in that sense, the strike was not fully successful. Yet it was widely seen as a victory of students over the university, and set the pace for future teaching assistant association unions.

The “Global Revolutionary Moment,” one could almost say the theorization as well as the practice, happened so quickly that it had nearly passed by the time we could grapple with its consequences. In retrospect, the striving to document the experience in new venues substituted in some ways for the Old Left compulsion to draw didactic lessons. Oral History, a field that grew up with the civil rights movement, lent itself naturally to graduate students and community activists seeking a deeper take on events around them. Preservation, the archiving of leaflets, posters, local poetry broadsides and other such materials, became an almost reflexive activity.

Drawing “lessons,” in the Old Left sense, however, seemed dubious. As militant, even proto-revolutionary waves passed from French campuses and the Bay Area to Quebec to Italy, and Portugal. Radical America, in its happy optimism, published the texts of leaflets, the use of cartoon images, and reports of ordinary people taking history into their hands.²

And then it was gone, or seemed to have been finished, at least in its intensity. What did this historical moment leave behind? Because so much of the radical energy in graduate schools had been directed toward History and so many history students in this discipline involved in every aspect of the campus Left, a different way of seeing history, but especially US History, survived and as a scholarly apparatus of understanding, grew stronger. Black History and Women’s History offered different ways of seeing life, with “labor history,” seen in a new light, as a part of both. After Maoism faded and the usual Trotskyist venues narrowed, a certain sensibility survived.

I would like to say, without much confidence, that thereafter, the shift (or slide) of former campus activists into working class history and the pursuit of meaning in popular culture offered the same kind of syndicalist, revolutionary prospects. They did not and could not. But the syndicalist, working-class-from-below perspective cheerfully infected or inflected a wide-ranging study of working class culture, music to dance (e.g. the deeply working class polka), connections of film to the Hollywood films of the Old Left, and so on. Cultural Correspondence (1975–82), its very name taken from the James group’s paper Correspondence – in turn from the Workers Correspondence impulse of the early Comintern – carried an old memory onward.

And there is yet another important sidebar, for me as well as others, in the decades after the 1960s. The struggle of unions to maintain their position in the face of industrial erosion and corporate power offered, from time to time, real opportunities for solidarity campaigns that recalled the older hopes. The Mill Hunk Herald, in Pittsburgh of the 1980s, was an illustrated, home-grown magazine of great verve and humor, a reflection of the solidarity movement there. During the 1990s, labor muralist Mike Alewitz managed to insert himself and his work into a variety of local campaigns, most impressively the struggle waged by UFCW Local P-9 against Hormel in Austin, Minnesota (though nearly all of his murals have been effaced in the United States as in Nicaragua, where his work began).³ Many other examples could be cited.

My own activity connected the ongoing labor history of Rhode Island with a very particular, current industrial struggle: the Brown and Sharpe Strike, the longest in the United States, 1979–83.⁴ The International Association of Machinists (IAM), an old-fashioned craft union in some respects, had won NLRB recognition only during the 1940s, after decades of failed efforts, and only because the Roosevelt administration needed wartime production. Yet the union more than held on, a paragon of workers’ rights in some respects, with workers given a broad scope of doing their jobs largely in their own ways, while protected from forced early retirement. Management was cooperative until profits declined, owing mainly to competition from Japanese capital. A strike was forced upon the proud machinists, but they did not go down without a struggle. By the end of that struggle, every avenue of solidarity or protest had been exhausted.

Nothing seemingly remained but “labor history.” This cannot be quite true, because a solidarity movement with its own state labor history society, various commemorations, annual award ceremonies, etc., continues in Rhode Island as elsewhere. This is definitely not a celebration of labor conservatism à la George Meany and Lane Kirkland. Is it syndicalist in some way? An open question.⁵

“Everything in and through the unions,” was oddly enough the leading slogan of the Lovestoneites, as leaders of the then-largest union locals in the US, International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) Local 22, in New York. Charles “Sasha” Zimmerman, very much attached to memories of his visiting old Wobblies, laid out a vision encompassing union militancy, wide cultural programs, and much more. His boss was David Dubinsky, who clamped down on the Left at the first opportunity, and hired former communist Lewis Corey to “clean out” the Reds’ pockets of strength, wiping the slate clean of the culture-and-recreation sector that had been so vital. Corey had been Louis Fraina, quasi-Wobbly of the 1910s and subject of my MA thesis (and later, biography). Irony of ironies, when I found Sasha Zimmerman in 1981, he was the nominal head of SDUSA (he was actually blind) and had totally converted to Zionism.

But measuring the role of syndicalism today, in the US, depends upon widening the focus. The effort to build unions outside the existing frameworks failed again with the Amazon workers’ merger with the Teamsters. The IWW effort with Starbucks almost a couple of decades ago fell short for the same reasons: not enough financial reserves or infrastructure to fight giant corporations.

On the other hand, the impulses in the historic direction of syndicalism have been very much alive in state teachers’ unions striking despite opposition from the higher orders of AFT or National Education Association (NEA), and alive again in the graduate workers’ actions that go beyond the narrow tactics and goals of existing unions. In most cases, rallying community support or campus-wide support is the answer to the no-win strategies of unions seeking to negotiate and contain the framework of struggles. Syndicalism is not gone, just taking on new forms.

The particulars change. The effort continues.