It has been a preoccupation (damn near an occupation) of ours for the last year in developing an archive of the literature of the Sojourner Truth Organization, a New Left grouping that had originated in the RYM II wing of the Students for a Democratic Society. In one of our more recent posts, Democracy and Hip-Hop – Our Line, we stated, in essence, that our views on hip-hop are not views unto themselves, but are rather informed by a larger political ideology, foremost among these are those that were propounded by the STO during the 70s and 80s.We’ve made a couple of references to their literature in the past, but have not yet had the opportunity to dedicate a specific post to the former group itself.
By and large it is a thankless job that we've spent hours, days, weeks, and months on, with the only gratification being a finished pamphlet or HTML page, but it has still been rewarding to even be able to read such rare material.
The thing about us and the thing about this blog is that if we weren’t able to locate how the new society (and the old, conservative one) is expressed in hip-hop, we would either have a different blog dedicated to rock music (I guess) or one that is much broader than one simply based on artistic movements. Or maybe we be like most hip-hop bloggers and just dwell on dead forms and restorationist artists of the hip-hop movement.
With this said, we would like to formally introduce our very small, but loyal readership to the Sojourner Truth Organization (the origin of this worldview) and their contributions to the struggle of working people to institute a radically different and better world. It goes without saying that the influence of C.L.R. James on our thinking spills into almost everything we publish. But without the STO, it is possible that we would still be in the dark regarding James.
First, let us point out one of the first and most influential articles that we’ve both read written by one of STO’s many political heavyweights, Lee Holstein. The piece is entitled, Working Class Self-Activity. In the piece, Holstein takes on International Socialists’ (a Trotskyist holdover group) theoretician Kim Moody and his attempt at articulating the self-active forms of working class action and organization. Where Moody is wrong is in locating this activity within the official and traditional patterns of action and organization and not, as Holstein highlights, with the autonomous types of action that have always broke with officialdom and with old categories of struggle and which have foreshadowed a new, more egalitarian society. For Moody, self-activity is the workers’ struggles for unions as perpetuated by the “lash of the bourgeoisie”. For Holstein, self-activity is that which positions workers’ struggles outside of the realms of capital and bourgeois legality. To sum it up, Holstein serves up Moody with a logic and a worldview that he was unable to contest.
Another pamphlet that has been added recently to the archive is Introduction to the United States by Noel Ignatin which demonstrates the revolutionary predisposition of black workers from pre-Civil War and forward and the subsequent failure of white workers to find their common class interests with the blacks. The qualifying policy of STO as opposed to most of the other New Left groups of their time, is situating the class struggle in the United States as part and parcel of the struggle against white supremacy and white privilege.
We stand 100 percent behind the politics and logic of the above pamphlets and they represent, more or less, the official line of thought of our blog. The above are vital components to any understanding of the working class as well as their aesthetic expressions.
