From the Free Speech Movement to the Factory Floor: A Collective History of the International Socialists, edited by Andrew Stone Higgins (Haymarket Books, March 2026)
Towards the end of the 1960s, a small group of socialists in northern California were shopping around for a national left-wing organization to join. They invited members of various groups to speak and try to convince them that they were the right choice. The last speakers were from a group called the International Socialists. Dan La Botz, a member of the local collective, asked one of the presenters after their talk, “When do you expect a revolution to take place?” The speaker answered, “Within twenty years.” Reflecting on the way that the social and political upheavals of the previous decade had shaken US society, La Botz found the prospect of revolution by 1989 convincing.
This story is one of many recounted in From the Free Speech Movement to the Factory Floor, recently released by Haymarket Books, that conveys the extraordinary climate of optimism that led thousands of young people like La Botz to join revolutionary organizations in the late 1960s and 1970s. The International Socialists were a revolutionary socialist organization active in the US from 1964 to 1986 whose members played important roles in some of the key struggles of this period. Unlike many other radical organizations of this period, the IS have an important organizational legacy today, including through the Labor Notes magazine and conference, which continue to play an important role for leftists in the labour movement. From the Free Speech Movement to the Factory Floor tells the story of this organization through contributions from twenty-six former members, edited and with a valuable introduction by historian Andrew Stone Higgins.
The roots of International Socialists
The IS had its roots in the Independent Socialist Club, formed in September 1964 by a group of students at the University of California, Berkeley mentored by a handful of leftist veterans with experience stretching back to the 1930s. They shared a political perspective which emphasized the democratic, bottom-up character of socialism, rejecting both the social democratic welfare state and Soviet-style party-states as ‘models’ of socialist society. They also emphasized the need for workers’ struggles to be independent of capitalist parties and union bureaucrats. This support for independent self–organization also applied to the Black liberation struggle and later, to the women’s and gay liberation movements.
Members of the ISC played a central role in the ‘Free Speech Movement’ at UC Berkeley, which began as the group was being formed and which represented the first major campus revolt in the US during the 1960s. Involvement in struggles like this led the group to attract supporters across the US, who formed a loose federation called the Independent Socialist Clubs of America. ISCA members worked within the antiwar and student movements to promote independence from the Democratic party. They helped form the Peace and Freedom Party, an independent antiwar and antiracist ticket for the 1968 elections. This campaign led to an alliance with the Black Panther Party, with the Panthers registering Black voters for the PFP and the mostly white PFP campaigning to free Panther leader Huey Newton from prison.
The collected accounts of this ‘60s period in the IS’s history give a powerful portrait of how young people who usually entered political activity out of moral outrage at racism and war became revolutionary socialists, the intellectual excitement of discovering a Marxist understanding of the world and the way that participating in truly mass movements bolstered their morale. They also include some valuable insights into how IS members organized. David McCullough recounts the methods he learned from Jack Weinberg, a leader of the Berkeley student movement who became a leader in the IS: “…decide what the goal was and work back from there, step by step, until we had an action within our immediate grasp, and take it…systematically seek out and cultivate people with whom we could work as allies. We never just went to a meeting. We went to a meeting and then to a coffee shop or somebody’s house with a subset of people from the meeting and talked our way deeper into the project we shared…”
The turn to industry
By the end of the decade, the political temperature was rising both in the US and internationally. The general strike in France in May ‘68 and a growing number of strikes in the US turned the attention of young radicals to the working class. The students and youth who had made up the mass movements of the ‘60s, many concluded, could not make revolution: only the workers could. The IS became a national organization in 1969 with the goal of ‘turning to the working class.’ They moved their headquarters to Detroit and changed the name of their newspaper to Workers’ Power. They encouraged their members to move from the East and West coasts to the industrial centers of the Midwest and get jobs in key industries–auto, steel, trucking, and telephone.
The IS had two distinct, but related, strategic goals in ‘industrializing.’ One was to build rank-and-file movements in the unions, first at a local level and eventually nationally, which could move the labour movement to the left, promoting militancy and political independence. The other was to recruit the most politically conscious activists in the rank-and-file movements to the IS, transforming it from a small group of ‘industrialized’ radicals to one of thousands of socialist workers. With this foundation in place, ISers believed and hoped, a revolution like that of Russia in October 1917 would become possible in the United States.
Turning student radicals into industrial workers was not easy. It required a level of discipline and commitment that, I suspect, even the most serious activists today would find difficult to muster. Mark Levitan was living in Massachusetts when he got a call from one of the top leaders of IS, telling him that there was a job for him at Chrysler’s Dodge Main plant if he could make it to Detroit by the next morning. Levitan got on the next plane, got the job, and organized in the plant for several years. Dan La Botz, who had joined IS as a graduate student, became a truck driver in Chicago. He had to carry a gun to work and keep another in his house in order to protect himself from goons hired by the corrupt Teamster bureaucracy. Several contributions provide insight into how IS members, with greater or lesser success, navigated racism and sexism in the workplace, as well as the complex politics of the shopfloor and unions.
Despite all the obstacles they encountered, the IS’s careful approach to building rank-and-file workplace organization bore fruit. They played a key role in building a nationwide opposition movement in the Teamsters, one of the most corrupt unions in the country. Even more remarkably, this movement, Teamsters for a Democratic Union, still exists today. The IS was less successful in the other goal of its industrial strategy, that of recruiting decisive numbers of workers. For all the respect IS activists sometimes gained from their coworkers, there turned out to be an unbridgeable gap between young radicals whose lives, in La Botz’s words, “revolved around the IS and its politics,” and those of workers with responsibilities to family and community. The IS and other radical groups who made the ‘turn to the working class’ were also undermined by the recessions of the 1970s, which put workers on the defensive, and the onset of deindustrialization.
Alongside its work in industry, the IS during the 1970s managed to attract a remarkable cohort of younger activists. The radicalization of the 1960s and early ‘70s had reached deep into the high schools, and in the mid-’70s IS made contact with two collectives of socialist secondary students in California. One gave its name, the Red Tide, to a new youth organization formed in close alliance with the IS. Key Red Tide activists relocated to the Midwest and eventually recruited a mainly Black, working-class membership through consistent participation in antiracist struggles–including mobilizing against growing fascist groups and supporting liberation struggles in southern Africa. Larry Bradshaw was one of the young activists who made the move from California to Detroit. He recalls his philosophy in editing the Red Tide’s newspaper: “…I tried to adopt Malcolm X’s advice: if you give people a thorough understanding of what confronts them and the basic causes that produce it, you’ll get action.”
The revolutionary socialist tradition
The IS, of course, did not succeed in building a revolutionary working-class party. The contributions collected in this book detail many mistakes, major and minor. While the IS was more favourable to feminism than most left groups of its time, some members felt that the group’s intense focus on a few male-dominated industries automatically made women second-class members. Members who did not make the ‘turn to industry’ for one reason or another also frequently felt shortchanged. For all members, the effort to build an organization of ‘professional revolutionaries’ modeled on the Bolsheviks took a heavy toll. Over the course of the 1970s, the IS underwent several splits. Both–or all–sides of most of these divisions are represented in this collection. Some defend the positions their side took at the time, while others lament the detrimental effect they had on the group as a whole.
Despite these weaknesses, the account of the IS that emerges in From the Free Speech Movement to the Factory Floor is a predominantly positive one. Like any good work of its kind, the book manages to convey the satisfaction that comes from participation in a collective project of struggle for a better world. The experience of previous generations is indispensable for those who hope to build a socialist movement today. From the Free Speech Movement to the Factory Floor provides a valuable slice of that experience and deserves careful reading.
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