When Socialists Joined the Rank-and-File Upsurge
Often forgotten today, the US saw a tidal wave of rank-and-file worker militancy in the late 1960s and early ’70s. Many socialists of the era took jobs on the shop floor to help foment the upsurge and build a revolutionary movement to replace capitalism.
The Teamsters for a Decent Contract rally outside their union's headquarters to press for better wages and conditions in the 1976 National Master Freight Agreement. They would become Teamsters for a Democratic Union later that year. (Jim West / UCG / Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
For more than fifty years, conservatives and liberals alike in the United States have ignored, denied, and disparaged class struggle. Academic “left” liberalism has reduced class to a minor category of identity politics. But as Karl Marx explained, the class struggle carries on uninterrupted, even if at times it is hidden. Class struggle in the 1960s and ’70s was open, explosive, impossible to ignore. Yet most histories of the period overlook it, almost wiping out historical memory of the rank-and file-revolt that shook America over the turbulent ten-year period of 1965–1975.
This article aims to restore a small part of that history for the new generation of anti-capitalists. We first describe the decade-long working-class upsurge and explore its roots. In this context, we then focus on the labor work of the International Socialists (IS), whose rank-and-file strategy has gained wide recognition for its lasting contribution to left-labor organizing. The labor success of the IS, while real, was modest and only made possible by the working-class revolt of those years together with the organization’s revolutionary politics and its commitment to fighting for socialism from below.
The Working-Class Revolt
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.
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