In the late 1960s and early ’70s, a number of members of the American New Left that had incubated on college campuses in the prior decade set out to take rank-and-file jobs as blue-collar workers. The social and political ferment of the ’60s — including the women’s movement, the antiwar movement, the civil rights movement, and the Black Power movement — was reaching a fever pitch and was reflected in an upsurge of rank-and-file militancy in unions. Student activists, influenced by a variety of Marxist traditions and the venerable history of socialist and communist trade-union organizing, decided to try to integrate themselves with the industrial working class and foment class struggle from the shop floor.

These efforts ran into headwinds, including the personal difficulties activists had in sustaining their work as well as the broader political, social, and economic trends that marginalized the Left and hollowed out the labor movement. Johanna Brenner, a veteran of the New Left, wrote in 2023:

For the following three decades, as corporate capital restructured the U.S. economy, hollowing out the cities and industries that had been at the center of the rank and file project, as “socialism” continued to be a dirty word politically, as young people mostly turned away from the left . . . the stream of young radicals entering into working-class jobs for rank and file organizing ran dry.