DSA’s “Rank-and-File Strategy” has 60s Roots at UC Berkeley.

“The lessons of the International Socialists can help point us in the right direction by sharing what has worked and what has failed in past decades.”

– Andrew Stone Higgins

Some young radicals are still pondering how they should relate, personally and collectively, to the labor movement. Should they try to become agents of workplace change while serving on the staff of local, regional, or national unions?

Or should they organize “on the shop-floor”—in non-union shops or as a unionized teacher, nurse, or social worker? And then, later on, seek elected, rather than appointed, union leadership roles?

A few years ago, delegates to a national convention of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) debated this latter strategy and then narrowly passed a resolution favoring the rank-and-file route. Some DSA members  have joined the Rank-and-File Project which supports this approach “to fighting for a better world from the bottom up.”

Fifty years ago, Sixties’ leftists pondered the same options before launching their own reform efforts, within the labor bureaucracy or as challengers to it. Some had the foresight to transition from campus and community organizing to union activism in healthcare, education, and social work where college degrees were helpful and job security good.

Other former student radicals– under the (not-always-helpful) guidance of multiple left-wing formations opted to become blue-collar workers in trucking and telecom, mid-west auto plants and steel mills, and West Virginia coal mines in the 1970s. Unfortunately, in the decade that followed, de-regulation, de-industrialization, and global capitalist restructuring produced enormous job losses and industrial contraction.

Radicals who made a “turn toward industry” often lost union footholds they had struggled for years to gain. But, thankfully, many ended up back on the academic track, retooling as teachers, lawyers or pro-labor college professors. Others became community organizers, public sector union activists, labor educators or staffers, and, in some cases, even entered the business world.

Among the recent volumes recounting this personal and generational journey is Mike Stout’s book about working in a Pittsburgh-area steel mill, Jon Melrod’s recollections of his “fighting days” in Wisconsin manufacturing plants, Dave Ranney’s account of “life and death on the factory floor” in Chicago, and the late Frank Empsak’s memoir  about being a third generation GE worker in the northeast. Alumni of one left group active during the same period—the Progressive Labor Party—compiled a more gender diverse collection focused on their “adventures building a worker-student alliance,” in the late 1960s and thereafter.

Socialism from Below 

In similar fashion, Haymarket is now publishing From the Free Speech Movement to the Factory Floor: A Collective History of the International Socialists, edited by Andrew Stone Higgins. Higgins tells the story of the International Socialists (IS) via oral history interviews with 26 former members or chapters, written by them. The IS was founded in 1969 by veterans of the Free Speech Movement (FSM) at Berkeley and other hotbeds of Sixties’ activism. The FSM alums featured in the book include the late Mike Parker, an East Bay DSA member whose chapter on “The Student Movement and Beyond” contains good advice for campus radicals today.

Like organizational rivals on the left less interested in promoting “socialism from below,” the IS made a decade-long attempt to “bridge the gap between a left disproportionately formed on college campuses and the working class, which, of course, remains a central concern for all American socialists.”

In Higgins’ collection, contributors like Candace Cohn, Gay Semel, and Wendy Thompson provide vivid first-person accounts of their experience leaving student life or white-collar jobs to become embedded in industry. Each of them helped fight the discriminatory treatment of women and/or African-American workers that was widespread in the blue-collar world they entered in the 1970s.

Cohn became politically active as a member of Students for a Democratic Society at the University of Michigan. After graduation, she moved to Pittsburgh and helped create a local advocacy group for Mon Valley workers exposed to hazardous health and safety conditions.  She then became “one of the first women hired into basic steel since World War II” at U.S. Steel’s Clairton Coke Works, “the world’s largest coking operation and its filthiest and deadliest.”

In the mill, “sexual harassment was non-stop, both from foremen and from older white co-workers.” Nevertheless, Cohn built relationships with black workers and other female steel workers, started a shop floor paper, Steelworkers Stand Up, and helped rally fellow rank-and-filers on behalf of Ed Sadlowski and his “Fight Back” slate in a 1977 international union election.

Retooling in Law School

Sadlowski was a “left social democrat,” who was heavily red-baited during his exciting but, ultimately unsuccessful, challenge to labor-management partnering in the steel industry. “In the employer’s offensive that followed,” Cohn writes, “tens of thousands of steelworkers were thrown onto the street, mills shuttered, and steel valley voices silenced.” She was able to re-train as a labor and civil rights lawyer.

Like Cohn, Gay Semel went to law school after her tour of duty in the IS, as its national secretary and editor of Workers Power, an “agitational newspaper” featuring a popular column called “Labor Notes.” Before that, she worked as a telephone operator in N.Y.C. In that well-timed intervention, she got herself expelled from the Bell System company union then representing her-co-workers, which the Communications Workers of America was trying to oust. As a lawyer, she spent most of later career working for CWA, the union she also tried to support, back in 1971, when she wouldn’t cross its picket-lines during a nine-month strike by 38,000 N.Y Tel technicians.

Unlike Cohn and Semel, Wendy Thompson actually made it to the finish line of a good union pension in the auto industry after being radicalized during her junior year abroad (in France, circa May, 1968). Thompson worked for General Motors at a Chevy gear and axle plant, with a predominantly black workforce. Surviving lay-offs and repeated management attempts to fire her, Thompson battled sexism on the shop floor, contract concessions, and the long dominant influence of the Administration Caucus in the United Auto Workers (UAW).

During her 33 years in the plant, only one Administration Caucus critic was ever elected to the UAW international executive board. But the 2022 membership vote to ditch convention voting for top officers–and switch to direct election by the rank-and-file–enabled a slate backed by Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD) to win what Thompson calls an “unprecedented victory—and a great culmination of my many years of activity” on the shop floor.

Working Class Recruits? 

The recollections of individual IS members definitely support Higgins’s conclusion that their “pre-party formation” of 500 failed to create an organizational culture “more fully welcoming to diverse working-class recruits.” The latter numbered only about one-fifth of the IS’s peak membership, and, according to Higgins, here’s why:

While refreshingly democratic and seriously committed to political education of new members, the IS culture of deep reading, broad discussion, fierce debates, and long, numerous meetings was a hard sell to prospective members, pressing familial obligations, and a limited amount of free time.

And then there was the internal feuding that disrupted the group’s initially well-coordinated labor work. In 1976-77, the IS split three ways. Several hundred loyalists stayed put; fifty formed a group called Workers Power, and one hundred created the International Socialist Organization (ISO), which grew bigger over the years but then suddenly imploded in 2019. In the mid-1980s, as part of a more constructive “regroupment” process, Workers Power members got back together with remaining ISers to form Solidarity, a looser network of socialists which publishes the journal Against the Current.

According to former Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) supporter Dan LaBotz, now a Brooklyn DSA member and co-editor of New Politics, “one of the principal reasons for the IS split was differences over the labor work,” which some members argued was “making the group more conservative.”

As feminist historian Barbara Winslow recalls, the grounds for her expulsion from the IS, in the late 1970s, was arguing “for a larger engagement in all possible areas of working-class women’s struggles—blue-, white-, and pink-collar movements as well as other women’s liberation activities.”  She and her historian husband, former IS National Industrial Organizer Cal Winslow, became targets of a subsequent purge, when they were expelled from the ISO, despite being among its founding members. (Winslow then resumed his long and productive career as a labor educator, author, and environmentalist.)

A Durable Legacy

Contributors to Higgins collection like UC Santa Barbara Professor Nelson Lichtenstein, David Finkel, co-editor of Against the Current, and others cite TDU and Labor Notes as the main legacies of the IS. The latter is a uniquely durable labor education, rank-and-file organizing, and alternative media project launched forty-seven years ago, during an era when most socialist or communist groups favored highly competitive self-promotion.

Their publications often prioritized new “cadre” recruitment over building a broad-based, multi-tendency rank-and-file movement. In contrast, as Thompson recalls, “the IS clearly rejected the model that many organizations had of maintaining their labor front groups tightly under their control. Originally staffed by IS members, Labor Notes became a project where workers would feel they were in a comfortable milieu but also a pond where socialists could swim.”

This may have “violated all the norms of so-called Leninism,” Finkel notes. But, in the end, a more ecumenical approach was critical to developing a multi-generational network of rank-and-file militants that now meets every two years with 5,000 or more in attendance, as opposed to just 600 in the early 1980s, which was good turnout back then. (To attend the June, 2026 Labor Notes conference, register as soon as possible at )

This very readable volume has much solid advice for socialists trying to revitalize existing unions or create alternatives to them today.  One key lesson is that building a big labor or political tent is better, for the left, than becoming a small one. If you prefer the latter result, then endless meetings, too much organizational “discipline,” and fractious debates over the finer points of Marxist theory–followed by destructive purges–will get you there pretty quick. On the other hand, if you want to be an individual or organizational long-distance runner on the labor left, there are, in this book, some very good role models to follow. 

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