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DSA’S “RANK-AND-FILE STRATEGY” HAS 60S ROOTS AT UC BERKELEY  
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Steve Early
January 26, 2026
California Red
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_ This 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. _

,

 

"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 DSA members 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, the DSA convention debated this latter strategy and
then narrowly passed a resolution favoring the rank-and-file route.
Some members locally have joined the Rank-and-File Project
[[link removed]] 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.

SOCIALISM FROM BELOW

Andrew Stone Higgins’ history of the International Socialists (IS),
_From the Free Speech Movement to the Factory Floor: A Collective
History of the International Socialists,_ brings together individual
oral histories or contributor-written chapters by 26 former members of
that organization. The IS was founded in 1969 by veterans of the Free
Speech Movement (FSM) at Berkeley and other hotbeds of Sixties’
activism. 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 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 [[link removed]] in a 1977
international union election.  

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
retrain 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 becoming a
labor-oriented radical 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.

A HARD SELL

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; seventy five 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
[[link removed]], a looser network of socialists
which publishes the journal _Against the Current_.
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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 then 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.

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.
That uniquely durable labor education, rank-and-file organizing, and
alternative media project was launched forty-six years ago, during an
era when other socialist or communist formations were still mired in
highly competitive self-promotion. 

For example, their organizational newspapers usually put a higher
priority on new “cadre” recruitment than helping to build
broad-based, multi-tendency rank-and-file movement. In contrast, as
Thompson recalls, “the IS clearly rejected the model that many
socialist groups had of maintaining their front groups rightly 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 [link removed].)

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 purge—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.

 

_From the Free Speech Movement to the Factory Floor: A Collective
History of the International Socialists, _edited by Andrew Stone
Higgins, Haymarket Books, available March 2026.

 

_Steve Early is a longtime labor activist, journalist, and author. He
is an East Bay DSA member who belonged to the New American Movement
(NAM) in the 1970s and favored the socialist group merger that led to
DSA’s formation in 1982. He has been a contributor to Labor Notes
since 1979 and, for many years, served on its editorial advisory
board. He can be reached at [email protected]._

 

_California Red is the bimonthly newsletter of California DSA._

* International Socialists
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* rank and file strategy
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* Free Speech Movement
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* Labor Notes
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* DSA
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