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From the Free Speech Movement to the Factory Floor documents the overlooked history and lasting influence of the International Socialists through the words of its members.
The Independent Socialist Club, founded at UC Berkeley in 1964 as a radical civil rights group, lit the spark of the Free Speech Movement that same year, and its members and successor organizations would go on to play an outsized role in shaping the course of both the Black freedom struggle and the rank-and-file labor insurgency of the 1970s.
Following their success in the Bay Area, the ISC launched chapters across the country, and in 1969 became the International Socialists, with much of its growing membership relocating to the Midwest to take industrial jobs in the auto, steel, communications, and trucking industries. In their final years, among other important efforts, the IS created a majority-Black youth group known as the Red Tide, founded the seminal publication Labor Notes, and helped create Teamsters for a Democratic Union.
From the Free Speech Movement to the Factory Floor includes twenty-six original reflections by leading members—including renowned scholar-activists Nelson Lichtenstein and Nancy Holmstrom—offering invaluable insights into this influential but little-known organization.
"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." —Spring Magazine
"For a new generation seeking to rebuild a fighting left amid precarity, climate crisis, resurgent authoritarianism, and hollowed-out labor institutions, From the Free Speech Movement to the Factory Floor offers something priceless: proof that disciplined, principled, mass-oriented socialism once flourished in the belly of American capitalism, and can again." —Hossam el-Hamalawy
"There is no red thread of continuity between generations; the organisations which were meant to play that role aged badly, taught habits of deference antithetical to the restless spirit necessary to revolutionary politics. Those of us who came later have had to learn through our own experiences of struggle, had to dream our own visions of revolutionary change. But, whatever mistakes they made, here were people facing many of the same problems as us, and we can learn from them." —D K Renton
“As the American democratic socialist movement experiences a stunning revival, too little credit has been given to the Independent Socialists, who paved the road directly beneath our feet. They kept the spirit of the Old Left alive in the New Left, and tended the flame of class struggle through the dreary decades thereafter. Today’s young socialists have been lucky to know many of them personally, to hear firsthand about their audacious experiments, their clumsy missteps and stunning victories, and the personal ups and downs of lives devoted to political struggle. Thanks to the vivid accounts collected in this necessary and long-overdue book, the experiences of the Independent Socialists will remain a source of inspiration and education for generations of socialists to come.” —Meagan Day, senior editor at Jacobin and coauthor of Bigger Than Bernie
“From the Free Speech Movement to the Factory Floor is a vivid, indispensable collective history of the ‘socialism from below’ tradition that shaped everything from the Berkeley Free Speech Movement to rank-and-file union insurgencies. It shows how a small socialist current punched above its weight, leaving power- ful legacies like Teamsters for a Democratic Union and Labor Notes.” —Eric Blanc, assistant professor of labor studies at Rutgers University and author of We Are the Union
"This very readable volume has much solid advice for socialists trying to revitalize existing unions or create alternatives to them today." —Steve Early for California DSA
"From the Free Speech Movement to the Factory Floor faithfully follows the ideas, the personalities, the ups and downs of a critically important thread in the US socialist garment. I hope every young socialist will sit down and read this book, and then read it again, patiently, thoughtfully: you will be a better radical for having done so." —Paul Buhle, coeditor of Encyclopedia of The American Left, author of Marxism in the United States, and the authorized biographer of C. L. R. James
Introduction by Andrew S. Higgins
Mike Parker
Thomas Harrison
Marilyn Morehead
Nelson Lichtenstein
David McCullough
Lois Weiner
Kim Moody
Robert “Gabe” Gabrielsky
Nancy Holmstrom
Sam Friedman
Joel Geier
David Finkel
Dan La Botz
Wendy Thompson
Mark Levitan
Candace Cohn
Gay Semel
Anne Mackie
Barbara Winslow
Sheila Jordan
Michael Letwin
Larry Bradshaw
Kim Anno
Arnita Dobbins
Tonya English
Kyle Hopkins