It wasn’t long before my friends recruited me into a cadre organization called the Revolutionary Union (RU). I was aware of the RU’s reputation for sinking roots into workers issues in the San Francisco Bay Area. The founders had been radicals from Berkeley who elaborated a plan for revolution based on Marx, Lenin, and Mao. The RU was quickly spreading to industrial cities in the Midwest and Northeast. The founders of the Milwaukee chapter were smart and dedicated. Many had formerly been in the student movement in Madison.
The woman who met to recruit me had been a former girlfriend. How was I supposed to say “No”? I hesitated a little when she closed with “are you sure that you will always support the dictatorship of the proletariat?” It sounded stiff and foreign. But this was only a momentary misgiving. The RU had an elaborate strategy that was drawn in large part from the Chinese revolution. One of the key guidelines was “Winning as much as can be won in the immediate battles and help the working class take leadership of the united front.” It was a new stage in my life. I was a cadre. The group became like a family to me. I had migrated from truth seeker, to radical, to militant, to revolutionary, to communist — in just a few years.
The RU projected a swagger. We acted macho, rough, ready, and street smart. Now the group could boast of an ex-con who had knocked down a police lieutenant!
Our collectives always discussed fully what we were doing and why. The watchword was “democratic centralism.” We held that practical efforts are the source and validation of any approach. And that locally developed ideas should get kicked up for regional and national decision making. For the most part this spiral of knowledge was tremendously helpful. Sometimes there were ways for those of us who were in local leadership to color the discussion. We sometimes promoted the ideas of a working class cadre or an advanced contact to get agreement for something we wanted.
Other times we moved the pea quickly under the shells. Members would get dizzy sorting out primary contradictions from secondary, principal aspect of the contradiction from the factors in decline. I still employ dialectical methods of thinking and decision making. The two philosophical essays, On Practice and On Contradiction have helped me in whatever I tried to do in life. The difference is that now I freely admit that I’m never quite sure of anything.
As part of the group’s strategy of sending organizers into heavy industry, I managed to get a job at the American Motors Body plant. I enjoyed hearing a white union steward with a deep southern drawl tell stories of the union’s heyday. In the fifties, Ramblers were coming off the line 24 hours a day to meet postwar demand. The threat that workers would disrupt production allowed him to offer even the most preposterous excuse for an infraction. “Once,” he said, “I wrote that a guy missed a few cars because a fly flew up his nose.” The AMC union had a contract provision that even the Big 3 did not – strike vote as the final step of the grievance procedure.
I was installing back seats on the line. It was a lot of humping. But I was lean with a size 30 waist and fresh from pumping iron in the joint. Just short of my probation period, I was fired for lying on my application. I had omitted my one year as a guest of the state.