Book Review: Motown and the making of working-class revolutionaries…

Written by: “Contributed - Craig Brittain” on 23 September 2026

 

A reader has sent us his review of a book on the League of Revolutionary Black Workers who were organised in the Detroit auto plants in the late 1960s. Rank and file workers in America, led by oppressed minority groups (Black workers and immigrant workers from Central and South America) have a proud history of waging the class struggle. This continues today, but is concealed by the US mainstream media and the two Party system of Republicans and Democrats - Eds.

"Working Class Marxists"

Review of: Jerome Scott and Walda Katz-Fishman (2025), Motown and the making of working-class revolutionaries: the story of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, University of Georgia Press

Of all the radical groups to emerge in the U.S. in the 1960’s one of the most interesting was the League of Revolutionary Black Workers that began organising in the car industry in Detroit. 

Motown and the making of working-class revolutionaries is based on extensive interviews done with the surviving members of the League

Before and after the Second World War large numbers of Blacks had moved north from the southern states to escape segregation and police violence, and in search of the $5 a day Henry Ford was promising in his factories, when they were used to earning about $6 a week.

However, what they discovered in the car plants wasn’t the utopia they’d hope for - as usual, whites got the pick of the jobs, and Blacks did the dirty work. Management were white and so was the union. Both were racist.

Those who went north might not have experienced the legally sanctioned discrimination they’d experienced in the South, but there was plenty of discrimination nonetheless; in housing, education and employment. And the police were just the same.

In 1967 things came to a head in the Detroit Rebellion, which the media naturally referred to as “race riots”. President Johnson called in the National Guard and the military, which opened fire with machine guns upon ordinary Americans. 45 died in the street.

Finally, Black workers in Detroit had had enough. They started organising in their work places. A few student workers got together and created the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement or DRUM in May 1968 at the Chrysler Hamtramck Assembly Plant. Later on other RUMs (Revolutionary Union Movement) were set up in other plants and industries  - FRUM (Ford) and ELRUM (Chrysler Eldon Avenue), UPRUM (UPS United Parcel Service). They were formed in opposition to the United Auto Workers (U.A.W.). which like so many unions, then and now, had effectively become another branch of management. The U.A.W and the company had come to a convenient arrangement whereby the union would give advance notice of a strike. The companies would prepare and plan around it, effectively undermining the reason for going on strike in the first place. The union got financial and other kickbacks for this service.

The first thing the DRUM workers did was stage a wildcat strike over speedups on the assembly line. They were also protesting against the racist practices of the company and the union. 4000 workers walked off the job which stopped the production of 3000 cars.

Wildcat strikes became their main tactic.

The League of Revolutionary Black Workers was established to bring the various RUMs together and coordinate their activity. The leadership were Marxist-Leninist, but most of the production-line workers didn’t start out that way, they became Marxist on the shop floor.  

None of the white officials had counted on the fact that Blacks had learned strategies and tactics in the Civil Rights movement, the Black nationalist movement, and a range of socialist groups many had belonged to. They were experienced in mass meetings, collective decision-making, and direct action, and believed strongly in grass-roots leadership. And they knew how to put what they’d learnt to good use. 

Right at the beginning they set up newspapers to communicate with workers and the Black community at large. The Inner City Voice and South End became major sources of information.

As a group they were prepared to use whatever methods worked. It didn’t matter whether they’d originally come from the I.W.W., the Communist Party, the anarcho-syndicalists or the Maoists. 

They held demonstrations and rallies; issued plant bulletins and leaflets; picketed union headquarters and forced union executives to listen to their demands; boycotted nearby bars that refused to hire blacks. They also worked out how to quickly move pickets from one plant to another to outsmart the police… Two of the standard texts they studied were Mao’s “On Practice” and “On Contradiction”, which helped them analyse situations dialectically, and then decide what to do.

The League of Revolutionary Workers lasted two years (1969 - 1971) before it split. But it achieved a remarkable amount in that time. The split, when it occurred, was primarily over a difference of opinion about priorities. There were those like General Baker and Jerome Scott who felt that they should stick with what they’d set out to do - improve conditions for Blacks in the car industry; but others, like Mike Hamlin and Ken Cockerel wanted to broaden the focus to include areas like education and health care, publishing and film making. By-and-large the production-line workers thought that the Executive Branch were separating themselves from the workers and no longer listening to their grievances. They wanted more democracy; as it had been in DRUM at the beginning, when everyone had a say, and there wasn’t a gap between the “thinkers” (the Executive Branch) and the “workers” on the shop floor. Eventually, some of them, like Ernie Allen, were expelled for complaining, and the organisation didn’t last long much after that.

What is reassuring however (and true of most old leftist I know) is that they didn’t give up and become born-again capitalists or move to a commune in the country - they, each in their own way, kept up the struggle. Some members of the League, like Jerome Scott and General Baker, joined the Communist Labor Party, which eventually became the League of Revolutionaries for a New America, with the die-hard old radical, Nelson Peery.  They stuck with production workers in the factories and then, as automation and offshoring took over, increasingly concentrated on organising and educating the unemployed and under-employed. The other group went into community work, legal support, health work and local government. Both groups have made long-standing contributions. 

As one of the original League members, Luke Tripp, said in 2017: “The system in this country keeps me in a revolutionary orientation. The criminality and immorality of the system. Billionaires just sucking up all the wealth - super greedy, selfish and mean spirited. That’s what keeps me in a fighting spirit - a lot of outrage and anger.  Revolutionaries are fighters” p.155

The class struggle goes on. 

Another excellent book about the League is: Dan Georgakas’ and Marvin Surkin’s Detroit: I do mind dying: a study in urban revolution, St Martin’s Press, N.Y. 1975, available at the Internet Archive 
https://archive.org/details/detroitidominddy0000geor/page/n5/mode/1up

A documentary made by the group at the time is called Finally got the news and is available at the Internet Archive:
 https://archive.org/details/finally-got-the-news-1970

 

 

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