Two peaks of Communist organization in the US are typically identified in the historical record: the CPUSA in the first half of the ’30s and the Black Panther Party (along with the New Left in general) in the ’60s and ’70s.² The first peak coincided with the Great Depression. The CPUSA’s success in the Deep South must be credited to the fusion of Communists with the Black national liberation movement, which itself was a line attributed to firstly Black revolutionaries themselves and secondly the Comintern and its intervention in CPUSA supporting the Black Belt Thesis.³ The second peak was in many ways a reaction to the class collaboration and liquidation of CPUSA by Browderism and McCarthyism, and the disorganization of the party by internal revisionist lines and Soviet revisionist “peaceful co-existence” policies, in particular the abandonment of the Black Belt Thesis and the liquidation of the Black national liberation struggle and Southern CPUSA branches. The second peak was characterized by theoretical eclecticism, adventurism, and the failure to consolidate all Communist forces into a unified revolutionary party to wage class war. The material basis for these errors, of course, lie in the original settler-system itself and the later development of a burgeoning labor aristocracy within the US Empire.

Owing to these factors, there hasn’t been a successful Communist revolution in the so-called United States to this day. The CPUSA was routed by its own internal enemies (arguably, stemming from its foundation as a forced merger of two settler-chauvinist groups and the Comintern’s complete failure to deal with the Indigenous land question) and became a reformist social-democratic organ; the New Left, which failed to build the united front against settlerism and therefore did not survive state repression, was shattered into various remnants and cults and erased or recuperated into the “nonviolent Civil Rights Movement” narrative in US history books. Therefore, it is of interest to me when there is history to be relearned that is not the stereotypical “crazy revolutionary age where students committed terrorism” depiction of the New Left.

Contemporaneous with the Black Panther Party for its brief three years, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (1969 to 1971) was consolidated out of spontaneous Black worker’s uprisings after the 1967 Detroit Rebellion and the flowering of Black-led auto unions, student unions, and neighborhood organizations thereafter.⁴ Disagreements on whether to nationalize the revolutionary unions throughout the country or to consolidate and train members in Marxism-Leninism, and longstanding class tensions between workers and intellectuals led to a split, of which one faction merged with the California Communist League, later reforming into the Communist League, the Communist Labor Party, and finally, the League of Revolutionaries for a New America of which both authors of Motown and the Making of Working-Class Revolutionaries: The Story of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers are members of.

The bulk of Motown‘s contents is based on interviews with people who actually lived through the formative events that gave rise to the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW). What the authors of this book hope for, clearly, is that this book will be more than a historical curio for niche specialists, and that the knowledge of generations past will contribute meaningfully to the present struggle. In this sense the book operates more as a collection of testimonies about the Black revolutionary worker’s movement in mid-1970s Detroit than a critical movement post-mortem. This is a weakness of the book, in so far as it is minimally editorialized (and where there is analysis, points of sharp disagreement arise for me).

It is also important to note that previous works about the LRBW were composed by outside academics whom rank-and-file workers refused to speak to, as is addressed in the first chapter. This book, published through the University of Georgia Press, is based on the testimony of those who actually lived through the events. That it exists at all is both something sad and hopeful; we are merely reading a radical history in place of living through the revolutionary changes that the members of the LRBW hoped for. But we can be glad that this knowledge has not been consigned to the dust bin of history, as much as the bourgeois state would like it to be, and is part of our inheritance as Communists that will arm us for future struggles.

Motown generally moves chronologically. Since all people start off as children, that is where the book starts. It accounts for the origins of LRBW leading members as immigrants or children of immigrants to the Midwest from the Southern US (or in another view, New Afrikan diaspora) and their paths to political activity, whether born into it as the children of the advanced masses or through personal experiences with capitalism and national oppression. These children grew up in a US that won the Second World War and reaped the profits of the imperialist (re-)redivision of the world, that was organizing a globalized White Terror to massacre Communists (and leftists of all stripes), and had already “cleaned up” at home with the domestic innovations of Browderism and McCarthyism.

With the disembowelment of the CPUSA (where it was not already insufficient in addressing the national question in the US Empire) and the disruption of institutional Communist memory, new organizers were left with the task of essentially developing mass organs from scratch in a hostile landscape dominated by state-controlled collaborator unions. Fortunately, the actions of the state itself gave workers the impetus to organize themselves in defense against repression. The Detroit Rebellion of 1967 was touched off by the police raiding a blind pig (unlicensed bar), one of the many that served as a node of social reproduction for factory workers. The heavy-handed state repression that came down, principally on Black workers, kicked off their self-organization in Revolutionary Union Movements (RUM) the following year, principally through the use of the wildcat strike, against both the auto corporations and the settler UAW. These RUMs were consolidated into the LRBW.

What I find useful about this section of the book is the descriptions of practical mass activities and tactics that organizers took on to mobilize not only the sections of Black workers within the factories themselves, but also to mobilize the households of striking workers. In the context of the struggle of Black workers against white-chauvinist and class-collaborationist unions, the wildcat strike was their primary weapon, as the disproportionate placement of Black workers in the most difficult, unsafe, and tedious jobs gave them control over specific choke points in the supply chains of major automobile manufacturers. Wildcat strikes were publicized and made into mass actions by the use of printed materials (especially the newspaper format, directly inspired by Lenin) circulated by high schoolers and use of existing cultural forms like music and poetry. The mass movement also had the services of radical lawyers on hand to defend workers from legal repression, though these intellectuals would later contribute to the split of the LRBW.

Specific material conditions (such as the proximity of bars to factories as an after-work socialization nexus) facilitated the mass movement, but in particular the effectiveness of the wildcat strikes and the RUMs themselves were based on the density of industry in the city. This tactic lost effectiveness as bourgeois counter-measures like offshoring and automation removed Black workers’ jobs and leverage. The wildcat strike cannot be repeated uncritically today (a point that is repeated again and again in this book), but must be related to organizational strategy under specific conditions at particular historical moments. Still, it is important to understand that previous generations of organizers did not fall into a stereotyped and mechanistic class-only or workplace-only style, but instead brought in all aspects of society possible to exert targeted pressure on specific contradictions.

Exemplary of creative organizing is how the RUMs brought in students and other non-workers into the movement, effectively supporting the workplace struggles by organizing entire neighborhoods for propaganda and logistics and to truly extend the RUMs into a mass movement. The book dedicates an entire chapter to the involvement of high school students (through the Black Student United Front) in the League and to the role of women in the day-to-day operations of the mass movement and especially in running Black Star Publishing. The LRBW conducted outreach to wives of striking workers to explain why their husbands were not working; the wives mobilized to support their husbands and organized themselves to take on many logistical tasks to support strikers (Scott and Katz-Fishman 2025, 82). The self-criticism on the treatment of women (especially the lack of women in the leadership) in the LRBW also is worth highlighting, though it appears that misogynistic men had not been quite as successfully weaponized by the state in the same manner that it was against groups like the Black Panther Party. In terms of obvious pitfalls that will destroy Communist organizations (or at least demonstrate their lack of internal democracy and inability to rectify themselves), the improper handling of patriarchal chauvinism and gender oppression shares the top spot with settler chauvinism.

On the topic of the split that led to the demise of the LRBW, the authors remain perhaps far more restrained than should be warranted (if I had to guess, to have those on the other side of the split consent to be included in the book at all). Though there are doubtless many sides to the narrative, it is commonly agreed on that there were two major factions of the split. The first faction, consisting principally of intellectuals, wanted to scale up the League and export its model to other cities in the USA, uniting revolutionary unions of Black workers nationwide in the Black Workers Congress (BWC). The second faction, consisting principally of workers themselves, wanted to develop and educate themselves in Marxism rather than nationalize the League. Importantly, the LRBW won workplace concessions around desegregation in the workplace and unions but did not fundamentally affect the exploitative class relations that workers experienced daily (Scott and Katz-Fishman 2025, 109).

These irreconcilable views led to the BWC faction resigning from the executive board and the education faction having to look afar for teachers themselves. They eventually found it in Nelson Peery of the California Communist League (CCL), and the remainder of LRBW was brought in to merge with the CCL, which (with many factions and organizations dropping in and out) eventually transformed into the League of Revolutionaries for a New America (LRNA).

The authors of this book remain cordial when discussing the other side of the split. Since I don’t need to, I will state that in my opinion, the intellectual elements who walked off the board were an opportunist faction who wished only to replicate and spread the LRBW model to other cities so that they could benefit from the larger movement personally as well as politically, with little attention to the burden this placed on workers in the organization, who themselves opposed it because they were already having difficulties maintaining the pace of organization in Detroit alone. Peery himself remarked on the fact that the LRBW had a lot of resources at its disposal thanks to its independent, self-funding Black Star Publishing press and the large amount of voluntary labor it was able to draw from Detroit’s Black working-class community. These were crucial resources to move the headquarters of the fused organization from California to Chicago.

Opportunism does not necessarily blatantly look like “selling out” because opportunist goals can align with revolutionary ones, even if the basic motive is unprincipled self-gain. Had the BWC plan been unanimously agreed upon by the Executive Board, the result of pursuing pure quantitative increases at the cost of educating organizers and workers to a higher level of theoretical understanding would have been the growth of a theoretically underdeveloped mass movement, unable to mount a challenge against its leadership clique and thereby reduced to following the clique’s whims instead of being able to sum up and readjust revolutionary strategy in a rational manner. The example of PSL and its literally idealist Socialist Consciousness Thesis, and the recent wave of resignations by principled Communists from that party is instructive for what consequences arise from pursuing quantity over quality, though the errors of the Mensheviks and their disdain for qualitative party-building predate the PSL. These were errors that should have been obvious to the intellectual faction and it is likely that intellectual petit-bourgeois prejudice against workers also played a role in fomenting the split.⁵

Related to this lack of editorializing, perhaps in reaction to the rampant sectarian nationalism (one might be reminded of the Jewish Labor Bund’s insistence on the exclusive right to organize Jewish workers, which was correctly repudiated by the RSDLP and other internationalist Social-Democratic parties at the time) in New Left, oppressed-national, and Communist organizations of the ’60s and ’70s, the analysis of the Multi-National Working Class is the one which shapes the entire book.⁶ In short, the thesis that the revolutionary class in the US Empire must be the “multi-national working class” ignores the stark fact that settler workers, as a class, subjugate colonized workers whenever they are united in class organs and that white supremacy is not a one-sided invention of the settler bourgeois class, but rather, a two-sided gentlemen’s agreement between the settler masses and the settler rulers. The formation of the new revolutionary vanguard party in the US Empire will not be guaranteed unless this reality is understood for what it is and all backdoors for white supremacy to sneak in through are hermetically sealed shut.

Nonetheless, the impact of practical experience in the LBRW integrated with Marxist education (as described in the last chapters of Motown) shows clearly in the lifelong dedication of individuals to the revolution (whether they are organized in the mass movement or in the LRNA and other organizations). At the same time, the failures of all revolutionaries up to the present day demonstrates how deeply embedded settler consciousness is even in those who truly do desire revolution. But, consciousness is a subjective factor that can be changed. Today, where the US Communist movement barely qualifies as a movement and continues to harbor red liberals and chauvinists of all stripes, and the advanced masses are drawn to ineffectual anarchism and adventurism because no current Communist organization has the ability to actually lead them to revolutionary action, reconstituting the party by principled, disciplined struggle and dialogue is the most urgent task to be taken by serious Communists.

I write this review as part of this disciplined struggle; there is no time to waste. As is emphasized in the final chapter of Motown, the working and oppressed masses are already on the move: the Communists must lead the way and not drag at the tail of the mass movement. With the climate apocalypse on the horizon, it is no longer a choice between socialism or barbarism; it is a choice between socialism or extinction.

Despite its editorial mutedness and disagreeable analysis of present day conditions, Motown is a book that should be read especially by those who are already familiar with the New Left and those seeking precedents for neighborhood and workplace organizing in oppressed-nationality communities. To pull a quote from Motown itself:

Survival of humanity and the earth requires all us to take up this revolutionary work. The revolutionary horizon is within our grasp. Make it happen!

1. The first chapter of Motown makes this exact same point about the academy and bourgeois media in general. ︎
2. The following summary of US Communist history relies on “A True Accounting of the CPUSA In Its Members Own Words” by G. Gracchus and Settlers by J. Sakai. ︎
3. The book Marxist-Leninist Perspectives on Black Liberation and Socialism by Frank Chapman covers the history of the intersection of Black nationalism with Communism; it specifically credits the Comintern’s outside intervention as a kind of “adult in the room” into intra-CPUSA debates to the correct line taken up by CPUSA during this time as regards the Black nation in the United States. Chapman was personally involved in politically lynching a member of Chicago FRSO who questioned the mythology of Black internationalism in 1935 around the Ethiopian-Italian war and advocated for the support of national liberation struggles within Ethiopia. J. Sakai also lauded 1935 as an example of Black internationalism in Settlers. ︎
4. There is a brief section that describes the LRBW forming their own Panther chapter to avoid conflict with them. This speaks to a lack of political stringency on the part of the Panthers and to the issues with a purely numerical view of organizing. Unfortunately the book does not opine so much about the different versions of Black nationalism promoted by the Panthers and other groups such as Nation of Islam. This was a missed opportunity in my view. ︎
5. If I had to speculate from the account of their behavior (specifically their disapproval about workers educating themselves while proclaiming Marxism to be the guiding ideology of LRBW), it appears that the intellectual faction drew upon an opportunistic reading of Kautsky’s political consciousness thesis as expounded on in Lenin’s What Is To Be Done. In essence, Kautsky’s thesis states that no class struggle in of itself is revolutionary; workers on their own can only develop trade-union consciousness and organize towards reformism. Socialist, revolutionary, political consciousness must come from the outside. This political consciousness originates from petit-bourgeois revolutionary intellectuals who fuse with the worker’s movement, providing political consciousness to the advanced ranks of the workers, realizing the proletariat as a conscious class-for-itself, and orient it towards the goal of social revolution. Shifting the meaning of words, one could argue that it is not the place of workers to be educated but that workers need to be under the firm and enlightened hand of a small elite of revolutionary intellectuals. ︎
6. Informing the bulk of political-economic analysis and thus strategic orientation is the thesis that automation, robotics, and AI/LLMs are developing a “new mode of production,” which is overstated in my view. I would point to the chief driver of the weakness of the Communist movement in the US and extending existing weaknesses caused by settlerism from the ’80s to present day, being the increased exploitation of the Global South (through industrial offshoring) resulting in the extension of the labor aristocracy and its settler unions, and the atomization of remaining proletarian workplaces through techniques such as digital securitization, external contracting, gig work, and other technological and organizational innovations on part of the imperial settler-bourgeois. However, even with all of their tricks, the bourgeois cannot outrun the law of the falling rate of profit and the fact that the machinery of society still remains in the hands of the colonized working class worldwide. ︎