CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Searching for the Way Forward

Many activists moved from organizing mass demonstrations and direct actions against Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza to organizing militant demonstrations and direct actions against ICE and for immigrant rights. Today, with a lull in both of these mass movements, activists are asking what are the next steps in building a movement against imperialism in its manifestations of foreign wars and militarism, as well as internal policing and surveillance.

One of the ways to search for such answers is to review the history of American protest, reform and revolutionary movements and organizations. Motown and the Making of Working-Class Revolutionaries / The Story of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (University of Georgia Press, 2025) is a worthy addition to the multitude of books examining the upsurge of the Long Sixties.

The League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW) had a relatively short but impactful organizational life. The individuals who formed the League in Detroit in 1969 had worked together as early as 1961, and then more concretely after some of the group traveled to Cuba and met with the exiled African American Robert Williams, an advocate of armed self-defense for Black Americans.

The story of the LRBW has previously been told by Dan Georgakas and Marvin Sorkin in their book Detroit: I Do Mind Dying (1975) and the documentary film Finally Got the News (1970). Both of these have merit.

Motown and the Making of Working-Class Revolutionaries by Jerome Scott and Walda Katz-Fishman, tells the story of the LRBW through interview with forty former members of the LRBW largely done in 2017, supplemented by a few earlier interviews.

There are valuable lessons to be gained from this book. Perhaps foremost is the emphasis on evaluation of conditions and study of Marxism to address those conditions. LRBW member William “Mitch” Mitchell, reflected........

© CounterPunch