by Chris Mahin
Motown and the Making of Working-Class Revolutionaries: The Story of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers: Jerome Scott and Walda Katz-Fishman ,University of Georgia Press, September 2025, 216 pp; pbk: rrp £31.95, hbk rrp £124.95
This is a moving account of one of the most important organisations in the United States during the late 1960s written by Jerome Scott and Walda Katz-Fishman. Scott was a leader of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW) who helped organise a walk-out to protest unsafe conditions at Chrysler Corporation’s Detroit Forge plant. That wildcat strike at a strategic factory shut down Chrysler production throughout the entire world for one week. Walda Katz-Fishman is a revolutionary and scholar who received her Ph.D. in sociology from Wayne State University in Detroit. Since the late 1970s she has worked closely with veterans of the LRBW and she helped coordinate the League’s oral history project.
Motown is the product of 50 years of struggle and almost a decade of preparation. In December 2015, veterans of the LRBW began planning a history of the organisation. The need for such a history became increasingly urgent as some of the LRBW’s most important leaders began to die. In 2016 and 2017, the authors took part in videotaped interviews with more than 40 people. Motown includes extensive excerpts from those interviews.
The result is both an extraordinary collective memoir and a detailed history of Detroit. This book recounts how the leaders of the Black workers’ insurgency in Detroit in the 1960s found their way to Marxism and how they used it as a guide to understand the profound changes which have swept the world since.
In the interviews, former members of the LRBW recount the horrific conditions in the auto plants, the challenges the League faced, and the long struggle to build other revolutionary organisations after the LRBW split in 1971. To their credit, the people interviewed do not simply reminisce – they reflect deeply on what the hard-fought battles of the 1960s mean for today. They are frank and self-critical about mistakes that were made – particularly about the way women were treated in the LRBW. They are brutally realistic about how different the economic and political conditions are today,
the Motor City
Part One includes a detailed historical materialist analysis of the auto industry and Detroit.
From the first quarter of the 20th century until the 1970s, Detroit was the leading producer of motor-cars in the entire world. The city earned its nickname – “The Motor City” – or simply “Motown”. Detroit’s diverse proletariat included Black workers whose families had fled the Jim Crow South; white workers who had travelled up the “Hillbilly Highway” from the Appalachian Mountains; workers from Mexico; Arab workers from Palestine, Yemen and other parts of the Middle East; and workers from many other parts of the world.
In the 20th century, Black auto workers were concentrated in the most dangerous and difficult jobs, enduring racist mistreatment and unsafe conditions. The car workers’ trade union in the United States – the United Auto Workers – was run by a clique of right-wing social-democrats who had conducted witch-hunts against communist trade unionists during the 1950s.
In July 1967, police brutality against Black workers sparked the massive Detroit Rebellion. In 1968 Black workers walked out of Dodge Main – a factory of 10,000 workers. They created the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM). Soon, Black workers at other factories were forming Revolutionary Union Movement (RUM) groupings. Eventually, these formations combined into one umbrella organisation – the League of Revolutionary Black Workers.
In mid-1971, the LRBW went into crisis. Some of its top leaders wanted to expand into other cities. Many LRBW members in the factories questioned that approach. They wanted to deepen the LRBW’s involvement in the day-to-day struggle in Detroit.
On 12th June 1971, the LRBW split in two. After some of the most prominent leaders left, the members who remained – workers based in the factories -- discussed what to do next. Resolved to continue the struggle, they knew they needed to step back and assess – and study. In the LRBW, the top leaders had read some Marxism, but there had never been a full-fledged education programme for the entire membership. Determined to change that situation, the LRBW cadre who remained after the split reached out to revolutionaries in California. They ultimately established contact with veteran Marxist-Leninists who had taken part in the fight against revisionism within the Communist Party USA during the 1950s and were now part of the Communist League.
What followed was a year of intense discussion and study. At first, some of those from the LRBW were wary of joining a multi-ethnic organisation. Detailed discussions of Lenin and Stalin’s writings on the national colonial question were extremely helpful. The revolutionaries from the LRBW ultimately joined the Communist League. That decision helped set the stage for a Congress of Marxist-Leninists which founded the Communist Labor Party of the United States of North America in 1974. Later, former LRBW leaders were also instrumental in creating the League of Revolutionaries for a New America in the 1990s.
Today...
...Detroit is no longer the epicentre of world auto production. Globalisation and automation have changed that. Today, former LRBW members are involved in the fight against homelessness and poverty and against the growth of fascism in the United States.
Part Four of the book looks to the future. One key lesson is the dialectical relationship between theory and practice. Every person interviewed for this book spoke with great feeling and gratitude about the education they received in the LRBW and the organisations that succeeded it – Marxist political education. All stated emphatically that they would never have been able to continue as life-long revolutionaries without that education.
Ultimately Motown is about how revolutionaries adapt without betraying their principles. It’s the story of how young people were forged into revolutionaries while working in the crucible of a very dangerous industry. At a moment of crisis, those revolutionaries had to step back to study and assess – in order to return to the practical movement and fight with greater clarity in a changed environment.
Since its publication in September 2025 Motown has attracted considerable attention from young revolutionaries in the United States. Hopefully, the hard-won lessons in this collective memoir will help that new generation as it steps forward to continue the fight for a new world.
Motown is available on the Liverpool University Press website at https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/
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