From the Free Speech Movement to the Factory Floor tells the often overlooked history of the International Socialists and their lasting influence, through the words of its members.

The International Socialist Club, founded at UC Berkeley in 1964 as a radical civil rights group, lit the spark of the Free Speech Movement that same year, and its members and successor organizations would go on to play an outsized role in shaping the course of both the Black freedom struggle and the rank-and-file labor insurgency of the 1970s. From its inception, the organization adhered to the tenets of “socialism from below”—the belief that revolutionary Marxism meant an expansion of democracy, not its curtailment and erasure at the hands of bureaucratic dictatorships that claimed to be building socialist societies. 

Following their success in the Bay Area, the ISC launched chapters across the country, and in 1967 forged the first Black-white alliance of the Black Power era when they joined with the Black Panthers to promote Huey P. Newton’s candidacy on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket. In 1969, the ISC became the International Socialists, and much of its growing membership relocated to the Midwest to take industrial jobs in the auto, steel, communications, and trucking industries. In their final years, among other important efforts, the IS created a majority-Black youth group known as the Red Tide, founded the seminal publication Labor Notes, and helped create Teamsters for a Democratic Union. 

From the Free Speech Movement to the Factory Floor includes twenty-six original reflections by leading members—including renowned scholar-activists Nelson Lichtenstein and Nancy Holmstrom—offering invaluable insights into this influential but little-known organization.