Thursday, April 16, 2026
YOU ARE INVITED TO A PANEL DISCUSSION
Thursday, April 16, 2026
8:00 pm Eastern Daylight Time
“SOCIALIST ACTIVISTS IN INDUSTRY:
The Experience of the International Socialists”
Panelists:
* Candace Cohn, Steelworker
* Bill Parker, Chrysler/Stellantis worker
* Mel Packer, Teamster
* Wendy Thompson, General Motors/American Axle worker
IN 1970 THE International Socialists decided to reorient their socialist activism from campus-based movements to organizing with and amongst industrial workers. The IS relocated their organization, leaders, and core membership to cities in the midwest, and emphasized factory and transport work. These mostly young activists were convinced that the industrial working class was on the march, and, combined with the socialism from below perspectives, could give rise to a new era of revolutionary change in the United States.
Bill Parker will outline the development of the IS perspective as comrades got jobs at the phone company. As the IS defined their priority industries, he moved to Detroit and got a job in the auto industry.
Candace Cohn will discuss how IS members in various industries worked to creatively implement the IS perspective. It was not building a “socialist” caucus but rather one that develops from the concrete needs at the workplace. In seeking to take on the employer (and often union officials), who did they find to work with?
Both Candace Cohn and Wendy Thompson, college graduates and socialist activists before they “industrialized,” were among the first women since World War II hired in steel and auto. Each faced sexual harassment as they sought to build unity within the work force.
Mel Packer had a job in a warehouse and was a Teamster when he met the IS.
Ultimately, the promise of increased militancy that sounded at the beginning of the 1970s quieted by the end of the decade, replaced with mass layoffs, a turn to concessionary bargaining by bureaucratically led labor unions, and the foreclosing, for the time being, of the sense that socialist revolution was possible. But the legacy of the International Socialist experiment with “industrialization,” what they called their organizational turn to working-class organizing, contains vital lessons for socialists today.
Join Solidarity for a panel discussion with former members of the International Socialists.
This panel coincides with the release of a new book, From the Free Speech Movement to the Factory Floor, edited by Andrew Stone Higgins. Read Steve Early’s review. Both Candace Cohn and Wendy Thompson have articles in the book.