"A Component Part of the General Struggle of All the People of the World": Finally Got the News between Black Detroit and the World Revolution

Abstract: The documentary Finally Got the News (dir. Stewart Bird, Peter Gessner, and René Lichtman, 1970) remains a lasting and inspiring document of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and the cycle of militant Black working-class struggle that gripped the Detroit auto industry during the Long Sixties. The conditions of the production process, however, suggest a League that was slowly breaking apart under the weight of contradictions both internal and external. For the Marxist-Leninist bloc in the League's leadership, the basis of this contradiction was ideological, between their own analysis of Black racialization and racial oppression as grounded in racialized super-exploitation and an amalgam of competing Black nationalist perspectives they viewed as insufficiently revolutionary. The Marxist-Leninists saw the documentary as an opportunity to consolidate their authority within the organization and build a communist hegemony in the Black working-class movement. This evaluation of the terms of struggle, unfortunately, was based on a flawed equivalence between theoretical perspective, ideological line, and practical political strategy and tactics. In pursuing this plan, they actually exacerbated existing tensions with other leaders and the rank-and-file membership, inadvertently contributing to the dissolution of the League soon after.