The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) turned 119 years old today

The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or Wobblies) was founded on today's date in Chicago in 1905. The original Preamble to the Constitution of the IWW read as follows:

The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on until all the toilers come together on the political, as well as on the industrial field, and take and hold that which they produce by their labor through an economic organization of the working class, without affiliation with any political party.

The rapid gathering of wealth and the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands make the trade unions unable to cope with the ever-growing power of the employing class, because the trade unions foster a state of things which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars.

The trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers. These sad conditions can be changed and the interests of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries, if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.

This was later amended to read

The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the earth and the machinery of production, and abolish the wage system.

We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever-growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same Industry, thereby helping to defeat one another in wage wars.

Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers. These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries, if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.

Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wages for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wage system." It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for the every-day struggle with the capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.

The change in language marked an evolution in the organization and changing times in the United States. In just a few years after the founding of the IWW a significant body of the union's members had come to feel confident in their rejection of political action by labor and in their sharpening criticism of other unions. Conservative, liberal, and revolutionary political action and craft, trade, and rival industrial unionisms were all rejected in favor of a revolutionary industrial unionism that hoped to unite the workers of the world in one international union that would not only organize workers by industry but that would also be prepared to take dramatic action, dispossess the capitalists through a general strike, and abolish the political state and replace it with the collective economic administration of production and distribution by these same industrial unions. These ideas and goals are most often referred to as revolutionary syndicalism, and these doctrines have appeared and found bases in most industrialized countries and labor movements. They have been, at least for a time, a necessary or inevitable part of our working-class experience.

I cannot think of a union that has received as much scholarly attention as has the IWW (see here and here for starters and see here for the best mapping done of the IWW). The IWW has existed more as a movement than it has as union, although the IWW took notable steps in establishing itself among hardrock and metal miners, textile workes, coal miners, lumber and sawmill workers, maritime and longshore workers, auto workers and metal workers, and agricultural workers in its early years. This included much organizing here in Oregon. The IWW not only punched way above its weight but has also had a tremendous and continuing effect on working-class culture.

Five factors worked against the IWW in the first twenty-five years of its existence, greatly inhibiting its chances of future growth and constraining what it could reasonably be expected to accomplish.

Employer and government opposition effectively crimialized the IWW for a time and nearly caused the union to fold during and immediately following the First World War and the union's wartime strikes. Perhaps hundreds of IWW members were martyred, and hundreds or thousands more were jailed or sent to prison. The opportunities to build a strong labor movement in the United States after the First World War were mostly lost, some of the most anti-labor and anti-immigrant and racist forces took power instead, and all progressive and labor groups paid a steep price for their collective failures. Large numbers of workers in the United States engaged in dramatic struggles in these years and needed an organization like the IWW that sought to build working-class solidarity across political, racial, ethnic, class, sectional, gender, craft, and trade differences, but the IWW's dogmatic rejection of political action and other forms of unionism and particular forms of struggles used by workers of color and rural workers helped isolate the organization.

The IWW's philosophy and practice led its members to reject collective bargaining and signing contracts in most situations, and led as well to a misplaced faith in a "militant minority" of workers being able to harness working-class spontaneity for the common good. There were no national or international strike funds, no strike pay, no dues check-off, and few lasting political friends. The door was opened to factionalism and splits which were often nearly deadly and always unprincipled. The IWW and other attempts to build radical unionism from the mid-1920s into the early 1930s lacked cohesion and unity. The IWW essentially ceded its space, and the resulting vacuum was filled by the more conservative, and better resourced and primed, Congress of Industrial Organizations.

Another point is relevant here. Syndicalism is, at its core, a belief in taking care of one's own (however that is defined) without much regard to politics, and often without regard to others. This can be conservative or revolutionary, and it shows up in the conservative or liberal building trades unions as much as it does among decidedly more liberal or radical unions. Many of the workers who the IWW most wanted to reach, or who the organization most needed without realizing it, were often essentally conservative but were prepared to use radical tactics like sabotage, wildcat strikes, and local or regional general strikes to keep what they had and do better and take care of one another in ways that were excusivist. For instance, hardrock miners in the western states who were first- or second-generation Irishmen and who were living relaively stable and upwardly-mobile lives maintained an industrial unionism that ran parallel to or crossed paths with the IWW and its radical tactics but that also often excluded later immigrant hardrock mine workers who did not have the skill set or the stability of the older and established workers. Different political, cultural, and work values were in play even when the later immigrants were Irish. What appeared to be radical and inclusive was not always so, and this says much about class-consciousness in the United States.

Just so, the workers who the IWW most needed and whose support was most necessary had a material and ideological interest in winning acceptance and inclusion, if not assimilation, and were often prepared to use radical tactics and strategies to achieve what were essentially liberal or conservative goals. It is not that that these workers were not truly radical or revolutionary, but that the struggles over the terrms and conditions and limits of acceptance and inclusion by women, people of color and immigrants in the United States are the stuff of revolution even when revolutionaries can't see this.   

Following from this, the IWW projects a daily life of class struggle, constant organizing and mobilizing against the bosses and anyone who appeares to take their side, and protest and strike after protest and strike until we all get it right and spontaneously arise as a class against capitalism. But what do we do when workers need to take breathers or the daily fight-back isn't winning or when political action is necessary? Can a union really survive without dues check-off and strike funds? And what about the lives and identities of workers away from work and those spaces in our lives where race, gender identity, ethnicity, political and cultural identities, religion, and our subjective histories intersect and don't intersect with our identities as workers and our class-consciousness? 

 

IWW longshore union leader Ben Fletcher 

For all of that, and for better and worse, the IWW has left its imprint on the labor movement. We still beneit from the many civil liberties and other court cases won by members of the IWW. Labor historians have a difficult time defining the IWW, but the union has been an essential part of American history and culture (see here). Many of the union's instincts and core values carry good weight even if the IWW's overall theory and practice and the substance of its eventual goals are lacking. The IWW's shortcomings are not solely the fault of the organization but often reflect the grim realities and contradictions of working-class life. The IWW still exists and is on an upward swing. It is attracting some very smart and capable young people.