14.09.2005

Centenary of struggle

Paul Buhle and Nicole Schulman (eds) Wobblies! A graphic history of the Industrial Workers of the World Verso, 2005, pp256, £14.99

The influence of the Industrial Workers of the World cannot be overstated. Their vision and dynamism caught the imagination of generations upon generations of working class activists, singers, writers and artists across the globe. Time and again we find the very best labour and communist leaders have been spawned from the great ideological and organisational pool of influence of the IWW. Time and again the great upsurges of class resistance in Britain, Australia, Canada and more particularly the USA had the IWW somewhere in among it - at least in the opening decades of the last century. There is a theory which says the IWW and its international expansion represented the true revolutionary path down which humanity was marching - until the Bolshevik asteroid hit the earth and eclipsed the movement with pragmatic achievement and organisational superiority. However, many of their key organisational planks, if not in fact borrowed from the IWW, at least were preconceived by them. The very idea of the soviet as an organ of class power was a simple variant on the industrial union itself. The organ of struggle under capitalism, the unit for essential collective organisation to unite labour for wage bargaining in the here and now, is also an instrument to abolish the wages system itself, which can act as the basic administrative block on the far side of the destruction of capitalism. Whether Lenin actually ever believed in the slogan, 'All power to the soviets', is open to conjecture, but millions upon millions of workers across the globe actually did, and the western 'soviet' was the IWW. This year, 2005, is the centenary of the organisation's founding conference in Chicago. This book marks the centenary and does so in true Wobbly innovative style. It takes the form of an illustrated, animated, black and white cartoon story. Why? Well, why not? The form is actually a little hard to stay with at first - one expects the cartoons to give way to more conventional text - but it does not: it runs from start to finish and, as it does so, the form becomes more comfortable. The book sets out the definitive moments of the Wob's history as an organisation, and a history of its parts, in the shape of some of the most outstanding, incorruptible working leaders to come out of America. It tells of the epochal struggles of poor folk, many of them abandoned by the craft unions, the AFL, and the sectionalism of the more progressive CIO. The IWW organised everyone, everywhere, anyhow, and not just for another crust, but for another world. One of the more endearing descriptions among many as to where the term 'Wobbly' came from was that it was applied to the army of 'stiffs', 'blanket bums', down and outs and drifters, many of them alcoholics, whom the IWW recruited and who were prone to 'the wobblies'. Personally I think it comes from the huge proportion of Finnish and Scandinavian recruits who could not pronounce the sound represented by the letter W. From its inception, the organisation would be deeply entrenched in the rich proletarian seam amongst the mines and logging camps, amongst the dock workers and seamen and in growing numbers across the army of migratory workers picking crops to feed America. It would intersect the intelligentsia, singers, painters, dancers and the whole communist/anarchist 'beat' culture emerging in pre-World War I America through into the 20s. The modern artists, the gifted film makers. Their ideas were so much more than trade unionism: this was overt class struggle. There was a union card with an anti-capitalist preamble which declared there could never be class peace while the class system remained. The tactics were of the mass strike, the wildcat, sabotage, the occupation, the sit-down, the go-slow, violence, self-defence and offence, propaganda, agitprop, carnival, music, dancing and singing, and the ultimate weapon of worldwide total class war, the international general strike. This wildcat was too hot, too wild and too untamed for the employers and the state, and was everywhere ruthlessly eradicated. Anyone who has a touching belief in the notion of 'democracy and freedom' ought to take a good, hard look at this book: the massacres of innocent workers, lynching, shootings, beatings, bombings and killings of men, women and many children. The frame-ups, the judicial hangings and incarcerations, the prison tortures. America has not far to look to find wilful examples of tyranny and oppression, though their history books are short on vision of this sort. The book more or less accurately spells out the deep decline of the organisation - not a natural decline, it must be said: the organisation was systematically targeted for murder and terror, from around about the start of World War I. The Wobs opposed the war, carried on fighting for workers' conditions at home, denounced all bosses, American and German. This made them public enemy No1. Following the Russian Revolution, the red scare and the growth of mass movements in the 20s, the Wobs took the brunt of the witch-hunt and repression, but enjoyed ongoing popularity despite their isolation by the Comintern until they were more or less fought to exhaustion before World War II. They still exist though, and now and again come rises in membership, as a new generation discovers the IWW and its message. Certainly on this side of the Atlantic we have seen some modest growth in the organisation and attempts to organise those which other unions have not reached. For me I believe every communist and anarchist worthy of their salt ought to be a member of the IWW, whatever other union they belong to. This is our union: the union of the reds. It could do much to stop the rot in the unions, to steel the stand being made across industry and workplaces, to coordinate the struggle in the fight we are in - and in the fight we want to get into, for the big picture. It could do much to put the horse back in front of the cart and restate that our aim is a classless, wage-free, communist world. This book should grace every activist's bookshelf. David Douglass