Wobblyism:
Revolutionary Unionism for Today[1]
by the Wobblyism Working Group:
Ryan Faulkner Tim
Khaki Mykke H. Agoge
with contributions from:
Gayge Operaista
Scott Nappalos
Brandon S. Nate
Hawthorne
“...revolution
is not a question of the form of organisation […] the class must have its own
thought, its own critical method, its own will bent on the precise ends defined
by research and criticism, and its own organisation of struggle channelling and
utilising with the utmost efficiency its collective efforts and sacrifices...”[2]
Amadeo Bordiga “Partito e classe,”
Rassegna Comunista, no 2, April 15, 1921
“...the
end in view is well worth striving for, but in the struggle itself lies the
happiness of the fighter.”[3]
A. S. Embree, Wobbly, Letter to the
Editor, Solidarity, Sept. 19, 1917
“...you
cannot destroy the organization [...] It is something you cannot get at. You
cannot
reach it. You do not know where it
is. It is not in writing. It is not in anything
else. It is a simple understanding between
men (sic), and they act upon it
without any
evidence
of existence whatever.”[4]
U.S. Senator William Borah, on
Wobblies’ “conscientious withdrawal of efficiency”, 1918.
Outline
1.
Introduction
2.
How Did We Get Here?
3.
Redefining ‘Unionism’
4.
Three Dominant IWW Organizing Models: Praise and Critique
5.
Revolutionary Unionism and the Trajectory of the IWW: Staking Out a
New Organizing Tradition
6.
Conclusion
1. Introduction
We would like to take a moment to set the tone for the
following article, and help get you on a solid footing to understand and
appreciate its contents. Wobblyism is
our effort to stir up some dust in the workers’ movement and get people talking
- in a comradely way of course. It’s high time to take to task the conventional
wisdom of the Left (from center to far), and propose concrete forward movement
for revolutionary organization that is relevant for our time. Thankfully, we’re
not the only ones talking about this; Wobblies and “fellow travelers” are studying
their history, re-evaluating political dogmas, and shaping a vibrant discourse
on what is to be done today. We would like to stake out our own specific
approach within this discourse - arguing for a revolutionary unionism that is
holistic, life-affirming, relevant, and effective. We hope that this piece will
be shared and discussed widely throughout the revolutionary movement, within and beyond our organization, the
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, aka “Wobblies”). Indeed, while this piece
deals specifically with the IWW, we believe its content can be appreciated much
more widely.
As for the significance we attach to this work, no illusions
are entertained. It is not pompous self-indulgence that motivates us here, but
an earnest yearning to build a working-class movement that is capable of
advancing us all beyond this shit-hole we call capitalism and into a
qualitatively new and free society. We do not consider this piece the last word
on this subject, but we do hope that it will be received as a sincere
contribution to a comradely discourse on revolutionary organization for today.
Further, this is a gargantuan undertaking for the Wobbly writers; our
experience writing has overall been limited to brief articles focusing on one
aspect of organizing. Also, the fact that we are full-time workers, organizers,
parents, partners and so on - and that most of us are not trained writers - means churning this out has been all the more
challenging. We expect readers to note that we have missed some key areas that
need attention, and that some parts could be conveyed more clearly. The
chronology of IWW events may be a bit off in places, and other details might
not be quite correct. We have taken great care to avoid these errors, but we’re
bound to have left some mistakes intact.
As to who we’re reaching out to with this piece, we should
state straight up that the target audience is small. This piece is probably not
going to be read widely throughout the working class at this point. Most of our
brothers, aunts, co-workers, or our friends, generally speaking, are not going
to pick this up and tell us later that it changed their life. That’s ok. This
piece is written by and for worker-organizers who can relate on this subject
and communicate through this medium to carry our conversation forward. This
piece is a contribution to the development of a small but burgeoning current of
working class organizers[5].
Finally, while we hope that many revolutionaries (and
soon-to-be-revolutionaries) read this, it is especially to the active
worker-organizer we appeal. Much of this can be understood by those engaged in
some level of political work. But nothing shapes our consciousness and theory
like experience, and it is experience of a specific kind that has allowed us to
convey these ideas. The ideas in this article are indeed informed by recorded
history (books), but would never be possible without the writers’ on-the-ground
experience, the sweat, tears, victories, and failures of revolutionary
organizing at the workplace. We invite comradely critique of this piece, and
hope to continue fleshing these ideas out more on an ongoing basis as active
organizers.
Some Background
The IWW has in recent years made a long-overdue return to the
stage of history. Since the 1950s, we Wobblies barely plodded along - almost
for the sake of just existing - but gradually got back on our own feet as an
organization that organized. Small
skirmishes with employers - and some victories - occurred here and there over
the last decades of the 20th century. Wobblies made short-lived but impressive
advances in the courier industry and among restaurant workers; put the IWW on
the map for non-members when they organized low-wage baristas into the
Starbucks Workers Union; developed an organizer training program to share past
organizing lessons and improve organizers’ skillsets, and engaged in much other
significant activity. The generation of Wobblies who established these
developments broke new ground on a long-dormant tradition of revolutionary
union organizing.
Alongside an uptick in membership and activity in the late
1990s and early 2000s came the prominence of "Solidarity Unionism,”[6]
a grassroots organizing approach which put workers themselves in charge of
their own struggle for justice in the workplace. A relative flurry of activity
and a wave of new members accompanied this significant new development.
Naturally, this activity waxed and waned, but the IWW and its practice of
solidarity unionism established itself in the contemporary labor movement (even
if it’s still on the margins).
Much has happened in and around the IWW in the last several
years. New high-profile organizing drives have taken off, some won, and some
failed (though we challenge rigid discernments between victory and failure).
The Starbucks campaign, for example, inspired new organizers to establish
similar unions in several low-wage workplaces that most other unions ignored.[7]
Where Wobblies worked in unionized workplaces, they organized among the
rank-and-file along IWW principles, winning gains through direct action that
their “official” union could not or would not pursue. On the national scale in
the US, IWWs played visible roles in both the Wisconsin Uprising and the Occupy
Wall Street movement that swept the country and brought an unprecedented many
thousands of everyday working people onto the streets and into political life.
Through all this, the IWW has learned much, and organizers have improved their
skills a great deal.
Toward Synthesis, and Something New
Each step the class struggle takes forward owes itself to the
step taken before it. As Rosa Luxemburg related waves of struggle in
revolutionary Russia in her essay The
Mass Strike, each wave recedes but leaves “sediment” behind for the next
wave to rise from. As it is for Wobblies. The last few years of struggle have
washed to shore a great deal of sediment packed full of invaluable
"nuggets" of organizing wisdom. Revolutionary organizers would do
well to mine these nuggets out, analyze their content, and synthesize the best
of it. They can compare these nuggets from different waves of struggle and
single out some similarities which they can apply to practice. They test them,
share them with other organizers, synthesize what they learn, and develop a
distinct, transmutable organizing approach - or method - over time. We believe that we are beginning to establish
this method now.
Let us clear the air ahead of time and say that we don’t
believe that an organizer can apply the exact same practice to any and every
situation and expect the same results. We could not seriously claim to have a
“copy and paste” approach to organizing, even if that’s what we set out to do.
To be gratuitously clear, we do not
set out to do that. But a revolutionary in any setting acts in that setting according
to some core values. The way those values are implemented will vary with the
circumstance, but all the more successfully when done in concert with other
revolutionaries in other unique settings. Thus we attempt to establish an
organizational methodology for revolutionary workers at every place in the
economy.
While we’re at it, let’s nip some other misunderstandings in
the bud. This essay critiques different organizing approaches that we have seen
play out in practice. We make no bones about this. However, without these
approaches, and without the practical experience that came of them, we would be
in no position to advance new ideas. Indeed, while we critique certain
organizing approaches, we are also critiquing ourselves. It is the spirit of camaraderie,
synthesis, and the further development of the IWW and the class struggle
generally that motivates us here.
The period the working class is in right now represents a
historical marker for struggle. It is plainly evident that the IWW is
experiencing a crux as well. This crux presents itself in the worldwide arena,
and the workplaces Wobblies organize. From here, there are many different
directions the IWW can go. Before embarking on one or a number of different
directions, we propose a collective pause to reflect and look ahead through a
grounded, pragmatic lens (of course, with a revolutionary compass).
In the following pages we attempt to dissect the varied stages
of growth the union has progressed through since its revitalization, focusing
on the period of the 1990s to the present. Understanding what truths can be
extracted from previous practices, while minding which theories and strategies
impinged progress is crucial to evolving the way Wobblies organize. We will
analyze three dominant paradigms that have taken root over the last several
decades in the IWW to foster an understanding of their benefits and limitations
- both theoretically and as shop-floor practices. These are: Radical Service
Unionism (RSU), Solidarity Unionism (SU), and Direct Unionism (DU). On the
shoulders of these prior practices, we argue for a new paradigm built on
Revolutionary Unionism (RU). The
methodology that underlies this model of organizing and the steps we think need
to be undertaken for its implementation will follow.
2. How Did We Get Here?
A Brief Critical History of the IWW[8]
The IWW is not what it used to be. The organization has gone
through stages of historical evolution, and in order to understand the current
situation it’s necessary to be aware of its place in this history. The early
IWW of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Vincent St. John, Ben Fletcher and so on, from
which Wobblies draw so much pride and tradition, no longer exists. It is a
memory - one that is essential to hold on to because of its importance to the
history and culture of the working class, but as an organization it is no more.
Decades of ruling class repression, containment of working
class rebellion through state (legal) channels, capitalist advancements in
managerial control and internal IWW conflict--subjects critical to an
understanding of how the IWW got here,
but which are beyond the scope of this piece--drove the IWW to a point in the
1980s where it could claim few members, little activity, and almost no power in
the working-class. Though the union still held on to relics of the original IWW
in the form of Joe Hill's ashes and membership records, and on paper the
organization was technically the same one that was founded in 1905, its content
had drastically changed. What was once a powerful, revolutionary force for
organized class struggle, stretching across the continent with influence
throughout the world, had long since faded to a withered husk - an organization
better characterized as a labor history club than a revolutionary union.
Let's stop to note that this observation is not meant as an
attack on anyone who was a member during the 80s, or an attempt to say that
everything after World War I isn't the “real” IWW. It is just as real of an
organization, but a different organization, which changed over time due to a
multitude of historical factors, not least of which being the relative strength
and consciousness of the American working-class, which had reached a similarly
low point in the 1980s. Individuals who were members of the organization had
ultimately very little capacity to do much within those limits, and can't be
held responsible for what was the product of historical dynamics far out of
their control. But it's important to recognize that the IWW had reached a
demise. Though not a final demise, since it was brought back from the brink and
into a new stage of development in the 1990s.
The Activist Turn
Rising class-consciousness and growing interest in “radical”
politics attracted more members to the IWW starting in the 1960s, with
membership spiking in the mid to late 90s. The spike in the late 90s was
largely activists - some of them politicized workers - immersed in the
anti-globalization and anti-war protest movements. But while the organization’s
membership scale increased, its content was still fundamentally different from
the content of the union that led the Bread and Roses strike[9].
Those traditions of struggle had been broken and the union was forced to
re-establish itself in a barren terrain. The 90s IWW largely functioned as a
history club of greater size, but took on another dimension that sharply
diverged from the union's organizing roots; increasingly (but not exclusively)
the IWW became an activist organization. Here we use the term “activism”
critically, in our examination of a kind of activity that is not rooted in
class struggle, but instead devoted to expressing moral outrage at the
capitalist system's superstructural contradictions.
Activism comprises of protesting
against the many different ways in which the social antagonism of capital
manifests in society, usually through the staging of demonstrations, marches,
and “actions” targeted against particular individuals, bosses, companies,
organizations, or instututions that are deemed especially heinous. Activists usually analyze the world
through the prism of “issues,” which are generally (though not always) treated
as their own separate sphere of oppression, with their own separate roster of
activists, more or less independent of others (e.g. regarding gender, the
environment, etc). Time and resources are spent devising and executing evermore
sophisticated ways of condemning manifestations of oppression in the eventual
hopes that if enough people were to yell at them loud enough, the structure of
oppressive social relations would collapse and give way to a better world.
Generally speaking, activists poorly understand, if at all, the historical
roots and context of the issues that they're trying to address. Efforts to
resolve the issue(s) therefore tend to remain fixated on surface manifestations
of a deeper exploitative system, and often give way to burnout or
demoralization. (Take for example protesting against the excesses and violence
of the Iraq war without an understanding of the origins and purpose of war in
this society. Slogans like “War is not
the answer!” convey this well.).
Activists generally joined the IWW not to advance the class
struggle towards revolution and the destruction of ruling class exploitation,
but because of an interest in “labor issues”, as an activist might say. Sporadic organizing did occur -
passively - primarily based on solicitation from workers in workplaces close to
established General Membership Branches (GMBs). Overall there was little scope
for strategic organizing, initiated either from within the ranks of current
membership, or directed at serious workplace targets within the reach and scope
of branch capacity. However, by
and large the membership activity within the union was (and unfortunately still
is to a large extent) defined by attendance at monthly GMB business meetings
and promoting the history and continued existence of the IWW at tabling events,
marches, and demonstrations.
Looking back at the decline in organizing and the growth of an
activist milieu in the IWW, we also see a concurrent development away from an
explicitly revolutionary trajectory and toward the ubiquitous radicalism that persists today. For our purposes here, we contrast
radicalism with revolution. Radicalism is a frustratingly vague concept
commonly defined as “getting to the root.” The root of what often remains unclear, but we understand it
in this context as having methods and
strategies unequipped to challenge
the ruling class, generally stemming from a poor understanding of the system as
a whole. Many well-meaning radicals fall in this trap, citing the structure of this society as the source
of its evils, rather than the exploitative content
that gives this structure its form.
Unfortunately, many self-styled revolutionary groups today adopt
non-revolutionary radicalism in shaping their goals and activities, which has
been a common ailment of the IWW over the last few decades.
Indeed, increasingly, radical IWW activists sought to develop a
more and more sophisticated method of activism by agitating around myriad forms
of oppression. From this
perspective, oppressions are divided up among their special interest groups (at
best “intersecting” and influencing each other from time to time, at worst seen
as entirely independent sociological systems), leaving revolutionaries
struggling to synthesize a coherent theory and practice of struggle against
them. Within this framework “class” and “class struggle” are their own specific
arenas of interest that a specific species of radical can opt into or out of.
In this way, the content of those terms is completely distorted. Consequently,
“class” becomes a form of oppression and is added to the laundry list of other
forms of oppression (e.g. sexism, racism) which, despite the best intentions,
tend to pay lip service to those oppressions and help little to address them in
a meaningful - let alone revolutionary - way. Radicalists aimed for the root, but were shy of the mark:
they did not succeed in articulating the causes or remedies of those forms, let
alone a strategy to fight oppression and win. Thus there was a clear break from
the traditional theory and practice of the IWW[10]. Attempting
to be a revolutionary organization with reformist political content created a
contradiction that members of the union failed to resolve. This new strong
current of radical activists eclipsed the Wobblies' revolutionary traditions
based in revolutionary class struggle organizing.
In contrast, revolution has vision that, in addition to
structural and tactical considerations, takes a stance on the content of
struggle, as well as organizational methodology, strategy, and trajectory. Let
us clarify that we often sympathize or even coordinate with activists in
certain endeavors, and we do not necessarily see ourselves as better than
activists. For many in the IWW, activism was an important part of their
development as revolutionaries. To be sure, valuable work has been achieved
within this framework (e.g. groups of Wobblies addressing sexist behavior
patterns within their branches, etc). We would like to retain those
achievements and synthesize them with a revolutionary Wobbly theory and practice of struggle. But the IWW must move past
the limitations of activist culture and fulfill its own distinct role as a
powerful organization of the revolutionary working class.
3. Redefining ‘Unionism’
It’s important for us to spell out what we mean by “union” in
the first place, as well as what we don’t
mean. Today, most people’s understanding of unionism is very limited. For some, unions act as an organ for
self-defense from employers, which is an activity necessarily separate from
workers expressing their political will[11]. For others,
unions act as labor cartels, taking dues money from hard-working people to
squander on political lobbying and the lavish lifestyles of the union’s top
officials. Of course, there are interpretations of what unions are that lie
everywhere in between. But all these views share the assumption that unions are
inherently alien to the workers (that
workers do not or cannot organize unions themselves).
It is thus taken for granted by most on both the Right and the
Left that ‘The Union Question’ begins not
with workers’ self-organization, but with a particular organizational form, i.e, a bureaucratic interest group
servicing one subset of workers or another. They conform to legally-sanctioned
representative institutions that are run by professionals who specialize in
“union” work (whether they’re on the AFL-CIO’s payroll or that of a worker
center’s).
For many years members of the IWW have played into this
narrative by characterizing the Wobblies as a more militant and structurally
“horizontal” union--merely a “union” as defined above with more or less of one
quality or another. However, this explanation hasn’t gotten us anywhere, and
it’s not accurate. The IWW is not just a better option over the
"other" unions. We have a different vision of what a union can be;
indeed, we are a completely different kind
of organization altogether.
In order to disabuse ourselves from today's narrow conceptions
of the union form, it’s important to put things in historical perspective. Since the earliest days of capitalism’s
development, workers have organized to protect their interests from an
increasingly powerful exploiting class. In the US during the 17th and 18th
centuries, workers’ organization was often transient - sometimes to address a
specific grievance, other times a violent rebellion against the exploitative
social order. But by the late 19th century, permanent labor organizations had
become prominent. And while "labor statesmen” of capital's loyal
opposition had already emerged (the A F of L is the easiest example), the
imaginary "win-win" partnership of Labor with Capital had not yet
been sealed.
The Labor Relations system we know today was largely a response
to the Great Depression and the mass strike wave that shook the US to its core
in the mid-1930s. In a nutshell,
economist John Maynard Keynes and then US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt
led a push to rescue capitalism from the crisis of the time through State
intervention. In order to restore productivity and profits, it was necessary to
expand the purchasing power of working class Americans through subsidies,
public works projects, and, no less, by encouraging the formation of unions.
The New Deal, specifically the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (NLRA, aka
Wagner Act), in this way addressed the crisis of overproduction by facilitating
the expansion of demand. Keynes and Roosevelt recognized class struggle as
unavoidable, and used the NLRA to contain struggle and rout it into a
bureaucratic system we now call Labor
Relations.
The Keynes-Roosevelt intervention represented the capitalists’
best answer to winning the class war at the moment. Without such an
intervention, more reactive elements of the capitalist class would have likely
annihilated the whole capitalist economy by provoking such deep and wide
strikes as those that swept the continent in 1934.
Hindsight allows us to see clearly why the capitalist class
adopted the system of Labor Relations. Throughout the 30s into WWII it
reinforced capitalist class hegemony, re-shaping the content of unionism by
institutionalizing a specific union form mediated by the State - and further
and further removed from the membership at the point of production.
However, after decades of channeling proletarian rebellion into
Labor Relations, capital no longer requires Labor as its junior partner. In the U.S. and other service dense
economies the “Team Concept” has replaced “Labor Peace” as a more efficient
model for social control. No
longer needing to contract working class containment out to unions, many
employers have introduced managerial strategies that combine classic Taylorist
self-management values with “corporate social responsibility” culture. Workers
are trained to view their own productivity and efficiency with a sense of pride
and as a means for achieving greater financial incentives. We see this in the retail sector with
the emphasis on “Team” or department based profit sharing programs. With Labor
on its deathbed, capitalists insourced solutions to class war through increased
employee propaganda, seeking to equate the sale of one’s labor power with a
purpose and passion to save the world.
This is the world in which we are organizing, and for us,
though unionism can take on many forms, it comes to life at the most basic
level when two or more workers band together to struggle in their common
interest. Here the “concerted”, or collective, aspect of the workers’ activity
is foundational. In this scenario, workers themselves act together to address
common concerns. No one acts in their stead. Unionism is here not merely
passive enrollment into a representative labor institution, but a practice of
solidarity and struggle carried out by real workers in real time.
Now, two or more workers engaged in workplace struggle is not
on its own necessarily building a union
per se. Further, it is not sufficient to build a revolutionary organization,
nor is there anything necessarily revolutionary about this type of activity.
There are many directions workers have taken from this initial point of
struggle due to many reasons. So what constitutes a union, let alone a “revolutionary” union?
At its most basic, a union is “an organization of workers
formed to protect the [...] interests of its members”[12] over time.
Where an instance of self-activity could dissipate or pass, unionism is the
practice of consolidating workers into an organization that acts to protect
their interests on an ongoing basis. In recent decades, this has often meant
that union representatives do the “protecting” in the form of negotiating with
management on the workers’ behalf,
thus “unions developed a life independent of their membership and began
to operate over their heads”. Solidarity Federation calls this tendency the representative function of unions as we know them now, in contrast to the (once
more prevalent) associational function
of workers relating directly to each other without the mediation of an
entrenched bureaucracy[13].
This distinction is useful as it demonstrates that unions can have diverging
trajectories, leading to them playing very different roles in society. While
many ultra-Left positions[14]
take the representational function of
unions for granted, understandably portraying them as backwards institutions
who have a stake in maintaining capitalism, clearly there have also been many
workers’ organizations throughout the history of capitalism that have retained
their associational function and
represented a genuine threat to capital. Whether we call it a council, a union,
or anything else doesn’t change the fact that it is possible to create and
maintain “an organization of workers formed to protect the [...] interests of
its members” - and that such a formation can retain its autonomy from the State
and its allied institutions, can win improved conditions for workers under
capitalism, and, further, can facilitate the development of a revolutionary
politics amongst the workers. The fact that such formations must come up
against limitations under this system does not render them irrelevant,
ineffective, or “infantile”.
Clearly, we believe self-organization is the cornerstone of
unionism, and it is the premise upon which we base our argument for Wobblyism.
We draw on a rich tradition of working class self-organization in the US, from
the Knights of Labor[15]
of the late 19th century, the IWW agricultural and maritime workers of the
1910s and 20s[16],
the rank-and-file worker rebellion in the 1930s that gave rise to the CIO and
continued well into World War II[17],
to the Revolutionary Union Movement cells in automotive production in the
1960s-70s[18],
among so many other examples. Each had its rise and fall, strengths and
weaknesses, but all shared workers’ autonomous self-organization as an enduring
key ingredient. This ingredient represents an irrepressible impulse of the
class to assert its humanity and fight its class opponents head-on - whether
its opponents take on the form of The Company or The Union.
4. Three Dominant IWW
Organizing Models: Praise and Critique
Radical Service Unionism (RSU)
General Membership Branches (GMBs) increased alongside the
proliferation of “street” activism in the 1990s, and the IWW drew a good number
of recruits from within these activist milieus. Several decades of political
decomposition of the US working class meant that during this time of growth, no
surviving Wobbly organizing traditions were left to draw on to re-build the
organization. Many Wobblies in turn looked to the business unions for
organizing models that they would adapt to a more egalitarian, less
bureaucratic approach. This led to a style of organizing that we call Radical
Service Unionism (RSU).
Stripped bare, RSU is a form (service union) and a structure
(democratic). Notable examples of
this model can be found in most contract shops throughout the union. They are
especially apparent in larger branches such as Portland and the Bay Area.
Workers organized in these campaigns are dependent upon GMB
representatives and “outside” organizers, possibly with a few leads or IWW
militants on the inside. Formalized employer recognition and collective
bargaining agreements, or contracts, tend to be the organizers’ principal
goals. Direct action and mobilizing an activist base generally play into the
strategy used to achieve them, lending the organizing some street-cred. This
organizing model is primarily directed at organizing “shops”, with no explicit
intent or strategy to build class power more broadly. When these shops are
organized, union maintenance clauses that are often written into contracts have
had the effect of reinforcing a service relationship to the workers in order to
continue representation and avoid legal trouble. Affiliation with a revolutionary
organization gives this method “radical” credentials, but we observe little to
no distinction in practice between this and service unionism - a union model we
should avoid replicating.
As much as this model is a result of the dominant aim and
method of organization in the IWW at that time, it also reflects the broader
level of struggle emanating from the class at that moment in history. It isn't
only because of RSU organizers, but also because of inherent limitations of
struggles generally at that time, as well as workers’ general alienation from
political life, and a notable lack of investment in building their own
organization.[19]
It is worth noting that where this scenario exists, efforts
have been made to change this situation, with some success. We do not advocate
abandoning these shops because of their present limitations, and we hope that
Wobblies will help these shops develop their own rank and file leadership and
expand their fighting role in the class. In the meantime, we encourage Wobblies
to reflect critically on this approach to organizing, and learn from its
practical limitations.
Characteristic Features
of Radical Service Unionism
1. Dependency on organizers from outside the workplace
2. Organizing orients around recognition (as something prior to
and distinct from, demands) with a deference to “contractualism”
3. Single shop strategy
Solidarity Unionism (SU)
The essential components of Solidarity Unionism (SU) are workers’ self-activity[20]
and direct action. SU provides a
framework for workers to unite in pursuit of issue-oriented struggles (e.g.
wages, schedules, sexual harassment, sick pay, etc) within a workplace or in
multiple shops within a campaign.
“Direct action gets the goods through workers’ self-activity” might be
an appropriate summary of the SU approach.
The concept of Solidarity Unionism challenged the backwardness
of mainstream union methods by asserting that workers are better off acting
together on the job through direct action rather than relying on a business
agent to solve their problems for them (a practice which is in itself very
problematic). The workers’ own “self-activity” represents a higher, more
effective form of organization than the bureaucratic “business unions”. This
holds true whether or not the workers are members of a union; they supercede
the limitations of the union that “represents” them, if one exists, and they become the union in effect.
Such a concept naturally finds a welcome home in the IWW. It
could be said that “Solidarity Unionism” is a more recent term for a practice
that unions like the IWW have practiced for a century or more. But while we
should encourage members to “be the union” rather than just join it, there are
other key dimensions of IWW organizing that we feel SU hasn’t adequately
articulated.
Since labor bureaucrats and staffers are absent from the
solidarity unionist picture, it would seem that through SU, workers
collectively assume leadership of their own struggles. However, even though
this model has recruited several solid and long-term Wobblies from workplace
struggles, we have observed an overall pattern of a strong reliance on the
initial organizer, with no well-developed system for developing leadership
throughout the ranks. Also, the generation of Wobblies who pioneered SU tended
to fixate on brand-based and retail-based strategies. In spite of a push from
some organizers to expand down their respective supply chains (to their
credit), supply chains were left mostly untouched. Inspired by the feats of SU
at Starbucks and other prominent chains, fully-fledged organizing campaigns
were launched by enthusiastic new members at single retail outlets (e.g.
“stores”, “shops”, “locations,” etc) wherever a lead or contact was identified,
but would often fizzle out due to a dearth of experience, mentorship, and/or
local support.
Lastly, the IWW is a revolutionary organization. We see workplace struggle around specific
issues as part of a class struggle
against capitalism. We reject the idea that the two struggles are separate.
While Wobblies “inscribe on our banner the revolutionary
watchword, ‘Abolition of the wage system,’” it’s perfectly consistent within
the paradigm of SU for a union[21]
of workers to exhibit self-activity and take direct action within an organizing
framework that is ultimately reformist in its aim, method, and overall
trajectory.
If we engage in direct action with our co-workers, say over a
safety issue, but don’t integrate an educational component that helps our
co-workers think about the connection of that safety issue to the unsafe
priorities of capitalism, then the struggle around the safety issue will more
likely seem isolated to that one workplace, a “bad apple” in an otherwise
healthy tree. Additionally, without the “big picture” vision of the system and
our struggle that comes with an educational component, it will be more
difficult to recruit and retain new
members who will commit to the struggle for the long haul.
While we embrace the core concepts of SU, we feel that this
model - as it is - has reached a wall in the IWW. Without additional components
of leadership development and political co-education along revolutionary Wobbly
lines, we will not be able to push the virtues of SU into a higher stage of
Wobbly organizing.
Characteristic Features of
Solidarity Unionism
1. Workers’ self-activity
2. Direct action
Direct Unionism (DU)
Along the way, Wobblies reflect on what they’ve done, compare
notes, and formulate new approaches to do it better next time. Through
experience - gains and especially losses - purpose and practice as an
organization is clarified. Organizer's energy becomes more focused and better
spent. Often, organizers write these things down in the form of pamphlets or
articles and share them with fellow workers for feedback. One such key article
was the 2010 discussion paper on what the authors called “Direct Unionism.”
Drawing on the best aspects of Solidarity Unionism, the Direct Unionists
offered a practice for implementing militant worker-led unionism in unionized
as well as non-union workplaces, in “public” and in underground campaigns. They
emphasized “reproducing” the organizer - a “quality over quantity” approach to
developing new militant working class organizers who, even if they don’t join
the IWW, can take their skillset with them and organize on their own.
Direct Unionism was a synthesis
of Solidarity Unionism with the organizers’ own lessons and theories drawn out
of experience. Their document crystalized hard-won lessons from some of the
IWW's brightest organizers, and offered itself for reflection and critique. To
be fair, DU was less a developed organizing model (though some Wobblies do
consider it as such), and can only be fairly treated as an influential
discussion paper. We also acknowledge upfront that the discussion paper
reflected much compromise. When we
refer to ‘Direct Unionism’ and ‘Direct Unionists’ in this article, we speak
only of opinions expressed in the discussion paper.
Nonetheless, we consider DU an important benchmark in the IWW’s
growth and we will likely retain much of its insights. These lessons also
inform current high-profile underground campaigns, which are keen to invest in
long term qualitative growth through organizer-development (“reproducing the
organizer”).
DU picks up where SU leaves off, taking direct action and
workers’ self-activity as a starting point, and stressing the importance of the
way that workers’ consciousness is
affected in workplace struggles. DU asserts that class consciousness should
develop and expand with the experience of struggle
(“struggle” understood as a process of confronting a boss together, for
example). But little more is added regarding the role of the organizer as an
active facilitator within this process.
The Direct Unionists don’t hesitate to assert an organizing
method based on very specific revolutionary values. They keenly remind
organizers that even the largest mainstream unions are guided by their own set
of values, just as Wobblies are. With that in mind, it is easier to dispel
misconceptions about principles and values being incongruent with developing a
“mass organization” like a trade union. But while Change To Win may be guided
by its own set of values, it is true that the IWW has qualitatively different,
and in some ways narrower, values. Instead of uniting workers behind the
lowest-common-denominator value (say, “fair wages”), the Direct Unionists want
to organize the working class to fight for its truest and deepest interests. In
so doing, they counter the fallacy that the IWW is a “non-political”
organization.[22]
Instead of struggling for a temporary improvement under capitalism, the aim is
to end capital’s domination over society. What Wobbly could disagree? While
many contemporary IWW’s espouse a desire to enroll as many workers as possible
and leave the revolutionary content of its purpose to the side, DU asserts that
this is unlikely to attract members on a large scale anyway, outside of
extraordinary periods of working class rebellion. Instead, DU focuses on recruiting and retaining quality
members with experience in and a commitment to struggle. What this looks like
in practice could vary, but we agree that more red cards is not inherently
equal to quality development and long-term growth of the IWW.
Direct Unionism represented some of the most advanced ideas on
organizing outside the narrow parameters of business (or service) unionism,
including the issue of worker/organizer class consciousness.
According to Direct Unionists, “struggling collectively against
a boss is transformative. It changes the way we relate to our coworkers and
bosses, it changes the way we think about work, society, class, the world, and
ourselves, and it can change our commitments.”
Moreover, as Wobblies:
“In the long-term, politically and
socially, our goal should be changing the way workers relate to one another,
how they view their boss, and how the working class understands the larger
economic system. In a nutshell, we need to be able to leverage the short-terms
gains we make to not only improve conditions, but to make workers understand
that we won’t be able to achieve long-term changes in society without a
fundamental confrontation with capital...The long-term goal of the industrial
strategy, then, is to organize in a way that develops such consciousness and
gives workers a way to relate to one another that creates that very change
within their workplaces and within themselves.”[23]
We couldn’t agree more that an important goal of Wobbly
organizing should be to develop revolutionary class conscious organizers (and
therefore long-term, self-reliant Wobblies). We do however believe that direct
action alone is insufficient as a method for achieving this end.
“Action precedes consciousness”
“Direct action and
solidarity...build up a collective consciousness. But it’s important to
recognize what comes first: direct action and solidarity. These must be the
building blocks of not only successful organization, but successful education.”[24]
On the process of education, Direct Unionism leaves off with
the assumption that revolutionary consciousness will generally develop out of
the experience of open, collective conflict with the boss. Indeed, in the short
term, Direct Unionists argue that “the goal of actions is to build up
leadership and consciousness amongst other workers.”
The emphasis on direct action as a method for qualitative
development and growth has also been advocated by groups like Seattle
Solidarity Network (aka “SeaSol”), a grassroots collective of workers and
tenants who’ve inspired spin-off groups in several other cities in the US. They
can be characterized by their use of direct action to address grievances
brought by individual workers or tenants, usually demanding stolen deposits for
tenants and reinstatement and back wages for fired workers. The idea, according
to a leading member of SeaSol, is “to view these small fights as a training
ground for class struggle organising, from which we can progress to bigger,
more collective, more prolonged projects. They aren't a model for social change
as such but they contain a key ingredient required for large scale social
change - direct action by the people facing a problem themselves...fighting
together against bosses and landlords, planning things collectively, pooling
our resources, realising that we have power together.”[25]
Direct Unionism differs markedly in their approach from that of
solidarity networks like SeaSol in that, importantly, they advocate membership
development in committees firmly planted at the point of production. That is, Direct Unionists engage the
class war and build organization in their own and others workplaces rather than
search for and support individual battles of members of the class. However, like SeaSol, Direct Unionism
takes for granted that the source of conflict and the virtue in addressing it
collectively are implicit, and will likely be understood on some level by those
who experience it. We believe that the class character of the issues and of the
fight should be made explicit, in
part by action demonstrating this character in the flesh, but also in part
through the educational approach of the organizer. Rather than interpreting the
phrase “action precedes consciousness”
strictly as “one must take place before
the other, and the other will naturally follow”, we encourage IWWs and to
see action and consciousness as two components of a fluid process where each
necessitates and influences the other.
It is hard to blame the authors much for this oversight, since
for all the IWW’s growth the last few years it's still having to learn through
experimentation, through trial and error. But it is important that Wobblies
find ways to merge the two practices of organization and education, and take
the next step in its growth as an organization.
Additional key features of Direct Unionism include cadre
formation or a “network of militants” and an industrial unionism strategy. Ideally the two coincide: IWWs connect
with/develop militants within the same industry. This strategy is appealing. It recognizes the need to connect strong organizers who are
capable and committed to building committees at the point of production over
the long haul. It also argues that we intentionally focus resources within
industries where we have an active presence.
However, as we discussed briefly above, DU takes for granted
that membership development and retention will proceed from taking action on
the shop floor. It’s unclear
exactly how we arrive at the initial form of a network of militants if we
haven’t provided a method for development. Another practical consideration that is not mentioned in the
DU strategy is the importance of choosing target-based workplaces prior to and
in continuation of cadre building.
A network of militants scattered among unstrategic workplaces, even
within the same industry, is not the best way to maximize our limited
capacity. Finally, an industrial
union strategy, as prescribed in Hagerty’s Wheel[26], may not be
the most effective approach to building a strong class-wide organization.
Characteristic Features
of Direct Unionism
1. Network of militants based in Wobbly workplace committees
2. Collective direct action yields class consciousness
3. Industrial unionism strategy
4. Contracts are
Contractualism (Reject both as one and the same)
5. Revolutionary Unionism and
the Trajectory of the IWW: Staking
Out a New Organizing Tradition
“The
IWW made the notion of the social factory a concrete reality, and it built on
the extraordinary level of communication and coordination possible within the
struggles of a mobile workforce. The IWW succeeded in creating an absolutely
original type of agitator: not the mole digging for decades within the single
factory or proletarian neighbourhood, but the type of agitator who swims within
the stream of proletarian struggles, who moves from one end to the other of the
enormous [North] American continent and who rides the seismic wave of the
struggle, overcoming national boundaries and sailing the oceans before
organising conventions to found sister organisations. The Wobblies' concern
with transportation workers and longshoremen, their constant determination to
strike at capital as an international market, their intuitive understanding of
the mobile proletariat - employed today, unemployed tomorrow - as a virus of
social insubordination, as the agent of the "social wildcat": all
these things make the IWW a class organisation which anticipated present-day
forms of struggle...”
-Sergio Bologna, “Class composition
and the theory of the party at the origins of the workers’ council movement” (1972)
By now we’re assuming that you have not already made your mind
up about revolutionary unionism as a contradiction in terms, and are open to
ideas on how to implement it. Clearly, we are proponents of revolutionary
unionism, but we believe that its content and form will be different from
“unionism” as it is commonly understood today. Rather than trying to
appropriate the form of unionism that we see around us to wield for our own
purposes (as RSU did), our approach to unionism starts with an understanding
that unionism begins with the most basic collective struggle against
capitalism. As we discussed earlier, we regard two co-workers asserting
themselves together against an employer as unionism, though in a nascent stage.
That is to say, unionism is not defined by its forms as determined by mainstream business unions or bourgeois
labor law, but by its content of
collective struggle against capital (whether conscious or not). Such is the
essence of Solidarity Unionism, which Direct Unionism took for granted, and
which we use as a starting point for our understanding of Revolutionary
Unionism. Finally, we are writing
from experience organizing waged
workers at various points of production, but Revolutionary Unionism is,
fundamentally, an approach to class-wide struggle so we believe it to be an
equally essential method for developing revolutionary organization amongst unwaged workers, and other proletarian
sectors of the ‘social factory.’[27]
Let us make a bold statement by asserting that the IWW, or any
revolutionary workers’ organization, is not simply one better or worse option
out of a menu of unions. Wobblies have used a good deal of talent and energy
trying to dress the IWW up as a “better alternative” to the business unions.
Posturing as such will not lead to the growth in membership hoped for. The
truth is, we cannot fulfill the role of a business union as well as a business
union can, nor should we, because the
IWW is not a business union. The function
the IWW has historically played in struggle necessarily leads to a form distinct from mainstream unions. At
the height of the IWW’s membership and activity, members were less attracted to
it because it “got the goods” (though it often did), but because of the IWW’s
revolutionary content and methodology. Had that not been the case, liberalism
or simple “trade union consciousness” would have won the day early on and we
would not have such shining historical examples of revolutionary activity to
learn from.
Making this distinction in this stage of growth is well-timed,
as revolutionaries are having to define and develop the kind of organization
they want to be in the coming period. Again, we do not assume to have the last
word on the subject, but we do hope that we can avoid historical pitfalls by clarifying
our revolutionary role in struggle. For example, the General Confederation of
Labor (CGT) of France established itself firmly on revolutionary principles,
but turned eventually into a “business union with red flags”, showing its true
colors as a “reactionary” (holding back or trying to reverse revolutionary
struggle) force during that country’s uprising in 1968.[28]
Closer to home, when the Great Depression hit, John L. Lewis
and his cadre of bureaucrats observed the declining American Federation of Labor
(AF of L), contrasted it with the vibrancy of the IWW, and sought to co-opt
elements of Wobbly organizing to their own class-collaborationist ends. The CIO
appropriated the Wobblies’ concept of Industrial Unionism, recognizing that its
intrinsically revolutionary content was proven false, and organizers were
picked from the crop of militants that were either former Wobblies themselves
or were developed through IWW traditions. These organizers played a major role
in establishing a foundation for the CIO in automotive production, rubber,
steel, and other major industries, in one of the most significant waves of
struggle in US history. But once they had established this base, union
leadership promptly purged the radicals who helped to build it (if the Federal
Government didn’t get them first). The path was cleared for the CIO to become
the class-collaborationist business union that Lewis and Murray aspired to
create. Today, the CIO is known only as the last three letters of the AFL-CIO.
Little distinction can be detected in their organizing practices. Incidentally,
they are declining in membership - and power.
Today, the IWW has attracted new members that don’t just want
the organization to be a cut-rate business union. Meanwhile, the business union
leadership is grasping for straws trying to pull itself out of the margins of
the working class and back onto center stage. Just as the nascent CIO sought to
utilize the innovations and creativity of the militant worker-organizer,
today’s progressive wing of mainstream labor realizes it must find fresh blood
to prop itself up again. Wobblies have observed these unions adopt direct
action tactics (walk-out’s, civil disobedience, even occasional workplace
occupations) similar to what the IWW uses. Wobblies have also heard these
elements echo calls for fundamental change from below, for example, when
attempting to co-opt the Occupy movement[29]. And many
organizers in the IWW have witnessed these same unions win over more than a few
of its brightest, most motivated members to their ranks with salaries and other
resources the IWW does not have. Thus the labor bureaucracy uses the talent and
energy of the rank and file to build and mobilize a base, yet contain class
struggle within its own liberal narrative of justice in the workplace. This
remains a looming threat to the IWW’s prospects for building a genuine
revolutionary pole outside of the moribund labor mainstream. IWW's would do
well to inoculate themselves against this.
Towards a Wobbly Methodology for Today...and
Tomorrow
What we’ve learned over the last several years is that, in
order to build a revolutionary union movement the IWW needs to identify and
implement more nuanced Wobbly practices at the micro level with an eye toward
its trajectory and growth as a revolutionary force within the working class.
Our internal organizer development programs along with the lessons and concepts
laid out in IWW pamphlets like “Weakening the Dam” have provided organizers
with excellent reference points by focusing on the individual organizer in the
workplace. We hope to supplement
and expand on those points by addressing 4 main methodological areas:
A. Recruitment and Orientation
B. Member Development and
Retention
C. Analysis and Orientation
around Class Composition
D. Organizational Growth and
Trajectory
A. Recruitment and Orientation
We’re all Leaders?
When a few hundred Wobblies aboard the steamer Verona approached the dock in Everett,
WA on November 5th, 1916 to support striking shingle workers they were met with
hostility by hundreds of local vigilante “citizen deputies.” When asked “who’s your leader?” by
local sheriff Donald McRae, a chorus of Wobblies famously replied, “we’re all
leaders!” The slogan has been a
hit ever since. But what exactly
does it mean and what does it imply about the IWW and its members? To answer these questions one must
first disambiguate the term ‘leader’ in this context. McRae could have done this initially had he originally asked
the more precise question he had in mind, namely, “who is in charge?” It is well known that Wobblies harbor
healthy aversions to illegitimate authority and hierarchical structure. Thus the response made loud and clear
on the docks in Everett, which was a reply to the fact that no one Wobbly was “in
charge.” However, the other side of the ambiguity is more complicated and begs
important questions like what constitutes a good revolutionary leader and how
can we recruit, develop and retain them?
Let us take a moment to clear up what we mean by "leadership".
Leadership as a personal quality manifests itself in countless ways. In the Organizer Trainings, we discuss
what it means to be a social leader in the context of the workplace. This
brings up an important point: "leader" is a concept relative to a
particular social group or situation. Where in one situation one person could
be seen as a leader, in others they are led. Thinking about it this way, it is
true indeed that all IWW members are leaders (along with most everyone else). However, the IWW has historically
raised the bar for promoting a particular kind of leadership and developing a
particular kind of revolutionary leader, namely, a Wobbly.
For us, the phrase “we’re all leaders” simply suggests that all
workers are able to develop qualities and skills conducive to leadership in a
multiplicity of situations. This
does not mean all workers will
acquire these qualities and skills, nor does it imply that they will acquire
the qualities and skills to be a Wobbly.
But this does not bear on the IWW’s approach to the present. Its strength as a revolutionary force
within the working class is dependent on developing Wobbly leaders. Therefore
it makes sense to identify Wobbly qualities and leadership characteristics, in
order to highlight their virtues and reproduce them widely amongst the
class.
What is a Wobbly?
While we’re on the subject of Wobbly leadership, we would like
to briefly outline basic qualities we think Wobblies should strive for. Every
member, when they join, agrees to study the principles of the organization and
acquaint themselves with its purposes. But a red card does not a Wobbly make.
We began this essay with a quote from FW Embree which strikes at the heart of
Wobblyism. It’s worth repeating: “...the end in view is well worth striving
for, but in the struggle itself lies the happiness of the fighter.” Wobblies are revolutionary class
warriors, tireless fighters against capital and its allies. They are
responsible, competent, and accountable members to their class - adept at, and
committed to, anticipating and negotiating diverse social terrain. They are courageous, not reckless;
spartan, not obedient. They lead by listening. They are humble to learn and
careful in speech. They understand
the intimate and interdependent connection between personal aim and action
within collective struggle and revolutionary social change. Therefore, above
all, Wobblies are dedicated to reproducing Wobblies greater than themselves.
Salt: Every Worker an Organizer
“Every worker is an organizer” is useful shorthand for some of
the principles the IWW holds close to its heart. It’s both a phrase and philosophy that resides in the back
of every Wobbly’s mind as they survey the shop floor or run their thumb down a
list of co-workers–scanning for potential allies and bookmarking future
1-on-1’s. Stripped bare, it’s a
Wobbly maxim that recognizes the necessity for workers to organize for a truly
new society.
Consequently, as the IWW seeks to maximize its strength with
still limited numbers, we encourage every Red Card to adopt the mindset and
approach of a salt. Salting is the
proven, time-tested tactic of selling your labor power strategically, with the
specific aim of advancing the union and building class power. Salting is not exclusive of personal
needs and desires, nor do we see it as a discrete series of events whereby
Wobblies coldly calculate their move from one campaign to the next. ‘Every Wob a salt’ is a battle cry we
embrace, but by this we mean a thoughtful, nuanced and long-term approach to
orienting oneself to class struggle. In the section on “Growth and Trajectory”
below we propose basic criteria to guide Wobblies in thinking about a personal
revolutionary trajectory. We
intend this guide to supplement Wobbly’s individual predilections regarding
where they choose to sell their labor power. We hope this will encourage comrades to be thoughtful about
their role as Wobblies and revolutionaries and instill an appreciation for
acquiring skills and resources needed for securing a specific job in a
particular workplace and learning how to establish oneself as a leader. These are critical skills every Wobbly
should have in their revolutionary arsenal.
Not all Salts are Wobs
With this in mind, we are also increasingly looking to recruit
new salts from outside the union.
And Interestingly, we’re finding that workers unaffiliated with the IWW
are increasingly looking to join the organization to fight within existing
campaigns. Some of these workers
have workplace organizing experience, many don’t, and most aren’t familiar with
the rigors associated with revolutionary union organizing or the virtues
conducive to reproducing class warriors.
As many Wobblies know (and as we discuss in more detail below) it takes
a tremendous amount of time and energy to help organizers salt into a campaign
and ensure that they have the skills and information needed to find their
stride. In our own campaigns we've
stumbled blindly through this process several times in the last few years
alone, with little success. There
are numerous reasons for failure, largely derived from false starts. We failed to determine commitment,
provide sufficient tools and/or resources, and generally gauge overall
investment on the part of the interested salt. Looking back, we could have eliminated a lot of wasted time
(by both parties) had our committee taken a more proactive “orientation”
approach.
It is true that the ‘One Big Union’ has always gone to great
pains to fight for inclusivity as a
guiding principle of class conscious organizing. However, inclusivity is often
reduced to meaning non-discrimination of
membership. We want to move beyond
this passive approach. We want to be inclusive in the sense that all members of
the working class are able to join the OBU, but we also want to take a positive
approach to membership that ensures that new IWWs are well informed and
equipped to become capable fighters in the class struggle.
What does it mean to join the One Big Union?
The IWW is an organization of the class. Therefore, as we have
tried to impress, the union’s membership, if it is to be successful in its
historic mission, must be composed of working-class leaders. Wobbly organizers
are always on the lookout for workers who demonstrate potential to become
capable leaders on the job and within the class. Every worker is important, but
for many reasons, not every worker is going to be a caring, responsible and
class-conscious leader. We want to identify co-workers who demonstrate these
qualities, or the potential to develop them, and who could duplicate and build
on the skillset of the initial organizer and recruit yet new organizers. All
this is based on organic, human-to-human relationships that we begin to develop
in the workplace. We have developed the flexible guideline below for recruiting
new organizers from the job, starting from this basic relationship to taking on
the first tasks on the committee. Many aspects of this practice could also be
applied to branch building or other similar organizing activity.
Wobbly Organizer
Recruitment Process
●
Meet workers where they’re at. This is very basic: it
means listening, learning about people as people, engaging them on their
interests and building a relationship of mutual respect and support.
●
Trust: establishing trust through relationship-building
and mutual aid.
●
Initiative/Reliability/Follow-through: Is this worker a
self-starter, responsible, accountable?
●
Conduct a series of formal and informal “one on ones”.
Discretion is obviously important, and it’s best to reflect on these
interactions with a committee if one exists. These encounters could vary from
casual socializing, to focused one-on-one meetings where workplace issues are
discussed, to asking a worker to join the committee. Each step is an
opportunity to assess whether to continue pursuing the worker’s involvement in
the campaign or not, but is also an important part of an ongoing process of
relationship-building throughout the workplace. As we state elsewhere,
“Ultimately we need to know our co-workers, not just know about them.”
○
Social mapping as an example of a practical entry to
ongoing committee work.
○
Promoting Wobbly values, practices, and expectations.
○
Connect new member with available resources
(literature, websites, people, communication tools).
Establishing yourself as an
organizer in a new workplace and becoming a
social leader
Upon getting hired at a new job, it’s tempting to jump right
into agitating and educating co-workers.
This approach is problematic for several reasons. Experience has shown
that workers who do not first build relationships and establish themselves as
social leaders within the shop are apt to be quickly labeled as an arrogant and
disgruntled employee by management and gain a reputation among co-workers as a
“complainer” and/or just another naive “crazy radical.”
Depending on the workplace it’s generally a good rule of thumb
to allow yourself a few months to get acquainted with the social landscape at
your new job. During this time,
organizing consists of getting to know as many names and faces as possible,
social mapping, building positive relationships with everybody - including
management and co-workers that you may find personally repulsive and lacking in
class-consciousness. While organizing under the radar, having enemies only
makes things harder, whether those enemies are worthy of ire or not.
Becoming a social leader requires putting yourself out there,
going out of your way to introduce yourself to people and making it a point to
say hello to folks both inside and out of your immediate work group. The first
few weeks give you a unique opportunity to get acquainted with nearly every
worker that passes you by. In many
workplaces, departments and jobs are segregated in numerous ways. Intentionally
pursuing relationships that force you to move beyond your comfort zone requires
seeking out co-workers outside your immediate work group. Doing so will introduce you to a wider,
more diverse social milieu, and give you a more informed understanding of the
composition of your workplace.
This puts you at a tremendous advantage to become a social leader and
teaches you a lot about what the organizing committee should look like in order
to build substantial workers’ power in your shop or campaign. At the same time, keeping all this
information locked up in your head is nearly impossible. The taking of daily notes on the
interactions you have with co-workers will prove indispensable when you want
pass on that information to another Wobbly or simply organize your own thoughts
into a clearer social map. Check
with fellow organizers as to how they keep their notes in order so that you can
devise a system that best fits your own situation.
Building a reputation as a worker who carries their load, helps
others, covers shifts, arrives on time and doesn’t call out sick frequently is
another critical element of becoming a social leader. It’s a cliché, but the
best workers usually make the best organizers. Working hard and doing a ‘good
job’ may increase the rate at which you’re exploited, but it also makes the
labor process easier for other workers, and they will take notice. Being known
as someone whom everyone likes and respects is invaluable in establishing
credibility, which is a vital prerequisite for assuming social leadership in
the workplace.
B. Development and
Retention
Building Relationships and Community in the
Committee and the Class
“At its best, one of the
most creative activities is being involved in a struggle with other people,
breaking out of our isolation, seeing our relations with others change,
discovering new dimension in our lives.”
Silvia Federici “Putting Feminism Back on its Feet”
(1984)
At this point we’d like to magnify the discussion by homing in
on the level of conversation and organizing that takes place between
individuals in struggle. Wobblies
who are new to point of production organizing can fail to see between and
beyond the ‘stages of a campaign.’
It is difficult and uncomfortable at first, to integrate the seemingly
disparate spheres of one’s life (‘home,’ ‘friends,’ ‘work,’ ‘IWW,’ ‘family,’
etc.). As a result, organizers
tend to remain fixated on a numbers game of growing the committee and signing
up new members. This approach
often focuses singularly on quantitative results and outcomes (e.g. “going public”) that take little to no consideration
of the overall vision for the stated goal, and limited attention to methods for
achieving success. We want to contrast this practice with our conception of
revolutionary unionism, which we assert requires a greater emphasis on a process for developing dynamic
individual relationships, sharing leadership skills, creating experiences
rooted in struggle, ensuring laughter, lessons, co-education and
reflection. In our experience this
process has had an invaluable effect on the quality, character, and content of
struggle.
Qualitative growth does not equal slow growth. In the long-run
it will yield exponentially more organizers who have the capacity to move
people in revolutionary directions.
Thus we believe IWW organizers need to better understand how to develop
relationships, particularly those that transcend the personal/political
dichotomy. When Wobblies
compartmentalize their lives they limit their connection and contribution to
their families, comrades, and ultimately, the class struggle. Moving forward,
we suggest IWW organizers place greater emphasis on the process of building the
kind of relationships necessary to growing a union of revolutionaries.
Decompartmentalization
is a term we use to describe a revolutionary approach to relationship
building. It’s a holistic view of
the different parts of our lives and the class struggle. In practice the activity is a reciprocal one: our dynamic
working class social relationships inform how and why we struggle—and struggle
informs, nurtures, and transforms our relationships to one another. This
implies that revolutionaries “meet people where they’re at,” which requires the
continual development of relationships outside radical circles, social cliques,
and otherwise comfortable ‘milieus.'
This approach is not an exercise in friendship building. It’s an
approach to organizing that recognizes the class struggle as a fundamental
battle for our humanity. As such,
our organizing should reflect the basic
aim of revolutionary struggle--to stimulate, nourish, and develop those
humanistic qualities suppressed under capitalist rule. For us, this suggests building more
comprehensive relationships with co-workers, comrades, and broader members of
the class.
Occasionally we hear comrades say they are frustrated because
their job is such a hindrance to their “political work.” If only they had more time off the
clock, more could be achieved.
There is a wide range of activity that falls under the umbrella of
political work so we aren’t being derisive of the term, per se. Nor are we questioning fellow workers
who work long hours, multiple jobs, and/or simply have very little "free
time." Our quarrel is with the idea that political work is
extracurricular, something lying outside the necessary daily routine--one among
many independent priorities competing for our attention. But denying capital's omnipresence only
contributes to the illusion that some spheres of life are still sacred.
As Selma James makes clear,
“...capital is a social relation not only between classes but between all
individuals. All
the relationships in society are
transformed on the basis of this capitalist way in which human beings are
exploited in the course of working to survive and develop. The most obvious,
pervasive, and fundamental change is that we relate to each other through
things...The class struggle is in essence to end exploitation and to transform
the quality of our lives: we don’t wish to spend any of our precious time
submitting to an alien--an alienating--will.”[30]
From this perspective, every aspect of life becomes
“political”. Each seemingly separate sphere of life (work, socializing,
hobbies, etc) is shaped by this “social relation”. All life, all creative human capacities are channeled into
reproducing this relation; to creating and reinforcing capitalist society. The
working class doesn't own or control society’s “means of production”, thus it
has little choice but to take part in this process or starve (the bagel
dumpsters don’t fill themselves). The process of workers’ alienation from the
means of making life possible is profoundly political in itself. For us, some
of the most important political work a revolutionary can do is where they’re
forced to work in order to live.
Working class intellectual Stan Weir coined the term
‘singlejack solidarity’ to describe the nature and significance of developing a
close bond with co-workers and other working class organizers (the term is also
the title of a great edited compilation of Weir’s essays).[31] We believe ‘Singlejacking’ should be a
principle method of Wobbly organizing because it draws out the underlying
commonalities workers have in class struggle by penetrating the personal and
breaking through the ‘compartmentalization’ that tends to separate our lives
into separate spheres of work, personal life, identity and politics.
Babysitting, helping someone move, and going camping might not at first seem
like things we would associate with workplace organizing, but they are
essential to building a broader and mature sense of solidarity, comradeship,
and community in our workplaces and within committees.
If Wobblies can agree that building a powerful and sustainable
workplace committee depends on organizing that practices and promotes a
decompartmentalized approach to relationship building, they are able to release
the pressure to rush quantitative growth in their campaigns. They are able to
devote more attention to qualitative development and to ensure that new
organizers receive the skills, capacity, and competence to be leaders. This
approach requires patience, but Wobblies should be up for this challenge.
There is a reason why much of the IWW's rich history and other
thoughtful accounts of class struggle are couched in spiritual language:
Revolutionary organizing requires an understanding that working class
solidarity must transcend the daily forms of isolation and alienation
reproduced under capitalism. In crafting a spirit of revolutionary community
with co-workers and within committees
revolutionaries are actively “building a new society” by forming new types of
relationships “in the shell of the old.”
Ultimately Wobblies need to know their co-workers, not just
know about them. Whether a Wobbly is a committee of one, or one member in a
larger committee, the method of decompartmentalized organizing is universally
applicable. Building one strong relationship is one of the most difficult
things to do as an organizer. It is also the most important.
Mentorship, On the Job Organizer Training
and Political Co-education
Mentorship is elemental to growing a sustainable organization.
A mentor shares experiences and insights which foster growth and development. A
good mentor will pass on skills and lessons for others to build on and become
mentors themselves. Most Wobblies, if they're active members, have probably
played a mentor role in orienting a new member with branch meetings, or as an
adviser when a new organizing drive is getting on its feet. However, we feel
that the form and level of priority that mentoring takes in recruiting and
developing IWW members needs to be better impressed.
Many current members joined the IWW online, waiting for a clue
as to what to do next when the new member packet came in the mail. Others
joined in person, but were left to orient themselves in a new organization
mostly on their own. Still today, we find an overall lack of a practice of
building relationships with new members, fielding questions about the
organization they’re about to join, and providing guidance once they’re in so
they can be a thriving member. Even the most thorough Organizer Training will
have little effect without extensive follow-up and support. While mentorship
takes place on an informal level sometimes, it has yet to be made a priority of
the organization in general. Experienced members must mentor newer members,
helping them past unforeseen obstacles and nuances of day-to-day organizing.
How does this look? There are many ways we can step up
mentorship, but some examples may be helpful. For instance, in the Food Mart
campaign, new committee members have “shadowed” more experienced members
through one-on-one’s to build their sense of competence to initiate their own;
those with a history of workplace organizing will follow up with newer members
- especially if there’s a natural rapport in place - after committee meetings
to field questions, explain new concepts, and generally check in. Food Mart
committee members have also experimented with establishing “organizing
partners,” two worker-organizers who meet together regularly, if briefly, to
keep each other motivated and on task, to share experiences and skills, analyze
and discuss readings, write articles together, and most importantly, learn how
to ask questions. There are a wide-range of possibilities within this framework
depending on the context and situation (e.g. It may be beneficial for IWW
Industrial Organizing Committee (IOC) members who have not established a
workplace committee to pair up even though they do not share the same
workplace. Or perhaps
circumstances suggest partnering with someone outside your industry, branch, or
location. Having an organizing
partner you can relate to and grow with is critical).
Wobblies in Portland have developed a systematic approach to orienting
new delegates to their responsibilities, and to the inner workings of the IWW
more generally. Also of note is the “resource tree” system Twin Cities Wobs are
developing, which matches resources with people who need them, in effect
supporting the development of new and more diverse leadership (which should
continue to be a priority for the IWW going forward).
Alongside mentorship, another essential but often-lacking
component of our organizing has been education.
Early Wobblies identified three key components of our revolutionary
organizational practice known as “the Three Stars of the IWW”: Education, Organization, and Emancipation. Throughout the first
decades of Wobbly activity, a rich culture of working class self-education
prevailed, giving the rank and file a compass toward Emancipation to guide
their daily activity on the job. Fellow Workers led classes on economics using
real-world terminology and illustrations. “Ordinary workers” recorded their
ideas, often very advanced even for our time, in union publications or in
pamphlet form[32].
They recognized that it was important for workers to understand their position
in society in order for them to use it to the class’s advantage. They knew that
workers could not only grasp concepts of struggle, but expand on and improve
them, because they too were workers who yearned to resolve the system’s
contradictions that played out in their everyday lives. Clearly, education
plays an indispensable role in Wobbly organizing, now as much as then. The
challenge today is to identify obstacles to successful education practices and
to overcome them. Specifically, the IWW needs a method of co-education where Wobblies share their knowledge and experiences
to build a smarter, more vibrant organization on a trajectory toward universal
emancipation.
To be clear, our perspective as revolutionary organizers is not
as professionals or intellectuals, hoping to insert correct ideas into an
ignorant and passive working class from the outside. “The workers” - if we can
refer to “them” in the third-person - are neither ignorant nor passive as a
whole, and we are living examples of that. Our approach to education is from
within the class, and this shapes our education practice. Further, even as
“well-read” revolutionaries, we do not find that we have to bring politics[33]
into organizing, but that politics is implicit in everything we do. The power
relations built into this society touch every aspect of our lives. We do not
have to search long to find the connection between an aspect of our lives and
the system. Thus the personal becomes political in a profound way. “Politics”,
we find, are lying around everywhere.
That said, our role can be seen as two-fold: one is to draw out
the contents of this system from our co-workers’ lived experience and
facilitate a process of connecting that experience to the big picture of the
system and revolution; second is to give them the tools to better agitate and
organize on their own. In doing so, we stand to learn as much as we share. In
fact, we should approach our education practice expecting to learn something
from our co-workers that we didn’t know before. While we will often have
organizing and political tools that others have not yet developed, we should
not see ourselves as possessing all relevant knowledge. We say that a Wobbly
educational component should resemble a two-way street; we call this co-education.
Our approach to co-education will necessarily vary with the
circumstance. We should be flexible and do our best to orient education around
our co-workers' interests, experience, and capacity. While study groups are
appropriate for some, others might get more out of a film or discussing how
things went on their first picket line. Drawing from a Food Mart example, we’ve
adapted dense texts to a slideshow presentation, adding visuals and extracting
key quotes for discussion. This way, the contents of the text can be
communicated more easily for more people, and there’s more time to discuss how
it relates to everyone’s lives. Further, by breaking down complicated concepts
this way, we’re better able to take these concepts into the workplace and
enrich our agitation skills.
Obviously, a key ingredient in this process is a desire to
participate. Our co-workers have to want to be part of this, and we have to
want to initiate and follow through with it. As with everything else, there are
no silver bullets to revolutionary co-education. It is challenging, and at
times discouraging, but nonetheless necessary - and possible.
C. Class Composition and
the Orientation of the IWW
The IWW of the early part of the 20th century is known for its
diverse composition. It agitated in earnest for equality, against racial
subjugation of blacks, exclusion of recent immigrants, and the marginalization
of women. Many compelling examples can be used to demonstrate that these
weren’t just meaningless sentiments. A large portion of the active membership
were recent immigrants who were often not regarded as genuinely “American”.
Asian immigrants were called on to join when even the most progressive forces
of the time (most unions, various US socialist parties, the Second
International, etc) kowtowed to then-prevalent anti-Asian public sentiment[34].
Black leadership was key in holding together the IWW’s powerful maritime organization
in Philadelphia, MTWU Local 8. Philip A. Randolph, a key organizer of the
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, often admired the Wobblies’ attention to
the conditions of black worker[35]
and their appeals to join[36].
And surely women in the organization faced unfair challenges, but were able to
take meaningful leadership roles with the ardent support of many male members.
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn asserted: “The IWW has been accused of putting the women
in the front; the truth is: the IWW does not keep them at the back – and they
go to the front.” Thus the IWW made ongoing earnest efforts to put its money
where its mouth was on organizing all workers based on their common interests,
“regardless of creed, color, or nationality.”
Today, the question of class composition (Who is the class
composed of? What immediate issues concern them? How do they relate to the rest
of the class at this time?) is again a burning one for us to consider for our
growth. The terrain of struggle is shaped by race, immigrant status, sexuality,
gender, and the historical backdrop of decades of both struggle and working
class decomposition[37]
(a process of the class breaking up into separate interest groups and a loss of
a relevant working class political culture). The question of how to navigate
this complex terrain and build a class-based organization whose composition
reflects that of the widest possible segments of the class is one that cannot
be answered in one sweeping document. However, we must use this question as a
guide in considering how we want to carry on our work in the coming period to
make our organization more effective and relevant.
In doing so, we would recommend avoiding falling into a liberal
narrative around “diversity”, which we hold to have little meaning. True,
having a composition within the IWW representative of our class at large is a
good thing, but diversity for diversity’s sake is not a response to struggle or
historical conditions, and too easily tends toward tokenizing certain
demographics. A compositional approach starts with material (historical)
conditions that call forth the possibility and necessity for different layers
of the class to support each other in struggle. As the universal emancipation
of humanity from the history of class societies is our goal, our scope for
compositional analysis and movement-building is broad indeed.
With all this said, it is true that the IWW has, especially in
recent years, had a limited composition compared to the wider class. This is a
subject which we could easily write another several pages on, but we would
rather reflect on this in real time with other Wobblies. For now, there are at
least a few key ways we think this limited composition perpetuates itself, and
that we would like to consider while orienting ourselves toward a higher phase
of organization.
To make a convenient generalization, our organization as it
exists today has been largely built up by organizers coming out of activist
milieus with their own distinct cultural norms. (See above: “The activist turn”.) While this fact on
its own isn’t necessarily bad, there seems to be a tendency to reproduce the
cultural norms of those milieus within the IWW. This is especially evident in
areas where branch-building takes priority over - or is done instead of - workplace
organizing. Still often enough, where there has been workplace activity, an
inertia has set in where radicals of this bent defer to other such radicals in
building committees. Whether this looks like the stereotype of the “old lefty”
labor history club, or the younger, hipper radical activist, this orientation
tends to alienate many others who don’t share that background. True, this
tendency is less prominent in some areas where serious workplace organizing has
taken place, but it is a phenomenon that still ails us.
We would like to see the broader IWW take steps to orient its
activity around workplace struggle in more meaningful ways. Where serious
workplace organizing is going on, we have to consciously build organization
with composition in mind. Again, compositional considerations will vary from
place to place, but clearly the overall tendency, up till now, of retaining
members who share a specific cultural reference point through the Left (all too
often mostly white) isn’t paying off.
Moreover, qualitative growth and stability is possible only insofar as
class composition is thoughtfully addressed by existing workplace committees,
by organizers currently “picking a target”, and by wider IWW recruitment
strategies.
Like much of the Wobblyism method we're advocating, this
process is dialectical. Organizers
develop relationships with workers as
people. Based on the evolution of those relationships toward or away from
struggle, more concerted efforts are taken to connect with key demographics within
particular workplaces, industries, regions, international campaigns, etc. It is true that the class--a constantly
evolving force--"still remains an unknown continent."[38] Revolutionary organizers must
continually experiment with creative ways to fruitfully connect with
ever-changing and diverse sectors of this rich proletarian landscape.
Therefore, the challenge for Wobblies on the ground is to social map the
“social factory” from different angles and from different dimensions according
to the climate and context of struggle.
They must grow adept at analyzing the composition of the workplace to
gain insight into shop floor leadership dynamics, to identify social and
cultural pull within the context of campaigns, and importantly, master the art
of acclimation, while encouraging an orientation towards class struggle. Only through careful attention and
practical activity devoted to building an organization which reflects the
diverse composition of our class can Wobblies pursue revolutionary
unionism.
D. Growth and Trajectory
We have focused a lot on the “micro” level of day-to-day Wobbly
organizing, a method distinct from the business union approach. But just as
important is the scope for organizational growth and, eventually, revolution.
We would like to relate our thoughts on building for the next stage of IWW
organizing.
The IWW could never boast membership sizes that could compare
to the millions of workers enrolled in the best-known business unions.
Nonetheless, it has historically played a disproportionately powerful role in
advancing the interests of the entire class. Many of the gains and comforts the
class enjoys today can be largely credited to the methods and traditions of the
IWW. This could not have been accomplished without the IWW’s distinct approach
to organizing, which emphasized organizing worker-to-worker in many of the
world’s key industries. In this way, the dichotomy between leadership and
rank-and-file was blurred, if it existed at all; the self-activity of the
workers themselves was the motor that drove the IWW. This approach is vividly
exemplified in the dynamic organization Wobblies built in timber, agriculture,
and maritime in the 1910’s and 20’s.[39]
Many of us are familiar with the Wobbly adage, “Organize the
worker, not the job.” In other words, share with other workers the tools to
build up their own organs of struggle, and leave the problems of running
capitalist production to the capitalists. One other sentiment we’ve heard
within the IWW goes something like, “Organize where you’re at.” Without
digressing too much from the point, we think there is merit in acting like a
Wobbly whether you work at a small print shop or in a massive steel mill. We
should implement our method where we can, when we can. However, the IWW has finite
resources and cannot meaningfully support fully-fledged campaigns in just any
and all places. The IWW should aim to build sustainable organs of struggle that
will have the broadest possible positive impact on the class as a whole. There
is an important distinction here between organizing
and organizing campaigns. Both
are important, but here we will focus on campaigns.
One would be hard pressed to find a Wobbly who feels that
members of the IWW shouldn’t always be working to organize our class, regardless
of where we fall in it. In any given workplace a Wobbly might happen to work,
they have a responsibility to their co-workers and their class to nurture
solidarity and act on their revolutionary principles. But Wobblies, like most
other workers, aren't static objects born to a single workplace where we must
be affixed until the end of time. Many factors affect and change where we end
up, not least of which being our own decisions. It would be unrealistic to
expect a Wobbly to ease into a workplace that requires training and experience
that they do not have, in a line of work that they would never seriously
consider. However, if a member is on a trajectory toward the kind of job called
for in a strategic workplace, the story changes. There are many valid considerations
a person should make before taking on this kind of commitment, but our point is
that worker-organizers do not require an academic education to be salts. It
could be alleged that it is unfair for workers to make a strategic choice in
who they sell their labor-power to. However, workers change jobs constantly. We take jobs first because
we have to in order to live. We are encouraging working-class revolutionaries
to pick workplaces that they are on a trajectory to work in anyway, if they
can, with the intent to help organize those workplaces.
The question is therefore raised to us: what considerations
must we make as Wobblies individually and as the IWW collectively when
determining "where we're at?" That process begins with a survey of
the industrial terrain before us and an assessment of the path to revolution.
It is true that the stages of capitalist production are
necessarily integrated. Producing a commodity is a process spanning many
diverse and separate workplaces, demanding a structure to facilitate all of
this capital getting to the right places at the right times. The component
parts of the commodity must arrive to be prepared for sale, and a long chain of
ships, planes, trains, and trucks must connect all these distant points together.
Any strike at a vital point of distribution is a crippling blow
to the employing class. Production might continue at tremendous rates, and
customers could still flood the stores, but without operational means of
distribution to get commodities from the point of production to the point of
exchange, the circuit of capitalism shorts. Thus we make our case for supply chain strategies, a more
effective way to use our limited resources to leverage power against employers.
Ideally, our organization's capacity would allow for
industry-wide organizing in maritime, auto, or Walmart, as examples. But we're
not there in terms of size, location, and capability at this point.
Nonetheless, the organizing upturn over the last decade or so has put the IWW
in a position to pursue larger targets than it could before. One well-known
Wobbly organizer often recommends that we “pick the low-hanging fruit.” We
agree, but many Wobblies now have the tools and experience to start picking
higher. We encourage organizers to use the key considerations below before
pursuing a serious organizing drive:
-Picking
Key Capital Targets: Is the employer a powerful player in the economy,
locally or more broadly? Are they vulnerable to Wobbly organization in your
region? After considering your branch or committee’s organizing capacity, zero
in on reachable targets that will have a significant impact on workers in the
industry or in the economy more broadly.
-Identifying
Where Momentum Is and Assessing Organizing Capacity: Is there already organizing
activity taking place at your target workplace, or a serious interest in
initiating a campaign there? Is your branch or committee prepared to lead a
long-term campaign there?
-Supply
Chain Agenda and Geographical Strength[40]: Aiming
down the supply chain, instead of just across points of exchange, will likely
reap more gains, especially for a small organization. Does your target have
production, warehousing, or transportation facilities within range of your
committee? Neglecting these key points in the chain will only give the employer
that much more leverage.
-Compositional
Analysis and Education: Does the workplace or industry demographics reflect
the demographics of the class locally? Is your committee equipped to navigate
diverse workplaces and build on-the-job leadership among different segments of
the workplace? Will your campaign resonate with broad segments of the class?
-Membership
and Orientation: Does your committee have a system in place for recruiting
lasting and able members who understand and embrace IWW aims and methods?
-The
Campaign and the Class: How does your campaign affect or advance the growth
of the IWW and the interests of the class? Will it resonate widely and help
build class power more broadly? If so, how?
-Goal-setting:
What short-term goals do you want to achieve through this effort? How will this
affect where the IWW is at in 1 year, 2 years, or 5 years out?
Wobblyism: Toward a model for Revolutionary Unionism
1. Organizing aim and method based on a revolutionary trajectory
2. Integration of leadership development (“reproducing the
organizer”) and political co-education into everyday workplace struggle
3. Target-based workplace committees
4. Supply chain organizational strategy
6. Conclusion
Summing it up
Zooming out from the subject of organization-building we’ve
discussed here, it is helpful to keep in mind our context in the world-wide
class struggle. This can be a lot to conceive of, but it is this global
struggle that gives our local efforts direction and meaning. Capitalism is not
the first stage of exploitation and inequality the world has known; humanity
has been burdened with the struggle to free itself of these shackles for a long
time. Class societies gave way one to the next over time. Convincing analysis
cites the domination of women as the first manifestation of class[41];
ancient chattel slavery gave way to feudalism, which capitalism triumphed over,
which has wrought its own divisions and oppressions to secure its preservation.
Capitalism is thus a culmination of a long and tired history of systemic
oppression; it also has the distinct disadvantage of daily digging a grave for
class societies as a whole. This system has given the very class it depends on
for survival the tools for its own destruction. Workers have immense
transformative power, but it is not written destiny that they will use it to
transform society. Capitalism will run out of steam one way or another. Are
Wobblies prepared to build something qualitatively better in its place?
An essential aspect of fighting an opponent is understanding your opponent, their
motives and their tactics. Capitalism, our opponent, is the rule of
exchange-value (or simply, “value”) over society. It is the systematic
squandering of the earth’s resources (people among them) for the purpose of
exchanging commodities for yet more commodities. This represents the basis of
social relations in capitalist society. The business
unions have found a niche in this system, negotiating the effects value has
on the working class. They address surface manifestations of capitalist
antagonism, while preserving its essential exploitative function (and hence,
their own preservation). Activism
critiques the heirarchical form of
capitalism, and finds its own niche in the system as the vocal critic of its
“errors” and “excesses”. Wobblies have no horse in that race, and should
understand and struggle directly against the rule of value itself. We do not
entertain illusions about a more “fair” or “horizontal” capitalism. We cannot
build an organization that attenuates, ignores, or misunderstands the role of
value in our struggle. Indeed, this is what inspired the IWW into existence,
and which the Preamble declares in no uncertain terms. This, for us, is the
starting point when we assess the role of our organization, our opponent’s
tactics and weaknesses, and what we need to do to win in struggle.
Wobbly Grover Perry once stated, “Labor produces all wealth.
Labor is therefore entitled to all wealth. We are going to do away with
capitalism by taking possession of the land and the machinery of production. We
don’t intend to buy them, either.”
Going forward
If nothing else, this piece is an attempt to reflect upon our
organization and its history. We sense that this article is merely articulating
what’s already developing on the ground, and we hope to push this positive
development as far as we can. A variety of changing historical dynamics have
shaped the organization we know today and defined its political content, with
all its flaws. But these changes have also given the IWW an opportunity to
embark on a trajectory that is truly revolutionary. This is only possible,
however, with rigorous self-evaluation. We must recognize that adherence to
particular forms of unionism is inherently problematic, at best limiting our
organization to militant reformism, and at worst allowing it to degrade into a
cut-rate business union. We must attempt to transcend the relegation of class
struggle to an activist hobby and commit to organizing in a way that recognizes
its fundamental role in the formation of society (and, consequently, our
individual lives). And we must develop a strategic analysis of our current and
potential role in struggle to insure that the IWW can once again be central in
moving our class towards revolution. And finally, our approach to these tasks
must reflect our holistic view of the system as well as what gives the struggle
against it its deepest meaning: the struggle for our humanity.
In the absence of such evaluation, it is likely that continuing
on the exact same course we have been on for the past 20 years will lead to
marginalization and defeat. We need a serious re-evaluation of our trajectory,
and to advance to a higher phase of organization. This is our moment to do so.
Without the IWW our class will probably not see victory for a long time to
come. We can again be a powerful force for change, and surpass our history’s
more glorious heights. It’s up to us. This is our contribution to that process.
We look forward to working with you all in good faith to live up to our
historic mission.
PDF Version https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B3HadB58Pxt8MnA1REEwYmkydVk/edit
[1] This
article was a remarkably collective process. Though initiated by members of the
Food Mart organizing committee in the Bay Area, many IWWs provided valuable
insight and criticism; some directly contributed to portions of the piece.
Creating a vibrant intellectual working class culture is integral to the IWW’s
success as a revolutionary union. We hope this piece will enhance debate and
discussion and encourage other fellow workers to share their reflections on
struggle. There is so much more our class has to say.
[2]
http://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1921/party-class.htm
[3]
http://libcom.org/history/thw-iww-one-hundred-return-haunted-hall
[4] Kornbluh, Joyce L. Ed.
2011. Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology.
p. 255. PM Press: Oakland.
[5] In this paper we use the
terms “organizers” and “organizing” to refer to actual workers engaged in
self-organization or self-activity. Our relationship to our co-workers,
comrades, families and communities are driven by the necessity for absolute
class solidarity, not charity or moral obligation.
[6] This term
was coined (as best we know) by Staughton Lynd in his pamphlet of the same
name. See Solidarity Unionism, S.
Lynd, C. H. Kerr Publishing Company 1992. Also see Solidarity Unionism at Starbucks, S. Lynd and D. Gross, PM Press
2011.
[7] See for
example Jimmy John’s Workers Union - a Wobbly union formation at a North
American fast food chain.
[8] Here we
focus on specific historical currents within the IWW, which often point to
contradictory elements in the union as a whole, and not features of specific
people and campaigns. Our timeline
is a representation of events and processes from a birds eye view. We admit
that more detail would yield a chronologically more complex story with fits and
starts. Particular trends overlap, die out, and sometimes re-emerge. Such is
the case with our organization’s history.
[9] The dramatic textile manufacturing strike in Lawrence, MA, 1912. For more on this crucial historical moment, see Bread and Roses: Mills, Migrants, and the Struggle for the American Dream, Bruce Watson, Penguin Books 2006.
[9]
[10] This isn’t to say that the
Wobblies from “back in the day” had it all worked out theoretically and
practically. Far from it. But the unique revolutionary tradition of the early
Wobblies made them some of the most advanced thinkers - and doers - of the
time. The “residue” left from those early generations nourishes our generation
of revolutionary workers and Wobblies.
[11] See V. I. Lenin, Left-Wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder
(“Should Revolutionaries Work in Reactionary Trade Unions?”) 1921.
[12] Merriam-Webster online
dictionary, 2013.
[13] Solidarity Federation is an
anarchosyndicalist organization in the UK. Their recent position paper Fighting For Ourselves features this
critique of unions and today’s mainstream workers’ movement:
http://libcom.org/library/1-mainstream-workers-movement.
[14] See Workers’ Councils by Anton Pannekoek, Ch. 2 Pt. 1: Trade Unionism;
1947: http://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1947/workers-councils.htm#h13. See also, Unions and Political Struggle by French
libertarian communist group Mouvement Communiste; 2003: http://libcom.org/library/unions-political-struggle-mouvement-communiste, and Soviets In Italy by A. Gramsci, 1920:
http://libcom.org/library/soviets-italy.
[15] Originally a labor fraternal
organization, the Knights took on many “union” traits as it grew in the
economic and political turmoil of the 1870s-80s. The Knights were in many ways
a precursor to the IWW. Overview of the Knights:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_of_Labor
[16] Both industries saw
thriving and dynamic worker-led organizations that embraced direct action and
political development. For more on IWW activity among agricultural workers, see
Rebel Voices, ed. J. L. Kornbluh, PM
Press 2011. For maritime activity, Wobblies
On the Waterfront, P. Cole, University of Illinois Press 2007.
[17] For more on working class
militancy and self-organization during World War II in the US, see Wartime Strikes by M. Glaberman, Bewick
Editions 1980. See also Singlejack
Solidarity by Stan Weir, Univ Of Minnesota Press 2004.
[18] Referring here to the
all-black Revolutionary Union Movements (RUMs) that grew out of Detroit’s
working class college campuses and automotive factories in the late 1960s. The
RUMs, later assembled under the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW),
were autonomous shopfloor organizations formed by politicized black workers as
a response to the entrenched racism of both their employers and their union
(United Auto Workers), as well as the general corruption of the latter. RUM
cells carried out strikes and other job actions to address their grievances,
and sought to mobilize black workers generally behind a revolutionary program.
For more, see Detroit, I Do Mind Dying,
D. Georgakas and M. Surkin, St. Martin’s Press 1975.
[19] To
clarify, by this we mean a more formal organization beyond the “Informal Work
Group” - a phenomenon identified by worker-organizer Stan Weir. Informal Work
Groups are organic, informal, often unseen solidarity groups that workers form
through the course of working with each other. They are built on trust, the
need for comeraderie, and self-defense from management, and are the essential
building block for any coordinated self-activity.
[20] Very
simply, collective activity that workers engage in without the mediation of a
[service] union, the employer, or the state. For George Rawick, in his cogent
essay Working Class Self-Activity,
the strengths of wildcat strikes in unionized workplaces sum up the virtues of
self-activity: “first, through this device workers struggle simultaneously
against the bosses, the state, and the union; second, they achieve a much more
direct form of class activity, by refusing to delegate aspects of their
activity to an agency external to themselves.”
[21]Solidarity
Unionism is a model often equated (sometimes pejoratively) with ‘Minority
Unionism’ but the terms are not synonymous. One possible source of conflation is that SU advocates often
highlight the National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) definition of “concerted
activity,” which state that “two or more employees discussing work-related
issues beyond pay, such as safety concerns, with each other” enjoy legal
organizing protections.
[21](http://www.nlrb.gov/rights-we-protect/employee-rights). Similarly, the IWW Organizer Training
101 defines a union as “two or more workers coming together to improve their
lives at work and change the balance of power at their job or in their
industry.” Regardless, workers’
self-activity and direct action - the basis of SU - are consistent with
majority rank and file participation.
[22] This
reflects a debate that has gone on long in the IWW, but some context is
important here. Early on in the organization, “political” often meant something
very specific (either attributed to bourgeois, electoral politics, or to a
“political state”. The critique of the latter was often a response to an
emerging current of Leninists and Stalinists soon after the Russian Revolution
of 1917. A key example text on this is Industrial
Communism - the IWW by Harold Lord Varney, which was most likely written in
the 1920s or 30s. This understanding of “politics” was apparently understood by
Wobblies, especially in the 1980s and 90s, as an outright rejection of all
political ideas within the IWW. Instead, the IWW would limit its scope to
“economism”, or activity only around bread and butter issues at the traditional
workplace. Members could act on their political worldview outside of this
context, whatever it may be. This distortion of IWW ideas ignored the political
content of struggle at all levels (at the workplace and elsewhere), disregarded
a tradition of political education within the IWW, and nonetheless did not stop
the fact that almost all members throughout the period of its revitalization
were recruited from within the Left. This contradiction is further spelled out
by Nate Hawthorne in his essay Mottos and
Watchwords.
[23] Direct
Unionism Section 5: “What is the industrial strategy?”
[24]Ibid.
Section 2. “So what is to be done?”
[25] Interview with the Seattle Solidarity Network (SeaSol), 2010. http://libcom.org/library/seasol-interview
[25]
[26] Father
Hagerty, an early and influential IWW member, developed the Industrial Union
(“IU”) “wheel” for the IWW that endures still today. The only changes have been
the addition of new IU’s for different sub-sets of workers (e.g. IU 690 for sex
workers). The industrial strategy from the time of Hagerty was an advanced response
to the conditions of the time, when craft unionism as a form of workers’
defense and struggle had mostly become obsolete - even reactionary. It was
generally assumed that organizing along industrial lines brought with it a
natural class consciousness among the workers. While the concept of industrial
unionism created an effective opening to expand on concepts of class
solidarity, this approach today can be awkward, and has not had the effect of
building industrial unions as we have envisioned them up to now. We do not
advocate throwing the IU baby out with the bathwater, but this is another area
of critical self-evaluation that needs attention. In short, we should retain
the tradition of strategic class-wide organizing that industrial unionism aimed
for, while imagining a more effective approach for today. More on Hagerty’s
Wheel here: http://www.iww.org/en/about/official/wheel.
[27] For
insightful analysis and discussion on unwaged work and struggle see Silvia
Federici, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, and Selma James, among others.
[28] During
factory occupations initiated by the workers, the Communist Party-affiliated
labor union CGT turned away enthusiastic agitators who came to initiate
dialogue with the striking workers for whom it claimed to speak. Union officials
feared that they could lose control over "their" strike if the
workers insisted on changing the demands from the usual ones concerned with
wages to ones which the union could not easily co-opt. Therefore, they kept the
factory gates locked and insisted on mediating all contacts with the workers
who were occupying the factory. More here:
http://libcom.org/book/export/html/1849.
[29] This was
observed frequently. On November 2nd 2011, the day of the general strike called
for by Occupy Oakland, officers from several business unions rallied the crowd
from the podium. The Teamsters drove an enormous truckbed advertisement to the
head of the march to the port that afternoon. Reformist trade union slogans
abounded throughout the height of Occupy (late summer 2011 to May Day 2012 in
Oakland).
[30] James,
Selma. (1983) “Marx and Feminism.” In James, Selma. 2012. Sex, Race, and Class--The
[30]Perspective of Winning: A Selection of Writings
1952-2011. pp. 149-150. Oakland: PM Press.
[31] PDF
available for download here: http://libcom.org/library/singlejack-solidarity-stan-weir
[32] An example
of this during the years of the Agricultural Workers’ Organization is the study
document called An Economic
Interpretation of the Job, crafted by Wobblies, which we use still today.
The One Big Union Monthly, an IWW
periodical, featured in-depth articles from the membership dealing with a
variety of complex political questions. The book Rebel Voices, referenced elsewhere, also documents this culture of
self-education.
[33] We should
be clear what we mean here by “politics”: “the total complex of relations
between people living in society” (thanks due to Merriam-Webster online
dictionary). Understanding politics this way, every dyed-in-the-wool Wobbly
deals with politics as a primary concern.
[34] See The Rhetoric of Inclusion: The I.W.W. and
Asian Workers, an essay by Jennifer Jung Hee Choi, 1999.
[35] There were
different approaches to anti-racism within the IWW of this period, but
developments in the class struggle after World War I seemed to make them more
mature. A key example of this is the IWW pamphlet Justice for the Negro: How He Can Get It of 1919, which can be found online here:
http://libcom.org/files/justice.pdf.
[36] See The Messenger, July 1919, pg 8. See
also, Peter Cole, Wobblies on the Waterfront,
University of Illinois Press 2007.
[37]
‘"Decomposition" is the process by which the working class is
divided, atomized (fighting among itself) and exploited more intensively.’ Midnight Notes, early 1990s.
[38] Mario
Tronti in Steve Wright’s Storming Heaven:
Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomous Marxism. http://libcom.org/library/class-composition
[38]
[39] Historians
almost unanimously conclude that the IWW’s radicalism in this period caused it
to fall short of the long term stability of membership and workplace
representation that other unions attained. While the IWW did not establish the
same kind of workplace organs that the CIO or others did, its aims and methods
were entirely different. As a fighting organ emanating from the class, its
culture and methods were not codified in bargaining agreements (even where they
existed) but instead thrived as a living tradition of struggle that workers
used to flex their class power wherever they were employed. For more on
maritime, see Peter Cole, Wobblies on the
Waterfront, University of Illinois Press 2007. For a glimpse of this
tradition among agricultural workers, see Len De Caux, Labor Radical: From the Wobblies to CIO, Beacon Press 1970. Much
more can also be gleaned from Rebel
Voices: An IWW Anthology, J. Kornblugh, PM Press 2011.
[40] A great
online resource - empire-logistics.org - has supply chain analysis tools that
can be helpful for Wobblies to determine longterm organizing strategies. Members
of Insane Dialectical Posse, some of whom are Wobblies, have many materials on
this as well. They can be contacted through their website: flyingpicket.org.
[41] Two key
figures we could point to for more research on this (out of many many more) are
Silvia Federici and FW Gayge Operaista. This statement also reflects our
perspective fairly well: http://www.angelfire.com/pr/red/feminism/womens_oppression.htm.
Thanks so much for this! Probably the most important piece of organizational theory since Lynd's "Solidarity Unionism." If I had my way we'd give this to every new member instead of the OBU pamphlet.
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