March 2014

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Industrial Worker

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__I afrm that I am a wo rker, and that I am not an emp loyer.

__I agree to ab ide by the IWW consti tution. __I will study its principles and acqua int myself with its p urposes.

Name: ________________________________ Address: ______________________________

City, State, Post Code, Country:

_______________ Occupation: ____________________________ Phone: ____________ Email: _______________ Amount Enclosed: _________

The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and wa nt are found among millions of working

people and the few, who make up the em

-

ploying class, have all the good things of

life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world

organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the

earth.

We nd that the center ing of the

management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions un- able to cope with the ever-growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another

set of workers in the same industry,

thereby helping defeat one another in

wage wars. Mo reover, the tr ade unions

aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belie f that the workin g class have interests in common with their employers. These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one

industry, or all industries if necessary,

cease work whenever a strike or lockout is

on in any department thereof, thus mak

-

ing an injury to one an injury to all. Instead of the conservative motto, “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work,” we

must inscribe on our banner the revolu-

tionary watchword, “Abolition of the wage system.”

It is the historic mission of the work- ing class to do away with capitalism. The

army of production must be organized,

not only for the everyday struggle w ith

capitalists, but also to carry on produc

- tion when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are formi ng the str ucture of the new society within the shell of the old.

TO JOIN:

Mail this form with a check or money order for initiation

and your rst month’s dues to: IWW, Post Ofce Box 180195, Chicago, IL 60618, USA.

Initiation is the same as one month’s dues. Our dues are calculated

according to your income. If your monthly income is under $2000, dues are $9 a month. If your monthly income is between $2000 and $3500, dues are $18 a month. If your monthly income is over $3500 a month, dues

are $27 a month. Dues may vary outside of North America and in Regional

Organizing Committees (Australia, British Isles, German Language Area).

Membership includes a subscription to the

Industrial Worker

.

Join the I WW T oday

T

he IWW is a union for all workers, a union dedicated to organizing on the job, in our industries and in our communities both to win better conditions today and to build a world without bosses, a world in which production and

distribution are organized by workers ourselves to meet the needs of the entire

population, not merely a handful of exploiters.

We are the Industrial Workers of the World because we organize indus trially –

that is to say, we organize all workers on the job into one union, rather than dividing workers by trade, so that we can po ol our strength to ght the bosses together. Since the IWW was founded in 1905, we have recognized the need to build a

truly international union movement in order to confront the global power of the bosses and in order to strengthen workers’ ability to stand in solidarity with our fel- low workers no matter what part of the globe they happen to live on.

We are a union open to all worke rs, whether or not the IWW happens to have representation rights in your workplace. We organize the worker, not the job, recog

-

nizing that unionism is not about government certication or employer recognition

but about workers coming together to add ress our common concerns. Sometimes this means striking or signing a contract. Sometimes it means refusing to work with an unsafe machine or following the bosses’ orders so literally that nothing gets done.

Sometimes it means agitating around particular issues or grievances in a specic workplace, or across an industr y. Because the IWW is a democratic, member -run union, decisions about what is

- sues to address and what tactics to pursue are made by the workers directly involved.

IWW Constitution Preamble

Readers’ Soapbox

A Reader’s Response To “Nonviolent Direct Action And The Early IWW”

By Lowell May (X333295)

If Stephen Thornton’s article on nonviolence in the early IWW (“Nonvio-

lent Direct Action And The Early IWW,”

December 2013

Industrial Worker

, page

11) was meant as an argument in favor of nonviolence being or becoming a “strat-

egy” (his term) of the IWW, it deserves a response. I am bound to say “if” because

it is not clear what the aim of the piece

is, whether he means nonviolence as an overall strategy, to apply it to the IWW as an organization or to the class as a whole, or to identify a trend. Unfortunately, the

problem here could become more than ambiguity.

First, we should rule out the possible

interpretation that nonviolence is or has been an overall union principl e. I f t his were

true without restriction, it would mean all other matters, including considerations of class justice and the elimination of the class system, would be subordinate to the principle of nonviolence, which is anath

- ema to everything the IWW has stood for in any of its manifestations.

Not only is the blanket rejection of

non-violence true to our historical prin-

ciples, it is also the r ight thing to do. While conceding that it is our union’s job to be, to some degree, a leader in working-class thought and conscience, it is also our re

- sponsibility to accept direction from the class. There is no class struggle that has

not had violence as a factor, even if just as

a backdrop alternative. One of the clear- est examples is the story o f the civil rights

movement as exemplied by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Not only was King’s ef

- fectiveness enhanced by the specter of

Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party,

not only was King’s nonviolent doctrine eroded by his latter-year involvement with oppo siti on to the imper ialis t war and the plight of workers in Memphis and

elsewhere, but we have also learned that

King was shadowed by a force of defend-

ers who did not avoid violence, according

to Lance Hill’s “The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resis tance and the Civil Rights

Movement.”

But developing competing lists of

examples doesn’t prove anything, except

perhaps who is the best empiricist. The point is that we should not involve our-

selves in ruling out tactical options, or

suggesting that they are passé without ref- erence to their impact on and response to the complicated and unique conditions at hand and our overall strategy of workers’ control. An example of such circumstanc es out of our Colorado history might help.

In the early 1900s, Colorado was a hotbed of class struggle, especially in the mining industry, largely because coal

and metals were becoming a huge part of

developing imperialism, new technology,

and new forms of manipulating workers in mass-oriented industrialization. Big

Bill Haywood, the Western Federation of

Miners and the IWW all had their roots in

this development. In 1914, the resulting conict made headlines when women and

children were slaughtered in the Ludlow

Massacre, which triggered federal military

intervention and an imposed peace with some concessions to mineworkers. We are currently in the midst of a spate of 100-year commemorations of these events statewide.

In 1927, after the United Mine Work

- ers of America (UMW) had retreated from the state in the wake of Ludlow and other failed attempts to unionize the coal and

hard rock mines, another statewide strike

broke out. This one emanated from north-

ern Colorado, just 15 miles or so north of downtown Denver, and resulted in the Col

- umbine Mine strike and massacre where state militia machine gunned dozens and murdered at least six picketing miners. This strike was waged under the banner of the IWW and is the centerpiece of a book which was published in 2005 by the IWW and which I helped edit along with the late Fellow Worker Richard Myers. What the offi cia l his tori es of bot h Ludlow and Columbine (actually all part of a protracted miners’ struggle all up and down the Colorado Front Range) reveal is that violence played a pivotal role in their eventual success. At Ludlow in the south

and, 13 years later, at Columbine in the north, it was organized workers’ militias

that were key in forcing concessions from the bosses and the state. Organized work-

ers’ militias, along with the reputation of

the IWW as a militant and perhaps violent

union, are what led to the unionization of the coal elds because that’s where the

struggles eventually led: to armed stand- offs between state militias and miners’ militias (complete with military training camps) which forced not only concessions but union representation as well. The coal capitalists chose to soften the blow by recognizing the UMW instead of the IWW. The use or threat of violence was nei- ther pre-ordained nor pre-conceived on our side. It grew organically out of the self-

defense and offensive—the line between the two is often obscure—requirements of the situations, implemented by those

directly under attack and not for the pur-

pose of inicting harm per se. There is a

place for calculating the appropriate use of force in hindsight; all our decisions should

be informed by not just our immediat e

experience but also by that of our prede-

cessors. In other words, there is a role for

intellectual s and historians here. This kind

of assessment is not limited to reviewers, however, our culture carries these kinds of lessons within it, available to those directly involved, in real time, and sometimes

much more clearly than the analyses of intellectuals. Sometimes the further we are away from the immediate situation the more likely we are to import distorting

biases into the process. I n this case, and I suspect many others, the IWW’s op

- position to the use of this violence would have placed it outside the struggle as it

existed, and would have violated our real

dedication to the most effective use of class leverage to achieve power. In general it isn’t the use of violence or the myth of a violent IWW that is at the heart of the matter any more than the em- ployment of nonviolent tactics would be. Both are part of an arsenal of tactics that are available in life-and-deat h struggle and must be determined as conditions unfold. In this case it was a series of accidents and

acts of courage—including the violent sei

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zure of control of nearby towns—that on

balance garnered sympathy and a popular

feeling that, at least, the miners were justi

-

ed in responding in kind. It also served,

and if our Colorado Bread and Roses Workers’ Cultural Center has a nything to

say about it, still serves as an inspiration

to workers hungry to take control of their

lives, even by force if necessary, and a re

- minder that workers do not have to accept a ruling class monopoly on the use of force. Details on these events are documented in our “Slaughter in Serene: the Columbine

Coal Strike Reader,” available from the

IWW or online at http://www.workers-

breadandr oses.org, and Scott Martelle’s

“Blood Passion: the Ludlow Massacre and

Class War in the American West.”

As always it’s important to view the Colorado events in the context of the broader political and historical landscape.

The struggle of the early 1900s, from which the IWW sprouted, was a scene in transi

- tion between the naked authoritarianism of feudal times and modern bourgeois rule.

This “new deal” rule was marked by the

mythology of capitalism as a universal so-

lution to all woes, and policies that tended

to subdue the class by a combination of repression and partial appeasement and (thanks to the intriguing collaborative

efforts of the “progressive” reform move

- ment in the United States and the state capitalist communists in the Comintern) the establishment of the state as the ove r- arching mediator of capitalist domination. It follows that a movement designed more toward capturing the hearts and minds of those deceived by this form of rule should

become more prevalent, and with it, non

-

violence. But again, this is a tactical deci

-

sion, not a universal principle, based on the fact that times change, time changes, and with them, tactics. We should, nally, applaud Thornton’s

emphasis on the role of women’s involve-

ment in struggle, but, again, we should

add some balance to his references. We dedicated a section of our book to the too- often unrecognized leadership of women militants in mineworkers’ struggles. So we noted the leadership of not only icons

like Mother Jones, who led marches of

mineworkers and their supporters on the

Colorado state capitol at the time, but also

on much less acknowledged militants like

Colorado’s “Flaming Milka” Sablich and Santa Benash, as well as others in Kansas,

Illinois and beyond.

Readers’ Soapbox continues on

pages 10-11!

Photo: libcom.org