The potential for the IWW and revolutionary unionism

During this time of massive upheaval I do believe there is a time of reassessment all that has gone before has not worked up till now and new ideas and tactics are to be re looked at and rightly so. For one I think revolutionary unionism as a movement may make a comeback of sorts. The idea that people will continue to look towards the bureaucratic and hierarchical trade unions of today such as the TUC in the United Kingdom will always be the case is somewhat missing the point. Workers will not stick blindly and loyally by a system of organising that is not producing any progress or results. While the IWW is a small movement and is a long way from making a big comeback I do feel however the conditions for horizontalism and non bureaucratic unionism is possible as we stand today. Where many political parties from the mainstream to the non mainstream including left sects on the fringes are becoming more and more discredited why cant revolutionary unions make a comeback and start to influence the workers movement? It is entirely possible and entirely necessary in my opinion. To organise away from the huge bloated bureaucracy of traditional unions of the TUC is sometimes desirable but also quite necessary. The example I give is the IWGB who at the university of London have organised away from Unison the recognised union there at the workplace but have don little to nothing and often become a obstruction on struggle for the workers involved who have been out sourced to a private company who are not recognising the new union there and their demands still till this day. However big strides have been made in their struggles a and I do firmly believe they will win and win well and shine a light to other workers in similar positions across the land. 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. 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,”5 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. 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. 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. 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 strike8. 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. At its most basic, a union is “an organization of workers formed to protect the [...] interests of its members”11 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 bureaucracy12. 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 positions13 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 Labor14 Its true that the IWW is small and largely unheard of in the UK but I do believe its method of organising and the idea of revolutionary unions is something all revolutionaries should revisit and take a moment to think can this be of any use to our struggle or for us wishing to change society as I believe it can be if taken seriously. I’d encourage all to read up more on this via this excellent new document put out at http://libcom.org/library/wobblyism-revolutionary-unionism-today

Learning from the school of struggle

As I’ve travelled through political ideas and seen struggles come about develop and fade and paying particular interest to how workers learn as they struggle is fascinating in my opinion. For me there are no set modes of struggles we must take. Experience and lessons from all different forms of struggles. We must be flexible and open to new and different ideas on the ground not be fed from the top down what is neceesary to win. What may win for one strike and struggle may not for another. During times of austerity there is lots of ways to fight back whether it is through our unions or outside community campaigns or simply organising ourselves. To find ways to encourage and support workplace militants find space for them to flourish and develop is key. Learning as we go is not just simply making it up as we go along that is missing the point but what I am trying to say is we do simply learn as we go and that there is no blueprint that is predefined that will see us win every time. During a time of labour history where we are seeing defeat after defeat on the whole finding new ways to struggle and involving new methods and new ideas should not be feared. Everything starts small and organising very small campaigns can lead to small victories and can build confidence. Confidence is very important in labour struggles and must be encouraged at all times I feel. Building links with workers in the same workplace is vital to knocking down barriers of sectors. Building links with users of a service and the workers and focusing on a strong media campaign including a social media presence can really mobilise many people if they are fully engaged and drawn into a democratic campaign. There is no blueprint as I said to win and to struggle but we should be open to all ideas working in and outside of the traditional union structures. If a union bureaucracy will not budge or actively support a struggle then we should not waste our time in trying to use vital energy and resources to reform them but why not go around them and organise outside the grips of the union bureaucracy. We can win and have we have won. It’s important we promote and celebrate our past victories but also learn from them and how we can improve our ways and means of struggle over vital things that are all under threat today. Things are constantly changing and this is no different for unions and labour organising. Of course we cannot put the horse before the cart we must not try and skip stages and avoid the solid hard work that is built up over time its important to engage with all on the ground. Things will change on the ground very quickly so we must be open and fluid to change and to change our own tactics to adapt to the new situations. Trying new things and them not working is not something to shout down but it is important to learn from our mistakes find out what works and what doesn’t so well. By learning as we struggle we can learn to struggle to win. This is not an easy thing to do and will take time to develop links with unions and union militants. A crucial lesson is that we do not have to rely on our leaders who are often self appointed we can start to organise today from where we are. We cannot be held hostage by the past we must look forward and learn from the past. The future is there for the taking if we are open minded and confidence in our own power as workers taking action to win and to improve our lot. With trade unions today they may seem useless and in many ways they are today but are still huge organisations I would suggest that we don’t trust our unions but use them for our own ends. Unions have huge resources and should be working for us. But we must remember their role within capitalism of managing struggles and managing defeats to their memberships. Strike action is not the be all and end all but is the workers most powerful weapon available and can’t be ignored for its importance. Building militancy is possible and workplace wide meetings is one way I would suggest this with a democratic non hierarchical structure in place where no leads are able to co opt the movement. By keeping all involved at all times and not allowing any particular individual or party to take control of a struggle is very important for me where there is huge dis trust of hierocracy then a need for democracy and rank and file control at all times is vital. We must be aware of the conflict between rank-and-file workers and the union leadership who have separate interests in fact the leadership and the officials have a interest to maintain the right to negotiate with the boss’s this is not the same interest the rank-and-file workers do. Remembering this is important t recognise that unions are not one big body of people al seeing things the same way as it’s a traditional hierocracy mans that there are different interests at different levels within the union itself different layers of workers and officials all fighting for their own ends. Lastly I’d just like to say well done to the 3 cosas campaign at ULU in London who have organised fantastically this week in 48 hour strike action and with over 120 workers out on strike more on the 2nd day than the first and over £5000 raised for their hardship fund all away from the traditional unions such as Unison the union many who are now with the independent union IWGB have already started to win and will win again as their material states they are hugely determined to win and I think they will personally. Solidarity to them and all involved in the campaign this week and going forward.