The lessons of the Wobblies

Revolutionary Industrial Unionism: The Industrial Workers of the World in Australia
By Verity Burgmann
Cambridge University Press, 1995.
346 pp., $29.95 (pb)
Reviewed by Jonathan Strauss In the first two decades of this century "the Industrial Workers of the World [IWW] developed its own unique and coherent approach of revolutionary industrial unionism", writes Verity Burgmann in Revolutionary Industrial Unionism. By thoroughly documenting the history of the IWW (better known as the "Wobblies"), Burgmann has made a valuable contribution to our ability to learn from the history of working-class struggle in Australia. Burgmann argues that the revolutionary industrial unionism of the IWW Locals was a distinct form of working-class politics. She argues it was different, not only from the trade unions and the socialist parties that existed before it, but also from the anarchist and syndicalist currents which were its closest political relatives. Burgmann says: "The IWW ... aimed, firstly, to educate the working class into an understanding of its exploited position in capitalist society and to inspire workers with a class-conscious determination to end this wage slavery; secondly, it aspired to organise the working class, now educated, into industrial unions, not craft unions, ultimately joined together in the One Big Union; ... finally, it planned that this One Big Union ... would emancipate the working class ... by assuming control of the means of production, distribution and exchange." Some aspects of the Wobblies' struggles represented real advances for the working-class in Australia. Its agitation was primarily directed towards, and its members primarily drawn from unskilled workers. It offered a sharp critique of parliamentarianism, narrow craft unionism and subservience to arbitration, and counterposed these to direct industrial action. The IWW was organised democratically, with strong membership participation and binding majority decision-making. It "issued the first effective challenge to working-class racism in Australia" and attempted to organise Aboriginal and immigrant workers. And, unlike other socialist organisations at the time, it generally did not exclude women from public activities. The Wobblies' paper, Direct Action, developed a national correspondence and circulation. They carried out a number of free speech fights, undergoing mass arrests to win the right to speak. The IWW was the most determined group opposing World War I and its strength in the workers' movement grew as a result. Workers, urged to accept worsening conditions for "the sake of the war effort", responded with a wave of industrial agitation and action. With the bureaucratic domination of the union movement by its officials and the Labor Party weakening, the state was mobilised to crush the IWW. Burgmann argues that the Wobblies serve as, "at the very least, an example of more effective oppositional politics" than either Communism or Laborism. In so doing she conflates the experience of Stalinist Communism with the earlier experience of the Bolsheviks which, she says, was one of "a forcible seizure of state power" in the "style of revolution from above". Ironically, however, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism actually illustrates the weaknesses of the IWW in comparison with Bolshevism. The IWW failed as the revolutionary vanguard of the working class because of its conception that, by bringing all workers together, the union could constitute the instrument of revolution. Although well-read on the problem of capitalist exploitation, the IWW down-played the role of theory, leaving itself open to the influence of ruling class ideas outside the areas of its immediate experience. Its "philosophical debt to Marx" also remained partial, excluding, in particular, the lessons from the 1871 Paris Commune on the need for a working-class political party to overthrow the capitalist state and establish a revolutionary state run by the working class and defended by armed workers. Lenin argued that the working class's development of revolutionary class consciousness depends on agitation and organisation by the revolutionary party against all forms of oppression and, therefore, that workers' revolutionary consciousness can only come "from outside", not primarily through the industrial sphere. In contrast, the IWW viewed even its anti-war work as a "danger" by which it could be "sidetracked from its primary purpose of organising [only wage-workers] at the point of production". Its criticism of the injustices of capitalism beyond the industrial sphere, as described by Burgmann, were rather crude. While the IWW excelled in street actions and public meetings, and advocated semi-legal and illegal direct action on the job, it refused to engage in electoral or parliamentary activity and had no underground organisation. When the state moved to suppress it, the IWW did not survive either illegally or through legal fronts. Burgmann's rather lame excuse, that the IWW acted according to the Marxist method of "disdaining to hide one's views", ignores the need to flexibly use both the legal and illegal avenues for political activity. This is a tactical question, not one of principled honesty, as Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto while they were members of the illegal Communist League. Later, however, they participated in the 1848 revolutions as editors of the "extreme-democratic" Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Burgmann also notes that the IWW could not respond effectively to state suppression because of its "erratic" organisation and lack of national coordination. Under attack from the state, locals dissolved, laid low or fought back according to local decisions. The sharpest indicator of the IWW's weaknesses and of Burgmann's failure to engage with the revolutionary legacy of Leninism comes in her brief comparison of the responses to World War I by the IWW and Europe's leading revolutionary socialists — Lenin, Trotsky and Luxemburg. Burgmann poses the issue as one of "wrestling with problems of class-consciousness". In fact, the heart of the issue lies in the difference between Lenin's "revolutionary defeatist" stance — favouring defeat of one's own ruling class in inter-imperialist war in order to develop the revolutionary struggle — and the various "peace" slogans of the IWW and other organisations, which, while they opposed the "class peace" of the war supporters and pacifists, did not see use the crisis of imperialist war to foment the social crisis in each country. Instead, they gave priority to the struggle for peace over the struggle for socialist revolution. Burgmann's reasons for ignoring Leninism is that it was followed by Stalinism: the IWW were better because "failure before the event hardly constitutes the proven political bankruptcy after the event". This attitude, that it is better to have never tried and failed, than to have tried and (not even necessarily) failed completely, contradicts the Marxist method of testing out ideas in practice. Nevertheless, what we can learn from the Wobblies comes from what they did which, despite the analytical weaknesses of the book, Burgmann has recorded well.