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The Industrial Workers of the World is a union unlike any other. Founded in 1905 in Chicago, it rapidly gained members across the world thanks to its revolutionary, internationalist outlook. By using powerful organising methods including direct-action and direct-democracy, it put power in the hands of workers. This philosophy is labeled as ‘revolutionary industrial unionism’ and the members called, affectionately, ‘Wobblies’. This book is the first to look at the history of the IWW from an international perspective. Bringing together a group of leading scholars, it includes lively accounts from a number diverse countries including Australia, Canada, Mexico, South Africa, Sweden and Ireland, which reveal a fascinating story of global anarchism, syndicalism and socialism. The book draws on many important figures of the movements such as Tom Barker, Har Dayal, Joe Hill, James Larkin and William D. "Big Bill" Haywood. 

https://issuu.com/plutopress/docs/cole_for_issuu

The Industrial Workers of the World is a union unlike any other. Founded in 1905 in Chicago, it rapidly gained members across the world thanks to its revolutionary, internationalist outlook. By using powerful organising methods including direct-action and direct-democracy, it put power in the hands of workers. This philosophy is labeled as ‘revolutionary industrial unionism’ and the members called, affectionately, ‘Wobblies’.

This book is the first to look at the history of the IWW from an international perspective. Bringing together a group of leading scholars, it includes lively accounts from a number diverse countries including Australia, Canada, Mexico, South Africa, Sweden and Ireland, which reveal a fascinating story of global anarchism, syndicalism and socialism.

Drawing on many important figures of the movements such as Tom Barker, Har Dayal, Joe Hill, James Larkin and William D. "Big Bill" Haywood, and exploring particular industries including shipping, mining, and agriculture, this book describes how the IWW and its ideals travelled around the world.


Review

“As a second-generation member of the IWW, I am delighted to see this outstanding collection of essays on the Wobblies, their achievements, and their substantial impact despite severe repression.”
(Noam Chomsky)

"A splendid project and a vitally important contribution to the understanding of labor as a social movement, within but also beyond the limits of contracts and sustained organization. In our century, the lessons of the IWW loom larger than they have for generations."
(Paul Buhle, co-editor of Wobblies!) --This text refers to the hardcover edition.

About the Author

Peter Cole is professor of history at Western Illinois University and the author of Wobblies on the Waterfront. David M. Struthers is a historian of race and transnational radical organizer based in Copenhagen. Kenyon Zimmer is assistant professor of history at the University of Texas and the author of Immigrants Against the State.



Wobblies of the World

Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW

Peter Cole
David Struthers
Kenyon Zimmer
Series: Wildcat
Copyright Date: 2017
Published by: Pluto Press
https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1vz4973
Pages: 320
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1vz4973
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Table of Contents

  1. Front Matter
     (pp. i-iv)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1vz4973.1
  2. Table of Contents
     (pp. v-vi)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1vz4973.2
  3. Acknowledgments
     (pp. vii-viii)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1vz4973.3
  4. Introduction
     (pp. 1-26)
    Peter Cole, David Struthers and Kenyon Zimmer
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1vz4973.4

    This book proudly proclaims itself the first-ever global history of the Industrial Workers of the World (iww, or Wobblies). In this collection of essays, 20 scholars from around the world begin a long-overdue conversation about the IWW as a global phenomenon. Although the union’s official membership never was numerically as large as mainstream unions, its influence during its early years—1905 into the 1920s—was enormous in the United States, where it was founded, and worldwide. The IWW was part of a global upsurge of anarchism and syndicalism, which in the early twentieth century, before the Russian Revolution and birth...

  5. Part I: Transnational Influences on the IWW

    • I “A Cosmopolitan Crowd:” Transnational Anarchists, the IWW, and the American Radical Press
       (pp. 29-43)
      Kenyon Zimmer
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1vz4973.5

      It is no coincidence that Salvatore Salerno’s groundbreaking study of transnational influences on the Industrial Workers of the World,Red November, Black November, devoted much space to the role of anarchists. Within the constellation of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century radical movements that gave rise to the IWW, anarchism was the most transnational in its activities and internationalist in its commitments. Anarchists, Jose Moya notes, “formed the world’s first and most widespread transnational movement organized from below and without formal political parties,” and both anarchism and syndicalism spread across the globe through the same international migrations of workers, exiles, activists, and students....

    • 2 Sabotage, the IWW, and Repression: How the American Reinterpretation of a French Concept Gave Rise to a New International Conception of Sabotage
       (pp. 44-58)
      Dominique Pinsolle
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1vz4973.6

      Symbolized by the famous black cat drawn by Ralph Chaplin, sabotage is closely associated with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). However, France was where this practice was theorized (though not invented) in the middle of the 1890s, particularly by the revolutionary syndicalist Emile Pouget.¹ The Confédération Générale du Travail (General Confederation of Labour, or cgt) officially adopted sabotage as a means of struggle at the Toulouse Congress of 1897, although the term’s etymology is obscure. The iww generally endorsed the legend of wooden shoes(sabots)being thrown into machines by workers,² which explains the recurrence of the symbol...

    • 3 Living Social Dynamite: Early Twentieth-Century IWW–South Asia Connections
       (pp. 59-73)
      Tariq Khan
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1vz4973.7

      Founded in Chicago in 1905, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) played a crucial part in the social circuitry of a radical, transnational complex of networks connecting revolutionary movements on every inhabited continent. This chapter discusses the influence of the IWW in the anticolonialist movement that defied British authority in Hindustan—mainly the part of British India consisting of present-day India and Pakistan. Wobblies admired Indian rebels as serious insurgents who took direct action against elite power. Historian Kornel Chang wrote, “Within IWW circles, no figure was held in higher esteem than the South Asian revolutionary.”² The Ghadr movement...

    • 4 IWW Internationalism and Interracial Organizing in the Southwestern United States
       (pp. 74-88)
      David M. Struthers
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1vz4973.8

      In the contested space of the Southwestern United States that previously had been Native American land, New Spain, and northern Mexico, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was a syndicalist labor union that promoted a beautiful ideal for a better world. The IWW’s organizational foundation in the region grew from locals in Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Francisco. Yet historians need to balance attention to the formal consolidation of these locals with the grassroots organizing undertaken by loosely affiliated, or even unaffiliated individuals, in the name of the IWW. In a dispersed productive landscape requiring mobile labor to satisfy...

    • 5 Spanish Anarchists and Maritime Workers in the IWW
       (pp. 89-102)
      Bieito Alonso
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1vz4973.9

      Spanish emigrants to the United States in the early twentieth century typically had proletarian backgrounds. Largely unskilled, these workers migrated to different parts of the Americas in search of jobs or occupations that other European migrants rejected owing to their difficulty or limited duration. Until the global financial crisis of 1929, this transnational group of workers helped erect some of the most iconic infrastructure projects of the period, from the tobacco factories of Tampa to the Panama Canal. This same group also labored aboard American ships that crossed the Atlantic and other oceans. Spanish maritime workers recognized themselves as the...

  6. Part II: The Iww in the Wider World

    • 6 The IWW and the Dilemmas of Internationalism
       (pp. 105-123)
      Wayne Thorpe
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1vz4973.10

      By its very name the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), now well into its second century, suggests an international organization.¹ Its history is certainly international: though founded in 1905 in Chicago, its influence quickly extended into Canada and Mexico. In countries further afield, groups identified with it, adopted its name, and established official or semi-official branches. But that is not to say that the IWW regarded itself in 1905 as a self-standing world organization or a labor International. Founded as an industrial rival of the craft-based American Federation of Labor (AFL), the IWW also encouraged radical industrialism beyond the...

    • 7 The IWW in Tampico: Anarchism, Internationalism, and Solidarity Unionism in a Mexican Port
       (pp. 124-139)
      Kevan Antonio Aguilar
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1vz4973.11

      On the morning of July 2, 1917, 15,000 workers affiliated with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the anarchist labor confederation La Casa del Obrero Mundial (House of the World Worker or com) brought the Port of Tampico in Mexico to a standstill. The unions called for a general strike targeting Mexican, US, and British oil companies located throughout the Eastern Gulf region of Mexico. Workers marched from their dilapidated tenements to obtain better living conditions for themselves and their families. They called for salaries and conditions comparable to the white American drillers, who received better treatment, higher...

    • 8 The Wobblies of the North Woods: Finnish Labor Radicalism and the IWW in Northern Ontario
       (pp. 140-155)
      Saku Pinta
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1vz4973.12

      Northern Ontario occupies a unique place in the socioeconomic structure of Ontario, Canada. The economy of “New Ontario,” as it was known in the colonial phraseology of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, has traditionally been dominated by primary resource extraction, above all mining and forestry. The expansive, sparsely populated northern hinterland sits in sharp contrast to the much more populous political, manufacturing, and financial centers of the south. As historian Jean Morrison remarked, “the splendors of Toronto’s financial district … could be explained, in part, by northern Ontario’s scarred landscape.”¹ Large-scale settlement began in the 1880s, with the...

    • 9 “We Must Do Away with Racial Prejudice and Imaginary Boundary Lines”: British Columbia Wobblies before the First World War
       (pp. 156-167)
      Mark Leier
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1vz4973.13

      Transnationalism may seem an odd concept to apply to people moving back and forth across the US– Canadian border. As settler-colonial states largely populated by immigrants from around the world, neither country is a “nation-state” in the sense of a community sharing a common language, heritage, economy, and culture, especially during the years of the Wobblies’ greatest influence. “American” and “Canadian” were formal, legal labels signifying citizenship rather than a national identity, and citizenship did not erase privileges and stigmas of race and ethnicity. Furthermore, capital and workers flowed easily across the border, and the two countries developed in broadly...

    • 10 Wobblies Down Under: The IWW in Australia
       (pp. 168-185)
      Verity Burgmann
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1vz4973.14

      On the other side of the Pacific Ocean, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) became a significant force within a labor movement that was already industrially strong and represented by a politically successful Labor Party. This chapter explains why the IWW appealed to workers in a national context very different from that of the United States, investigates the type of workers who became Wobblies “down under,” discusses the distinctive strategies of this far-flung IWW, and tells the tale of how it met its particular and peculiar fate.

      The militant workers who joined IWW clubs established by the De Leonite...

    • 11 Ki Nga Kaimahi Maori Katoa (“To All Maori Workers”): The New Zealand IWW and the Maori
       (pp. 186-203)
      Mark Derby
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1vz4973.15

      Of all the international labor movements of the early twentieth century, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) has been described as “certainly the most consistent in organizing workers of color.”² The Wobblies’ commitment to working-class solidarity across racial and ethnic, as well as national, lines is attested to by its polyglot publications, the status of leaders such as the African American longshoreman Ben Fletcher, and its influence on other multiracial organizations such as South Africa’s Industrial and Commercial Union.³ The IWW’s anti-racism, like other aspects of its revolutionary syndicalist platform, took varying forms in the many different countries and...

    • 12 Patrick Hodgens Hickey and the IWW: A Transnational Relationship
       (pp. 204-211)
      Peter Clayworth
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1vz4973.16

      Patrick Hodgens Hickey (1882–1930) was a transnational labor agitator whose relationship with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) strongly influenced his development as an activist. His early career as a radical ran parallel to the birth and growth of the IWW. Hickey was a New Zealander who adopted socialism and revolutionary industrial unionism while working as an itinerant miner in the United States. His “conversion” took place in mid-1905, just as the IWW was being founded. Hickey came to prominence from 1907 to 1914 as a militant leader of a major workers’ revolt against New Zealand’s compulsory arbitration...

    • 13 “The Cause of the Workers Who Are Fighting in Spain Is Yours”: The Marine Transport Workers and the Spanish Civil War
       (pp. 212-227)
      Matthew C. White
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1vz4973.17

      With the precipitous decline of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in the 1920s, many Wobblies looked to Spain, the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (National Confederation of Labor or CNT), and the international labor organization to which the cnt belonged, the International Working Men’s Association (IWA, also sometimes referred to as the IWMA) as models to rebuild around. When the Spanish Civil War began in 1936, IWW members saw not only the workers’ revolution they dreamed of but also a battle against the fascism that they saw spreading around the world, including the United States. Not surprisingly, given their...

    • 14 Edith Frenette: A Transnational Radical Life
       (pp. 228-236)
      Heather Mayer
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1vz4973.18

      Edith Bonny Frenette was a border-hopping Wobbly. Born in Maine in 1881 to Canadian parents, Frenette worked as a cook in the lumber camps of Port Alberni, British Columbia but also spent time in the United States. She frequently crossed the US–Canadian border during her active years, and fought for and with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in both countries. A true “Rebel Girl,” Frenette did not let fear of arrest keep her from fighting for the right to free speech. She roused her fellow workers with her rendition of “The red flag” outside the jailhouse in...

  7. Part III: Beyond the Union:: The IWW’s Influence and Legacies

    • 15 Jim Larkin, James Connolly, and the Dublin Lockout of 1913: The Transnational Path of Global Syndicalism
       (pp. 239-252)
      Marjorie Murphy
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1vz4973.19

      The ideas of “One Big Union,” or industrial democracy, as espoused by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), captured the imagination of a global community of young socialists (broadly defined) who hungered for social justice in their own lives and world. Jim Larkin and James Connolly grew up in two different Irish immigrant communities outside of Ireland. Both traveled to America and participated in all that the IWW had to offer, and then together they launched an aggressive, successful One Big Union drive in Dublin. Even in the most obscure immigrant neighborhoods, the Irish imagined an entirely different way...

    • 16 Tom Barker and Revolutionary Europe
       (pp. 253-261)
      Paula de Angelis
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1vz4973.20

      In February of 1920, maritime worker and Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) organizer Tom Barker ended his tenure as general secretary of the Marine Transport Workers Industrial Union (MTW) chapter in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He worked his passage to London aboard a Norwegian steamer with an IWW crew, carrying with him almost a decade’s experience as a “globetrotting agitator.”¹

      A self-educated worker in a classic socialist tradition, erudite, multilingual, and widely read, Barker wrote vividly and with a masterful grasp of the IWW rhetorical style. His contemporary writing, as well as his autobiography (recorded as an oral history in...

    • 17 P. J. Welinder and “American Syndicalism” in Interwar Sweden
       (pp. 262-270)
      Johan Pries
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1vz4973.21

      When Pär Jönsson Welinder returned home to Sweden some time in the spring of 1925, he should have been a broken man. Twice he had been part of veritable hurricanes of labor militancy. And twice he had seen them utterly defeated.

      In his mid-20s, P.J. Welinder had participated in the cataclysmic Swedish “Great Strike” of 1909. This series of strikes and lockouts was driven by demands from the labor movement’s grassroots, forcing the leadership into an all-out battle with employers. The entire country eventually came to a complete standstill for a month, transforming unruly local conflicts into a disciplined war...

    • 18 “All Workers Regardless of Craft, Race or Colour”: The First Wave of IWW Activity and Influence in South Africa
       (pp. 271-287)
      Lucien van der Walt
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1vz4973.22

      The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) quickly spread across the globe, its ideas and organizing model having a notable impact in a wide variety of contexts. In South Africa, the IWW had an important influence on sections of the left, labor, and national liberation movements beginning in 1908. By the end of 1910, IWW-style syndicalism was an important influence on local socialist networks, and on the country’s main left weekly, the Voice ofLabour; an active iww union had waged significant strikes in Johannesburg, and also spread into Durban and Pretoria; and the local iww and Socialist Labour Party...

    • 19 Tramp, Tramp, Tramp: The Songs of Joe Hill Around the World
       (pp. 288-298)
      Bucky Halker
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1vz4973.23

      Of the many people who passed through the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and achieved some degree of public recognition, only songwriter Joe Hill (1879–1915) realized mythic status and international fame, albeit posthumously. Hill long ago ascended to the upper realm in the pantheon of protest songwriters, and his music continues to be sung and heard in areas far removed from the United States. The legendary Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger understood Hill’s esteemed stature and acknowledged his importance. They included three Hill songs in their collectionHard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People, and Guthrie wrote a song...

  8. Index
     (pp. 299-312)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1vz4973.24

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A Truly Global Union: The IWW
by Peter Cole, David Struthers and Kenyon Zimmer
BUY THE BOOK

From all four corners of the globe, the Industrial Workers of the World made rampant capitalists shake in their boots! This article, by the editors of Wobblies of the World, tells the global history of the Wobblies and the radical organising and displays of solidarity in countries as diverse as Australia, Canada, Mexico, South Africa, Sweden and Ireland.

——————

In our last blogpost we closed with an explanation of the IWW motto—an injury to one is an injury to all—as an expression of the core Wobbly value of solidarity in opposition to capitalism. Capitalism, however, varied across industry, geography, and country, creating different injuries in different places and the various forms that organising and solidarity took across the IWW’s chapters reflected these differences. In this post, we want to highlight some of the regional and global variations of the influences that acted upon the IWW, and of subsequent IWW organising, as described in the book. To capture the flexibility and adaptability of the IWW, the contributors to this volume drew on archival resources scattered around the world and on linguistic skills well beyond most individual researchers. (Someone out there surely must read both Maori and Finnish, right?)

An appropriate understanding of what exactly the IWW was is necessary to see its variations. Salvatore Salerno’s Red November, Black November: Culture and Community in the Industrial Workers of the World (1989) crucially shifted from prior scholars’ views of the IWW as a formal organisation to framing it as more like a social movement. Growing from this perspective, recent work—including that of the three editors—on the IWW in the United States emphasised the many cultural elements of the IWW that spread its influence beyond those holding the union’s red membership card. The scholars included in the present volume trace the IWW’s growth as one strand within the global syndicalist movement and document both the chartering of formal union branches in many countries, as well as forms of its cultural and intellectual influence carried by mobile workers, sailors, and Wobbly publications.

As we wrote in the book’s introduction, ‘the IWW was an international organisation, with national administrations, local branches, and mobile members spread out across the globe.’ If we judge the IWW’s reach by its official international organisation, its peak came directly before American entry into the First World War, and included branches in Australia, Canada, Chile, England, Mexico, New Zealand, South Africa, and Sweden. But new research illustrates how the chronology of the IWW’s ascendency and retreat varied by region and within individual locals in countries without formal ties to the international organisation. The IWW achieved different forms—from having the power to organise at workplaces to being limited to speaking and propaganda efforts—over time, a trend heightened by government repression, most notably during the First World War. Wartime repression and decline is an important element in the IWW’s story, though decline occurred more gradually than often recounted and the IWW retained significant power out through its global reaches into the 1920s and 1930s. For the IWW to inspire and grow in as many countries as it did, it had to adapt to local conditions.

The IWW itself was also an adaptation of sorts. The time has long since passed when scholars could describe the IWW as an organisation solely spawned by white American hard rock miners. The IWW’s founding and its membership in the United States reflected myriad immigrants arriving in or passing through the country and the ideas they carried. Contributions to the book reflect this diversity in different regions of the United States and in the IWW’s contiguous spread into Canada and Mexico. Influences were also intellectual, as Dominique Pinsolle’s chapter, Sabotage, the IWW, and Repression: How the American Reinterpretation of a French Concept Gave Rise to a New International Conception of Sabotage, brings a nuanced understanding to the IWW’s development of the concept and tactic of sabotage represented by the iconic black cat, the ‘Sabo Tabby.’

In the United States, the IWW had a national level organisation that supported local labour organising to various degrees—usually limited by the national body’s lack of financial resources—but never controlled it. In the Southwest, the IWW forged its own way forward among itinerant workers, piecing together an existence through agricultural labour and construction work on projects like roads, laying track, and gas pipelines. The IWW also organised in Arizona copper mines in the years before American entry into World War One. Multiracial workforces were the norm and the IWW’s acceptance of all workers regardless of race dramatically shone through in the region. Many Mexican IWW organisers also organised with the revolutionary Partido Liberal Mexicano. This lent a particularly militant streak to IWW organising in the region.

In Australia, the IWW worked with the mainstream unions—despite ideological differences—in opposing World War I, which resulted in surprising solidarity from those unions when the IWW suffered fierce government repression. In Ireland, one-time Wobblies led a nationalist revolution. What Wobblies did in Tampico, Mexico could be quite different than what they did in Malmö, Sweden. Perhaps equally fascinating are the commonalties. For one, the IWW did not shed its bedrock opposition to racism and xenophobia, no matter the mainstream customs of whichever society in which it organised. The IWW was the first white-majority union or organisation to attempt lining up Maori in New Zealand and Xhosa in South Africa. The IWW rejected anti-Asian sentiment in California and embraced Finns across northern Ontario.

As we argue in our introduction to this volume:

The IWW defined, in a very real way, the ideal of solidarity when it coined the legendary motto, ‘An Injury to One is an Injury to All.’ That slogan, like the Wobblies themselves, spread globally. For example, it was introduced by Wobbly sailors to South Africa in the First World War era, and today remains the motto of South Africa’s largest labour federation, the Congress of South African Trade Unions. The struggles of a century ago still resonate throughout the industrialising Global South as well as the deindustrialising Global North. Only when workers around the world embrace the spirit and internationalism of the Wobblies will they be strong enough to challenge global capitalism, which might as well formally adopt as its own motto, ‘divide and conquer’.

We’re writing this blog post as German elections results indicate that Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) will become the first openly nationalist party to join the Bundestag in over half a century, largely on the back of anti-immigrant sentiment. In Myanmar, the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Rohingya is ongoing. In the United States furore continues over Donald Trump’s attempt to force symbolic sports patriotism on American football players while ignoring the plight of American citizens in Puerto Rico. In Catalonia, Guardia Civil dispatched from Madrid raided the offices and arrested leaders of the independence/nationalist movement. Each draws from distinct local and regional histories, but they all rest on the fundamental issue of how people understand membership in ‘their’ community, how they construct the ‘all.’ For the IWW ‘an injury to one is an injury to all’ was and remains a rallying cry for solidarity against capitalism, racism, nationalism, and militarism. Forces which continue to wreak havoc on the planet now as surely as they did over century ago at the IWW’s founding. Our book’s lessons of the successes and failures of the IWW around the world point to one conclusion: the only way we can be defeated is if we stop fighting for justice in all its forms.

—————

Peter Cole is Professor of History at Western Illinois University and Research Associate at the Society, Work and Development Institute, University of the Witwatersrand. He is the author of Wobblies on the Waterfront (University of Illinois Press, 2007).

David M. Struthers is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Copenhagen.

Kenyon Zimmer is Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Arlington. He is the author of Immigrants Against the State (University of Illinois Press, 2015).

—————

Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW edited by Peter Cole, David Struthers and Kenyon Zimmer is available to buy from Pluto Press.


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