In the history of the American workers' movement, at least from 1905 to 1920, the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W., commonly known as wobblies) held a position of considerable importance. It is thanks to this organisation, which came into being by special initiative of the Western Federation of Miners (founded in 1897 and the protagonist of the toughest of fights in this sector) that the workers of the West (but not only), where capitalism had established itself in its most modern and fiercely exploitational form, were finally able to present a united front to the big companies spreading towards the Pacific coast. Unlike the corrupt and ultra-reformist American Federation of Labour, it made no distinction of race, nationality or colour and unqualified, seasonal and migrant workers - the most oppressed and therefore the most belligerent - were in the forefront.

The wobblies were responsible for the great strikes of 1907 in the mines of Nevada and the steelworks of Pennsylvania, of 1911 in the timber industry of the extreme north-west, of 1912 in the textile industry (Lawrence, Massachusetts), of 1913 particularly in the silk factories (Paterson, New Jersey) and, in the First world war, for the powerful movements in the copper, timber and steel industries. In all these glorious episodes, the practice of extending specific struggles, of militant solidarity between different categories, of abstention from work with no time limits (the Paterson strike lasted 7 months!), of open organisation and acceptance of both the employed and the unemployed, together with the firm decision not to surrender to the police and, if necessary, to the army, either in "peace" time or when the First World War broke out and the United States entered it in 1917 - all this made the pulses and veins of the so perfectly democratic US rulers tremble, made the bourgeois and petit-bourgeois citizens foam with rage and the official orators of the ruling class and their opportunist lackeys thunder from the tribunes (as well as the priests of a thousand different American churches and sects from the pulpits), whilst the lead bullets of the police cut down hundreds of militants and the prison gates were thrown open to jail them in their thousands. A golden roll of honour from all these viewpoints, which the I.W.W. filled with the obscure names of an ardent proletariat that dared to write on its banners: Abolish the wage system!

Decimated by the repression of the police forces, labelled outcasts by the trade unionist and political bonzes, weakened by their own theoretical and programmatic inadequacies (which were subsequently reflected in tragic organisational weaknesses), the I.W.W. movement started to decline after the First World War. However, it did not die out and, in the oppressive atmosphere of the stars and stripes Republic, the fact that its voice persists, even feebly, is one of the few signs of life. The opening lines of the "1908 Preamble", published in every issue of the Chicago Industrial Worker, cannot be read without emotion: "The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people and the few, who make up the employing 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 earth and the machinery of production, and abolish the wage system. […] Instead of the conservative motto, 'A fair day's wage for a fair day's work', we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, 'Abolition of the wage system'. It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism"[1] .

* * *

The acknowledgement of a heritage and tradition of great and heroic battles, of obstinate insistence in the grey world of the dollar, of an eminently open profession of faith in the revolutionary role of the working class, of the persistent criticism of opportunist trade unionists "who allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry" and encourage in them "the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers" (idem), must not, however, close our eyes to the unsubstantial nature of the I.W.W.'s theoretical and programmatic bases. The latter are basically analogous to those of European anarcho-trade unionism and, from some points of view, to Italian "Ordinovismo" originating from Gramsci[2]: a lack of substance which, as far back as 1920-1921, prevented those bold workers - the only ones to persist in holding aloft the torch of class revolution - from finding the path of communism and joining the Third International or even the International of Red Trade Unions. They are in favour of "direct action" and "a general strike" but then refuse the political battle and its organ the class party, whilst they see the general strike as a thaumaturgic means of bringing about the collapse of the "system" on its own, by virtue of the dead weight of paralysed production. They are immediatists: thus they refuse the mediation of the party-form and hence the State-form (dictatorship) as the "imposition of leaders on the masses", "substitution of a will" that is unrelated to the immediate will of the class in its indistinct, general and, it must be said, vague, nature. The wobblies declare: "By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old" (idem). They thus refuse violence (as though a general strike were not in itself violence!) and thus terror, because it destroys the means of production: instead, their "direct action" aims at making useless the means of production for exploiters, while preserving them for the use of the workers, once the bosses are deprived of their control. And so, contrary to their best intentions, they slip into a sort of gradualism and reformism: let's keep the machines shining, because one day they'll fall into our own hands! It is thus curious but logical for the I.W.W. to consider not only the "industrial unions" but also existing co-operatives as cells of the new society within the old…

Like the anarcho-syndicalists, the I.W.W. react vigorously to parliamentary degeneration and the opportunism of the traditional "workers" parties and trade unions - driven to open blacklegging and the support of bourgeois institutions - but then refuse any organisation into a party, any form of State: they fail to understand (as the Third International observed in a letter of January 1920)[3] that "destroying the capitalist State edifice, breaking capitalist class resistance and disarming it, confiscating property and passing it over to the workers: to carry out all these tasks, a government, a State is necessary - the dictatorship of the proletariat, by means of which the workers can break the enemy class with a fist of iron". All this - and indeed even the earlier defeat of the bourgeois régime - presupposes organisation into a political party. They fail to understand that the general strike either transforms itself into the right conditions for armed rebellion, or exhausts itself; that it is impossible to build "the structure of the new society within the shell of the old", because nothing new can be "built" unless power is won and exercised in order to crush the resistance of an "entrepreneurial" class that will not disappear just because we have "put down our tools." This is the source of the internal battles, which produced repeated lacerations between the "politicised" and the "unpoliticised", between "centralisers" and "decentralisers".

Like the anarcho-syndicalists, they believe that a certain form of economic organisation - in their case the form based on industry and not on skill or trade - is in itself revolutionary, confusing a problem of strength and content with a problem of form. In so doing, they do not realise that any immediate form of organisation can have revolutionary or reformist aims, and be counter-revolutionary, according to whether revolutionary or reformist political forces and programmatic content prevail. This is well demonstrated in the United States itself by the fact that the principle of organisation by industry and not by skill or trade was adopted by the Congress of Industrial Organisations (C.I.O.), which subsequently assumed an identical position to that of the reformist conservatism of the A.F.L..

The profound sense of militant solidarity, the refusal of any distinction of race or nation, the call to the great levers of direct economic action including the general strike, are the strong points of an organisation that re-connects a negative present to a resplendent past. The ball and chain attached to it is its pre-Marxism, as is well demonstrated by the enthusiastic praise of the wobblies sung by "workerists" of all sorts and varieties in Europe and America - the sworn enemies of the party and centralisation of economic and political battles. But in the huge battles that are to take place in what today seems to be the impregnable temple of Mammon - just as it seemed impregnable when the wobblies of a hundred years ago launched their war cry against the system of wage work - a minority of those proletarians will feel (or rather will be obliged to feel) that the class party, revolutionary dictatorship, the red terror, are links in the only chain joining the first, instinctive reactions of the working class against its own exploitation to the final objective of its emancipation (that same emancipation that it saw before it, when organising itself as "industrial workers of the world"). It will see that "every economic battle is a political battle", that "the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat" as a necessary step "towards the suppression of all classes and a classless society".

This is the only way that the I.W.W. must be remembered on the hundredth anniversary of their birth.

Notes

[1] See Joyce Kornbluh, ed., Rebel Voices: an I.W.W. Anthology (The University of Michigan Press, 1968).
[2] For a criticism of all these positions, see Vol. II of our History of the Communist Left (Edizioni Il programma comunista, 1972), in particular chaps. VI, VIII and IX.
[3] Extracts from the letter can be read in Jane Degras, ed., The Communist International. 1919-1943. Documents, Vol. I: 1919-1922 (1951). The quotation is here from the Italian version (Feltrinelli 1975), pp. 87-89.