A recent exchange in the Industrial Worker attempts to come to grips with the internal sterilty and general ossification of the IWW. Really tiresome bromides like ‘lacking roots in the class’ and ‘we need to get out more’ avoid self-criticism in avoiding addressing root causes–in avoiding addressing, in other words, what the IWW has actually done in the first place to find itself in a position of marginality amidst historic levels of discontent with majestic capitalist class hierarchy. Indeed, the discussion seems avoidant of clues as to root causes, even as they appear repeatedly.
In ‘Rebuilding the IWW,’ x423752 writes:
When we talk about workplace organizing, we often refer to the “organizing pyramid” which places “understanding the workplace” at the bottom because understanding the workplace is the most fundamental step of any organizing campaign. The same is true of the task at hand, namely rebuilding an IWW that has the power to transform society. We must first begin by understanding the current position of our class and also the relationship of the IWW to the broader working class. This is one question that I think Weakening the Dam fails to discuss.
The relationship of union and class is certainly fundamental to syndicalism. Living values and learning to relate to one another in ways other than those we have been conditioned to by a culture of competitive, selfish individualism is key to the syndicalist strategy of developing, per Bakunin’s classic formulation, the ‘facts of the future’ in the present. It is hardly a new debate:
“The organization of the trade sections and their representation in the Chambers of Labor creates a great academy in which all the workers can and must study economic science; these sections also bear in themselves the living seeds of the new society which is to replace the old world. They are creating not only the ideas, but also the facts of the future itself.”
This as we know became the basis for French Syndicalism and its pioneering strategy of using the unions as a ‘school of revolutionary gymnastics,’ based on the understanding that workers did not need lecturing on the alienating and exploitative facets of capitalism, but rather an ear to hear their grievances on those counts and support in developing confidence to act on our own account as a class. This strategy worked to a “T” in Spain and accounts in no small part for the spectacular organising success of the CNT up to 1936, even if Durruti didn’t expropriate the gold reserves of the Bank of Spain, and anarchists joined the government, and whatever the hell else went wrong in that moment.
Any teacher worth their salt will tell you an educator’s first skill is listening, so we can understand those we are trying to help. So too arguably for a syndicalist organiser. The working class is neither stupid nor unaware of its misery; it has only been gaslighted out of awareness of its power while being taught to identify with the prerogatives of moneyed big knobs, and is untutored in acting on its own behalf. What it doesn’t need is ideologues talking down to it like the working class is only capable of a ‘trade union consciousness.’ Political Marxist microcults, for their part, are nothing if not visible on the left, and yet somehow are generally avoided by workers they consider too stupid to be able to function without a vanguardist nanny. Being ‘out there and visible’ is not a good in and of itself.
As educators, the Angry Education Workers have plenty to say on organising revolutionary unions, but for whatever reason the IWW doesn’t care enough to listen to listen to the Angry Education workers:
Prefiguration is an excellent framework for understanding how social structures shape individual and collective actions—which helps take the focus off of an individual’s personal character and intentions. Revolutionary unions recognize that all individuals and groups are flawed, and take steps to develop egalitarian systems that facilitate working class self-leadership. . . .
. . . If someone is a worker and willing to respect members of all backgrounds, they should be welcome. Forty percent of the teachers who walked out for the Red for Ed strikes of 2018 voted for Trump in the 2016 election. The revolutionary union movement encourages plurality of thought while engaging in collective education. Our present choices about how to handle disagreement and conflict—both internally and between organizations—will determine the type of society we replace capitalism with. We must use internal political education and persuasion to help workers begin to overcome the baggage we all carry under capitalism. “Beyond ‘Fuck You: An organizer’s approach to confronting hateful language at work” provides a model of what this looks like in one-on-one and small group settings. As we grow, we have to incorporate this model into all of our organizational infrastructure. Whatever our other disagreements about politics are, we must all commit to structuring our unions directly democratically.
Rasmus Hästbacka explains the thinking behind this approach:
The problem is that the left-wing label creates misunderstandings that are very destructive in practice. Syndicalist unions are then perceived as organizations only for those who identify with the left, i.e. for workers and bosses who call themselves left-wing but not for workers who vote center or right. But the reality is the exact opposite. Our unions are open to workers in general, including workers who vote on bourgeois parties, while the unions exclude all leftists who are bosses or employers.
We can see some clues here as to why syndicalist unions might become separated from the working class in the first place, all the more so to the extent that libertarian socialist political groupings ape Leninist contempt for the working class by assuming workers to be blank slates in need of education regarding the horrors of wage-slavery and the troubles capitalism creates for their own lives. Yet ‘Rebuilding the IWW’ has nothing to say on this count. Hästbacka elaborates:
Syndicalists emphasize the economic and social interests that unite workers, rather than the religious, political and national affiliations that divide people. We build unions because we have a common interest in improving everyday life for everyone. We do not organize and come together because we have the same opinion on every issue. Union organizing has the potential to unite workers in every workplace, within and across industries.
Therefore,
The crucial differences between syndicalist unions and the political left can be summed up as follows. A syndicalist union is an interest organization for sellers of labor power. It is open to all employees except bosses. The union also welcomes those parts of the working class who are not wage earners (unemployed, people on sick leave, pensioners, self-employed entrepreneurs with no hired staff, etc.). The condition for becoming a member is not that you identify with the left or hold a set of leftist opinions.
x423752 is not reading Weakening the Dam carefully if they are not seeing where it speaks to these issues:
. . . . many self-identified radicals have little real-world organizing experience. This is okay. Like anything else, organizing takes practice. What we do have, however, is a wealth of grand arguments supporting class struggle and a vision for a post-capitalist future. Because of this there’s a temptation to ‘intellectualize’ the organizing process. Speaking from personal experience, I know what it’s like to feel unsure about doing something new, especially when it comes to organizing. It’s tempting to fall back on something we’re more comfortable with—like making the argument for why we need a revolutionary union.
Reality, however, is much more complicated than a well-phrased argument. Instead of trying to ‘win the organizing argument’ we’re much better off building relationships of trust with our co-workers. Through this relationship, we engage our co-workers in small scale winnable actions. These actions, in turn, lay the groundwork for larger struggles and deeper conversations.
To put it another way, workers—conscious of it or not—undertake individual anti-capitalist acts all the time. Workmates, however, often need to see collective activity in action before they’re willing to join a union. From there, it’s involvement in collective struggle that opens a space for us, as radicals, to begin having discussion about class, capitalism, and the labor movement.
In other words then, we don’t need to ‘intellectualise’ the organising process because organising revolutionary unions isn’t about drawing workers into groupings of correct ideology (anarchism), but listening to them, understanding them and helping them to help develop class consciousness and individual and collective self-efficacy as participants in the class struggle. Indeed, counterhegemonic antiauthoritarians have historically employed dual organising structures to enable workers self-activity while protecting it from manipulative entryist scum like Tristan Bunner and his various bystanders and enablers. This is not the same thing as
We must first begin by understanding the current position of our class and also the relationship of the IWW to the broader working class.
If we replace references to union with party, this sentences reads: “We must first begin with a political position and also the relationship of the party to the broader working class.” With this, the underlying logic becomes clearer, and with it the underlying problem. The question of union and class is generally understood; the problem of party is only one to the extent that the dumb peasants with our trade union consciousness continue to refuse to submit to the patronage of our betters. This is less syndicalism then and more vanguardism and church- or microcult-building. It does not seem so much a surprise that
The reality today is that the IWW is largely viewed as irrelevant and/or a “thing of the past” in a lot of communities across the country.
If this is the case, the bromides of ‘lacking roots in the class’ and ‘we need to get out more’ are meaningless. If the IWW is perceived to be an ideological grouping, which it is, being of the class or being visible aren’t going to fix anything. Political marxists can be working class and they certainly have no problem being in your face, but neither does that mean they will ever be given a chance to lead another revolution, and create problems as bad or worse than everything they were supposed to be overcoming in coming to embody everything they claim to oppose.
While failing to identify these issues as problems, x423752 talks to workers and finds that the community of the pure has withdrawn into a nice safe cocoon:
I also asked them how the IWW is perceived back in their various hometowns and many of them reported to me that their local branches are very insular and the broader organizing community doesn’t really know who they are or what they do. It’s almost like they don’t exist.
Furthermore,
I’ve also spoken with former wobs who described their experience with the IWW as endless meetings: lots of talk, but no action. They kept showing up, but eventually left, because they didn’t feel like their local branches were up to anything that was significant or worth their time. We shouldn’t write these people or these experiences off!
But nor do we reflect on where this meeting and organisationitis is coming from. There is no question that the IWW is a top-heavy bureaucracy with stupid amounts of work for anyone dumb enough to sign up for delegate responsibilities; all the ‘no dues checkoff’ rule means is that the delegate has to chase members who don’t show up to meetings before spending hours on Microsoft Excel, built with Lucifier’s own code. There is no question either the IWW is a labour history club for a few people also. These are not the core issues though.
Other issues are not hard to uncover; take this segment of a long postmortem on the Brisbane GMB from the organiser of a branch that came to include over 100 members after a year or two. The individual concerned is a member of Aus-ROC, and an acolyte of the Trotskyist entryistsy of “Unite,” who became the Secretary following the entryist purges:
I try to engage Tilde over the following weeks, and explain the situation in detail, explain the break in process, and she just goes on about how she needed to ‘put on her big boots’ to kick out the mysoginists. She also states she wishes she had just done this in Melbourne earlier to kick out Ben Debney. And she begins questioning my personal character as well. All this is straight up bullying.
It seems interesting to note here that the performance of ‘putting the big boots on’ and ‘kicking out the misogynists’ was so important to the vanguardist colonisers of the IWW that they wished to do it over and over again. Purging evildoers from the IWW once was clearly not enough. Are purges and personal attacks problematic for the culture of the union? Do they go any way to engendering paranoia and a close culture of hostility to outsiders if the class struggle becomes more a matter of who we are in relation to ableist ingroups and who we know, as opposed to what we’re about or what we do? What if the root cause of insularity and separation from the mass of workers is the emergence of a vanguardist cadre that wishes only for perennial purges?
As Call It Sleep points out of the Tidle the Purge Queens and the Unite factions of the world,
The cadre must appear to be in the vanguard of [their] epic, [they] must be in favor of everything progressive, everything radical, everything that purports to be new and innovative and stylish. [They are] the modern consumer who hates what [they] must consume because [they] knows all of its inadequacies and yet who continues to search for the perfect commodity, the one which contains no imperfections. [They believe] that [their] educated refusal of inadequate commodities placed [them] above the obedient consumer, who believes what [they] is told. The cadre simultaneously wants to enjoy the security of submission and the thrill of refusal.
Performative purges, with endless opportunities for grandstanding, are nothing if not the combination of the security of submission and the thrill of refusal. Conform to the morality-policing bandwagon in the name of fighting misogyny while we speak truth to patriarchy.
From this perpective, the problem isn’t that we aren’t being sold a lemon, the diminished shadow of an organisation that once was, by codependents clinging to the hollowed-out shell of something that might have been. The problem it’s that we’re not applying the correct solution with enough vigor. Grace Blakeley describess this mentality in terms of a moral imperialism:
Like the early capitalist reformers, we increasingly understand our political participation as a way of signalling our personal moral rectitude to others. We think of ourselves as consumers – not just of goods, but of political identities – expressing who we are through what we buy and the language we use. Politics becomes a performance of individual ethics, rather than a process of coalition building and consciousness raising.
This certainly seems true of the perfomative moralising of morally imperialist entryists. It appears telling that this gets a pass under tired bromides of ‘we’re not working class enough and need to double our efforts,’ not least if the ‘performative of individual ethics as a feature of weaponised, single-issue identity politics creates hierarchies of value that mirror the scapegoating logic of imperialism. The needs of the Other need not matter if they can be effectively demonised and dehumanised, after all; such is the basis of what social psychology calls moral disengagement. Indeed, as Black Lodges notes,
If imperialism is understood as a structural relation of domination, then opposition to it cannot be conditional upon the perceived moral adequacy of its targets. Imperial power does not select objects of intervention on the basis of democratic standards but according to strategic alignment and geopolitical utility. To oppose imperialism only where the targeted state conforms to particular ideological expectations risks transforming anti-imperialism into a form of selective moralism rather than a consistent political position.
We have no trouble understanding that identitarian chauvanism is an imperialist scapegoating mechanism when we like the target and disagree with the pretext, but it doesn’t even merit a mention if the target is easy to dislike and we agree with the pretext–all the more so if the target agrees with the pretext and thus finds it doubly hard to process narcissistic ambush and the kinds of online mobbings and doxxings that would attract gaol time for violent affray if perpetrated off the internet where there are laws for that kind of thing. The rule for the ingroup is “sympathy for me if I’m a Trot (or one of their enablers), punishment for thee if you’re not.’ And we remain surprised somehow that our organisation has become insular and hostile to the unenlightened working class.
Folklore tells of an old Wob who said the union should never be rebuilt if he was subject to repression, because it would no longer be that drawn together from the disparate autonomous formations that preceded it, but a church of sectarians cut off from the culture of class struggle. It doesn’t mention if he said anything about chauvanist middle class identitarians, but he might have,
The thing about that comment was that it was actually right. It probably even stands out for its perspicacity and foresight in much the same way as Bakunin’s predictions about the Red Bureaucracy favoured by Lenin’s Dad’s Army of Bootlickers. We also ignore it in much the same way as we ignored Bakunin, and clearly to our peril. Lenin’s bootlickers can’t attract interest from the working class with their arrogant vanguards, so they introduce vanguardism through the back door with entryism and moral imperialism instead. Morality-policing bandwagons recgonise the authority of the vanguard implicitly, even if they drive almost all of the IWW’s new initiates to leave. The catastrophe of IWW membership remains no cause to question moral imperialism however, apparently.
With a turnover of something in the order of 20,000 members in the last 7 years, the IWW faces an existential crisis with which it is clearly ill-equipped to deal. According to one or two of those 20,000, the empire of revolutionary morality is all “endless meetings: lots of talk, but no action . . . [and not] up to anything that was significant or worth their time.” In addition to being increasingly irrelevant as a sect of identitarian chauvanists prone to performative purges, there is also the danger of becoming a target of purges, which of course cTarries punitive penalties in terms of job and life opportunities; if you are a while cishet male and you sign a red card, you could wind up on welfare for two years and counting and be romantically unattached in middle age. The moral empire can never free its Other lest it have to account for itself.
With that being the case, that 20,000 and all the rest likely to follow in their wake might do better to refrain from joining the IWW. You may already be a Wildcat Wob, who has no more time for ableist scum as a self-appointed leadership inside a nominally revolutionary union than the bosses and labor fakirs inside the business unions whose main purpose is disciplining workers in the interests of capital. The Starbucks Workers Union is an example of the kinds of unions that could form new confederations out of grassroots struggle; it is perhaps telling that they have distanced themselves from the IWW in the name of staying relevant. The Renters and Housing Union here in Australia is a grouping of some 4000 people. In Seattle people have formed a local autonomous union. It’s not like anyone is obliged of necessity to stick with identitarian cults that have outlived their usefulness.
In any event, and regardless of what happens next in the class struggle, it is clear that doubling efforts and self-flagellation have nothing to offer. Apathy and toxic shame are possibly even more symptoms of deeper problems with openness and true equality, such as those we have just been reviewing. We no more need the moral imperialists of the cadre class than we need the moral imperialists of the boss class; they need us, not the other way around. Where the IWW is concerned, at this point, sacking the bosses starts with sacking the ones in the union, if for no other reason than because their answer to the problems of their own making is to feel bad and work harder.
Ben Debney
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