The latest Industrial Worker features a review of IWW membership in the North American Regional Administration. Of note are two things: 1) the overall growth in membership, and 2) the degree of membership turnover.
The overall membership of the IWW is looking healthy enough at around 3 times what it was almost a decade ago:
Fascinatingly, and despite a growth in overall membership from around 3500 in 2017 to around 9500 by 2023, the union continues to suffer from high turnover. The IWW can attract new members, but it can’t keep them:
It goes without saying this is a shocking graphic. The first three years of the graph in particular tell of an organisation bringing in new members at the rate of 1000+, then 2000+, then around 2500, and losing almost all of them.
Indeed: In rough terms, between 2016 and 2023 the IWW attracted around about 25,000 new initiates who signed red cards (adding totals and rounding down). Being generous to the orange line, the IWW retained about 5000. This represents a retention/loss ration of approximate 4:1. For every one member the IWW retained, it lost four. 2023 appears to have been a bumper year insofar as the IWW managed not to lose more members than it attracted.
If this is not an organisational disaster for the IWW, it’s hard to know what to call it.
Accounting for disaster
The commentary attached to these statistics does not much lend itself to any suspicion that the IWW is overly concerned with self-criticism. The matter of attracting new initates offers some clues:
Our current strategy for growth at the branch level consists of two efforts: Maintaining our social media presence, and convincing workers to join through the efficacy of our campaigns. At the national level, we rely on word-of-mouth. Here we see that only 4.9 percent of members found us from one of their coworkers in the IWW. But the efforts we put into social media were the first exposure to the union of 17.5 percent of our membership.
Maybe if the IWW sourced 17.5% of new members from coworkers and campaigns and 4.9% from social media things might improve. This suspicion is not much allayed by the comment that:
People join when bad things happen and they see the IWW as potentially addressing these bad things. It is more difficult to correlate specific IWW projects with bumps in membership. It seems that often when a workplace organizing campaign goes public, there is a bump in people joining in that specific metro area.
People join the IWW, in other words, when it’s off the internet and engaging with the world outside of cyberspace. By the Industrial Worker‘s own commentary, they leave again when it gets a bit too perpetually online:
12 percent of exiting members reported they were leaving because they had never been contacted by a branch. 29 percent had never taken part in any union activity.
A tenth of the membership are never contacted, and the IWW is too online for a third of it to ever be involved in anything off the internet. Despite these obvious practical issues, the Industrial Worker surmises that the problems with membership retention might involve ‘Echo chamber effects,’ ‘Lack of connection with intersectional issues,’ ‘Difficulties recruiting and retaining members from a majority of the social groups that comprise the working class,’ and ‘Workers will not feel like they are represented in the union, and in the positions of leadership.’
It is worth noting that trans women and non-binary people are massively overrepresented in the IWW compared to the general population. Otherwise, the data shows that our membership is very homogeneous which can lead to flaws in our organization.
This is a strange line of reasoning. Either trans women and non-binary people are massively overrepresented in the IWW, or the membership is very homogeneous. The IWW certainly does not appear to be suffering from ‘Echo chamber effects,’ ‘Lack of connection with intersectional issues,’ or ‘Difficulties recruiting and retaining members from a majority of the social groups that comprise the working class’ in terms of its trans membership.
Maybe the Industrial Worker is closer to nailing the problem in the fact A) that it assumes the IWW to have leadership, and B) that ‘the positions of leadership’ don’t need to be called into question.
From the land Down Under, it would sure as fucking shit seem like there are some issues with a self-appointed vanguard within the IWW globally, if not its style and manner of maladministration.
The authoritarian left
It is to the credit of the IWW that it is honest enough to publish internal research; the membership patterns of the IWW are surely comparable to those of Leninist microcults, which are nothing if not notorious for being autocratic party meatgrinders with — drumroll — high membership turnover.
There are no prizes for guessing why Leninist microsects have high membership turnover: if not for blind worship of the secular priesthood of Political Marxism and the deadening effect on the creativity, cooperative self-activity and independent intellectual innovations of the working class, then for the habit of reducing class struggle to alienated roles of permanent protest, the endless cavacade of left protests then being used as a recruitment pool by competing microcults.
“We represent the working class,’ says the identitarian Political Marxist microcult, ‘so if you doubt the judgement of the party line, that means you hate workers and love class hierarchies.’ In the words of Black Lodges, the problem of alienated roles of permanent protest is one of the ‘production of a subcultural identity through which educated classes can symbolically distance themselves from the brutality of capitalism whilst continuing to materially benefit from it.’ Thus
contemporary left politics across much of the West increasingly suffers from a profound inversion of means and ends. Theory, which should function as an instrument of political clarity and collective organisation, has instead frequently become an end in itself. Radical language operates as cultural capital and political affiliation becomes a marker of taste and social identity. Entire milieus of self-described radicals speak endlessly of liberation whilst remaining structurally incapable of confronting power beyond rhetorical performance. The consequence is not merely political weakness but the gradual transformation of communism into precisely what Marx spent his life opposing: an abstract philosophy detached from material struggle.
In a similar vein, as Natasha Walter notes, hyper-individualistic late capitalism has engendered ‘a feminist culture which is more invested in the individuals success than in structural change and collective liberation.’ This is arguably not a problem limited to liberal feminism, but to middle-class identitarian chauvanism in general, and our habit of using politics as a means of accumulating cultural capital and confronting power structures with our performance of revolutionary virtue denouncing those outside the sectarian microcult who lack our purity and superior moral sensibilities.
Perhaps these are more significant issues to the IWW when it comes to membership retention than their ability to conform to the ideological norms of identitarian neoliberalism? Dare it even be suggested, but perhaps the overhang middle class identitarianism and chauvanism creates a stultifying and oppressive milieu that repels many who see in the morally respectable and upstanding left the embodiment of everything we claim to oppose. With supreme relevance for the IWW, a former member of the Anarchist Federation UK describes their battles with Political Marxist overhang in the form of condescention towards the idealised ingroup. The author of an introductory pamphlet on class struggle anarchism, Without History writes that
This introductory pamphlet was deliberately written to be simple, even simplistic, and jargon free. Accessibility was prioritised over detail and complexity. But in this section we find a whole cluster of denial mechanisms condensed into a few phrases. This pattern will repeat over and over throughout the rest of the piece with the same purpose – to displace the power exercised over subordinated and minoritised working class people by other working class people onto the ruling class so an idealised potential for working class unity can be preserved. The fundamental conflict in society is between capital and labour. All other power struggles can be reduced somehow to this. There are no divisions within the class which are irreconcilable. There is no alliance between sections of the working class and the ruling class which is not a fundamental betrayal of the working class’s long term interests for the short term gain of a “corrupt” minority. Whether divisions in the working class are called “sites of struggle” or “contradictions” or “fractures” they remain opportunities for organisation and the creation of unity, never a struggle over irreconcilable differences in power in the way the struggle between the ruling and working class is [emphasis added].
The self-appointed vanguard of the IWW do very much seem to know how to displace their own power to destroy names and livelihoods onto the ruling class, the latter represented apparently by the bad apples purged from the union by Trotskyist entryists. The South-East Queensland IWW has been calling out both Aus-ROC and GHQ for their despicable opportunism and vicious ableism for years now; it does perhaps figure that the Industrial Worker doesn’t want to dig too deeply into the history of its own self-appointed vanguard purposed to the defense of revolutionary morality.
In any event, it is certainly a tell that none of these issues appear in the Industrial Worker‘s attempt to account for the incredible hemorrhaging of its membership. Trotskyist microcults have the same problem accounting for their inability to retain members. Maybe there’s something to that. The opportunism and craven bigotry to which the Australian Regional Organising Committee degenerated in purging of members in Australia has firmly embedded identitarian chauvanism on the Australian left. If this helps to explain why respectable leftists here are as incapable of slowing our descent into authoritarianism and fascism as in the land where the IWW was born, maybe it also helps to explain what people who do actually come into contact with the IWW find so conspiculously alienating.
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