Wobblies! and Strike! :
Two Labor Histories from an Ultra-Left perspective
[Note: This is not a proper critical review in the academic
sense, but more a collection of elements I found interesting and important
from these two books regarding workers’ self management outside the
usual avenues.]
Brecher, Jeremy. _Strike!_ San Francisco, Straight Arrow
Books, 1972
Buhle, Paul, and Nicole Schulman editors. _Wobblies!:
A Graphic History of
the Industrial Workers of the World_. New
York, Verso, 2005.
What are the “rights” of
workers, and what role have spontaneous mass uprisings and grass roots workers’
movements played in labor history over the past century? These two books describe
and, more so in the case of _Strike!_, analyze workers’ movements in
the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Not only were
these movements struggling against capitalist owners and bosses, they were
quite often independent of and even in opposition to ostensibly radical parties
and official unions.
_Wobblies!_ uses text and graphic novel representations
to tell
The
history moves from first IWW meeting in 1905 in Chicago, through the
movement’s peak, leading
strikes, and “inventing” the sit down strike, between 1910 and
the end of World War I. Their actions influenced both the U.S. and European
labor scenes (53). The establishment fought back utilizing police repression,
anti-immigrant legislation (immigrants led many IWW strikes), the criminalization
of syndicalist activity, and appeals to patriotism to paint the IWW as “pro-German”
(38). Many Wobblies were deported.
Compared to unions like the American Federation
of Labor (A.F.L.), which was
the most powerful union in the country in the late 19th and early 20th centuries
when the Wobblies were emerging,The IWW was more radical in its willingness
to strike when other unions were not, and its open anti-capitalism, stating in its Constitutional
preamble that “[t]he working class and the employing class have nothing
in common” (18). In this,
the IWW had more in common with the Knights of Labor, who were opposed to
the wage system, but who had been decimated by the first “Red Scare”
following the Haymarket massacre of 1886. The IWW also organized along a much
broader social base than the A.F.L. As opposed to unions which targeted certain
sectors and crafts often favoring
more skilled workers and white workers, the IWW was antiracist, and in the
words of Big Bill Haywood, a charismatic organizer and miner, recruited “every
man that earns his living either by his brain or his muscle” (20).
Before organizing could happen, there were
serious obstacles to overcome. The section on free speech rights serves as
a reminder that while the concept of free speech is often a bourgeois ruse
in which the rich have access to freer speech than anyone else, it nonetheless
had to be fought for at a a heavy price. Wobblies who “soap boxed”,
speaking in the streets to workers, were targeted by authorities and locked
in jail to rot merely for organizing.
Workers faced manipulations by companies,
treating them intentionally as surplus labor, being told to head to certain
cities for "guaranteed jobs" only to find out they were used to
create a labor glut to drive down wages. "Mr. Block" who looks suspiciously
like the inspiration for the "blockheads" in Gumby, is a character
from some old IWW original comics at the back of the collection. He never
does join in solidarity to challenge the bosses, and he is always made a chump
for it, losing what he thought he would gain by being an isolated individual
only out for himself, being chased out of town at the business end of a cop’s
billy club (286).
There is also material on the influence the
Wobblies continue to have to the present day. Former Wobbly Joe Brundage ran
his “College of Complexes” bar which was a center of free speech
from 1951-1961, bringing together disparate
elements of the Left and working class including beatniks, feminists, Anarchists
and Communists (233-34). In the 1960s movements like Students For a Democratic
Society pushed for a break from Trotskyist and Old Left ideology, favoring
participatory democracy and an organizing “from below” that was
in many ways an echo of the Wobblies’ stances. In fact, many SDS members
sported IWW buttons on their lapels (243). Also in the 60s, there was an infusion
of youth into the IWW, many of the new members being centered around a chicago
radical magazine called the “Rebel Worker”. They wrote about everything
from Revolution to pop culture, printed classics of revolutionary theory that
were long neglected, and were also active in the Civil Rights Movement and
organizing “at the point of production (238-239). In the Twenty-First
century, IWW have organized Starbucks workers, “where the mainstream
labor movement had given up trying” (244). The last sections of the
book elaborate the many ways that Wobbly history and tactics can and should
inform today’s labor struggles, even as the terrain has changed.
Like _Wobblies!_, Jeremy Brecher's _Strike!_
is a mostly ultra-Left elaboration of workers' uprisings in the United States.
Brecher, despite his preference for antiauthoritarian and direct democratic
action, maintains an even hand, treating all who strove for labor rights and
power for workers with respectful portrayals, from Communist party leaders involved
in organizing, to mainstream union organizers, to anarchists and others. But
he does show a consistent pattern of mainstream union collaboration with management,
and provides some analysis on why that inevitably happens, as well as clarifying
the limited role of radical parties and organizations in actually instigating
worker uprisings and resistance, as opposed to having a militance that coincided
with that of other workers (177,257).
The first section of the book takes the reader from the 1877 series of strikes known as the
"Great Upheaval", mainly centered around the rail road industry,
which was the key industry in the U.S. at the time, through late 19th and
early 20th century strikes. These include the Homestead strike of the Carnegie
Steel Works, and the take over of the city of Seattle by workers in 1919,
and many others proceeding through the World War II period, ending with the
early 1970s. (I don't have the updated edition.) The World War II period actually
saw a huge amount of strikes during and in the immediate aftermath of the
war, despite government/industry/union collaboration to "discipline"
labor and keep war production steady. In 1944, there were “more strikes
than in any previous year in American history” (224). The strike wave
extended after the end of the war. Despite the massive postwar strike wave,
unions served as a mediating force between labor and management, often stepping
in to lead strikes, and thereby lessening the impact of confrontations between
workers, and industry and government.
Brecher makes a few things clear about the
nature of workers' struggles and strikes. First, strikes are often carried
out without the approval of the unions, as with the wave of sit down strikes
in 1936-37, which the C.I.O. attempted to dismantle, and as with the "quickie"
strike waves during World War II, which were often wildcat strikes due to
the unions' promises not to strike or disrupt the war effort. Brecher explains
that “[s]ince 1877, the trade union leadership as a whole has recognized
the mass strike process and consciously opposed it...” (257).
Secondly, Communist and radical leaders did
not often instigate direct action or wild cat strikes, and when the members
of their organizations did participate it was because their direct interests
coincided with other workers in a given situation. Brecher goes so far as
to say that "radical parties and organizations whose self-proclaimed
goal [was] not just marginal improvements but a different kind of society..."
such as "Communists, Socialists, Trotskyists...Socialist Labor and other
parties as well as their members in the A.F.L., C.I.O. and other duelist trade
unions...had little significance in instigating the mass struggles" described
in his book. And when radical leaders did get organizational control over
unions "the unions have operated within the framework of orderly collective
bargaining like any others." (259). Brecher explains that during World
War II the "unions with Communist leadership carried this policy [of
disallowing strikes] the furthest" quoting a Business Week article
which saw these unions as "the most vigorous proponents of labor-management
cooperation," and having " the best no-strike record of any section
of organized labor" (221).
Brecher postulates that Mass Strikes have
not gone over into revolution in the U.S. for the two main reasons: "While
the conditions under which a mass strike develops revolutionary goals are
not completely clear, the weakening of the apparatus of repression and the
lack of a margin for making concessions seem to be most important." (As
of the 1973 edition) corporations could afford to pay concessions to the workers
which undermine revolutionary goals and solidarity. The police army and guard
remain strong and loyal in the U.S. But he sees a third reason in "a
lack of appreciation of their own potential power" by the workers, who
"have always assumed that at the end of any strike, no matter how large
or powerful, they would always go back to work for somebody else." This
was due to lifelong conditioning that the workers would be unfit to manage
their own lives
and would always need managers over them. This is a "division
of labor" not just between different types of specialists, but between
"those who decide and those whom they order to carry out their decision."
These feelings are bolstered by the reality of economic dependence on employers.
(258-260)
I must say it is counterintuitive that Haymarket
Books, run by the Vanguardist,Trotskyist/Leninist International Socialist
Organization (ISO), would offer this classic, and largely more libertarian
socialist labor history, on their website with high praise. Brecher is clearly
antiauthoritarian, and anti-Bolshevik, stating that Lenin and the Bolshevik
party opposed "workers' control" over industry, instead aiming at
setting up control centralized in the Party itself, with the aim of State
Capitalism. He quotes Lenin, who said that "Socialism is nothing else
than a capitalistic State monopoly worked in the interest of the whole nation
and therefore no longer a capitalist monopoly." Brecher also outlines
how the Bolsheviks undermined the power of the Factory Committees, run by
workers, by creating the All-Russia Council of Workers' Control," a top
down organization run by the Bolshevik Party, and how, in yet another example
of union collaboration with elites against workers, the Bolsheviks used the
unions to attack the Factory Committees {296-297). Imagine an ISO member elaborating
such a position! Brecher cares about such subject matter, because he is interested
in elaborating the regressive effects of the State, parties, ostensibly radical
vanguards, and mainstream unions on workers movements.
The two books make clear, through example
upon example, the connection between the State, with its police, army, and
national guard apparatus, and business elites, and unfortunately, also with
unions who in an effort to maintain their existence often become the police
for the corporations "disciplining" workers against strikes and
resistance. The myth that the "law and order" of the State is for
Comrade Motopu
August, 2006