Introduction: The Revolutionary Enterprise
Every revolutionary group must decide either to work within the system it seeks to overthrow or to abandon the morals and institutions of the system for new forms that will not only achieve the revolution but foreshadow the new society. American history is replete with groups which faced this dilemma with courage and thought, including the Puritans, the antebellum utopians, the Populists, and the New Left. Between 1905 and 1913 the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the Socialist Labor party (SLP), and the Socialist party (SP) debated this issue. The two socialist parties largely opted to work within the parameters established by the existing order, while the IWW adopted the strategy of "forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old" in the course of the struggle to overthrow capitalism. The three groups found, as did previous and subsequent attempts to radically transform American society, that neither approach worked; after brief periods of vitality all three groups joined the forbiddingly long honor roll of wrecked or debilitated American revolutionary organizations.
The IWW defined its identity as a revolutionary alternative to conventional politics, a genuine counterculture, in the course of its struggles not only against capitalism, but with the two socialist parties.[i] The founders of the IWW envisioned a revolutionary industrial union that would eventually participate in electoral politics in a fashion similar to the socialist-led unions in Europe. The IWW inexorably drifted towards an anti-political stance partly because of its hostile encounters with the political socialists, but even more fundamentally because of the organic unfolding of the consequences of its own premises. The IWW's splits with the SLP in 1908 and the SP in 1913 only culminated the process of estrangement that began at the founding of the IWW in 1905. Far from being the result of personality clashes or misunderstandings, as some participants and historians have claimed, these splits were instead a belated recognition of the irreconciliable differences between two philosophies of social revolution.[ii]
Between 1905 and 1913 the controversy proceeded in three stages. From the founding convention in 1905 through the fourth convention in 1908, the IWW struggled to free itself from the suffocating embrace of the SLP and from efforts by individual SP members to use the IWW for partisan gain. Many SP members voluntarily left the IWW in 1906, after the second convention, as a consequence of a major split not directly concerned with political or party issues. The fourth convention ejected Daniel De Leon, the SLP's leader, and repudiated all alliances with political parties. During the second stage, from October 1908 until late 1911, a unified IWW elaborated its distinctive countercultural ideology. The third stage began in November 1911, when William Haywood announced his candidacy for the Socialist party's National Executive Committee (NEC), and ended with his recall from that body in February 1913. During this time the SP and the IWW debated the relative efficacy of political activity and direct action as mechanisms for achieving socialism. In this controversy over the legitimacy of conventional morality, the advisability of violating the law, and the acceptability of sabotage and violence, the relative merits of working within the system and of forging a revolutionary counterculture became apparent. The intellectual history of this debate tells us much about the general problems faced by socialist movements throughout the world by making explicit one of their universal and most intractible dilemmas.
This history also illuminates specific American conditions, which differed from those in Europe in several key respects. Both the political socialist movement and the labor movement were much weaker in the United States than in most of Western Europe. Moreover, the labor movement was much more conservative; the AFL was marked by racism and craft exclusiveness, and although it contained many socialists, its leadership hated all forms of socialism. Finally, the tiny American socialist movement was divided into two hostile parties. All of these factors militated against the alliance between a united political socialist movement and a united labor movement which seemed so natural in Europe.
When the IWW was founded in 1905, it confronted a situation unparalled in Europe, stemming from past interactions between the socialist and labor movements. In 1895 the SLP, disgusted by the conservatism of the rising AFL and the decrepit Knights of Labor, launched the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance (STLA), a revolutionary national labor organization committed to socialist politics. The STLA's overt plan to supplant the AFL and the Knights of Labor made the organized working class and its leaders suspicious of socialism and implacably hostile to any party meddling in union affairs; the STLA's disruption of the labor movement also helped make "dual unionism" the one unforgivable sin in the eyes of organized labor. Nevertheless, the STLA briefly prospered, attracting recruits and winning a few strikes.
In 1898, however, Daniel De Leon, the unofficial head of the SLP, fearing the union's political laxity and growing independence, tightened party control, expelled many locals, and purged the SLP of members who backed the STLA's genuine trade unionists. These actions effectively destroyed the STLA and split and decimated the SLP. They also gave rise to the Socialist party, which eschewed dual unionism (meaning, in practice, that it worked within the AFL), adhered to a policy of noninterference in union affairs, and pledged to support workers in all their struggles. The SLP's attempt to create a revolutionary union subordinate to the party thus poisoned socialist relations with organized labor even as it destroyed both the party and its revolutionary union. The IWW, which hoped to work with members of both socialist parties, attract organized workers, and organize the unorganized, learned from this debacle. At the Founding Convention in 1905 Daniel De Leon shook hands with Eugene Debs, one of the founders and leaders of the rival SP, "across the bloody chasm" of their past disagreements.[iii]
CHAPTER ONE: THE IWW AND THE SOCIALIST LABOR PARTY
The effort to define the IWW's relationship to the rival socialist parties consumed most of the IWW's energies for the first years of its existence, and the resolution of that problem helped chart the IWW's future course. The seeds of controversy were inherent in a central tension in the purposes and philosophy of the IWW's founders. This in turn resulted from an underlying ideological ambiguity in Marxism, the inherent difficulties of mixing unionism with revolutionary politics, and the unique difficulties confronting the American radical enterprise.
The Founding Convention Debates Political Action
The IWW was conceived by political socialists who envisioned revolutionary industrial unionism as a necessary supplement to electoral politics. The letter of invitation to a preliminary meeting in Chicago coupled the twin evils of "craft division and political ignorance," advocated organization "on both industrial and political lines," and asserted that "the Socialist ballot, in order to be sound, must have its economic counterpart in a labor organization builded as the structure of Socialist society." Yet the Industrial Union Manifesto issued by that preliminary meeting subtly shifted this emphasis; while reiterating that "craft divisions foster political ignorance among the workers, thus dividing their class at the ballot box, as well as in the shop, mine, and factory," it asserted that the IWW should constitute "the economic organization of the working class, without affiliation with any political party."[iv] The political language is probably attributable to the Western Federation of Miners, a major power in the formation of the IWW, which advocated working-class unity both on the job and at the ballot box. But the WFM consistently supported a political party--the SP.
This ambiguity remained in the Preamble to the IWW's constitution: "The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. . . . Between these two classes a struggle must go on until all the toilers come together on the political as well as the industrial field, and take and hold that which they produce by their labor, through an economic organization of the working class, without affiliation with any political party." Such language raises an immediate question of how a union can fight political ignorance and division if it is not committed to a specific party. Castigated by one delegate as "contradictory and confusing" and by another as "a toadyism to three different factions in this convention," the political clause of the Preamble opened a wide-ranging discussion of the relative efficacy of political and direct action, and of the legitimacy of the bourgeois state and its laws, that continued throughout the founding convention.[v] This controversy--based partly on the endemic perils of combining unionism and politics, partly on the historically contingent existence of rival socialist parties in the United States, and partly on fundamental ideological differences--fostered internal divisions within the IWW and conflict with both socialist parties. The resolution of this controversy helped shape the ideology of IWW.
The delegates approved the political clause partly because it covered a variety of incompatible meanings, partly because of their belief that economic struggle ultimately entailed political action, and partly because most delegates wanted the workers to use every weapon at their disposal, including political action outside the auspices of the IWW. As Algie Simons, a prominent member of the Socialist party (and who soon deserted the IWW) put it, "I want to see that the proletariat of America . . . stands ready to grasp the ballot, the strike, the bullet if it should be that we are driven to it." The convention even refused to censure those accepting nominations from capitalist parties, on the grounds that the IWW had no right to interfere in the political activities of its members. The IWW wanted to refute AFL accusations that it was a political organization rather than a labor union; it was not yet accused of being anti-political.[vi]
The debate on the political clause nevertheless revealed scattered hostility to political action. Various delegates averred that politicians inevitably betrayed the working class; that the capitalists were disfranchising masses of workers and fraudulently refused to count socialist ballots; that labor legislation was routinely violated by the capitalists and invalidated by the courts; and that electioneering distracted workers from more fundamental economic struggles. Yet the most influential delegates supported the political clause of the Preamble as following from the Marxist doctrine of economic determinism. Most Wobblies believed that the state was a reflection of property relations and therefore subordinate to economic power. Those who controlled the resources necessary for human survival were masters of the whole of society, including the government. Debs was convinced that because economic conditions generated political consequences, a proper revolutionary union movement would result in a single union and a single working-class party, "the one the economic expression, the other the political expression of the working class; the two halves that represent the organic whole of the labor movement." De Leon asserted that a mature revolutionary union would generate its own political reflex or shadow, which would come later and more or less automatically; Haywood agreed that "just as surely as the sun rises, when you get the working class organized economically it will find its proper reflection at the polls."[vii]
This interpretation of economic determinism thus justified the postponement of political unity until that time when it would inevitably be generated by economic unity. Such a view allowed hostile SLP and SP partisans to work together in the economic struggle, even if it did not explain why, if agreement on economic issues and philosophy inevitably engendered political unanimity, those who presently agreed on economic issues could not reach political accord.[viii] Yet economic determinism could as easily lead to a deemphasis on or even rejection of political action. Why waste time fighting over the political superstructure if the economic base determines everything? Thomas J. Hagerty's emphasis and tone differ from those of De Leon, Debs, and other advocates of political action so greatly as to suggest a change in substance. "If one is rightly to take the sense of comrade De Leon's explanation, a political party can never be anything else but a shadow; and while shadows will do occasionally in vaudeville shows and projected against white canvases, they will never secure the ends that we are after. We are after the substance and will let the shadows take care of themselves. The substance, the whole thing, the thing that we are after, is the tools. We want to get the whole thing, not any shadows. . . . When (the workingmen) are united all the days in the year, and every hour of every day, they will cast the proper shadows at the proper time."[ix] Hagerty, a renegade Catholic priest who largely composed the Industrial Union Manifesto and the original Preamble, argued that all class-conscious economic action was deeply political and extolled the Russian revolutionaries of 1905 as engaged in the most meaningful kind of politics, despite their lack of the ballot.
Although Haywood remained deeply committed to electoral politics until at least 1913, those aspects of his philosophy that later caused his rupture with the Socialist party were already present in 1905. He emphasized that the Western Federation of Miners, a main influence behind the creation of the IWW, had improved the conditions of its members in the teeth of unrelenting opposition from "the militia, the judiciary, the county and the state and municipal officers" and that it won the eight-hour day without "a legislative lobby to accomplish it." Furthermore, "when the working class are sufficiently well organized to control the means of life . . . the ownership of legislatures and senates and militias and police will be of little avail" to the capitalists, because "the army or police that would raise a hand, a club or a gun against a workingman would have to leave this community or starve to death." Finally, he strongly implied--as did other speakers--that workers should violate capitalist law if that proved to be necessary for individual survival or collective advancement.[x]
Haywood was not alone in his beliefs. The idea of the general strike was adumbrated in the Preamble's hope that all "members in any one industry, or in all industries, if necessary" would stop work if any members struck, and the Industrial Union Manifesto hinted at the concept of a revolutionary industrial union that would supplant as well as overthrow the political state. If workers could win meaningful victories at the point of production despite the capitalist state, if control of the government would avail the capitalists nothing at the revolutionary moment, if the union rather than the political state would administer the means of production after the revolution, and if neither capitalists nor workers would obey laws they had the need and power to violate, what would be the significance of electioneering?
De Leon likewise enunciated the ideology which was soon to land him outside the IWW. He had previously stressed the primacy of political action. Now, disillusioned by the quick growth of the rival Socialist party and seeing in the rise of class-conscious unionism an opportunity to revive his moribund Socialist Labor party, he proclaimed the preeminence of the economic struggle and of the revolutionary union over the political party. Yet his need to salvage a central place for his beloved SLP mired him in a web of obfuscation and contradiction. He simultaneously claimed both that "the political expression of labor is but the shadow of the economic organization" and must emanate from it, and that the workers could organize economically only after they had attained political unity. Furthermore, he equated the revolutionary union and strikes with violence, and political agitation with peaceable persuasion, thus giving priority to the latter. "The aspiration to unite the workers upon the political field is in line and in step with civilization. Civilized man . . . begins with arguing; physical force by arms is the last resort."[xi] This positing of a supra-class, universal morality contradicts the Marxist doctrines of economic determinism and the class struggle, even as De Leon's equation of politics with peaceable discussion ignored capitalist terrorism, fraud, and rampant lawbreaking. De Leon's position stemmed partly from a traumatic episode in the history of the SLP: in the 1880s many socialists, disgusted and disillusioned with political action, broke away from the party, advocated armed self-defense, and formed rifle clubs. These anarchists evoked widespread public hysteria, and six were judicially murdered as a result of the Haymarket bombing in 1887, an incident widely credited with setting back the labor movement for a generation. De Leon, remembering this history, equated a rejection of political action with anarchist terrorism, a threat not only to the SLP but to the labor movement itself.
Although De Leon accorded the party priority in time and in moral status, he conceded that the revolutionary union was necessary to "take and hold" the means of production in accordance with IWW goals. The capitalists would never concede a socialist electoral victory, and, in any event, geographical governmental units could not administer industries. The moral right of the ballot, De Leon asserted, must be backed by the physical force might of the industrial union. "There is nothing more silly than Right without Might to back it up. . . . (The capitalists) will never yield until they realize that behind that ballot lies an organized movement, well organized, well disciplined and entirely awakened." Without this, the capitalists would shut down the industries and bully the working class into submission, as they threatened in 1896. As De Leon later said, "Without political organization, the labor movement cannot triumph; without economic organization, the day of its political triumph would be the dy of its defeat."[xii]
De Leon Defines His Position
De Leon's insistence on the necessity of electioneering, his manifest hope that the SLP or a facsimile would carry the banner of IWW politics, and his equation of union activity with violence alienated IWWs who opposed political action, or De Leon's brand of it. To win over such opposition he restated and elaborated his doctrine in The Preamble of the IWW (later retitled The Socialist Reconstruction of Society) and in a long exchange of letters (later published under the title As to Politics in The People, the SLP organ he edited. He also spoke at length at the Third Convention of the IWW in 1907, where the issue of political action was debated at length. De Leon's writings and speeches clearly reveal the problems in his theories.
De Leon's stress on political action does not stem from respect for the capitalist state and its laws. He brands the state a "robber burg", exclusively an instrument of class dominion, and affirms that contracts between unequals--such as those between employers and workers--are null and void. "The whip took the oath, let the whip keep it." Nor does De Leon believe in capturing the governmental apparatus to use it as a revolutionary instrument. The victorious party, in his view, will in its first and only act dissolve the state, devolving all administration to the revolutionary union. De Leon derived this from the doctrine of economic determinism and the Marxian concept of the state as "the executive committee of the ruling class." De Leon further concedes to the opponents of political action that the capitalists will fraudulently deprive the political socialists of their electoral victory and will probably initiate violence even before that victory. The revolutionary union, in theory only backing up the ballot, will therefore make the revolution as well as administer the socialized industries. De Leon soon abandoned his belief in the primacy of the party, and proclaimed the chronological and well as revolutionary priority of the revolutionary union. At the Third Convention he quoted Marx as saying "that only the economic organization can set afoot the political movement of labor" and asserted that "when the day shall come [the IWW] shall itself project its own political party."[xiii]
What function would the party have in this scenario? De Leon said that peaceful political agitation would provide a legal shield to protect the "physical force" union as it drilled and organized itself. The capitalists would hesitate to resort to violence against political opponents, whereas they use it freely against the unions; political activity thus enables revolutionists to preach to the masses. De Leon claimed that the capitalists fear working-class political action because "if we place ourselves upon that plane of civilization, of a theoretical peaceful solution, we can demand anything we want, whereas if you do not put yourself on that plane then they can do whatever they choose." De Leon even claimed that "the vote is not the essential part"; the issue was anarchism versus legal methods. Most workers, he claimed, fervently believe in the legitimacy of the government and the efficacy of political action, and consider opponents of politics as "freaks." De Leon claimed that if the WFM and the IWW had repudiated political action, the government would have hanged Haywood in 1907 in connection with the murder of Idaho's ex-governor Steunenberg. And indeed, De Leon could have used Haywood's testimony in the Steunenberg murder trial as evidence for his assertions. Although Haywood had spoken skeptically of political action at the IWW's founding convention, and attributed the WFM's gains to union activity rather than politics, at his trial he extolled the legislative and electoral activities of the WFM, asserted (correctly) that the WFM aimed "to organize its members industrially and unite them politically," and claimed (more dubiously) that "we have made fair progress" in winning desired legislation.[xiv]
De Leon's equation of union activity with violence, and his assumption that for the IWW to adopt a nonpolitical stance would be tantamount to rejecting politics, led him to his assertion that any tampering with the Preamble's political clause would transform the IWW into a conspiratorial and terroristic group. "The rejection of political action would throw the IWW back upon the methods of barbarism--physical force exclusively." De Leon opposed this partly because he believed the values of civilization to be absolutes, "conquests that the human race have wrung from the clutches of the ruling class," which enable us "to do what we are doing here today, talking, although we may disagree, peacefully, without jumping at one another's throats." De Leon also feared that a conspiratorial cabal would deprive the masses of necessary knowledge, exclude them from effective participation in their revolution, and open the door to provocateurs. If the labor movement repudiated the open methods of political action, De Leon asserted, "I will have to go then into rat holes and carry on my propaganda; and keep this in mind, the labor movement is one that takes in the masses and the masses cannot be addressed in rat holes" but must be reached "in the open" and "the sun of the twentieth century civilization." Terrorism, in addition to being undemocratic, would evoke savage retaliation from the capitalist state. Most of these arguments would find echo by SP leaders during the IWW's controversy with that party in 1911-1913.[xv]
De Leon's opponents effectively answered these arguments. They pointed out that the IWW could and did agitate peacefully in all the ways a political party could; that a party that had no hope or intention of taking office was really only a propaganda league; that politicking would delude the masses into belief in a political solution that De Leon himself thought chimerical; that revolutionary agitation was most effective at the point of exploitation; and that the capitalists would use violence as readily against a successful party as against a threatening union. The IWW did not need a political adjunct, because the union would make the revolution and administer the country. Critics wondered how a political shield would protect a union that could not protect itself and scorned De Leon's idea that the extant capitalist order was in any way civilized or based upon peaceful discussion and consent.[xvi]
De Leon's convoluted ideology was partly a device to accord primacy to his political party after he had accepted a thesis that logically relegated it to the background. His equation of direct union action with violence cannot be accounted for on any other basis; political power and government are based on force and violence more than the most revolutionary union activity. De Leon's assertion that the IWW's peaceful agitation would be impossible if the political clause were removed from the Preamble and that a "correct political posture" was necessary "for the very existence" of the IWW was bizarre, if portentious.[xvii]
The long exchange of views in The People hardened positions on both sides. Most of the letters which De Leon printed argued against political action entirely, whereas many prominent IWWs believed in political action outside the auspices of the IWW. The absence of any letters arguing this latter position enabled De Leon falsely to brand his opponents as anti-political. While most participants argued that the IWW could agitate peacefully, some followed De Leon's own assumptions about capitalist resistance and fraud to their logical conclusion and propounded armed revolution as the only solution. Arturo Giovannitti, a revolutionary poet later famous for his role in the Lawrence strike, was particularly emphatic on this point, advocating "collective, organized violence . . . not a riotous outbreak, but a good and proper civil war." A truly revolutionary organization "can not and must not employ legal and lawful methods, neither can it hope in a peaceful solution, as the simple fact that a class is revolutionary implies that it is outlaw. . . . Why should we speak to the working class of a peaceful settlement when probably not ONE of the SLP members believes in it?"[xviii] Although Giovannitti's vision did not differ much from De Leon's own scenario, it sounded more apocalyptic, thus making De Leon's equation of a nonpolitical stance with dynamite seem plausible. Even more divisive than the theoretical dispute was De Leon's clear expectation that the SLP would be anointed as the IWW's political reflex. Many IWWs adamantly opposed this.
The majority of Wobblies agreed with De Leon that some form of political action was essential. The second IWW convention, in 1906, voted against a proposal to delete the political clause from the Preamble. Yet many delegates interpreted political action in a very broad sense that did not imply electoral activity. De Leon himself, in a startling and insincere outburst, proclaimed: "I for one hold that politics is not worth going across the street for by an economic organization such as the IWW. . . . It impedes the unification of the working class. That political unity that we aim at cannot be brought about now by having this organization take sides with this, that or the other political party. That political unity can only be the result of this organization keeping its hands off the squabbles between political parties, and then let itself be built so strongly that it compels a unification of political views and political methods." In this spirit the delegates added a clause to the Preamble forbidding the IWW to endorse or to seek the endorsement of any political party. The IWW thus paradoxically advocated working-class unity on the political field while explicitly refusing to endorse any existing political party--a stance which opponents condemned as ludicrous, incomprehensible, and contradictory. Taking its neutrality stance to an extreme, the convention unanimously censured a Denver local for endorsing the campaign of one of the IWW's most beloved and prominent members, Big Bill Haywood, then running for governor of Colorado while incarcerated awaiting trial in one of labor's causes celebres, the Steunenberg murder show trial. Perhaps in repudiation of the AFL's "no politics in the union" stance, however, the convention somewhat inconsistently recommended that every local devote at least ten minutes of every meeting to a discussion of economic and political issues.[xix]
The IWW's activities at the International Labor Congress at Stuttgart, Germany, in August 1907 revealed that the political actionists firmly controlled the IWW. Fred Heslewood, representing the IWW, and Daniel De Leon, representing the SLP, told the Congress that "unity on the political field.... can only be achieved and demonstrated when the solidarity on the economic battle ground is assured." The IWW, they averred, "will measure swords also on the political arena, as soon as a true political reflex of working class solidarity is established." The IWW is presently "at work preparing the necessary groundwork upon which will be builded a true political expression of the aims, aspirations, and wishes of the working class, and through which capitalist government will pass out of existence and the workers' republic be established." The delegates, echoing a common IWW themes of this era, denounced the AFL on the grounds that, by dividing the workers into competing craft unions at the point of production, it rendered political divisions inevitable. Heslewood doubted whether workers who scabbed on each other 364 days a year could unite on election day and vote in the Socialist commonwealth.[xx]
The majority at the Stuttgart Congress, however, endorsed the SPD's dual arm theory which accorded equal importance to the unions and the party. The SPD, by far the largest Socialist party in the world, had founded the German labor movement, including the most important unions (most of which were organized by craft), and firmly endorsed the electoral path to Socialism. The SPD and the majority it commanded at Stuttgart would not countenance a philosophy which privileged a revolutionary industrial union over the political party of Socialism. De Leon, analyzing the Congress after its conclusion, asserted that the United States, as "the leading capitalist nation--economically, politically, mentally, morally, and sociologically"--would show the world the way to the Socialist commonwealth. Such an assertion, coming from the leader of a tiny splinter sect, would have seemed ludicrous to the seasoned and powerful leaders of the SPD.[xxi]
The third IWW convention, in 1907, debated the Preamble's political clause at some length. Delegate Axelson averred that the working class need unite only once, at the point of production; if the IWW divided working-class insurgency into two arms, why not add more arms, such as the religious field? Axelson repudiated the epithet "physical force anarchist" as inappropriate; "education is thoroughly civilized," as much so as electioneering, and industrial organization, unlike politicking, can include the entire working class, and mobilize them permanently, not only sporadically at election time. A political machine would ruin the IWW because it, like the capitalist parties, would be controlled by "the shyster lawyer and the rest of the bunch that are only the lackeys of the capitalist class." Socialists disagree on almost everything, and cannot possibly unify an economic movement; if the IWW strikes the political clause, it would "talk strictly industrial unionism."[xxii]
Delegate Foote, also opposed the political clause. In a significant argument, he asserted that the IWW was necessarily political in the sense that it was a self-governing, structured organization which would conquer and administer the industries; "upon the taking and holding of industry it must assume the functions of ownership and control." The working class would not require a government in the traditional sense of a territorially-organized instrument of class oppression, but it "will have an industrial administration and that administration must be political in the sense that it is controlled by the ballot on the inside of your own organization." Industrial organization superceded both the political ballot and the bomb, and was primarily constructive. The IWW contains "within itself all the essential qualities that are good for the working class" and will legislate on the factory floor. Foote cited the example of a Kansas law regulating the size of a loaf of bread, which went unobserved until Foote's union enforced it in the bakery where they worked by threatening a strike. In the bakery "we enforced our law and that is the basis for political action as I understand it." For too many revolutionists "revolution has not been in the domain of industry but in our own heads," in mindless and ineffectual blather on the soap-box. For the capitalists, the ballot box "is an actual fact, an actual condition by which the capitalist class control their affairs in their domination of us," but for the workers it was a chimera.[xxiii]
Although Foote advocated elimination or explication of the political clause, Delegate Hagenson adduced similar considerations in favor of the political clause. "The minute we assemble here to make any rules, and enforce them, we are acting in politics," as the IWW does when it legislates on the shop floor. "We are a political organization. We are constructing rules governing ourselves, and governing society." Delegate Delaney, however, pointed out that the workers interpreted the Preamble's mention of the ballot as referring to electoral politics; if the IWW did not mean that, the Preamble misled the workers. Delegate Levoy responded that the political clause was an indispensable aid in organizing the workers, whose respect for the ballot "is inborn in them. They have lived in it. It is educated in them every day and every hour. We cannot reach them without that. We cannot talk to them at all." Delegates on both sides averred that retaining or eliminating the political clause would confuse and alienate the workers, and replied, to the assertions of the other side, that the IWW must proclaim the truth and educate the workers, no matter how arduous that task may prove.[xxiv]
De Leon, his SLP stalwart Rudolph Katz, and many other delegates supported retention of the political clause, and won by a resounding vote of 113-13. But the debate flared up again when dissidents proposed that the IWW issue an official statement interpreting the clause in the industrial and administrative sense favored by Axelson and Foote. Outraged advocates of the political clause complained that the defeated delegates were merely trying to reopen the issue by a subterfuge, and easily defeated the motion 104-24. During the discussion of the IWW press and literature Delegate Glover motioned that the editor of the Industrial Union Bulletin should not print articles "treating of politics and political expressions at the capitalist ballot box" without setting forth the IWW's official position of neutrality. De Leon objected to the phrase "capitalist ballot box," and the convention eventually tabled the motion.[xxv]
Yet many Wobblies, basing their stance on economic determinism, disputed De Leon's belief that political action was equal in importance to economic organization. These members intensely distrusted political parties as composed largely of self-aggrandizing middle-class "leaders" who were led to the working class by their quest for personal power. They claimed that the workers must achieve their own revolution without the debilitating "help" of such outsiders and saw in a revolutionary union composed exclusively of proletarians the only safe repository of working-class power. W.F. Loquist wrote the Industrial Union Bulletin that political organization is "the organized power of one class to suppress another class" and that "The IWW is the political field for the working class, and the capitalist organization, the government, is the political field for the capitalist." Yet the proponents of political action effectively countered these arguments. Samuel L. Brooks, in a prominent front-page article in the Bulletin, agreed that "no amount of study can balance the loss of actual proletarian experience which is vital to all intelligent working class revolutionary action.... A working class movement that must be initiated, guided, and financed by the middle class is simply a farce." The IWW could avoid this pitfall if it eschewed all existing political parties and, at some future date, founded its own. Because the IWW accepted only wage earners as members, its political expression would naturally exclude all middle-class meddlers and reformers and remain an authentic form of proletarian self-expression.[xxvi]
The official stance of the IWW, therefore, remained staunchly, if indefinitely, political. Major pamphlets and articles in the Industrial Union Bulletin consistently touted the advantages of (eventual) political activity. Robert Rives La Monte claimed that a large socialist vote would intimidate the capitalists, and thus moderate their ferocious attacks on the most militant unions. Other writers reiterated that the IWW would contain within itself every instrument that the working class required to free itself from wage slavery and class oppression. William Trautmann, an SLP stalwart, admitted that the political state was of secondary importance compared to the industrial machinery, but insisted that the IWW must take that capitalist outpost before the main citadel would fall. IWW writers attacked the AFL for dividing the workers at the point of production, thus inevitably dividing them at the polls. A major exposition of IWW principles explained that "The pure and simple unions promote political disunity among the workers.... The workers, mentally blinded by the bourgeois principles expounded by their leaders in the unions, bring the same confusion of thought to the political arena, and join themselves to ranks of the various avowed capitalist parties, or to some one or other of the 'Labor' Reform or quasi-socialist parties." The IWW, on the contrary, solidifies class consciousness by its industrial organization, and this class consciousness will express itself in every area of life. Another major article averred that "The guarantee of class-conscious action at the ballot box is the existence of class-consciousness in the mine, mill, factory, and transportation service. If there is no unity and no recognition of class interests where the workers are employed, capitalist politicians can readily succeed in dividing them at the polls. Separated by craft unionism where they work, they are logically the prey of designing politicians where they vote." John Kortan, an SLP leader, said that "this doubly united working class" would "capture the powers of government" and use them for self-emancipation.[xxvii]
Finally, IWW theoreticians hotly denied that political action implied state socialism, which they regarded as a middle-class fantasy of red tape, bureaucracy, and regimentation. The "practical proletarian Socialist" seeks "not to devise some middle class State Socialist nightmare, but to free production and the useful productive section of society from the incubus of a parasitic class. The production of wealth and the producers thereof will not be dominated by men outside and above the process of production, but by the working class themselves, those who are directly engaged in production. The revolutionary working class will not drive out the capitalist in order to saddle themselves with a bureaucracy of State officialdom--the same foe under a new name." The IWW therefore opposed municipal socialism and public ownership of street cars as merely reinforcing the reign of the capitalists by cementing them more firmly with the government, thus enabling them to decrease wages and break strikes with even greater ferocity.[xxviii]
James Connolly, a member of the IWW General Executive Board, expressed the mainstream IWW philosophy in an address in April 1908 which was printed in the IWW's organ, The Industrial Union Bulletin. The workplace, said Connolly, is "the cockpit of civilization"; political battles are not the real fight but only its echo. The IWW could perform for itself any function that a party could perform. Although political action is a necessary adjunct to the economic struggle, the political party of labor should germinate as an organic growth from the revolutionary union rather than arising separately, and therefore should be "the direct expression of the will of the rank and file" and "a weapon of its own forging, and wielded by its own hand." The IWW did not use the institutions of the old order; rather, it was building the industrial republic within the shell of the capitalist system. When the new organization was fully matured and able to assume all necessary industrial and social functions it would "crack the shell of the political state" and supplant it.[xxix]
Although De Leon's expositions on political action won widespred assert within the IWW in the years 1905-1907, another of his central tenants generated more dissent. De Leon believed that strikes must prove futile except insofar as they resulted in socialism; they could not improve the immediate condition of the workers because any rise in wages would be offset by an increase in prices. This contradicted a central tenet of Wobbly ideology. Most IWWs felt that the workers could gradually build power in the shops, mines, and factories, winning genuine concessions that would provide the base for further victories; each successful strike contributed to ultimate revolution. De Leon falsely equated this with Gompers's belief that the workers could secure the full product of their labor by winning incremental concessions, without any revolutionary alteration in the ownership of the means of production. De Leon insisted that the workers would not build upon successive victories when achieving their revolution. They would instead go from defeat to defeat until they mustered the understanding and organization to mount a final and successful assault upon capitalism. This belief, if widespread among Wobbly leaders and members, would have had disastrous consequences for Wobbly morale and its ability to recruit members; it would have reduced the IWW to a band of hard-core fanatics who had no hopes this side of the revolution. De Leon, in fact, inverted the IWW's usual methodology. The IWW recruited all workers, of whatever political party or religion, and revolutionized them after they had entered the union, associated with other workers on the basis of class, acquainted themselves with revolutionary literature, and learned what a revolutionary class organization could do for them. De Leon claimed, on the contrary, that the workers must be indoctrinated before they were recruited into the union rather than being brought in under the "false pretense" that the union could improve their condition. When Wobblies asked how the IWW could recruit all the workers if it erected a political test for membership, and insisted that the IWW must recruit workers regardless of their political beliefs, De Leon replied that the IWW could not unite workers at the point of production if they remained in thrall to political error. "The man who cannot vote right will be everything else wrong," De Leon asserted.[xxx] This philosophy, if adhered to, would have made the IWW little more than the Socialist Trades and Labor Alliance redux.
The IWW Repudiates Political Action
However important these theoretical differences may have been, it was De Leon's attempt to foist SLP control upon the IWW that precipitated the break in 1908. Although occasional complaints were voiced that the SP and unnamed "anti-political sects" were also disrupting the IWW by using it to preach their doctrines, the SLP was the main offender. The controversy erupted in March 1908 when Ben Williams, an IWW organizer, told two SLP audiences that sectarian political wrangling was alienating potential IWW recruits. Williams castigated numerous SLP members for "regarding the IWW as mainly a product of SLP teaching and experience, and therefore requiring to be under the especial tutelage and supervision of the SLP." He said that his experience convinced him that "just in proportion as we adhered strictly to the non-affiliation clause in the Preamble did we gain a hearing and response from the workers."[xxxi]
In addition to emphasizing the non-affiliation over the political clause, Williams asserted that "the laws relating to labor's interests must be made in the shops through the industrial organizations. . . . For the IWW to set up a political party in the ordinary sense would mean confusion and retardation for the movement, to say nothing of the corruption that must surely follow the advent of the adventurous labor politician." Williams redefined political action in terms of the IWW press and lecture bureau, thus excluding a political party for the present. This, he said, was wholly compatible with De Leon's "peaceful solution of the labor question." For good measure he claimed that the industrial union could improve the condition of its members and concluded that the IWW should "insist on controlling itself and its own meetings without dictation or interference from outside organizations or individuals."[xxxii]
De Leon was present at the second Williams speech and villified it as "pure and simple physical force. . . . a veiled dynamitism" and closet anarchism. The IWW would "read itself out of the pale of civilization ... if it rejected the ballot," whereupon all SLP members would depart. Denying that the SLP dictated to the IWW, De Leon asserted that when the IWW did generate its own political reflex "that party would contain every one of the principles of the SLP." In a related and ominous development, The Weekly People praised the U.S. post office for barring an anarchist pamphlet from the mails. If indeed the pamphlet advocated violence, the post office in banning it "did the working class a great service thereby. The working class . . . can not keep its skirts too clear of the propaganda of physical force only. . . . The Post Office . . . has aided the Social Revolution better than it knew." The implication was clear: if the IWW deleted the Preamble's political clause, the government would be justified in suppressing it. Indeed, one of De Leon's supporters had, at the third convention, dramatically asserted that if the IWWA excised the political clause from its Preamble, "the capitalist classes and their hirelings will be justified in setting us in the electric chair, turning the current on and putting us out of existence" because the IWW would have become an anarchist organization based on physical force.[xxxiii]
The Industrial Union Bulletin had traditionally remained open to various points of view and had generally espoused political views close to De Leon's. Yet it prominently featured the full text of Williams's speech, denied that the IWW repudiated the political vote, and censured De Leon (though not by name) as indulging in "perverted controversy" and "recklessly playing with language." Later it attacked him for joining the capitalists in slandering the IWW. On 18 April The Bulletin insisted on the primacy of economic action and the necessity of IWW self-government while adding that "we do not thereby deny the utility of political action in its proper time." It also gave first-page coverage to Justus Ebert's letter of resignation from the SLP. Ebert, a prominent Wobbly organizer and publicist, proclaimed that "we leave a dying political party without hope of resuscitation for a live economic organization with promises of growth," charged that SLP members "prefer domination or destruction to democracy and development," and predicted that the IWW would go the way of the STLA "if it permits an external political body to dominate its politics." The Bulletin warned against members who "wish to use [the IWW] to serve some other organization of which he is also a member," insisted that the IWW "HAS NO POLITICAL PARTY TEST FOR MEMBERSHIP" and repudiated those who lay down such tests "which the organization itself has not formulated and does not contemplate."[xxxiv]
The Bulletin also pointed out that revolutionary unionism implied organization, industrial government, and majority rule, all anathema to anarchists. "The dynamite most needed in the labor movement of America is compounded of ideas. . . . The revolution means, for us, education, organization, discipline--in a word, preparation." Premature revolt would be calamitous. In a short notice with obvious implications for De Leon, The Bulletin savaged The Chicago Tribune for siccing the authorities on the Italian Socialist Federation's La Propaganda on the grounds that La Propaganda was an anarchist sheet: the Chicago paper placed itself "almost on a level with the Goldfield advocate of assassination" of socialists.[xxxv]
De Leon's characterization of his opponents as anarchists (he also accused Connolly of being a police spy) made no sense. If the IWW retained its political clause but deferred political affiliation to the future, as many IWWs advocated, did that make it an anarchist organization in the interim? De Leon could hardly claim that the political clause alone, without any practical party work, changed the essential nature of the IWW; yet all agreed, at least in theory, that the IWW should eschew political affiliation until its industrial organization was well developed. In fact, however, De Leon and the SLP acted as if the IWW were an SLP reflex, thus making conflict inevitable. Conditions were thus ripe for the split in 1908, at the fourth annual IWW convention.
De Leon and the SLP were the main issue at the Fourth Convention only because the IWW had long since broken with the SP. Although many members of the SP helped found the IWW at the first convention, the IWW's relations with the SP had long since deteriorated. The ouster of President Charles Sherman at the second convention in 1906 alienated many SP members. Sherman was a personally corrupt careerist and opportunist, who had affiliated with the IWW only because of a personal feud with the AFL, rather than from any fundamental disagreement with conservative craft unionism. Yet his removal embroiled the IWW in a long and bitter faction fight. When Sherman forcibly seized the assets, membership lists, and office of the IWW, he precipitated a battle ultimately resolved (in favor of the IWW) by the capitalist courts. While this incident did not concern electoral politics, many SP members favored Sherman and were displeased by his ouster and the ensuring acrimony. This episode also precipitated a long and bitter faction fight within the WFM, further alienating SP members who feared that the IWW spelled disruption for the labor movement. The spectacular trial of Haywood on the charge of murdering Steunenberg ended in acquittal, but further associated the IWW in the public mind with violence and disorder. Even Eugene Debs, a strong supporter of industrial unionism, complained that the enthusiasm of some SP members for the IWW was detracting from their party activities; some SP members apparently regarded the IWW as an alternative, rather than a supplement, to the SP.[xxxvi]
The IWW also spent much of its first year trying to wean existing AFL affiliates (especially mine and brewery workers) away from the AFL, rather than organizing the unorganized. The IWW bitterly attacked the AFL and those SP members who sided with it as not only mistaken but as criminals and deliberate betrayers of the working class. As early as 1905, William Trautmann, then affiliated with the SLP and the IWW, said that "the craft organizations of labor, led by capitalist lieutenants, mistakenly called unions, are the most formidable instruments for the protection of capitalist interests.... The cheating of one group of workers by another, to the benefit of the exploiters, destroying also all sense and feeling of solidarity, is the supreme function of a labor union movement." The AFL responded by expelling Wobblies from AFL unions (which cost them their jobs in closed-shop factories) and from local labor councils. AFL members sometimes refused to work with Wobblies, demanded that capitalists fire them, and struck to force such discharge. AFL unions also recruited scabs to destroy IWW strikes (replicating the AFL's practice of breaking many AFL strikes) and boycotted the products of IWW shops. On two occasions IWW members actually walked out with AFL members who were demanding the firing of those very Wobblies; while on strike, they convinced the AFL members to call off their hate strike. Yet the IWW was also accused of scabbing during AFL strikes until it explicitly prohibited its members from working during any strikes, even those of the hostile AFL. All this, however, confirmed the fears of SP members who worried that the IWW would further divide, rather than unite, the American working class.[xxxvii]
The International Labor Congress at Stuttgart in 1907 further inflamed IWW hostility towards the SP. Morris Hillquit, a top SP leader and delegate to Stuttgart, prepared a report for the Congress which brutally slandered the IWW; when proven wrong, he lamely claimed that he had written an amended report which he had left at home in New York. The SP delegation accepted a delegate from the bogus and non-existant "Sherman faction" of the IWW, thus forcing the IWW's delegate, Fred Heslewood, to join the SLP delegation. Heslewood attacked the SP delegation as "representatives of reactionary, capitalist unionism, although sailing under the name of political party Socialists" and as "emissaries of a corrupted, decaying pure and simple union movement of America, and its political reflex." He further denounced the SP as for having "endorsed resolutions condemning the Japanese and asking for their exclusion from America." In their resolution of the relationship of the unions to the socialist parties, Heslewood and De Leon said that "neutrality towards trade unionism on the part of a political party of Socialism is equivilent to a neutrality towards the machinations of the capitalist class." The 1908 SP Convention, which met before that of the IWW, refused to endorse the IWW or industrial unionism, waffled on immigration restriction, and pronounced a penalty of expulsion upon any member who did not believe in "political action as a weapon of the working class."[xxxviii]
The Fourth Convention's debate over political action, therefore, primarily concerned the SLP. A coalition of IWW leaders and Western migrant workers--John Walsh's famous hobo "overall brigade," which rode the rails to Chicago--were determined to expunge De Leon and sectarian bickering from the IWW. William Trautmann, the IWW's executive officer, in his report to the convention, reiterated the primacy of economic struggle, warned against "the disease of political schemery, injected by the elements of disruption and fraud," and charged that strikes had been sabotaged and members alienated by organizers whose first loyalty was to the SLP rather than the IWW. Trautmann defined the issue as the IWW's right to function "without the interference and self-assumed guardianship of any political party and its functionaries." He did not oppose "other weapons than on the industrial field" but said that "the political organizations should be allowed to pursue their own course without interference on the part of the Industrial Workers of the World, and likewise should any interference by political parties in the supreme functions and essential duties of the economic organization be rejected."[xxxix]
De Leon's opponents moved to exclude him from the convention on the grounds that he was not a member of the proper local (having been notified of this fact in time to transfer). In addition, he had never attended a meeting of the local to which he did belong until the one that elected its delegate. This meeting, it was alleged, had been packed with enough newly initiated members to elect De Leon. These reasons are often considered a mere pretext, and indeed De Leon had been duly seated at previous conventions as a delegate from the same union. Yet De Leon admitted his lack of attendance, and published accounts indicate that he was probably guilty of packing the meeting. Far more crucially, De Leon's assertion that IWW locals were defined by the tool used rather than the product or service provided (which justified his choice of local) contradicted the fundamental premise of the IWW. Vincent St. John, already one of the IWW's most effective organizers, was surely correct when he said that "the unit of an industrial union is not organized according to the tools used, but according to the plant, the workshop, the industry in which the workers are employed." De Leon's conception of the IWW as a confederation of craft unions is simply incomprehensible.[xl]
De Leon's intransigent defense of a universal, supra-class morality (which he never reconciled with his Marxist beliefs) also embroiled him in controversy. When one Stodel, an employee of The People, began selling a device that enabled people to cheat streetcar companies out of their fares, De Leon fired him and published information that could have helped the police file criminal charges against Stodel. De Leon affirmed that he had acted correctly and alleged that when workers were caught pillaging and stealing from the enemy during the French Revolution, they were shot by other workers. "The working class rose to the dignity of their position. The principle was supreme that the workers are not thieves. Anarchist doctrines were discredited." St. John charged that De Leon "has placed the life of workingmen below . . . capitalist class rules and ethics." The workers' belief in the sanctity of capitalist property was "the curse of the labor movement." The point was not whether the cheating of companies by such methods was "the method of warfare advocated by the Industrial Workers of the World [but that De Leon] would make us and the organization informers--we should, in his opinion, assume police duties." Other Wobblies had even stronger opinions; Haywood, at the Founding Convention, had ridiculed unemployed workers who lacked the courage to steal, and John Walsh had boasted that his overall brigade had stolen food en route to Chicago.[xli]
The convention voted 40 to 21 to deny De Leon a seat, and also barred one supporter on technical grounds. Two days later it discussed the Preamble. The course of the debate indicates that the exclusion of De Leon was not a plot by direct actionists, as De Leon charged and many historians have assumed. The range and type of comments and the closeness of the vote make it unlikely that anyone could have predicted, much less orchestrated, the outcome. The Committee on the Constitution voted 3 to 1 against any change in the Preamble--unlikely if the leadership had a coordinated plan to remove the political clause--but an otherwise uncelebrated delegate submitted the version that was ultimately adopted. This not only excised the political clause but stressed that the IWW was organized "not only for the every-day struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organzing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old." This phrase, which summarized the results of years of philosophizing on the part of IWW theorists, implied that the future society would dispense with government as a territorial organization and instrument of class dominion.[xlii]
The debate centered on the political clause. Some delegates denigrated political action entirely, while others merely disparaged the confusion and disruption caused by politicking within the IWW; there were not enough opponents of political action to strike the clause. One defender of the old Preamble predicted trouble with both socialist parties if the clause were deleted, while another "did not care to be called a dynamiter." Joseph Ettor, one of the initiators of the charges against De Leon, argued that "the political freak and the anti-political freak were both guilty" and opposed any change until the general membership discussed the issue. The eighteen delegates who participated in the debate (out of a total of twenty-six) divided evenly. The new Preamble was adopted 35 to 32 (some delegates had more than one vote), whereas De Leon had garnered only twenty votes.[xliii] A switch by a single person could have retained the political clause. The exclusion of De Leon and one of his allies may have helped adoption of the new Preamble, but certainly did not insure it.
After changing the Preamble, the delegates declared that to secure unity and discipline (not out of a conviction that political action was futile or harmful) "the IWW refuses all alliances, direct or indirect, with existing political parties or anti-political sects." Officers and organizers were forbidden to accept office in or nomination for office by any political organization. Because many delegates resented De Leon's venting of his quarrels with the IWW in the SLP press, the convention barred "editors of papers not controlled by the IWW" from membership. The convention also blasted De Leon's scurrilous Weekly People article about the convention's opening days, including his reference to IWW members as "slum proletarians." However, the delegates also pledged the IWW "to do all in our power" to free M. R. Preston, an IWW member and political prisoner whom the SLP was running for president, and raised a fund in his behalf.[xliv]
Responses to the convention were predictable. The Industrial Union Bulletin said that a correct understanding of industrial unionism was essential, praised the new Preamble in a statement that deftly combined an anti-political with a politically neutral stance, and exalted the hobos whom De Leon had stigmatized as "slum proletarians" as "the leaven of the revolutionary labor movement of the West." De Leon and his minions denounced his opponents as dynamiters, slum proletarians, and chicken thieves.[xlv] De Leon, following his ideas to their logical conclusion, tried to convince the post office to deny The Industrial Union Bulletin a second-class mailing permit on the grounds that it was an anarchist publication. The SLP launched a "Detroit IWW" which it claimed was the one true IWW. This organization published a pamphlet used by "employment sharks" in their battle to deny free speech rights to Wobbly organizers, republished Giovannitti's incendiary letter to The People when he was on trial for his life for his role in the Lawrence strike and, in 1912, tried to convince the Passaic, New Jersy, authorities to ban Big Bill Haywood from the city on the grounds that he advocated violence. Although De Leon had claimed that the rejection of political action would open the way for the police spy and provocateur, St. John was more prescient: it was De Leon and the SLP who acted as agents of the police and the capitalist class in their war against the IWW. De Leon melodramatically and transiently (not to say mendaciously) shook hands with Eugene Debs "over the bloody chasm" in 1905; in charging the IWW with dynamitism and violence, he more enduringly and significantly allied with the capitalist state over a much bloodier chasm.[xlvi]
American Exceptionalism and the Significance of 1908
Although the furor with the SLP, like the Haywood trial which preceded it, may have associated the IWW with violence in the minds of some people, the controversy in fact had nothing to do with violence and everything to do with the personality and designs of Daniel De Leon, whose political stance was based not upon logic or evidence but upon the exigencies of self-aggrandizement. The SLP debacle afforded radicals an early lesson in relating to sectarian and authoritarian organizations, which in future decades would repeatedly disrupt, fragment, and demoralize broadly based movements.
Socialist party members had also harmed the IWW by injecting partisan maneuvering into its meetings, and had played an important role in a major split in 1906 that did not directly concern political action. The hope that hostile socialist parties would put aside their enmity and eschew proselytizing within the IWW was unrealistic; officals of both parties were political animals accustomed to foraging for votes and power wherever they went. Yet the persistence of the SLP as a tiny yet divisive splinter after 1900 was due largely to De Leon's indomitable will; without him, the political socialists would have been unified in theory as they largely were in fact. De Leon could not build a socialist movement by an act of will; nor could he by force of personality alone have disrupted a powerful indigenous movement. But he could and did vitiate the frail American movement by embroiling it in incessant and meaningless squabbles. That the IWW lacked the single, natural political ally possessed by most socialist-led unions in Europe is due primarily to the baneful influence of De Leon.
Yet seen from a larger perspective, the split of 1908 seems almost inevitable, stemming from fundamental problems faced by the IWW and from its own contradictory nature. For one thing, the emphasis on economic power inherent in the concept of a revolutionary industrial union reinforced tendencies in the Marxist doctrine of economic determinism to lessen reliance on political action. For another, the IWW was attempting to organize two groups who lacked the vote: the recent immigrants (many of them women and children) who largely staffed the mass production industries, and Western migrants. Moreover, the implacable hostility of federal, state, and local governments to unionism of any kind and the ability of corporations to evade or violate whatever minimal labor laws existed made politics seem futile. Finally, the AFL and almost all previous American labor movements had found that partisan politics and unionism simply did not mix; political disagreements meant that political agitation in the union divided and alienated union workers. The conservative AFL was at this time seeking a political voice by endorsing whichever major party candidates backed its demands, but the revolutionary IWW scorned such capitalist politicking.
The founders of the IWW had chafed under the AFL's earlier "no politics in the union" policy and wanted to recruit the workers it organized into revolutionary politics. They realized that most people voted as members of a group rather than as individuals, and must be organized even to vote correctly. They wanted to transcend the pure-and-simple, nonpolitical, class-collaboration unionism advocated by Gompers and eventually to emulate the European unions, which were allied to but independent of a unified socialist party. This proved impossible not only because the American socialist movement was weak and divided but, even more fundamentally, because the American labor movement was not founded by or loyal to any socialist group, whereas in Germany, the stronghold of European socialism, the SPD had founded and still led the most important unions. The SLP responded to this situation with a hostile, sectarian labor policy, while the SP expended its energies in a futile attempt to work within and convert the AFL--an effort that perforce estranged the IWW. The IWW's efforts to surmount all these difficulties on the basis of a vague and contradictory statement of principles was destinied to encounter difficulties as soon as anyone pressed for clarification or consistency. The IWW could have squared the circle by sponsoring its own political party after it had organized a sufficient number of workers; but, as we shall see later, capitalist terrorism and violence crippled and destroyed the IWW's industrial unions, the seedbeds of all its countercultural institutions.
The split of 1908, therefore, was in one sense an uproar over nothing, in another sense a great divide. The IWW remained in theory nonpolitical rather than anti-political; this neutrality was in keeping with its original stance. Members were free to participate in whatever party they preferred, except that officers and paid organizers of the IWW could no longer hold office in any party. Big Bill Haywood remained active and influential in the SP after 1908. Yet despite this formal similarity, Wobblies increasingly disparaged political action altogether and, ironically, moved steadily and without controversy toward a rhetorical advocacy of sabotage, illegality, and at times even violence. As a union existing in a hostile political climate characterized by injunctions against picketing and other union activity, the IWW (like the AFL) inevitably found itself on the wrong side of the law far more often than the most incendiary political group. The AFL and the IWW responded differently to political terrorism and repression. While the AFL internalized much of the capitalist legal philosophy--the rule of law, the sanctity of contracts, the legitimacy of capitalism, "a fair day's wage for a fair day's work"--the IWW repudiated capitalism and its entire legal, moral, and philosophical structure.[xlvii] The seeds of the later conflict with the SP, planted in 1905, began to germinate in 1908.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF A COUNTERCULTURE
Between the split with the SLP in 1908 and the break with the SP in 1913, the IWW elaborated its distinctive countercultural ethos in the realms of direct action, sabotage, and a new morality. Although the IWW's ideology evolved partly as a reaction to the conduct and criticisms of the political socialists, it more fundamentally resulted from the IWW's natural desire to formulate an ideology consistent with its own nature and assumptions. This philosophy was based on rigorous thought, a profound analysis of the problems confronting any revolutionary movement, and the personal experiences of most IWW members. The IWW's revolutionary counterculture encompassed almost every area of life and thought, and presented a profound challenge to mainstream American values and assumptions. Although avowedly based on the orthodox interpretation of economic determinism widespread in the Second International, it actually foreshadowed cultural versions of Marxism characteristic of more recent decades.
IWW Philosophy: The State and Political Action
As we have seen, a de-emphasis of political action, easily shading over into opposition to it, was inherent in the interpretation of the doctrine of economic determinism shared by many delegates to the founding convention in 1905. As The Industrial Worker later throtsaid, "Industrial power is superior to military power, and it is power which will decide the life and death class struggle--not prayers and not votes." Workers were exploited at the point of production, not at the ballot box: "The workers are not concerned with who votes or who does not vote. What we want is shorter hours, more wages and better conditions." Because workers operated all the factories without any assistance from the capitalists, the requisites for worker control were already fully in place. William Haywood reminded his audiences, "You have all the industries in your own hands at the present time."[xlviii]
The IWW regarded the political state, concerned solely with protecting property, as a class institution that could no more be transformed into an instrument of the general welfare than a hangman could become a physician. Government ownership of the means of production was not socialism but state capitalism, as pernicious to the working class as the private variety. Many governments owned the industries essential to the functioning of society, where the workers' power was potentially greatest; they throttled that power by treating strikes as mutiny or treason. Governments also bought failing industries, paying with long-term bonds, thus aiding bankrupt capitalists and saddling the workers with huge debts for the means of production which they had created and which were therefore rightfully theirs. Whatever the industry, governments exploited workers worse than private employers did. State ownership was based on citizenship rather than class. Haywood emphasized that government ownership was not even a step toward socialism because all government is rule from the top rather than democratic administration from the bottom. The Industrial Worker agreed. "Government implies governors and governed, a ruling and a subject class. No man is great enough or good enough to rule another."[xlix] The workers, not the political state, should own and operate the industries.
Many Wobblies had personal experiences that confirmed this view of the state. Governments at all levels enacted and enforced laws in a patently unjust and discriminatory manner. Local authorities in many communities hastily passed unconstitutional statutes to prevent IWW members from speaking in public; they then arrested, beat, tortured, and at times murdered Wobbly organizers and free-speech fighters. They attempted to provoke Wobblies to acts of self-defense or retaliation, which could then be used as a justification for massive violence. Newspapers and civic authorities openly advocated lynch law and incited vigilante terrorism while the Wobblies, who usually counseled peace, were arrested for making inflammatory statements. When the police killed a striker or protestor, as they frequently did, strike leaders would be arrested, charged with murder, and imprisoned for months while awaiting trial. Meanwhile, employers routinely violated what minimal health, safety, and hours laws existed and were seldom punished; the same governments that resorted to illegal and violent action to suppress strikes and throttle free speech refused to enforce laws protecting labor. When Socialists approached electoral victory in many localities, the capitalists changed the law. They disfranchised many workers by stringent residency and registration requirements, sponsored charter revisions that mandated non-partisan and at-large elections, and made many previously elected positions appointive.[l]
Because of these experiences, the Wobblies deemed capturing the state or smashing it, as the political socialists and the anarchists respectively advocated, equally irrelevant. Armies were composed largely of workers who could be won over by anti-militarist teachings. More important, armies could not prevail against a united working class in control of the mines, factories, and farms because they could not move or even survive without workers to transport them and feed them. "The enemy has the guns, we have the shovels. . . . Bread and butter power is stronger than gunpowder and dynamite," the Industrial Worker said.[li]
Instead of capturing and using the government through the mechanism of a political party or overthrowing it by armed insurrection, the IWW advocated a general strike to secure "the unconditional surrender of the capitalist class." Such a strike could begin legally, locally, and in pursuit of a specific gain, and spread to other regions and industries as the workers intensified their militancy and increased their demands. A "militant minority" in key industries could precipitate the strike and win the acquiescence and then allegiance of the passive majority in the course of the struggle; those who remained home out of fear or indecision would actually aid the revolution. Other IWW theorists called for a general lockout of the capitalist class. Instead of folding their arms and leaving the industries idle until the capitalists surrendered, the workers would simply seize them and continue to operate them for their own benefit. Both scenarios envisioned a peaceful revolution, punctured only by such ineffectual violence as the capitalists and their paralyzed governments could instigate; both plans ignored rather than overthrew the state.[lii]
Although hostile to the state, the IWW distanced itself from anarchism. Industrialism, it said, exalted collective action, majority rule, and the union, whereas anarchism was based on the individual; industrialism was based, then, on organization, discipline, and solidarity, which the anarchists disdained. The IWW stressed an allegedly scientific philosophy based on the class struggle, and accused the anarchists of antiquated bourgeois sentimentalism. IWW opposition to wars and militarism stemmed from the strikebreaking role of the army and their violation of the international solidarity of the working class, rather than from humanitarianism.[liii]
The Wobblies felt that political parties, like the state, were inadequate vehicles for revolutionary transformation. Parties were multi-class conglomerations united on the basis of ideas rather than class institutions based on interests. The Socialist party not only admitted nonworkers but was largely led by them and therefore could not foster class-consciousness or lead the class struggle. Although a party could contain and rule over diverse classes, it could represent only one, and that class must be organized. The working class, presently unorganized, could not be represented by any existing party; it could only be used as cannon fodder by other classes, as it had been for centuries. Looking to any party for salvation therefore violated the IWW preamble on several grounds. It assumed that the workers had something in common with their exploiters; it divided the workers over trifles; by accepting the leadership of intellectuals and professionals it denigrated worker self-activity and denied that the workers could emancipate themselves; and it failed to build up the new society within the shell of the old.
The IWW believed that the structure, composition, methods, and aims of even a socialist party rendered it ineffectual. The Wobblies asserted that politicians representing workers were not themselves workers. Often they were intellectuals, professionals, or petty bourgeois in origin; even if they had been workers, once elected they became increasingly distant from their constituencies. The conflict with the SP was thus a class conflict; Socialist politicians were regularly stigmatized as "blood suckers and parasites on the back of labor." Wobbly theorists often spoke of "labor fakirs" in the same vein.[liv]
The Wobblies pointed out that any socialist party must play by capitalist rules designed to ensure capitalist hegemony; it must favor reform over revolution. If it elected an official, it had to enforce capitalist laws until it repealed them, thus making a fetish of law and respectability. Any socialist party that took winning elections seriously would be driven inexorably to the right in order to appeal to a wider constituency; every nonproletarian accretion would dilute the party and seek allies still further to the right. The party mobilized the workers only occasionally, at election time, rather than daily; it thus bred fatalism and passivity, the belief that capitalism will fall of its own weight. "A little skirmish with paper bullets and pens, and the thing is done." The party could not shield the union. Capitalist courts annulled elections when convenient, and even if the workers controlled a local or state government a larger jurisdiction would move in to crush any strike. The union actually shielded the party; the corporations could destroy a party by firing its members, who were defenseless unless organized on the job. Party leaders tried to capitalize on the misery and struggles of the workers for their own benefit while betraying the workers at every opportunity, leading one disgusted Wobbly to demand that they "leave us alone to our misery and to fight our own battles."[lv] IWW newspapers understandably gave almost no coverage to SP electoral campaigns.
The IWW did not disdain electoral activity out of impatience, as SP politicos often charged; political activity was "chloroform for the worker" and moved in the wrong direction altogether. The immediate demands of the Socialist party were irrelevant or harmful. Labor legislation such as eight-hour laws and safety regulations would be violated routinely by the capitalists unless enforced by the union; but any union with such power could dispense with the state, the laws, and the parties. A beneficial law, if the term were not an oxymoron, would weaken the workers by encouraging them to rely on a power other than themselves. Pension schemes at best rewarded faithful slaves with a part of their own earnings dispensed either as charity, a bribe to good behavior, or a reward for votes. As Haywood said, "Give the worker the full value of his product and his pension is assured."[lvi]
Wobbly publications bolstered these theoretical considerations with arguments from American and European history. In Germany, the "two arm" theory vitiated union and party, both of which were mired in reformism, nationalism, and militarism. In France, the CGT had earlier followed a trajectory very similar to the IWW's. Vitiated by political squabbles and the drive of politicians for control, it had adopted a position of "no politics in the union" and espoused direct as opposed to political action. William Z. Foster, who witnessed the great French railroad strike in 1910, talked with radical unionists throughout Europe and dispatched a series of articles extolling the CGT and syndicalism to The Industrial Worker and Solidarity. The socialist political movement, he said, was not only trying to dominate and tame the revolutionary union movement; it was actively hostile, persecuting it whenever it had the power. The syndicalist plan of industrial action "is violently antagonistic to that of the Socialist movement. . . . The two movements cannot exist in harmony; they are trying to absorb each other. . . . There can be no cooperation between them; they must fight to the finish." SP friendliness and union neutrality were "only diplomatic pretenses" masking class war.[lvii]
Ben Williams, editor of Solidarity, concurred. According to Williams, Socialist politicians in the United States "hate the IWW worse than they pretend to hate capitalism" because the IWW aimed to displace their leadership with that of real proletarians who would work "solely in the interest of their class." The party and the union "will FIGHT, as they are doing in every country today, merely because of their essential differences in aims and methods. The one will seek to supplant or subordinate the other." Proletarian emancipation, Williams averred, would be brought about "only by and through the economic organization." The IWW should remain officially neutral on the ultimate possibilities of political action, because political or anti-political agitation divided the working class and diverted it from its main task, that of building the revolutionary union. The working class, Williams asserted, was fragmented by artificial divisions inherited from former ages: party, religion, craft union, and nationality. Because these self-identifications were meaningful to workers, the IWW should not attack them directly, thus becoming a sterile "anti-everything" sect. Instead, it should unite workers within the industries, where their common interests were most readily apparent. When the IWW was strong, the workers would see that it and it alone was sufficient to meet all their needs; they would then abandon their antiquated beliefs and outworn tactics. Meanwhile, the IWW should attack these institutions not on the basis of theory, but only when commenting on concrete events that revealed them for the pro-capitalist institutions they were.[lviii]
Despite Williams's advice, both The Industrial Worker and Solidarity were filled with theoretical condemnations of political action and virulent attacks on the Socialist party and its leaders. The SP's policy of "neutrality" and "non-interference" in union affairs was labeled treason to the working class. The AFL, the journals said, divided the workers and led them to defeat and demoralization; it bolstered capitalism and condemned socialism. It was not a labor union or a working-class organization at all, but a job trust. How, IWW publicists asked rhetorically, could a supposedly working-class party remain neutral in a fight between a revolutionary, class-conscious labor union and the reactionary, class-collaborationist, and racist AFL?
IWW literature, therefore, was actually hostile to electoral politics, even while claiming that the IWW was politically neutral, as is evident from two short pamphlets designed to reassure anxious workers that the IWW was not anti-political. Justus Ebert, in "Is the IWW Anti-Political?", claimed that "the IWW is the only real political factor in American society today," but also attacked both the SP and the SLP and said that "mere vote-getting, or vote-casting, is not politics." Ebert defined politics as "the vote of an organized working class, polled in the union hall and applied on the job" which will inaugurate "the industrial democracy which will eventually take the place of the present financial and industrial plutocracy." Vincent St. John, in his "Political Parties and the IWW" similarly averred that "The IWW will express itself politically in its general convention and the referendum of its members in the industries throughout the land, in proportion to its power." St. John denied that the IWW would "carry on a propaganda against political action," but also asserted that "the only value that political activity has to the working class is from the standpoint of agitation and education. Its educational merit consists solely in proving to the workers its utter inefficacy to curb the power of the ruling class and therefore forcing the workers to rely on the organization of their class in the industries." This "educational merit" is slight indeed![lix]
IWW Philosophy: Ethics, Direct Action, and Sabotage
To party politicking and electioneering the IWW counterposed direct action, "any economic step taken by the workers as a class without delegating power to representatives who must act within bounds set by the masters."[lx] It included action at the point of production for better wages, hours, and working conditions as well as tactics which coerced the state into granting such demands as free speech or releasing political prisoners. Gains won thereby emboldened and empowered the workers and could not be overturned by the capitalist courts or repealed by any legislature. Direct action at the workplace harked back to the old craft guilds and the skilled unions in the earliest days of the factory system, when workers legislated for themselves without parlaying with any capitalist and enforced their law by their own power and institutions. Activities that fell under the rubric of direct action ranged from work slowdowns to destruction of property and insurrection. The most obvious form of direct action was the strike.
The IWW repeatedly insisted that any means were justified against the capitalists. Vincent St. John, the IWW's general organizer from 1908 to 1915, said in an influential pamphlet that the IWW, as a revolutionary organization, uses "any and all tactics that will get the results sought. . . . The question of 'right' and 'wrong' does not concern us." William Haywood and Frank Bohn, in their Industrial Socialism (1911) set forth the IWW view in a much-quoted statement that was to figure largely in Haywood's trouble with the Socialist party:
The nature of man's social life depends chiefly upon the physical conditions under which he is living. This same principle is true in principles of morality. An individual, or nation, or a class, will finally come to think that right which is to his material advantage. . . . When the worker, either through experience or a study of Socialism, comes to know this truth, he acts accordingly. He retains absolutely no respect for the property "rights" of the profit-takers. He will use any weapon which will win his fight. He knows that the present laws of property are made by and for the capitalists. Therefore he does not hesitate to break them. He knows that whatever action advances the interests of the working class is right, because it will save the workers from destruction and death. A knowledge of economic determinism places the worker squarely on his intellectual feet and makes him bold and independent of mind.[lxi]
The capitalists, the IWW pointed out, murdered, stole, lied, and violated the law whenever profitable; capitalism was itself organized mass murder and plunder. As The Industrial Worker said, "The employing class respect nothing but physical force and the ruling class in all ages have never yielded to anything else. . . . The 'right and wrong' of the relations of workers and employers can only be settled by organized force." The victors wrote the law and decreed what is moral, while the defeated suffered the consequences. IWW publications truculently asserted that "might makes right" and that "to be wrong is to be weak, to be right is to be strong." Law, contracts, and moral codes protecting property were merely instruments of class oppression, no more valid than a title to a Negro slave.[lxii]
Despite these pronouncements, most Wobblies firmly believed in a universal morality based on the welfare of all people, and castigated bourgeois ethics and society precisely because they furthered the interest of a single class. The IWW's belief that "an injury to one is an injury to all" and that all workers should unite across the chasms of nationality, race, gender, and craft was an intensely moral conviction. Many IWWs asserted that even the capitalists would be better off in every human sense in the new society. Far from disdaining morality per se, the Wobblies, rejecting capitalistic ethics, sought to create a new moral code congruent with the struggle they were waging and the society they meant to construct. "We battle against the existing moral code and in so doing we are creating working-class morals. . . . In fighting we develop new ideas and ideals." Just as the IWW rejected political government for industrial government and craft unionism for class unionism, so they rejected class morality for a universal human ethical code, "the law of a masterless society." Existing society was hopelessly corrupt, its morals, institutions, and practices pure poison; the workers could build upon nothing (except perhaps the material achievements of capitalism), but had to destroy everything traditionally esteemed and begin anew. The working class had to isolate itself within its own organizations and form completely "the necessary institutions and mental conditions" that would both overthrow the present society and undergird the new.[lxiii]
If Wobbly pronouncements on morality often misrepresented their real position and provided ammunition for their enemies, an ambiguity in their specific tactical advice also created endless confusion. The IWW often seemed to be advocating individual rather than class action against their capitalist enemies; they were accused of sanctioning theft under the guise of "individual expropriation." IWWs vehemently denied this, yet their specific pronouncements were contradictory. According to the labor theory of value, a central tenet of both IWW and socialist ideology, all profits are stolen from the workers; why not steal part of them back? The Industrial Worker said that a thief only "takes back that which has already been stolen from him," and that if this was wrong, "the whole idea of revolution or labor organization is false." It advised against individual robbery of the capitalists only because it could not be done. "The aim of organized industrial unionism is to be to all the bosses just what the highwayman does to the individual boss--with this difference: the aim of the highwayman is merely to take what the other has. It is a case of a robber robbing a robber. The aim of an industrial union is to take from all the robbers, not only the proceeds of their past robbery, but also the power to rob in the future."[lxiv]
Such statements could be variously interpreted. For example, they raised the question of what individual workers should do if they could expropriate a capitalist. The Industrial Worker expressed its ambivalence when it said, "We do not advocate taking possession of such things as we need by individual expropriation at this time. We do claim, however, that property has no right that a starving man is bound to respect. . . . If warehouses are filled with the things that we have created, we will not peacefully starve." Nothing will prevent desperate people from taking matters into their own hands: "when the psychological moment arrives the individual or the class will step across the boundary and take what rightfully belongs to the producers of wealth. . . . Individual action fully merges into class action."[lxv] The IWW correctly perceived that great upheavals sometimes begin in the struggle of small groups for very specific goals, such as loaves of bread. The IWW combined two arguments here, one based on the theory of surplus value and one on the right of each person to the necessities of life.
The Industrial Worker followed the latter argument to its conclusion on at least two occasions in 1909 and directly urged harvest hands to steal in order to assure themselves a decent life. On 1 July it said. "The farmers will be glad to give you their chickens, if they do not see you take them, and you can live like a king in the jungles, if you throw your feet." Harvest hands should obtain for themselves conditions "as good as the horses, at least" and take all that they can every day. Six weeks later it assured its readers, "You are entitled to food, comfortable shelter, good clothes, and amusement all winter long. The enemy will not give any of these things to you. You might better be in jail or dead than begging or bumming when the snow is on the ground. Therefore, don't be afraid to take a chance when it comes to food, clothes, and shelter. If you are game, go after it. If you are afraid--jump in the river!"[lxvi] Perhaps due to adverse reactions on the part of their socialist opponents, Wobbly publications seldom repeated this advice after 1909.
Sabotage was the most controversial form of direct action, and one that raised disquieting fears about individual instead of class action. Although the IWW did not publish its pamphlets on sabotage until 1912 and 1913, its philosophy, rationale, and techniques were explained and advocated in both The Industrial Worker and Solidarity in 1910 and 1911. According to Ben Williams, "sabotage ranges all the way from passive resistance at one extreme to violent destruction of property at the other." One form was "striking on the job"--slowing the pace or producing an inferior product. "Never miss a chance to strike a blow at the wage system, if it is only to take less dirt on the shovel." The "passive strike" consisted of scrupulous obedience to every workplace rule; this could bring any railroad system to a halt. The "intermittent strike" would paralyze any factory repeatedly for short periods. J.W. Johnstone advocated the use of emery dust in "this veiled civil war" between the classes. "Machinery will suffer, power plants will break down, cities will be in darkness, traffic will be delayed, industry will be paralyzed, and the hirelings of the master class will be helpless."[lxvii]
IWW enthusiasm for sabotage received a tremendous impetus from the great French railroad strike of 1910, which William Z. Foster and William Haywood personally observed. Defeated by troops sent by the French premier, the ex-Socialist Briand, the workers were able to win reinstatement of fired workers and freedom for their imprisoned leader by acts of coordinated sabotage. The advantages of "the weapon that wins" were gleefully enumerated in the Wobbly press. Because saboteurs stayed on the job, they collected pay while devastating the boss; police violence and the introduction of scabs were averted. Detection was nearly impossible. Many forms of sabotage created jobs as the capitalists scrambled to restore production. A militant minority could initiate sabotage before the majority caught on. It demonstrated the source of the workers' power, that nothing was created or transported without them. "The psychological effect of instilling confidence into the working class as a whole and of inspiring contempt for the boss and his government is of far more value to the revolution than a mere increase in wages." A method the workers used for themselves, sabotage left "no room for politicians, arbitration boards, scabs of all hues, to get in between and earn their Judas money." In France, "no petitions or appeals are being used. No votes are being cast. The SABOTERS hate the parliamentarians."[lxviii]
When told that sabotage was immoral, Wobblies reminded their critics that capitalists closed factories, stopped production, and destroyed or adulterated goods whenever it was profitable, regardless of the starvation and misery this inflicted on the unemployed workers or the death it visited upon consumers. Whereas capitalist sabotage was committed for private profit, IWW sabotage was performed for moral reasons, and was in fact often the only way to compel mine and factory owners to install safety equipment and thus to save lives. Wobblies also adduced their argument based on economic determinism. Ben Williams said that "the social democrat who balks at sabotage on the ground that it is an 'immoral weapon' in the class war, views that war from the standpoint of the capitalists." Sabotage was "a WAR MEASURE, made necessary by the nature of the class struggle." Its utility, however, largely depended on the consciousness of the workers using it and affected by it. "In the present state of the workers' superstitious reverence for property (which they do not understand their masters have stolen from them)" destruction of property "may be of doubtful value, and often reacts upon the workers with disastrous effect." More than a month before the McNamaras were indicted for blowing up the Los Angeles Times offices, Williams asserted that "individual or craft violence, such as the blowing up of a bridge manned by scab labor, or the destruction of a machine in a factory . . . may be condemned not only by the capitalist, but by the working class as well." But any sabotage (except that took human life) that united the workers and won control of the shop was justified.[lxix]
The IWW on Violence
The IWW defended lawbreaking and destruction of property, but hedged when talking about violence against people. Wobbly statements on this subject were ambivalent and contradictory. The IWW usually emphasized passive resistance during its free speech fights, and peaceful tactics during strikes. Passive resistance would show that the IWW would proceed peacefully if possible; it would have a "tremendous moral effect" because it "reveals the self-control, the fortitude, the courage, the inherent sense of order" of the workers. "It requires the very best quality of courage to endure violence without retaliating and without retreating." Capitalist and official violence, on the other hand, revealed the employers and their government as immoral and lawless thugs. The workers were morally superior to the capitalists because they were shaped by the collective processes of industrial production and retained the social instincts deadened in those whose lives rested on the exploitation of others. Worker violence in self-defense could not be equated with capitalist violence on behalf of the profits wrung from exploitation.[lxx]
The IWW warned its members that provocateurs and the police would try to goad them into acts of vengeance or vigorous self-defense just in order to have a pretext for general slaughter. Yet as the number of killed and maimed Wobblies grew, faith in passive resistance faded, and the Wobblies publicly threatened the police with retaliation. St. John claimed that during the McKees Rocks strike the IWW threatened the Pennsylvania state constabulary "that for every striker killed or injured the life of a cossack would be exacted in return"; when this threat was carried out, violence against the strikers ceased.[lxxi]
Commenting on this incident, The Industrial Worker justified any means to defeat or overthrow capitalism while simultaneously condemning violence as wrong as well as impolitic: "Any and all means are justified when it comes to a matter of life and death. Deliberate bloodshed must be condemned, but if we are to be shot like dogs, who will tell us to die without a struggle? ... The employers have abolished the moral law, and the question is not at all one of right and wrong, but simply a question of what is best and what will succeed in the end. . . . The bread and butter control is more than military control. It is better to cut off the army's supplies than to kill our fellowmen, no matter if they are cowardly, brutal, and patriotic. . . . The IWW is the hope of those who oppose bloodshed."[lxxii]
Other Wobbly pronouncements on the morality and advisability of violence were equally ambivalent. One editorial in The Industrial Worker asserted "There is no positive good and no positive wrong.... It depends on your point of view. A slave thinks slavery wrong. A master thinks slavery right." A few sentences later, however, the writer said that "the reason the Industrial Union does not stand for military resistance to the enemy is that it is ethically wrong to take human life except in self-defense, and it is moreover foolish." The puzzled reader may well ask, From whose standpoint is military resistance to the employers wrong? Any killing of a master by a slave could be interpreted as self-defense. As if in answer, a long article in The Industrial Worker in early 1910 argued that assassinations of high officials, although they were futile because they were directed against symptoms, were defensible because they expressed the feelings of the whole people and because "a struggle against oppression and tyranny is always justified."[lxxiii]
One incident clearly revealed one side of the Wobbly attitude toward violence: an editorial by Victor Berger which advocated arming the workers. Berger was one of the most influential leaders of the Socialist party and the representative of its extreme right wing. The head of the "Milwaukee machine," which was widely extolled and anathemized as exemplifying municipal socialism, Berger edited the Social Democratic Herald and won election as the party's first congressman in 1910. Berger was one of two persons invited to the meeting that launched the IWW who had refused to attend, and was a vehement opponent of the IWW. He had long advocated the creation of a Swiss-style militia that would arm the workers, and on 31 July 1909 he reiterated this idea. In "Should Be Prepared to Fight for Liberty at All Hazards," Berger said that, despite his well-deserved reputation as a "constructive" rather than a revolutionary socialist, he had concluded that the law protected the plutocrat and the exploiter while leaving the Ameican workingman with fewer rights than his French, German, or English counterparts:
The safety and hope of this country will finally be in one direction only--that of a violent and bloody revolution.... I deny that dealing with a blind and greedy plutocratic class as we are dealing in this country, the outcome can ever be peaceful or that any reasonable change can ever be brought about by the ballot in the end.
I predict that a large part of the capitalist class will be wiped out for much smaller things than the settling of the great social question. That before any settlement is possible, most of the plutocratic class, together with the politicians, will have to disappear as completely as the feudal lords and their retinue disappeared during the French revolution.
That cannot be done by the ballot, or by only the ballot.
The ballot may not count for much in a pinch.
And in order to be prepared for all emergencies, Socialists and workingmen should make it their duty to have rifles and the necessary rounds of ammunition at their homes, and be prepared to back up their ballots with their bullets if necessary.[lxxiv]
The Industrial Worker of 19 August attacked this as an insane scheme to lead workingmen against machine guns. The politicians (such as Berger) were "the Gapons, the Judases of the working class" who openly admitted the futility of political solutions and, denying the efficacy of direct action and the industrial union, sought refuge in bullets. "We have been criticized for the so-called 'anti-political' stand of some of the utterances of the 'Industrial Worker.' What would our critics have said if we had done as the politicians: first deny the power of the so-called ballot and then tell the workers that they had no other remedy but bloodshed?" The ballot and the rifle were "two words for the same thing." Referring to rightist criticisms of sabotage in France, The Industrial Worker asked "Which is the worst, you peaceful politicians: a heap of undistributed mail in every post office in France, or heaps of unburied corpses of the working people?"[lxxv]
Reemphasizing the role of the industrial union, The Industrial Worker asked, "Even if those apostles of murder, the politicians, should succeed in killing some members of the employing class, will rifles weave cloth? Will powder and shot grow grain? Will a fanatical mob be able or willing to carry on the intricate productive life of today?" It concluded, The IWW is alike removed from the confusion of the anti-political sects and the vagaries and the dangers of the political idolaters."[lxxvi]
The IWW's response to the McNamara confessions also indicated its attitudes toward violence. Between 1906 and 1910 over a hundred explosions had marked the conflict between the Bridge and Structural Iron Workers Union and the Erectors' Association. On 1 October 1910, in the midst of a major effort to unionize the workers of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Times, a bitterly anti-labor paper which often printed incendiary editorials encouraging violence toward unions, was dynamited. Because of a gas leak, twenty-one workers were unintentionally killed. The McNamara brothers were arrested in April 1911; the labor movement, largely convinced of their innocence and fearing more of the perjured and provocateur testimony which had characterized previous political trials, organized a massive campaign to ensure a fair trial. Meanwhile, in a potentially epoch-making development, the Los Angeles AFL was backing Socialist party mayoral candidate Job Harriman, whose election would very likely result in major union gains throughout California. On 1 December, four days before the election, the McNamaras stunned their supporters and the country by confessing to the dynamiting, thus ensuring Harriman's defeat and dealing labor a catastrophic reverse in California and across the country.
The Industrial Worker averred that "we are no more in favor of killing people by labor union members than we are in having people killed by the thousands daily by the capitalist class." The city of Los Angeles and the publisher of the Los Angeles Times were "more responsible for the destruction of life in the Times disaster than James B. McNamara" because they practiced repression and preached hatred, leaving workers few options. Yet the McNamaras, far from being revolutionists, were conservative, Catholic trade unionists who, alone in their fight, were "trying to produce a power that should have been possessed by concerted action of the workers in the industry instead of a single craft. There is nothing to be gained by murdering each other, although we will insist that EVERY LIFE THAT HAS BEEN TAKEN IN THE CLASS WAR SHOULD BE CHARGED TO THE MASTER CLASS AND THEIR AGENTS." The Industrial Worker reiterated that "industrial organization is the best dynamite we can use."[lxxvii]
Solidarity concurred: craft union powerlessness necessitated resort to futile violence, which it likened to "the 18th century method of smashing machines." Craft unionism "stands forever condemned by the McNamara confession." Yet Solidarity blamed the confession more than the dynamiting, calling it "cowardly treason to the working class." But while the craft unions howled for the McNamaras' blood, the revolutionary unionist "cares no more for the property or the lives of the capitalists than the latter care for the lives of workingmen." For every capitalist who dies in the class war, "a thousand and more slaves go down to death in mill, mine, on buildings and elsewhere throughout our industrial hell." Meanwhile, Haywood proclaimed that "I am with the McNamaras and always will be."[lxxviii]
The IWW's emphasis on economic determinism served to downplay the role of violence. Even when IWWs referred to "physical force" they did not necessarily mean violence; like De Leon, they often meant the organized power of industrial unionism. The IWW, by organizing all the workers in a factory, could shut down the factory during a strike, leaving less room for the violence endemic to craft strikes, where the employer could import scabs. Many IWWs hoped that the general strike would constitute a peaceful revolution which would ultimately benefit everyone. The capitalists were too effete and numerically insignificant to fight; shorn of their power, they need not be exterminated, but instead would be offered work on the same terms as everyone else. Yet the stridency of IWW language, combined with its general position on morals and the law, strongly implied that most Wobblies would countenance or favor violence against employers or officials as long as the agent went undetected or won gains for the workers. The IWW sometimes justified violence because the capitalists and their government constantly practiced it, leaving their victims no choice but to resist violence with force. Even here, however, IWW publicists hesitated to urge front-line fighters to actions whose consequences the editorial writers would escape.
The Problems of the Counterculture
The IWW's analysis of the state and its critique of political socialism were prescient, and were partly corroborated by subsequent events in Europe and the United States. The IWW had arrived at important insights which inevitably alienated much of the public, including many workers, by attacking cherished myths that underpinned the sense of identity of many individuals. Yet the IWW exacerbated this alienation by unncessary truculence and by rhetorical extremism.
The IWW's ferocious insistence on the class basis of morals, religion, and the law repelled large numbers of socialists, workers, and middle-class reformers who might otherwise have been won to their side on at least some issues. It led the Wobblies to disdain public opinion. "POWER," said Solidarity, "determines the issue one way or another in a struggle between masters and slaves. No sentiment of 'right', 'justice', 'humanity', and other beautiful abstractions can possibly figure in the issue of the event."[lxxix] Yet these phrases and the realities they represent are meaningful to most people, especially when their own immediate interests are not at stake. They therefore attain power in their own right by boosting the morale of the oppressed and enlisting others on their side. Although the IWW recognized that mere public opinion means little unless it is backed by organized power, it was in fact aided by public opinion in many of its fights, from Spokane to Lawrence and beyond. The risks of appealing to or depending on public opinion are many and severe. At best, it would make the IWW dependent on its "class enemies" for many of its victories, or at least cause it to acknowledge this dependence, understandably an unsatisfactory alternative to worker self-activity and autonomously won victories. At worst, it could lead to an accommodation with racism and nationalism and the abandonment of everything good and decent in the movement, as the experience of European socialism attests. But experience indicates that a portion of the middle class can be won for at least some policies leading towards economic justice.
The IWW's emphasis on economic determinism distorted its perception of those it tried to organize, and, indeed, of its own activity. The IWW's assumption that all genuine human interests are economic undermined its appeal to workers whose self-concepts and moral sensibilities were based not on class but on religion, race, nationality, or other non-economic factors. These identities were not merely thin veneers covering an innate working-class consciousness; they constituted the integral and meaningful core of the personalities of many people, and could not be exorcised by simple appeals to material interest. The IWW's attempt to ignore or over-ride the self-identities of its potential constituency alienated prospective recruits while leaving the power of moral appeals to the capitalists.
Like reliance on public opinion, any efforts to acknowledge, validate, and work in tandem with identities based on ethnicity, religion, patriotism, or respectability would have been fraught with dangers. These forms of identity are inherently vile and disgusting, and all of them more readily undermine than solidify class consciousness. Yet if the IWW had to ignore or attack those identities, it forfeited a potent weapon when it truculently proclaimed that the IWW was merely "the quickest way to the pork chops" and refused to couch its appeals in moral terms.
The IWW correctly perceived the need for a new culture and new people to create and inhabit it; it saw the pitfalls in appealing to people on the basis of their old identities, which were too often the results of capitalist hegemony or the residue of ancient superstitions. Yet if the IWW was to convince the mass of workers to repudiate or abandon their inherited identities, it had to provide a meaningful alternative based on more than self-interest. Workers, after all, clung to their parochial identities largely because they offered the meaning, dignity, and sense of moral community that the roles of producer and consumer cannot provide. The IWW was based on the highest ideals--the struggle for justice, the mastery of knowledge--and could have appealed to moral sentiments and pointed to "the higher aims of socialism." It is understandable that it so seldom did; its members were justly cynical about lofty phrases, which usually masked torture and murder. They also had more immediate concerns. Still, the IWW's confusing rhetoric, which seemed to deny morality rather than claim it, was deplorable and self-defeating.
This is particularly true given the moral stature of most IWW activists. In a poignant passage The Industrial Worker disclaimed any heroic motives and asked, "If we are hung or shot because we agitate for the union, will we be able to smell . . . the flowers that the children of the future will plant on our graves?" Yet it also pointed out that "the majority has in all history persecuted the revolutionary minority, even to the point of death and torture."[lxxx] How, then, could it be in the immediate interests of a worker to join the IWW? This question is particularly urgent because most IWW activists were extraordinary people who could have reaped direct personal rewards had they sought self-advancement rather than fomenting revolution. (This ability of talented radicals to rise out of, rather than with, their class, remains one of the most intractible problems confronting American radicalism.) The IWW could justly and effectively have appealed to the moral sentiments it disparaged since its activists were largely motivated by such sentiments.
After World War I, the IWW issued a pamphlet which illustrates an effective use of traditional moral terms for radical goals. "What is the IWW?" interpreted the three virtues of the gospels as "hope for ultimate justice, faith in humanity, and charity to one another." It proclaimed the IWW's motto, "an injury to one is an injury to all," as "the golden rule from a working class viewpoint." Describing the jailings, lynchings, and tortures inflicted on innumerable Wobblies, this pamphlet correctly asserted that "men would not go to jail by the thousands for the sake of a few dollars and cents alone." The IWW's Declaration of Principles is "one of the most powerful ethical documents of the ages," exemplifying "the principle of human solidarity and the world-wide brotherhood of man which are at the bottom of our activities." The pamphlet contrasted this with "the sodden, sinful, unclean and unrighteous life of capitalist society."[lxxxi]
The IWW's tendency to correlate disagreement with class alignments and therefore to equate criticism with treason to the working class skewed its views of the relationship between the socialist movement and unionism. In particular, most IWW writers accused politicians and parties of undermining strikes, defusing worker militancy, and dragging the unions relentlessly to the right in tactics, strategy, and goals. This was a plausible assertion. Although the "dual arm" theory supposedly accorded equal status to the party and the union, Wobblies knew that German socialist theoreticians and union leaders claimed that the union was confined to securing the immediate demands of the workers, whereas the party's task was to fight for and inaugurate socialism. This effectively subordinated the union to the party and limited the radicalism of the unions to occasional affirmations of political orthodoxy.
Yet some IWWs conceded that unions had usually been a conservative force that led socialist parties into a tepid reformism. In Germany the unions were a major cause of the SPD's retreat from militancy and its gallop down the blood-splattered road to militarism and war. In Britain the unions deradicalized the socialist political movement. The AFL by its very existence pulled the Socialist party rightward. A radical union is not exempt from the conservatizing tendencies that afflict a revolutionary party; in both institutions the pursuit of short-term goals can obscure long-term vision.
Intellectuals, scorned by the Wobblies as parasites and priests of the bourgeoisie, have contributed much to the theory and practice of radicalism. Thinkers as distinct as V. I. Lenin and Selig Perlman have asserted that pure-and-simple unionism is the "natural" philosophy of the working class and that socialist consciousness must be injected from outside. This contention lacks merit because all philosophies are historically and socially determined, none is "natural" to a class outside a specific context, and peasants and workers have evolved their own forms of radicalism. It nevertheless remains true that individuals with freedom from immediate want and the means and leisure for education can often demystify, for themselves and others, the categories of capitalist cultural hegemony and see beyond immediate needs to long-term interests. Misery does not in itself generate radicalism; it is often the seedbed of an intense and resentful conservatism. Class consciousness does not arise directly from unmediated experience, as the Wobblies, contrary to their own experience, often claimed; it results from thought. It is, like all human perceptions, a cultural artifact, not a natural fact. The capitalist system has succeeded in making non-class forms of consciousness seem natural, primary, inevitable, and meaningful to most workers. Intellectuals and members of the middle class can help overcome these obstacles. In practice, the IWW acknowledged this; it valued intellectuals of whatever background who aided the IWW's struggles, and, as we shall see, it also evolved its own form of organic, working-class intellectual.
The IWW's interpretation of economic determinism poisoned its relations with the SP by stigmatizing that organization as bourgeois and therefore discreditable. It also led the IWW wildly to exaggerate the efficacy of economic organization and thus to underrate political activity. Katharine Hill, a Socialist party member, reprimanded the IWW for its simplistic attitudes towards political action in a letter published in Solidarity. If the SP "isn't red enough to suit you people, who is to blame for that fact? You are, because you don't come into it. If you would join the Socialist party, you could swing it any way you liked.... The IWW is right in refusing direct connection with the political wing of the movement. But you are throwing away a big advantatge when you refuse as individuals to hold membership in both organizations." Hill further argued that although the gains achieveable through the ballot were limited, "when you pause to consider how little work is involved in registering as a voter and afterwards making a cross on a ballot," Wobblies may think it worth the effort.[lxxxii] Hill could have pointed out that, although many Wobblies were ineligible to vote, this did not debar them from the SP, which accepted women and, presumably, other non-voters.
Socialists also pointed out the fallacy of Wobbly assertions that all problems were shop issues and that the unions could govern society. Many concerns such as education, public health, environmental regulations, and city planning and zoning ordinances require the geographical government the IWW claimed was superfluous because destined to remain a class instrument until it was abolished with the class society it upheld. Autonomous factories, even coordinated through a universal industrial union, could not manage the economy. Socialists pointed out that the Wobbly utopia would consist of fragmented union owner-capitalists competing with each other, presumably in the open market.
Squabbles over the outline of the future society were not, however, the most pressing controversy. The Wobblies not only proclaimed the ultimate irrelevance of government but also belittled the benefits that elected Socialist party officials could confer on the revolutionary union movement. The SP and its members did help the Wobblies immensely during many free speech fights and strikes by providing money, publicity, and organization. Wherever strikes occurred in municipalities controlled by the SP, the benevolent neutrality of the city administration proved an inestimable boon to the Wobblies. Although Victor Berger, detested by the Wobblies, exaggerated his role in the momentous victory at Lawrence, the hearings initiated by the lone Socialist member of the House of Representatives did play a significant role in exposing the wool corporations and arousing public opinion, as Haywood and the IWW both formally acknowledged. During the Patterson strike, which occurred after the recall of Haywood, the Wobblies had to march from the factories into Haledon, a nearby town controlled by the SP, merely to hold their meetings in peace. Yet many Socialists, including the New York Call, withheld needed support, and Socialist party members among the strikers eventually destroyed the strike by returning to work. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, one of the major leaders of that strike, bitterly attacked the SP for demanding endless thanks for support that they were duty-bound to offer. "We felt that there was no need to thank the socialist party for what they had done, because they had only done their duty and they had done very little in comparison with what they have done in AFL strikes, in the McNamara cases."[lxxxiii]
The IWW's official stance of political neutrality--much milder than the actual tone of the Wobbly press--obviously militated against SP electoral success, just as SP "neutrality" undermined the IWW. The reasons for this were well known to the Wobblies. Eugene Debs and other industrial unionists within the SP recognized that only an organized working class could vote the Socialists into power or even make sure their individual votes were counted. The SP could never win by appealing to individual workers, but only by securing the united vote of an organized class. The SP constantly reminded workers that to scatter their votes as individuals was tantamount to "scabbing at the ballot box"; workers must vote together, just as they must strike together. (The force of this argument was somewhat weakened by the SP's support of the AFL, which scabbed together as often as it struck together.) Whatever politics individual union members pursued outside the union was not working-class politics; ultimately it was no politics at all. The IWW's stance therefore alienated the SP for the same reason that the SP's neutrality and non-interference estranged the IWW. Both organizations wanted predominance; both, whatever their disclaimers, wanted commitment from the other without offering it themselves.
The IWW leadership failed to convert any sizeable number of recruits to their revolutionary ideology. The IWW leadership realized that most workers would join the IWW to secure immediate improvements on the job, and would drop out when the IWW proved powerless to achieve this goal. The Industrial Union Bulletin expressed this in a major article expounding the philosophy of the IWW: the IWW
has passed the narrow limitations of a mere wage movement; and the industrial and social question is no longer a barren, crude stomach-consideration,--but a question of changing the old mutual relations of mankind, the problem of acquiring industrial independence and complete economic freedom for the wealth producers.
But it is the stomach-consideration which foments the rebellion first among the indifferent masses; and once in revolt they are more accessible to high, nobler efforts; it's the wage struggle first which develops the courage and the virtues of self-sacrifice and an unflinching sense of solidarity in the ranks of the proletariat.... so that they would have a chance to share in the treasuries of education and refinement, and would recuperate and spend their leisure hours in the noble pursuits of life.[lxxxiv]
Devastated by repression, terrorism, and defeat, IWW leaders hoped that governmental repression and lost strikes would convince its members of the need for a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. However, defeat seems to have convinced most quondam Wobblies that any struggle for betterment, at least within the IWW, was hopeless. Most unions with substantial socialist memberships refused to affiliate with the IWW, finding (or at least believing) that they could fight for their immediate objectives more effectively within the AFL or in alliance with one of the major parties. Even the Western Federation of Miners, perhaps the most radical of important American unions and a major impetus for the founding of the IWW, withdrew after a short time and later reaffiliated with the AFL. The IWW was noble for its dreams, and transiently important in some important strikes; its attempt to wean the workers from the mainstream culture (or from their separate ethnic and localist cultures) was an almost total failure. This failure did not stem from any defects in the Wobbly ideology, which was far more rational and moral than any of the belief-systems prevalent among the American working class. Rather, it resulted from the inexorable power of the received cultures (a power, as we shall see, inculcated by terrorism), a power the IWW, as most previous and subsequent American radical movements, struggled vainly against.
The IWW's position on both morals and politics had much to recommend it. Wobbly attacks on the Socialist party and its leaders were often justified, and many of the IWW's most offensive pronouncements only highlighted conundrums and exacerbated problems inherent in the American radical enterprise. Still, its intransigent and linear interpretation of the Marxist doctrine of economic determinism alienated potential allies and involved it in avoidable difficulties. Toward the end of 1911,, Wobblies and their sympathizers agitated within the SP to convert individual members or extract from the party official support of revolutionary industrial unionism, while party conservatives continued to criticize the IWW. The result was a showdown in 1912.
THE IWW AND THE SOCIALIST PARTY
The controversy between the IWW and the SP between 1911 and 1913 (a debate that simultaneously raged within the SP) was fought over the concrete issues of direct action, sabotage, and violence. The underlying disagreement, however, was between those who wanted to work within the institutions of mainstream society and in accordance with the values of that society, and those who aimed to create new institutions, new values, and ultimately new persons, prefiguring those of the future society. In the course of this discussion the glaring weaknesses of the SP's attempt to work within the old structures became readily apparent. The IWW's rebuttal to the socialist critique reveals the socialist position as untenable and inconsistent.
The Socialist Critique of the IWW
The center and symbol of the raging dispute was William Haywood, one of the few persons prominent in both the IWW and the SP. Haywood embraced the philosophy of the IWW. He defined socialism as direct worker rule in the shops rather than as government ownership of the means of production. Socialism was to be secured by a general lock-out of the capitalist class rather than through victory at the polls. Yet, unlike most Wobblies, he placed great emphasis on the role of the Socialist party. His Industrial Socialism (1911, with Frank Bohn) asserted that control of the government was "absolutely essential" if the unions were to win their demands and that municipal governments were "much more than the agents of the capitalist class," because they provided essential services to the workers. The SP, Haywood said in a statement that generated controversy in Wobbly ranks, had three important tasks. "First, it must lay hold of the powers of political government and prevent them from being used against the industrial organization of the workers. Second, it must be the bearer of sound knowledge, using its great and growing organization to teach Socialism. Third, it must use the governments of the cities to advance the social interests of the working class."[lxxxv] Haywood was an ardent and popular campaigner who contributed substantially to the party's municipal victories in Ohio in 1911.
Nevertheless, relations between the IWW and the SP were strained by mid-1911. Socialists accused Wobblies of disrupting the SP by using it as a recruiting ground, and Wobblies hurled the charge back. Although both Solidarity and The Industrial Worker advised against boring from within the Socialist party, individual Wobblies undoubtedly did join the SP to win it for industrial unionism or to convert and detach individual members. Although this embittered some party members otherwise sympathetic to the IWW, the party's increasingly numerous and vocal left wing agitated for a more activist party which would endorse industrial unionism and lead as well as support union struggles.[lxxxvi] Most IWW leaders, viewing the SP as irredeemable, stood aloof from this agitation and predicted that the radicals would lose. But in November 1911 Haywood announced his candidacy for a position on the party's National Executive Committee, and ran on a platform stressing industrial unionism.
Haywood's statement of candidacy evoked an immediate and sharp response from Morris Hillquit, an attorney, author, frequent SP candidate for various offices, and leader of the powerful New York organization. Hillquit attacked Haywood's position on sabotage, observance of the law, and direct action, thus igniting a debate that, fueled by the sensational McNamara confessions, raged for over a year and vented the irreconcilable differences between the SP and the IWW and within the SP. Hillquit took as his text the passage on morality from Industrial Socialism quoted above, and replied:
This is good anarchistic doctrine, but is diametrically opposed to the accepted policies of Socialism, and is not even a remote cousin to the theory of economic determinism. . . . To preach to the workers lawbreaking and violence is ethically unjustifiable and tactically suicidal. The laws of political democracies in the last analysis always represent the will of the majority of the people. They may be conceived in ignorance or procured by fraud or purchase, but in that case they exist only because the majority of the people and voters are so indifferent, ignorant or corrupt as to sanction them or at least acquiesce in them. The remedy of the minority aggrieved by the law is to convert their fellow citizens to their own views--to turn their minority into a majority, and thus to get possession of the legislative machinery for the interests and policies represented by them. Whenever we will obtain control of the legislative machinery of the government, we will exact obedience to our laws, working class laws, upon precisely the same grounds upon which we now yield obedience to the capitalist laws.[lxxxvii]
Hillquit conceded that modern law was in the main "capitalist law made to enslave the workers," but he claimed that socialists urged its change "by the regular and lawful methods established for that purpose." Illegal and violent action "has invariably served to demoralize and destroy the movement, by attracting to it professional criminals, infesting it with spies, leading the workers to needless and senseless slaughter, and ultimately engendering a spirit of disgust and reaction." If the ruling class refuses to accept the verdict of the people, "we will fight like tigers and mount the barricades if need be. But then we will be fighting, not as a mob of lawbreakers, but against such a mob." Any talk of lawbreaking or violence "is sure to be quoted against us forever and ever."[lxxxviii]
The working class, Hillquit averred in a subsequent letter, should not emulate capitalist morals and methods; it was "fighting for a better and higher order of things." Illegal actions could not be discussed publicly and voted on; they necessitated "the secret pact of a very small circle of trusted individuals. And there we have again the whole code of anarchist philosophy and tactics: the apotheosis of the intelligent minority instead of democratic faith in the majority, guerrilla warfare instead of organized class action, conspiratory councils instead of open organized class action . . . and force and violence instead of education and political action." The IWW "has no corporeal existence in the labor movement and is merely a sort of masonic formula for cantankerousness and disruption within the Socialist party."[lxxxix]
Hillquit raised most of the main themes of the anti-Haywood forces. Unlike the IWW, Hillquit, a wealthy, refined aristocrat, the very embodiment of urbane liberalism, perceived much of value in received morals, political structures, and ways of life; he wanted to build within and upon established institutions and practices rather than outside and against them. The IWW, however, criticized him for his great wealth and his detachment from working-class life and concerns.
Karl Kautsky, a major figure in the German Social Democratic party, backed Hillquit's appeal to ethics. In a widely reprinted statement he said, "Private property rests not alone upon laws that were created by the ruling classes, but also upon an ethical sentiment which is a product of thousands and thousands of years of development and which is alive in the toiling proletariat. . . . The mass of wage workers despise the thief."[xc] Violence against property, others claimed, injures society and the perpetrator, not merely the capitalist. Evil means will pollute good ends; unless care was exercised, the "torture wheels of socialism" would replace those of capitalism. Class rule might be won or maintained by violence, but its abolition required the raising of consciousness and the cultivation of humanity's finer qualities.[xci]
Hillquit's appeal to democracy, like his appeal to ethical principles, found supporters. John Spargo said, "Socialism and democracy are ultimately one." (This, however, implied either that the United States was not a democracy, or that it was socialist.) Opponents of Haywood and the IWW claimed that the United States was a genuine democracy affording genuine and fair chances for fundamental change. Proponents of this argument often asserted that legal and peaceful methods should be followed as long as they offered any chance of success; Kautsky mandated legality until the illegal practices of the capitalists made it "impossible for us to gain influence over the masses in a legal way." Violence and lawbreaking were justified only to secure the legal right to organize or to enforce a victory at the polls. Violence and crime, asserted another backer of Hillquit, "cannot be defended by argument. They are the absense of argument." Socialists should confine themselves to educating and winning the workers. As long as the SP lacked a majority, nothing could or should be achieved; as soon as it gained such a majority, everything else would naturally follow, for "when the majority of the working class unite to abolish the present order it will have to go."[xcii] At times, these Socialists spoke as if socialism could be preached into existence.
Closely related to the arguments from ethics and democracy was that based on the alleged benefits of contemporary civilization. Hillquit and his supporters were recruited from a segment of society that had much to lose by disruption and revolution. Winfield Gaylord, one of Berger's lieutenants, averred at the SP's convention in 1912 that political action entailed majority rule and "the maintaining of the social order which we have, and under which we live, and under which we must live, for the maintaining of such safeguards for liberty and life, and the pursuit of happiness as we have. . . . I prefer to take those that we have rather than ask for those which may not be granted by the advocates of direct action and sabotage. Those safeguards we know and understand." Another delegate--in a statement surprising at a Socialist convention--almost equated capitalism with civilization. "The working class is entitled to the best that there is in our civilization, and I protest against this attitude upon the part of some members of this party that, because there are not more good things in capitalism and civilization as it exits, therefore, we should repudiate capitalism and civilization and all its work." Other delegates likewise saw much of value in the present system and preferred temporary submission to injustice rather than the risk and uncertainty of revolution, anarchy, or chaos. Hillquit believed that the workers had some stake in extant society, which was protecting workers "from excessive exploitation from their employers"; he even claimed that "it may well be said that we are in the midst, or at any rate the beginning, of the socialist 'transition state.'"[xciii] Such a tolerably just and improving society, Hillquit believed, could well advance a moral claim to obedience. Hillquit saw the incipient welfare state as evidence of working-class power; IWW theorists more accurately perceived it as a new and ingenious form of capitalism control.
In addition to these arguments from principle, the anti-IWW forces marshalled an impressive array of practical arguments. Sabotage, crime, and violence would open the Socialist movement to spies, provocateurs, and out-and-out criminals and would convert the working class into sneak thieves, murderers, and petty criminals. "If the revolutionist becomes a thief, the thief becomes a revolutionist." This would breed demoralization and suspicion instead of solidarity and mutual confidence, and would encourage the antithesis of the qualities needed by the workers who were to inherit and govern modern civilization. The working class will lose whatever temporary gains accrue to it through force, as it has for centuries, unless it is educated and organized. "It requires no organization to commit violence. Crime is the opposite of discipline. Sabotage sneers at education." If a small band could liberate the workers, what need had workers of class organization? Such a band would inhibit working-class self-emancipation, essential to socialism.[xciv]
Crime, this argument continued, alienates public opinion and allows the government to smash the workers' movement; the Haymarket fiasco set it back many years. Capitalists were able commit crime, sabotage, and violence for profit only because they were organized, methodical, and in control of the government and the means of life. Crime is the method not of the workers but of the lumpenproletariat, a parasitic class which seeks to appropriate the property of others rather than create a classless society. The lumpenproletarians--who Berger and other right-wing socialists identified with the Wobblies--would fight for the capitalists as soon as they had full bellies.[xcv]
Hillquit and his supporters castigated the IWW and boosted the SP. No union could achieve socialism, they claimed, because all unions fought selfishly for a part of the working class rather than the entire class; the SP was the only strictly class organization. Furthermore, one of the ultimate goals of socialism, the capture of the public powers, could be achieved by a party but not by a union. The IWW's crime of dual unionism divided the working class. The SP wooed the AFL workers allegedly abused by the IWW because without the organized working class socialism was impossible. Hillquit also castigated Haywood's disparagement of intellectuals, professionals, and other members of the middle class who joined the labor movement. Hillquit thought it natural that some professionals would desert the bourgeoisie and "place themselves at the head of the new movement. . . . The leaders of the socialist movement in all countries recruit themselves largely from . . . bourgeois ideologists" convinced of socialism's desirability or inevitability. This, of course, was a standard IWW complaint. By what right, Wobblies asked, did bourgeois intellectuals, few of whom had any direct experience or understanding of working-class life, "place themselves at the head" of the labor movement? Hillquit also appealed endlessly to the Socialist International position and to orthodoxy and tradition (even while freely contradicting them at his pleasure.)[xcvi]
The Counterculture Responds
Supporters of Haywood within and outside the SP answered these arguments in the socialist and IWW press. The argument based on morality evoked outrage, incredulity, and the multifaceted response that characterized IWW moral conceptions. Morality was sometimes conceived as just another means to subjugate the working class, an efficient instrument of class rule that allowed the exploiters to minimize brute violence; in other formulations it was a genuine reality that capitalists ignored; finally, it was an evolving process that workers were reformulating for their own and hence the universal welfare. Robert Rives La Monte, one of the IWW's most acute champions within the SP, replied that the moral sentiment that Kautsky appealed to was the idea that a person is entitled to the product of his labor. "What a monstrous perversion it is to make this sentiment, which is the very foundation of our Socialist demand that the worker shall have the full product of his toil, the source and justification of respect for the rights of property" extorted from the workers by fraud and violence. The entire capitalist system was nothing but the organized and continual robbery and murder of the workers, La Monte said; any action against the capitalists was necessary self-defense, for which the capitalists were themselves fully responsible. Stealing back part of the spoils from a thief is not robbery, nor is killing an assailant murder; those who obey traditional moral scruples in dealings with those who continually flout them are doomed to destruction.[xcvii]
The purpose of the socialist movement, this argument continued, was the abolition of government and of the entire present order of society; if this was moral, individual crime or violence undertaken with this aim could not be wrong in principle, however impolitic or unwise it might be. "Mass violence is nothing but crime and violence multiplied, and thus made effective." If individual crime and violence are wrong, then so are revolution and expropriation, which indeed are always wrong and illegal from the standpoint of the dispossessed class. Capitalist seizure of church and feudal lands was criminal according to the rules of feudal society; in the same way all actions that tamper with profits are criminal by bourgeois, but not by proletarian, morality. Real socialists stand within the exploiters' morality and law as long as long as such conduct is effective or as long as they have no other option, and not a minute longer. Would Hillquit, his opponents asked, fail to inaugurate socialism if he could do so only at the cost of disreputable conduct?[xcviii]
The real immorality, IWW writers asserted, consisted of obedience to capitalist law and ethical codes, at the inevitable cost of injury and death for the workers. Capitalist adulteration of food, practiced routinely for profit, killed far more workers than did proletarian sabotage undertaken to protect human life; the workers who tamely and routinely commit this sabotage for pay as part of their jobs were the real criminals. "Their blood is on their own heads. Obsessed by an automatic subservience to things as they are, obsessed by capitalist class consciousness, they are like the fabled swine who drove blindly over the cliffs to destruction." Similarly, capitalist disregard of safety laws results in the mass murder of the workers, as well as destruction of capitalist property that far exceeds that exacted by worker retaliation; workers who refuse to engage in sabotage when this is the only effectual resistance in effect collaborate in their own extinction.[xcix]
Hillquit, according to his opponents, fundamentally misconstrued the task of the socialist movement and placed himself athwart its most vital task: the education of the workers about the class nature of contemporary morals and law, and the forging of a new morality conducive to the welfare of the working class and therefore of all humanity. Self-liberation from bourgeois morality was the main task confronting the proletariat. Property could not be destroyed in fact until it was destroyed as idea; but the moment workers ceased to revere and bow down before capitalist property, that property would cease to exist. Workers, like the capitalists, would rule as much by the force of ideas as by any other mechanism; contempt for the rights of property was a vital element in the class war. Morals were not eternal or absolute; they evolved along with machinery and in conjunction with class relations. As The Industrial Worker said, "We battle against the existing moral code and in so doing we are creating a working class morality.... In fighting we develop new ideas and ideals."[c]
Hillquit, the self-appointed guaradian of socialist orthodoxy, should have known that his appeal to morality to buttress capitalist property relations contravened socialist doctrine. That many of his supporters repudiated his sentiments is not surprising, because Hillquit himself, in Socialism in Theory and Practice (1909) endorsed economic determinism and its implications for morality and the law. "Moral conduct, as ordinarily interpreted, is conduct tending to conserve the existing order," he said. But the working class is emancipating itself from "the special morality of the ruling classes" and is creating "a new and distinct code of ethics" based on solidarity, cooperation, and class consciousness. "The modern labor movement is maturing its own standards of right and wrong conduct, its own social ideals and morality. Good and bad conduct has largely come to mean to them conduct conducive to the welfare and success of their class in its struggle for emancipation." Society is evolving toward a classless society characterized by an organic morality in which the interests of various individuals, and those of individuals and society, will coincide. "All factors which impede the path to its approximate realization are anti-ethical or immoral; contrariwise, all factors or movements which tend in its direction are ethical."[ci] William Haywood could not have said it better.
Hillquit's argument from democracy also evoked vigorous rebuttals. Gustave Eckstein, in an article translated for the New York Call from Die Neue Zeit, the theoretical journal of the SDP, opposed Haywood even while pointing out that Hillquit's theory contradicted the fundamental doctrine of the class struggle. Socialists did not regard the people as a unit or as isolated individuals, but as organized into contending classes, one of which controls the government. No government in a class society could represent "the people"; no class society could be a democracy. The idea of revolution as a response if the government thwarted the mythical "will of the people" was bourgeois. Other writers ridiculed the idea that meaningful change was possible within the system; the officially approved mechanisms of change were part of the very capitalist law designed to enslave the workers, and they served this purpose admirably. Reforms could be secured within the parameters of capitalist law; revolution could not.[cii]
Many writers went beyond theory and explained just how the United States governmental structure made exactment of the will of the workers difficult or impossible even in relatively minor matters. Victor Berger, Hillquit's staunch ally, was as vehement on this subject as anyone, hurling defiance and contempt at all three branches of the U.S. government in his newspaper, The Social Democratic Herald. The Constitution, a fraud foisted on the people in secrecy and illegality, was "practically an admission that the American people have not free institutions, are not a free people." It could not be amended "except by a bloody war.... revolutions and a sea of blood." Its preamble was a lie. The president had more power than any monarch in the world, possibly excepting the czar of Russia. The Senate was undemocratic and should be abolished. The American judge is "the absolute king of the Fifteenth or Sixteenth centuries," almost invariably a corporation lawyer and "a regular fiend" when deciding questions regarding the rights of the workers. The power to declare laws unconstitutional is a usurped power and the socialists in power will ignore it. "Under present conditions," Berger thundered, "the American people are as absolutely prevented from exercising their political power as the people of Russia or China."[ciii]
Laws emanating from such a government, Berger continued, "are made just by the ruling class and in their interest. They represent might and not right." They protect property and "those whose lives are worth something in a capitalistic sense" but not the lives of the propertyless. Expropration (which Berger on other occasions opposed) "sounds well to us" and will be legal when done by the strongest party. "And we hereby solemnly promise not to undertake any expropriation until we have the power." American capitalists will shoot down workers with an eagerness matched only in Russia. "Political equality, under the present system, is a snare and a delusion. The wage worker who depends upon an employer for the opportunity to work and support his family, is not on terms of political equality with his master." The United States is "a plutocratic republic" rather than a "genuine democracy." "We are a subjugated nation. We have been conquered by the capitalist class" and, without arms, will have to submit to any outrage, including a denial of the franchise. "Lawlessness of the right kind is a lever that has moved the world forward," but in any event the capitalists violate the laws "whenever it serves their purpose."[civ] Conditions in Colorado were as bad as anywhere in the world except Russia or China.
Berger's editorial of 31 July 1909 (quoted above), which predicted a bloody cataclysm and urged workers to arm themselves, was a typical pronouncement which he never disavowed, even at the 1912 Socialist convention. In subsequent editorials Berger stressed that he counselled peace but claimed that a nonviolent solution was impossible unless the working class was armed and thus able to dissuade the capitalists from excessive aggression. (He never explained why the capitalists would consent, or how they could be forced, to arm the workers.) The abolition of wage slavery was a far greater change than gaining religious toleration or the right of the ballot, both of which had been secured by blood. Berger said that street riots and insurrection were a crime against the working class (not against the capitalists), as was an appeal to arms by those lacking weapons. Violence could not itself secure the social revolution but would probably be necessary for it; as in the past, many "revolutions" might be necessary stages toward the final consummation. The ballot is in itself as impotent as violence; all it can do is to "strengthen the power of resistance of the laboring people.... Up to this time men have always solved great questions by blood and iron. And so it will be in the future."[cv]
Two months after the SP's 1912 convention Berger reiterated his belief that the Kaiser would not dare to oppress German workers as much as the American government did American workers. "Patience has ceased to be a virtue. But the American workmen have long ceased to claim any virtues. . . . There is a possibility of a peaceful solution of the social question in Germany. There is none here, although no doubt the orators of the Fourth of July will favor us as usual with glowing accounts of the government under which we live. . . . The big capitalists are constantly showing (the workers) that 'law and order' are humbugs, and that constitutions, courts, etc., are simply snares to oppress the non-resistants."[cvi]
The IWW and its supporters could easily have quoted Berger to their purpose. They had other arguments as well. Henry Slobodin, a left-wing socialist, thought that Hillquit had "a strange conception of human will": how could laws secured by intimidation, bribery, and lies rest on the consent of their victims? (Indeed, obedience to such laws could be construed as the very acquiescence that Hillquit used as an argument for their validity.) As for capitalist obedience to socialist law, the capitalists did not even obey their own law when it served their purposes to violate it; they would obey socialist law only for the same reason that workers obeyed capitalist law, out of fear of superior force. The free exchange of ideas that Hillquit's thesis assumed was ludicrous because it assumed equal access to power, wealth, education, and the means of expression. In fact, the capitalists owned the press, the pulpit, and the educational system, and their control of the resources necessary to life made the free consent of their slaves a mockery.[cvii] Indeed, it could be argued that if the conditions necessary for Hillquit's argument to be valid in fact existed, socialism would be either unnecessary or already achieved.
Still other opponents reminded Hillquit that the labor movement was born in crime and would triumph in it; had the unions not organized when that was illegal and struck when that was against the law, they would not yet exist. The prevalence of anti-labor laws and injunctions still necessitated routine lawbreaking by all unions, including the AFL. Only the implicit threat of mass action restrained the greed and depravity of the capitalists. The threat of illegal action was necessary even to safeguard the ballot. At the first sign that the revolutionary movement might triumph, the capitalists would hurriedly suspend or ignore the constitution and ban even those activities now accorded a precarious legality, as they already do routinely in specific "emergency" situations.[cviii] For all these reasons, inculcation of respect for the law would deliver socialists and unionists bound and gagged to their oppressors.
To Hillquit's charges that sabotage and illegality were undemocratic, Haywood's supporters rejoined that the Socialist party was itself undemocratic. Its exclusive reliance on the ballot effectively excluded a vast and growing mass of disfranchised workers--blacks, immigrants, migrants, women, and children--from the struggle for their own emancipation. The IWW charged that party leaders, union heads, and political representatives desired to supplant the masses, dampen revolutionary fervor, and rule in place of those they purported to serve; in contrast, the IWW's militant minority catalyzed the sluggish majority into action and encouraged them to become part of the revolutionary process. The electoral Socialists, Wobblies charged, also misconstrued the means by which a majority was obtained. Socialists felt that workers would be converted by mere preaching, whereas the IWW aimed, by direct action, to create a whole new context for action and engender entirely new options which the majority could not desire until they recognized their possibility.[cix] (It is worth noting that many mass-production industries were ultimately organized by just such a process; illegal sit-down strikes by a militant minority opened new possibilities which the majority only belatedly embraced. However, success in those strikes required relatively benign governments partly dependent on labor votes.)
Finally, some Socialists reminded Hillquit that democracy included respect for human lives and rights as well as majority rule and that the present society was based on the murder and torture of a substantial portion of its population. Wobblies at times raged at the apathetic majority whose acquiescence in their own exploitation rendered the oppression of all other workers inevitable.[cx] The liberation of all was necessary for the freedom of any, precisely because the enslavement of some facilitated the enslavement of all.
The IWW and its supporters also ridiculed Hillquit's notion that Socialists would "mount the barricades and fight like tigers" if a mob of capitalist lawbreakers overturned a fairly won election. First, workers were dying by the hundreds of thousands even as Hillquit wrote, due to capitalist indifference to the health and safety of their workers; the Triangle fire was only one recent and highly-publicized example. As Haywood said, "We are fighting against such a mob at the present time. . . . The fight is now on." Second, if socialists were justified in fighting to preserve a Socialist victory, why could they not fight to win a victory, of whatever kind? Breaking capitalist law was often necessary to preserve the unions from destruction--not only as important as maintaining an electoral victory, but a prerequisite to attaining one. Revolutionists should decide to fight based on their chances of winning, and by whatever methods would succeed, not according to some abstract formula.[cxi]
Finally, Hillquit's opponents pointed out that mounting the barricades to forestall capitalist theft of an election would be ineffective and suicidal. The capitalists could prevent the Socialists from ever winning an election by changing the law, by securing a court decision legally nullifying an election (as they had done not long ago in Colorado), by legally disfranchising workers (as they were presently doing to hundreds of thousands), or threatening to shut down their plants (as they did in 1896). If the SP somehow did win an election which the capitalists then negated, resistance would lead to a massacre because the workers would be no match for a trained and well-equipped army. Hillquit, said The Industrial Worker, "will have to play the tiger himself. We are not going to spill any more working class blood to seat officials. We have done that too often in the past."[cxii]
Hillquit could look with equanimity upon gradual, peaceful change because he was not himself upon "the torture wheels of capitalism" with the unskilled and migratory workers. His preachments about "democracy," "civilization," and "the transitional state" are obscene when seen in the light of the slow death by torture endured by most unskilled workers, or the quicker death by torture suffered by many Wobbly organizers and free speech fighters. As Solidarity reminded its readers, in a metaphor redolent of the lampshades of Auschwitz, "every yard of cloth produced is saturated in the life-blood of the workers. The coat you wear, the shirt, the pretty lace, all are compounded of human lives--the lives of little children, of women, and of men." This was not only a metaphor; it approached literal truth. The owners of this society were determined to maintain their power by any means. The Wobblies and their supporters in the SP felt that the workers' only salvation lay in recognizing the iniquitous and class nature of capitalist law as well as of capitalist morality and in acting in accordance with their own interests rather than those of their masters. Robert Rives La Monte said that the workers were
"cursed by a superstitious and paralyzing reverence for the law.... Respect for law, respect for the 'sacred rights of private property' are the stone walls against which every Socialist (agitator) in America is continually ramming his long-suffering head. This wall we must batter down, even though Hillquit and Spargo and Feigenbaum, assisted by the convenient cowardice of party editors, are doing their utmost to buttress it up. It will be so much the worse for them if their heads are pushing against the other side of the wall when we topple it over."[cxiii]
Go to Part 2
Notes:
[i] I am indebted to Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment, New York, 1978, for the idea of perceiving a counterculture in what may appear only a political and economic movement. Richard Oestreicher, Solidarity and Fragmentation, brilliantly applies this concept to the Knights of Labor. Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist and Gary Gerstle, Working Class Americanism are two splendid treatments of the uses of conservative rhetoric and cultural symbols for radical ends. European labor historians have created a vast literature on this subject. For some examples, see Vernon Lidtke, Alternative Culture and William Sewell, Jr., Work and Revolution in France. ADD TO THIS NOTE
[ii] From the time of the split until the present, authors sympathetic to the IWW and the SP have lamented the failure of the two groups to gorge a united political and economic movement. Ira Kipnis, The American Socialist Movement, 1897-1912 (New York, 1972) and Nick Salvatore, Eugene Debs: Citizen and Socialist (Urbana, Illinois, 1982) strongly imply that it was avoidable. Robert Rives La Monte was one contemporary who argued that they entire controversy was a misunderstanding based on mere words ("Tools and Tactics," (ISR, March 1912, and "The New Socialism," ISR, September 1912). Anyone arguing this position must explain how such a misunderstanding could continue for so long as have such (for the participants) momentous consequences.
[iii] Ira Kipnis and Nick Salvatore, cited above; Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All (New York, 1969); Philip Foner, The Industrial Workers of the World (New York, 1965); Glen L. Seretan, Daniel De Leon: The Odyssey of an American Marxist (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1979); Marc Karson, American Labor Unions and Politics, 1900-1918 (Boston, 1965); David Shannon, The Socialist Party of America (Chicago, 1967).
[iv] IWW, Proceedings of the First Convention of the Industrial Workers of the World (New York, 1905), pp. 82-83, 5-6.
[v] PFC, pp. 247, 224, 229.
[vi] PFC, 163, 270-72, 252-63.
[vii] PFC, pp. 146, 156, 148, 227. The discussion of political action recurred throughout the convetion in various contexts; see. pp. 117-175, 220-248, 252-263, 568-594.
[viii] The debates within the IWW contained an implicit answer to this question. A mature, powerful IWW would generate its own political party as an organic growth from the membership. This party would promulgate a practical, revolutionary programe, rather than the necessarily vapid theories of marginal parties not affiliated with the IWW; when political action became concrete and real, Wobblies would unite behind the party of their own creation.
[ix] PFC, p. 153.
[x] PFC, 154-55, 579, 157, 240, 129.
[xi] PFC, pp. 148, 227.
[xii] PFC, 226-27, 231, 148, 150; Daniel De Leon, The Socialist Reconstruction of Society in Socialist Landmarks: Four Addresses by Daniel De Leon (New York), p. 226.
[xiii] De Leon, Socialist Reconstuction, pp. 214, 228, 211-223; De Leon, As to Politics, p. 61; De Leon, speech to the Third Convention, Proceedings of Third Annual Convention, Industrial Workers of the World, Official Report No. 3, p. 5.
[xiv] De Leon speech, PTAC, Official Report No. 3, p. 5; "Haywood Under Direct Examination," IUB, July 27, 1907.
[xv] As to Politics, 58; Socialist Reconstruction, 218-23; PTAC, Official Report No. 3, p.5. [check first two references; paragraph has been altered]
[xvi] As to Politics, passim.
[xvii] De Leon, Industrial Unionism, p. 50; As to Politics, p. 39.
[xviii] As to Politics, pp. 42-46.
[xix] Proceedings of the 1906 IWW Convention, pp. 548-49, 316-18, 420-1, 304-13.
[xx] "Report of the IWW to the International Labor Congress at Stuttgart," IUB, 8-10-07 [this was reprinted as a pamphlet]; "Relations of Trades Unions and the Political Party. Speech by Delegate Helsewood," IUB, 9-14-07. For other information on the IWW activities at the Congress, see "International Socialist and Labor Congress. Partial Report of Delegate Heslewood," IUB, 9-7-07; "Hillquit's Lying Report to the Stuttgart Congress," IUB, 9-7-07; "The Trade Union Resolution Adopted by the Congress," IUB, 9-14-07; "Delegate to Stuttgart Congress Submits his Report to the Convention,: IUB, 9-28-07; and "Report to the Convention by Fred W. Heslewood," IUB, 9-28-07. Heslewood and De Leon were members of the committee on the relations of the Unions and the Party, the issue that most interested them and which was consuming the IWW.
[xxi] Daniel De Leon, "Notes on the Stuttgart Congress," in The Daily People, reprinted in IUB, 11-2-07.
[xxii] PTAC, Official Report No. 3.
[xxiii] PTAC, Official Report No. 3. Foote's account of the strike at the bakery is in PTAC, Official Report No. 4; it related not to the motion to strike the political clause, but to interpret it as referring to the IWW's internal and industrial administration, as recounted below.
[xxiv] PTAC, Official Report No. 3.
[xxv] PTAC, Official Report No.3; PTAC, Official Report No. 5.
[xxvi] "As to Political Parties," a letter by W.F. Loquist, IUB, 4-27-07; Samuel L. Brooks, "As to Revolutionary Unity," IUB 8-17-07.
[xxvii] "Industrial Unionism," IUB, 10-17-07; "The Industrial Structure and the Working Class Task," IUB 3-21-08; John Kortan, "Craft Unionism or Industrial Unionism," IUB, 3-21-08 (a lecture given on February 22 in Detroit); Robert Rives La Monte, "Economic Organization and the Ballot," IUB, 4-27-07; William Trautmann, "The Question of Might," IUB, 12-7-07, reprinted from the Cleveland Arbeiter Zeitung sometime in 1905. Trautmann emphasized that if the workers mistakenly believed that the political state was the main citadel of capitalism, they would suffer extreme demoralization and defeat when, after capturing it, they found themselves little closer to victory than before.
[xxviii] "Industrial Unionism," IUB, 10-12-07; "Address to the Streetcar Workers," IUB, 5-18-07 (also reprinted as a leaflet).
[xxix] James Conolly, "The Future of Labor," IUB, April 18, 1908; Philip Foner, The Industrial Workers of the World, pp. 98-99.
[xxx] PFC, p. 151; PTAC, Official Report No.3.
[xxxi] B.H. Williams, "Industrial Unionism and Politics," IUB, March 14, 1908.
[xxxii] B.H. Williams, "Industrial Unionism and Politics," IUB, March 14, 1908.
[xxxiii] De Leon was allotted a half hour to reply to Williams on March 11; his remarks were printed in the Weekly People, March 21, 1908 as "Political Action." See also the Daily People for March 13, 1908. On the Post Office, "Why Does it Stop?," Weekly People, April 4, 1908. Delegate Schwend on the electric chair, PTAC, Official Report No. 3.
[xxxiv] "Is this Veiled Dynamitism, IUB, April 4, 1908; "A Letter of Resignation," IUB, April 18, 1908; "Has No Political TEsts," IUB, 5-9-08; editorial, IUB, 5-30-08.
[xxxv] "The Industrial Structure and the Working Class Task," IUB, March 21, 1908; IUB, May 9, 1908, blurb near "Flowers or Rice."
[xxxvi] For an account of the split at the second convention in 1906, the problems with the WFM and the AFL, and Debs's doubts, see Foner, Industrial Workers of the World, 60-80; see also Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, 93-119. Dubofsky wryly remarks that with the IWW victory over Sherman in the courts, "capitalist justice thus giving 'revolutionary wage slaves' at least one victory."
[xxxvii] William Trautmann, "The Question of Might," Cleveland Arbeiter Zeitung, unspecified date in 1905, reprinted in IUB, 12-7-07; Foner and Dubofsky, cited above; William Trautmann, Report of the General Secretary-Treasurer to the IWW Second Convention (IWW, 1906), 39-40; unpublished notebook of GEB meetings, IWW collection, Wayne State University, Detroit.
[xxxviii] "Report of the IWW to the International Labor Congress at Stuttgart," IUB, 8-10-07; "Relations of Trades Unions and the Political Party," IUB, 9-14-07; "International Labor and Socialist Congress. Partial Report of Delegate F.W. Heslewood," IUB, 9-7-07. The IWW had not paid dues to the Socialist International, and hence was not entitled to a delegate at the Congress, and had to approach some dues-paying member for recognition. Both the SLP and the SP had paid dues.
[xxxix] "To the Fourth Annual Convention of the Industrial Workers of the World," IUB, October 24, 1908.
[xl] "The Worker Against the Intellectual" and "The Intellectual Against the Worker," IUB, October 10, 1908.
[xli] "The Worker Against the Intellectual" and "The Intellectual Against the Worker," IUB. October 19, 1908.
[xlii] "The Fourth Annual Convention of the IWW," IUB, November 7, 1908; IWW Preamble, 1908.
[xliii] "The Fourth Annual Convention of the IWW," IUB, November 7, 1908.
[xliv] "The Fourth Annual Convention of the IWW," IUB, November 7, 1908; "Convention Notes," IUB, October 10, 1908; "The Fourth Annual Convention of the IWW," IUB, February 20, 1909; IUB, October 24, 1908.
[xlv] "'The Slum Proletariat',", IUB, February 27, 1909.
[xlvi] The best accounts of the "Detroit IWW" are Paul F. Brissendon, The IWW: A Study of American Syndicalism (New York, 1957 REPRINTED FROM) chapter X; Michael Ebner, "The Passaic Strike of 1912 and the Two IWWs," Labor History, Fall 1970. NEW BOOK ON PATTERSON
[xlvii] For an excellent analysis of the effects of repression on the mainstream labor movement in the U.S. see Forbath, Law and the Shaping of American Unions.
[xlviii] untitled, IW, April 22, 1909, p. 2; "Suffragettes and the Suffering Workers," IW, October 8, 1910; William Haywood, "The General Strike," speech by William Haywood at Meeting Held for the Benefit of the Buccafori Defense, at Progress Assembly Rooms, New York, March 16, 1911, (Chicago, n.d., p. 10).
[xlix] William Haywood and Frank Bohn, Industrial Socialism, Chicago, 1911, pp. 50-51' "Queries and Replies," IW, May 8, 1913. These arguments against government ownership recur in many squibs and short articles in IW and Solidarity, and, at greater length, in William English Walling, "Government Ownership," ISR, April 1912; Austin Lewis, "A Positive Platform," ISR, April 1912; and J.H. Frazier, "What We Want," ISR, December 1911.
[l] Almost any issue of IW or Solidarity has relevant stories, and any book on the IWW documents dozens of examples. The best are Dubofsky, We Shall Be All and Foner, Industrial Workers of the World. For Progressive Era disfranchisment, see Why American's Don't Vote. Sally Miller, Kate Richards O'Hare, p. 89, says that such changes in St. Louis defused the SP challenge. "Whereas the Socialists had made a very strong showing in the election prior to the new charter, thereafter they were never serious contenders." This happened in many localities.
[li] "Right and Wrong," IW, May 20, 1909.
[lii] William Haywood, "The General Strike"; William Haywood, "Socialism the Hope of the Working Class," ISR, February 1912; William Haywood and Frank Bohn, "Industrial Socialism"; "The General Strike," IW, June 10, 1909; "The General Strike," IW, August 19, 1909; "The General Strike," IW, February 5, 1910; "Building a New Society," IW, May 1, 1912; "Labor Movement in France," IW, June 4, 1911.
[liii] "Final Aim of the IWW," IW, May 5, 1909.
[liv] "Taking a Step Forward," IW, July 17, 1911.
[lv] "Political Fatalism," Solidarity, December 16, 1911; editorial, IW, September 14, 1911. The arguments against political parties occur in "The 'Policy' of Solidarity, Solidarity, July 23, 1910; "Employment Sharks Must Go," IW, March 25, 1909; "Industrial Unionism," IW, March 25, 1910; "Battle is for Workers," IW, June 1, 1911; "Industrial Idea V the Political," IW, May 7, 1910; "The Workingman, the Law, and Anarchy," Solidarity, April 16, 1910; "From our Friends Deliver Us," IW, June 25, 1910; "Where Is Your Power," IW, April 20, 1911; "Outline of an Argument for Direct Action," Solidarity, May 10, 1911; "Is the IWW Dead?", Solidarity, July 22, 1911.
[lvi] "A Web of Sophistry," Solidarity, October 28, 1911; William Haywood, "Against Old Age Pensions," ISR, November, 1911; "Our Bourbon Socialism," IW, July 30, 1910; "Labor Laws and Others," February 1, 1912.
[lvii] William Z. Foster, "Foster Replies to Robert Rives La Monte," IW, March 23, 1911. See also "About IWW Literature"; William Z. Foster, "Socialist Labor Movement in Germany," Solidarity, September 10, 1911; William Z. Foster, "German Socialist Unions," Solidarity, September 2, 1911.
[lviii] Ben Williams, "Shall We Grow or Shall We Wither? The 'Anti-Political' in the IWW," Solidarity, April 15, 1911. See also Ben Williams, "The 'Policy' of Solidarity, Solidarity, July 23, 1910; "Sugar Coated Capitalism," IW, February 15, 1912.
[lix] "Pleas to the Socialists," Solidarity, April 1, 1911; "Is this Neutrality," IW, February 8, 1912; "Revolutionizing the "Revolutionists,", IW, March 7, 1912; "The Socialist Reactionists," IW, May 5, 1912; and all the articles on the Stuttgart Congress of 1907, in The Industrial Union Bulletin, 8-10-07, 9-7-07, 9-14-07, 9-28-07; Justus Ebert, "Is the IWW Anti-Political"; Vincent St. John, "Political Parties and the IWW."
[lx] "Political Policemen," IW, June 6, 1912.
[lxi] Vincent St. John, The IWW: Its History, Structure, and Methods (Chicago, 1911), p. 17; William Haywood and Frank Bohn, Industrial Socialism, (Chicago, 1911), pp. 56-57.
[lxii] "As to Politics," IW, May 6, 1909; "One Big Union," Solidarity, July 15, 1911; "Might is Right," Solidarity, July 1, 1911; "Debs and Direct Action," IW, February 22, 1912.
[lxiii] IWW Preamble; "Destruction and Construction," IW, May 1, 1913; "Three Fundamentals of Syndicalism," Solidarity, August 3, 1912; "Robert Rives La Monte, "Tools and Tactics," ISR, March 1912; Covington Hall, "Machinery and Morals," IW, February 1, 1912; Covington Hall, "Workingmen Unite," IW, September 30, 1909; "Nothing to Lose," S*, July DATE IS UNCERTAIN, 1911.
[lxiv] "Honesty!," IW, November 2, 1910; "Get Something Now," IW, March 25, 1909; "The Coming Winter," IW, August 12, 1909; "Newest Form of Labor Revolution," IW, May 1, 1912.
[lxv] "Weinstock's Report," IW, June 13, 1912; "Violence," IW, March 21, 1912.
[lxvi] "Industrial Unionism for Harvest Hands," IW, July 1, 1909; "The Coming Winter," IW, August 12, 1909.
[lxvii] Ben Williams, "Two Views of Sabotage," S*, February 25, 1911; "Cockroaches," IW, September 9, 1909; "One Big Union," S*, July 15, 1909; Leon Vasilio, "What Shall Be Our Attitude in the Matter of Strikes," IUB, 4-13-07.
[lxviii] "Weapon that Wins," IW, February 23, 1911; "A Lesson for the American Slave," IW, October 19, 1910; "One Big Union," S*, July 15, 1911; "Power in France," IW, February 11, 1911; "How Sabotage Affects the Scissor-Bills," IW, May 28, 1910; "Are Tactics Revolutionary?," IW, May 16, 1912; "Special News from France," IW, November 12 1910 and February 2, 1911.
[lxix] "Capitalist Sabotage," S*, July 6, 1912; Ben Williams, "Two Views of Sabotage," S* February 25, 1911.
[lxx] S*, December 24, 1910, as cited in Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, p. 161; "As to Violence," S*, June 8, 1912; "Mailed Fist," IW, May 8, 1913.
[lxxi] Vincent St. John, The IWW: Its History, Structure, and Methods, pp. 20-21.
[lxxii] "Massacre of Working People," IW, August 26, 1909. See also "McKees Rocks--An Object Lesson," IW, September 23, 1909; "Go Slow, Mr. Thug," IW, January 8, 1910.
[lxxiii] "Right and Wrong," IW, May 20, 1909; "Industrial Unionism Spells Emancipation," IW, January 8, 1910.
[lxxiv] Victor Berger, "Should Be Prepared to Fight for Liberty at All Hazards," Social Democratic Herald, July 31, 1909. For Berger's career, see Sally Miller, Victor Berger and the Promise of Constructive Socialism, (Westport, Connecticut, 1973).
[lxxv] "Bloodshed the Hope of Politicians," IW, August 19, 1909.
[lxxvi] "Bloodshed, the Hope of the Politicians," IW, August 19, 1909.
[lxxvii] "Are they Guilty," IW, December 14, 1911; "McNamara Makes Startling Confession," IW, December 7, 1911.
[lxxviii] "Desperate Reaction," S*, December 9, 1911; GET EXACT QUOTE AND SOURCE FOR HAYWOOD ON MCNAMARAS.
[lxxix] "Might is Right," S*, July 1, 1911.
[lxxx] "What is There In It," IW, June 24, 1909; FIND SOURCE FOR QUOTE ON MARTRYS, BENEFACTORS OF HUMANITY; NOT IN MY VERSION OF NOTES
[lxxxi] "What is the IWW? A Candid Statement of its Principles, Objects, and Methods." The third edition, from which these quotes are taken, was apparently published in 1923, although the library of the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, dates it as 1922. This pamphlet probably undercut its intended message by claiming that the IWW was itself "a religion" which has achieved "what no other religion could" in the lives of many Wobblies. "It has 'saved' them, given peace to their minds and hope for the future." This would predictably alienate adherents to older and more established religions, as well as those Wobblies who felt that their beliefs were scientific, not taken on faith.
[lxxxii] Katharine Hill, "A Socialist Woman's View," S*, 5-17-13.
[lxxxiii] Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, "The Truth About the Patterson Strike," in Joyce L. Kornbluh, Rebel Voices, (Ann Arbor, 1968), pp. 223-225.
[lxxxiv] "The Importance of the Industrial Union Movement," IUB, 5-9-08.
[lxxxv] William Haywood and Frank Bohn, Industrial Socialism (Chicago, 1911) pp. 54, 59. I have compressed Haywood's three paragraphs into one.
[lxxxvi] "A War of Words," IW, July 20, 1911; "News and Views," S*, December 9, 1911; S*, December 2, 1911; Frank Bohn, "Is the IWW to Grow?", ISR, July 1911.
[lxxxvii] Morris Hillquit, "Socialism and the Law," The New York Call, November 20, 1911. For Hillquit's career, see Norma Fain Pratt, Morris Hillquit: A Political History of an American Jewish Socialist (Westport, Connecticut).
[lxxxviii] Hillquit, "Socialism and the Law," NYC, November 20, 1911.
[lxxxix] Morris Hillquit, "Again Socialism and the Law," NYC, December 9, 1911.
[xc] Karl Kautsky, "Kautsky Defines Position on Question of 'Legality,'" NYC, December 30, 1911.
[xci] Caroline Pratt, "A Word to Both Sides," NYC, December 7, 1911; Boston, "Concerning Force," NYC, December 7, 1911; William Morris, "In the Matter of Violence," NYC, December 11, 1911; Joseph Cohen, "Socialism and Violence," NYC, December 18, 1911; Dorat Layne, "Reform, Revolution, and Respectability," NYC, June 26, 1912; Joseph Cohen, "The Dynamiters," NYC, January 9, 1913.
[xcii] John Spargo, "John Spargo States his Views," NYC, November 30, 1911; Karl Kautsky, "Kautsky Defines Position on Question of 'Legality,'" NYC, December 30, 1911; Joseph Cohen, "Unholy Trinity," NYC, June 16, 1912; Dorat Layne, "Reform, Revolution, and Respectability," NYC, June 26, 1912; Johnathon Pierce, "Failure of Violence," NYC, December 4, 1911.
[xciii] Socialist Party of America, National Convention of the Socialist Party Held at Indianapolis, Indiana, May 12 to 18, 1912, Chicago, 1912, pp. 123, 128, 122-136; Morris Hillquit, Socialism in Theory and Practice, (New York, 1912) pp. 98, 104.
[xciv] Gustave Eckstein, "Democratic and Syndicalism Illusions," NYC, March 3, 1912; Joseph Cohen, "Unholy Trinity," NYC, June 16, 1912.
[xcv] John McMahon, "As to Direct Action," NYC, February 12, 1912; Morris Hillquit, "Karl Marx... Against Louis Boudin," NYC, December 27, 1911; Karl Kautsky, "Kautsky Defines Position on 'Legality'," NYC, December 30, 1911.
[xcvi] Morris Hillquit, Socialism in Theory and Practice, pp. 161, 169.
[xcvii] Robert Rives La Monte, "Socialist Respect for Capitalist Law," ISR, February 1912; "Breaking the Law," NYC, January 30, 1912; Joshua Wanhope, "Might Makes Right," NYC, January 29, 1913.
[xcviii] Richard Perin, "Article II, Section 6," NYC, June 6, 1912.
[xcix] Frank Pease, "Foodstuffs and Sabotage," NYC, January 25, 1913; "Capitalist Sabotage," S*, July 6, 1912; "Mr. Block" and "Business" (cartoons), IW, December 12, 1912.
[c] "Destruction and Construction," IW, May 1, 1913; Jesse Fales, "Working Class Morality," ISR, May 1912; "Debs and Direct Action," IW, February 22, 1912; "Where Does the IWW Stand?", IW, January 16, 1913.
[ci] Morris Hillquit, Socialism in Theory and Practice, pp. 55-56, 62-63, 58-59.
[cii] Gustave Eckstein, "Democratic and Syndicalism Illusions," NYC, March 3, 1912; Moses Oppenheimer, "Spitting Upon the Law," NYC, December 27, 1911; S*, Bromberg, "Socialism and the Law," NYC, December 10, 1911; Robert Rives La Monte, "Shall We Be Law Abiding?", NYC, December 7, 1911; Boudin, "Law and Order in the United States," NYC, December 26, 1911.
[ciii] Victor Berger, Broadsides (a collection of his columns), Milwaukee, 1912, pp. 68, 65, 63, 43-54, 64, 64-5, 201, 68.
[civ] Berger, Broadsides, pp. 71, 117, 71-72, 141, 87, 171, 143, 144-5, 215, 78-79.
[cv] National Convention of the Socialist Party..., p. 133; Victor Berger. "An Armed People is Always a Free People," SDH, August 14, 1909; Victor Berger, "Do We Want Progress by Catasthrope and Bloodshed or by Common Sense?", SDH, September 25, 1909; Victor Berger, "Sectarian Babble Means Impotence--Our Way Means Success," SDH, October 30, 1909.
[cvi] Victor Berger, "Let Us Face the Question of Freedom," SDH, July 6, 1912.
[cvii] Henry Slobodin, "Concerning Violence," NYC, November 30, 1911; Louis Boudin, "Law and Order," NYC, December 7, 1911; Boudin, "Law and Order in the United States," NYC, December 26, 1911.
[cviii] Henry Slobodin, "Concerning Violence," NYC, November 30, 1911; S*, Brombery, "Socialism and Law," NYC, December 10, 1911; Richard Perin, "Article II, Section 6," NYC, June 11, 1912; "A Socialist Editor's Lament," S*, March 30, 1912; Dry Point, "Once More, Section 6," NYC, July 1, 1912; Courtney Lemon, "Haywood, the McNamaras, Violence, and a Few Other Things," NYC, December 31, 1911.
[cix] Phillips Russell, "What is the Socialist Message," NYC, December 12, 1912; Loius Levine, "The Labor Movement in France," IW, July 4 and July 11, 1912; "Propaganda of the Deed," IW, March 21, 1912.
[cx] For a hostile comment on this, see Aileen Kraditor, The Radical Persuasion (Baton Rouge, 1981), pp. 129-131.
[cxi] William Haywood, "Socialism and the Law," NYC, November 29, 1911; Henry Slobodin, "Concerning Violence," NYC, November 30, 1911; Robert Rives La Monte, "Shall We Be Law Abiding?", NYC, December 7, 1911.
[cxii] "A Different Paris Commune," IW, March 14, 1912; Phillips Russell, "How Shall We Fight," NYC, December 21, 1911; Robert Rives La Monte, "Shall We Be Law Abiding?", NYC, December 7, 1911; "Better than Baarricades," ISR, January 1912.
[cxiii] "They Shall Not Die," S*, May 18, 1912; Robert Rives La Monte, "Socialist Respect for Capitalist Law," ISR, February 1912.
Every revolutionary group must decide either to work within the system it seeks to overthrow or to abandon the morals and institutions of the system for new forms that will not only achieve the revolution but foreshadow the new society. American history is replete with groups which faced this dilemma with courage and thought, including the Puritans, the antebellum utopians, the Populists, and the New Left. Between 1905 and 1913 the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the Socialist Labor party (SLP), and the Socialist party (SP) debated this issue. The two socialist parties largely opted to work within the parameters established by the existing order, while the IWW adopted the strategy of "forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old" in the course of the struggle to overthrow capitalism. The three groups found, as did previous and subsequent attempts to radically transform American society, that neither approach worked; after brief periods of vitality all three groups joined the forbiddingly long honor roll of wrecked or debilitated American revolutionary organizations.
The IWW defined its identity as a revolutionary alternative to conventional politics, a genuine counterculture, in the course of its struggles not only against capitalism, but with the two socialist parties.[i] The founders of the IWW envisioned a revolutionary industrial union that would eventually participate in electoral politics in a fashion similar to the socialist-led unions in Europe. The IWW inexorably drifted towards an anti-political stance partly because of its hostile encounters with the political socialists, but even more fundamentally because of the organic unfolding of the consequences of its own premises. The IWW's splits with the SLP in 1908 and the SP in 1913 only culminated the process of estrangement that began at the founding of the IWW in 1905. Far from being the result of personality clashes or misunderstandings, as some participants and historians have claimed, these splits were instead a belated recognition of the irreconciliable differences between two philosophies of social revolution.[ii]
Between 1905 and 1913 the controversy proceeded in three stages. From the founding convention in 1905 through the fourth convention in 1908, the IWW struggled to free itself from the suffocating embrace of the SLP and from efforts by individual SP members to use the IWW for partisan gain. Many SP members voluntarily left the IWW in 1906, after the second convention, as a consequence of a major split not directly concerned with political or party issues. The fourth convention ejected Daniel De Leon, the SLP's leader, and repudiated all alliances with political parties. During the second stage, from October 1908 until late 1911, a unified IWW elaborated its distinctive countercultural ideology. The third stage began in November 1911, when William Haywood announced his candidacy for the Socialist party's National Executive Committee (NEC), and ended with his recall from that body in February 1913. During this time the SP and the IWW debated the relative efficacy of political activity and direct action as mechanisms for achieving socialism. In this controversy over the legitimacy of conventional morality, the advisability of violating the law, and the acceptability of sabotage and violence, the relative merits of working within the system and of forging a revolutionary counterculture became apparent. The intellectual history of this debate tells us much about the general problems faced by socialist movements throughout the world by making explicit one of their universal and most intractible dilemmas.
This history also illuminates specific American conditions, which differed from those in Europe in several key respects. Both the political socialist movement and the labor movement were much weaker in the United States than in most of Western Europe. Moreover, the labor movement was much more conservative; the AFL was marked by racism and craft exclusiveness, and although it contained many socialists, its leadership hated all forms of socialism. Finally, the tiny American socialist movement was divided into two hostile parties. All of these factors militated against the alliance between a united political socialist movement and a united labor movement which seemed so natural in Europe.
When the IWW was founded in 1905, it confronted a situation unparalled in Europe, stemming from past interactions between the socialist and labor movements. In 1895 the SLP, disgusted by the conservatism of the rising AFL and the decrepit Knights of Labor, launched the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance (STLA), a revolutionary national labor organization committed to socialist politics. The STLA's overt plan to supplant the AFL and the Knights of Labor made the organized working class and its leaders suspicious of socialism and implacably hostile to any party meddling in union affairs; the STLA's disruption of the labor movement also helped make "dual unionism" the one unforgivable sin in the eyes of organized labor. Nevertheless, the STLA briefly prospered, attracting recruits and winning a few strikes.
In 1898, however, Daniel De Leon, the unofficial head of the SLP, fearing the union's political laxity and growing independence, tightened party control, expelled many locals, and purged the SLP of members who backed the STLA's genuine trade unionists. These actions effectively destroyed the STLA and split and decimated the SLP. They also gave rise to the Socialist party, which eschewed dual unionism (meaning, in practice, that it worked within the AFL), adhered to a policy of noninterference in union affairs, and pledged to support workers in all their struggles. The SLP's attempt to create a revolutionary union subordinate to the party thus poisoned socialist relations with organized labor even as it destroyed both the party and its revolutionary union. The IWW, which hoped to work with members of both socialist parties, attract organized workers, and organize the unorganized, learned from this debacle. At the Founding Convention in 1905 Daniel De Leon shook hands with Eugene Debs, one of the founders and leaders of the rival SP, "across the bloody chasm" of their past disagreements.[iii]
CHAPTER ONE: THE IWW AND THE SOCIALIST LABOR PARTY
The effort to define the IWW's relationship to the rival socialist parties consumed most of the IWW's energies for the first years of its existence, and the resolution of that problem helped chart the IWW's future course. The seeds of controversy were inherent in a central tension in the purposes and philosophy of the IWW's founders. This in turn resulted from an underlying ideological ambiguity in Marxism, the inherent difficulties of mixing unionism with revolutionary politics, and the unique difficulties confronting the American radical enterprise.
The Founding Convention Debates Political Action
The IWW was conceived by political socialists who envisioned revolutionary industrial unionism as a necessary supplement to electoral politics. The letter of invitation to a preliminary meeting in Chicago coupled the twin evils of "craft division and political ignorance," advocated organization "on both industrial and political lines," and asserted that "the Socialist ballot, in order to be sound, must have its economic counterpart in a labor organization builded as the structure of Socialist society." Yet the Industrial Union Manifesto issued by that preliminary meeting subtly shifted this emphasis; while reiterating that "craft divisions foster political ignorance among the workers, thus dividing their class at the ballot box, as well as in the shop, mine, and factory," it asserted that the IWW should constitute "the economic organization of the working class, without affiliation with any political party."[iv] The political language is probably attributable to the Western Federation of Miners, a major power in the formation of the IWW, which advocated working-class unity both on the job and at the ballot box. But the WFM consistently supported a political party--the SP.
This ambiguity remained in the Preamble to the IWW's constitution: "The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. . . . Between these two classes a struggle must go on until all the toilers come together on the political as well as the industrial field, and take and hold that which they produce by their labor, through an economic organization of the working class, without affiliation with any political party." Such language raises an immediate question of how a union can fight political ignorance and division if it is not committed to a specific party. Castigated by one delegate as "contradictory and confusing" and by another as "a toadyism to three different factions in this convention," the political clause of the Preamble opened a wide-ranging discussion of the relative efficacy of political and direct action, and of the legitimacy of the bourgeois state and its laws, that continued throughout the founding convention.[v] This controversy--based partly on the endemic perils of combining unionism and politics, partly on the historically contingent existence of rival socialist parties in the United States, and partly on fundamental ideological differences--fostered internal divisions within the IWW and conflict with both socialist parties. The resolution of this controversy helped shape the ideology of IWW.
The delegates approved the political clause partly because it covered a variety of incompatible meanings, partly because of their belief that economic struggle ultimately entailed political action, and partly because most delegates wanted the workers to use every weapon at their disposal, including political action outside the auspices of the IWW. As Algie Simons, a prominent member of the Socialist party (and who soon deserted the IWW) put it, "I want to see that the proletariat of America . . . stands ready to grasp the ballot, the strike, the bullet if it should be that we are driven to it." The convention even refused to censure those accepting nominations from capitalist parties, on the grounds that the IWW had no right to interfere in the political activities of its members. The IWW wanted to refute AFL accusations that it was a political organization rather than a labor union; it was not yet accused of being anti-political.[vi]
The debate on the political clause nevertheless revealed scattered hostility to political action. Various delegates averred that politicians inevitably betrayed the working class; that the capitalists were disfranchising masses of workers and fraudulently refused to count socialist ballots; that labor legislation was routinely violated by the capitalists and invalidated by the courts; and that electioneering distracted workers from more fundamental economic struggles. Yet the most influential delegates supported the political clause of the Preamble as following from the Marxist doctrine of economic determinism. Most Wobblies believed that the state was a reflection of property relations and therefore subordinate to economic power. Those who controlled the resources necessary for human survival were masters of the whole of society, including the government. Debs was convinced that because economic conditions generated political consequences, a proper revolutionary union movement would result in a single union and a single working-class party, "the one the economic expression, the other the political expression of the working class; the two halves that represent the organic whole of the labor movement." De Leon asserted that a mature revolutionary union would generate its own political reflex or shadow, which would come later and more or less automatically; Haywood agreed that "just as surely as the sun rises, when you get the working class organized economically it will find its proper reflection at the polls."[vii]
This interpretation of economic determinism thus justified the postponement of political unity until that time when it would inevitably be generated by economic unity. Such a view allowed hostile SLP and SP partisans to work together in the economic struggle, even if it did not explain why, if agreement on economic issues and philosophy inevitably engendered political unanimity, those who presently agreed on economic issues could not reach political accord.[viii] Yet economic determinism could as easily lead to a deemphasis on or even rejection of political action. Why waste time fighting over the political superstructure if the economic base determines everything? Thomas J. Hagerty's emphasis and tone differ from those of De Leon, Debs, and other advocates of political action so greatly as to suggest a change in substance. "If one is rightly to take the sense of comrade De Leon's explanation, a political party can never be anything else but a shadow; and while shadows will do occasionally in vaudeville shows and projected against white canvases, they will never secure the ends that we are after. We are after the substance and will let the shadows take care of themselves. The substance, the whole thing, the thing that we are after, is the tools. We want to get the whole thing, not any shadows. . . . When (the workingmen) are united all the days in the year, and every hour of every day, they will cast the proper shadows at the proper time."[ix] Hagerty, a renegade Catholic priest who largely composed the Industrial Union Manifesto and the original Preamble, argued that all class-conscious economic action was deeply political and extolled the Russian revolutionaries of 1905 as engaged in the most meaningful kind of politics, despite their lack of the ballot.
Although Haywood remained deeply committed to electoral politics until at least 1913, those aspects of his philosophy that later caused his rupture with the Socialist party were already present in 1905. He emphasized that the Western Federation of Miners, a main influence behind the creation of the IWW, had improved the conditions of its members in the teeth of unrelenting opposition from "the militia, the judiciary, the county and the state and municipal officers" and that it won the eight-hour day without "a legislative lobby to accomplish it." Furthermore, "when the working class are sufficiently well organized to control the means of life . . . the ownership of legislatures and senates and militias and police will be of little avail" to the capitalists, because "the army or police that would raise a hand, a club or a gun against a workingman would have to leave this community or starve to death." Finally, he strongly implied--as did other speakers--that workers should violate capitalist law if that proved to be necessary for individual survival or collective advancement.[x]
Haywood was not alone in his beliefs. The idea of the general strike was adumbrated in the Preamble's hope that all "members in any one industry, or in all industries, if necessary" would stop work if any members struck, and the Industrial Union Manifesto hinted at the concept of a revolutionary industrial union that would supplant as well as overthrow the political state. If workers could win meaningful victories at the point of production despite the capitalist state, if control of the government would avail the capitalists nothing at the revolutionary moment, if the union rather than the political state would administer the means of production after the revolution, and if neither capitalists nor workers would obey laws they had the need and power to violate, what would be the significance of electioneering?
De Leon likewise enunciated the ideology which was soon to land him outside the IWW. He had previously stressed the primacy of political action. Now, disillusioned by the quick growth of the rival Socialist party and seeing in the rise of class-conscious unionism an opportunity to revive his moribund Socialist Labor party, he proclaimed the preeminence of the economic struggle and of the revolutionary union over the political party. Yet his need to salvage a central place for his beloved SLP mired him in a web of obfuscation and contradiction. He simultaneously claimed both that "the political expression of labor is but the shadow of the economic organization" and must emanate from it, and that the workers could organize economically only after they had attained political unity. Furthermore, he equated the revolutionary union and strikes with violence, and political agitation with peaceable persuasion, thus giving priority to the latter. "The aspiration to unite the workers upon the political field is in line and in step with civilization. Civilized man . . . begins with arguing; physical force by arms is the last resort."[xi] This positing of a supra-class, universal morality contradicts the Marxist doctrines of economic determinism and the class struggle, even as De Leon's equation of politics with peaceable discussion ignored capitalist terrorism, fraud, and rampant lawbreaking. De Leon's position stemmed partly from a traumatic episode in the history of the SLP: in the 1880s many socialists, disgusted and disillusioned with political action, broke away from the party, advocated armed self-defense, and formed rifle clubs. These anarchists evoked widespread public hysteria, and six were judicially murdered as a result of the Haymarket bombing in 1887, an incident widely credited with setting back the labor movement for a generation. De Leon, remembering this history, equated a rejection of political action with anarchist terrorism, a threat not only to the SLP but to the labor movement itself.
Although De Leon accorded the party priority in time and in moral status, he conceded that the revolutionary union was necessary to "take and hold" the means of production in accordance with IWW goals. The capitalists would never concede a socialist electoral victory, and, in any event, geographical governmental units could not administer industries. The moral right of the ballot, De Leon asserted, must be backed by the physical force might of the industrial union. "There is nothing more silly than Right without Might to back it up. . . . (The capitalists) will never yield until they realize that behind that ballot lies an organized movement, well organized, well disciplined and entirely awakened." Without this, the capitalists would shut down the industries and bully the working class into submission, as they threatened in 1896. As De Leon later said, "Without political organization, the labor movement cannot triumph; without economic organization, the day of its political triumph would be the dy of its defeat."[xii]
De Leon Defines His Position
De Leon's insistence on the necessity of electioneering, his manifest hope that the SLP or a facsimile would carry the banner of IWW politics, and his equation of union activity with violence alienated IWWs who opposed political action, or De Leon's brand of it. To win over such opposition he restated and elaborated his doctrine in The Preamble of the IWW (later retitled The Socialist Reconstruction of Society) and in a long exchange of letters (later published under the title As to Politics in The People, the SLP organ he edited. He also spoke at length at the Third Convention of the IWW in 1907, where the issue of political action was debated at length. De Leon's writings and speeches clearly reveal the problems in his theories.
De Leon's stress on political action does not stem from respect for the capitalist state and its laws. He brands the state a "robber burg", exclusively an instrument of class dominion, and affirms that contracts between unequals--such as those between employers and workers--are null and void. "The whip took the oath, let the whip keep it." Nor does De Leon believe in capturing the governmental apparatus to use it as a revolutionary instrument. The victorious party, in his view, will in its first and only act dissolve the state, devolving all administration to the revolutionary union. De Leon derived this from the doctrine of economic determinism and the Marxian concept of the state as "the executive committee of the ruling class." De Leon further concedes to the opponents of political action that the capitalists will fraudulently deprive the political socialists of their electoral victory and will probably initiate violence even before that victory. The revolutionary union, in theory only backing up the ballot, will therefore make the revolution as well as administer the socialized industries. De Leon soon abandoned his belief in the primacy of the party, and proclaimed the chronological and well as revolutionary priority of the revolutionary union. At the Third Convention he quoted Marx as saying "that only the economic organization can set afoot the political movement of labor" and asserted that "when the day shall come [the IWW] shall itself project its own political party."[xiii]
What function would the party have in this scenario? De Leon said that peaceful political agitation would provide a legal shield to protect the "physical force" union as it drilled and organized itself. The capitalists would hesitate to resort to violence against political opponents, whereas they use it freely against the unions; political activity thus enables revolutionists to preach to the masses. De Leon claimed that the capitalists fear working-class political action because "if we place ourselves upon that plane of civilization, of a theoretical peaceful solution, we can demand anything we want, whereas if you do not put yourself on that plane then they can do whatever they choose." De Leon even claimed that "the vote is not the essential part"; the issue was anarchism versus legal methods. Most workers, he claimed, fervently believe in the legitimacy of the government and the efficacy of political action, and consider opponents of politics as "freaks." De Leon claimed that if the WFM and the IWW had repudiated political action, the government would have hanged Haywood in 1907 in connection with the murder of Idaho's ex-governor Steunenberg. And indeed, De Leon could have used Haywood's testimony in the Steunenberg murder trial as evidence for his assertions. Although Haywood had spoken skeptically of political action at the IWW's founding convention, and attributed the WFM's gains to union activity rather than politics, at his trial he extolled the legislative and electoral activities of the WFM, asserted (correctly) that the WFM aimed "to organize its members industrially and unite them politically," and claimed (more dubiously) that "we have made fair progress" in winning desired legislation.[xiv]
De Leon's equation of union activity with violence, and his assumption that for the IWW to adopt a nonpolitical stance would be tantamount to rejecting politics, led him to his assertion that any tampering with the Preamble's political clause would transform the IWW into a conspiratorial and terroristic group. "The rejection of political action would throw the IWW back upon the methods of barbarism--physical force exclusively." De Leon opposed this partly because he believed the values of civilization to be absolutes, "conquests that the human race have wrung from the clutches of the ruling class," which enable us "to do what we are doing here today, talking, although we may disagree, peacefully, without jumping at one another's throats." De Leon also feared that a conspiratorial cabal would deprive the masses of necessary knowledge, exclude them from effective participation in their revolution, and open the door to provocateurs. If the labor movement repudiated the open methods of political action, De Leon asserted, "I will have to go then into rat holes and carry on my propaganda; and keep this in mind, the labor movement is one that takes in the masses and the masses cannot be addressed in rat holes" but must be reached "in the open" and "the sun of the twentieth century civilization." Terrorism, in addition to being undemocratic, would evoke savage retaliation from the capitalist state. Most of these arguments would find echo by SP leaders during the IWW's controversy with that party in 1911-1913.[xv]
De Leon's opponents effectively answered these arguments. They pointed out that the IWW could and did agitate peacefully in all the ways a political party could; that a party that had no hope or intention of taking office was really only a propaganda league; that politicking would delude the masses into belief in a political solution that De Leon himself thought chimerical; that revolutionary agitation was most effective at the point of exploitation; and that the capitalists would use violence as readily against a successful party as against a threatening union. The IWW did not need a political adjunct, because the union would make the revolution and administer the country. Critics wondered how a political shield would protect a union that could not protect itself and scorned De Leon's idea that the extant capitalist order was in any way civilized or based upon peaceful discussion and consent.[xvi]
De Leon's convoluted ideology was partly a device to accord primacy to his political party after he had accepted a thesis that logically relegated it to the background. His equation of direct union action with violence cannot be accounted for on any other basis; political power and government are based on force and violence more than the most revolutionary union activity. De Leon's assertion that the IWW's peaceful agitation would be impossible if the political clause were removed from the Preamble and that a "correct political posture" was necessary "for the very existence" of the IWW was bizarre, if portentious.[xvii]
The long exchange of views in The People hardened positions on both sides. Most of the letters which De Leon printed argued against political action entirely, whereas many prominent IWWs believed in political action outside the auspices of the IWW. The absence of any letters arguing this latter position enabled De Leon falsely to brand his opponents as anti-political. While most participants argued that the IWW could agitate peacefully, some followed De Leon's own assumptions about capitalist resistance and fraud to their logical conclusion and propounded armed revolution as the only solution. Arturo Giovannitti, a revolutionary poet later famous for his role in the Lawrence strike, was particularly emphatic on this point, advocating "collective, organized violence . . . not a riotous outbreak, but a good and proper civil war." A truly revolutionary organization "can not and must not employ legal and lawful methods, neither can it hope in a peaceful solution, as the simple fact that a class is revolutionary implies that it is outlaw. . . . Why should we speak to the working class of a peaceful settlement when probably not ONE of the SLP members believes in it?"[xviii] Although Giovannitti's vision did not differ much from De Leon's own scenario, it sounded more apocalyptic, thus making De Leon's equation of a nonpolitical stance with dynamite seem plausible. Even more divisive than the theoretical dispute was De Leon's clear expectation that the SLP would be anointed as the IWW's political reflex. Many IWWs adamantly opposed this.
The majority of Wobblies agreed with De Leon that some form of political action was essential. The second IWW convention, in 1906, voted against a proposal to delete the political clause from the Preamble. Yet many delegates interpreted political action in a very broad sense that did not imply electoral activity. De Leon himself, in a startling and insincere outburst, proclaimed: "I for one hold that politics is not worth going across the street for by an economic organization such as the IWW. . . . It impedes the unification of the working class. That political unity that we aim at cannot be brought about now by having this organization take sides with this, that or the other political party. That political unity can only be the result of this organization keeping its hands off the squabbles between political parties, and then let itself be built so strongly that it compels a unification of political views and political methods." In this spirit the delegates added a clause to the Preamble forbidding the IWW to endorse or to seek the endorsement of any political party. The IWW thus paradoxically advocated working-class unity on the political field while explicitly refusing to endorse any existing political party--a stance which opponents condemned as ludicrous, incomprehensible, and contradictory. Taking its neutrality stance to an extreme, the convention unanimously censured a Denver local for endorsing the campaign of one of the IWW's most beloved and prominent members, Big Bill Haywood, then running for governor of Colorado while incarcerated awaiting trial in one of labor's causes celebres, the Steunenberg murder show trial. Perhaps in repudiation of the AFL's "no politics in the union" stance, however, the convention somewhat inconsistently recommended that every local devote at least ten minutes of every meeting to a discussion of economic and political issues.[xix]
The IWW's activities at the International Labor Congress at Stuttgart, Germany, in August 1907 revealed that the political actionists firmly controlled the IWW. Fred Heslewood, representing the IWW, and Daniel De Leon, representing the SLP, told the Congress that "unity on the political field.... can only be achieved and demonstrated when the solidarity on the economic battle ground is assured." The IWW, they averred, "will measure swords also on the political arena, as soon as a true political reflex of working class solidarity is established." The IWW is presently "at work preparing the necessary groundwork upon which will be builded a true political expression of the aims, aspirations, and wishes of the working class, and through which capitalist government will pass out of existence and the workers' republic be established." The delegates, echoing a common IWW themes of this era, denounced the AFL on the grounds that, by dividing the workers into competing craft unions at the point of production, it rendered political divisions inevitable. Heslewood doubted whether workers who scabbed on each other 364 days a year could unite on election day and vote in the Socialist commonwealth.[xx]
The majority at the Stuttgart Congress, however, endorsed the SPD's dual arm theory which accorded equal importance to the unions and the party. The SPD, by far the largest Socialist party in the world, had founded the German labor movement, including the most important unions (most of which were organized by craft), and firmly endorsed the electoral path to Socialism. The SPD and the majority it commanded at Stuttgart would not countenance a philosophy which privileged a revolutionary industrial union over the political party of Socialism. De Leon, analyzing the Congress after its conclusion, asserted that the United States, as "the leading capitalist nation--economically, politically, mentally, morally, and sociologically"--would show the world the way to the Socialist commonwealth. Such an assertion, coming from the leader of a tiny splinter sect, would have seemed ludicrous to the seasoned and powerful leaders of the SPD.[xxi]
The third IWW convention, in 1907, debated the Preamble's political clause at some length. Delegate Axelson averred that the working class need unite only once, at the point of production; if the IWW divided working-class insurgency into two arms, why not add more arms, such as the religious field? Axelson repudiated the epithet "physical force anarchist" as inappropriate; "education is thoroughly civilized," as much so as electioneering, and industrial organization, unlike politicking, can include the entire working class, and mobilize them permanently, not only sporadically at election time. A political machine would ruin the IWW because it, like the capitalist parties, would be controlled by "the shyster lawyer and the rest of the bunch that are only the lackeys of the capitalist class." Socialists disagree on almost everything, and cannot possibly unify an economic movement; if the IWW strikes the political clause, it would "talk strictly industrial unionism."[xxii]
Delegate Foote, also opposed the political clause. In a significant argument, he asserted that the IWW was necessarily political in the sense that it was a self-governing, structured organization which would conquer and administer the industries; "upon the taking and holding of industry it must assume the functions of ownership and control." The working class would not require a government in the traditional sense of a territorially-organized instrument of class oppression, but it "will have an industrial administration and that administration must be political in the sense that it is controlled by the ballot on the inside of your own organization." Industrial organization superceded both the political ballot and the bomb, and was primarily constructive. The IWW contains "within itself all the essential qualities that are good for the working class" and will legislate on the factory floor. Foote cited the example of a Kansas law regulating the size of a loaf of bread, which went unobserved until Foote's union enforced it in the bakery where they worked by threatening a strike. In the bakery "we enforced our law and that is the basis for political action as I understand it." For too many revolutionists "revolution has not been in the domain of industry but in our own heads," in mindless and ineffectual blather on the soap-box. For the capitalists, the ballot box "is an actual fact, an actual condition by which the capitalist class control their affairs in their domination of us," but for the workers it was a chimera.[xxiii]
Although Foote advocated elimination or explication of the political clause, Delegate Hagenson adduced similar considerations in favor of the political clause. "The minute we assemble here to make any rules, and enforce them, we are acting in politics," as the IWW does when it legislates on the shop floor. "We are a political organization. We are constructing rules governing ourselves, and governing society." Delegate Delaney, however, pointed out that the workers interpreted the Preamble's mention of the ballot as referring to electoral politics; if the IWW did not mean that, the Preamble misled the workers. Delegate Levoy responded that the political clause was an indispensable aid in organizing the workers, whose respect for the ballot "is inborn in them. They have lived in it. It is educated in them every day and every hour. We cannot reach them without that. We cannot talk to them at all." Delegates on both sides averred that retaining or eliminating the political clause would confuse and alienate the workers, and replied, to the assertions of the other side, that the IWW must proclaim the truth and educate the workers, no matter how arduous that task may prove.[xxiv]
De Leon, his SLP stalwart Rudolph Katz, and many other delegates supported retention of the political clause, and won by a resounding vote of 113-13. But the debate flared up again when dissidents proposed that the IWW issue an official statement interpreting the clause in the industrial and administrative sense favored by Axelson and Foote. Outraged advocates of the political clause complained that the defeated delegates were merely trying to reopen the issue by a subterfuge, and easily defeated the motion 104-24. During the discussion of the IWW press and literature Delegate Glover motioned that the editor of the Industrial Union Bulletin should not print articles "treating of politics and political expressions at the capitalist ballot box" without setting forth the IWW's official position of neutrality. De Leon objected to the phrase "capitalist ballot box," and the convention eventually tabled the motion.[xxv]
Yet many Wobblies, basing their stance on economic determinism, disputed De Leon's belief that political action was equal in importance to economic organization. These members intensely distrusted political parties as composed largely of self-aggrandizing middle-class "leaders" who were led to the working class by their quest for personal power. They claimed that the workers must achieve their own revolution without the debilitating "help" of such outsiders and saw in a revolutionary union composed exclusively of proletarians the only safe repository of working-class power. W.F. Loquist wrote the Industrial Union Bulletin that political organization is "the organized power of one class to suppress another class" and that "The IWW is the political field for the working class, and the capitalist organization, the government, is the political field for the capitalist." Yet the proponents of political action effectively countered these arguments. Samuel L. Brooks, in a prominent front-page article in the Bulletin, agreed that "no amount of study can balance the loss of actual proletarian experience which is vital to all intelligent working class revolutionary action.... A working class movement that must be initiated, guided, and financed by the middle class is simply a farce." The IWW could avoid this pitfall if it eschewed all existing political parties and, at some future date, founded its own. Because the IWW accepted only wage earners as members, its political expression would naturally exclude all middle-class meddlers and reformers and remain an authentic form of proletarian self-expression.[xxvi]
The official stance of the IWW, therefore, remained staunchly, if indefinitely, political. Major pamphlets and articles in the Industrial Union Bulletin consistently touted the advantages of (eventual) political activity. Robert Rives La Monte claimed that a large socialist vote would intimidate the capitalists, and thus moderate their ferocious attacks on the most militant unions. Other writers reiterated that the IWW would contain within itself every instrument that the working class required to free itself from wage slavery and class oppression. William Trautmann, an SLP stalwart, admitted that the political state was of secondary importance compared to the industrial machinery, but insisted that the IWW must take that capitalist outpost before the main citadel would fall. IWW writers attacked the AFL for dividing the workers at the point of production, thus inevitably dividing them at the polls. A major exposition of IWW principles explained that "The pure and simple unions promote political disunity among the workers.... The workers, mentally blinded by the bourgeois principles expounded by their leaders in the unions, bring the same confusion of thought to the political arena, and join themselves to ranks of the various avowed capitalist parties, or to some one or other of the 'Labor' Reform or quasi-socialist parties." The IWW, on the contrary, solidifies class consciousness by its industrial organization, and this class consciousness will express itself in every area of life. Another major article averred that "The guarantee of class-conscious action at the ballot box is the existence of class-consciousness in the mine, mill, factory, and transportation service. If there is no unity and no recognition of class interests where the workers are employed, capitalist politicians can readily succeed in dividing them at the polls. Separated by craft unionism where they work, they are logically the prey of designing politicians where they vote." John Kortan, an SLP leader, said that "this doubly united working class" would "capture the powers of government" and use them for self-emancipation.[xxvii]
Finally, IWW theoreticians hotly denied that political action implied state socialism, which they regarded as a middle-class fantasy of red tape, bureaucracy, and regimentation. The "practical proletarian Socialist" seeks "not to devise some middle class State Socialist nightmare, but to free production and the useful productive section of society from the incubus of a parasitic class. The production of wealth and the producers thereof will not be dominated by men outside and above the process of production, but by the working class themselves, those who are directly engaged in production. The revolutionary working class will not drive out the capitalist in order to saddle themselves with a bureaucracy of State officialdom--the same foe under a new name." The IWW therefore opposed municipal socialism and public ownership of street cars as merely reinforcing the reign of the capitalists by cementing them more firmly with the government, thus enabling them to decrease wages and break strikes with even greater ferocity.[xxviii]
James Connolly, a member of the IWW General Executive Board, expressed the mainstream IWW philosophy in an address in April 1908 which was printed in the IWW's organ, The Industrial Union Bulletin. The workplace, said Connolly, is "the cockpit of civilization"; political battles are not the real fight but only its echo. The IWW could perform for itself any function that a party could perform. Although political action is a necessary adjunct to the economic struggle, the political party of labor should germinate as an organic growth from the revolutionary union rather than arising separately, and therefore should be "the direct expression of the will of the rank and file" and "a weapon of its own forging, and wielded by its own hand." The IWW did not use the institutions of the old order; rather, it was building the industrial republic within the shell of the capitalist system. When the new organization was fully matured and able to assume all necessary industrial and social functions it would "crack the shell of the political state" and supplant it.[xxix]
Although De Leon's expositions on political action won widespred assert within the IWW in the years 1905-1907, another of his central tenants generated more dissent. De Leon believed that strikes must prove futile except insofar as they resulted in socialism; they could not improve the immediate condition of the workers because any rise in wages would be offset by an increase in prices. This contradicted a central tenet of Wobbly ideology. Most IWWs felt that the workers could gradually build power in the shops, mines, and factories, winning genuine concessions that would provide the base for further victories; each successful strike contributed to ultimate revolution. De Leon falsely equated this with Gompers's belief that the workers could secure the full product of their labor by winning incremental concessions, without any revolutionary alteration in the ownership of the means of production. De Leon insisted that the workers would not build upon successive victories when achieving their revolution. They would instead go from defeat to defeat until they mustered the understanding and organization to mount a final and successful assault upon capitalism. This belief, if widespread among Wobbly leaders and members, would have had disastrous consequences for Wobbly morale and its ability to recruit members; it would have reduced the IWW to a band of hard-core fanatics who had no hopes this side of the revolution. De Leon, in fact, inverted the IWW's usual methodology. The IWW recruited all workers, of whatever political party or religion, and revolutionized them after they had entered the union, associated with other workers on the basis of class, acquainted themselves with revolutionary literature, and learned what a revolutionary class organization could do for them. De Leon claimed, on the contrary, that the workers must be indoctrinated before they were recruited into the union rather than being brought in under the "false pretense" that the union could improve their condition. When Wobblies asked how the IWW could recruit all the workers if it erected a political test for membership, and insisted that the IWW must recruit workers regardless of their political beliefs, De Leon replied that the IWW could not unite workers at the point of production if they remained in thrall to political error. "The man who cannot vote right will be everything else wrong," De Leon asserted.[xxx] This philosophy, if adhered to, would have made the IWW little more than the Socialist Trades and Labor Alliance redux.
The IWW Repudiates Political Action
However important these theoretical differences may have been, it was De Leon's attempt to foist SLP control upon the IWW that precipitated the break in 1908. Although occasional complaints were voiced that the SP and unnamed "anti-political sects" were also disrupting the IWW by using it to preach their doctrines, the SLP was the main offender. The controversy erupted in March 1908 when Ben Williams, an IWW organizer, told two SLP audiences that sectarian political wrangling was alienating potential IWW recruits. Williams castigated numerous SLP members for "regarding the IWW as mainly a product of SLP teaching and experience, and therefore requiring to be under the especial tutelage and supervision of the SLP." He said that his experience convinced him that "just in proportion as we adhered strictly to the non-affiliation clause in the Preamble did we gain a hearing and response from the workers."[xxxi]
In addition to emphasizing the non-affiliation over the political clause, Williams asserted that "the laws relating to labor's interests must be made in the shops through the industrial organizations. . . . For the IWW to set up a political party in the ordinary sense would mean confusion and retardation for the movement, to say nothing of the corruption that must surely follow the advent of the adventurous labor politician." Williams redefined political action in terms of the IWW press and lecture bureau, thus excluding a political party for the present. This, he said, was wholly compatible with De Leon's "peaceful solution of the labor question." For good measure he claimed that the industrial union could improve the condition of its members and concluded that the IWW should "insist on controlling itself and its own meetings without dictation or interference from outside organizations or individuals."[xxxii]
De Leon was present at the second Williams speech and villified it as "pure and simple physical force. . . . a veiled dynamitism" and closet anarchism. The IWW would "read itself out of the pale of civilization ... if it rejected the ballot," whereupon all SLP members would depart. Denying that the SLP dictated to the IWW, De Leon asserted that when the IWW did generate its own political reflex "that party would contain every one of the principles of the SLP." In a related and ominous development, The Weekly People praised the U.S. post office for barring an anarchist pamphlet from the mails. If indeed the pamphlet advocated violence, the post office in banning it "did the working class a great service thereby. The working class . . . can not keep its skirts too clear of the propaganda of physical force only. . . . The Post Office . . . has aided the Social Revolution better than it knew." The implication was clear: if the IWW deleted the Preamble's political clause, the government would be justified in suppressing it. Indeed, one of De Leon's supporters had, at the third convention, dramatically asserted that if the IWWA excised the political clause from its Preamble, "the capitalist classes and their hirelings will be justified in setting us in the electric chair, turning the current on and putting us out of existence" because the IWW would have become an anarchist organization based on physical force.[xxxiii]
The Industrial Union Bulletin had traditionally remained open to various points of view and had generally espoused political views close to De Leon's. Yet it prominently featured the full text of Williams's speech, denied that the IWW repudiated the political vote, and censured De Leon (though not by name) as indulging in "perverted controversy" and "recklessly playing with language." Later it attacked him for joining the capitalists in slandering the IWW. On 18 April The Bulletin insisted on the primacy of economic action and the necessity of IWW self-government while adding that "we do not thereby deny the utility of political action in its proper time." It also gave first-page coverage to Justus Ebert's letter of resignation from the SLP. Ebert, a prominent Wobbly organizer and publicist, proclaimed that "we leave a dying political party without hope of resuscitation for a live economic organization with promises of growth," charged that SLP members "prefer domination or destruction to democracy and development," and predicted that the IWW would go the way of the STLA "if it permits an external political body to dominate its politics." The Bulletin warned against members who "wish to use [the IWW] to serve some other organization of which he is also a member," insisted that the IWW "HAS NO POLITICAL PARTY TEST FOR MEMBERSHIP" and repudiated those who lay down such tests "which the organization itself has not formulated and does not contemplate."[xxxiv]
The Bulletin also pointed out that revolutionary unionism implied organization, industrial government, and majority rule, all anathema to anarchists. "The dynamite most needed in the labor movement of America is compounded of ideas. . . . The revolution means, for us, education, organization, discipline--in a word, preparation." Premature revolt would be calamitous. In a short notice with obvious implications for De Leon, The Bulletin savaged The Chicago Tribune for siccing the authorities on the Italian Socialist Federation's La Propaganda on the grounds that La Propaganda was an anarchist sheet: the Chicago paper placed itself "almost on a level with the Goldfield advocate of assassination" of socialists.[xxxv]
De Leon's characterization of his opponents as anarchists (he also accused Connolly of being a police spy) made no sense. If the IWW retained its political clause but deferred political affiliation to the future, as many IWWs advocated, did that make it an anarchist organization in the interim? De Leon could hardly claim that the political clause alone, without any practical party work, changed the essential nature of the IWW; yet all agreed, at least in theory, that the IWW should eschew political affiliation until its industrial organization was well developed. In fact, however, De Leon and the SLP acted as if the IWW were an SLP reflex, thus making conflict inevitable. Conditions were thus ripe for the split in 1908, at the fourth annual IWW convention.
De Leon and the SLP were the main issue at the Fourth Convention only because the IWW had long since broken with the SP. Although many members of the SP helped found the IWW at the first convention, the IWW's relations with the SP had long since deteriorated. The ouster of President Charles Sherman at the second convention in 1906 alienated many SP members. Sherman was a personally corrupt careerist and opportunist, who had affiliated with the IWW only because of a personal feud with the AFL, rather than from any fundamental disagreement with conservative craft unionism. Yet his removal embroiled the IWW in a long and bitter faction fight. When Sherman forcibly seized the assets, membership lists, and office of the IWW, he precipitated a battle ultimately resolved (in favor of the IWW) by the capitalist courts. While this incident did not concern electoral politics, many SP members favored Sherman and were displeased by his ouster and the ensuring acrimony. This episode also precipitated a long and bitter faction fight within the WFM, further alienating SP members who feared that the IWW spelled disruption for the labor movement. The spectacular trial of Haywood on the charge of murdering Steunenberg ended in acquittal, but further associated the IWW in the public mind with violence and disorder. Even Eugene Debs, a strong supporter of industrial unionism, complained that the enthusiasm of some SP members for the IWW was detracting from their party activities; some SP members apparently regarded the IWW as an alternative, rather than a supplement, to the SP.[xxxvi]
The IWW also spent much of its first year trying to wean existing AFL affiliates (especially mine and brewery workers) away from the AFL, rather than organizing the unorganized. The IWW bitterly attacked the AFL and those SP members who sided with it as not only mistaken but as criminals and deliberate betrayers of the working class. As early as 1905, William Trautmann, then affiliated with the SLP and the IWW, said that "the craft organizations of labor, led by capitalist lieutenants, mistakenly called unions, are the most formidable instruments for the protection of capitalist interests.... The cheating of one group of workers by another, to the benefit of the exploiters, destroying also all sense and feeling of solidarity, is the supreme function of a labor union movement." The AFL responded by expelling Wobblies from AFL unions (which cost them their jobs in closed-shop factories) and from local labor councils. AFL members sometimes refused to work with Wobblies, demanded that capitalists fire them, and struck to force such discharge. AFL unions also recruited scabs to destroy IWW strikes (replicating the AFL's practice of breaking many AFL strikes) and boycotted the products of IWW shops. On two occasions IWW members actually walked out with AFL members who were demanding the firing of those very Wobblies; while on strike, they convinced the AFL members to call off their hate strike. Yet the IWW was also accused of scabbing during AFL strikes until it explicitly prohibited its members from working during any strikes, even those of the hostile AFL. All this, however, confirmed the fears of SP members who worried that the IWW would further divide, rather than unite, the American working class.[xxxvii]
The International Labor Congress at Stuttgart in 1907 further inflamed IWW hostility towards the SP. Morris Hillquit, a top SP leader and delegate to Stuttgart, prepared a report for the Congress which brutally slandered the IWW; when proven wrong, he lamely claimed that he had written an amended report which he had left at home in New York. The SP delegation accepted a delegate from the bogus and non-existant "Sherman faction" of the IWW, thus forcing the IWW's delegate, Fred Heslewood, to join the SLP delegation. Heslewood attacked the SP delegation as "representatives of reactionary, capitalist unionism, although sailing under the name of political party Socialists" and as "emissaries of a corrupted, decaying pure and simple union movement of America, and its political reflex." He further denounced the SP as for having "endorsed resolutions condemning the Japanese and asking for their exclusion from America." In their resolution of the relationship of the unions to the socialist parties, Heslewood and De Leon said that "neutrality towards trade unionism on the part of a political party of Socialism is equivilent to a neutrality towards the machinations of the capitalist class." The 1908 SP Convention, which met before that of the IWW, refused to endorse the IWW or industrial unionism, waffled on immigration restriction, and pronounced a penalty of expulsion upon any member who did not believe in "political action as a weapon of the working class."[xxxviii]
The Fourth Convention's debate over political action, therefore, primarily concerned the SLP. A coalition of IWW leaders and Western migrant workers--John Walsh's famous hobo "overall brigade," which rode the rails to Chicago--were determined to expunge De Leon and sectarian bickering from the IWW. William Trautmann, the IWW's executive officer, in his report to the convention, reiterated the primacy of economic struggle, warned against "the disease of political schemery, injected by the elements of disruption and fraud," and charged that strikes had been sabotaged and members alienated by organizers whose first loyalty was to the SLP rather than the IWW. Trautmann defined the issue as the IWW's right to function "without the interference and self-assumed guardianship of any political party and its functionaries." He did not oppose "other weapons than on the industrial field" but said that "the political organizations should be allowed to pursue their own course without interference on the part of the Industrial Workers of the World, and likewise should any interference by political parties in the supreme functions and essential duties of the economic organization be rejected."[xxxix]
De Leon's opponents moved to exclude him from the convention on the grounds that he was not a member of the proper local (having been notified of this fact in time to transfer). In addition, he had never attended a meeting of the local to which he did belong until the one that elected its delegate. This meeting, it was alleged, had been packed with enough newly initiated members to elect De Leon. These reasons are often considered a mere pretext, and indeed De Leon had been duly seated at previous conventions as a delegate from the same union. Yet De Leon admitted his lack of attendance, and published accounts indicate that he was probably guilty of packing the meeting. Far more crucially, De Leon's assertion that IWW locals were defined by the tool used rather than the product or service provided (which justified his choice of local) contradicted the fundamental premise of the IWW. Vincent St. John, already one of the IWW's most effective organizers, was surely correct when he said that "the unit of an industrial union is not organized according to the tools used, but according to the plant, the workshop, the industry in which the workers are employed." De Leon's conception of the IWW as a confederation of craft unions is simply incomprehensible.[xl]
De Leon's intransigent defense of a universal, supra-class morality (which he never reconciled with his Marxist beliefs) also embroiled him in controversy. When one Stodel, an employee of The People, began selling a device that enabled people to cheat streetcar companies out of their fares, De Leon fired him and published information that could have helped the police file criminal charges against Stodel. De Leon affirmed that he had acted correctly and alleged that when workers were caught pillaging and stealing from the enemy during the French Revolution, they were shot by other workers. "The working class rose to the dignity of their position. The principle was supreme that the workers are not thieves. Anarchist doctrines were discredited." St. John charged that De Leon "has placed the life of workingmen below . . . capitalist class rules and ethics." The workers' belief in the sanctity of capitalist property was "the curse of the labor movement." The point was not whether the cheating of companies by such methods was "the method of warfare advocated by the Industrial Workers of the World [but that De Leon] would make us and the organization informers--we should, in his opinion, assume police duties." Other Wobblies had even stronger opinions; Haywood, at the Founding Convention, had ridiculed unemployed workers who lacked the courage to steal, and John Walsh had boasted that his overall brigade had stolen food en route to Chicago.[xli]
The convention voted 40 to 21 to deny De Leon a seat, and also barred one supporter on technical grounds. Two days later it discussed the Preamble. The course of the debate indicates that the exclusion of De Leon was not a plot by direct actionists, as De Leon charged and many historians have assumed. The range and type of comments and the closeness of the vote make it unlikely that anyone could have predicted, much less orchestrated, the outcome. The Committee on the Constitution voted 3 to 1 against any change in the Preamble--unlikely if the leadership had a coordinated plan to remove the political clause--but an otherwise uncelebrated delegate submitted the version that was ultimately adopted. This not only excised the political clause but stressed that the IWW was organized "not only for the every-day struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organzing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old." This phrase, which summarized the results of years of philosophizing on the part of IWW theorists, implied that the future society would dispense with government as a territorial organization and instrument of class dominion.[xlii]
The debate centered on the political clause. Some delegates denigrated political action entirely, while others merely disparaged the confusion and disruption caused by politicking within the IWW; there were not enough opponents of political action to strike the clause. One defender of the old Preamble predicted trouble with both socialist parties if the clause were deleted, while another "did not care to be called a dynamiter." Joseph Ettor, one of the initiators of the charges against De Leon, argued that "the political freak and the anti-political freak were both guilty" and opposed any change until the general membership discussed the issue. The eighteen delegates who participated in the debate (out of a total of twenty-six) divided evenly. The new Preamble was adopted 35 to 32 (some delegates had more than one vote), whereas De Leon had garnered only twenty votes.[xliii] A switch by a single person could have retained the political clause. The exclusion of De Leon and one of his allies may have helped adoption of the new Preamble, but certainly did not insure it.
After changing the Preamble, the delegates declared that to secure unity and discipline (not out of a conviction that political action was futile or harmful) "the IWW refuses all alliances, direct or indirect, with existing political parties or anti-political sects." Officers and organizers were forbidden to accept office in or nomination for office by any political organization. Because many delegates resented De Leon's venting of his quarrels with the IWW in the SLP press, the convention barred "editors of papers not controlled by the IWW" from membership. The convention also blasted De Leon's scurrilous Weekly People article about the convention's opening days, including his reference to IWW members as "slum proletarians." However, the delegates also pledged the IWW "to do all in our power" to free M. R. Preston, an IWW member and political prisoner whom the SLP was running for president, and raised a fund in his behalf.[xliv]
Responses to the convention were predictable. The Industrial Union Bulletin said that a correct understanding of industrial unionism was essential, praised the new Preamble in a statement that deftly combined an anti-political with a politically neutral stance, and exalted the hobos whom De Leon had stigmatized as "slum proletarians" as "the leaven of the revolutionary labor movement of the West." De Leon and his minions denounced his opponents as dynamiters, slum proletarians, and chicken thieves.[xlv] De Leon, following his ideas to their logical conclusion, tried to convince the post office to deny The Industrial Union Bulletin a second-class mailing permit on the grounds that it was an anarchist publication. The SLP launched a "Detroit IWW" which it claimed was the one true IWW. This organization published a pamphlet used by "employment sharks" in their battle to deny free speech rights to Wobbly organizers, republished Giovannitti's incendiary letter to The People when he was on trial for his life for his role in the Lawrence strike and, in 1912, tried to convince the Passaic, New Jersy, authorities to ban Big Bill Haywood from the city on the grounds that he advocated violence. Although De Leon had claimed that the rejection of political action would open the way for the police spy and provocateur, St. John was more prescient: it was De Leon and the SLP who acted as agents of the police and the capitalist class in their war against the IWW. De Leon melodramatically and transiently (not to say mendaciously) shook hands with Eugene Debs "over the bloody chasm" in 1905; in charging the IWW with dynamitism and violence, he more enduringly and significantly allied with the capitalist state over a much bloodier chasm.[xlvi]
American Exceptionalism and the Significance of 1908
Although the furor with the SLP, like the Haywood trial which preceded it, may have associated the IWW with violence in the minds of some people, the controversy in fact had nothing to do with violence and everything to do with the personality and designs of Daniel De Leon, whose political stance was based not upon logic or evidence but upon the exigencies of self-aggrandizement. The SLP debacle afforded radicals an early lesson in relating to sectarian and authoritarian organizations, which in future decades would repeatedly disrupt, fragment, and demoralize broadly based movements.
Socialist party members had also harmed the IWW by injecting partisan maneuvering into its meetings, and had played an important role in a major split in 1906 that did not directly concern political action. The hope that hostile socialist parties would put aside their enmity and eschew proselytizing within the IWW was unrealistic; officals of both parties were political animals accustomed to foraging for votes and power wherever they went. Yet the persistence of the SLP as a tiny yet divisive splinter after 1900 was due largely to De Leon's indomitable will; without him, the political socialists would have been unified in theory as they largely were in fact. De Leon could not build a socialist movement by an act of will; nor could he by force of personality alone have disrupted a powerful indigenous movement. But he could and did vitiate the frail American movement by embroiling it in incessant and meaningless squabbles. That the IWW lacked the single, natural political ally possessed by most socialist-led unions in Europe is due primarily to the baneful influence of De Leon.
Yet seen from a larger perspective, the split of 1908 seems almost inevitable, stemming from fundamental problems faced by the IWW and from its own contradictory nature. For one thing, the emphasis on economic power inherent in the concept of a revolutionary industrial union reinforced tendencies in the Marxist doctrine of economic determinism to lessen reliance on political action. For another, the IWW was attempting to organize two groups who lacked the vote: the recent immigrants (many of them women and children) who largely staffed the mass production industries, and Western migrants. Moreover, the implacable hostility of federal, state, and local governments to unionism of any kind and the ability of corporations to evade or violate whatever minimal labor laws existed made politics seem futile. Finally, the AFL and almost all previous American labor movements had found that partisan politics and unionism simply did not mix; political disagreements meant that political agitation in the union divided and alienated union workers. The conservative AFL was at this time seeking a political voice by endorsing whichever major party candidates backed its demands, but the revolutionary IWW scorned such capitalist politicking.
The founders of the IWW had chafed under the AFL's earlier "no politics in the union" policy and wanted to recruit the workers it organized into revolutionary politics. They realized that most people voted as members of a group rather than as individuals, and must be organized even to vote correctly. They wanted to transcend the pure-and-simple, nonpolitical, class-collaboration unionism advocated by Gompers and eventually to emulate the European unions, which were allied to but independent of a unified socialist party. This proved impossible not only because the American socialist movement was weak and divided but, even more fundamentally, because the American labor movement was not founded by or loyal to any socialist group, whereas in Germany, the stronghold of European socialism, the SPD had founded and still led the most important unions. The SLP responded to this situation with a hostile, sectarian labor policy, while the SP expended its energies in a futile attempt to work within and convert the AFL--an effort that perforce estranged the IWW. The IWW's efforts to surmount all these difficulties on the basis of a vague and contradictory statement of principles was destinied to encounter difficulties as soon as anyone pressed for clarification or consistency. The IWW could have squared the circle by sponsoring its own political party after it had organized a sufficient number of workers; but, as we shall see later, capitalist terrorism and violence crippled and destroyed the IWW's industrial unions, the seedbeds of all its countercultural institutions.
The split of 1908, therefore, was in one sense an uproar over nothing, in another sense a great divide. The IWW remained in theory nonpolitical rather than anti-political; this neutrality was in keeping with its original stance. Members were free to participate in whatever party they preferred, except that officers and paid organizers of the IWW could no longer hold office in any party. Big Bill Haywood remained active and influential in the SP after 1908. Yet despite this formal similarity, Wobblies increasingly disparaged political action altogether and, ironically, moved steadily and without controversy toward a rhetorical advocacy of sabotage, illegality, and at times even violence. As a union existing in a hostile political climate characterized by injunctions against picketing and other union activity, the IWW (like the AFL) inevitably found itself on the wrong side of the law far more often than the most incendiary political group. The AFL and the IWW responded differently to political terrorism and repression. While the AFL internalized much of the capitalist legal philosophy--the rule of law, the sanctity of contracts, the legitimacy of capitalism, "a fair day's wage for a fair day's work"--the IWW repudiated capitalism and its entire legal, moral, and philosophical structure.[xlvii] The seeds of the later conflict with the SP, planted in 1905, began to germinate in 1908.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF A COUNTERCULTURE
Between the split with the SLP in 1908 and the break with the SP in 1913, the IWW elaborated its distinctive countercultural ethos in the realms of direct action, sabotage, and a new morality. Although the IWW's ideology evolved partly as a reaction to the conduct and criticisms of the political socialists, it more fundamentally resulted from the IWW's natural desire to formulate an ideology consistent with its own nature and assumptions. This philosophy was based on rigorous thought, a profound analysis of the problems confronting any revolutionary movement, and the personal experiences of most IWW members. The IWW's revolutionary counterculture encompassed almost every area of life and thought, and presented a profound challenge to mainstream American values and assumptions. Although avowedly based on the orthodox interpretation of economic determinism widespread in the Second International, it actually foreshadowed cultural versions of Marxism characteristic of more recent decades.
IWW Philosophy: The State and Political Action
As we have seen, a de-emphasis of political action, easily shading over into opposition to it, was inherent in the interpretation of the doctrine of economic determinism shared by many delegates to the founding convention in 1905. As The Industrial Worker later throtsaid, "Industrial power is superior to military power, and it is power which will decide the life and death class struggle--not prayers and not votes." Workers were exploited at the point of production, not at the ballot box: "The workers are not concerned with who votes or who does not vote. What we want is shorter hours, more wages and better conditions." Because workers operated all the factories without any assistance from the capitalists, the requisites for worker control were already fully in place. William Haywood reminded his audiences, "You have all the industries in your own hands at the present time."[xlviii]
The IWW regarded the political state, concerned solely with protecting property, as a class institution that could no more be transformed into an instrument of the general welfare than a hangman could become a physician. Government ownership of the means of production was not socialism but state capitalism, as pernicious to the working class as the private variety. Many governments owned the industries essential to the functioning of society, where the workers' power was potentially greatest; they throttled that power by treating strikes as mutiny or treason. Governments also bought failing industries, paying with long-term bonds, thus aiding bankrupt capitalists and saddling the workers with huge debts for the means of production which they had created and which were therefore rightfully theirs. Whatever the industry, governments exploited workers worse than private employers did. State ownership was based on citizenship rather than class. Haywood emphasized that government ownership was not even a step toward socialism because all government is rule from the top rather than democratic administration from the bottom. The Industrial Worker agreed. "Government implies governors and governed, a ruling and a subject class. No man is great enough or good enough to rule another."[xlix] The workers, not the political state, should own and operate the industries.
Many Wobblies had personal experiences that confirmed this view of the state. Governments at all levels enacted and enforced laws in a patently unjust and discriminatory manner. Local authorities in many communities hastily passed unconstitutional statutes to prevent IWW members from speaking in public; they then arrested, beat, tortured, and at times murdered Wobbly organizers and free-speech fighters. They attempted to provoke Wobblies to acts of self-defense or retaliation, which could then be used as a justification for massive violence. Newspapers and civic authorities openly advocated lynch law and incited vigilante terrorism while the Wobblies, who usually counseled peace, were arrested for making inflammatory statements. When the police killed a striker or protestor, as they frequently did, strike leaders would be arrested, charged with murder, and imprisoned for months while awaiting trial. Meanwhile, employers routinely violated what minimal health, safety, and hours laws existed and were seldom punished; the same governments that resorted to illegal and violent action to suppress strikes and throttle free speech refused to enforce laws protecting labor. When Socialists approached electoral victory in many localities, the capitalists changed the law. They disfranchised many workers by stringent residency and registration requirements, sponsored charter revisions that mandated non-partisan and at-large elections, and made many previously elected positions appointive.[l]
Because of these experiences, the Wobblies deemed capturing the state or smashing it, as the political socialists and the anarchists respectively advocated, equally irrelevant. Armies were composed largely of workers who could be won over by anti-militarist teachings. More important, armies could not prevail against a united working class in control of the mines, factories, and farms because they could not move or even survive without workers to transport them and feed them. "The enemy has the guns, we have the shovels. . . . Bread and butter power is stronger than gunpowder and dynamite," the Industrial Worker said.[li]
Instead of capturing and using the government through the mechanism of a political party or overthrowing it by armed insurrection, the IWW advocated a general strike to secure "the unconditional surrender of the capitalist class." Such a strike could begin legally, locally, and in pursuit of a specific gain, and spread to other regions and industries as the workers intensified their militancy and increased their demands. A "militant minority" in key industries could precipitate the strike and win the acquiescence and then allegiance of the passive majority in the course of the struggle; those who remained home out of fear or indecision would actually aid the revolution. Other IWW theorists called for a general lockout of the capitalist class. Instead of folding their arms and leaving the industries idle until the capitalists surrendered, the workers would simply seize them and continue to operate them for their own benefit. Both scenarios envisioned a peaceful revolution, punctured only by such ineffectual violence as the capitalists and their paralyzed governments could instigate; both plans ignored rather than overthrew the state.[lii]
Although hostile to the state, the IWW distanced itself from anarchism. Industrialism, it said, exalted collective action, majority rule, and the union, whereas anarchism was based on the individual; industrialism was based, then, on organization, discipline, and solidarity, which the anarchists disdained. The IWW stressed an allegedly scientific philosophy based on the class struggle, and accused the anarchists of antiquated bourgeois sentimentalism. IWW opposition to wars and militarism stemmed from the strikebreaking role of the army and their violation of the international solidarity of the working class, rather than from humanitarianism.[liii]
The Wobblies felt that political parties, like the state, were inadequate vehicles for revolutionary transformation. Parties were multi-class conglomerations united on the basis of ideas rather than class institutions based on interests. The Socialist party not only admitted nonworkers but was largely led by them and therefore could not foster class-consciousness or lead the class struggle. Although a party could contain and rule over diverse classes, it could represent only one, and that class must be organized. The working class, presently unorganized, could not be represented by any existing party; it could only be used as cannon fodder by other classes, as it had been for centuries. Looking to any party for salvation therefore violated the IWW preamble on several grounds. It assumed that the workers had something in common with their exploiters; it divided the workers over trifles; by accepting the leadership of intellectuals and professionals it denigrated worker self-activity and denied that the workers could emancipate themselves; and it failed to build up the new society within the shell of the old.
The IWW believed that the structure, composition, methods, and aims of even a socialist party rendered it ineffectual. The Wobblies asserted that politicians representing workers were not themselves workers. Often they were intellectuals, professionals, or petty bourgeois in origin; even if they had been workers, once elected they became increasingly distant from their constituencies. The conflict with the SP was thus a class conflict; Socialist politicians were regularly stigmatized as "blood suckers and parasites on the back of labor." Wobbly theorists often spoke of "labor fakirs" in the same vein.[liv]
The Wobblies pointed out that any socialist party must play by capitalist rules designed to ensure capitalist hegemony; it must favor reform over revolution. If it elected an official, it had to enforce capitalist laws until it repealed them, thus making a fetish of law and respectability. Any socialist party that took winning elections seriously would be driven inexorably to the right in order to appeal to a wider constituency; every nonproletarian accretion would dilute the party and seek allies still further to the right. The party mobilized the workers only occasionally, at election time, rather than daily; it thus bred fatalism and passivity, the belief that capitalism will fall of its own weight. "A little skirmish with paper bullets and pens, and the thing is done." The party could not shield the union. Capitalist courts annulled elections when convenient, and even if the workers controlled a local or state government a larger jurisdiction would move in to crush any strike. The union actually shielded the party; the corporations could destroy a party by firing its members, who were defenseless unless organized on the job. Party leaders tried to capitalize on the misery and struggles of the workers for their own benefit while betraying the workers at every opportunity, leading one disgusted Wobbly to demand that they "leave us alone to our misery and to fight our own battles."[lv] IWW newspapers understandably gave almost no coverage to SP electoral campaigns.
The IWW did not disdain electoral activity out of impatience, as SP politicos often charged; political activity was "chloroform for the worker" and moved in the wrong direction altogether. The immediate demands of the Socialist party were irrelevant or harmful. Labor legislation such as eight-hour laws and safety regulations would be violated routinely by the capitalists unless enforced by the union; but any union with such power could dispense with the state, the laws, and the parties. A beneficial law, if the term were not an oxymoron, would weaken the workers by encouraging them to rely on a power other than themselves. Pension schemes at best rewarded faithful slaves with a part of their own earnings dispensed either as charity, a bribe to good behavior, or a reward for votes. As Haywood said, "Give the worker the full value of his product and his pension is assured."[lvi]
Wobbly publications bolstered these theoretical considerations with arguments from American and European history. In Germany, the "two arm" theory vitiated union and party, both of which were mired in reformism, nationalism, and militarism. In France, the CGT had earlier followed a trajectory very similar to the IWW's. Vitiated by political squabbles and the drive of politicians for control, it had adopted a position of "no politics in the union" and espoused direct as opposed to political action. William Z. Foster, who witnessed the great French railroad strike in 1910, talked with radical unionists throughout Europe and dispatched a series of articles extolling the CGT and syndicalism to The Industrial Worker and Solidarity. The socialist political movement, he said, was not only trying to dominate and tame the revolutionary union movement; it was actively hostile, persecuting it whenever it had the power. The syndicalist plan of industrial action "is violently antagonistic to that of the Socialist movement. . . . The two movements cannot exist in harmony; they are trying to absorb each other. . . . There can be no cooperation between them; they must fight to the finish." SP friendliness and union neutrality were "only diplomatic pretenses" masking class war.[lvii]
Ben Williams, editor of Solidarity, concurred. According to Williams, Socialist politicians in the United States "hate the IWW worse than they pretend to hate capitalism" because the IWW aimed to displace their leadership with that of real proletarians who would work "solely in the interest of their class." The party and the union "will FIGHT, as they are doing in every country today, merely because of their essential differences in aims and methods. The one will seek to supplant or subordinate the other." Proletarian emancipation, Williams averred, would be brought about "only by and through the economic organization." The IWW should remain officially neutral on the ultimate possibilities of political action, because political or anti-political agitation divided the working class and diverted it from its main task, that of building the revolutionary union. The working class, Williams asserted, was fragmented by artificial divisions inherited from former ages: party, religion, craft union, and nationality. Because these self-identifications were meaningful to workers, the IWW should not attack them directly, thus becoming a sterile "anti-everything" sect. Instead, it should unite workers within the industries, where their common interests were most readily apparent. When the IWW was strong, the workers would see that it and it alone was sufficient to meet all their needs; they would then abandon their antiquated beliefs and outworn tactics. Meanwhile, the IWW should attack these institutions not on the basis of theory, but only when commenting on concrete events that revealed them for the pro-capitalist institutions they were.[lviii]
Despite Williams's advice, both The Industrial Worker and Solidarity were filled with theoretical condemnations of political action and virulent attacks on the Socialist party and its leaders. The SP's policy of "neutrality" and "non-interference" in union affairs was labeled treason to the working class. The AFL, the journals said, divided the workers and led them to defeat and demoralization; it bolstered capitalism and condemned socialism. It was not a labor union or a working-class organization at all, but a job trust. How, IWW publicists asked rhetorically, could a supposedly working-class party remain neutral in a fight between a revolutionary, class-conscious labor union and the reactionary, class-collaborationist, and racist AFL?
IWW literature, therefore, was actually hostile to electoral politics, even while claiming that the IWW was politically neutral, as is evident from two short pamphlets designed to reassure anxious workers that the IWW was not anti-political. Justus Ebert, in "Is the IWW Anti-Political?", claimed that "the IWW is the only real political factor in American society today," but also attacked both the SP and the SLP and said that "mere vote-getting, or vote-casting, is not politics." Ebert defined politics as "the vote of an organized working class, polled in the union hall and applied on the job" which will inaugurate "the industrial democracy which will eventually take the place of the present financial and industrial plutocracy." Vincent St. John, in his "Political Parties and the IWW" similarly averred that "The IWW will express itself politically in its general convention and the referendum of its members in the industries throughout the land, in proportion to its power." St. John denied that the IWW would "carry on a propaganda against political action," but also asserted that "the only value that political activity has to the working class is from the standpoint of agitation and education. Its educational merit consists solely in proving to the workers its utter inefficacy to curb the power of the ruling class and therefore forcing the workers to rely on the organization of their class in the industries." This "educational merit" is slight indeed![lix]
IWW Philosophy: Ethics, Direct Action, and Sabotage
To party politicking and electioneering the IWW counterposed direct action, "any economic step taken by the workers as a class without delegating power to representatives who must act within bounds set by the masters."[lx] It included action at the point of production for better wages, hours, and working conditions as well as tactics which coerced the state into granting such demands as free speech or releasing political prisoners. Gains won thereby emboldened and empowered the workers and could not be overturned by the capitalist courts or repealed by any legislature. Direct action at the workplace harked back to the old craft guilds and the skilled unions in the earliest days of the factory system, when workers legislated for themselves without parlaying with any capitalist and enforced their law by their own power and institutions. Activities that fell under the rubric of direct action ranged from work slowdowns to destruction of property and insurrection. The most obvious form of direct action was the strike.
The IWW repeatedly insisted that any means were justified against the capitalists. Vincent St. John, the IWW's general organizer from 1908 to 1915, said in an influential pamphlet that the IWW, as a revolutionary organization, uses "any and all tactics that will get the results sought. . . . The question of 'right' and 'wrong' does not concern us." William Haywood and Frank Bohn, in their Industrial Socialism (1911) set forth the IWW view in a much-quoted statement that was to figure largely in Haywood's trouble with the Socialist party:
The nature of man's social life depends chiefly upon the physical conditions under which he is living. This same principle is true in principles of morality. An individual, or nation, or a class, will finally come to think that right which is to his material advantage. . . . When the worker, either through experience or a study of Socialism, comes to know this truth, he acts accordingly. He retains absolutely no respect for the property "rights" of the profit-takers. He will use any weapon which will win his fight. He knows that the present laws of property are made by and for the capitalists. Therefore he does not hesitate to break them. He knows that whatever action advances the interests of the working class is right, because it will save the workers from destruction and death. A knowledge of economic determinism places the worker squarely on his intellectual feet and makes him bold and independent of mind.[lxi]
The capitalists, the IWW pointed out, murdered, stole, lied, and violated the law whenever profitable; capitalism was itself organized mass murder and plunder. As The Industrial Worker said, "The employing class respect nothing but physical force and the ruling class in all ages have never yielded to anything else. . . . The 'right and wrong' of the relations of workers and employers can only be settled by organized force." The victors wrote the law and decreed what is moral, while the defeated suffered the consequences. IWW publications truculently asserted that "might makes right" and that "to be wrong is to be weak, to be right is to be strong." Law, contracts, and moral codes protecting property were merely instruments of class oppression, no more valid than a title to a Negro slave.[lxii]
Despite these pronouncements, most Wobblies firmly believed in a universal morality based on the welfare of all people, and castigated bourgeois ethics and society precisely because they furthered the interest of a single class. The IWW's belief that "an injury to one is an injury to all" and that all workers should unite across the chasms of nationality, race, gender, and craft was an intensely moral conviction. Many IWWs asserted that even the capitalists would be better off in every human sense in the new society. Far from disdaining morality per se, the Wobblies, rejecting capitalistic ethics, sought to create a new moral code congruent with the struggle they were waging and the society they meant to construct. "We battle against the existing moral code and in so doing we are creating working-class morals. . . . In fighting we develop new ideas and ideals." Just as the IWW rejected political government for industrial government and craft unionism for class unionism, so they rejected class morality for a universal human ethical code, "the law of a masterless society." Existing society was hopelessly corrupt, its morals, institutions, and practices pure poison; the workers could build upon nothing (except perhaps the material achievements of capitalism), but had to destroy everything traditionally esteemed and begin anew. The working class had to isolate itself within its own organizations and form completely "the necessary institutions and mental conditions" that would both overthrow the present society and undergird the new.[lxiii]
If Wobbly pronouncements on morality often misrepresented their real position and provided ammunition for their enemies, an ambiguity in their specific tactical advice also created endless confusion. The IWW often seemed to be advocating individual rather than class action against their capitalist enemies; they were accused of sanctioning theft under the guise of "individual expropriation." IWWs vehemently denied this, yet their specific pronouncements were contradictory. According to the labor theory of value, a central tenet of both IWW and socialist ideology, all profits are stolen from the workers; why not steal part of them back? The Industrial Worker said that a thief only "takes back that which has already been stolen from him," and that if this was wrong, "the whole idea of revolution or labor organization is false." It advised against individual robbery of the capitalists only because it could not be done. "The aim of organized industrial unionism is to be to all the bosses just what the highwayman does to the individual boss--with this difference: the aim of the highwayman is merely to take what the other has. It is a case of a robber robbing a robber. The aim of an industrial union is to take from all the robbers, not only the proceeds of their past robbery, but also the power to rob in the future."[lxiv]
Such statements could be variously interpreted. For example, they raised the question of what individual workers should do if they could expropriate a capitalist. The Industrial Worker expressed its ambivalence when it said, "We do not advocate taking possession of such things as we need by individual expropriation at this time. We do claim, however, that property has no right that a starving man is bound to respect. . . . If warehouses are filled with the things that we have created, we will not peacefully starve." Nothing will prevent desperate people from taking matters into their own hands: "when the psychological moment arrives the individual or the class will step across the boundary and take what rightfully belongs to the producers of wealth. . . . Individual action fully merges into class action."[lxv] The IWW correctly perceived that great upheavals sometimes begin in the struggle of small groups for very specific goals, such as loaves of bread. The IWW combined two arguments here, one based on the theory of surplus value and one on the right of each person to the necessities of life.
The Industrial Worker followed the latter argument to its conclusion on at least two occasions in 1909 and directly urged harvest hands to steal in order to assure themselves a decent life. On 1 July it said. "The farmers will be glad to give you their chickens, if they do not see you take them, and you can live like a king in the jungles, if you throw your feet." Harvest hands should obtain for themselves conditions "as good as the horses, at least" and take all that they can every day. Six weeks later it assured its readers, "You are entitled to food, comfortable shelter, good clothes, and amusement all winter long. The enemy will not give any of these things to you. You might better be in jail or dead than begging or bumming when the snow is on the ground. Therefore, don't be afraid to take a chance when it comes to food, clothes, and shelter. If you are game, go after it. If you are afraid--jump in the river!"[lxvi] Perhaps due to adverse reactions on the part of their socialist opponents, Wobbly publications seldom repeated this advice after 1909.
Sabotage was the most controversial form of direct action, and one that raised disquieting fears about individual instead of class action. Although the IWW did not publish its pamphlets on sabotage until 1912 and 1913, its philosophy, rationale, and techniques were explained and advocated in both The Industrial Worker and Solidarity in 1910 and 1911. According to Ben Williams, "sabotage ranges all the way from passive resistance at one extreme to violent destruction of property at the other." One form was "striking on the job"--slowing the pace or producing an inferior product. "Never miss a chance to strike a blow at the wage system, if it is only to take less dirt on the shovel." The "passive strike" consisted of scrupulous obedience to every workplace rule; this could bring any railroad system to a halt. The "intermittent strike" would paralyze any factory repeatedly for short periods. J.W. Johnstone advocated the use of emery dust in "this veiled civil war" between the classes. "Machinery will suffer, power plants will break down, cities will be in darkness, traffic will be delayed, industry will be paralyzed, and the hirelings of the master class will be helpless."[lxvii]
IWW enthusiasm for sabotage received a tremendous impetus from the great French railroad strike of 1910, which William Z. Foster and William Haywood personally observed. Defeated by troops sent by the French premier, the ex-Socialist Briand, the workers were able to win reinstatement of fired workers and freedom for their imprisoned leader by acts of coordinated sabotage. The advantages of "the weapon that wins" were gleefully enumerated in the Wobbly press. Because saboteurs stayed on the job, they collected pay while devastating the boss; police violence and the introduction of scabs were averted. Detection was nearly impossible. Many forms of sabotage created jobs as the capitalists scrambled to restore production. A militant minority could initiate sabotage before the majority caught on. It demonstrated the source of the workers' power, that nothing was created or transported without them. "The psychological effect of instilling confidence into the working class as a whole and of inspiring contempt for the boss and his government is of far more value to the revolution than a mere increase in wages." A method the workers used for themselves, sabotage left "no room for politicians, arbitration boards, scabs of all hues, to get in between and earn their Judas money." In France, "no petitions or appeals are being used. No votes are being cast. The SABOTERS hate the parliamentarians."[lxviii]
When told that sabotage was immoral, Wobblies reminded their critics that capitalists closed factories, stopped production, and destroyed or adulterated goods whenever it was profitable, regardless of the starvation and misery this inflicted on the unemployed workers or the death it visited upon consumers. Whereas capitalist sabotage was committed for private profit, IWW sabotage was performed for moral reasons, and was in fact often the only way to compel mine and factory owners to install safety equipment and thus to save lives. Wobblies also adduced their argument based on economic determinism. Ben Williams said that "the social democrat who balks at sabotage on the ground that it is an 'immoral weapon' in the class war, views that war from the standpoint of the capitalists." Sabotage was "a WAR MEASURE, made necessary by the nature of the class struggle." Its utility, however, largely depended on the consciousness of the workers using it and affected by it. "In the present state of the workers' superstitious reverence for property (which they do not understand their masters have stolen from them)" destruction of property "may be of doubtful value, and often reacts upon the workers with disastrous effect." More than a month before the McNamaras were indicted for blowing up the Los Angeles Times offices, Williams asserted that "individual or craft violence, such as the blowing up of a bridge manned by scab labor, or the destruction of a machine in a factory . . . may be condemned not only by the capitalist, but by the working class as well." But any sabotage (except that took human life) that united the workers and won control of the shop was justified.[lxix]
The IWW on Violence
The IWW defended lawbreaking and destruction of property, but hedged when talking about violence against people. Wobbly statements on this subject were ambivalent and contradictory. The IWW usually emphasized passive resistance during its free speech fights, and peaceful tactics during strikes. Passive resistance would show that the IWW would proceed peacefully if possible; it would have a "tremendous moral effect" because it "reveals the self-control, the fortitude, the courage, the inherent sense of order" of the workers. "It requires the very best quality of courage to endure violence without retaliating and without retreating." Capitalist and official violence, on the other hand, revealed the employers and their government as immoral and lawless thugs. The workers were morally superior to the capitalists because they were shaped by the collective processes of industrial production and retained the social instincts deadened in those whose lives rested on the exploitation of others. Worker violence in self-defense could not be equated with capitalist violence on behalf of the profits wrung from exploitation.[lxx]
The IWW warned its members that provocateurs and the police would try to goad them into acts of vengeance or vigorous self-defense just in order to have a pretext for general slaughter. Yet as the number of killed and maimed Wobblies grew, faith in passive resistance faded, and the Wobblies publicly threatened the police with retaliation. St. John claimed that during the McKees Rocks strike the IWW threatened the Pennsylvania state constabulary "that for every striker killed or injured the life of a cossack would be exacted in return"; when this threat was carried out, violence against the strikers ceased.[lxxi]
Commenting on this incident, The Industrial Worker justified any means to defeat or overthrow capitalism while simultaneously condemning violence as wrong as well as impolitic: "Any and all means are justified when it comes to a matter of life and death. Deliberate bloodshed must be condemned, but if we are to be shot like dogs, who will tell us to die without a struggle? ... The employers have abolished the moral law, and the question is not at all one of right and wrong, but simply a question of what is best and what will succeed in the end. . . . The bread and butter control is more than military control. It is better to cut off the army's supplies than to kill our fellowmen, no matter if they are cowardly, brutal, and patriotic. . . . The IWW is the hope of those who oppose bloodshed."[lxxii]
Other Wobbly pronouncements on the morality and advisability of violence were equally ambivalent. One editorial in The Industrial Worker asserted "There is no positive good and no positive wrong.... It depends on your point of view. A slave thinks slavery wrong. A master thinks slavery right." A few sentences later, however, the writer said that "the reason the Industrial Union does not stand for military resistance to the enemy is that it is ethically wrong to take human life except in self-defense, and it is moreover foolish." The puzzled reader may well ask, From whose standpoint is military resistance to the employers wrong? Any killing of a master by a slave could be interpreted as self-defense. As if in answer, a long article in The Industrial Worker in early 1910 argued that assassinations of high officials, although they were futile because they were directed against symptoms, were defensible because they expressed the feelings of the whole people and because "a struggle against oppression and tyranny is always justified."[lxxiii]
One incident clearly revealed one side of the Wobbly attitude toward violence: an editorial by Victor Berger which advocated arming the workers. Berger was one of the most influential leaders of the Socialist party and the representative of its extreme right wing. The head of the "Milwaukee machine," which was widely extolled and anathemized as exemplifying municipal socialism, Berger edited the Social Democratic Herald and won election as the party's first congressman in 1910. Berger was one of two persons invited to the meeting that launched the IWW who had refused to attend, and was a vehement opponent of the IWW. He had long advocated the creation of a Swiss-style militia that would arm the workers, and on 31 July 1909 he reiterated this idea. In "Should Be Prepared to Fight for Liberty at All Hazards," Berger said that, despite his well-deserved reputation as a "constructive" rather than a revolutionary socialist, he had concluded that the law protected the plutocrat and the exploiter while leaving the Ameican workingman with fewer rights than his French, German, or English counterparts:
The safety and hope of this country will finally be in one direction only--that of a violent and bloody revolution.... I deny that dealing with a blind and greedy plutocratic class as we are dealing in this country, the outcome can ever be peaceful or that any reasonable change can ever be brought about by the ballot in the end.
I predict that a large part of the capitalist class will be wiped out for much smaller things than the settling of the great social question. That before any settlement is possible, most of the plutocratic class, together with the politicians, will have to disappear as completely as the feudal lords and their retinue disappeared during the French revolution.
That cannot be done by the ballot, or by only the ballot.
The ballot may not count for much in a pinch.
And in order to be prepared for all emergencies, Socialists and workingmen should make it their duty to have rifles and the necessary rounds of ammunition at their homes, and be prepared to back up their ballots with their bullets if necessary.[lxxiv]
The Industrial Worker of 19 August attacked this as an insane scheme to lead workingmen against machine guns. The politicians (such as Berger) were "the Gapons, the Judases of the working class" who openly admitted the futility of political solutions and, denying the efficacy of direct action and the industrial union, sought refuge in bullets. "We have been criticized for the so-called 'anti-political' stand of some of the utterances of the 'Industrial Worker.' What would our critics have said if we had done as the politicians: first deny the power of the so-called ballot and then tell the workers that they had no other remedy but bloodshed?" The ballot and the rifle were "two words for the same thing." Referring to rightist criticisms of sabotage in France, The Industrial Worker asked "Which is the worst, you peaceful politicians: a heap of undistributed mail in every post office in France, or heaps of unburied corpses of the working people?"[lxxv]
Reemphasizing the role of the industrial union, The Industrial Worker asked, "Even if those apostles of murder, the politicians, should succeed in killing some members of the employing class, will rifles weave cloth? Will powder and shot grow grain? Will a fanatical mob be able or willing to carry on the intricate productive life of today?" It concluded, The IWW is alike removed from the confusion of the anti-political sects and the vagaries and the dangers of the political idolaters."[lxxvi]
The IWW's response to the McNamara confessions also indicated its attitudes toward violence. Between 1906 and 1910 over a hundred explosions had marked the conflict between the Bridge and Structural Iron Workers Union and the Erectors' Association. On 1 October 1910, in the midst of a major effort to unionize the workers of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Times, a bitterly anti-labor paper which often printed incendiary editorials encouraging violence toward unions, was dynamited. Because of a gas leak, twenty-one workers were unintentionally killed. The McNamara brothers were arrested in April 1911; the labor movement, largely convinced of their innocence and fearing more of the perjured and provocateur testimony which had characterized previous political trials, organized a massive campaign to ensure a fair trial. Meanwhile, in a potentially epoch-making development, the Los Angeles AFL was backing Socialist party mayoral candidate Job Harriman, whose election would very likely result in major union gains throughout California. On 1 December, four days before the election, the McNamaras stunned their supporters and the country by confessing to the dynamiting, thus ensuring Harriman's defeat and dealing labor a catastrophic reverse in California and across the country.
The Industrial Worker averred that "we are no more in favor of killing people by labor union members than we are in having people killed by the thousands daily by the capitalist class." The city of Los Angeles and the publisher of the Los Angeles Times were "more responsible for the destruction of life in the Times disaster than James B. McNamara" because they practiced repression and preached hatred, leaving workers few options. Yet the McNamaras, far from being revolutionists, were conservative, Catholic trade unionists who, alone in their fight, were "trying to produce a power that should have been possessed by concerted action of the workers in the industry instead of a single craft. There is nothing to be gained by murdering each other, although we will insist that EVERY LIFE THAT HAS BEEN TAKEN IN THE CLASS WAR SHOULD BE CHARGED TO THE MASTER CLASS AND THEIR AGENTS." The Industrial Worker reiterated that "industrial organization is the best dynamite we can use."[lxxvii]
Solidarity concurred: craft union powerlessness necessitated resort to futile violence, which it likened to "the 18th century method of smashing machines." Craft unionism "stands forever condemned by the McNamara confession." Yet Solidarity blamed the confession more than the dynamiting, calling it "cowardly treason to the working class." But while the craft unions howled for the McNamaras' blood, the revolutionary unionist "cares no more for the property or the lives of the capitalists than the latter care for the lives of workingmen." For every capitalist who dies in the class war, "a thousand and more slaves go down to death in mill, mine, on buildings and elsewhere throughout our industrial hell." Meanwhile, Haywood proclaimed that "I am with the McNamaras and always will be."[lxxviii]
The IWW's emphasis on economic determinism served to downplay the role of violence. Even when IWWs referred to "physical force" they did not necessarily mean violence; like De Leon, they often meant the organized power of industrial unionism. The IWW, by organizing all the workers in a factory, could shut down the factory during a strike, leaving less room for the violence endemic to craft strikes, where the employer could import scabs. Many IWWs hoped that the general strike would constitute a peaceful revolution which would ultimately benefit everyone. The capitalists were too effete and numerically insignificant to fight; shorn of their power, they need not be exterminated, but instead would be offered work on the same terms as everyone else. Yet the stridency of IWW language, combined with its general position on morals and the law, strongly implied that most Wobblies would countenance or favor violence against employers or officials as long as the agent went undetected or won gains for the workers. The IWW sometimes justified violence because the capitalists and their government constantly practiced it, leaving their victims no choice but to resist violence with force. Even here, however, IWW publicists hesitated to urge front-line fighters to actions whose consequences the editorial writers would escape.
The Problems of the Counterculture
The IWW's analysis of the state and its critique of political socialism were prescient, and were partly corroborated by subsequent events in Europe and the United States. The IWW had arrived at important insights which inevitably alienated much of the public, including many workers, by attacking cherished myths that underpinned the sense of identity of many individuals. Yet the IWW exacerbated this alienation by unncessary truculence and by rhetorical extremism.
The IWW's ferocious insistence on the class basis of morals, religion, and the law repelled large numbers of socialists, workers, and middle-class reformers who might otherwise have been won to their side on at least some issues. It led the Wobblies to disdain public opinion. "POWER," said Solidarity, "determines the issue one way or another in a struggle between masters and slaves. No sentiment of 'right', 'justice', 'humanity', and other beautiful abstractions can possibly figure in the issue of the event."[lxxix] Yet these phrases and the realities they represent are meaningful to most people, especially when their own immediate interests are not at stake. They therefore attain power in their own right by boosting the morale of the oppressed and enlisting others on their side. Although the IWW recognized that mere public opinion means little unless it is backed by organized power, it was in fact aided by public opinion in many of its fights, from Spokane to Lawrence and beyond. The risks of appealing to or depending on public opinion are many and severe. At best, it would make the IWW dependent on its "class enemies" for many of its victories, or at least cause it to acknowledge this dependence, understandably an unsatisfactory alternative to worker self-activity and autonomously won victories. At worst, it could lead to an accommodation with racism and nationalism and the abandonment of everything good and decent in the movement, as the experience of European socialism attests. But experience indicates that a portion of the middle class can be won for at least some policies leading towards economic justice.
The IWW's emphasis on economic determinism distorted its perception of those it tried to organize, and, indeed, of its own activity. The IWW's assumption that all genuine human interests are economic undermined its appeal to workers whose self-concepts and moral sensibilities were based not on class but on religion, race, nationality, or other non-economic factors. These identities were not merely thin veneers covering an innate working-class consciousness; they constituted the integral and meaningful core of the personalities of many people, and could not be exorcised by simple appeals to material interest. The IWW's attempt to ignore or over-ride the self-identities of its potential constituency alienated prospective recruits while leaving the power of moral appeals to the capitalists.
Like reliance on public opinion, any efforts to acknowledge, validate, and work in tandem with identities based on ethnicity, religion, patriotism, or respectability would have been fraught with dangers. These forms of identity are inherently vile and disgusting, and all of them more readily undermine than solidify class consciousness. Yet if the IWW had to ignore or attack those identities, it forfeited a potent weapon when it truculently proclaimed that the IWW was merely "the quickest way to the pork chops" and refused to couch its appeals in moral terms.
The IWW correctly perceived the need for a new culture and new people to create and inhabit it; it saw the pitfalls in appealing to people on the basis of their old identities, which were too often the results of capitalist hegemony or the residue of ancient superstitions. Yet if the IWW was to convince the mass of workers to repudiate or abandon their inherited identities, it had to provide a meaningful alternative based on more than self-interest. Workers, after all, clung to their parochial identities largely because they offered the meaning, dignity, and sense of moral community that the roles of producer and consumer cannot provide. The IWW was based on the highest ideals--the struggle for justice, the mastery of knowledge--and could have appealed to moral sentiments and pointed to "the higher aims of socialism." It is understandable that it so seldom did; its members were justly cynical about lofty phrases, which usually masked torture and murder. They also had more immediate concerns. Still, the IWW's confusing rhetoric, which seemed to deny morality rather than claim it, was deplorable and self-defeating.
This is particularly true given the moral stature of most IWW activists. In a poignant passage The Industrial Worker disclaimed any heroic motives and asked, "If we are hung or shot because we agitate for the union, will we be able to smell . . . the flowers that the children of the future will plant on our graves?" Yet it also pointed out that "the majority has in all history persecuted the revolutionary minority, even to the point of death and torture."[lxxx] How, then, could it be in the immediate interests of a worker to join the IWW? This question is particularly urgent because most IWW activists were extraordinary people who could have reaped direct personal rewards had they sought self-advancement rather than fomenting revolution. (This ability of talented radicals to rise out of, rather than with, their class, remains one of the most intractible problems confronting American radicalism.) The IWW could justly and effectively have appealed to the moral sentiments it disparaged since its activists were largely motivated by such sentiments.
After World War I, the IWW issued a pamphlet which illustrates an effective use of traditional moral terms for radical goals. "What is the IWW?" interpreted the three virtues of the gospels as "hope for ultimate justice, faith in humanity, and charity to one another." It proclaimed the IWW's motto, "an injury to one is an injury to all," as "the golden rule from a working class viewpoint." Describing the jailings, lynchings, and tortures inflicted on innumerable Wobblies, this pamphlet correctly asserted that "men would not go to jail by the thousands for the sake of a few dollars and cents alone." The IWW's Declaration of Principles is "one of the most powerful ethical documents of the ages," exemplifying "the principle of human solidarity and the world-wide brotherhood of man which are at the bottom of our activities." The pamphlet contrasted this with "the sodden, sinful, unclean and unrighteous life of capitalist society."[lxxxi]
The IWW's tendency to correlate disagreement with class alignments and therefore to equate criticism with treason to the working class skewed its views of the relationship between the socialist movement and unionism. In particular, most IWW writers accused politicians and parties of undermining strikes, defusing worker militancy, and dragging the unions relentlessly to the right in tactics, strategy, and goals. This was a plausible assertion. Although the "dual arm" theory supposedly accorded equal status to the party and the union, Wobblies knew that German socialist theoreticians and union leaders claimed that the union was confined to securing the immediate demands of the workers, whereas the party's task was to fight for and inaugurate socialism. This effectively subordinated the union to the party and limited the radicalism of the unions to occasional affirmations of political orthodoxy.
Yet some IWWs conceded that unions had usually been a conservative force that led socialist parties into a tepid reformism. In Germany the unions were a major cause of the SPD's retreat from militancy and its gallop down the blood-splattered road to militarism and war. In Britain the unions deradicalized the socialist political movement. The AFL by its very existence pulled the Socialist party rightward. A radical union is not exempt from the conservatizing tendencies that afflict a revolutionary party; in both institutions the pursuit of short-term goals can obscure long-term vision.
Intellectuals, scorned by the Wobblies as parasites and priests of the bourgeoisie, have contributed much to the theory and practice of radicalism. Thinkers as distinct as V. I. Lenin and Selig Perlman have asserted that pure-and-simple unionism is the "natural" philosophy of the working class and that socialist consciousness must be injected from outside. This contention lacks merit because all philosophies are historically and socially determined, none is "natural" to a class outside a specific context, and peasants and workers have evolved their own forms of radicalism. It nevertheless remains true that individuals with freedom from immediate want and the means and leisure for education can often demystify, for themselves and others, the categories of capitalist cultural hegemony and see beyond immediate needs to long-term interests. Misery does not in itself generate radicalism; it is often the seedbed of an intense and resentful conservatism. Class consciousness does not arise directly from unmediated experience, as the Wobblies, contrary to their own experience, often claimed; it results from thought. It is, like all human perceptions, a cultural artifact, not a natural fact. The capitalist system has succeeded in making non-class forms of consciousness seem natural, primary, inevitable, and meaningful to most workers. Intellectuals and members of the middle class can help overcome these obstacles. In practice, the IWW acknowledged this; it valued intellectuals of whatever background who aided the IWW's struggles, and, as we shall see, it also evolved its own form of organic, working-class intellectual.
The IWW's interpretation of economic determinism poisoned its relations with the SP by stigmatizing that organization as bourgeois and therefore discreditable. It also led the IWW wildly to exaggerate the efficacy of economic organization and thus to underrate political activity. Katharine Hill, a Socialist party member, reprimanded the IWW for its simplistic attitudes towards political action in a letter published in Solidarity. If the SP "isn't red enough to suit you people, who is to blame for that fact? You are, because you don't come into it. If you would join the Socialist party, you could swing it any way you liked.... The IWW is right in refusing direct connection with the political wing of the movement. But you are throwing away a big advantatge when you refuse as individuals to hold membership in both organizations." Hill further argued that although the gains achieveable through the ballot were limited, "when you pause to consider how little work is involved in registering as a voter and afterwards making a cross on a ballot," Wobblies may think it worth the effort.[lxxxii] Hill could have pointed out that, although many Wobblies were ineligible to vote, this did not debar them from the SP, which accepted women and, presumably, other non-voters.
Socialists also pointed out the fallacy of Wobbly assertions that all problems were shop issues and that the unions could govern society. Many concerns such as education, public health, environmental regulations, and city planning and zoning ordinances require the geographical government the IWW claimed was superfluous because destined to remain a class instrument until it was abolished with the class society it upheld. Autonomous factories, even coordinated through a universal industrial union, could not manage the economy. Socialists pointed out that the Wobbly utopia would consist of fragmented union owner-capitalists competing with each other, presumably in the open market.
Squabbles over the outline of the future society were not, however, the most pressing controversy. The Wobblies not only proclaimed the ultimate irrelevance of government but also belittled the benefits that elected Socialist party officials could confer on the revolutionary union movement. The SP and its members did help the Wobblies immensely during many free speech fights and strikes by providing money, publicity, and organization. Wherever strikes occurred in municipalities controlled by the SP, the benevolent neutrality of the city administration proved an inestimable boon to the Wobblies. Although Victor Berger, detested by the Wobblies, exaggerated his role in the momentous victory at Lawrence, the hearings initiated by the lone Socialist member of the House of Representatives did play a significant role in exposing the wool corporations and arousing public opinion, as Haywood and the IWW both formally acknowledged. During the Patterson strike, which occurred after the recall of Haywood, the Wobblies had to march from the factories into Haledon, a nearby town controlled by the SP, merely to hold their meetings in peace. Yet many Socialists, including the New York Call, withheld needed support, and Socialist party members among the strikers eventually destroyed the strike by returning to work. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, one of the major leaders of that strike, bitterly attacked the SP for demanding endless thanks for support that they were duty-bound to offer. "We felt that there was no need to thank the socialist party for what they had done, because they had only done their duty and they had done very little in comparison with what they have done in AFL strikes, in the McNamara cases."[lxxxiii]
The IWW's official stance of political neutrality--much milder than the actual tone of the Wobbly press--obviously militated against SP electoral success, just as SP "neutrality" undermined the IWW. The reasons for this were well known to the Wobblies. Eugene Debs and other industrial unionists within the SP recognized that only an organized working class could vote the Socialists into power or even make sure their individual votes were counted. The SP could never win by appealing to individual workers, but only by securing the united vote of an organized class. The SP constantly reminded workers that to scatter their votes as individuals was tantamount to "scabbing at the ballot box"; workers must vote together, just as they must strike together. (The force of this argument was somewhat weakened by the SP's support of the AFL, which scabbed together as often as it struck together.) Whatever politics individual union members pursued outside the union was not working-class politics; ultimately it was no politics at all. The IWW's stance therefore alienated the SP for the same reason that the SP's neutrality and non-interference estranged the IWW. Both organizations wanted predominance; both, whatever their disclaimers, wanted commitment from the other without offering it themselves.
The IWW leadership failed to convert any sizeable number of recruits to their revolutionary ideology. The IWW leadership realized that most workers would join the IWW to secure immediate improvements on the job, and would drop out when the IWW proved powerless to achieve this goal. The Industrial Union Bulletin expressed this in a major article expounding the philosophy of the IWW: the IWW
has passed the narrow limitations of a mere wage movement; and the industrial and social question is no longer a barren, crude stomach-consideration,--but a question of changing the old mutual relations of mankind, the problem of acquiring industrial independence and complete economic freedom for the wealth producers.
But it is the stomach-consideration which foments the rebellion first among the indifferent masses; and once in revolt they are more accessible to high, nobler efforts; it's the wage struggle first which develops the courage and the virtues of self-sacrifice and an unflinching sense of solidarity in the ranks of the proletariat.... so that they would have a chance to share in the treasuries of education and refinement, and would recuperate and spend their leisure hours in the noble pursuits of life.[lxxxiv]
Devastated by repression, terrorism, and defeat, IWW leaders hoped that governmental repression and lost strikes would convince its members of the need for a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. However, defeat seems to have convinced most quondam Wobblies that any struggle for betterment, at least within the IWW, was hopeless. Most unions with substantial socialist memberships refused to affiliate with the IWW, finding (or at least believing) that they could fight for their immediate objectives more effectively within the AFL or in alliance with one of the major parties. Even the Western Federation of Miners, perhaps the most radical of important American unions and a major impetus for the founding of the IWW, withdrew after a short time and later reaffiliated with the AFL. The IWW was noble for its dreams, and transiently important in some important strikes; its attempt to wean the workers from the mainstream culture (or from their separate ethnic and localist cultures) was an almost total failure. This failure did not stem from any defects in the Wobbly ideology, which was far more rational and moral than any of the belief-systems prevalent among the American working class. Rather, it resulted from the inexorable power of the received cultures (a power, as we shall see, inculcated by terrorism), a power the IWW, as most previous and subsequent American radical movements, struggled vainly against.
The IWW's position on both morals and politics had much to recommend it. Wobbly attacks on the Socialist party and its leaders were often justified, and many of the IWW's most offensive pronouncements only highlighted conundrums and exacerbated problems inherent in the American radical enterprise. Still, its intransigent and linear interpretation of the Marxist doctrine of economic determinism alienated potential allies and involved it in avoidable difficulties. Toward the end of 1911,, Wobblies and their sympathizers agitated within the SP to convert individual members or extract from the party official support of revolutionary industrial unionism, while party conservatives continued to criticize the IWW. The result was a showdown in 1912.
THE IWW AND THE SOCIALIST PARTY
The controversy between the IWW and the SP between 1911 and 1913 (a debate that simultaneously raged within the SP) was fought over the concrete issues of direct action, sabotage, and violence. The underlying disagreement, however, was between those who wanted to work within the institutions of mainstream society and in accordance with the values of that society, and those who aimed to create new institutions, new values, and ultimately new persons, prefiguring those of the future society. In the course of this discussion the glaring weaknesses of the SP's attempt to work within the old structures became readily apparent. The IWW's rebuttal to the socialist critique reveals the socialist position as untenable and inconsistent.
The Socialist Critique of the IWW
The center and symbol of the raging dispute was William Haywood, one of the few persons prominent in both the IWW and the SP. Haywood embraced the philosophy of the IWW. He defined socialism as direct worker rule in the shops rather than as government ownership of the means of production. Socialism was to be secured by a general lock-out of the capitalist class rather than through victory at the polls. Yet, unlike most Wobblies, he placed great emphasis on the role of the Socialist party. His Industrial Socialism (1911, with Frank Bohn) asserted that control of the government was "absolutely essential" if the unions were to win their demands and that municipal governments were "much more than the agents of the capitalist class," because they provided essential services to the workers. The SP, Haywood said in a statement that generated controversy in Wobbly ranks, had three important tasks. "First, it must lay hold of the powers of political government and prevent them from being used against the industrial organization of the workers. Second, it must be the bearer of sound knowledge, using its great and growing organization to teach Socialism. Third, it must use the governments of the cities to advance the social interests of the working class."[lxxxv] Haywood was an ardent and popular campaigner who contributed substantially to the party's municipal victories in Ohio in 1911.
Nevertheless, relations between the IWW and the SP were strained by mid-1911. Socialists accused Wobblies of disrupting the SP by using it as a recruiting ground, and Wobblies hurled the charge back. Although both Solidarity and The Industrial Worker advised against boring from within the Socialist party, individual Wobblies undoubtedly did join the SP to win it for industrial unionism or to convert and detach individual members. Although this embittered some party members otherwise sympathetic to the IWW, the party's increasingly numerous and vocal left wing agitated for a more activist party which would endorse industrial unionism and lead as well as support union struggles.[lxxxvi] Most IWW leaders, viewing the SP as irredeemable, stood aloof from this agitation and predicted that the radicals would lose. But in November 1911 Haywood announced his candidacy for a position on the party's National Executive Committee, and ran on a platform stressing industrial unionism.
Haywood's statement of candidacy evoked an immediate and sharp response from Morris Hillquit, an attorney, author, frequent SP candidate for various offices, and leader of the powerful New York organization. Hillquit attacked Haywood's position on sabotage, observance of the law, and direct action, thus igniting a debate that, fueled by the sensational McNamara confessions, raged for over a year and vented the irreconcilable differences between the SP and the IWW and within the SP. Hillquit took as his text the passage on morality from Industrial Socialism quoted above, and replied:
This is good anarchistic doctrine, but is diametrically opposed to the accepted policies of Socialism, and is not even a remote cousin to the theory of economic determinism. . . . To preach to the workers lawbreaking and violence is ethically unjustifiable and tactically suicidal. The laws of political democracies in the last analysis always represent the will of the majority of the people. They may be conceived in ignorance or procured by fraud or purchase, but in that case they exist only because the majority of the people and voters are so indifferent, ignorant or corrupt as to sanction them or at least acquiesce in them. The remedy of the minority aggrieved by the law is to convert their fellow citizens to their own views--to turn their minority into a majority, and thus to get possession of the legislative machinery for the interests and policies represented by them. Whenever we will obtain control of the legislative machinery of the government, we will exact obedience to our laws, working class laws, upon precisely the same grounds upon which we now yield obedience to the capitalist laws.[lxxxvii]
Hillquit conceded that modern law was in the main "capitalist law made to enslave the workers," but he claimed that socialists urged its change "by the regular and lawful methods established for that purpose." Illegal and violent action "has invariably served to demoralize and destroy the movement, by attracting to it professional criminals, infesting it with spies, leading the workers to needless and senseless slaughter, and ultimately engendering a spirit of disgust and reaction." If the ruling class refuses to accept the verdict of the people, "we will fight like tigers and mount the barricades if need be. But then we will be fighting, not as a mob of lawbreakers, but against such a mob." Any talk of lawbreaking or violence "is sure to be quoted against us forever and ever."[lxxxviii]
The working class, Hillquit averred in a subsequent letter, should not emulate capitalist morals and methods; it was "fighting for a better and higher order of things." Illegal actions could not be discussed publicly and voted on; they necessitated "the secret pact of a very small circle of trusted individuals. And there we have again the whole code of anarchist philosophy and tactics: the apotheosis of the intelligent minority instead of democratic faith in the majority, guerrilla warfare instead of organized class action, conspiratory councils instead of open organized class action . . . and force and violence instead of education and political action." The IWW "has no corporeal existence in the labor movement and is merely a sort of masonic formula for cantankerousness and disruption within the Socialist party."[lxxxix]
Hillquit raised most of the main themes of the anti-Haywood forces. Unlike the IWW, Hillquit, a wealthy, refined aristocrat, the very embodiment of urbane liberalism, perceived much of value in received morals, political structures, and ways of life; he wanted to build within and upon established institutions and practices rather than outside and against them. The IWW, however, criticized him for his great wealth and his detachment from working-class life and concerns.
Karl Kautsky, a major figure in the German Social Democratic party, backed Hillquit's appeal to ethics. In a widely reprinted statement he said, "Private property rests not alone upon laws that were created by the ruling classes, but also upon an ethical sentiment which is a product of thousands and thousands of years of development and which is alive in the toiling proletariat. . . . The mass of wage workers despise the thief."[xc] Violence against property, others claimed, injures society and the perpetrator, not merely the capitalist. Evil means will pollute good ends; unless care was exercised, the "torture wheels of socialism" would replace those of capitalism. Class rule might be won or maintained by violence, but its abolition required the raising of consciousness and the cultivation of humanity's finer qualities.[xci]
Hillquit's appeal to democracy, like his appeal to ethical principles, found supporters. John Spargo said, "Socialism and democracy are ultimately one." (This, however, implied either that the United States was not a democracy, or that it was socialist.) Opponents of Haywood and the IWW claimed that the United States was a genuine democracy affording genuine and fair chances for fundamental change. Proponents of this argument often asserted that legal and peaceful methods should be followed as long as they offered any chance of success; Kautsky mandated legality until the illegal practices of the capitalists made it "impossible for us to gain influence over the masses in a legal way." Violence and lawbreaking were justified only to secure the legal right to organize or to enforce a victory at the polls. Violence and crime, asserted another backer of Hillquit, "cannot be defended by argument. They are the absense of argument." Socialists should confine themselves to educating and winning the workers. As long as the SP lacked a majority, nothing could or should be achieved; as soon as it gained such a majority, everything else would naturally follow, for "when the majority of the working class unite to abolish the present order it will have to go."[xcii] At times, these Socialists spoke as if socialism could be preached into existence.
Closely related to the arguments from ethics and democracy was that based on the alleged benefits of contemporary civilization. Hillquit and his supporters were recruited from a segment of society that had much to lose by disruption and revolution. Winfield Gaylord, one of Berger's lieutenants, averred at the SP's convention in 1912 that political action entailed majority rule and "the maintaining of the social order which we have, and under which we live, and under which we must live, for the maintaining of such safeguards for liberty and life, and the pursuit of happiness as we have. . . . I prefer to take those that we have rather than ask for those which may not be granted by the advocates of direct action and sabotage. Those safeguards we know and understand." Another delegate--in a statement surprising at a Socialist convention--almost equated capitalism with civilization. "The working class is entitled to the best that there is in our civilization, and I protest against this attitude upon the part of some members of this party that, because there are not more good things in capitalism and civilization as it exits, therefore, we should repudiate capitalism and civilization and all its work." Other delegates likewise saw much of value in the present system and preferred temporary submission to injustice rather than the risk and uncertainty of revolution, anarchy, or chaos. Hillquit believed that the workers had some stake in extant society, which was protecting workers "from excessive exploitation from their employers"; he even claimed that "it may well be said that we are in the midst, or at any rate the beginning, of the socialist 'transition state.'"[xciii] Such a tolerably just and improving society, Hillquit believed, could well advance a moral claim to obedience. Hillquit saw the incipient welfare state as evidence of working-class power; IWW theorists more accurately perceived it as a new and ingenious form of capitalism control.
In addition to these arguments from principle, the anti-IWW forces marshalled an impressive array of practical arguments. Sabotage, crime, and violence would open the Socialist movement to spies, provocateurs, and out-and-out criminals and would convert the working class into sneak thieves, murderers, and petty criminals. "If the revolutionist becomes a thief, the thief becomes a revolutionist." This would breed demoralization and suspicion instead of solidarity and mutual confidence, and would encourage the antithesis of the qualities needed by the workers who were to inherit and govern modern civilization. The working class will lose whatever temporary gains accrue to it through force, as it has for centuries, unless it is educated and organized. "It requires no organization to commit violence. Crime is the opposite of discipline. Sabotage sneers at education." If a small band could liberate the workers, what need had workers of class organization? Such a band would inhibit working-class self-emancipation, essential to socialism.[xciv]
Crime, this argument continued, alienates public opinion and allows the government to smash the workers' movement; the Haymarket fiasco set it back many years. Capitalists were able commit crime, sabotage, and violence for profit only because they were organized, methodical, and in control of the government and the means of life. Crime is the method not of the workers but of the lumpenproletariat, a parasitic class which seeks to appropriate the property of others rather than create a classless society. The lumpenproletarians--who Berger and other right-wing socialists identified with the Wobblies--would fight for the capitalists as soon as they had full bellies.[xcv]
Hillquit and his supporters castigated the IWW and boosted the SP. No union could achieve socialism, they claimed, because all unions fought selfishly for a part of the working class rather than the entire class; the SP was the only strictly class organization. Furthermore, one of the ultimate goals of socialism, the capture of the public powers, could be achieved by a party but not by a union. The IWW's crime of dual unionism divided the working class. The SP wooed the AFL workers allegedly abused by the IWW because without the organized working class socialism was impossible. Hillquit also castigated Haywood's disparagement of intellectuals, professionals, and other members of the middle class who joined the labor movement. Hillquit thought it natural that some professionals would desert the bourgeoisie and "place themselves at the head of the new movement. . . . The leaders of the socialist movement in all countries recruit themselves largely from . . . bourgeois ideologists" convinced of socialism's desirability or inevitability. This, of course, was a standard IWW complaint. By what right, Wobblies asked, did bourgeois intellectuals, few of whom had any direct experience or understanding of working-class life, "place themselves at the head" of the labor movement? Hillquit also appealed endlessly to the Socialist International position and to orthodoxy and tradition (even while freely contradicting them at his pleasure.)[xcvi]
The Counterculture Responds
Supporters of Haywood within and outside the SP answered these arguments in the socialist and IWW press. The argument based on morality evoked outrage, incredulity, and the multifaceted response that characterized IWW moral conceptions. Morality was sometimes conceived as just another means to subjugate the working class, an efficient instrument of class rule that allowed the exploiters to minimize brute violence; in other formulations it was a genuine reality that capitalists ignored; finally, it was an evolving process that workers were reformulating for their own and hence the universal welfare. Robert Rives La Monte, one of the IWW's most acute champions within the SP, replied that the moral sentiment that Kautsky appealed to was the idea that a person is entitled to the product of his labor. "What a monstrous perversion it is to make this sentiment, which is the very foundation of our Socialist demand that the worker shall have the full product of his toil, the source and justification of respect for the rights of property" extorted from the workers by fraud and violence. The entire capitalist system was nothing but the organized and continual robbery and murder of the workers, La Monte said; any action against the capitalists was necessary self-defense, for which the capitalists were themselves fully responsible. Stealing back part of the spoils from a thief is not robbery, nor is killing an assailant murder; those who obey traditional moral scruples in dealings with those who continually flout them are doomed to destruction.[xcvii]
The purpose of the socialist movement, this argument continued, was the abolition of government and of the entire present order of society; if this was moral, individual crime or violence undertaken with this aim could not be wrong in principle, however impolitic or unwise it might be. "Mass violence is nothing but crime and violence multiplied, and thus made effective." If individual crime and violence are wrong, then so are revolution and expropriation, which indeed are always wrong and illegal from the standpoint of the dispossessed class. Capitalist seizure of church and feudal lands was criminal according to the rules of feudal society; in the same way all actions that tamper with profits are criminal by bourgeois, but not by proletarian, morality. Real socialists stand within the exploiters' morality and law as long as long as such conduct is effective or as long as they have no other option, and not a minute longer. Would Hillquit, his opponents asked, fail to inaugurate socialism if he could do so only at the cost of disreputable conduct?[xcviii]
The real immorality, IWW writers asserted, consisted of obedience to capitalist law and ethical codes, at the inevitable cost of injury and death for the workers. Capitalist adulteration of food, practiced routinely for profit, killed far more workers than did proletarian sabotage undertaken to protect human life; the workers who tamely and routinely commit this sabotage for pay as part of their jobs were the real criminals. "Their blood is on their own heads. Obsessed by an automatic subservience to things as they are, obsessed by capitalist class consciousness, they are like the fabled swine who drove blindly over the cliffs to destruction." Similarly, capitalist disregard of safety laws results in the mass murder of the workers, as well as destruction of capitalist property that far exceeds that exacted by worker retaliation; workers who refuse to engage in sabotage when this is the only effectual resistance in effect collaborate in their own extinction.[xcix]
Hillquit, according to his opponents, fundamentally misconstrued the task of the socialist movement and placed himself athwart its most vital task: the education of the workers about the class nature of contemporary morals and law, and the forging of a new morality conducive to the welfare of the working class and therefore of all humanity. Self-liberation from bourgeois morality was the main task confronting the proletariat. Property could not be destroyed in fact until it was destroyed as idea; but the moment workers ceased to revere and bow down before capitalist property, that property would cease to exist. Workers, like the capitalists, would rule as much by the force of ideas as by any other mechanism; contempt for the rights of property was a vital element in the class war. Morals were not eternal or absolute; they evolved along with machinery and in conjunction with class relations. As The Industrial Worker said, "We battle against the existing moral code and in so doing we are creating a working class morality.... In fighting we develop new ideas and ideals."[c]
Hillquit, the self-appointed guaradian of socialist orthodoxy, should have known that his appeal to morality to buttress capitalist property relations contravened socialist doctrine. That many of his supporters repudiated his sentiments is not surprising, because Hillquit himself, in Socialism in Theory and Practice (1909) endorsed economic determinism and its implications for morality and the law. "Moral conduct, as ordinarily interpreted, is conduct tending to conserve the existing order," he said. But the working class is emancipating itself from "the special morality of the ruling classes" and is creating "a new and distinct code of ethics" based on solidarity, cooperation, and class consciousness. "The modern labor movement is maturing its own standards of right and wrong conduct, its own social ideals and morality. Good and bad conduct has largely come to mean to them conduct conducive to the welfare and success of their class in its struggle for emancipation." Society is evolving toward a classless society characterized by an organic morality in which the interests of various individuals, and those of individuals and society, will coincide. "All factors which impede the path to its approximate realization are anti-ethical or immoral; contrariwise, all factors or movements which tend in its direction are ethical."[ci] William Haywood could not have said it better.
Hillquit's argument from democracy also evoked vigorous rebuttals. Gustave Eckstein, in an article translated for the New York Call from Die Neue Zeit, the theoretical journal of the SDP, opposed Haywood even while pointing out that Hillquit's theory contradicted the fundamental doctrine of the class struggle. Socialists did not regard the people as a unit or as isolated individuals, but as organized into contending classes, one of which controls the government. No government in a class society could represent "the people"; no class society could be a democracy. The idea of revolution as a response if the government thwarted the mythical "will of the people" was bourgeois. Other writers ridiculed the idea that meaningful change was possible within the system; the officially approved mechanisms of change were part of the very capitalist law designed to enslave the workers, and they served this purpose admirably. Reforms could be secured within the parameters of capitalist law; revolution could not.[cii]
Many writers went beyond theory and explained just how the United States governmental structure made exactment of the will of the workers difficult or impossible even in relatively minor matters. Victor Berger, Hillquit's staunch ally, was as vehement on this subject as anyone, hurling defiance and contempt at all three branches of the U.S. government in his newspaper, The Social Democratic Herald. The Constitution, a fraud foisted on the people in secrecy and illegality, was "practically an admission that the American people have not free institutions, are not a free people." It could not be amended "except by a bloody war.... revolutions and a sea of blood." Its preamble was a lie. The president had more power than any monarch in the world, possibly excepting the czar of Russia. The Senate was undemocratic and should be abolished. The American judge is "the absolute king of the Fifteenth or Sixteenth centuries," almost invariably a corporation lawyer and "a regular fiend" when deciding questions regarding the rights of the workers. The power to declare laws unconstitutional is a usurped power and the socialists in power will ignore it. "Under present conditions," Berger thundered, "the American people are as absolutely prevented from exercising their political power as the people of Russia or China."[ciii]
Laws emanating from such a government, Berger continued, "are made just by the ruling class and in their interest. They represent might and not right." They protect property and "those whose lives are worth something in a capitalistic sense" but not the lives of the propertyless. Expropration (which Berger on other occasions opposed) "sounds well to us" and will be legal when done by the strongest party. "And we hereby solemnly promise not to undertake any expropriation until we have the power." American capitalists will shoot down workers with an eagerness matched only in Russia. "Political equality, under the present system, is a snare and a delusion. The wage worker who depends upon an employer for the opportunity to work and support his family, is not on terms of political equality with his master." The United States is "a plutocratic republic" rather than a "genuine democracy." "We are a subjugated nation. We have been conquered by the capitalist class" and, without arms, will have to submit to any outrage, including a denial of the franchise. "Lawlessness of the right kind is a lever that has moved the world forward," but in any event the capitalists violate the laws "whenever it serves their purpose."[civ] Conditions in Colorado were as bad as anywhere in the world except Russia or China.
Berger's editorial of 31 July 1909 (quoted above), which predicted a bloody cataclysm and urged workers to arm themselves, was a typical pronouncement which he never disavowed, even at the 1912 Socialist convention. In subsequent editorials Berger stressed that he counselled peace but claimed that a nonviolent solution was impossible unless the working class was armed and thus able to dissuade the capitalists from excessive aggression. (He never explained why the capitalists would consent, or how they could be forced, to arm the workers.) The abolition of wage slavery was a far greater change than gaining religious toleration or the right of the ballot, both of which had been secured by blood. Berger said that street riots and insurrection were a crime against the working class (not against the capitalists), as was an appeal to arms by those lacking weapons. Violence could not itself secure the social revolution but would probably be necessary for it; as in the past, many "revolutions" might be necessary stages toward the final consummation. The ballot is in itself as impotent as violence; all it can do is to "strengthen the power of resistance of the laboring people.... Up to this time men have always solved great questions by blood and iron. And so it will be in the future."[cv]
Two months after the SP's 1912 convention Berger reiterated his belief that the Kaiser would not dare to oppress German workers as much as the American government did American workers. "Patience has ceased to be a virtue. But the American workmen have long ceased to claim any virtues. . . . There is a possibility of a peaceful solution of the social question in Germany. There is none here, although no doubt the orators of the Fourth of July will favor us as usual with glowing accounts of the government under which we live. . . . The big capitalists are constantly showing (the workers) that 'law and order' are humbugs, and that constitutions, courts, etc., are simply snares to oppress the non-resistants."[cvi]
The IWW and its supporters could easily have quoted Berger to their purpose. They had other arguments as well. Henry Slobodin, a left-wing socialist, thought that Hillquit had "a strange conception of human will": how could laws secured by intimidation, bribery, and lies rest on the consent of their victims? (Indeed, obedience to such laws could be construed as the very acquiescence that Hillquit used as an argument for their validity.) As for capitalist obedience to socialist law, the capitalists did not even obey their own law when it served their purposes to violate it; they would obey socialist law only for the same reason that workers obeyed capitalist law, out of fear of superior force. The free exchange of ideas that Hillquit's thesis assumed was ludicrous because it assumed equal access to power, wealth, education, and the means of expression. In fact, the capitalists owned the press, the pulpit, and the educational system, and their control of the resources necessary to life made the free consent of their slaves a mockery.[cvii] Indeed, it could be argued that if the conditions necessary for Hillquit's argument to be valid in fact existed, socialism would be either unnecessary or already achieved.
Still other opponents reminded Hillquit that the labor movement was born in crime and would triumph in it; had the unions not organized when that was illegal and struck when that was against the law, they would not yet exist. The prevalence of anti-labor laws and injunctions still necessitated routine lawbreaking by all unions, including the AFL. Only the implicit threat of mass action restrained the greed and depravity of the capitalists. The threat of illegal action was necessary even to safeguard the ballot. At the first sign that the revolutionary movement might triumph, the capitalists would hurriedly suspend or ignore the constitution and ban even those activities now accorded a precarious legality, as they already do routinely in specific "emergency" situations.[cviii] For all these reasons, inculcation of respect for the law would deliver socialists and unionists bound and gagged to their oppressors.
To Hillquit's charges that sabotage and illegality were undemocratic, Haywood's supporters rejoined that the Socialist party was itself undemocratic. Its exclusive reliance on the ballot effectively excluded a vast and growing mass of disfranchised workers--blacks, immigrants, migrants, women, and children--from the struggle for their own emancipation. The IWW charged that party leaders, union heads, and political representatives desired to supplant the masses, dampen revolutionary fervor, and rule in place of those they purported to serve; in contrast, the IWW's militant minority catalyzed the sluggish majority into action and encouraged them to become part of the revolutionary process. The electoral Socialists, Wobblies charged, also misconstrued the means by which a majority was obtained. Socialists felt that workers would be converted by mere preaching, whereas the IWW aimed, by direct action, to create a whole new context for action and engender entirely new options which the majority could not desire until they recognized their possibility.[cix] (It is worth noting that many mass-production industries were ultimately organized by just such a process; illegal sit-down strikes by a militant minority opened new possibilities which the majority only belatedly embraced. However, success in those strikes required relatively benign governments partly dependent on labor votes.)
Finally, some Socialists reminded Hillquit that democracy included respect for human lives and rights as well as majority rule and that the present society was based on the murder and torture of a substantial portion of its population. Wobblies at times raged at the apathetic majority whose acquiescence in their own exploitation rendered the oppression of all other workers inevitable.[cx] The liberation of all was necessary for the freedom of any, precisely because the enslavement of some facilitated the enslavement of all.
The IWW and its supporters also ridiculed Hillquit's notion that Socialists would "mount the barricades and fight like tigers" if a mob of capitalist lawbreakers overturned a fairly won election. First, workers were dying by the hundreds of thousands even as Hillquit wrote, due to capitalist indifference to the health and safety of their workers; the Triangle fire was only one recent and highly-publicized example. As Haywood said, "We are fighting against such a mob at the present time. . . . The fight is now on." Second, if socialists were justified in fighting to preserve a Socialist victory, why could they not fight to win a victory, of whatever kind? Breaking capitalist law was often necessary to preserve the unions from destruction--not only as important as maintaining an electoral victory, but a prerequisite to attaining one. Revolutionists should decide to fight based on their chances of winning, and by whatever methods would succeed, not according to some abstract formula.[cxi]
Finally, Hillquit's opponents pointed out that mounting the barricades to forestall capitalist theft of an election would be ineffective and suicidal. The capitalists could prevent the Socialists from ever winning an election by changing the law, by securing a court decision legally nullifying an election (as they had done not long ago in Colorado), by legally disfranchising workers (as they were presently doing to hundreds of thousands), or threatening to shut down their plants (as they did in 1896). If the SP somehow did win an election which the capitalists then negated, resistance would lead to a massacre because the workers would be no match for a trained and well-equipped army. Hillquit, said The Industrial Worker, "will have to play the tiger himself. We are not going to spill any more working class blood to seat officials. We have done that too often in the past."[cxii]
Hillquit could look with equanimity upon gradual, peaceful change because he was not himself upon "the torture wheels of capitalism" with the unskilled and migratory workers. His preachments about "democracy," "civilization," and "the transitional state" are obscene when seen in the light of the slow death by torture endured by most unskilled workers, or the quicker death by torture suffered by many Wobbly organizers and free speech fighters. As Solidarity reminded its readers, in a metaphor redolent of the lampshades of Auschwitz, "every yard of cloth produced is saturated in the life-blood of the workers. The coat you wear, the shirt, the pretty lace, all are compounded of human lives--the lives of little children, of women, and of men." This was not only a metaphor; it approached literal truth. The owners of this society were determined to maintain their power by any means. The Wobblies and their supporters in the SP felt that the workers' only salvation lay in recognizing the iniquitous and class nature of capitalist law as well as of capitalist morality and in acting in accordance with their own interests rather than those of their masters. Robert Rives La Monte said that the workers were
"cursed by a superstitious and paralyzing reverence for the law.... Respect for law, respect for the 'sacred rights of private property' are the stone walls against which every Socialist (agitator) in America is continually ramming his long-suffering head. This wall we must batter down, even though Hillquit and Spargo and Feigenbaum, assisted by the convenient cowardice of party editors, are doing their utmost to buttress it up. It will be so much the worse for them if their heads are pushing against the other side of the wall when we topple it over."[cxiii]
Go to Part 2
Notes:
[i] I am indebted to Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment, New York, 1978, for the idea of perceiving a counterculture in what may appear only a political and economic movement. Richard Oestreicher, Solidarity and Fragmentation, brilliantly applies this concept to the Knights of Labor. Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist and Gary Gerstle, Working Class Americanism are two splendid treatments of the uses of conservative rhetoric and cultural symbols for radical ends. European labor historians have created a vast literature on this subject. For some examples, see Vernon Lidtke, Alternative Culture and William Sewell, Jr., Work and Revolution in France. ADD TO THIS NOTE
[ii] From the time of the split until the present, authors sympathetic to the IWW and the SP have lamented the failure of the two groups to gorge a united political and economic movement. Ira Kipnis, The American Socialist Movement, 1897-1912 (New York, 1972) and Nick Salvatore, Eugene Debs: Citizen and Socialist (Urbana, Illinois, 1982) strongly imply that it was avoidable. Robert Rives La Monte was one contemporary who argued that they entire controversy was a misunderstanding based on mere words ("Tools and Tactics," (ISR, March 1912, and "The New Socialism," ISR, September 1912). Anyone arguing this position must explain how such a misunderstanding could continue for so long as have such (for the participants) momentous consequences.
[iii] Ira Kipnis and Nick Salvatore, cited above; Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All (New York, 1969); Philip Foner, The Industrial Workers of the World (New York, 1965); Glen L. Seretan, Daniel De Leon: The Odyssey of an American Marxist (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1979); Marc Karson, American Labor Unions and Politics, 1900-1918 (Boston, 1965); David Shannon, The Socialist Party of America (Chicago, 1967).
[iv] IWW, Proceedings of the First Convention of the Industrial Workers of the World (New York, 1905), pp. 82-83, 5-6.
[v] PFC, pp. 247, 224, 229.
[vi] PFC, 163, 270-72, 252-63.
[vii] PFC, pp. 146, 156, 148, 227. The discussion of political action recurred throughout the convetion in various contexts; see. pp. 117-175, 220-248, 252-263, 568-594.
[viii] The debates within the IWW contained an implicit answer to this question. A mature, powerful IWW would generate its own political party as an organic growth from the membership. This party would promulgate a practical, revolutionary programe, rather than the necessarily vapid theories of marginal parties not affiliated with the IWW; when political action became concrete and real, Wobblies would unite behind the party of their own creation.
[ix] PFC, p. 153.
[x] PFC, 154-55, 579, 157, 240, 129.
[xi] PFC, pp. 148, 227.
[xii] PFC, 226-27, 231, 148, 150; Daniel De Leon, The Socialist Reconstruction of Society in Socialist Landmarks: Four Addresses by Daniel De Leon (New York), p. 226.
[xiii] De Leon, Socialist Reconstuction, pp. 214, 228, 211-223; De Leon, As to Politics, p. 61; De Leon, speech to the Third Convention, Proceedings of Third Annual Convention, Industrial Workers of the World, Official Report No. 3, p. 5.
[xiv] De Leon speech, PTAC, Official Report No. 3, p. 5; "Haywood Under Direct Examination," IUB, July 27, 1907.
[xv] As to Politics, 58; Socialist Reconstruction, 218-23; PTAC, Official Report No. 3, p.5. [check first two references; paragraph has been altered]
[xvi] As to Politics, passim.
[xvii] De Leon, Industrial Unionism, p. 50; As to Politics, p. 39.
[xviii] As to Politics, pp. 42-46.
[xix] Proceedings of the 1906 IWW Convention, pp. 548-49, 316-18, 420-1, 304-13.
[xx] "Report of the IWW to the International Labor Congress at Stuttgart," IUB, 8-10-07 [this was reprinted as a pamphlet]; "Relations of Trades Unions and the Political Party. Speech by Delegate Helsewood," IUB, 9-14-07. For other information on the IWW activities at the Congress, see "International Socialist and Labor Congress. Partial Report of Delegate Heslewood," IUB, 9-7-07; "Hillquit's Lying Report to the Stuttgart Congress," IUB, 9-7-07; "The Trade Union Resolution Adopted by the Congress," IUB, 9-14-07; "Delegate to Stuttgart Congress Submits his Report to the Convention,: IUB, 9-28-07; and "Report to the Convention by Fred W. Heslewood," IUB, 9-28-07. Heslewood and De Leon were members of the committee on the relations of the Unions and the Party, the issue that most interested them and which was consuming the IWW.
[xxi] Daniel De Leon, "Notes on the Stuttgart Congress," in The Daily People, reprinted in IUB, 11-2-07.
[xxii] PTAC, Official Report No. 3.
[xxiii] PTAC, Official Report No. 3. Foote's account of the strike at the bakery is in PTAC, Official Report No. 4; it related not to the motion to strike the political clause, but to interpret it as referring to the IWW's internal and industrial administration, as recounted below.
[xxiv] PTAC, Official Report No. 3.
[xxv] PTAC, Official Report No.3; PTAC, Official Report No. 5.
[xxvi] "As to Political Parties," a letter by W.F. Loquist, IUB, 4-27-07; Samuel L. Brooks, "As to Revolutionary Unity," IUB 8-17-07.
[xxvii] "Industrial Unionism," IUB, 10-17-07; "The Industrial Structure and the Working Class Task," IUB 3-21-08; John Kortan, "Craft Unionism or Industrial Unionism," IUB, 3-21-08 (a lecture given on February 22 in Detroit); Robert Rives La Monte, "Economic Organization and the Ballot," IUB, 4-27-07; William Trautmann, "The Question of Might," IUB, 12-7-07, reprinted from the Cleveland Arbeiter Zeitung sometime in 1905. Trautmann emphasized that if the workers mistakenly believed that the political state was the main citadel of capitalism, they would suffer extreme demoralization and defeat when, after capturing it, they found themselves little closer to victory than before.
[xxviii] "Industrial Unionism," IUB, 10-12-07; "Address to the Streetcar Workers," IUB, 5-18-07 (also reprinted as a leaflet).
[xxix] James Conolly, "The Future of Labor," IUB, April 18, 1908; Philip Foner, The Industrial Workers of the World, pp. 98-99.
[xxx] PFC, p. 151; PTAC, Official Report No.3.
[xxxi] B.H. Williams, "Industrial Unionism and Politics," IUB, March 14, 1908.
[xxxii] B.H. Williams, "Industrial Unionism and Politics," IUB, March 14, 1908.
[xxxiii] De Leon was allotted a half hour to reply to Williams on March 11; his remarks were printed in the Weekly People, March 21, 1908 as "Political Action." See also the Daily People for March 13, 1908. On the Post Office, "Why Does it Stop?," Weekly People, April 4, 1908. Delegate Schwend on the electric chair, PTAC, Official Report No. 3.
[xxxiv] "Is this Veiled Dynamitism, IUB, April 4, 1908; "A Letter of Resignation," IUB, April 18, 1908; "Has No Political TEsts," IUB, 5-9-08; editorial, IUB, 5-30-08.
[xxxv] "The Industrial Structure and the Working Class Task," IUB, March 21, 1908; IUB, May 9, 1908, blurb near "Flowers or Rice."
[xxxvi] For an account of the split at the second convention in 1906, the problems with the WFM and the AFL, and Debs's doubts, see Foner, Industrial Workers of the World, 60-80; see also Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, 93-119. Dubofsky wryly remarks that with the IWW victory over Sherman in the courts, "capitalist justice thus giving 'revolutionary wage slaves' at least one victory."
[xxxvii] William Trautmann, "The Question of Might," Cleveland Arbeiter Zeitung, unspecified date in 1905, reprinted in IUB, 12-7-07; Foner and Dubofsky, cited above; William Trautmann, Report of the General Secretary-Treasurer to the IWW Second Convention (IWW, 1906), 39-40; unpublished notebook of GEB meetings, IWW collection, Wayne State University, Detroit.
[xxxviii] "Report of the IWW to the International Labor Congress at Stuttgart," IUB, 8-10-07; "Relations of Trades Unions and the Political Party," IUB, 9-14-07; "International Labor and Socialist Congress. Partial Report of Delegate F.W. Heslewood," IUB, 9-7-07. The IWW had not paid dues to the Socialist International, and hence was not entitled to a delegate at the Congress, and had to approach some dues-paying member for recognition. Both the SLP and the SP had paid dues.
[xxxix] "To the Fourth Annual Convention of the Industrial Workers of the World," IUB, October 24, 1908.
[xl] "The Worker Against the Intellectual" and "The Intellectual Against the Worker," IUB, October 10, 1908.
[xli] "The Worker Against the Intellectual" and "The Intellectual Against the Worker," IUB. October 19, 1908.
[xlii] "The Fourth Annual Convention of the IWW," IUB, November 7, 1908; IWW Preamble, 1908.
[xliii] "The Fourth Annual Convention of the IWW," IUB, November 7, 1908.
[xliv] "The Fourth Annual Convention of the IWW," IUB, November 7, 1908; "Convention Notes," IUB, October 10, 1908; "The Fourth Annual Convention of the IWW," IUB, February 20, 1909; IUB, October 24, 1908.
[xlv] "'The Slum Proletariat',", IUB, February 27, 1909.
[xlvi] The best accounts of the "Detroit IWW" are Paul F. Brissendon, The IWW: A Study of American Syndicalism (New York, 1957 REPRINTED FROM) chapter X; Michael Ebner, "The Passaic Strike of 1912 and the Two IWWs," Labor History, Fall 1970. NEW BOOK ON PATTERSON
[xlvii] For an excellent analysis of the effects of repression on the mainstream labor movement in the U.S. see Forbath, Law and the Shaping of American Unions.
[xlviii] untitled, IW, April 22, 1909, p. 2; "Suffragettes and the Suffering Workers," IW, October 8, 1910; William Haywood, "The General Strike," speech by William Haywood at Meeting Held for the Benefit of the Buccafori Defense, at Progress Assembly Rooms, New York, March 16, 1911, (Chicago, n.d., p. 10).
[xlix] William Haywood and Frank Bohn, Industrial Socialism, Chicago, 1911, pp. 50-51' "Queries and Replies," IW, May 8, 1913. These arguments against government ownership recur in many squibs and short articles in IW and Solidarity, and, at greater length, in William English Walling, "Government Ownership," ISR, April 1912; Austin Lewis, "A Positive Platform," ISR, April 1912; and J.H. Frazier, "What We Want," ISR, December 1911.
[l] Almost any issue of IW or Solidarity has relevant stories, and any book on the IWW documents dozens of examples. The best are Dubofsky, We Shall Be All and Foner, Industrial Workers of the World. For Progressive Era disfranchisment, see Why American's Don't Vote. Sally Miller, Kate Richards O'Hare, p. 89, says that such changes in St. Louis defused the SP challenge. "Whereas the Socialists had made a very strong showing in the election prior to the new charter, thereafter they were never serious contenders." This happened in many localities.
[li] "Right and Wrong," IW, May 20, 1909.
[lii] William Haywood, "The General Strike"; William Haywood, "Socialism the Hope of the Working Class," ISR, February 1912; William Haywood and Frank Bohn, "Industrial Socialism"; "The General Strike," IW, June 10, 1909; "The General Strike," IW, August 19, 1909; "The General Strike," IW, February 5, 1910; "Building a New Society," IW, May 1, 1912; "Labor Movement in France," IW, June 4, 1911.
[liii] "Final Aim of the IWW," IW, May 5, 1909.
[liv] "Taking a Step Forward," IW, July 17, 1911.
[lv] "Political Fatalism," Solidarity, December 16, 1911; editorial, IW, September 14, 1911. The arguments against political parties occur in "The 'Policy' of Solidarity, Solidarity, July 23, 1910; "Employment Sharks Must Go," IW, March 25, 1909; "Industrial Unionism," IW, March 25, 1910; "Battle is for Workers," IW, June 1, 1911; "Industrial Idea V the Political," IW, May 7, 1910; "The Workingman, the Law, and Anarchy," Solidarity, April 16, 1910; "From our Friends Deliver Us," IW, June 25, 1910; "Where Is Your Power," IW, April 20, 1911; "Outline of an Argument for Direct Action," Solidarity, May 10, 1911; "Is the IWW Dead?", Solidarity, July 22, 1911.
[lvi] "A Web of Sophistry," Solidarity, October 28, 1911; William Haywood, "Against Old Age Pensions," ISR, November, 1911; "Our Bourbon Socialism," IW, July 30, 1910; "Labor Laws and Others," February 1, 1912.
[lvii] William Z. Foster, "Foster Replies to Robert Rives La Monte," IW, March 23, 1911. See also "About IWW Literature"; William Z. Foster, "Socialist Labor Movement in Germany," Solidarity, September 10, 1911; William Z. Foster, "German Socialist Unions," Solidarity, September 2, 1911.
[lviii] Ben Williams, "Shall We Grow or Shall We Wither? The 'Anti-Political' in the IWW," Solidarity, April 15, 1911. See also Ben Williams, "The 'Policy' of Solidarity, Solidarity, July 23, 1910; "Sugar Coated Capitalism," IW, February 15, 1912.
[lix] "Pleas to the Socialists," Solidarity, April 1, 1911; "Is this Neutrality," IW, February 8, 1912; "Revolutionizing the "Revolutionists,", IW, March 7, 1912; "The Socialist Reactionists," IW, May 5, 1912; and all the articles on the Stuttgart Congress of 1907, in The Industrial Union Bulletin, 8-10-07, 9-7-07, 9-14-07, 9-28-07; Justus Ebert, "Is the IWW Anti-Political"; Vincent St. John, "Political Parties and the IWW."
[lx] "Political Policemen," IW, June 6, 1912.
[lxi] Vincent St. John, The IWW: Its History, Structure, and Methods (Chicago, 1911), p. 17; William Haywood and Frank Bohn, Industrial Socialism, (Chicago, 1911), pp. 56-57.
[lxii] "As to Politics," IW, May 6, 1909; "One Big Union," Solidarity, July 15, 1911; "Might is Right," Solidarity, July 1, 1911; "Debs and Direct Action," IW, February 22, 1912.
[lxiii] IWW Preamble; "Destruction and Construction," IW, May 1, 1913; "Three Fundamentals of Syndicalism," Solidarity, August 3, 1912; "Robert Rives La Monte, "Tools and Tactics," ISR, March 1912; Covington Hall, "Machinery and Morals," IW, February 1, 1912; Covington Hall, "Workingmen Unite," IW, September 30, 1909; "Nothing to Lose," S*, July DATE IS UNCERTAIN, 1911.
[lxiv] "Honesty!," IW, November 2, 1910; "Get Something Now," IW, March 25, 1909; "The Coming Winter," IW, August 12, 1909; "Newest Form of Labor Revolution," IW, May 1, 1912.
[lxv] "Weinstock's Report," IW, June 13, 1912; "Violence," IW, March 21, 1912.
[lxvi] "Industrial Unionism for Harvest Hands," IW, July 1, 1909; "The Coming Winter," IW, August 12, 1909.
[lxvii] Ben Williams, "Two Views of Sabotage," S*, February 25, 1911; "Cockroaches," IW, September 9, 1909; "One Big Union," S*, July 15, 1909; Leon Vasilio, "What Shall Be Our Attitude in the Matter of Strikes," IUB, 4-13-07.
[lxviii] "Weapon that Wins," IW, February 23, 1911; "A Lesson for the American Slave," IW, October 19, 1910; "One Big Union," S*, July 15, 1911; "Power in France," IW, February 11, 1911; "How Sabotage Affects the Scissor-Bills," IW, May 28, 1910; "Are Tactics Revolutionary?," IW, May 16, 1912; "Special News from France," IW, November 12 1910 and February 2, 1911.
[lxix] "Capitalist Sabotage," S*, July 6, 1912; Ben Williams, "Two Views of Sabotage," S* February 25, 1911.
[lxx] S*, December 24, 1910, as cited in Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, p. 161; "As to Violence," S*, June 8, 1912; "Mailed Fist," IW, May 8, 1913.
[lxxi] Vincent St. John, The IWW: Its History, Structure, and Methods, pp. 20-21.
[lxxii] "Massacre of Working People," IW, August 26, 1909. See also "McKees Rocks--An Object Lesson," IW, September 23, 1909; "Go Slow, Mr. Thug," IW, January 8, 1910.
[lxxiii] "Right and Wrong," IW, May 20, 1909; "Industrial Unionism Spells Emancipation," IW, January 8, 1910.
[lxxiv] Victor Berger, "Should Be Prepared to Fight for Liberty at All Hazards," Social Democratic Herald, July 31, 1909. For Berger's career, see Sally Miller, Victor Berger and the Promise of Constructive Socialism, (Westport, Connecticut, 1973).
[lxxv] "Bloodshed the Hope of Politicians," IW, August 19, 1909.
[lxxvi] "Bloodshed, the Hope of the Politicians," IW, August 19, 1909.
[lxxvii] "Are they Guilty," IW, December 14, 1911; "McNamara Makes Startling Confession," IW, December 7, 1911.
[lxxviii] "Desperate Reaction," S*, December 9, 1911; GET EXACT QUOTE AND SOURCE FOR HAYWOOD ON MCNAMARAS.
[lxxix] "Might is Right," S*, July 1, 1911.
[lxxx] "What is There In It," IW, June 24, 1909; FIND SOURCE FOR QUOTE ON MARTRYS, BENEFACTORS OF HUMANITY; NOT IN MY VERSION OF NOTES
[lxxxi] "What is the IWW? A Candid Statement of its Principles, Objects, and Methods." The third edition, from which these quotes are taken, was apparently published in 1923, although the library of the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, dates it as 1922. This pamphlet probably undercut its intended message by claiming that the IWW was itself "a religion" which has achieved "what no other religion could" in the lives of many Wobblies. "It has 'saved' them, given peace to their minds and hope for the future." This would predictably alienate adherents to older and more established religions, as well as those Wobblies who felt that their beliefs were scientific, not taken on faith.
[lxxxii] Katharine Hill, "A Socialist Woman's View," S*, 5-17-13.
[lxxxiii] Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, "The Truth About the Patterson Strike," in Joyce L. Kornbluh, Rebel Voices, (Ann Arbor, 1968), pp. 223-225.
[lxxxiv] "The Importance of the Industrial Union Movement," IUB, 5-9-08.
[lxxxv] William Haywood and Frank Bohn, Industrial Socialism (Chicago, 1911) pp. 54, 59. I have compressed Haywood's three paragraphs into one.
[lxxxvi] "A War of Words," IW, July 20, 1911; "News and Views," S*, December 9, 1911; S*, December 2, 1911; Frank Bohn, "Is the IWW to Grow?", ISR, July 1911.
[lxxxvii] Morris Hillquit, "Socialism and the Law," The New York Call, November 20, 1911. For Hillquit's career, see Norma Fain Pratt, Morris Hillquit: A Political History of an American Jewish Socialist (Westport, Connecticut).
[lxxxviii] Hillquit, "Socialism and the Law," NYC, November 20, 1911.
[lxxxix] Morris Hillquit, "Again Socialism and the Law," NYC, December 9, 1911.
[xc] Karl Kautsky, "Kautsky Defines Position on Question of 'Legality,'" NYC, December 30, 1911.
[xci] Caroline Pratt, "A Word to Both Sides," NYC, December 7, 1911; Boston, "Concerning Force," NYC, December 7, 1911; William Morris, "In the Matter of Violence," NYC, December 11, 1911; Joseph Cohen, "Socialism and Violence," NYC, December 18, 1911; Dorat Layne, "Reform, Revolution, and Respectability," NYC, June 26, 1912; Joseph Cohen, "The Dynamiters," NYC, January 9, 1913.
[xcii] John Spargo, "John Spargo States his Views," NYC, November 30, 1911; Karl Kautsky, "Kautsky Defines Position on Question of 'Legality,'" NYC, December 30, 1911; Joseph Cohen, "Unholy Trinity," NYC, June 16, 1912; Dorat Layne, "Reform, Revolution, and Respectability," NYC, June 26, 1912; Johnathon Pierce, "Failure of Violence," NYC, December 4, 1911.
[xciii] Socialist Party of America, National Convention of the Socialist Party Held at Indianapolis, Indiana, May 12 to 18, 1912, Chicago, 1912, pp. 123, 128, 122-136; Morris Hillquit, Socialism in Theory and Practice, (New York, 1912) pp. 98, 104.
[xciv] Gustave Eckstein, "Democratic and Syndicalism Illusions," NYC, March 3, 1912; Joseph Cohen, "Unholy Trinity," NYC, June 16, 1912.
[xcv] John McMahon, "As to Direct Action," NYC, February 12, 1912; Morris Hillquit, "Karl Marx... Against Louis Boudin," NYC, December 27, 1911; Karl Kautsky, "Kautsky Defines Position on 'Legality'," NYC, December 30, 1911.
[xcvi] Morris Hillquit, Socialism in Theory and Practice, pp. 161, 169.
[xcvii] Robert Rives La Monte, "Socialist Respect for Capitalist Law," ISR, February 1912; "Breaking the Law," NYC, January 30, 1912; Joshua Wanhope, "Might Makes Right," NYC, January 29, 1913.
[xcviii] Richard Perin, "Article II, Section 6," NYC, June 6, 1912.
[xcix] Frank Pease, "Foodstuffs and Sabotage," NYC, January 25, 1913; "Capitalist Sabotage," S*, July 6, 1912; "Mr. Block" and "Business" (cartoons), IW, December 12, 1912.
[c] "Destruction and Construction," IW, May 1, 1913; Jesse Fales, "Working Class Morality," ISR, May 1912; "Debs and Direct Action," IW, February 22, 1912; "Where Does the IWW Stand?", IW, January 16, 1913.
[ci] Morris Hillquit, Socialism in Theory and Practice, pp. 55-56, 62-63, 58-59.
[cii] Gustave Eckstein, "Democratic and Syndicalism Illusions," NYC, March 3, 1912; Moses Oppenheimer, "Spitting Upon the Law," NYC, December 27, 1911; S*, Bromberg, "Socialism and the Law," NYC, December 10, 1911; Robert Rives La Monte, "Shall We Be Law Abiding?", NYC, December 7, 1911; Boudin, "Law and Order in the United States," NYC, December 26, 1911.
[ciii] Victor Berger, Broadsides (a collection of his columns), Milwaukee, 1912, pp. 68, 65, 63, 43-54, 64, 64-5, 201, 68.
[civ] Berger, Broadsides, pp. 71, 117, 71-72, 141, 87, 171, 143, 144-5, 215, 78-79.
[cv] National Convention of the Socialist Party..., p. 133; Victor Berger. "An Armed People is Always a Free People," SDH, August 14, 1909; Victor Berger, "Do We Want Progress by Catasthrope and Bloodshed or by Common Sense?", SDH, September 25, 1909; Victor Berger, "Sectarian Babble Means Impotence--Our Way Means Success," SDH, October 30, 1909.
[cvi] Victor Berger, "Let Us Face the Question of Freedom," SDH, July 6, 1912.
[cvii] Henry Slobodin, "Concerning Violence," NYC, November 30, 1911; Louis Boudin, "Law and Order," NYC, December 7, 1911; Boudin, "Law and Order in the United States," NYC, December 26, 1911.
[cviii] Henry Slobodin, "Concerning Violence," NYC, November 30, 1911; S*, Brombery, "Socialism and Law," NYC, December 10, 1911; Richard Perin, "Article II, Section 6," NYC, June 11, 1912; "A Socialist Editor's Lament," S*, March 30, 1912; Dry Point, "Once More, Section 6," NYC, July 1, 1912; Courtney Lemon, "Haywood, the McNamaras, Violence, and a Few Other Things," NYC, December 31, 1911.
[cix] Phillips Russell, "What is the Socialist Message," NYC, December 12, 1912; Loius Levine, "The Labor Movement in France," IW, July 4 and July 11, 1912; "Propaganda of the Deed," IW, March 21, 1912.
[cx] For a hostile comment on this, see Aileen Kraditor, The Radical Persuasion (Baton Rouge, 1981), pp. 129-131.
[cxi] William Haywood, "Socialism and the Law," NYC, November 29, 1911; Henry Slobodin, "Concerning Violence," NYC, November 30, 1911; Robert Rives La Monte, "Shall We Be Law Abiding?", NYC, December 7, 1911.
[cxii] "A Different Paris Commune," IW, March 14, 1912; Phillips Russell, "How Shall We Fight," NYC, December 21, 1911; Robert Rives La Monte, "Shall We Be Law Abiding?", NYC, December 7, 1911; "Better than Baarricades," ISR, January 1912.
[cxiii] "They Shall Not Die," S*, May 18, 1912; Robert Rives La Monte, "Socialist Respect for Capitalist Law," ISR, February 1912.