Wobbly times number 197

Writings of Daniel Deleon: A Collection of Essays by One of the Founders of American Revolutionary Socialism by Daniel de Leon
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The best introduction to socialism you can get. DeLeon deals with reformist tactics, revolutionary unionism, the abolition of wage labour, the change necessary in the mode of production and the establishment of common ownership of the collective product of labour...aka socialism. From here, go to "Value, Price and Profit" and then to "CAPITAL" v.1-v.4 THEORIES OF SURPLUS VALUE.

The reader can safely disregard DeLeon's bitter rejection of the post-1908 IWW. In this reader's opinion the Preamble to the Constitution of the IWW actually improved after 1908 and was in no way an endorsement of anti-political sects.

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Wobbly times number 154

Began/Begone/Begin 

I joined the party

became a comrade

put my passion in

Facing hostile public words
"Go back to Russia!"

with leaflets

explaining our very rational
position

Gave my trust

my name 

and all my ambition

Spoke my mind

once too often

Stepped on toes

in honest confusion
contradiction
confrontation

And then
my comrades turned

on me and those I loved

Made me look the simpleton

I left and licked my wounds

Then later
joined a union

Once again
did I begin 

so full of passion

honestly relating

once too often

and got myself in trouble
with the keepers of the cage's keys

Got brought up on

some trumped up charges
racial slurs

and sexism
all by petty power mongers
in search of self-esteem

And then I quit their games
refused their rule
"Begone?" said I
"Of that
you can depend"
And now
I'm back where I began
I think
I'll just begin

Wobbly times number 126

For the record, I don't think the IWW was/ is an anarchist organisation.  Of course, there are plenty of anarchists, anarcho syndicalists in the IWW, along with communists, democrats and workers with various ideological preferences. How could it be otherwise in a union dedicated to classwide organisation? Workers are different, come from different backgrounds, different personal histories and from different cultures.  Workers are individuals and by definition, individuals are diffferent. There was never a time when Wobblies have been barred from voting in elections on pain of losing membership in the One Big Union; just as there has never been a time when the IWW barred members from believing in god(s). DeLeon was dishonest when he portrayed the IWW as being anarchist, all because the union didn't ENDORSE voting and instead leaving it a private matter for the member.  He took out his personal anger on the union, after being denied his delegate's credentials at the 1908 Convention of the IWW, denouncing the One Big Union as having been captured by people who would subject its members to being tartgeted by State sponsored, agent provocateurs because 'the political clause' had been dropped from the IWW Preamble by the attending delegates. While the fear of police agent infiltration is genuine in any revolutionary organisation, merely endorsing peaceful revolution via the Amendment Clause to the US Constititution is no guarantee of freedom from police spies and provacateurs in your organisation.  But more than this, the IWW doesn't endorse a lot of proscriptive ideological doctrines. For example, the IWW also doesn't endorse Socialist Realism as the only form of acceptable working class art, although some on the left would consider that a terrible misjudgement.  The truth is that the IWW doesn't endorse a lot of the left's pet reformist projects. What workers need to know is that the IWW is organised around its Preamble. What Wobblies want and struggle for is written there, out in the open for all to see.  Wobblies are individual workers (sorry, no member of the employing class allowed membership) who endorse the Preamble, no matter whether they believe in divine powers after death; the Pope's inherent infallibility or surrealism as the only revolutionary art form etc. You will find no mention or endorsement of violence, 'bombism' or 'anarcho-syndicalism' in the IWW's Preamble. On the other hand, you will find a resolution in its Constitution which was written in 1908 stating that the IWW "...refuses all alliances, direct or indirect, with existing political parties or anti-political sects." That said, DeLeon was on target in his definition of socialism and his conception of how a revolutionary political party should dissolve itself and the political State on the day of its victory at the polls, as the workers themselves, organised in democratic, socialist industrial unions take, hold and operate the means of production for themselves.

Industrial Unionism
by Daniel De Leon
from The Daily People, Jan. 20, 1913 

In these days, when the term "Industrial Unionism" is being played with fast and loose;

-- when, in some quarters, partly out of conviction, partly for revenue, "striking at the ballot box with an axe," theft, even murder, "sabotage," in short, is preached in its name;

-- when, at the National Councils of the A. F. of L., lip-service is rendered to it as a cloak under which to justify its practical denial by the advocacy and justification of scabbery, as was done at Rochester, this very year, by the Socialist Party man and International Typographical delegate Max Hayes;

-- when notoriety seekers strut in and thereby bedraggle its fair feathers;

-- when the bourgeois press, partly succumbing to the yellow streak that not a member thereof is wholly free from, partly in the interest of that confusion in which capitalist intellectuality sees the ultimate sheet-anchor of class rule, promotes, with lurid reports, "essays" and editorials, a popular misconception of the term;

-- at this season it is timely that the Socialist Labor Party, the organization which, more than any other, contributed in raising and finally planting, in 1905, the principle and structure of Industrialism, reassert what Industrial Unionism is, restate the problem and its import.

Capitalism is the last expression of class rule. The economic foundation of class rule is the private ownership of the necessaries for production. The social structure, or garb, of class rule is the political State -- that social structure in which government is an organ separate and apart from production, with no vital function other than the maintenance of the supremacy of the ruling class.

The overthrow of class rule means the overthrow of the political State, and its substitution with the Industrial Social Order, under which the necessaries for production are collectively owned and operated by and for the people.

Goals determine methods. The goal of social evolution being the final overthrow of class rule, its methods must fit the goal.

As in nature, where optical illusions abound, and stand in the way of progress until cleared, so in society.

The fact of economic despotism by the ruling class raises, with some, the illusion that the economic organization and activity of the despotized working class is all-sufficient to remove the ills complained of.

The fact of political despotism by the ruling class raises, with others, the illusion that the political organization and activity of the despotized working class is all-sufficient to bring about redress.

The one-legged conclusion regarding economic organization and activity fatedly abuts, in the end, in pure and simple bombism, as exemplified in the A. F. of L., despite its Civic Federation and Militia of Christ affiliations, as well as by the anarcho-syndicalist so-called Chicago I.W.W., -- the Bakouninism, in short, against which the genius of Marx struggled and warned.

The one-legged conclusion regarding political organization and activity as fatedly abuts, in the end, in pure and simple ballotism, as already numerously and lamentably exemplified in the Socialist Party, -- likewise struggled and warned against by Marx as "parliamentary idiocy."

Industrial Unionism, free from optical illusions, is clear upon the goal the substitution of the political State with the Industrial Government. Clearness of vision renders Industrial Unionism immune both to the Anarch self-deceit of the "No government!" slogan, together with all the mischief that flows therefrom, and to the politician's "parliamentary idiocy" of looking to legislation for the overthrow of class rule.

The Industrial Union grasps the principle: "No government, no organization; no organization, no co-operative labor; no co-operative labor, no abundance for all without arduous toil, hence, no freedom." -- Hence, the Industrial Union aims at a democratically centralized government, accompanied by the democratically requisite "local self-rule."

The Industrial Union grasps the principle of the political State -- central and local authorities disconnected from productive activity; and it grasps the requirement of the government of freedom -- the central and local administrative authorities of the productive capabilities of the people.

The Industrial Union hearkens to the command of social evolution to cast the nation, and, with the nation, its government, in a mold different from the mold in which class rule casts nations and existing governments. While class rule casts the nation, and, with the nation, its government, in the mold of territory, Industrial Unionism casts the nation in the mold of useful occupations, and transforms the nation's government into the representations from these. Accordingly, Industrial Unionism organizes the useful occupations of the land into constituencies of future society.

In performing this all-embracing function, Industrial Unionism, the legitimate offspring of civilization, comes equipped with all the experience of the age.

Without indulging in the delusion that its progress will be a "dress parade"; and, knowing that its program carries in its fold that acute stage of all evolutionary processes known as revolution, the Industrial Union connects with the achievements of the revolutionary fathers of the country, the first to frame a constitution that denies the perpetuity of their own social system, and that, by its amendment clause, legalizes revolution. Connecting with that great achievement of the American revolution, fully aware that the revolution, which it is big with, being one that concerns the masses and that needs the masses for its execution, excludes the bare idea of conspiracy, and imperatively commands an open and above board agitational, educational and organizing activity; finally, its path lighted by the beacon tenet of Marx that none but the bona fide Union can set on foot the true political party of labor; Industrial Unionism bends its efforts to unite the working class upon the political as well as the industrial field, -- on the industrial field because, without the integrally organized union of the working class, the revolutionary act is impossible; on the political field, because on none other can be proclaimed the revolutionary purpose, without consciousness of which the Union is a rope of sand.

Industrial Unionism is the Socialist Republic in the making; and the goal once reached, the Industrial Union is the Socialist Republic in operation.

Accordingly, the Industrial Union is at once the battering ram with which to pound down the fortress of Capitalism, and the successor of the capitalist social structure itself.

Wobbly times number 103

A film about my union:

THE WOBBLIES!

C. Wright Mills: "You've asked me, 'What might you be?' Now I answer you: 'I am a Wobbly.' I mean this spiritually and politically. In saying this I refer less to political orientation that to political ethos, and I take Wobbly to mean one thing: the opposite of bureaucrat. […] I am a Wobbly, personally, down deep, and for good. I am outside the whale, and I got that way through social isolation and self-help. But do you know what a Wobbly is? It's a kind of spiritual condition. Don't be afraid of the word, Tovarich. A Wobbly is not only a man who takes orders from himself. He's also a man who's often in the situation where there are no regulations to fall back upon that he hasn't made up himself. He doesn't like bosses –capitalistic or communistic – they are all the same to him. He wants to be, and he wants everyone else to be, his own boss at all times under all conditions and for any purposes they may want to follow up. This kind of spiritual condition, and only this, is Wobbly freedom."



 And today, the IWW is still going strong. Joe Hill lives in the spirit of Fellow Wobbly, Tom Morello.  Sing it brother!




 

Wobbly Times number 65

What is a Wage-Slave?

A wage-slave a person who has to sell their skills and time for a price to an employer in order to make a living. One has to be educated in order to have skills. Are you a wage-slave?

Employers make their living by selling the goods and services which are made by the wage-slaves whom they employ. Members of the landlord class make their living from renting and selling real property which they own.

To sum up: the employing class makes its living from selling the property which its wage-slaves produce. The landlord class makes its living from renting and selling the real property which it owns. The working class makes its living from selling its skills and time to the employing class for a wage. Only the working class owns a property which can add wealth to what wealth already exists in class dominated society. The workers are forced to sell their skills and time to the employing class because they don't own any other exchangeable property other than maybe the house they live in, if the bank doesn't own it, or their socks and shoes. The employing class owns the places and machinery needed for the production of wealth. The employing class could be nested in the State apparatus or, more likely in privately owned corporations or small businesses. It is because the working class is obliged to sell their life-time to another class that they are wage-slaves. They are in bondage to their employers during the time they've sold themselves for.

Of course, the working class is also free. After all, the working class are not chattel slaves. The working class is free to go homeless and collect cans for the recycling industry in order to keep body and soul together. But this is just a sub-minumum form of wage-slavery. The working class is free to sleep under hedges as opposed to buying a home from the banks or renting from landlords--using their wages of course. The working class is free to travel to another country where the political State uses its hired, armed bodies of men to enforce capitalist property laws. The working class is free to use its time and skills to grow vegetables. The working class is also free to become members of the capitalist class, if they can get enough capital together by saving their wages or engaging in selling illegal commodities. Risk ideology is big amongst the promoters of capitalism. But, in essence, most of the working class are wage-slaves and will remain so, until they become class conscious enough to organise One Big Union.

Wobbly Times number 53

Why I Became a Wobbly
By Mike Ballard Industrial Worker
May 2009

It was on the birthday of Karl Marx in 1990 that I became a Wobbly. There was a “call-in-sick on May Day” gathering in my hometown that year, organised by the local IWW GMB. I decided to check it out. There were some Wobs selling copies of the Industrial Worker, and singing songs from the “Little Red Songbook,” using kazoos as musical instruments. I took a copy of the IW home, and I noticed that it was about workers, not just “anarchists” as I had been told. Sure, there were anarchists in the IWW, but the One Big Union was not an anti-political sect. I noticed the Preamble still made mention of the abolition of the wage system and of the need for the workers themselves to organise as a class to abolish this vile system of exploitation. It was then that I decided to get organised into the One Big Union.

As a university student, I had been part of the anti-war movement in the 1960s and 1970s. I hung out with various student radicals and began reading what many on the left were saying. I knew that I wanted a more democratic society. I had experienced military dictatorship a few years before, in the Marines. I was never exposed to much other than Republican and Democratic Party thinking before my entry into the military, just after high school graduation. My parents, relatives and friends had next to no political beliefs outside the dominant ideologies of hard work, disdain for lazy workers, anti-socialism, belief in a Protestant or Catholic version of God and so on. Everybody I knew liked Ike and Kennedy.

In other words, I wasn't brought up as a “red diaper baby,” but as more time passed and the more the simplistic aphorisms of my youth fell by the wayside in the wake of disturbing realities— such as legalized segregation below the Mason-Dixon Line, the horrors of the Vietnam War, and mass poverty in the land of plenty—the more I was drawn toward looking for ways to understand why things were happening the way they were. None of my friends and family actually wanted to do any harm. "Could it be the system?" I wondered. I began to reject “old time religion” shortly after my first day at boot camp in Parris Island. I could no longer believe that God worked in mysterious ways that we could not comprehend and that we needed to be docile until death.

After my discharge, I started looking for answers. I began to find some of them in the "Catch 23" leaflets being passed out on the Michigan State University campus by members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). There were many anti-war demonstrations and rallies to attend, and I became convinced that just ending the war wasn't enough. We needed something more to become free from this sort of scourge. Then, there was a free university class taught by an old Socialist Labor Party member on Marx's "Value, Price and Profit," which blew away most of my cobwebs about “economics.” A very bright light went on in my head after that and I started making connections to all sorts of troubling issues. Even the Situationist texts which I read with some confusion in the past began to glow with a life of their own after that class. Old revolutionaries like Korsch, Lukacs and my future Fellow Workers in the IWW began to make real sense. It became clear that what was needed was a social revolution, a revolution accomplished by the workers themselves to get rid of the wage system and all its unspeakable spin-offs: sexism, racism, environmental destruction, and the suffering of the producers of the world's wealth.

It was in 1990 at my first IWW Convention that I met Judi Bari, Utah Phillips, and other class conscious workers striving to change the world and make it into a more humane place, a place where we could start living in harmony with the Earth. And all of this was to be done in a democratic way. My Fellow Workers did not project themselves as the “vanguard of the proletariat,” nor as politicos hooked on the idea of “party building” or worshipping leaders, nor were they determined to sloganeer the masses into helping them seize state power. In fact, my Fellow Workers actually disagreed with each other about political matters and still stayed together in One Big democratic Union. I liked that, and I am still a proud member.

Wobbly Times number 48

Preamble to the IWW Constitution


The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.

Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.

We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers.

These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.

Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wage system."

It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.

Wobbly Times number 44

HOW TO MAKE A SOCIAL REVOLUTION


1. Take out a Red Card. Joining the One Big Union is the first step.

a. study the IWW Constitution and consciously digest the IWW Preamble.

2. Once you've taken out your IWW union card, pay your dues.

a. One Big Union cannot function without your active solidarity and that begins with supporting the OBU with your dues. If you don't pay your dues, you've failed to make even a minimal contribution to your own liberation.
b. If everyone who had ever taken out a Red Card had continued to pay their dues, we'd have the Four Hour day by now. War, sexism, racism and wage-slavery would have come to their well deserved end.


3. Once you've paid your dues; agitate, educate and organise your fellow workers to the point where they see the necessity of getting together to support their One Big classwide Union.

a. Paying your dues is the minimum effort you can contribute toward making a social revolution. Only the workers can make a social revolution happen and 'workers' mean you.


4. Learn Wobbly songs and make them up yourself with your fellow workers and sing them at the picketlines and demonstrations you go to.



If all workers who take out Red Cards do these things and continue to do them, the social revolution can happen in our lifetimes. If workers just take out a Red Card and do none of these things,even the MINIMUM thing of paying their dues, they will be able to say, "Look, I have a Red Card." That's all that will happen. That worker will have purchased another cultural icon which can be safely stored with the other junk in the garage.

REMEMBER!


The job is the only place where you can win your demands.
Organization does not just happen; it is made to happen. Do your part.
The person next to you should be in the union. Have you tried?
The IWW is practical. Let people know about it.
Union literature in your pocket is lying idle. Take it out and put it to work.
If every Wobbly gets a new Wobbly every month, we would have a 4 hour day in a year.
If meetings aren't being held in your locality, you can arrange them.
The activity of the rank and file, and not the "leaders," will advance the cause of labor.
Don't send for a delegate when you can do it yourself.
One who fears is enslaved. To understand the IWW is to know that industrial unionism
will guarantee your protection.
Even on a job that can't be unionized for now there is always something that can be improved,
and collective action can lay the ground work for later organizing.
The strength of workers lies in solidarity.

Wobbly Times number 26

What I'd like to get across is that the revolutionary subjectivity/class consciousness which the Wobblies have exhibited over the years is what is needed to get the movement to progress towards more freedom, including chipping bits of surplus value and time off from the bosses' control--aka reform. The submissive position of many on the left vis a vis their own leaders runs counter to the class struggle for freedom and a classless society. One has only so much TIME in one's life to put energy into the movement. If one spends all one's time subsuming oneself to liberal reform agendas, one never sets the agenda. Thus, the 'class in itself' remains alienated from the 'class for itself' i.e. we remained ruled by Capital.

*******************************************************

"The functions fulfilled by the capitalist are
no more than the functions of capital - viz.
the valorization of value by absorbing living labour
- executed consciously and willingly. The capitalist
functions only as personified capital, capital as a
person, just as the worker is no more than labour
personified. That labour is for him just effort
and torment, whereas it belongs to the capitalist as a
substance that creates and increases wealth, and in
fact it is an element of capital, incorporated into
it in the production process as its living, variable
component. Hence the rule of the capitalist over
the worker is the rule of things over man, of dead labour
over the living, of the product over the producer.
For the commodities that become the instruments of
rule over the workers (merely as the instruments of
the rule of capital itself) are mere consequences of
the process of production; they are its products.
Thus at the level of material production, of the
life-process in the realm of the social
- for that is what the process of production is -
we find the same situation that we find in religion
at the ideological level, namely the inversion of
subject into object and vice versa. Viewed historically
this inversion is the indispensable transition without
which wealth as such, i.e. the relentless productive
forces of social labour, which alone can form the
material base of a free human society, could not
possibly be created by force at the expense of the
majority. This antagonistic stage cannot be avoided,
any more than it is possible for man to avoid the
stage in which his spiritual energies are given a
religious definition as powers independent of himself.
What we are confronted by here is the alienation
[Entfremdung] of man from his own labour. To that
extent the worker stands on a higher plane than the
capitalist from the outset, since the latter has his
roots in the process of alienation and finds absolute
satisfaction in it whereas right from the start the
worker is a victim who confronts it as a rebel and
experiences it as a process of enslavement. At the
same time the process of production is a real labour
process and to the extent to which that is the case
and the capitalist has a definite function to perform
within it as supervisor and director, his activity
acquires a specific, many-sided content. But the labour
process itself is no more than the instrument of the
valorization process, just as the use-value of the product
is nothing but a repository of exchange-value.
The self-valorization of capital - the creation of
surplus-value - is therefore the determining, dominating
and overriding purpose of the capitalist; it is the
absolute motive and content of his activity. And in fact
it is no more than the rationalized motive and aim
of the hoarder - a highly impoverished and abstract
content which makes it plain that the capitalist is just as
enslaved by the relationships of capitalism as is
his opposite pole, the worker, albeit in a quite
different manner."

("Results of the Immediate Process of Production" 1863-1866 Marx, Appendix to Capital,vol. I, Penguin ed., pp. 989-90)

Wobbly Times number 9

Unemployment in the USA now (7/3/09) stands at 9.5%. That's over 14.7 million workers.

From "Hallelujah I'm a Bum"

I worked overtime

like a big greedy slob

now the warehouse is full

and I'm out of a job

Hallelujah I'm a bum

Hallelujah bum again

Halleluha give us a hand out

to revive us again

Shorter work time with no cut in pay would solve the problem of unemployment, drive wages up and give workers a better crack at organising unions to protect their living standards from encroachments by their employers. You have to take responsibility, get yourself organised in the IWW and add your voice to the call for, THE FOUR HOUR DAY WITH NO CUT IN PAY.

You have to stand up for yourself or the bosses will ride roughshod over you. If you want to remain a wage-slave, just keep your mouth shut, shake hands with your boss and look wise.

Mike B)