Comments Elsewhere

Jeffrey,

I look forward to the opportunity to read the book.

I would be interested to know to what extent Garret’s book portrays the local Wobblies as being directly involved in the Non-Partisan League’s activities. After all, it was the N.P.L., not the I.W.W. (which was not an electoral party) which won a majority in the legislature and pushed through the taxes, government-operated mills and banks, etc.

The articles that you cite don’t say much about active collaboration between the two on these kind of political measures, and neither does the (admittedly scattered) reading I’ve done on the topic elsewhere. The first article you link to describes an effort by I.W.W. members to rescue some of their comrades from a state jail, and has nothing in particular to do with the NPL, as far as I can see. The second article details some abortive plans for the agricultural department of the I.W.W. (A.I.W.U. 110) to make a private contract with farmers in the N.P.L., to the effect that the farmers in the N.P.L. would only hire A.I.W.U. workers, and the A.I.W.U. workers would only work for N.P.L. farmers. This is of course a perfectly legitimate labor contract between two independent parties, and disingenuously portrayed as “amalgamation” by government lawyers, who were in the process of prosecuting over a hundred Wobs for the political crime of organized opposition to St. Woodrow’s Holy War. In order to sex up their tyrannical prosecution, they had good reason for trying to portray the I.W.W. as more involved in political scheming than it actually was.

The N.P.L. has often been described as “sympathetic” to the I.W.W., compared with other state governments in the West, but that’s mainly used to mean that the N.P.L. was less aggressive than other state governments about punching their heads and locking them in cages for public speeches.

This isn’t to say that there wasn’t actual collaboration between some of the Wobblies in North Dakota and the state socialists in the N.P.L., beyond the issue of private labor contracts. There may have been; I haven’t read enough on the topic to say definitively. But the materials you cite here certainly don’t bolster my confidence that the North Dakota Wobblies are being fairly portrayed.

Jeffrey Tucker: For those who don’t know, the I.W.W. was the American movement of Reds – hardcore communists of the pure Stalin variety.

This contains several different misrepresentations of the Industrial Workers of the World.

The I.W.W., although much reduced in membership, still exists. You can find them on the web at iww.org. I am am a dues-paying member, as are several other libertarians I could name.

The I.W.W. neither were nor are “hardcore communists.” There were communists who became members of the I.W.W., most of whom left for Daniel De Leon’s Socialist Labor Party within a few years, or for the Communist Party of the U.S.A. some years later. But the economic ideas promoted by the union itself are decentralist and syndicalist, and disavow state confiscation of the means of production. (Incidentally, if you check up on von Mises’s exchanges with Polanyi et al. during the socialist calculation debate, you’ll find that he concedes that rational calculation, while not possible under state socialism, is possible under syndicalism.)

The I.W.W. certainly neither were nor are Stalinists. When the I.W.W. was founded in 1905, Koba was still snitching for the Okhrana back in Georgia. In part because of the many anarchists in their ranks, and in part because of the Stalinist CPUSA’s repeated attempts to take control of U.S. labor unions for its own purposes, the I.W.W. largely detested Stalinism and Stalinists. The Industrial Worker ran anti-CPUSA cartoons, including one from the 1940s in which Communist operatives were depicted as a rat studying a union rule-book.

eric lansing: sure sounds like communism to me, don’t ya think?

No, it doesn’t.

Communism is the belief that all forms of private property, at least in the so-called “means of production,” should be abolished in favor of collective ownership, either by the State or by some central organization putatively representing the workers.

Communists might agree with the selections from the Preamble that you quote, but so would many others, including many anarchists. The Preamble does not specify that the means of production should be owned collectively by the whole community, or revolutionary expropriation by a “workers’ state,” or anything of the sort. Not surprisingly; the I.W.W. rejected those approaches in favor of industrial organizing, direct action, the general strike, and “forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.”