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.”