If you're a card-carrying member of the IWW or just Wobbly-adjacent, this message is for you. (If you've never heard of the IWW, it's also for you.)
As recently as 2015 I did regional tours in the US themed around the history and current activities of the Industrial Workers of the World, which involved local IWW branches organizing the gigs. In more recent years, whenever a local Wobbly tries to get their local Wobbly branch involved with organizing something involving me, what tends to happen is the local IWW branch doesn't want to be involved, or they start out being involved and then somewhere along the line decide to pull out, with their members avoiding the gig if it eventually happens.
Oftentimes when this happens -- as it just did with a planned visit to Wisconsin, as it did in another visit to Virginia in 2023, and a couple months ago in Gothenburg, Sweden -- the local branch loses one or more members. So, rather than hosting an event that might help build their branch, raise funds, educate people about IWW history, and rather than having a musician in town to sing at a union rally or at local picket lines that may be happening, instead nothing like that happens, and the branch loses a member.
If this sort of thing is taking place regularly -- and it is, not just with me -- then it's a wonder that there are still any active IWW branches left in the US, since they were mostly very small before adopting the contemporary leftwing circular firing squad mindset.
The way out of this hole, for the IWW and for anyone with a brain, really, in my humble opinion, is to embrace the principles and the practices that the IWW embraced when it was at its peak, when it had millions of members and millions more supporters, when it represented syndicalism in North America.
These days there are many kinds of people who are not welcome in IWW spaces. If you have the wrong views on one subject or another, and you're deemed therefore to make some people feel unsafe, you should then be excluded from all IWW spaces, which is a modern term that applies to everything both online and in meatspace. Indeed, when you enter some IWW-adjacent venues in the US today, the first thing you'll encounter is a big sign with the word "NO" being the most prominent among all the sorts of things that aren't welcome -- racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc.
These days I hear from a lot of disaffected former members of local IWW branches who had wanted to be part of a radical labor union, but found themselves spending most of their time engaged in debates over questions that seemed completely and even absurdly unrelated to organizing the working class.
There's nothing neat and clean about history or current events. There are so many intersecting complexities to the whole picture. But specifically for my Fellow Workers and anyone else who might identify with syndicalism, libertarian socialism, anarchism, democratic socialism, or any number of related orientations around how to organize, and how to organize a society, I want to point out that for much of the past century, these sorts of political perspectives could be said to have occupied a certain "independent left" pole, in a complex and changing landscape with many other poles. Two others of which we could characterize as the Moscow-aligned Communist Party pole, and the fascist (National Socialist) pole.
I mention this historical political dynamic which most especially evokes the political struggle and the struggle on the streets in some places -- and at some times -- more than others, especially in the 1930's, because this period has in one way or another dictated so much of the politics that have come along since then -- but it's been almost a century since then, and most of us have no idea how deeply we are impacted by the political lines that were drawn during that period.
The point I'm trying to make here about different political tendencies may be a bit more complicated still by the fact that by the 1930's and since then, the IWW was no longer a force to be reckoned with. Whether people would like this to be the case or not, the IWW since 1924 or so has played the role much more as a sort of placeholder for a very important historical epoch that we all have so much to learn from -- it has not been a major union since that period. Not since the FBI formed for the purpose of destroying the organization, and launched the nationwide Palmer Raids in the fall of 1919. So the IWW, and syndicalism generally, didn't play the kind of role in the debates and struggles of the 1930's that it had played twenty years earlier, and this was true on both sides of the Atlantic.
The way of thinking represented by groups like the IWW, however, did continue to persist through the ages, and it existed in the 1930's as well. And I bring up the 1930's specifically because this was the period that gave rise to Antifa in Germany, whose influence continues today in a profoundly problematic way.
Before the 1930's, before the Comintern, before Stalin, and before the German Communist Party organized Antifa, with its hyper-sectarian, street-fighting orientation towards both fascists and social democrats, and even before the Russian Revolution of 1917, there was the heyday of the IWW, of the One Big Union as it was known in Canada, and of syndicalism generally, from Denmark to Ukraine to Japan.
What set the Wobblies apart from unions that existed prior to them was a lot of things, including a radical inclusivity. This was the union for the entire working class, regardless of skill set, nationality, immigration status, race, creed, color, gender, etc. The union was famous for using street theater and musical performances to do popular education and to recruit, and build the movement.
The IWW was not a pacifist organization by any means, and the Riot Squads were famous for beating up scabs, including down the road from where I am sitting right now, in Portland, Oregon. But by and large, the IWW preferred to reach out to anyone who might join their ranks, with whatever flaws they came with, which could be ironed out along the way through the same methods the union used to organize the union, through popular education in the forms of street theater, cartoons, collective singing and collective action.
A case in point when it came to both the IWW and the Canadian OBU's orientation towards recruiting the entire working class is the veterans returning from World War 1, when it ended, and the flu pandemic of 1918 began.
Many returning soldiers were recruited into veterans groups that served the interests of business and empire, such as the American Legion, which was so deeply involved with destroying the IWW during the times of the Palmer Raids. But in cases where the IWW was taking the stage locally, such as in Winnipeg and in Seattle, returning veterans were a vital part of the whole operation of the General Strikes in those cities -- which would never have happened if the Wobblies had just written off certain groups as regressive, if they weren't actively trying to recruit the entire working class.
Moving on to the 1930's, though the IWW wasn't really part of the equation, especially in Germany, if it had been, what would the IWW position have been on Antifa's tactics of physically attacking fascists, social democrats, and other political tendencies Stalin and the German Communist Party didn't like?
There were lots of people on the left in Germany who were opposed to these hyper-sectarian, hyper-militant tactics. Lots of people who tried to say we needed to talk to these people rather than attack them, recruit them to a vibrant, exciting, musical social movement with vision, rather than call them counter-revolutionaries and acquaint their heads with the sidewalks.
The IWW, with all its vision and brilliance, was destroyed by the Palmer Raids and the extremely repressive political atmosphere that followed them. But the position represented by Antifa and the German Communist Party also failed, spectacularly, as Hitler came to power in 1933. Which is not to hold Antifa exclusively responsible for Hitler being invited into the government, but to say that when I look at this history what I see are tactics that not only failed, but were usually counter-productive, and broadly helped inspire more support for fascism.
If the IWW were a force in German society in the 1930's, hypothetical as this notion may be, it would not have been part of the Moscow-sponsored Antifa faction of the German left, in my humble opinion. It's conjecture, of course. But I think it would have been part of the independent factions of the German left that were then advocating for communication with and recruitment of the entire working class.
Antifa, and the intolerant tactics advocated by and practiced by Antifa in the 1930's and far too often in various parts of the world in the present day, was one of many bad ideas promoted by the leadership of the Soviet Union throughout that country's existence, which served to cause historic levels of devastation and disaster in the world. One of the most horrific examples of Soviet meddling on the left in other countries is what the USSR and its adherents in Germany did to the German left, through their puppet "mass organization," Antifascist Action, known popularly then and now as Antifa.
Today -- and in various parts of the world, since the 1970's or thereabouts -- the politics of Antifa have been widely revived. No longer led by directives from Moscow, in my lifetime the orientation has become more associated with anarchists than with communists.
For those of us who might identify with terms like "anarchist," but who associate anarchism with syndicalism, and horizontal methods of organizing the entire working class such as those employed by the IWW in the early twentieth century and occasionally since then, the idea that what remains of the anarchist-adjacent community represented by groups such as local IWW branches has largely adopted the sectarian orientation that was once promoted by Stalin in the 1930's seems totally bizarre.
According to my understanding of history, reality, and Wobbly ideas of organizing, we aren't part of that tradition.
You may be a person from wherever who has grown up without questioning the idea that if there are intolerant people in your midst then it is your responsibility to actively exclude and possibly attack them, rather than to try to communicate with them and recruit them, and win their hearts and minds to the cause of the working class. If you are such a person, then know that you are continuing a tradition that was promoted by Stalin, and that has had nothing but disastrous impacts on German, American, and other societies since the 1930's, very much including in recent years, leading up to our present situation with a world increasingly ruled by people like Trump.
If you believe that this whole hyper-sectarian orientation of exclusion, ridicule, and attack has been terribly destructive to society and has helped recruit for the right, and the old IWW orientation of building community, singing together, and recruiting the entire working class into One Big Union is the far better orientation, then you are part of the syndicalist, libertarian socialist, Wobbly tradition.
Now, there are many reasons the many canceled organizers and artists and professors, etc., have been canceled, had their careers destroyed, etc. Once a cancelation campaign gets going, the way social media platforms are organized tends to make it extremely easy for just one person to keep the whole atmosphere of fear and suspicion surrounding your target rolling along. But there is generally some kind of point at which the process got started, for all of the many people to whom this happens.
In my case, to complicate matters, there have been at least three different cancelation campaigns led by different political factions: the Antideutsche group in Germany, the Zionist lobby in England, and the element of the Antifa tradition here in the US that mirrors the Antideutsche, represented by organizations such as Rose City Antifa here in Portland, Oregon, websites like It's Going Down, and modern-day Antifa gurus like Shane Burley.
The offense that seems to be causing all the Wobbly branches anyone tries to recruit to organize a gig for me with to pull out is that I dared to interview an organizer of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on my YouTube channel, during the siege of the Capitol in 2021. As an organizer of another violent rightwing event, I thought Matthew Heimbach might have some important insights into what was happening right then, the siege on the Capitol, which he was not involved with, despite some news stories at the time that falsely indicated he was.
Anyone who knows me at all, or knows my work, music, writing, life history, etc., knows I'm deeply opposed to fascism, or any other form of authoritarianism. All the more reason to talk to fascists! Is this not obvious? I hope, dear reader, it is obvious that if we disagree with people, we need to convince them that there is a better way, and show them what it is -- not attack or exclude them and hope they go away. This orientation is not working, if the rise of the right here and in other countries where similar dynamics are at play is any indication.
Now I want to say something about the impact on the IWW in its current, diminutive form, of having branches so widely impacted by hyper-sectarian, Antifa-style thinking, that want to boycott my shows or pull out of organizing them, where just ten years ago they might have sponsored them and used them to help recruit for their branch.
When I do a search on Grok for a list of people who were most influential in spreading the ideas of and keeping alive the memory of the IWW in the twentieth century, the first three names that come up are Utah Phillips, Noam Chomsky, and Howard Zinn.
This makes sense. When I was in my late teens and I discovered all three of these wonderful people. Which is also when I first learned about the IWW, and this incredible history of a radically inclusive, deeply musical, extremely popular, very militant, and very heavily repressed union/social movement.
In A People's History of the United States, coming to Zinn's chapter on the IWW was an absolute revelation. I was shocked and thrilled in equal measure to know that such a group ever existed. Then hearing the album, "Utah Phillips Sings the Songs and Tells the Stories of the Industrial Workers of the World" was another revelation -- these songs Zinn wrote about actually exist, and can be sung today!
As soon as I heard Utah singing these songs, while cutting vegetables in the kitchen at a vegetarian restaurant in Seattle, I began to learn all of them, and soon, by my early twenties, I was standing on a sidewalk in the University District singing IWW songs, with a cardboard sign about the General Strike of 1919, and I started meeting lots of other like-minded people from there.
Utah traveled all over North America singing these songs, telling these stories, and spreading the ideas and the memory of his union, our union, the IWW -- our methods of organizing, our aims, the deep values of inclusion, recruitment, and the use of culture the union was most known for, and most successful with.
I wanted to continue in Utah's footsteps, with some variation -- more original songs than he did, fewer old Wobbly songs, but following in his footsteps in the sense of recruiting for the movement through popular education, through telling stories and singing songs about organizing, about social movements and what they can accomplish, and specifically about the IWW and all the lessons it has to teach us about these things.
For many years, I did just that, with local IWW chapters, student groups, peace groups, and others organizing gigs all over North America, Europe, and elsewhere. I'm still at it, but not much in the USA anymore, because the economics of small gigs collapsed a long time ago, with the demise of funded leftwing student groups, with the rise of Spotify, and with the housing crisis.
In Germany, when I started getting targeted by Antideutsche there in 2002, I adapted to the new situation by not playing in squats or other anarchist-adjacent venues, because of the tendency for these venues to cave in to Antideutsche pressure for them to cancel the gigs, when the Antideutsche people would tell them I was an antisemite (despite my Jewish lineage), because of my opposition to Zionism and support for the Palestinians.
It pained me greatly to adapt to my new reality like that, and stop playing in the very venues where people I once thought were most aligned with my political perspective could be found. But that's how it was, and that's very much how it still is, in Germany. In an interesting twist of history, I find I'm still very much welcomed by communist and socialist groups that don't identify with Antifa, who communists and socialists in modern times tend now to see as an anarchist-affiliated sectarian tendency.
Now, as a card-carrying member of the IWW who has songs in recent editions of the Little Red Songbook and a new series of history podcasts that tell the story of the IWW's rise and fall and lots of other relevant material I could be presenting to live audiences for Wobbly branches here and there, I will be henceforth telling anyone who wants to organize a gig that they should probably not bother looking to see if the local IWW branch wants to be involved.
I hesitate to say this because I don't want to make the people who dedicate their lives to canceling my career happy, but I think it's important for people to know how badly many IWW branches across the country are currently compromised by Antifa-style sectarian thinking -- and how much this has harmed and will continue to harm any hope for a revival of syndicalism in this world, if this kind of navel-gazing, exclusionist tendency doesn't radically change.
Yours for the One Big Union.
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