May 2014

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Industrial Worker

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__I afrm that I am a wo rker, and that I am not an emp loyer. __I agree to abide by the IWW constitution . __I will study its principles and acquaint myself w ith its purposes.

Name: ________________________________

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The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and w ant are found among millions of working people and the few, who make up the em

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ploying 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 nd that the center ing of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions un

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able 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. Mo reover, the tr ade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belie f that the workin g 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 all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus mak

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ing 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 revolu

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tionary watchword, “Abolition of the wage system.” It is the historic mission of the work

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ing class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for the everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on produc

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tion when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are formi ng the str ucture of t he new society within the shell of the old.

TO JOIN:

Mail this form with a check or money order for initiation and your rst month’s dues to: IWW, Post Ofce Box 180195, Chicago, IL 60618, USA. Initiation is the same as one month’s dues. Our dues are calculated according to your income. If your monthly income is under $2000, dues are $9 a month. If your monthly income is between $2000 and $3500, dues are $18 a month. If your monthly income is over $3500 a month, dues are $27 a month. Dues may vary outside of North America and in Regional Organizing Committees (Australia, British Isles, German Language Area).

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Industrial Worker

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Join the I WW T oday

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he IWW is a union for all workers, a union dedicated to organizing on the job, in our industries and in our communities both to win better conditions today and to build a world without bosses, a world in which production and distribution are organized by workers ourselves to meet the needs of the entire population, not merely a handful of exploiters. We are the Industrial Workers of the World because we organize indus trially – that is to say, we organize all workers on the job into one union, rather than dividing workers by trade, so that we can po ol our strength to ght the bosses together. Since the IWW was founded in 1905, we have recognized the need to build a truly international union movement in order to confront the global power of the bosses and in order to strengthen workers’ ability to stand in solidarity with our fel

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low workers no matter what part of the globe they happen to live on. We are a union open to all worke rs, whether or not the IWW happens to have representation rights in your workplace. We organize the worker, not the job, recog

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nizing that unionism is not about government certication or employer recognition but about workers coming together to add ress our common concerns. Sometimes this means striking or signing a contract. Sometimes it means refusing to work with an unsafe machine or following the bosses’ orders so literally that nothing gets done. Sometimes it means agitating around particular issues or grievances in a specic workplace, or across an industr y. Because the IWW is a democratic, member -run union, decisions about what is

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sues to address and what tactics to pursue are made by the workers directly involved.

IWW Constitution Preamble

Readers’ Soapbox

Reflections On The Brick: A Wobbly Reader Of Marx

By Andrew Stewart

My congratulations and expressions of hearty solidarity with Fellow Worker (FW) Lou Rinaldi regarding his astute review o f Karl Marx’s “Capital” in last month’s issue (“The Best Brick You’ll Ever Read: Why Wobblies Should Read ‘Ca pital,’” April

IW

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page 10). I have been feeling many of the same opinions myself in my own journey, not just through life as a laborer but as spe

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cically one who, restrained by physical impairment, labors in the academic disci

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pline. It is impossible to avoid Marx when slogging through the early part of graduate school and the rather shallow refutation of Marx I sometimes hear from certain radical circles is likewise preposterous. However, in the matter of biography and the now rather infamous confrontation bet wee n Mar x, Fri edr ich Eng els , and Mikhail Bakunin, it is also important to grasp why and how mythology and reality separate in this strange tale of the ongoing confrontation between communism and the Wobbly brand of industrial organiza

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tion, and indeed if Bakunin himself was truly in the same line of philosophy as the modern Wobbly may believe. Of course, many have already dened the historical origins of the Wobblies much more astutely. Theodore Draper’s “The Roots of American Communism,” a history of American unionism from its post-Civil War birth until 1923, notes: “ The I.W.W. accepted violence as a natural and inevi

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table part of the organizing job. It owed much less to the tradition handed down by the old Bakuni nist immigra nt intel

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lectuals than to the gun-toting morality generally prevalent in the Western states. Some European theories happened to t into the I.W.W.’s practice, but the practice would have existed without the theories.” The honest reality is that the outlaw spirit of the West, especially in the era between 1865 and 1895, when the Native Ameri

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cans were most brutally exterminated and nally defeated, truly was the force that spawned the original Wobblies—men and women who were witnesses to some of the most brutal colonialism and capitalist expansion in American history up until that point. But Bakunin’s points, even though they may in fact differentiate fro m the Wobbly vision, do also carry some relevant insights. To begin: in one of his copious foot

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notes in Volum e 1 of “Capital,” Marx writes an aside about why he b elieves the notions of direct barter and of Pierre-Jo

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seph Proudhon in general are “philistine” and utopian. Indeed, despite writing a rebuttal to Proudhon years earlier with Engels, Marx constantly was haunted by hanger-on followers, calling themselves “Marxists,” who were proposing ideas melding Proudhon and other thinkers into a miasma of mystical social organi

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zations. Marx was trying to propose an observational theory, rather, and hated these people so much he once proclaimed, “Thankfully, I am not a Marxist!” Marx was not positioning himself or anyone for any leadership in a dictatorship; he rather in

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sisted that the only seed that would bloom into the real and only effective rival of capital was the proletarian class. “Capital” is a book based essentially on dissection, on observational research, and most im

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portantly, non-interference and objectiv

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ity of the researcher. In Marx’s case, he does not write a book called “Socialism,” showing his notion of scientic socialism is to be made real; instead, he shows how the most brutal, the most scandalous, the most oppressive form of business capital will nally cause a reaction in response by the proletariat which will completely undermine the norms of social organiza

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tion itself. Proudhon’s notion of barter and invocations of mysticism in “The Philosophy of Poverty” are not unlike the writings of his contemporary poets, especially Percy Bysshe Shelley. This sort of religious nonsense only hinders the scientic maturation of the proletariat, a maturation created by radi

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calization and education about the concepts Marx so brilliantly explains. So what of the infamous Bakunin-Marx feud? Partly this extends from personality; Marx was a family man and Bakunin was, in his more ram

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bunctious moments, a drunk en mess, prone to crude behavior and vulgarity. And partly this extends from the vision Marx held; he believed the proper way to scientically create a socialist society would be based on an electoral success of the German Social Democrats who in turn would rely on his work to lead the revolution. In that regard, Germany is no longer the international power it once was, the Social Democra ts ar e no longer a radical party, and so the Marxist no

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tion of German revolutionary primacy is outdated. Instead, Marx would have been forced to re-dire ct his intentions to either America, as the center of capital, or perhaps to the post-colonial world, as Vladi mir Lenin later tried throu gh the Comintern. What is certain in reality is that his opposition to Bakunin stemmed from electoral and political motivations; Marx wanted to legitimate his program through the German Reichstag, and also Bakunin’s “parties-within-parties,” secret cadres of specially chosen revolutionaries, which ironically bore more resemblance to the Leninist vanguard party than meets the eye. His intent to form an “International Alliance of Social-Democracy” th at would function from within the greater Inter

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national Workingmen’s Association as a conspiratorial and secretive sub-division of the body was both absurd and counter- productive, a strategy taken from the era of Freemasonry and secret societies. A cen tur y lat er , pub lis her s in the United Kingdom and United States began to re-issue these writings simultaneously with the era of th e rise of the New Left and the Frankfurt School. In some regards, academically most of all, these publica

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tions carried historical insights about the true nature of Marx’s thought and showed he was in fact a philosopher whose work was far more applicable to the modern era than the Union of Soviet Socialist Repub

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lics (U.S.S.R.) let on, especially in regards to gender theory. But somewhere along the line, in the name of commercialism, an intentional confusion of the philosophical with the polemica l occurre d. Bakunin ’s personal screed against Marx, “Marxism, Freedom and the State,” an enraged vision of utopia lost, is haunting today because it portrays accurately the nature of Bol

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shevism four-and-a-half decades prior to Lenin’s rise. This fact is not lost on me, but the Bakunin version of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” is quite s trikingly different from that of Marx ’s, whereas Lenin and Bakunin’s are identical. In this sense, the publishing industry tried to equate Lenin

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ism with Marxism, for a reason exactly op

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posite to the one that the U.S.S.R. invoked Marx for at that time. In the United States, Marx equated with Lenin was therefore negative and totalitarian, whereas Lenin equated to Marx in the U.S.S.R. was in

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tended to propose a nominal notion of social and political freedom. But through the insight of FW Rinaldi, perhaps further scholarship like his into the corpus that is pre-Leninist Socialist literature will promote a wider respect not just of Marx

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ist insights into labor issues but indeed a greater understanding of how to most effectively communicate these messages to the working class.

Readers’ Soapbox continues on 15 .

Name: ______________ _____________ Address: _______________ __________ State/Pro vince: ________________ __ Zip/PC________________________ Send to: PO Box 180195, Chicago IL 60618 USA

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