ChuckO's question reveals the ignorance/arrogance of many of today's Wobblies and anarchists about which I wrote previously. The failure to acknowledge what the insurgent North American proletariat has accomplished demeans the true contribution of the IWW in its heyday, by likening its pale remnant to the authentic article, and denying the real history of working-class struggle.
The most massive and sustained proletarian insurgency in the United States after 1877 was that of the 1930s, organized by the Congress of Industrial Organizations. The IWW dreamed of and preached industrial unionism, as did the Red Unions of the Trade Union Unity League in the late 1920s, but it was the CIO that actually organized the mass industries of North America -- coal, steel, auto, meat packing, and so forth.
The CIO transformed and transcended the culture of insurgency well beyond the examples, heroic though they had been, pioneered by the IWW. The CIO conducted sit-down strikes (the first one began at GM in Atlanta) and factory occupations, created flying squads and armed security contingents to battle company goons and police, infiltrated and exposed the labor spy network, forbade all off-the-clock work by which renegades curried favor with the bosses, and required every worker to join the union.
Those achievements ossified in the years after 1947, with the expulsion of reds and the institutionalization of class-collaboration unionism. By 1970, the impetus to organize had been undercut because unions, for the first time in their history, achieved a higher rate of return on members' dues from profits on investments than from hiring organizers to recruit new members.
Those twin facts reversed the militancy of the unions -- but not the militancy of workers! Strike activity, authorized and wildcats combined, soared in the 1960s, and reached a record level in the early 1970s. That momentum did not dissipate until the first years of Ronald Reagan's presidency, during which the high-profile defeats of striking air traffic controllers and Continental Airlines workers sapped morale throughout the land, and from which we are only beginning to recover at long last, Seattle being the first major milepost of a rebirth.
So we really had three generations of proletarian insurgency that followed the IWW's days of glory, each one of which added new dimensions to struggle and tradition for today's and tomorrow's workers to emulate. Romanticizing just one element of that history does us all a disservice.
Ken Lawrence