One of the many colourful and intelligent leaders the IWW produced in its first brilliant incarnation in Australia was Montague Miller. Monty was, by 1916 already a veteran of more struggles than most fit into a lifetime - and still the shit was only just approaching the fan!
He had participated in the Eureka Stockade uprising; learned his lessons from physical force chartists working as diggers around the Ballarat mines; participated in the scandalising of proper public opinion by promoting atheism with the Australasian Secularists; participated in the scandalising the Australasian Secularists by linking up with the Melbourne Anarchist Club; he organised unemployment relief during the depression of the 1890's; helped, particularly in Western Australia, in the formation of the Labor Party and the winning it over to a socialist platform; left it in disgust when it achieved government and made it apparent, more clearly than the arguements of anarchists ever could, that governments never can and never will be able to introduce social justice but will always be tied to the dictates of property and power. He was found guilty of criminal conspiracy in Western Australia because he was a member of the IWW. He was found guilt of being a member of the IWW in Sydney after we were suppressed during World War One and, at the age of eighty years was given six months with hard labour. He let his ideas evolve but kept his faith in working folk and the power they hold to make society anew right up to the end.
Thus it is good to see a booklet "Eureka and Beyond: Monty Miller his own story" edited Vic Williams (110 pages) and a smaller pamphlet also produced by Vic: "Monty Miller – Revolutionary"
Monty was a carpenter and a rebel and a very smart cookie indeed. The last decade and a half of his life was devoted to promoting the IWW ideal. For Monty had turned towards the state socialism that he hoped to see the Labor Party introduce because of his despair of the noble ideals of anarchism ever being practicable. When this State Socialism was shown to be even more impractical he rediscover his hopes in the program of the Wobblies with its emphasis upon using the union to build the new world in the body of the old
He was never an apparatchik was Monty. Never was and never could be. What he believed in he fought for with all his strength but he thought everything through himself and his ideas were often tangential to the IWW and to any organisation he joined and, I suspect, that could ever exist. He was never anything other than his own person. He was, for example, a devoted follower of the American transcendentalist philosopher Emmerson. Also he was a bit weird about sacrifice. Monty believed that the tree of liberty needed to be regularly watered with the blood of martyrs. The epitome of this was his thinking upon the Eureka Stockade where working men made a brave principled stand for freedom and were cut down in a massacre by the state forces for doing so. The state won by its usual modus operandi but, for Monty at least, it was from the sacrifice of the defeated diggers at Bakery Hill that Victoria came to trace its universal manhood suffrage, its unionisation and the eight hour day. And note in his article on sabotage, printed here, that sabotage is "the true law of retributive justice working through the universe ..." Well my Karma ran over my dogma but it is nice to see it thriving as well in the 1916 rebels as the 1970's.
It is good, therefore to see a re-issue "Eureka and Beyond". Between its pages is a miscellany of writings by and about Monty. The first half or so is taken up very much by fellow worker Miller's tale of his own early years including his participation in the defence of the Eureka Stockade. It is not mentioned in the booklet but from reports in the press at the time this is probably an extended version of the story he put to the jurors on that hot afternoon in 1916 on trial for seditious conspiracy. Monty's take on that trial and the state suppression of the IWW that followed also have their place in the booklet, together with newspaper articles and reminiscences about him as well as a few other of his own writings.
One of the things to remember when reading Montague's own words is that he spent over half a century as a stump orator. He took his message to working people at thousands of occasions indoors and out; rain, shine or police informers, and had a voice that could move any halfway sympathetic audience to tears - but only when he wanted to! His text reads better if, in the back of the mind, one imagines it being delivered vocally. Nor, personally, would I take every word as gospel.
All in all it is a fairly good buy. Do I have gripes? Well yes, fairly minor ones. Chief amongst them is the myth that after World War One the Wobblies or sometimes "the better Wobbly elements" (or some such formulae) all realised the new era heralded in by the Russian Revolution and joined the Communist Party. And the inclusion of the commentary by Norman Jeffery and Katharine Susannah Prichard might seem to back up the misconception
As the myth has some currency amongst left wing working people it is worth a brief look. The author Katharine Susannah Prichard was a friend to Monty in his last days and they naturally talked over the events in Russia. She was convinced that, had he not been too sick to be asked, Monty would have joined the fledgling Communists. I happen to think she was right. I would give him about three years (generous estimation this) before he either stormed out or got expelled for some deviation or another. It is inconceivable, totally inconceivable, to me that Monty would have stayed there much longer, supporting the Stalin years and remaining a loyal friend of the Soviet Union through its Gothic period with its state sponcered famines, Gulag's, show trials, military interventions in Eastern Europe and other events too well known to mention. Admitted some fellow workers who ought to have known better, did do just that. Norman Jeffery, whose recollections of Monty also form part of the pamphlet, was one such. But, as historian Verity Burgmann put it: "Most of those who remained (in the Communist Party) were not seeking in a new organisation a continuation of Wobbly principles and practices but making a break with their Wobbly past. By remaining in the Party, these Wobblies changed themselves. Norman Jeffery, for instance, recreated himself in the image of Communism and became accepted by his fellow Communists. He claimed in 1960 that the Russian Revolution left many of his colleagues in the IWW 'floundering'."
Well, no wonder really.
For most Wobblies who joined the CPA the relationship was difficult, torturous and short. The cultural shift from a democratic, rebelious and open organisation to a closed, authoritarian and manipulative one was too much; particularly when the party down played industrial unionism and started indulging in electoral politics. When Jack Howie, communist president of the of the Labor Council, asked, "then how can we expect to capture the more powerful machine of the capitalist state?" former Wob J. B. King replied: "One doesn't want to capture a mad dog before shooting it." *1 And there it is. As with the Labor Party Monty would have washed the dust from his feet and walked away. Governments never can and never will ...
Ah but I also am an idealogue in my own anti-ideological way and mayhap I am reading too much here. Best to end, as Vic chooses to end, with a quote from Montague Milers pamphlet "Labors Road to Freedom". Clearly one of those things of which it might be said: "Truer now than when it was written!"
"All roads and paths that have been tried as the way out of the disabilities and sufferings of the slave class have only led us into the quicksands of delusion. They are now closed, and before us is the open highway, the track which has been blazed by pioneers who have paid the penalties of imprisonment and death. From the seeds of their martyrdom has sprung and bloomed the tree of Liberty; it stands at the end of the open highway and we can taste of its glorious fruit of social and industrial freedom. Onward with the march, then, fellow workers! The road is clear; it is that of the I.W.W., Industrial Unionism."
It is time that the IWW produced more of its own material about former members. Apart from Monty's "The Passing of Parliament" we have nothing by this former member. Until such time as this comes to pass, however, "Eureka and Beyond" is much recomended.
"Monty Miller Revolutionary" is a much smaller effort and in many ways is a summery of the contents of "Eureka and Beyond" as Vic sees them.
"Eureka and Beyond" is available from Lone Hand Press, 38 Garling Street, Willagee, Western Australia, 6163 for $12
"Monty Miller Revolutionary" from the same address $2
"Would you have freedom from wage-slavery.." Joe Hill http://iamawobbly.multiply.com/
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