On 2013-01-07, at 10:27 PM, Max Sawicky wrote:
> That's what I always thought. Didn't the Wobs disdain contracts?
>
>
> On Mon, Jan 7, 2013 at 9:51 PM, michael yates <mikedjyates at msn.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> andie_nachgeborenen says, "Anarchists have historically opposed unions, or
>> unions that they do not dominate like the IWW, and then tend to view
>> contracts as class collaboration. These days, with formal recognition and
>> contracts so hard to obtain, nonideological working class like WalMart
>> workers have redis overhead the strengths of nonunion noncontract concerted
>> action."
>>
>> Do you have some evidence that the IWW was dominated by anarchists? Debs
>> was a founder. Bill Haywood?
The IWW was influenced by anarcho-syndicalism, a strong current in the European labour movement before World War I. The anarcho-syndicalists did not believe in political action nor in the possibility of a workers' state, in this sense sharing the anarchist view that the state was an inherently oppressive institution which could not be transformed in the interest of the masses. The IWW was instead committed to the overthrow of capitalism by means of a massive and sustained general strike which would produce a new society organized from the bottom up through a confederation of self-governing industrial unions. Debs, Haywood, and other workers, however, were typically attracted to the organization because of its militancy and aim to unite the entire working class - notably including women, blacks, immigrants, and the unemployed - by industry rather than craft. Daniel de Leon eventually led a split from the organization on the question of political action to form the Socialist Labor Party. But it was the Russian Revolution which threw anarcho-syndicalism into political crisis in that it demonstrated that the working class could take state power under a revolutionary leadership. Haywood and others were drawn to the new Communist parties which formed in its wake, or as in Debs' case, were strongly influenced by it despite their rejection of the Bolshevik model of party organization.