This originally aired on The Final Straw radio show.

X380847. That’s my membership number in the Industrial Workers of the World. The I.W.W. has been around since 1905, making typical unions with the bosses and bureaucratic party, nervous, since the stated goals of the I.W.W. is the abolition of the wage system altogether rather than reformist efforts to “improve” the conditions of the owners and union bosses. Unlike every other union that sought to divide the workers into trades, the Wobblies, as the I.W.W. was called – had the ambitious program of unionizing all workers into one big union and thereby put the power into the hands of all workers collectively to shut down the industrial production system entirely.
Like the famed  anacho- syndicalist unions of Spain, the F.A.I. & C.N.T, Wobblies promoted worker direct action. In the teens and 20’s, Wobblies were targeted with charges of criminal syndicalism, sabotage and sedition.
Yeah. It was treason to demand a fair shake, to imagine power wrested from the hands of Crapitalists.
Still is, of course.
After FDR’S New Deal and the rise of the more reformist and industrial friendly unions like the AFL-CIO, Teamsters, and United Workers , the threat and the influence of the I.W.W. faded. Between state repression and the major unions collaborating to squeeze out the Wobblies, the I.W.W. was  largely neutralized during a time when anarchists were evolving new strategies and approaches that didn’t necessarily involve the seemingly impossible task of organizing all the workers of the entire of the entire world into the same union. But the Wobblies did not go away. They didn’t become extinct. They’re still Continue reading →