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from Green Left Weekly #135/Mar 16, 1994
Scaring hell out of the ruling class
The Wobblies at War: A History of the IWW and the Great War in Australia
by Frank Cain
Spectrum Publications, 1993. 300 pp., $19.95 (pb)
Reviewed by Phil Shannon
Every radical lefty's heart has a soft spot for the Wobblies (the Industrial
Workers of the World) if only for Joe Hill's songs, which, like their
martyred author, never really died. The Wobblies scared hell out of the rich
folk early in this century with their militant unionism and their outspoken
opposition to the 1914-18 blood-fest.
Frank Cain's book traces the rise and repression of the IWW in this country.
Following the depression of the 1890s and the defeats of union struggles at
that time, much of the labour movement had taken the parliamentary turning,
pinning their hopes on the ALP and arbitration. However, the ``pragmatism
and compromise'' of the trade union officials, the failure of arbitration to
maintain wages, and the disillusioning experience of Labor in government,
which ``had been tried and found wanting'', spurred some workers to revive
the strategy of direct action by unions against the employer.
The Wobblies were the foremost proponents of heating up the class war by
organising workers into One Big Union which would destroy capitalism by
revolutionary industrial struggle. Their ``idealism and militancy''
challenged the milk-and-water reformists of their day. Their famous creed
would cause apoplexy, derision or bemusement in the Keltys and Keatings of
our day:
``The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There
can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of
working people, and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the
good things in life.''
The IWW established a real presence in Sydney in 1913, peaking by 1917 to
around, in Cain's view, 2000 members (others estimate 4000) and having ``an
impact far in excess of what its numbers and limited resources would
indicate''.
Their paper, Direct Action, was extremely popular, with its ``fresh and
biting radicalism'' both measuring and raising the pulse of growing layers
of workers who were disgusted by timid trade union leaders, dismayed by ALP
politicians who ditched promises and principles as fast as their backsides
subsided into ``the soft leather of parliamentary benches'', and who were
revolted by the hideous human slaughter and gross profiteering during the
war.
The Wobblies' internationalism was pitted against the Germanophobia of the
war and the racism of the unions (the AWU, for example, refused to recruit
Aboriginal or Chinese workers). They played a leading role in defeating two
government conscription referendums, and they helped turn opinion against
the war, which provided them with excellent propaganda for showing the rich
to be sacrificing workers to die in uniform for their profit-ledgers.
``Make class before country your motto'', they wrote to their working-class
readers. ``When the Empire is in danger, let those who own and control it,
fight for it'', they said as they pointed out that whilst 20% of AWU members
enlisted in the army, only 2% of NSW parliamentarians and the Sydney Chamber
of Commerce were prepared to die for the alleged principles they expected
others to be killed for.
The IWW supported equal pay for women and had a number of women organisers.
The Wobblies had significant industrial influence in such major centres of
Australian working-class militancy as ``the shearing sheds of Queensland or
in the Broken Hill mines'', where workers won major struggles for increased
wages and shorter hours in 1916.
by 1917, the Wobblies had graduated from being a tolerated ``small radical
fringe group'' to a dangerous organisation threatening the government's war
policy. They were crushed by legislation outlawing membership of the IWW in
1917. The IWW never recovered from the raids, arrests, deportations and the
frame-up of their leaders (the ``IWW Twelve'') on charges of conspiring to
burn down Sydney.
Cain's book succeeds in recapturing the revolutionary vitality of the IWW
(``they showed a vision of what could be'', he writes approvingly) and the
calculated lengths to which governments of whatever stripe under capitalism
will go to preserve that system of institutionalised robbery and, at times
of war, mass murder of the working class.
Cain does, however, examine in rather excessive detail the legislation used
to ban the IWW and the holes in the frame-up of the IWW Twelve rather than
analysing the underlying political reasons which contributed to the relative
ease with which the IWW was destroyed. Only 103 Wobblies were sentenced to
jail in the 1917 crackdown (and then for only six months) and only 29 were
deported, yet this was sufficient to remove the IWW from the political
field. by the time of the great labour unrest in the postwar years, the
young Communist Party had filled the vacuum.
Unlike the CPA, the Wobblies were syndicalists, believing in ``victory in
class war by industrial unionism not revolution''. They did not have the
answers for working-class militants about the need for political struggle as
well as economic struggle, nor how to counter the capitalist state in the
transition to socialism that the Marxists in the early CPA were able to
provide. Nor did they have the solid organisation capable of surviving state
repression as the CPA or the Bolsheviks in Russia were able to do.
But these failings should not detract from the positive legacy of the IWW.
Their emphasis on trade unions as fighting organisations could well be
revived in the face of the current orthodoxy about unions being the partners
in running capitalism under the lovey-dovey, employer-employee, win-win
world of workplace productivity and enterprise bargaining. Their exposure of
parliament and the ALP as the graveyard of socialist hopes, and their
internationalism are also badges worth polishing. Trotsky, despite
criticising the IWW's syndicalist ideology, praised the Wobblies for
``really wanting to tear the head off the bourgeoisie''. That is not a bad
epitaph.
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