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. -30- Six-month airmail subscriptions (22 issues) to Green Left Weekly are available for A$60 (North America) and A$75 (South America, Europe & Africa) from PO Box 394, Broadway NSW 2007, Australia