The 100th Anniversary of the Founding of the Wobblies

[Karmadillo]

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=19&ItemID=8579

It's the 100th anniversary of the Industrial Workers of the World -- the IWW, one of the most influential yet ultimately unsuccessful organizations in U.S. history, founded in Chicago in 1905 by a band of fiercely dedicated idealists.

The Wobblies, as they were called, battled against overwhelming odds, their only real weapon an utter refusal to compromise in a single-minded march toward a Utopia that pitted them against the combined forces of government and business.

Their weapon, their goals, the power of their opponents, the imperfect world about them made it inevitable that they would lose. But this is not to say the Wobblies failed because they didn¹t reach their goal of creating One Big Union to wage a general strike that would put all means of production in the hands of workers and transform the country into a Cooperative Commonwealth of Workers. To say the Wobbles failed would be to misinterpret the history of the Wobbly battle which left the world, as few battles leave it, a little less imperfect.

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The Wobblies' refusal to support U.S. entry into World War I and their refusal to abandon strikes and other organizational activities during the war were used as an excuse by officials at all levels of government to side with employers. They called out troops and police to attack non-violent IWW strikers and raid IWW offices. They encouraged vigilantism and lynchings and generally raised public hysteria against ³IWW terror² that allegedly hampered the war effort.

After the war ended in 1918, officials seized on the IWW¹s open support for the Bolshevik revolutionaries in Russia as an excuse to crush Wobbly strikes and organizing efforts by mass arrests and imprisonment of strikers and IWW leaders for engaging in Bolshevik conspiracies.

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[wli]

1. ah, yes, "terrorism" exposed

Nothing but a bunch of false flag attacks and character assassinations.

Make no mistake, mass arrest and imprisonment is US policy. The US government is perfectly willing to cage or slaughter every last worker who stands up for himself, and has far more of its population imprisoned than the most oppressive totalitarian regimes in history.

i.e. the US is the most oppressive totalitarian regime ever in history.