Blackwell Reference Online

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The Industrial Workers of the World, known colloquially as Wobblies, remains unique in the history of US labor and the left despite its troubled history and small size, for a number of crucial reasons. Founded in 1905 as the industrial era proper reached a new phase across much of the globe, the IWW set out to build a global labor movement, ignoring national boundaries as well as differences in race, ethnicity, and gender. The IWW also represented, from its first day, a unique perspective upon the prospects for democracy : it sought to replace not only capitalist economics but also the political state with a decentralized democracy based in the workplace. In short, unlike socialist or communist visions of the future, it did not seek to take over a state mechanism or replace it with a party-style rule. Not ideologically anarchist , either, the IWW sought a functional as well as egalitarian answer to the question of how a modern society could govern itself. The exact origins of the IWW are elusive not only because it arose out of largely untutored and often violent labor experience in the Western US of the nineteenth century, but also because the language of participants was so frequently non-English. The “social revolutionaries” of the Chicago-based radical movement that peaked in the middle 1880s disdained the word “anarchist,” but clearly stood outside the socialist movements ... log in or subscribe to read full text