Nerve 12 - Rambling to Revolution

Rambling to Revolution

Hobohemia and the Industrial Workers of the World

When the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, otherwise known as ‘The Wobblies’) formed in 1905, its founders had little idea that their labour union would soon become North America’s foremost organisation of hoboes. Organisers set their sights on the stable workforces of massive mines and mills; but their greatest successes came among migrant labourers on farms, in forests, and at sea. Organisers looked to the urban east; but the rank and file rode west across empty, dusty plains.

During the period of the IWW’s greatest growth - from 1905 until the early 1920s - jobs became more precarious, and the North American workforce responded by staying constantly on the move. It was the IWW’s particular understanding of industry and work that lent the union so well to organising non-industrial non-workers.

The IWW’s greatest strategic innovation was to organise not by 'craft' but by 'industry'. All workers in an industry should organise together, which meant in practical terms that even people far from the centres of production had a legitimate role in creating the 'One Big Union' that aimed to abolish the whole wage system. No part of industry could be left out, no gear left free of sand or a wooden shoe. If the strategic centres of industry remained important, the fact soon emerged that even the reserve army of the unemployed was a crucial piece of the capitalist machinery. Its members had interests and were interesting; they had fighting and singing and moving spirit, and—until their power was broken by the state—they put more fear into the hearts of the US ruling class than any factory workers organised according to their craft, however strategically powerful their position in the economy might seem.

And as more precarious workers joined the IWW, they began laying the foundations for a new critique of work itself. The IWW is remarkable for its historical moment as a radical labour organisation that not only exalted the muscular 'commonwealth of toil' but also sang praises to the 'big rock candy mountain', 'where they hung the jerk who invented work'. IWW members organised as workers against work. They did this first of all as many workers do: by recognising that it is both a great misfortune and a great opportunity to be a worker, a member of the class uniquely exploited and uniquely capable of overcoming exploitation. But the IWW also had thousands of members in its ranks whose relationship to work was so tenuous that they had little trouble imagining a world where work would exist no longer.

Runaways from wage slavery, the hobo Maroon camps filled with songs of better lands and stories of adventure in a world otherwise made insipid by time clocks and top hats. They used their relative leisure to discuss human existence and the politics of the day; they brought their insights to the public in parks and on street corners from coast to coast. Their 'Hobohemia' laid the foundations for a proletarian public sphere the likes of which few of us have ever seen, raised as we are in cities that are hardly cities, on streets overrun with cars, in parks with more poodles than people, surrounded by iron fences where soapboxes once rested beneath the feet of unbathed orators….

Amidst the wreckage of present-day 'progress', hope may rise again alongside misery. After a long detour known to some as Fordism and to others as the welfare state, precarious labour has again become the salient feature of the day. The illusion of stability has faded away. Immigration rises, and soon we will all be migrants. Rare is the worker who keeps a job for months, and no more common is the workplace that does not break apart and move away. If there was ever a need for migrant workers to come together in One Big Union, where we keep our membership as we move from job to job, and where we keep our union as jobs move from place to place—if there was ever a time for that, the time is now.

The last remnants of community hang together every day by looser thread. But the possibility for new community may rise again. We are forced from our homes—but we are forced to look for better places to dwell. We are forced out of work, but we can begin to envision a world in which work is not really work at all.

For more information on the IWW, visit www.iww.org.uk

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