Our individual, collective, and institutional identities organize us. The common view suggests that identity is a stable given. You are X or Y and nothing changes that. Not only is this view inaccurate, it limits our ability to meet coworkers where they are and makes connecting with them difficult as a result. Identity is a construct and refusing to engage with it as a construct doesn’t make it any less constructed. It merely cedes the power to some usurper. I agree with Proudhon; “whoever lays his hand on me to govern me is a usurper and a tyrant and I declare him my enemy.” Our identities matter. People construct them. Our individual autonomy and success as organizers depends on knowing that because solidarity, non-bureaucratic, unionism relies upon relationships and trust between coworkers. We build these trusting relationships by identifying ourselves, our coworkers, and the union together. Kenneth Burke’s rhetoric of identification and division can help us think about how to work with identities. Identification means to identify something by its properties, genealogy, and associations. Identification generates consubstantiality. Consubstantiality matters because it determines whether we educate, entertain, persuade, and/or self-portray effectively and so helps us organize. Lastly, we need to strategically choose which identities we construct and employ based on what is good, true, and useful.
We identify something or someone by its properties. This includes the way it looks, talks, acts, feels, etc. its props and other material goods. We identify Anton Chigurh (played by Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men) by his unsettling, hood-like, haircut that equates him with the grim reaper. Unionizing workers identify each other by their IWW pins or red cards, which are props. I recently delivered and edited a very short introduction to the IWW and workplace organizing, which says that wobblies are democratic, direct, and caring. The presentation identifies us in terms of what we do and how we do it. In all these cases, we identify people, groups, and institutions by describing their properties.
We identify things genealogically, by their ancestry and familial relations. Let’s look at an example. In 1918, the Canadian government outlawed the IWW. The next year, 1919, the Canadian “One Big Union” sprang up. Pretend you’re a Canadian organizer in 1920. How could you describe the new “One Big Union” to a coworker? You could relate “The One Big Union” to the IWW and show that this offshoot comes from a tradition, a larger family of unions. When we identify something by its ancestry or familial relations, we call it genealogical. This also applies to words and when we do this with words, we call it etymological. My fiance once asked me why we’re called wobblies. I repeated the story from “The Wobblies.” The film says that immigrant Chinese workers had trouble pronouncing IWW and so they articulated it as “I wobble wobble” and now we all wobble but don’t fall down. Maybe that story is false, but it shows how we can identify a group, and hence all its members, by looking at the history of a term and its relationships. Whether genealogical or etymological, we identify a thing by its roots and relations.
Association creates identity, both unconsciously and consciously. Studies have shown that people can take a placebo, know that it’s a placebo, and still feel better. Their bodies unconsciously identify “pill” with “healing” because of all the times pills healed them. People can and will trust unsound research articles simply because they have the same form as trustworthy articles. I demonstrate this to my students with an exercise. I give them six sources and ask them to determine which ones are trustworthy and why. I include an anti-vaxx article that later researchers disproved beyond reasonable doubt. The vast majority of my students, more than 85 percent, still claim it’s a trustworthy article because it appears in a peer reviewed journal, is in a university library database, cites its sources, and so on. My students associate those formal features with trustworthy and true, even when the content is bogus. We can also identify the IWW by association. Rudolf Rocker’s recently reprinted Anarcho-Syndicalism Theory and Practice reports that the IWW participated in the 1921 conference of Syndicalist Organizations which called for a larger international syndicalist conference in Spring 1922. The IWW did not join the 1922 conference which established the IWA nor did it join any international (that I know of) until 2018 when it became a founding member of the ICL-CIT. We identify things by the company they keep and so this history tells us something about the IWW.
Identification also means to identify with, to become consubstantial. Consubstantiation comes from Catholicism and describes how Christ, the Holy Spirit, and God are different persons but share one substance. Consubstantiality provides the rhetorical power behind communion, the strange moment when previously different individuals suddenly feel as one. Other words in the “comm” family also share this power, like communication, community, communism. Consubstantiality brings us to substance and substance is complicated. Let’s break it down into sub and stance, meaning that which stands below. That is probably good enough, but I have two additional points that will help us better understand consubstantiality.
Point one: substance often means some unchanging essence, but whenever we try to grab hold, it slips through our fingers. The essentialist approach to substance falls apart because meaning is a web and humans make it. We cannot understand anything by itself but only in relation to everything they are not. We determine things in relation to other terms. There is no master without slaves, no boss without workers. There is no union of one.
Point two: substance is an act. The IWW grounds itself in the presence of two identities, the employing and the working class. Some old texts say “producers” and “parasites,” which hits harder, though some priests of Capital and the State flip this to defend themselves. Workers work and employers employ workers. Producers produce and parasites parasitize. Substance is an act and in acting together (wo)men become consubstantial. We become fellow workers or co-workers by working together. But, substance falls away once the relations cease and acts stop.
Identification and division are two sides of the same coin. Whenever I identify with and draw closer to A, I draw further away from B. So, we can identify with A by dividing from B. Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian makes this case succinctly. “The Judge watched him [the Kid] through the bars, he shook his head. What joins men together, he said, is not the sharing of bread, but the sharing of enemies.” He’s partly right. We can identify together by dividing from something else.
We don’t need to choose between the approaches. Let’s say that during agitation, we discover that our boss denied a coworker’s request for time off. Imagine we reacted with compassion and said, “I’m on your side. I’d like to help you if I can.” This obviously pulls us closer to our coworker. Imagine we instead said, “The boss is a jerk for not giving you time off.” No one likes jerks, so the boss’s new identity will divide them from our coworker. Now, imagine we said, “I’m on your side. The boss is a jerk. I’d like to help you if I can.” We straightforwardly identified ourselves with our coworker and divided them from the boss, generating consubstantiality two ways. Guiguzi, China’s First Treatise on Rhetoric calls this mending and breaking. Sages possess and practice this skill.
Organizers can identify themselves, wobblies, the IWW, their coworkers, bosses, etc. in many different ways. I recommend pragmatism when narrowing down and deciding which identities to employ at any given time. Good strategy grounds itself in analysis. This means thinking about the context, audience, purpose, topic, the means by which we’ll deliver our language (method or modality), and the event that directly called forth the speech act (exigence). This analysis will help organizers decide which identities are most likely to work for their situation.
Being practical and strategic does not mean that truth can go to hell and stay there, but we should not be naive either. People create many truths and, as Voline recognized, they often falsely assume their sliver is the whole Truth. But, no sliver is complete by itself. I’m not asking us to choose between truth and falsehood, but choose between truths with an eye for what is good and true and useful in our rhetorical situations. The better world that’s coming depends on it.
In sum, identities, identification, and division matter to organizers because to organize with our fellow workers, we must show them we are consubstantial, that we share a way of life and common ground. We demonstrate our consubstantiality by focusing on properties, genealogies, associations, and acts, by speaking their language, through gestures, tonalities, order, images, attitudes, and ideas. We must understand our rhetorical situations and be strategic about which identities we choose to construct/deconstruct with an eye toward what is good, true, and useful. There are other ways in which the rhetoric of identification and division relates to organizing, but we do not have the time or space here. I encourage everyone to think about it for themselves.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author. They do not purport to represent that of the IWW or Industrial Worker as a whole.