Among much of the IWW today, there is an oft-unchallenged belief that the best way to build the union is to attend street protests, anarchist bookfairs, and other subcultural gatherings. The idea goes, bring recruitment materials to these protest events on weekends and you will find people interested in joining the IWW. Similarly, the impulse to measure the size and growth rate of our membership against “the Left” feels almost universal. If “the Left” is growing, we should peel off some people for IWW membership – or so the thought goes. The only problem here? These people are not being targeted for recruitment because they are workers who need or want a union.
None of this recruitment happens within a workplace, at or near the point of labor value production, or due to any concrete working class demands. These people are not taking to the streets with their coworkers because they are agitated around specific labor grievances, educated in a strategy to wrest concessions, and organized into a union to take industrial action to force concessions from their employer(s). We don’t even know if these people are workers at all!
Rather, these events are at best directionless expressions of generalized discontent and at worst subcultural gatherings of the “correct” side of the culture war. There is little functional difference between recruiting from the activist community and recruiting from the audience at a Taylor Swift concert. In fact, recruiting from a Taylor Swift concert might even prove more fruitful – because the audience there would likely represent a more accurate cross-section of the American working class.
A defender of this recruitment approach may say, “but fellow worker, most people in the activist community are working class.” And that is probably correct by the numbers. But are these people even representative of the class? On closer inspection, the problems with the approach remain: these people, if they are workers, in all likelihood work different jobs at different workplaces in different industries, and their proven interest is in issues outside the workplace. If they are activists outside the workplace, they are already in the vast minority of workers. Moreover, activist groups and nonprofit-type organizations tend to be horrendously unorganized, undisciplined, and anti-democratic.
Is it in the best interests of our union to pull people from the already-politicized progressive liberal or socialist vanguard, then try to convert them to become worker-organizers? Is our goal to create a vanguard-within-a-vanguard? Or is it to grow a mass base within the workplaces, where we can democratically wield economic and political power to get what we want?
A similar defender may make the argument, “but fellow worker, we outreach to queer/radical/book/identity-based events because we want to focus on the most marginalized identity workers.” This is an admirable goal. However, the same criticism applies here as the previous one. Even within these demographics, only a very small minority are members of these activist groups. For example, at my workplace, I have coworkers that are: immigrants (Asian, African, Latin American, Iranian, Syrian…), BIPOC workers of various backgrounds, queer workers, women, religious minorities, and so on. By the numbers, the typical union worker in the US is a black woman working in the service industry.
Most importantly, the workplace is the exact place where discrimination against these demographics takes material form, such as:
- Hiring and wage discrimination by race, gender, and sexual orientation
- Work or other visas for immigrants and refugees
- Sexual assault and harassment
- Parental or family leave, particularly for pregnant women and new mothers
- Retaliation for speaking out
- Access to healthcare
- General economic concerns including wages, hours, vacation, and time off
These issues are dire enough for marginalized groups, who also usually experience several of these simultaneously. The perspective really comes when considering the secondary issues that arise from, and in combination with, these primary ones:
- Housing access and homelessness
- Poverty
- Unaddressed health issues and poor health outcomes
- Drug use and abuse
- Deportation
- Psychological trauma
- Family trauma
- Sexual trauma
- Shortened life spans.
Both lists can go on. However, the point should be clear. Racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of oppression are materially founded in class status at the point of production, the workplace. The links are direct and unbreakable. These divisions are exploited by the employing class to push wages down and maintain a reserve army of labor.
This analysis leads us to four crucial conclusions.
First, if we are to materially improve the lives of marginalized workers, the place to have the most impact is on the job because material conditions originate there. The job is where all workers have power to wrest concessions from the employer, which are doubly impactful for the marginalized. If we can be successful at organizing workers into taking action for our shared class interests, we will create a deeper, broader, more long-lasting impact on these issues than any street protest or fundraiser.
Second, if we are to take the goal of creating a more diverse organization seriously, building the IWW on the job and bringing these workers in as full members is a far more effective way to do it than tabling or recruiting from the liberal vanguard. There are simply far more marginalized workers within the workplace than at any given activist event.
Third, following the OT101, actively building the IWW on the job, signing these workers up, and engaging them in class struggle together gives them a voice and vote in their union and a chance to speak for themselves on the matters that affect them. This avoids tokenizing marginalized workers (or allowing room for individual heroics to claim to represent an entire group) and builds solidarity with other workers at the same time. True class struggle is far more effective anti-racism practice than street protest.
Fourth, we see that pulling away from marginalized workers on the job in favor of elections and street protests entirely avoids taking on racism, sexism, transphobia, ableism, etc. directly. When we take on workplace issues, fight them, and win, we are attacking the material causes of these injustices at the very source, together. When we do not build the IWW on the job – agitate, educate, organize, and take action with everyday workers – we do an injustice to marginalized workers by letting the injustice, oppression, and discrimination they experience continue where it is most widespread and does the most damage.
The “recruit from the activist community” approach is ultimately one that can never build to a mass base, can never build mass democratic worker power, and can never be a revolutionary force. Because ultimately, the effect is recruiting a minority from a minority, a small fraction of the working class population. Even then, in practice the constituency is only the people who are on the correct side of the culture war, and they cannot be organized into an economic force.
Our goal is to build a mass union that is democratic and can wield worker power in the class war. Not the culture war.
Riding the Coattails of “The Left”
What exactly is “the left”? Socialist, communist, and anarchist organizations (i.e. Democratic Socialists of America)? Jacobin Magazine subscribers? Hasan Piker viewers or subscribers? Marx reading groups? Nonprofit staffers?
The predominant model of political activity is the nonprofit organization, the 501c3/c4 structure. Think Jobs With Justice. These organizations are, at their most fundamental level, little more than funding structures for legal action or political lobbying. Members are really just donors; and, at times, protest attendees whose role is to make noise about a legal case that is ultimately decided behind closed doors.
There are very few left organizations out there that are, firstly, dues-based membership organizations, and secondly, that publish their membership numbers. But, let’s focus on the DSA. According to their National Political Committee, membership in the DSA topped 120,000 members in good standing recently. This is up from a little over 50,000 at the end of 2024, which itself was a trough in DSA membership following a previous peak of around 80,000 in 2021. So yes, DSA has seen tremendous growth in the past two years.
Now, the big question is, what is the origin of this growth in membership and electoral success? I assert that it originates in turning away from the subcultural baggage of the left activist subculture and orienting towards the average working person. NYC-DSA leadership in particular has discussed this turn in detail. The Mamdani campaign in New York could never have built their huge volunteer base and won the mayoral campaign without laser focusing on the core class interests they campaigned on.
On the other hand, the constellation of small activist groups that sprang up in 2016 and 2020 have largely collapsed. The IWW General Defense Committee (GDC) is a good lesson here too; it grew rapidly from late 2016 to early 2018 before completely collapsing by 2019. This was due to their lack of structure and their wholehearted embrace of activist culture war activity. The recent Industrial Worker article, “Against The Adventurist Creep” covers the arguments against this type of adventurism in detail.
At the most fundamental level, it does us no good to be the dog chasing the left’s ambulance. This approach is fundamentally limited in scope by turning away from the mass unorganized (and diverse!) working class in order to posture as the most radical group on the left. But ultimately this recreates all the worst social dynamics of the left by being a catch-all for people with the most alienating and authoritarian tendencies in the activist community.
The Right Leadership?
A similar argument goes, if we had leadership that would prioritize collaboration with activist groups, social justice groups, etc., we would have higher membership, presumably due to drawing members from these other groups.
This again begs the questions of who these people are, where their interests lie, and what they want out of membership in the IWW. Do they want to organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the earth? Do they have workplace grievances like those described above for marginalized workers? Were they motivated to join the IWW based on these goals or class interests, or did they join simply to divert our time, attention, and resources to other projects outside our mission? Are these people even wage laborers?
In the OT101, we teach that organic leaders exist in every workplace. Moreover, through the process of organizing and taking direct action, everyday workers can be transformed into leaders themselves. It is our goal – our responsibility – to find these people on the job, train them, and mobilize them to become shop floor militants. It is imperative that these people stay on the job and continue to agitate, educate, and organize amongst their fellow workers. This is how we build the IWW and institutional memory.
The problem with the IWW officership in general (General Executive Board, Committees, etc.) is that these roles currently do not require shopfloor organizing experience, much less successful shopfloor experience. The IWW national bodies function as a place for high-minded activist pet projects to be started for a couple years then fall apart and are left for the next officers to clean up, if there are officers at all. Or they devolve into fiefdoms that serve little purpose aside from building activist clout or resumés for the leaders – which creates perfect conditions for financial impropriety (see: IWOC & GDC for recent examples).
This is an excellent illustration of why activist organizing stands opposed to solidarity unionism. The unrestrained creation of these committees and side projects (almost always outside our core mission) requires a steadily growing amount of time and attention, presenting a structural barrier to shopfloor leaders from becoming officers. This is doubly true for people who have limited free time, including parents, people caring for aging or sick family members, those who maintain an active social life, etc. GEB members often do 20 to 40 hours per week of union business outside of their normal job. Worst of all – almost none of it contributes to shop organizing! Who has that much time?
Despite all the ink spilled about “accessibility” over the past several years, it is shocking that our union officership is fundamentally inaccessible to virtually anybody working a full-time job – regardless of their race, gender, disability status, etc. The roles structurally select for people who have ample free time and few responsibilities outside the IWW – which is extremely undesirable. We would be much better served – and open officership to a much larger set of members – if we simply dropped that activist stuff and focused on the activity laid out in the Preamble.
Which brings me to a question for the reader. What is the point of the IWW? Are we a vanguard-within-a-vanguard, an extremely closed-off group of ultra-leftist community activists pulled from other leftist groups? Is our union a springboard for social entrepreneurs to launch nonprofit organizations or cooperative small businesses? Or are we a revolutionary union aiming to unite the entire working class in the titanic struggle against capital, to organize as a class, seize the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth, thus ending our shared exploitation once and for all?
I think it’s time to drop all the extra stuff and focus on the main mission. We’ll all save ourselves a lot of heartache – and gain a lot of time back for it.
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.