The
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), also known as the "Wobblies", is an international labor union that was founded in 1905. The philosophy and tactics of the IWW are described as "revolutionary industrial unionism", with ties to socialist, syndicalist, and anarchist labor movements. The IWW promotes the concept of "One Big Union", and contends that all workers should be united as a social class to supplant capitalism and wage labor with industrial democracy. It is known for the Wobbly Shop model of workplace democracy, in which workers elect their own managers and other forms of grassroots democracy and self-management are implemented. The IWW
… Read more does not require its members to work in a represented workplace, neither does it exclude membership in another labor union.
Syndicalism is a current in the labor movement to establish local, worker-based organizations and advance the demands and rights of workers through strikes. Major syndicalist organizations include the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the General Confederation of Labor in France, the National Confederation of Labour in Spain, the Italian Syndicalist Union, the Free Workers' Union of Germany, and the Argentine Regional Workers' Federation. A number of syndicalist organizations were and still are to this day linked in the International Workers' Association.
Syndicalists advocate direct action, including working to rule, passive resistance, sabotage, and strikes, particularly
… Read more the general strike, as tactics in the class struggle, as opposed to indirect action such as electoral politics. The final step towards revolution, according to syndicalists, would be a general strike. Labor unions were seen as being the embryo of a new society in addition to being the means of struggle within the old. Syndicalists generally agreed that in a free society production would be managed by workers. The state apparatus would be replaced by the rule of workers' organizations. In such a society individuals would be liberated, both in the economic sphere but also in their private and social lives.
Class War, also referred to as class struggle and class warfare, is the political tension and economic antagonism that exists in society consequent to socio-economic competition among the social classes or between rich and poor. The forms of class conflict include direct violence such as wars for resources and cheap labor, assassinations, indirect violence such as deaths from poverty and starvation, illness and unsafe working conditions, and economic coercion. In the political and economic philosophies of Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin, class struggle is a central tenet and a practical means for effecting radical social and political changes for the social majority. The anarchist Mikhail
… Read more Bakunin said that the class struggles of the working class, the peasantry, and the working poor were central to realizing a social revolution to depose and replace the ruling class, and the creation of libertarian socialism. In political science, socialists and Marxists use the term class conflict to define a social class by its relationship to the means of production, such as factories, agricultural land, and industrial machinery. The social control of labor and of the production of goods and services, is a political contest between the social classes. Marx's theory of history proposes that class conflict is decisive in the history of economic systems organized by hierarchies of social class such as capitalism and feudalism. Marxists refer to its overt manifestations as class war, a struggle whose resolution in favor of the working class is viewed by them as inevitable under plutocratic capitalism.