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.
Franklin Henry Little was an
American labor leader who was murdered in Butte, Montana. Although no one was apprehended or prosecuted for Little's murder, many people have speculated about it. He joined the Industrial Workers of the World in 1905, organizing miners, lumberjacks, and
oil field workers. He was a member of the union's Executive Board when he was murdered. In August 1913, he was kidnapped in the course of a
strike, held at gunpoint outside of the city, and dramatically rescued by union supporters. In 1914, Little was elected a member of the IWW's General Executive Board. Two years later he was kidnapped again, severely beaten, and mock hanged. In 1917, six masked men broke
… Read more into the boardinghouse where Frank Little was staying. Little was beaten in his room and abducted while still in his underwear. He was bundled into a car which sped away. Little was later tied to the car's rear bumper and dragged over the granite blocks of the street. Photographs of his body show that his knee-caps had possibly been scraped off. Little was taken to Milwaukee Bridge at the edge of town where he was then hanged from a railroad trestle.
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.
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