We try not to use abbreviations or terms that are not familiar to most people. The "IWW" used below refers to the Industrial Workers of the World, popularly known as the Wobblies. Please hit the links provided to learn more about them.
This year and next will mark a number of important labor and radical history anniversaries that should serve to remind us of our past, help us celebrate and organize in the present and prepare for the future. We have the Russian revolution, the west coast longshore organizing, the Minneapolis Teamster strike, the Seattle general strike, the WTO protests and a number of other events to integrate into our work. A commemoration can be modest or a really big deal. Since I don't know a group of people locally who celebrate the liberation of Yugoslavia, or who know much about our Tito, I end up marking the day myself. On the other hand, our Communist Party is rightfully making a big deal out of being 90 years old this year; it has a legacy and past to be proud of.
Ask a group of union members why we should study labor history and you almost always get the answer that we should study history so that we don't make the same mistakes over again. It's a good answer, almost always given by rote learning, but it never satisfies me. If we learned froim our past, labor would be much further along as a movement. Instead, we repeat the same errors and each repitition looks like a sad caricature of the past. So I tell our sisters and brothers that it's okay if you study history for the fun of it, devouring like you might a good meal, or if it awakens in you some passions and curiosity that are ends in themselves or if you can use history as a weapon in the class struggle.
Yesterday and today two of us attended the anniversary of the Centralia Tragedy in Centralia, Washington. A planned and coordinated attack on an IWW hall by members of the American Legion in Centralia on Armistice Day of 1919 left 4 Legionnaires dead. Retaliation came with the horrible assassination or lynching of IWW member Wesley Everest by leading citizens of the town and a prolonged period of repression directed against labor and radical forces in the area. The events of that day still drive people to passionate discussions. A thoughtful mural and an old statue at the Centralia courthouse and Everest's rediscovered grave all help tell the story. The conference was well-attended and there was a good mix of local people with out-of-towners and spanned three generations.
The commemorative conference featured music by Mark Ross taken from labor's past and brought to life in the present. Mark has been a fixture on the left since the 1970s and much of his music reaches back in time for inspiration and energy. I am not a big fan of most so-called "labor music." I would be more of a fan if I knew more workers who sang it and if more of the singers came out of the working class and could use their music to interpret our lived experiences today. Hazel Dickens has been doing it for years.
We saw a brief preview of a still-being-produced film on the Centralia Tragedy by a local student. This looked interesting and homegrown without suffering from cliches or sentimentality. This project is called "The Forgotten: Armistice Day 1919" and we wish Michael Duffy, the film's producer, good luck.
Less satisfying for me was the long documentary film "Lewis County: Hope and Struggles" made by Anne Fischel. Fischel teaches at The Evergreen State College. The film deals with the Tragedy, has a long middle section on Lewis County farming and touches on some of the issues and struggles at stake in today's labor movement.
The film's strong point is in its ability to capture some of the details of the Tragedy and to arouse discussion and debate. It's well-made and meditative. It has footage of the IWW men who survived the repression of 1919 and this footage is slowed to give them fully human dimensions which allows the audience to identify with them. The film doesn't clobber you with facts and transmits some radical thinking quite well.
The downside is that the film transitions from labor issues to farming issues and then back to labor issues poorly and the family farmers interviewed seem to veer into right-wing populism in their interviews. This all passes without comment or needed context. THe IWW would not accept farmers, even tenant farmers, as members. The larger left had a place for them, but this flew very much ion the face of the IWW. The question of whether farmers are capitalists, part of a laboring middle class or part of the proletariat is never dealt with and this makes the film and the filmmaker's intentions somewhat confusing.
The other obvious downside is that the film does not deal with the complexities of the cases of the arrested IWW members, doesn't say much about what happened to them and doesn't critically examine the IWW.
The Saturday sessions we attended were a bit better. Mark Ross was still singing. There was some back-and-forth between Centralia residents and conference speakers. I found the readings of affidavits collected in the twenties and thirties testifying to the innocence of the railroaded IWW members enlightening and moving.
But the overwhelming questions skirted in the conference remain with me: how valid was IWW thinking and practice? How valid could it be today? How does a movement or an organization which claims to hold advanced working class thinking in its hands and head become so dogmatic? The conference was, in some sense, an IWW conference in disguise. We have to judge the IWW along with the conference.
By 1922, and certainly by 1928, most of the IWW's best organizers and most class-conscious members had joined the Communist Party. That said, none of the speakers gave the Party or its broader solidarity organizations much credit at the conference without being pushed to do so. The anarchists--and the IWW is an anarchist organization, regardless of what they say--are rewriting history and casting themselves as its victims. Lenin dealt with their politics, idealism and opportunism in some of his best writings.
Wesley Everest and the other arrested and railroaded Wobblies were indeed victims. But there were hints in the conference presentations that they had little or no grasp of what they were up against, that they lacked a collective discipline and that they attracted a marginal group of workers to their fold and could organize no further than that. Aaron Goings gave a balanced and scholarly presentation on the IWW but was cut off before he could properly finish his talk that might have helped clarify some of these questions.
I won't recommend "Lewis County: Hope and Struggle" or the politics that motivated it. Additional study and debate are needed as we approach the questions raised by the IWW.
Michael Duffy has the hope that an interpretive center can be built in Centralia which will explain the Tragedy to people. It is greatly needed.
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