A Wobbly Perspective

The Aesthetics of Resistance

Whatever your politics — and your perspective should be evolving — we need the Wobblies' spirit today.

Were they Comm… Commu… Comirnatyists? The Bolsheviks didn’t exist yet. Resistance to robber baron brutality explains enough. If you are a corporate type you’ve been duped: your bosses back in the day financed the Russian putsch. Did you notice the they’re still trying to reset society?

Monopoly capitalism is morphing into something with less soul than autocracy, more invasive than a police state and more total than any totalitarian project. Take a moment to fist bump a Wobbly and learn what they can teach us.

Timeless scene from Union Square, NYC, just before police attacked one of the Wobblies’ leading speakers, “Wild Joe” O’Carroll, in Nov 1914 [1]

Sep 4, 2021 — For Labor Day Weekend

There was no time to waste. Within minutes the union busters and Pinkertons would be arriving, paid thugs of the most aggressive robber barons and the forerunners to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The trick was to mount your soapbox, summon a crowd and, in rapid order: deliver a message, inspire and motivate, then skedaddle without being caught or beaten.

The original pop-up protest!

Time allotted: no more than two minutes — about the same as it would take nowadays for facial recognition and voice sensors to identify you and dispatch the police. [2]

The Wobblies, as the International Workers of the World were nicknamed, were not all factory workers. Many were unskilled day laborers existing as hobos. These hired hands were denied full membership of society, just like the marginal outsourced labor one finds in Asia today. [And since this was written, increasingly in the West - Apr 2024.]

Economic destruction during Event Covid could easily match or exceed that of a century ago. Emergency bans on evictions are ending and the ejected may find it hard to rent anew. Millions who refuse shots to modify their RNA could find themselves out of work.

Thunderbird jawsmiths

Wobbly oratory evolved because they were target number one for the corporations determined to stop the spread of unionism in the Americas. Wobblies got their name from the animated use of arms as gesticulation to draw attention to their words.

By no means were they form over substance. Their songs and speeches stand the test of time and their windmill arms have been adopted by television reporters today.

At the climax of his epic poem Letters to an Imaginary Friend, poet and Wobbly Thomas McGrath summons "thunderbird jawsmiths and soapbox phoenixes."

McGrath (1916-1990) knew these stump orators, east coast dockers and sailors, their diction colored by the fluid immigrant patois of the 19th century. His acquaintances were stevedores or waterfront manual laborers who loaded ships and trucks in the crammed and bustling workforce of the 1940s, and those who jumped aboard the trains working their way west, passing the stragglers still displaced by the Depression.

In his semi-autobiographical work McGrath calls out to these larger-than-life characters. He turns into the west wind and hails their spirit. Then from north, east and south, through water and fire, he beckons — bids them rise up from the "ice-lined, rolling coffins of the U.P. Line," the first transcontinental railroad.

His roving, vagabond idiom and industrial inventions reclaimed the language and reflect his observation that language is deliberately fuddled to flummox the people.

That language is used to delude is obvious today. McGrath exposes the systematic nature of overwriting people's own reality as part of the methodology of exploitation.

Language is appropriated, stolen and, despite the supposed digital era, locked down. I would like to read McGrath's Letters in full but there is no digital copy and I'm in Central Asia. Even the Jstor reviews may as well be across the Styx with Aaron Swartz.

The extracts I have found tell me that McGrath saw wealth producers repressed not just by the baton wielder but by corporatist media, paid to bury the people's voice.

Aesthetics of Resistance

Characters leap from McGrath's recollection, huge in size compared to modern activists or political performance artists. What don’t we have? Why are we shrivelled? He says it’s a lack not of politics, ideology, will or power but depth of humanity.

“As a poet I must refuse to cooperate with the committee on what I can only call aesthetic grounds… It is a view of life according to probability or necessity, not subject to the chance or accident of our real world and therefore in a sense truer than the life we see lived all around us.”

So he told the House Un-American Activities Committee which arraigned him in 1953.

“I believe that one of the things required of us is… to give it some of the pattern and beauty of art… It would be destructive of the pattern of my life if I were to cooperate with the committee.”

Most academics went along with the witch hunt. Few spoke up as McGrath was fired from teaching at Los Angeles State University and so he devoted himself to the Letters.

His language bears no relation to the narrow, codified jargon of the academic political constructs. In the real world that he describes there is no room for the ideologue theorizing the necessary permission to act outside one's privilege — or issuing fatwas of cancellation.

It's fair to conclude that he would have found nothing of interest in the anodyne, deconstructed stencil-people of postmodern archetype. The feeling is probably mutual.

It is impossible to frame McGrath within the taut theoretical paradigms of politically correct discourse. Perhaps as a result he gets less attention than he deserves, despite ranking with Pound, Ginsberg, Crane and Williams, in the view of Charlotte Mandel writing in Poets' Quarterly. [3]

Beyond rant

A good rant can take a stand against injustice and foul play, The ranter thumps the table enumerating, rhythmically, key objections.

It should be brief and, though employing caricature, accurate. The best sparkle with a flash of rhetoric.

It vents anger but — and here's my quibble — it can be part of the assenting process: raging at the keyboard before submitting bashfully. Flirting with outsider before fading into sheepishness.

We did this as children. It's part of the obedience process. If you make an effort to trawl recollections of far-off days you may dredge up a memory of the techniques your parents used to take down a ranter:

• Break a task into little steps. 'Okay, not the whole room. Just clean your desk.'

• Back off, suspend criticism and watch for a positive reaction.

• Good cop, bad cop.

• Praise you: 'You're so right about X. Let's agree Y.'

• Small concessions.

We can already see this technique being used to manipulate opposition to lockdown by the government behavioural psychologists.

What's great about rants? Mass appeal. They are not overtly political and can get a point across but only if you restrict yourself to that one point. I like this short rant by the writer Mark Chisnell about kettles, specifically, spouts. [4]

Rant is protest. But “protest is when I say this does not please me. Resistance is when I ensure that what does not please me occurs no more.”

Voice of dispossessed

Whereas a rant hollers against unfairness, the soapbox oration delivers a succinct message followed by a call to action. It challenges the mighty to rise up and seize what's theirs.

Matthew May in his PhD dissertation Hobo Orator Union argues the employers conspired to build and maintain a mass of itinerant hobos as a reserve army of laborers. Today economists would see this in the context of the output gap. Back then, criminal gangs preyed upon them, stinging them for access to jobs then robbing them of their earnings and running them out of town when no longer needed. [5]

As the Sans-papiers of the 21st-century, they had no rights and lived on society's margins. When May wrote his paper he had as a comparison the "summit-hopping hobos of the global justice movement in the post-Seattle world,” who sought to expand their protests against the World Trade Organization held in November 1999.

Today we have the very real prospect of a class of unvaccinated whom the state-capitalist media already brands Refuseniks — those to whom the Soviet state refused emigration while punishing them for asking. Many were fired from skilled occupations and had to take menial jobs like street sweeping, or were imprisoned on charges of social parasitism.

Wobblies anticipated the Refuseniks by 50 years and ourselves by a century.

May quotes the Wobbly Utah Philips (1935–2008) on the way to gather an audience: An orator would shout, “help, help, I’ve been robbed!” To the assembled crowd he would continue: “I’ve been robbed by the capitalist system, fellow workers!”

"The IWW were fond of many different genres of speaking and audiences often experienced a mélange of impromptu or extemporaneous address, lecture, recitation, poetry (in addition to IWW poets such as Agnes Thecla Fair or Covington Hall, they speak fondly of Whitman and Shelley for example), and frequently, song."

Folklorist Archie Greene (1917-2009) said “unlike many radicals before and after... the IWW accepted strange accents, surreal deliveries, zany humor, and pungent cartoons as proper in the organization’s discourse.”

If the Salvation Army band drowned them out, the Wobblies followed the tune with their own words. They even had an anthem, “Hallelujah I’m a Bum,” that encouraged call and response from the crowd.

And though they could easily hold an audience for half an hour many were arrested within seconds of opening. These became "free speech fights" in which one Wobbly after another would step up to speak, be arrested and replace another, testing the police's capacity to the limits.

This was no easy choice. One torture of Spokane police was to put up to 30 men in a room 10 feet by 8 and let them sweat, sometimes with an open steam vent.

Know thine enemy

We are assured if we compromise now, just one more lockdown will secure safety and peace. A final sacrifice has been the sales pitch of authoritarian regimes forever.

Progress was the excuse 100 years ago. The Wobblies had to listen to those who said progress was more important than resistance. Compromise with the boss, earn a little more, fatten the people a little, and they’d be keener to fight in the future having more to defend.

A century on, there is the same progressive promise of jam tomorrow. Bureaucrats assure the people they’ll get their life back, along with the five freedoms, if they just take another shot. But your vaccine “passport” expires if you don’t take the booster.

“You'll own nothing and you'll be happy.” Sell your present for the future and trust us, says the World Economic Forum’s Klaus Schwab his partner Prince Charles, who launched The Great Reset in June 2020.

As dispossessed itinerants they saw clearly — the hobos above all — that what matters is today. Tomorrow never comes.

Talking Wobbly

What does a Wobbly speech look like? As delivered by Phil Melman of San Fransisco, and performed by Utah Philips: [6]

Fellow workers, the Industrial Workers of the World is going to organize the entire working class. What is the working class, fellow workers? Well, the working class is anybody that's got a boss and works for wages. You got a boss and work for wages you're working class doesn't matter if you are a college professor or a ditch digger you're in the working class and better be proud of it. Why, the middle class is just a joke made up by the boss to keep us fighting against each other. Now, the Industrial Workers of the World is going to organize the working class into one big union of all skilled, semi skilled and unskilled workers, the Little Big Union. Got the LBU, we'll have a general strike. A strike like that will last about half an hour. Then we're going to take this thing apart and put it together so it makes more sense with the means of production in the hands of the producers: producing for you instead of profits; creating abundance for workers and nothing for parasites. Thank you.

Duration: 00:00:40

Exercise: Pause this article and write your own 40-second speech, aimed at persuading someone you don’t know to rethink their perception. Don’t tell them what to do. Challenge them.

Now read it out loud. Open your mouth as wide as you can. Emphasise your diction. Pro-noun-ce. Do it again until you make yourself heard.

Record it and shudder. We all sound awful on mic.

Here’s the trick. Over act. Clown it up. Exaggerate your words until it’s ridiculous and your teeth fall out. Then dial it back.

Now speak and move your arms at the same time. Watch the BBC reporters and move twice as much but with the conviction that they so obviously lack.

Congratulations. You Wobble.

Epilogue

The IWW had their own problems. Although they insisted their newspaper, Industrial Worker, was an absolute priority, ideological disputes between the executive suspended publication in the crucial years of 1913-1916.

Yet in today’s lingo, they managed to execute. They revolutionized political discourse and their effectiveness may be measured by the prolonged violence of the corporate and bureaucratic effort to exterminate them. The Palmer raids under President Woodrow Wilson from 1919 to 1921 arrested tens of thousands of activists, deporting at least 250 immigrants including notable anarchist Emma Goldman, and launching the career of Edgar J. Hoover. [7]

Can you say Progressive? If so, can you define it and explain it to the descendants of the Wobblies?

A century later there is much evidence to suggest the first red scare was overblown — and we also know that the banks, corporations and corporatist media had financed, assisted and promoted the very Bolsheviks whom they claimed were so frightening. [8]

Does it look like it was a pincer movement to frame and disrupt the labor markets and shape society for the benefit of The Investors?

If the Wobblies were set up to fail, they struggled valiantly and left a powerful example. No-one can say that each and every Wobbly was genuine. The Pinkerton-FBI had prancing provocateurs and agent stoolies as they do today. But the Wobblies seem more solid by comparison with later political movements.

Many suffered at the hands of brutal police who reserve for the honorable a bloody torture that blotyed the mirror, if they cared to revisit their own transgression. And Wobblies in vast numbers paid a high price, while leaving us a legacy that stands monumental in our time. [9]

NOTES:

[1] Ed. Tony Michels — Jewish Radicals: A Documentary History (2012), page 101 records how police attacked the Union Square meeting of Nov 2014 as O’Carroll was speaking. The beating he received led to his death some months later.

[2] John Sudworth, BBC, 2017 — China: "the world's biggest camera surveillance network" - BBC News

[3] Poets' Quarterly, Charlotte Mandel — The American Long Poem Goes West: Thomas McGrath’s Letter to an Imaginary Friend

[4] Mark Chisnell, 2016 — Pointless Rants

[5] Matthew May, PhD dissertation, 2009 — Hobo Orator Union: The Free Speech Fights of the Industrial Workers of the World, 1909-1916

[6] Utah Phillips - Soapbox Oration

[7] Steven Parfitt — The Justice Department Campaign Against the IWW, 1917-1920

[8] The Guardian, 2001: MI5 detained Trotsky on way to revolution but released after intervention by MI6

[9] These fine speakers are worth you time while you switch off CNN:

Frank Cedervall (1904-1996) and Ohio leader of IWW, speaking in the 1980s and transcript of a speech in 1972

Mario Savio (1942-1996). Not a Wobbly but his "bodies upon the gears" speech of 1964 is comparable given its brevity and power.