Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

If the I.W.W. had fought colonialism and national
oppression, it would have lost most of its white support.
What it did instead - laying out a path that the CIO
would follow in the 1930s - was to convince some white
workers that their immediate self-interest called for a
limited, tactical cooperation with the colonial proletariats.
Underneath all the fancy talk that "In the I.W.W. the colored
worker, man or woman, is on an equal footing with
every other worker," was the reality that the I.W.W. was a
white organization for whites.
While this new immigrant industrial proletariat
was thrown together from many different European nations,
speaking different languages and having different
cultures and class backgrounds, they were united by two
things: their exploited state as"foreign" proletarians and
their desire to achieve a better life in Amerika. The resolution
of these pressures was in their Americanization, in
them becoming finally integrated into settler citizens of the
Empire. In changing Amerika they themselves were
decisively changed. Some one-third of the immigrant
workers went back to Europe, with many of the most militant
being deported or forced to flee.
Looking back this underlying trend can be seen in
thelifeof the I.W.W. Whilethe1.W.W. fancieditself asa
dangerous revolutionary organization, in reality it was
nothing more nor less than the best industrial union that
class conscious white workers could build to "improve
their condition." It was a public, fully legal union open to
all. It was, therefore, just as dependent upon bourgeois
legality and government toleration as the A.F.L. The
I.W.W. could be very strong against local employers or
even the municipal government; against the imperialist
state it dared only to submit in unhappy confusion. The
national I.W.W. leadership understood this unpleasant
fact in an unscientific, pragmatic way.