Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

Such an unwillingness to fight U.S. imperialism
could hardly come from those with anti-imperialist
politics. The reason we have to underline this is that for
obvious ends the settler "Left" has been emphasizing how
the I.W.W. was a mass example of anti-racist labor unity.
This poisoned bait has been naively picked up by a number
of Third-World revolutionary organizations, and used as
one more small justification to move towards revisionistintegrationist
ideology.
There is no doubt that much of the I.W.W. genuinely
despised the open, white-supremacist persecution
of the colonial peoples. Unlike the smug, privileged A.F.L.
aristocracy of labor, the I.W.W. represented the voice of
those white workers who had suffered deeply and thus
could sympathize with the persecuted. But their inability to
confront the settleristic ambitions within themselves reduced
these sparks of real class consciousness to vague sentiments
and limited economic deals.
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The I.W.W. never attempted to educate the most
exploited white workers to unite with the national liberation
struggles. Instead, it argued that "racial" unity on the
job to raise wages was all that mattered. This is the approach
used by the AFL-CIO today; obviously, it's a way
of building a union in which white-supremacist workers
tolerate colonial workers. This was the narrow, economic
self-interest pitch underneath all the syndicalist talk. The
I.W.W. warned white workers: "Leaving the Negro outside
of your union makes him a potential, if not an actual,
scab, dangerous to the organized workers.. . " (3 1) These
words reveal that the I.W.W.'s goal was to control colonial
labor for the benefit of white workers - and that
Afrikans were viewed as "dangerous" if not controlled.
So that even in 1919, after two years of severe
"race riots" in the North (armed attacks by white workers
on Afrikan exile communities), the I. W. W. kept insisting
that there was: "...no race problem. There is only a class
problem. The economic interests of all workers, be they
white, black, brown or yellow, are identical, and all are included
in the I.W.W. It has one program for the entire
working class - "the abolition of the wage system." (32)
The I.w.w.'s firm position of not fighting the lynch
mobs, of not opposing the colonial system, allowed them
to unite with the racist element in the factories - and
helped prepare the immigrant proletariat for becoming
loyal citizens of the Empire. It must never be forgotten
that the I.W.W. contained genuinely proletarian forces,
some of whom could have been led forward towards
revolution.
We can see this supposed unity actually at work in
the I.W.W.'s relationship to the Japanese workers on the
West Coast. In the Western region of the Empire the settler
masses were deeply infected with anti-Asian hatred. Much
of this at that time was directed at the new trickle of
Japanese immigrant laborers, who were working mainly in
agriculture, timber and railroads.
These Japanese laborers were subjected to the
most vicious persecution and exploitation, with the
bourgeois politicians and press stirring up mob terror
against them constantly. Both the Socialist Party of
Eugene Debs and the A.F.L. unions helped lead the anti-
Asian campaign among the settler masses. In April 1903,
one thousand Japanese and Mexicano sugar beet workers
struck near Oxnard, California. They formed the Sugar
Beet & Farm Laborers Union, and wrote the A.F.L. asking
for a union charter of affiliation.
A.F.L. President Samual Gompers, in his usual
treacherous style, tried in his reply to split the ranks of the
oppressed: "Your union must guarantee that it will under
no circumstances accept membership of any Chinese or
Japanese."
The union's Mexicano secretary (the President was
Japanese) answered Gompers for his people: "In the past
we have counseled, fought and lived on very short rations
with our Japanese brothers, and toiled with them in the
fields, and they have been uniformly kind and considerate.
We would be false to them, and to ourselves and to the
cause of unionism if we now accepted privileges for
ourselves which are not accorded to them. We are going to
stand by men who stood by us in the long, hard fight which
ended in victory over the enemy." (33)
Japanese workers were not only unable to find
unity with the settler unions, but had to deal with them as
part of the oppressor forces. There was a high level of
organization among us, expressed usually in small, local,
Japanese national minority associations of our own. The
news, therefore, that the new I.W.W. was accepting Asian
workers as members was quite welcome to us.
In 1907 two white I.W.W. organizers went to the
office of the North American Times, a Japanese-language
newspaper in Seattle. They asked the newspaper to publish
an announcement of a forthcoming meeting. As the
newspaper happily informed its readers: "... every worker,
no matter whether he is Japanese or Chinese, is invited ...
This new organization does not exclude you as others do,
but they heartily welcome you to join. Don't lose this
69 chance." (34)