Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center
Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center
Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center
Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
ple, they were willing to sacrifice the interests of colonial<br />
and oppressed workers in order to gain their real goal -<br />
the unity of all white workers.<br />
While it was advantageous for the I.W.W. to keep<br />
Asians at arms length, in occupied New Afrika there was<br />
literally no way to build industrial unions without winning<br />
the cooperation of Afrikan workers. In the South the<br />
Afrikan proletariat was the bed-rock of everything. The<br />
I.W.W. experience there highlights the strategic limitations<br />
of its political line.<br />
In 1910 an independent union, the Brotherhood of<br />
Timber Workers, was formed in Louisiana and Mississippi.<br />
This was to become the main part of the I.W.W.'s Deep<br />
South organizing. These Southern settler workers were on<br />
the very bottom of the settler world. They were forced to<br />
labor for $7-9 per week - and that mostly not in cash, but<br />
in "scrip" usable only at the company stores. Their very<br />
exploited lives were comparable to that of the "Hunky"<br />
and "Dago" of the Northern industrial towns. In other<br />
words, they lived a whole level below the norm of settler<br />
society.<br />
For that reason the settler timberworkers were<br />
driven to build themselves a union. And because half of<br />
the workforce in the industry was Afrikan, they had to<br />
recruit Afrikans as well. Half of the 35,000 BTW members<br />
were Afrikan - organized into "seg" lodges and not admitted<br />
to the settler union meetings, of course. It was not a<br />
case of radicalism or idealism: the settler worker was<br />
literally forced by practical necessity to gain the cooperation<br />
of Afrikan workers. In a major pamphlet in which he<br />
calls on settler timberworkers to join up with the I.W.W.,<br />
the BTW's secretary, Jay Smith, reminds them that the<br />
controversial policy of integrating the union existed solely<br />
to keep Afrikans under control:<br />
"As far as the 'negro question' goes, it means<br />
simply this: Either the whites organize with the negroes, or<br />
the bosses will organize the negroes against the whites ..."<br />
(38)<br />
In 1912 the BTW joined the I.W.W., after integrating<br />
its union meetings at the demand of "Big Bill"<br />
Haywood. The I.W.W. now had a major labor drive going<br />
in the Deep South. But a few months later the BTW was<br />
totally crushed in the Merryville, La. strike of 1912. In a<br />
four-day reign of terror the local sheriff and company<br />
thugs beat, kidnapped and "deported" the strike activists.<br />
The BTW was dissolved by terror as hundreds of members<br />
had to flee the State and many more were white-listed and<br />
could no longer find work in that industry.<br />
The 1.W .W.'s refusal to recognize colonial oppression<br />
or the exact nature of the imperialist dictatorship over<br />
the occupied South, meant that it completely misled the<br />
strike. Industrial struggle in the Deep South could not<br />
develop separate from the tense, continuous relationship<br />
between the settler garrison and the occupied Afrikan nation.<br />
The I.W.W. in the South swiftly fell apart. They were<br />
unable to cope with the violent, terroristic situation.<br />
The I.W.W. had a use for oppressed colonial<br />
workers, and it certainly didn't conduct campaigns of mob<br />
terror against us. It publicly reminded white workers of the<br />
supposed rights of the colonial peoples; but as a white<br />
workers union it had no political program, no practical<br />
answers for the problems of the colonial proletariat. And<br />
insofar as it tried to convince everyone that there was a<br />
solution for the problems of colonial workers separate<br />
from liberation for their oppressed nations, it did a<br />
positive disservice.*<br />
The I.W.W. lived, rose and fell, at the same time<br />
as the great Mexican Revolution of 1910 just across the artificial<br />
"border." For this syndicalist organization to have<br />
reached out and made common cause with the anticolonial<br />
revolutions would have been quite easy. On<br />
November 27, 191 1 the Zapatistas proclaimed the Plan of<br />
Ayala, setting forth the agrarian revolution. It was from<br />
the U.S.-occupied territory of El Paso that <strong>Francisco</strong> Villa<br />
and seven others began the guerrilla struggle in Chihuahua<br />
on March 6, 1913. Hundreds of thousands of peasants<br />
joined Zapata's Liberator Army of the South and Villa's<br />
Division of the North. Even the Villistas, less politically<br />
developed than their Southern compatriots, were social<br />
revolutionaries. Villa, a rebel who had taught himself to<br />
read while in prison, was openly anti-clerical at a time<br />
when Roman Catholicism was the official religion of Mexico.<br />
He called the Church "the greatest superstition the<br />
world has ever known." The Villista government in<br />
Chihuahua founded fifty new schools and divided the land<br />
up among the peasants.<br />
This popular uprising spread the spirit of rebellion<br />
across the artificial "border" into the U.S.-occupied zone.<br />
One California historian writes: The dislocation caused by<br />
the Mexican Revolution of 1912-191 7 led to an increasingly<br />
militant political attitude in Los Angeles. This led to a<br />
Chicano movement to boycott the draft. Vicente Carillo<br />
led a drive to protest the draft and to use mass meetings to<br />
focus attention upon Mexican-American economic problems.<br />
" Again, it is easy to see that the I.W.W. didn't<br />
have far to look if they wanted alliances against the U.S.<br />
Empire.<br />
Proposals were even made that the I.W.W. and<br />
Mexicano workers join in armed uprisings in the<br />
Southwest. Ricardo Flores Magon, the revolutionary syndicalist<br />
who was the first major leader of Mexicano<br />
workers, had ties to the I.W.W. during his long years of<br />
exile in the U.S. His organization, the Partido Liberal<br />
Mexicano (PLM), led thousands of Mexicano miners in<br />
strikes on both sides of the artificial "border." Magon was<br />
imprisoned four times by the U.S. Empire, finally being<br />
murdered by guards to prevent his scheduled release from<br />
Ft. Leavenworth. His proposal for the I.W.W. to join<br />
forces with the Mexicano proletariat in armed struggle fell<br />
on deaf ears. Although some "Wobblies" (such as Joe<br />
Hill) went to Mexico on an individual basis for periods of<br />
time, the I.W.W. as a whole rejected such cooperation.<br />
*It is interesting to note that even on the<br />
Philadelphia waterfront, where the Afrikan-led I.W.W.<br />
Marine Transport Workers Union No. 8 was the most<br />
stable local in the entire I.W.W., the Afrikan workers<br />
eventually felt forced to leave the I.W.W. due to "slanderJ<br />
, baseless charges and race-baiting. "