-- At 11:22 PM 12/11/2000 -0500, R. A. Hettinga wrote:

http://www.ainfos.ca/en/ainfos05508.html

Looks like the Wobblies live...

The wobblies never lived. In the USA, class struggle unionism collapsed at the end of the nineteenth century. The wobblies were a "union" composed almost entirely of the leadership of vanished class struggle unions, with very few actual workers among their membership. All chiefs, no indians. From the very beginning in 1905, the wobblies were a nostalgic look back to the glory days of the 1870s and 1880s of class struggle unionism, as if in 1980 some forty year old ex hippies were to form a commune in memory of the sixties. During the early days of unionism, the 1870s, many unionists believed that the union was destined to replace the capitalist. Some of them believed the union would replace the capitalist while retaining the market economy in whole or part (syndicalism) and some believed the union would replace the capitalist and the entire market economy (socialism, one big union) In some parts of America they actually had some substantial success with this program. It then instantly became apparent that replacing the authority of the man who pays you, with the authority of the man you elected, was not an improvement, because the man you elected (claiming to be "the workers") claimed the authority to punish individual workers who did not do as they were told, whereas the unelected man with money claimed no such authority. After several horrifying incidents in which unions indiscriminantly murdered numerous members of the working class, class struggle unionism became violently unpopular among the working class in the USA. It then steadily and rapidly lost power to bread and butter unionism, sometimes voted out, and sometimes, when the violence of the class struggle union made voting and competition impossible, crushed by the militia. After all the class struggle unions had irrevocably lost power or been crushed, the washed up remnants of their leadership, remembering the glory days of their youth, formed the IWW, the wobblies, from remnants of the leadership groups of 57 different class struggle unions. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG SMD7xSkJ6JMdVcy9MegPQnRKEudA52hh9CVA4W14 4zka+pWxZEcihvPyDXbhTOTW1YuC93TklE6KwF97g