Comrades, from the left: Eugene Debs, Bill Haywood, Rosa Luxembourg, V.I. Lenin. Gene Debs and Big Bill Haywood, activists for the Socialist Party and IWW, tried to keep the two together: they argued that both electoral campaigns and direct action were valid tactics, depending on the situation, and whether the target was an employer or a government. Unfortunately, there were those in the SP who wanted nothing to do with direct action, preferring to deal with the AFL, and those in IWW who rejected electoral participation on principle. Because Debs and Haywood lost out to these un-dialectical folks, the SP went one way, the IWW the other. In 1908, Big Bill went to a Socialist International Congress in Copenhagen, there he met, among others, Rosa Luxembourg and V.I. Lenin. They both had a more dialectical approach, and Lenin could point to something extraordinary, which took place the same year as the IWW was founded: the Russian Revolution of 1905, in which the Soviets made their first appearance. Because Russia was in the process of losing a war against Japan, the Soviets arose from a general strike, and began to function as a socialist government: the IWW also aimed for a general strike, but, with no such crisis brewing in the US at the time, it wasnt able to match the Soviets. What if Debs and Haywood could have pointed to the Soviet example as evidence for a dialectical approach? What if they had used its failure, like the Paris Commune before it, as s spur to get the Wobblies to organise farmworkers? Think of how much differently history could have turned out...
Posted on: Fri, 17 Oct 2014 22:30:35 +0000
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