Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center
Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center
Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center
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Such an unwillingness to fight U.S. imperialism<br />
could hardly come from those with anti-imperialist<br />
politics. The reason we have to underline this is that for<br />
obvious ends the settler "Left" has been emphasizing how<br />
the I.W.W. was a mass example of anti-racist labor unity.<br />
This poisoned bait has been naively picked up by a number<br />
of Third-World revolutionary organizations, and used as<br />
one more small justification to move towards revisionistintegrationist<br />
ideology.<br />
There is no doubt that much of the I.W.W. genuinely<br />
despised the open, white-supremacist persecution<br />
of the colonial peoples. Unlike the smug, privileged A.F.L.<br />
aristocracy of labor, the I.W.W. represented the voice of<br />
those white workers who had suffered deeply and thus<br />
could sympathize with the persecuted. But their inability to<br />
confront the settleristic ambitions within themselves reduced<br />
these sparks of real class consciousness to vague sentiments<br />
and limited economic deals.<br />
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Sunday, Nov. 14th I8:Oo P M.1<br />
The I.W.W. never attempted to educate the most<br />
exploited white workers to unite with the national liberation<br />
struggles. Instead, it argued that "racial" unity on the<br />
job to raise wages was all that mattered. This is the approach<br />
used by the AFL-CIO today; obviously, it's a way<br />
of building a union in which white-supremacist workers<br />
tolerate colonial workers. This was the narrow, economic<br />
self-interest pitch underneath all the syndicalist talk. The<br />
I.W.W. warned white workers: "Leaving the Negro outside<br />
of your union makes him a potential, if not an actual,<br />
scab, dangerous to the organized workers.. . " (3 1) These<br />
words reveal that the I.W.W.'s goal was to control colonial<br />
labor for the benefit of white workers - and that<br />
Afrikans were viewed as "dangerous" if not controlled.<br />
So that even in 1919, after two years of severe<br />
"race riots" in the North (armed attacks by white workers<br />
on Afrikan exile communities), the I. W. W. kept insisting<br />
that there was: "...no race problem. There is only a class<br />
problem. The economic interests of all workers, be they<br />
white, black, brown or yellow, are identical, and all are included<br />
in the I.W.W. It has one program for the entire<br />
working class - "the abolition of the wage system." (32)<br />
The I.w.w.'s firm position of not fighting the lynch<br />
mobs, of not opposing the colonial system, allowed them<br />
to unite with the racist element in the factories - and<br />
helped prepare the immigrant proletariat for becoming<br />
loyal citizens of the Empire. It must never be forgotten<br />
that the I.W.W. contained genuinely proletarian forces,<br />
some of whom could have been led forward towards<br />
revolution.<br />
We can see this supposed unity actually at work in<br />
the I.W.W.'s relationship to the Japanese workers on the<br />
West Coast. In the Western region of the Empire the settler<br />
masses were deeply infected with anti-Asian hatred. Much<br />
of this at that time was directed at the new trickle of<br />
Japanese immigrant laborers, who were working mainly in<br />
agriculture, timber and railroads.<br />
These Japanese laborers were subjected to the<br />
most vicious persecution and exploitation, with the<br />
bourgeois politicians and press stirring up mob terror<br />
against them constantly. Both the Socialist Party of<br />
Eugene Debs and the A.F.L. unions helped lead the anti-<br />
Asian campaign among the settler masses. In April 1903,<br />
one thousand Japanese and Mexicano sugar beet workers<br />
struck near Oxnard, California. They formed the Sugar<br />
Beet & Farm Laborers Union, and wrote the A.F.L. asking<br />
for a union charter of affiliation.<br />
A.F.L. President Samual Gompers, in his usual<br />
treacherous style, tried in his reply to split the ranks of the<br />
oppressed: "Your union must guarantee that it will under<br />
no circumstances accept membership of any Chinese or<br />
Japanese."<br />
The union's Mexicano secretary (the President was<br />
Japanese) answered Gompers for his people: "In the past<br />
we have counseled, fought and lived on very short rations<br />
with our Japanese brothers, and toiled with them in the<br />
fields, and they have been uniformly kind and considerate.<br />
We would be false to them, and to ourselves and to the<br />
cause of unionism if we now accepted privileges for<br />
ourselves which are not accorded to them. We are going to<br />
stand by men who stood by us in the long, hard fight which<br />
ended in victory over the enemy." (33)<br />
Japanese workers were not only unable to find<br />
unity with the settler unions, but had to deal with them as<br />
part of the oppressor forces. There was a high level of<br />
organization among us, expressed usually in small, local,<br />
Japanese national minority associations of our own. The<br />
news, therefore, that the new I.W.W. was accepting Asian<br />
workers as members was quite welcome to us.<br />
In 1907 two white I.W.W. organizers went to the<br />
office of the North American Times, a Japanese-language<br />
newspaper in Seattle. They asked the newspaper to publish<br />
an announcement of a forthcoming meeting. As the<br />
newspaper happily informed its readers: "... every worker,<br />
no matter whether he is Japanese or Chinese, is invited ...<br />
This new organization does not exclude you as others do,<br />
but they heartily welcome you to join. Don't lose this<br />
69 chance." (34)