Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

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