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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Magon once angrily wrote his brother from<br />
prison: "The norteamericanos are incapable of feeling enthusiasm<br />
or indignation. This is truly a country of pigs ... If<br />
the norteamericanos do not agitate against their own<br />
domestic miseries, can we hope they will concern<br />
themselves with ours?"(39)<br />
In outlining these things we are, of course, not just<br />
discussing the I.W.W. Primarily we are looking at the forming<br />
consciousness and leadership of a new class: the<br />
white industrial proletariat. The same general weaknesses<br />
of this class can be seen outside the I.W.W. even more<br />
sharply: lack of revolutionary leadership, inability to<br />
withstand the sabotage of the labor aristocrats of the<br />
"native-born" Euro-Amerikan workers, opposition to the<br />
anti-colonial struggles. The great industrial battles in steel<br />
at the end of this period show not only these weaknesses,<br />
but emphasize the significance of what this meant.<br />
This was evident in the 1919 steel strike, for example,<br />
in which for the first time fifteen A.F.L. unions called<br />
an industry-wide strike. On Sept. 22, 1919 some 365,000<br />
steelworkers walked out. But while the mass of nonunionized,<br />
immigrant European laborers held firm, the<br />
unionized Euro-Amerikan skilled workers were a weak element.<br />
Capitalist repression had an effect - most notably<br />
in Gary, Indiana, where a division of U.S. Army troops<br />
broke the'strike - but the defeat was due to the incredibly<br />
bad leadership and the betrayal by the better-paid settler<br />
workers. The disaster of the strike shows why even the inadequate<br />
politics of the I.W.W. looked so good to the proletarians<br />
of that day.<br />
72 Many of the skilled Euro-Amerikan workers never