Industrial Workers of the World

Ian Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics, p.64-66

From late in 1908 there was unrest in the Australian I.W.W. clubs as more and more of the members advocated the adoption of the new preamble and the industrial tactics that went with it. The De Leonists denounced this "anarchistic" tendency in the movement, but it could not be quelled: as the socialists of the SFA grew increasingly disgusted with the role of the Labour Parties and governments in industrial disputes, and increasingly disheartened with their own failure to make electoral headway, so they turned to the shining promise of Chicago. Finally on the 6th May 1911, a meeting convened in Adelaide by a De Leonist but attended largely by members of the SFA resolved to form a "mixed local" of the Chicago I.W.W. and to begin recruiting members to the new union of the I.W.W. The Sydney I.W.W. Club found this "insane", but from the fourteen " muddle headed prejudiced and ignorant pseudo socialists" who constituted the Adelaide local grew the most significant revolutionary movement the Australian working class has yet known.

Six months later a group of dissidents in the Sydney I.W.W. Club, formed themselves into a local and applied for a charter from Adelaide, which the Chicago headquarters had nominated as the Australian administration of the I.W.W. In both Sydney and Adelaide the inspiration was not so much anarchism as dissatisfaction with the identification of the I.W.W. Club with the SLP; the Socialist Federation welcomed the formation of the new I.W.W. which the secretary of the Australian Administration declared was "neither pro-political nor anti-political but purely economic". The I.W.W. Club approached the new Sydney local, seeking unity but was told that this was possible only on the based of the Chicago preamble which omitted any mention of political action; and renewed discussions between the SLP and the newly constituted Australasian Socialist Party broke down on the SLP insistence that the unified party endorse its version of the I.W.W. ...

But the first Australian followers of the Chicago school had misunderstood both the nature and the essential appeal of the syndicalist doctrine. It was not enough that the new I.W.W. should be non-political - it must be anti- political, as well as anti-capitalist, anti-respectable and anti- patriotic. This was what Chicago offered, and this was what a significant part of the Australian working class was ready to receive. So, in Sydney, the same "cantankerous and disruptive elements" as had taken over the American I.W.W. invaded the No. 2 Australian local and succeeded in capturing it. The founders of the local departed indignantly; the ASP returned to the fold of the De Leonost I.W.W.; the physical-force element was left to propagate direct action, sabotage, and a plague on King, Country, Capitalism and the Law.
The vigour of this lower depths agitation for industrial unionism gave a new impetuous to the top level movement for closer unionism. The great AWU amalgamation was carried though; the craft unions through their Labour Councils joined in a pretentious Federal Grand Council of Labor which had a strictly limited power "to advise in respect to, and if deemed necessary, by the state council to control or endeavour to prevent any dispute with employers extending, or likely to extend beyond the limits of any one state"; the NSW mass unions not to be outdone formed a Federation of Labour which was denounced by the craft unions as No. 2 Labour Council, and later an Australian Union Federation which was denounced by the I.W.W. as an attempt to shackle the legs of trade unionists whose hands were already tied by arbitration. On the revolutionary front the I.W.W. Club had fallen away by mid-1913 to under a hundred members; the SLP was complaining of "apathy and indifference" and its membership was less then 300; the membership of the VSP was down to 200 odd and the circulation of its paper to 1500; and the desperate efforts of the political socialists to meet the challenge of the I.W.W. by uniting their declining strengths all foundered on sectarian bitterness.

Meanwhile the I.W.W. Chicago style flourished. Its propaganda was simple and effective and had a ready appeal especially to the itinerant and unskilled workers who were to be its source of strength ...

And its members were young and enthusiastic, with a burning conviction in the faith they professed and a total contempt for the boss and the law. They roamed Australia, at first in a handful, then five hundred, then a thousand or more of them, with copies of Direct Action in their swags and red cards and song-books in their pockets, working wherever their was a boss to trouble, agitating wherever there was a street corner or stump, forming locals and filling gaols, and when the war came and they were called to battle, they fought - not against their foreign brothers, but against the enemies at home.

Roger Coats, Note on the Industrial Workers of the World

 " in September 1910, H.E. Denford, a delegate from the South Australian Socialist Party to the 1910 SFA conference, brought the discussion of the I.W.W. clubs into the columns of the International Socialist. He argued that the I.W.W. clubs did not represent the I.W.W., and urged the formation of the I.W.W. in Australia. Denford who was later the first secretary of the Sydney local ...had a background of experience in the Australian Workers Union and the Amalgamated Miners' Association, as shed hand and labourer. He had first hand knowledge of the problems of disunity in Port Pirie and Broken Hill during and after the 1909 lockout, and was one of the militants boycotted of the Barrier.

Denford’s opening gambit was applauded by one who wrote as more of an anarchist than anything else. "In a real I.W.W. movement Anarchists, Socialists, Laborites and other wage earners could work together for the working class emancipation. I should like to see a move made to form a nucleus of the I.W.W. movement in Sydney. "
In a further statement Denford expressed at length the case for a new economic organisation. "Reports from America go to show that the best of its working class, the militant-fighters, are joining the I.W.W. as a result of their recognition of the uselessness of political action. I say we must place more reliance on the economic organisation of the working class on the lines of the I.W.W. for the important changes to come. It is folly to hope for the transformation of society by political action or even with the aid of our present sectional form of organisation. The emancipation of the working class must be the act of themselves alone, not by proxies and ballot boxes.

... The working class must prepare by the organising of the workers into industrial unions and the grouping of these for their common interests to take into their own hands the direction and contral of production and distribution of the means of life."

In the upshot the nucleus which "Industrial Unionist" called for did not first form in Sydney but in Adelaide. In July 1909, a South Australian union conference had considered the question of industrial unionism. In the period of the Broken Hill lockout and its aftermath of trials and agitation, Adelaide lay on the rout the major personalities, particularly Mann, Ross and Holland took from Sydney and Melbourne to Broken Hill. From this stimulus the South Australian Socialist Party came into existence. Later some of the industrially active workers from Broken Hill and Port Pierie came to Adelaide.

At the end of 1910 and the beginning of 1911 the countervailing views of Ross and Holland stood in the way of a turn in a syndicalist direction, especially in the main centres. In particular, until the breakdown of his health in May 1911, Holland in Sydney held out the vision of building up a revolutionary political party. The lessoning of Holland’s influence and the departure of Ross for New Zealand ... left a significant gap in the foremost advocated of political action. The growing dissatisfaction with the Labor Party's performance strengthened the incipient industrialist attitudes of the rank and file militants. While Denford and his co- delegate from Adelaide, F.J. Riley were busy on a propaganda and organising tour of Southern and Central Queensland, their compatriots at the Wakefield Street Hall in Adelaide were discussing much the same ideas raised by Demford in his International Socialist articles.

Late in 1910, about the time Demford articles appeared, E. Moyle, South Australian Socialist Party representative on the national executive of the SFA, lectured lectured in the Wakefield Street headquarters on industrial unionism. Present at that meeting was P. Christiansen of Sydney. He moved that "steps be taken to form a branch of the I.W.W. of Australia in Adelaide", H. S. Clarke moved the amendment that information be procured from America.. Neither the resolution nor the amendment were put. Instead it was agreed that Clarke and Christensen were to get constitutions and preambles for further discussion. According to Christensen, Clarke was to get one from both organisations in America. (ie Chicago and Detroit)

Christensen got the "political" constitution from Sydney and proceeded "to work quietly with my propaganda.” Eventually in March 1911, he was asked to give another lecture on industrial unionism. To Christensen the path now seemed clear for the formation of a club. Just then, however, "Clarke came to light with a lot of printed matter from Troutmann and Co". A meeting was then called to discuss the alternatives. Immediately the Chairman (E. Moyle) opened the meeting,

Clarke moved that admixed local of the I.W.W. of America be formed. Christensen, to his "amazement and chagrin" could not get a seconder to his amendment to form a club of the I.W.W. of Australia. Moyle, said by Christensen to have been scrupulously fair, refused to put either the motion or the amendment, before they had been fully discussed.

Apparently only Moyle, Christensen and Clarke were articulate about the issues. Christensen sought a fortnights adjournment, hoping to get a seconder out of the next meeting.

At the adjourned meeting of 6 May, Christensen did no better. Of the ten present, eight had attended the previous meeting. The principle objection to a club "was that the S.L.P. would dominate them - the I.W.W." The meeting resolved in favour of a local union of the I.W.W. of America and elected pro-term officers. The support for the Chicago viewpoint was by no means unambiguous. There were "some who are of the opinion that the political clause in the preamble is very necessary ... there will be trouble here yet between the politicals and the non-politicals. But those of them who are not prepared to join the new contraption are just as unprepared to form a club in the fear of offending others." A comparable situation prevailed in the Sydney local after its formation in November 1911. It was not until Tom Glynn's arrival from South Africa at the end of 1912 that the line of demarcation was clearly drawn.

Arising from the direct experience of the critical industrial struggles of 1909, especially the Broken Hill lockout, worker-militants who were members of the internationalist S.F.A, saw the 1908 Chicago preamble and the I.W.W. organisation as a way out of a political and industrial impasse. After the Labor Party electoral victories of 1910 the need for a new organisation claimed more attention.

The Adelaide local of the I.W.W. of America came into existence after an initiative taken by a supporter of the I.W.W. clubs. However, this initiative only served to stimulate the discussion of and support for the formation of an I.W.W. local union. A call for such a union had already been made. Within the organisational structure of the international socialists, the discussion of industrial unionism led in the direction of a new type of union, and this was the final outcome.