Adam Lincoln was born in 1973, he left home at 16 and spent ten years as an organiser for the Forestry, Mining and Energy Union. Here he was part of a reform group that ousted the leadership of the NSW CFMEU forestry branch and then had to deal with the reality of trying to organise and run a militant rank and file union with his comrades while enmeshed within a larger structure that was essentially authoritarian and run on business union principles. This he found was at heart a process trying to make their trade union structure meet a purpose that it was not designed for.
Adam also worked at jobs in banking as a temp., in the fast foods industry and other various odd jobs to put himself through university. He organised and led many successful organising campaigns in the timber manufacturing industry where he used covert and overt IWW tactics almost exclusively as a method of struggle—and found that they worked.
Adam joined the IWW because his personal experiences as a trade union member, organiser and political activist led him to a number of conclusions about the nature of class struggle. The life changing moment came while reading a speech by Eugene Debs, delivered to a mass audience in New York City, 1905: “Despite the antiquated speech of that era” he wrote, “the message, passion and hope shone through loud and clear: the absolute futility of trade unionism in the face of big money and mass production, the treachery of electoral politics and the union bureaucracy; the need to keep political, and other differences away from organising. The need for real unity.”
What he realised was that each generation of workers repeats the mistakes of the past and this is best summed up in the reliance union the political and union leaders who are going to lead us to salvation. The IWW, says Adam, “put things into a simple clarity which is more accurate about what really goes on in the world than volumes of books about political theory.”
Adam Lincoln joined the IWW in 2001 in Sydney. In the end he came to the IWW not because he agreed with the theory in the abstract but because his actual experiences meant that he could critically evaluate the One Big Union idea, and know that it is the only method of struggle and organisation that can make us strong enough to win.
Adam is currently a member of the General Executive Board of the IWW and living in the United Kingdom.
