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Questions from a fellow worker in the USA....

Submitted by Y on Thu, 17/07/2008 - 01:41
FW: Who or what will inspire the working class into collectively seizing the day?

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Wobbly: You and I will, when we get organised ourselves and communicate to others and when they help to get their friends organised. This won't come out of nowhere. We're more or less confronted now with the force of circumstance e.g. the North Pole will melt this summer. We'll also become more and more aware that we already run the world; but we run it for some other class, for our rulers' interests.

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FW: Will anything change with out violence? 
 
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Wobbly: I think the workers organised in One Big Union can pull off a relatively peaceful social revolution. There have been relatively peaceful political revolutions within the last fifty or so years: Iran, the Philippines, East Germany, Hungary.....all proving that when the overwhelming majority of the people, the workers, want the same kind of change, they can get it with relatively little violence. See my post on the Declaration of Independence for more on how a peaceful revoluton could come about in the USA.

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FW: The ruling class will not go silently.  
 
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Wobbly: Our rulers are essentially cowards and form only around one percent of the population. If the working class says one big collective, democratic, "NO!" to them, they'll fold.

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FW: What in human experience leads you to believe the working class will rise in collective rebellion effectively upsetting the status quo?
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Wobbly: You're right. While there have been many workers' rebellions, there has not yet been a successful end to class rule. Our rulers underwent a few defeats too when they confronted the old ruling aristocratic class. The transition to full blown bourgeois democracy took years, even in the USA. The historical diff in civil rights and voting rights between 1776, 1866, and 1966 demonstrates this. Those differences didn't come about because people did nothing, threw up their hands and said, "It's impossible."
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FW: How will the instinct for survival lead to a change in the social class hierarchies, when a few of the powerfully have the ability to destroy all.
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Wobbly: The few only have the power the many give to them with their subservience and their labour. By continuing to give our incompetent rulers the power, we allow them to destroy the planet and continue to murder us. Again, five thousand children died today and will continue to die from lack of access to clean water. All this while some ruler worries about how to pile up more of the old dough-ray-me.
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FW: Would the struggle be between workers and anyone else the workers state is not of their class?
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Wobbly: The class struggle is over the social product of labour. Workers create the social wealth and by extension the power. They give away their rights to this wealth and power when they sell themselves into wage-slavery.

The social revolution which the IWW is organised for does not end up in a 'workers' State'. It ends up in a co:operative commonwealth of freely associated producers. If the old rulers wish to live outside this commonwealth and produce wealth for themselves, they can; but I doubt whether they'd know how to do it.

Thanks for your intelligent, incisive questions, fellow worker!