By the Madison, WI General Membership Branch of the IWW
Bosses wage war to make money and workers are the ones who die in the process.
This fact should be obvious to most people. Yet many workers – along with their supposed unions – end up stoking the engines of an infernal war machine.
While many may secretly question the sanity of a capitalist system that sacrifices them and their children as cannon fodder on the altar of corporate profit, few are willing to challenge the power system behind such relentless warmongering.
It is indeed hard to tell when one war ends and another begins, when the current military industrial complex feeds itself, churning out fresh excuses and victims on a regular basis. The earlier “War to End All Wars” ends up leading to the latest “War on Terror.”
Of course, one’s notion of “terrorism” depends upon who is dropping bombs on whom. Guernica, Hiroshima, My Lai, Fallujah – all now serve as painful reminders of the bloodletting capacity of ruling elites to kill innocent people for their own short term self interest.
Why would working class folks want to go along with any of this?
Granted, there are those directly caught up in the military industrial complex who have few choices left. Soldiers, whether conscripted or recruited, find themselves in a “dog eat dog” world. Factory workers or university researchers may think the only way to butter their bread is to work for the Pentagon. Like selling slaves or harpooning whales, it can be hard to give up a “good” paying job, making anthrax or throwing grenades.
That elites could care less about workers is even more apparent when the latest warfare binge is used to curtail existing labor rights and bust more unions. Soldiers that survive the horror of war to return home still end up treated just like any other throwaway temp worker – dumped on society’s curb and left to fend for themselves. Are exploited Iraqi workers or crippled Afghani veterans really any different from those in the U.S.?
Thankfully, there have always been those who could not sleep with the complicity their work entailed and chose to take direct action instead. Roman gladiators joined slave revolts. Catholic missionaries supported indigenous rebels. French trade unionists sabotaged ordinance in solidarity with Algerian revolutionaries. U.S. sailors sank their own ships to make sure they didn’t reach the shores of Vietnam.
History is replete with examples of regular working class people who have successfully resisted the forces of militarism. Once you realize that the root cause of violence is often exploitation, it is much easier to identify the enemy that is at hand.
Better yet, there are those who go beyond challenging the status quo and are now actively building a new world from the ashes of the old. Destructive activities – like making bombs and dropping them – do not create a hopeful and prosperous future for anyone. Solidarity, mutual aid, common good, cooperation – those are the values around which one builds a better peaceful world. Economic conversion, though, requires cultural transformation. Can we learn nonviolent conflict resolution and ignore the orders to fight each other instead?
One labor union that has always opposed war, and still does, is the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Founded in 1905 in Chicago, many early IWW leaders were tossed in prison or deported for daring to ask why bosses were sending workers to kill each other in the trenches of WW1. Today, members of the IWW are still speaking truth to power - refusing to pay war taxes, joining counter recruiting efforts, supporting liberation struggles against imperialism, and otherwise seeking to halt the military industrial juggernaut in its tracks.
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Whereas: the IWW has previously endorsed and worked in support of calls to respect the rights of immigrant workers, including endorsing the May 1, 2006 call for a general strike; and
Fellow workers,