Myth #10 - The IWW is a Communist Party front group

Even as early as 1917 hysterical anti-communists tried to link the IWW (in the US and Canada) with Bolshevism. For example, in his early days Walt Disney created a cartoon with a live action character named Alice (a little girl who would act and appear in the cartoon). In one episode, "Alice" ran a dairy and owned a bunch of egg producing hens. Alice's cat was the foreman, and he was a typical slave driver. The cartoon then cuts to a scene of a rooster walking by a set of railroad tracks (possibly a reference to the IWW organizers who rode the rails as hoboes during the 1910s) with a Trotsky-like beard and a bag with the words "Little Red Henski, Moscow, Russia, IWW" written on the side. The union organizing hen would go on to induce the hens to strike. Whether the cartoon is pro or anti worker is irrelevant. Disney's message is that the IWW, in fact all unions, are Bolshevik missionaries.

After World War II, the IWW was not as high profile as dozens of other militant unions, leftist organizations, and critics of unfettered capitalism, but the IWW was targeted by Cold War Hysteria nonetheless. In fact, from 1947-62, anybody with even moderately leftist or anti-capitalist leanings was liable to be labeled a "Communist" by the defenders and apologists of capitalism. To organize a union in a workplace at all was to risk being labeled a "Communist".

Even though the IWW was not a major target of the Cold War hysteria, this period was one of the darkest for the IWW. The Taft Hartley Act was signed in 1947. The IWW was placed on U.S. Attorney General's List of Subversive Organizations in 1949. A strong and militant Metal Workers Industrial Union in Cleveland collapsed when all of the organized shops withdrew from the organization in 1950 because the IWW refused to sign the Taft-Hartley anti-communist affidavits (one is not necessarily a communist if they are not a rabid anti-communist). These events were all attacks by the employing class on the workers of the United States, and their effect was wide spread and the IWW was not spared the onslaught.

The cold warriors conveniently overlook the fact that the IWW refused several overtures by the Bolsheviks of the USSR to affiliate with them, the most notable example being a decision by the IWW's democratically elected General Executive Board to reject an offer to join the Red Trade Union International, a Bolshevik front group, in 1922. They overlook the numerous times the IWW fought against the oppression of bureaucratic state "Communism" and focus solely on the IWW's anti-capitalism. For example, the IWW issued a statement in 1945 called Chicago Replies to Moscow, in which the IWW took the Soviet Union to task for some of Stalin's atrocities (well before it became fashionable for the capitalist class to again start criticizing Stalin after the latter was a US ally against Hitler in the waning years of World War II). In reality the IWW has always stood for workers of the world as a class against all forms of economic oppression regardless of what it is called.

Even today, employers try to claim that the IWW is a supporter of Stalinist style "Communism", because they think it will frighten workers into thinking twice about joining our union, but even a casual reading of IWW history demonstrates the ridiculousness of that claim.

Next page: The IWW, like all unions, is controlled by organized crime.