Myth #4 - The IWW is violent and plans to overthrow the government

This is a long held myth, created by the employing class, because they see any challenge to their authority as a threat. Similarly, slaveholders saw abolitionists as violent, because abolitionism threatened their elite privilege.

The IWW has in fact always rejected the use of violence (including political assassinations, armed insurrection, guerilla warfare, terrorism, the taking of hostages, murder, vigilantism, or any other form of violent coercion) to achieve its goals, because historically such tactics generally do not work and marginalize workers. In fact, it is the employing class that used armed violence during the early 20th century to suppress the nonviolent attempts by the IWW to organize peacefully, whether through lawless vigilante mobs, armed militias, or abuse of the legal process. Similar false accusations of "violence" and use of violence was used against almost every other labor union (including the AFL and CIO) early in their histories. In many impoverished countries, the ruling class uses violence against democratic labor unions even today.

There were a few instances, notably at Everett and Centralia (both in the State of Washington) in the late 1910s, where IWW members returned the gun fire of vigilante mobs and were charged with murder (if they were not lynched on the spot), but in both cases, the IWW justifiably claimed self defense, and after having been subjected to vigilante mobs and lynchings for almost half a decade, how could any sane person blame them?

The employing class continually tries to equate strikes, direct action at the point of production (which is often little more than organized inefficiency by workers), public demonstrations, and well-reasoned intellectual denunciations of capitalism as "violence" because it challenges the rule of capital and the privilege of the property owning class. The capitalists are jealously insecure about their unearned power, and they squeal like greedy pigs at the trough when anyone under their yoke dares speak truth to that power. Naturally the use the charge of "violence", but it is in fact the capitalist class that uses violence. Even when they don't use it overtly, it is easy to see that the exploitation of the working class is, by definition, institutionalized violence.

Employers will often try and dig up violent incidents in the IWW's past (selectively omitting the fact that almost all of the violence was committed by the employers and what little "violence" the IWW committed was in self defense) to try and convince workers that the IWW is a dangerous and nefarious organization. The IWW submits that the facts say otherwise! The IWW isn't violent; it is in fact an antidote to organized capitalist violence.

Next page: Myth #5 - The IWW believes in wanton property destruction.