Myth #6 - The currently existing IWW is not the same organization as the historically famous IWW

Actually, in a sense, this statement is true, as there are no members alive today who were alive during the IWW's founding convention, but what people actually mean when they make the aforementioned claim, is that there is no historical continuity between today's IWW and the IWW of old.  This latter statement is false, however.  The IWW that exists today is indeed the same IWW as the Wobblies of old.  There was never any time in the IWW's history when it ceased to exist nor has it ever been necessary to recreate it from scratch.  

It is certainly true that the IWW has experienced many near deaths--the most serious having occurred in the 1950s when the IWW's Cleveland Metal Workers Industrial Union 440 membership left the union en masse in reaction to the IWW's General Executive Board's refusal to submit to the Taft-Hartley mandated anticommunist purges--but none of them have ever completely killed the organization, and--like its famous black cat alter ego--the IWW seems to have (at least) nine lives.

A variation on this myth is that the IWW ceased to be relevant after a specific year, starting with 1908, followed by 1917, 1921, 1924, etc... 

These claims are sometimes made by vocal individuals and/or specific political tendencies who have become disenchanted with the IWW and--in a parting shot or a case of sour grapes--have attempted to convince others that the IWW is not worth their attention.

There are at least two additional sources for this myth.

(A) Inaccurate labor histories (and sometimes incomplete study of such histories) - For many years, Philip Foner's extensive, (but by no means error-free) History of the Industrial Workers of the World, 1905-1917--Volume IV of his ten volume History of the Labor Movement of the United States--has been considered one of the two definitive histories of the IWW (the other is We Shall Be All, by Melvyn Dubofsky). It is sometimes assumed that since Foner's Volume IV ends with 1917, that the IWW's history ends there as well (although Foner covers some of the IWW's later history in Volumes VII and VIII).

(B) Sectarian leftists, in particular, Marxist-Leninists - For many in this camp, the watershed moment of the history of Marxist-Leninism is of course the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent rise of the Bolsheviks and the USSR (themselves two separate, but overlapping developments). Even before the shortcomings of the Russian Revolution became widely apparent, the IWW remained independent of the Soviet Union. In 1921 the IWW's General Executive Board refused to affiliate the IWW with the Soviet controlled Red Trade Union International (something that caused the Bolsheviks and many of their American supporters no small degree of consternation). The strongest supporters of dogmatic Bolshevism quit the IWW and some of them (including James P Cannon and Len DeCaux) argued that the IWW ceased to be relevant when they refused to "join the new Communist international".

Both views are incorrect. The IWW not only did not cease to exist after 1917, it achieved milestone victories for workers in Mining and Timber in the early 1920s and beyond (including the eight hour day), benefits which workers take for granted today.

Anti-union employers sometimes use this myth to undermine workers confidence in the IWW by making us seem irrelevant, a product of a bygone age.

Next page: Myth #7 - The IWW is a fifth column, controlled by hostile powers.