The Big Reddebrek PDF Archive

For about four or so years now I've been indulging in a rather strange hobby, I like making PDFs. My father got me an e-reader as a present but unlike Kindles and Ipads the company that made it went broke before I got mine, so it had no online service to get books from. You could however manually add texts to it either through usb or a cameras memory card. So I got into the habit of doing that, and reading on the go.

Unfortunately free e-books can be hard to find if you don't want to be limited to pre 1923 English language texts. Sites get taken down or ask you to download dodgy addons etc. Fortunately online texts are more plentiful and stable (though not always a lot of these sites were hosted on platforms like geocities) and after a little practise you can make them into pdfs/epubs fairly easily.

Depending on the websites formatting it can be as simple as highlighting, and then copy and pasting into a text document, and then exporting them into (pdf is the standard) a e-format and then you can transfer into all the others using software like Calibre.

I then decided to share them and a few people thanked me and it just escalated from there. I now have over 400 made and I keep making them now and then. So I'm making this blog as an archive of sorts for the pdfs I've made. Feel free to download and share if you like them.

Most of these use text hosted on libcom.org and can be found attached to their articles or in this thread,

Link to the folder

Note: Broken links or other download problems? Please let me know in the comments.

Books:

The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals
Conquered City
Spanish Marxism versus Soviet Communism (PDF)
Spanish Marxism versus Soviet Communism (Epub)
Spanish Marxism versus Soviet Communism (mobi)

Hugo's novel about the French Revolution Ninety Three, named after the year 1793

Ninety-Three (PDF)
Ninety-Three (epub)

Ninety-Three (mobi)

Capital the Manga
Volume I
Volume II

Spectacular Times:
Complete archive of a series of small 'pocketbooks' in the late 1970s/early 1980s entitled 'Spectacular Times' by Larry Law. They serve as a brief introduction to situationist ideas. Each consists of newspaper clippings, quotations, handwritten text by Law and illustrations, all compiled and arranged with great humour!
Spectacular Times 01-02: Images and everyday life
Spectacular Times 03: The media
Spectacular Times 04: Fin De Spectacle
Spectacular Times 05: Into the Endgame
Spectacular Times 06: Food
Spectacular Times 07: Women and the Spectacle
Spectacular Times 08: The Skeleton Key
Spectacular Times 08-09: skeleton Keys (Double Issue reprint)
Spectacular Times 10: Animals
Spectacular Times 11: More of the Shame
Spectacular Times 12: The Bad Days Will End
Spectacular Times 13: Cities of Illusion
Spectacular Times 14: Bigger Cages and Longer Chains

Pyrate Captain Mission
Revolutionary Self Theory

A Brief History of the IWW outside the US (1905 - 1999)

An attempt to curb the American centric focus of the IWW by giving a brief chronology of significant events made possible by Wobblies outside of the United States.

By F.N. Brill - January 1999
Special Thanks to: Gary Jewell (Canada), Alexis Buss, Tim Acott, Jon Bekken, Fred Chase, Gwion, Steve Kellerman and Robert Rush (US), Kevin Brandstatter (UK).

F.N. Brill's Introduction:
The International aspects of the IWW is something that has escaped most labor historians. While widely acknowledged as an important labor movement, it in many ways has been relegated to either an infantile expression of the proletariat or the inspiration for the "successful" unions of the 1930s.
For those hostile to it, the liberals and Stalinists, it was more convenient to proclaim it dead in 1919 and sweep the possibilities of the IWW under the carpet. Even though Lenin greatly respected the IWW, the Stalinist labor historians have needed to erase the differences between the IWW and the Communist's organizing practices of the 1920s and 30s. While superficially similar in style and rhetoric, the IWW and Stalinists differ in the IWW's insistence of a rotation of leadership from the rank and file. The communists, with the hopes they would be the leaders, helped build the entrenched labour bureaucracies we see today.
But even IWW historians have ignored the ramifications of the IWW's organizing on an international basis.
Sadly, even Fred Thompson, author of the IWW's wonderful official history, The IWW: Its First 50 Years only glosses over the tremendous impact the IWW had internationally and focuses only on the US. To be fair, the IWW's resources were tremendously limited at the time of the First 50 Years leading to a much more condensed book.
The IWW was a major movement in a number of countries and upon the high seas. It had probably more lasting importantance in Australia and Chile than it was in the US and Canada. At points the IWW's Marine Transport Workers Industrial Union stood poised to control much of the world's shipping, while in Australia the IWW effectively halted the Dominion's World War I military efforts.
While not organized, or only briefly, the IWW also held a significant influence upon the development of the workers movements in Ireland, South Africa, Scandinavia and China.
This (page) is a broad overview of all the information I could gather, thanks to IWWs from around the world. I was unable to get much information on the IWW in Sweden, and the Central European nations. Future editions should fill in those missing histories.
I hope this overview is a start to a new appreciation of what the IWW has accomplished. I also hope it is a provocation to rebuild the IWW internationally and win what our Fellow Workers weren't able to accomplish.
History of the IWW

Argentina
November 1919. The Marine Transport Workers had established a branch in Buenos Aries with its own paper.
Within a month the IWW had ended impressment of seamen at the Port through direct actions.
Australia
"Nobody has exercised a more profound influence on the whole outlook of labor in Australia (than the IWW)"
--Gordon Childe
"It's 1000 times better to be a traitor to your country than a traitor to your class"
Australian IWW "clubs" formed in 1907
July 1907 Coal Miner Strike in NSW and Victoria led by IWW
1908 IWW leads Sydney transport strike
1909 strike at Broken Hill, workers locked out for a year and IWW leaders tried for sedition.
31 January, 1914 Direct Action newspaper first appears.
1915
Brisbane -- Prime Minister Hughes' speech is drowned out by crowd led by IWWs. IWW's decide to 'count him down' and the audience joins in, by the number ten Hughes is speechless.
Victoria region -- Fruit pickers get wage increase when IWWs post signs in orchards "Please don't drive copper nails into fruit trees as it will destroy them."
1916 IWW leads New South Wales Railway workshop slowdown
1916 Broken Hill Miners take Saturday afternoons off, giving themselves a 44 hour week. Then strike for 8 hour day. Miners strike spreads to 11,500 miners demanding "bank-to-bank" 8 hour day, virtually shutting down coal mining nationally for 2 months.
Aug. 13, 1916 IWWs speak to 80-100,000 on Sydney Domain against war effort.
Sept. 30, 1916 Raids on IWW headquarters and arrests of key members.
Dec. 3, 1916 7 IWWs sentenced to 15 years in prison for anti-war efforts. Others sentenced to 5 and 10? years.
"A group of aggressive newsboys informed employers that they had joined the IWW and intended in the future to do as little as possible."
Aug. 27, 1917 IWW made illegal and membership rolls made available to employers.
Despite widespread repression, the IWW helps lead the General Strike of 1917.
1924 Melbourne IWW reformed.
1927 Sydney IWW reformed.
1928 May, Adeldale IWW forms Australian Administration, starts publishing Direct Action newspaper. In August, Direct Action is banned.
IWW agitates during the '30s for "Not a minute on the day, not a penny off the pay, Fight against 48 hours and Wage cuts".
IWW protests World War II and is made illegal
1946 Australian IWW reformed in Sydney
1964-65 IWW Pat Mackie leads major mining lock-out/strike at Mt. Isa
Two IWW Regional Organizing Committees exist today, in Australia proper and Tasmania.

Canada
Five Branches were formed in BC in 1906, including a Lumber Handlers Job Branch composed of Indigenous Canadians.
By 1911, the IWW claimed 10,000 members in Canada, notably in mining, logging, Alberta agriculture, longshoring and the textile industry.
In 1912 the IWW fought a fierce free speech fight in Vancouver, forcing the city to rescind a ban on public street meetings.
Organizing began in 1911 among construction workers building the Canadian Northern Railway in BC. In September a quick strike of 900 workers halted 100 miles of construction.
February 1912, IWW membership on the CN stood at 8,000.
March 27, unable to further tolerate the unbearable living conditions in the work camps, the 8,000 "dynos and dirthands" walked out. The strike extended over 400 miles of territory, but the IWW established a "1,000-mile picket line" as Wobs picketed employment offices in Vancouver, Seattle, Tacoma, San Francisco, and Minneapolis to halt recruitment of scabs.
August, 1912 they were joined by 3,000 construction workers on the Grand Trunk Pacific in BC and Alberta.
(According to legend) CN strike also spawned the nickname Wobbly. A Chinese restaurant keeper who fed strikers reputedly mispronounced "IWW" in asking customers "Are you eye wobble wobble?" and the name stuck.
"Scab on the job" tactic created, by sending convert Wobs into scab camps to bring the workers out on strike.
The IWW established an Edmonton Unemployed League, demanding that the city furnish work to everybody regardless of race, colour or nationality, at a rate of 30 cents an hour, and further, that the city distribute three 25-cent meal tickets to each man daily, tickets redeemable at any restaurant in town. On January 28, 1914 The city council agreed to provide a large hall for the homeless, passed out three 25-cent meal tickets to each man daily, and employed 400 people on a public project.
On September 24, 1918, a federal order in council declared that while Canada was engaged in war, 14 organizations were to be considered unlawful, including the IWW. Penalty for membership was set at 5 years in prison.
In 1916, virtually extinct in the rest of the country, the IWW had moved from the Minnesota iron fields in the Mesaba Range northward into Ontario and had gained a large following in the northern woods.
In 1919 the Ontario lumber workers joined the OBU, but Wobbly delegates continued to bootleg union supplies to the minority who wanted to keep their IWW membership books as well, as well as did OBU-IWW delegates in B.C.
April 2, 1919 the ban on the IWW was lifted. Two branches were formed in Toronto and Kitchener.
By 1923 IWW had three branches with job control in Canada: Lumberworkers IU 120 and Marine Transport Workers IU 510 in Vancouver and an LWIU branch in Cranbrook BC for a total of 5,600 members.
1924 marked a peak year for the IWW in Canada. 8,000 in Northern Ontario, the Canadian Lumber Workers vote to join the IWW.
On January 1, 1924, IWW Lumber Workers IU120 struck the British Columbia lumber owners, calling for an 8 hour day with blankets supplied, minimum wage of $4 per day, release of all class war prisoners, no discrimination against IWW members and no censuring of IWW literature.
Fighting a mandatory dues check off to the United Mine Workers, Alberta Coal miners joined the IWW in 1924. The mine company unsuccessfully offered a 10% wage increase if they agreed to accept the UMWA.
Canadian delegates met in Port Arthur September 20, 1931, and voted to form a Canadian administration to coordinate specifically Canadian industrial activity.
IWW unemployment ag -itation generated a number of arrests. Ritchie's Dairy in Toronto was unionized IWW for a time, and a fisher's branch formed in McDiarmid, Ontario.
Organizing was undertaken in the Maritimes but did not sustain itself. In 1935 the IWW had 12 branches in Canada with 4,200 members.
IWW agitation continued strong in Canada until 1939, especially in northern Ontario. Wobbly units in Sudbury and Port Arthur were mixed membership branches of scattered lumbermen, miners and labourers.
During the Spanish Civil War 1936-39, the IWW in Ontario actively recruited for the revolutionary union militias in Spain.
In 1949 membership in Canada stood at 2,100 grouped in six branches; two in Port Arthur and one each in Vancouver, Sault Ste. Marie, Calgary and Toronto.
IN 1968 it was decided to sign up students alongside teachers and campus workers into Education Workers IU620. There followed a wild and erratic campus upsurge, two notables being Waterloo U in Ontario and New Westminster BC.
1974 In Vancouver a construction crew in Gastown was signed IWW -- but certification was denied, the IWW declared not a "trade union under the meaning of the Act."
1988 Student newspaper at Simon Frazier university organizes IWW.
1998 IWW organizes at Harvest Foods in Winnipeg, first legal Canadian IWW union in decades.
1999 IWW organizes series of shops along Whyte Avenue in Edmonton.

Chile
The founding congress of the Chilean IWW took place in Santiago, in 1919. Upholding the principles and tactics of the international IWW, the Chileans were able to regroup radical teachers and longshoremen, along with most of the scattered Chilean anarcho-syndicalist movement.
During the 1920s, the IWW published 10 different newspapers in five cities in Chile. The central newspaper, Accion Directa, appeared from 1920-26. During times of repression, the Chilean papers were printed at the Chicago IWW printing plant and smuggled into Chile by wobbly sailors.
Through the summer of 1920 the Chilean union conducted a three month strike to prevent the export of grains from the country at a time when this export was producing famine and famine prices and profits.
On July 22, 1920 police conducted a raid on the Santiago headquarters. In Valparaiso, the police planted dynamite in the wobble hall and arrested most of the IWW organizers for terrorism. The reasons for these raid was the successful strikes against the exportation of grains during the famine.
1924 4000 Santiago IWW bookbinders win strike for 44 hour week.
The Chilean administration of the IWW remained united until 1925 when the unions representing Port, printing and bakeries split to form the anarcho-syndicalist Federation Obrerra Regionale Chile (FORCh). Objecting to the IWW's industrial unionism, these unions opted for regional/federalist organization according to craft.
The IWW was the only labor group to openly oppose the military coup of 1927. In contrast, the Communist Party 'was at first evasive, but then listed certain demands of the new regime...' Only when the CP's demands weren't met, did they decide to oppose the military dictatorship.
Both unions were silenced in 1927 by the Ibez dictatorship. In 1931, the Ibez government fell and former IWW and FORCh members formed a new anarcho-syndicalist union, the CGT.
After the military coup of 1973, an American IWW, Frank Terrugi, was shot to death by a Chilean death squad. Terrugi, in Chile studying workers movements, had been detained in a soccer stadium during the coup with hundreds of other radicals and unionists. He was found dead soon after he had been 'released" from the soccer stadium/prison. Turrugi is the sidekick to the missing American being sought by his father in the Oscar winning Costa Gavras film, "Missing".

China
During the period 1910-1916 Australian IWW helps get IWW materials translated into Chinese and distributed into China. These were published by Liu Szu-fu ("Shih-fu") and IWW ideals became influential in Canton and Shanghai.

Ecuador
Administration chartered 1922.
Fiji
1916 IWW fishers strike.

Germany
1924 Marine Transport Workers Union Branch formed in Settin, Hamburg and other ports. Over 10,000 members at founding. The IWW continues a open organizing until Hitler and continued underground.

High Seas
1924 IWW calls International Marine Transport Workers Conference in New Orleans. Delegates from Argentina, Canada, Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico and US.
1925 IWW controls all Scandinavian/US shipping through job actions and quick strikes.
November 1925 East coast IWWs strike in support of UK, Scandinavian, New Zealand and Australian sailors in first international maritime strike.
Second International conference help in Montevideo, Uruguay.
April 9, 1930 IWW organizes 1700 member crew on the Leviathan, then the world's largest vessel.

Ireland
1913 IWWs James Connolly and Jim Larkin found the Transport and General Workers Union as the basis of an Irish IWW.
During 1917-23 civil war period Ireland experienced outright insurrection, collectivization of transport in Cork, uprising of landless labourers, the establishment of Soviets and dual power situations in many cities...
Recession and a state clampdown knocked the union off course in 1923. A split movement still carried on a local variant of revolutionary unionism in the Workers Union of Ireland but was numerically weak.
Japan
1924 Marine Transport Workers Branch formed in Yokohama.
Mexico
Ties with Mexican revolutionaries date to ?the founding of the IWW.
Riccardo Flores Magon was an IWW and used the IWW press and organization to build support for revlutionary movement in Mexico.
In 1911 the Mexican Liberal party (PLM), a anarchist formation, invaded Baja California in an effort to set up a workers' republic. The campaign was run out of an IWW hall in Holtville, CA. 100 IWWs, including Joe Hill and Frank Little, were part of the insurrectionary force.
July, 1912 several trade unions unite under IWW preamble.
In 1917, when many of the wells closed down as a protest of the American owners against a tax imposed on oil and the wage demands of the workers, the leadership of the movement was almost entirely in the hands of the IWW."
During the later phase of the Mexican revolutionary process, IWW locals in Arizona endorsed the Zapata movement.
Dec. 1919, Mexican IWW Administration is chartered
On June 2, 1921 the IWW hall at Tampico, Mexico, was raided, and the IWW called a general strike in the area which won them the right to have their hall.
3000 IWW miners strike and win in Santa Eulalia.
Mexican Administration of the IWW continues until early 1960s.

New Zealand
IWW administration organized 1912
IWW organizer Tom Barker arrested for sedition during great Strikes of 1912-13, subsequently escapes to Australia to organize there.
Nicaragua
While in exile in Mexico during early 1920s, Sandino participates in strikes led by the IWW. Inspired by them he returns to foment revolution in Nicaragua. He adopts the IWW's black and red colours.
Peru
In 1923 the IWW led a strike on the Peruvian Central lines when a railwayman with 20 years good service was sacked. Within 24 hours the entire railway system...had struck in accordance with the IWW motto "an injury to one is an injury to all." The workman was reinstated, having first rejected a $50,000 bribe from the company to accept dismissal.
Russia
1919 16,000 Miners in Siberia form a union and adopt the IWW preamble.
Sweden
1971 Branch formed at Malm. shipyards.
Sierra Leone
1996 Diamond and Gold miners organize into IWW.

South Africa
South African Administration founded in 1911.
IWW campaigns to convince white workers "that their real enemy is not the coloured labourer, and that it is only by combining and co-operating irrespective of colour that the standard of life of the whites can be maintained and improved."
1912 IWW leads strike of tram-drivers in Johannesburg, the first multi-racial strike in that country's history.
United Kingdom
The IWW in Britain has been around in one form or another since 1906. It started with small groups of seafarers in particular bringing the message of industrial unionism to these shores from the USA.
In 1908 the union split along the same lines as in the USA. The IWW members who followed Daniel De Leon formed the British Advocates for Industrial Unionism and organized some major strikes, particularly in the industrial belt in Central Scotland. The strike at the Singer Sewing Machine Factory in 1908 was the most famous. The IWWs who stuck with the non-De Leon faction formed the Industrial League.
IWW involvement in a 1909 strike at Ruskin College, Oxford, which led to the creation of the revolutionary education movement "The Plebs League" and the marxist "Central Labour College". IWW members were also involved in the establishment of the "Daily Herald", the first working class controlled newspaper, which carried much labour news.
In 1910 Bill Haywood toured the country and in South Wales he spoke at a very large meeting of striking coal miners in one pit and urged them to spread their strike across the entire industry and occupy the pits. His influence is credited with an explosion of militancy in the area and was one reason why former IWW members in the mines produced and circulated "The Miners Next Step", a pamphlet aimed at turning the South Wales Miners Federation into a single region-wide industrial union. It is regarded as the most important piece of Industrial Unionist literature of the period.
In 1913 the Union granted a charter to a British Administration of the I.W.W. which ran as an essentially independent body. The union had strong branches in major cities, although there is no evidence of an IWW strike as such.
Prominent supporters of the IWW such as Peter Larkin and James Connolly were active in dockers and other transport workers strikes during the period.
The union was involved the years of unrest leading to the first world war through organisations such as the Industrial Syndicalist Education League (ISEL), the Industrial Democracy League and the League of Revolutionary Unionists. The ISEL was prominent in efforts to build industrial unions through mergers of existing trade unions and was at the forefront of the creation the National Union of Railwaymen and the Transport and General Workers Union.
The National Conferences of Trades Councils in 1919 and 1920 endorsed the principle of the One Big Union as a means of uniting the working class and establishing Industrial Unions. Shop Steward movement's cards were made interchangeable with IWW cards.
The Union stayed barely alive in the 20s and 30s having retreated to the cities of Liverpool, Birmingham and London with very little influence elsewhere.
In 1946 fortunes turned up and a new British Administration was chartered which played an active part in the dock strike of 1947.
In the mid 1970s a Workers Centre was set up in Oldham and a British Section remained active until the early 1980s. The IWW was particularly involved in efforts to spread the idea of rank and file control of the unions and IWW organsers were at the forefront of the National Rank and File Movement.
A new period for the I.W.W. started in 1993 when a small group met in London to re-establish the union. Membership has grown towards the hundred mark and branches have been established in a dozen or more cities.
In 1995 the union established its first "job branch" at Stevenson College in Edinburgh, which has played a significant role in fighting redundancies and exposing the crass nature of sectional unionism in education.
In 1995 members agreed to establish the first Regional Organising Committee and this came into being in 1997, shortly after the union launched its new quarterly magazine "Bread and Roses".
1998 IWW organizing Grocery and Pharmicutical workers in Devon and Dorset.
This pamphlet is dedicated to the memory of Fellow Worker Tom Barker, who organized for the IWW in New Zealand, Australia, Chile, Argentina, the US, the UK, Russia, Germany and upon the High Seas. For the One Big Union!
From Libcom.org
PDF Version

A Country Considered to Be Free - New Zealand and the IWW

 Much as I admire the IWW I have to admit that it remains a small Union both on global terms and in its national branches. But despite this it has been able to pull off some impressive feats, and punch above its weight. There are many examples of the old IWW managing to build links and have an effect on a much wider audience. This history of the New Zealand IWW is just one of them.

"Towards a Transnational Study of New Zealand Links with the Wobblies", an essay by Mark Derby which looks at New Zealand's relationship with the IWW.

In the 1890s a New Zealand watersiders’ leader announced to his members, “We have no flag, we have no country.”[1] He was declaring the internationalism of labor at a time when patriotism and imperialism then characterized the population. It was some years before his views became widespread, even within the militant end of the New Zealand union movement, and none promulgated them more strongly and sincerely than the Industrial Workers of the World, the Wobblies, whose name is itself a declaration of internationalism. The early Wobblies were internationalists in practice as well as in spirit – they belonged to transitory occupations, they crossed and re-crossed the Tasman, the Pacific and much further afield, were often in danger of deportation or on the run, and in general they regarded their nationality as an accident of birth and a supreme irrelevance.

For those reasons a study of the Wobblies in New Zealand, which has been barely attempted on practical grounds, is also inappropriate to its subject. It is imposing a nationalist frame on an internationalist movement. Instead, I am addressing the wider issue of New Zealand’s many links with the IWW, links which run both into and out of this country and include some of the organization’s most influential figures worldwide. My research suggests that the influence and extent of Wobbly ideas in New Zealand have been seriously understated, and New Zealand’s links with Wobbly movements elsewhere entirely overlooked. The Wobblies themselves left only scanty traces of their actions as they passed in and out of this country, and the partisan rewriting of history by the political parties which regarded themselves as natural successors to the IWW both co-opted and eliminated traces of their Wobbly roots. This essay is, therefore, an initial attempt at tracing the Wobbly strain in New Zealand’s political development.

The title, “A Country Considered to be Free,” comes from a speech made by William Trautmann at the IWW’s inaugural convention in Chicago in 1905. In accepting the post of general secretary, Trautmann informed the other delegates that he had been born in New Zealand, the son of a transient German miner who followed the gold rush to Coromandel in 1868 and was killed six years later in an industrial accident in the mine.[2] His widow and five children, including five-year-old William, returned to Germany, and as a young man William Trautmann made his way to the US and joined the fast-growing industrial unionism movement. In 1904 he wrote to labor bodies worldwide to seek support for a planned new organization to oppose the reformist American Federation of Labor (AFL) and was encouraged to found the IWW with a small group of fellow rebels the following year.[3]
In his speech to the first IWW convention, Trautmann referred in heavily qualified terms to New Zealand’s political freedom, since that country was then regarded internationally as the exemplar of moderate, state-sponsored socialism based on compulsory arbitration of industrial disputes. This system had quelled union radicalism for almost two decades, but by 1905 it was coming under growing attack from the more radical end of the labor movement, especially larger semi-skilled unions such as the miners, wharfies and seamen, and from the small, combative NZ Socialist Party, which aligned itself with De Leonite revolutionary industrial unionism. IWW ideas first reached New Zealand through the radical literature imported and sold by the Socialist Party. The industrial unionism message was also spread firsthand by transient individuals like the New Zealand-born miner Pat Hickey, who had earlier worked in Montana with the Western Federation of Miners, an IWW-affiliated union. When he returned home, in 1906, Hickey began to organize miners on the West Coast, together with other radicals from Australia. Less than a year after the IWW was formed in the US, the first strikes in 15 years took place in New Zealand mines, and by 1908 the miners’ unions broke away from the compulsory arbitration system to negotiate directly with employers using the strike weapon.[4]

Meanwhile, a militant Wellington watersider named John Dowdall, a keen reader and inveterate public orator, was spreading IWW ideas from his soapbox down on the wharves. In January 1908 he formed an IWW Club, which confirmed Wellington’s waterfront, then the busiest in the country, as a hotbed of activism. Two years later, another IWW Club was formed in Christchurch by militants from the anti-conscription movement. They applied to join the Federation of Labor, the new national body of industrial unions, as a New Zealand branch of the IWW and were admitted in June 1911.[5] Radical orators from abroad were an important impetus for this movement, although Emma Goldman’s keenly anticipated tour in 1909 was cancelled at the last minute after her US citizenship was revoked.6 In the same year the 36-year-old anarcha-feminist Lola Ridge contributed a poem, “The Martyrs of Hell,” to Goldman’s journal Mother Earth, and later became a sensation among New York’s modernist avant-garde. Ridge was formerly married to a New Zealand mine manager and had spent much of her preceding years in small South Island mining towns.[7]

In just a few fiery years the left wing of New Zealand’s labor movement had been reshaped from a timid collection of mainly craft unions working within the state-run arbitration system to a powerful federation of openly radical industrial unions winning their own terms of employment and confidently propagating a worker-run future for the country. The Wobblies were at the hard edge of this movement, especially in Auckland, the country’s biggest city, its first port of call for overseas ships, and a town thronged with young, single men raring for excitement and confrontation. Here the Socialist Party’s radical rhetoric drew huge crowds, but young militants found themselves more attracted to the anti-political Wobblies. Even the Party’s Auckland secretary, a young tram conductor named Tom Barker, defected to the IWW.[8]

This loose-knit band of Auckland Wobblies received a giant boost the day an overseas ship docked in late 1911. Down the gangplank walked three hardened revolutionaries from Canada, including Jack King, who had fled his own country after a strike in Vancouver. They were accompanied by two Englishmen, including twenty-six-year-old Alec Holdsworth, who had both been strongly influenced by the three Canadians during their long voyage. This small and utterly dedicated group made an explosive impact on the fertile Auckland scene. “In a very short time,” says Holdsworth, “Jack was on the street expounding Industrialism (One Big Union) and Marxism in the vernacular.”[9] He was backed up by at least twenty-five local Wobblies, including such striking figures as the openly gay fishmonger, Charlie Reeve, tattooed to the tips of his fingers.10 Every Sunday they drew thousands to their platform down by the wharves. “We had little or no objections around the soapbox,” according to Holdsworth. “Attention was good, collections were good – and we had no other source of income.”11 In early 1912, King left Auckland to spread the Wobbly message around North Island mining towns, eventually settling in Waihi, a company town entirely dependent economically on Australasia’s largest gold mine. There he led a Marxist economics class, enrolled about 30 miners in an IWW local, and played a leading part in a huge strike which soon shut down the mine. Shortly afterwards, King represented the miners at the Federation of Labor’s annual conference and convinced the Federation to adopt the first part of the IWW’s Preamble, “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common,” in its own constitution. His motion for a general strike in support of the Waihi miners was lost, but he won the backing of other delegates including future Prime Minister Peter Fraser who said, “With such propagandists I have no quarrel, whose work must undoubtedly advance the revolutionary working class movement.”[12]

By August 1912, with the Waihi mine still closed by strike action, King’s activities had become so notorious that he left for Australia just ahead of the police and immediately resurrected the Sydney local of the IWW. The mine strike was finally broken after nine bitter months. Many of the strikers and their families were driven out of town by vigilante mobs, and the Auckland Wobblies scoured the countryside to provide food and shelter for them. The IWW marched as a group in the massive funeral demonstration held for a murdered Waihi striker, Fred Evans. Holdsworth says, “We were industrialists, rebels on the job where we happened to be being exploited, and saboteurs if need be, and, instead of parliament, we stood for the One Big Union of the Workers of the World. We never led a strike but were always there.”[13]

He and his fellow Wobblies often travelled to other towns for work, always carrying with them imported IWW literature to help in “sowing the seed” of rebellion. While draining swamps in the farming district of the Waikato, Holdsworth wrote the Kiplingesque “Ballad of the Agitator”, which ends:
There’s never a place where the slave must sweat,
Not a town of soot or sun,
But we dared our worst and we gave our best,
And the work was freely done –
Though no tear be shed o’er our martyr’d dead,
We are ever marching on.[14]

Although New Zealand’s Wobblies were regularly accused by the popular press of sabotage, Holdsworth knew “of no occasion when it was carried out. We propounded it as a means of preventing scabbery, or dealing with it should it occur – it was a warning to both scab and employer. In America it was a different story, and we who had experience of real class war in America liked to tell of the various tricks, to those about us, never from the soapbox; and so the idea was spread.”[15] In place of the saboteur’s matches and dynamite, New Zealand Wobblies relied on the impact of IWW literature such as the Little Red Songbook and pamphlets like Marx’s Value, Price and Profit (translated from German by the bilingual William Trautmann).[16] “All boats from America were met by one or more of us wearing our IWW badge,” says Holdsworth, “in case there should be a Wobbly on board with the appropriate swag. But it was a precarious source of supply, so we set to and got out our own newspaper, the Industrial Unionist.”[17] This, the first IWW periodical in the Southern Hemisphere, was launched as a monthly in February 1913. It supplied industrial news from around the country, reported on JB King’s organizing efforts in Broken Hill, Australia, and printed letters from Hawaii by the somewhat isolated U.S. Wobbly, Albert Roe.[18]

One remarkable feature of the New Zealand Industrial Unionist may make it unique among Wobbly newspapers worldwide and has certainly never been matched in any other labor publication in New Zealand. From its July issue the paper ran regular articles in Maori, the language of New Zealand’s indigenous people. At that time many Maori spoke little or no English, although most were literate in their own language. The New Zealand IWW appears to have had no paid-up Maori members, so these articles were a means of reaching out to the most exploited section of the population. They were written by Percy Short, a member of the paper’s five-man editorial collective who worked as a house painter and licensed interpreter of Maori.19 His articles skillfully combined traditional Maori expressions with translations of IWW propaganda. One acknowledged the devastating loss of land and resources by Maori and said that all New Zealand workers were now placed in a similar condition by the boss class. Just as Maori had violently resisted the loss of their land in the past, now all workers should form a single tribe to recover and retain their possessions.[20] Collectively, these articles amount to an embryonic Marxist economic analysis in the Maori language, using authentically Maori metaphors and cultural values.

By mid-1913 the vigorous Auckland local of the IWW was holding four or five large public meetings a week. In September the English-born Tom Barker, who had taken over from JB King as the group’s guiding spirit, took the message to the rest of the country, riding with the tramps on railway goods wagons.[21] Holdsworth says, “He went without money and was without price. But he had a bundle of potential rebels in his bag – a pile of Industrial Unionists – each one more for the Revolution”.[22] Barker’s first stop was Wellington, where he reported, “I had 11 propaganda meetings in 14 days.” With the help of the stalwart John Dowdall, he was smuggled onto the wharves under the noses of the hostile waterfront police. “I finished on the piles down below, and talked Direct Action to the wharfies….Wellington will be a militant place for an IWW Local in the near future.”[23]
In Christchurch, the “storm centre of anti-militarism,” he found enough active IWW members to form a local immediately, reporting via the Industrial Unionist that “They have a nice room and nicely furnished, and all rebels peregrinating are requested to call in and introduce themselves…We will have half a dozen locals by Christmas, the tendency is all in our direction. The politicians are losing their grip, and the feeling is towards the repudiation entirely of nose counting, and the advocacy of Direct Action, Sabotage and Revolutionary Unionism.”[24] Finally Barker undertook a month-long tour of mining towns along the South Island’s West Coast, “the home of the fighters,” where he sold out the last of his stock of radical literature.[25]

His return journey was interrupted at Wellington by the outbreak of a long-awaited waterfront strike. Barker promptly organized a nonstop program of speakers and music in the public square opposite the wharves and led guerrilla attacks on large parties of mounted strikebreakers recruited from the rural districts. The strike soon spread to other industries and other cities and became the greatest industrial conflagration in New Zealand’s history. The Industrial Unionist now appeared every two or three days, urging workers throughout the country to make this a general strike which would bring down the ferociously anti-union government. Short’s articles told Maori workers, “This is the same government which confiscated your lands and killed your ancestors,” and urged them to join the strike.[26] Perhaps in consequence, very few Maori joined the thousands of strikebreakers, although they had been prominent in helping to break the Waihi strike the previous year.

As the strike grew more violent and widespread, the Industrial Unionist claimed a print-run of 5000 an issue. Barker himself sold 700 copies in a single morning, before being arrested along with other strike leaders and charged with sedition (which carried the death penalty). These arrests and the government’s recruitment of more than ten thousand strikebreakers and “special constables” finally broke the strike and forced the Wobblies to scatter far and wide to avoid retribution. Many left for Australia, including Barker, who jumped bail, and Reeve, who was badly beaten as he boarded his ship. There they both reunited with JB King and reinvigorated the Sydney IWW. Others headed for remote New Zealand communities where they were not known, often becoming active in the shearers’ and other rural unions.

The outbreak a few months later of World War I legitimized continuing persecution of the Wobblies. Some served long jail sentences for opposing conscription; others set up an escape route for conscientious objectors, smuggling them in the coal bunkers of ships to Australia, where conscription was not imposed.[27] However, a nationwide outburst of patriotism, and harsh emergency powers which outlawed strikes in essential industries and banned the importation of “seditious publications” (including the entire output of the IWW) shattered the strong movement which Barker and others had built up.[28]

Slowly, from about 1920, the remnants of New Zealand’s Wobblies began to reassert themselves. A One Big Union (OBU) Council, opposed to the parliamentary ambitions of the newly formed New Zealand Labour Party, began meeting above the shop of a sympathetic Auckland tailor. Its literature secretary, Leo Woods, said, “our activities were modeled along the lines of the IWW and consisted of public speaking and the dissemination of literature.”[29] Much of this printed matter was still banned and smuggled in on ships from Sydney; however, the OBU did not long survive the formation in 1921 of the New Zealand Communist Party, which assumed the leadership of the extreme left and opposed syndicalist views almost as strongly as the Labour Party.

Since then, founding Wobblies like Tom Barker and JB King reappeared occasionally in New Zealand, but their organization was never rebuilt, and the Wobbly strain in the labor movement was confined to determined individuals. One of these, Tom Gale, was a seaman from the Isle of Man who joined the IWW after witnessing police attacks on young female strikers in the silk-weaving plants of Paterson, New Jersey. He arrived in New Zealand in 1922 and had a long career as a rigger in the state railways. Railway workers were then represented by four different unions, and Gale’s attempts to form One Big Union on the railways failed when the four sets of paid officials could not agree on which of them would lose their jobs. In 1932, a period of massive unemployment and spreading fascist influence, he joined the New Zealand Communist Party and was elected to the executive of its Auckland branch, but left after refusing to sign correspondence with slogans such as “All Hail to Comrade Stalin.”[30] Another veteran of the 1913 Paterson silk-weavers’ strike was Alex Scott, the editor of a local newspaper who was convicted of “aiding and abetting hostility to the government.” Although not an IWW member, he was regarded as a valued ally by the U.S. Wobbly paper Solidarity. Arriving in New Zealand in 1922, Scott worked as a crusading journalist and helped establish large cooperatives in the working-class Hutt Valley into the 1940s.[31]

One of the more improbable New Zealand links with the worldwide Wobbly movement was Len de Caux, born in 1899 to a minister of religion serving a wealthy rural congregation in Hawkes Bay. He studied at elite private schools in New Zealand and England and entered Oxford University on a scholarship in 1919. This scion of privilege was radicalized during summer holidays in Europe. One of those, to Turin in 1920, coincided with a workers’ takeover of the auto factories. De Caux read of this in the newspaper L’Ordine Nuovo, in articles by the young Antonio Gramsci. Immediately after graduating, he “brushed from me the cobwebs of Oxford and emigrated to the United States…I’d come to join the working class in a country where class struggle was more brazenly brutal than in England or New Zealand.”[32] Soon de Caux was writing on-the-job articles for the IWW paper Industrial Solidarity, on Great Lakes shipping, Chicago packinghouses and Detroit steel mills, and dodging shotgun-wielding guards in order to ride freight trains to the Midwestern grain harvest. He became one of the leading labor journalists in the US and publicity director of the CIO until he was purged as a communist and blacklisted by the House on Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC). De Caux did not return to New Zealand until 1959, when he saw an old photograph from the turn of the century of the small West Coast mining town where he was born. “It was so startlingly similar to Western American towns around the same period, where the IWW had its start that I realized for the first time that the Wobblies might have had roots in like pioneering conditions in both countries.”[33]
It is this recognition of the universality of labor and its travails that has given the IWW its greatest strength and influence. Resisting all appeals to national pride or ethnic division, the Wobblies worked wherever they could be most effective, and I am persuaded by my research that their impact on New Zealand politics was much wider than has been acknowledged to date. For example, the IWW was greatly admired by those further to the center of the labor movement, who sympathized with the repression the Wobblies faced. In the early 20s a moderate laborite wrote a song called The Popular Scapegoat:
If a boiler blows up or a steamer goes down
Or somebody curses the Cross or the Crown
To find out the culprit, no, don’t let it trouble you
Put it all down to the Eye Double Double -You.[34]

A small number of the original Wobblies resisted joining either New Zealand’s Labour or Communist Parties and never departed from their IWW views. Bill Potter was an activist in the Wellington IWW and a militant in the 1913 strike, who later escaped to Australia where he took part in anti-conscription campaigns and the 1917 Brisbane tram strike. After returning to New Zealand he had a long career as a rank and file unionist, maintaining his IWW philosophy to the end.[35] That’s all I know about Potter, and I know even less about most of the others who have espoused and enacted the Wobbly strain of far-left politics in New Zealand, those spectral, semi-mythical figures whose humor, iconoclasm, commitment to working-class culture and dedication to democratic principle can still provide inspiration for actions in the present and hopes for the future.

Mark Derby is a writer and researcher in Wellington, NZ. He is currently editing a history of the New Zealanders who took part in the Spanish Civil War.

ENDNOTES
1. H Roth, Trade Unions in New Zealand, AH and AW Reed, 1973, p. 31
2. Proceedings of the First Convention of the IWW, 1905
3. William Trautmann, Fifty Years War, Book #2 1905-1920: The Rise and Fall of the Industrial Workers of the World, Trautmann collection, Walter Reuther Library, Detroit. I am indebted to Dr Jay Miller for drawing this important source to my attention, and permitting use of his PhD dissertation Soldier of the Class War - the life and writing of William E Trautmann, Wayne State University, Detroit, 2000.
4. For the formation of the NZ Federation of Labor, see Erik Olssen, The Red Feds – revolutionary industrial unionism and the NZ Federation of Labour 1908-1913, Auckland 1988. For an important contemporary account, see, Pat Hickey, Red Fed Memoirs – being a brief survey of the birth and growth of the Federation of Labour from 1908 to 1915 and the days immediately preceding it, reprinted Wellington Media Collective, 1980, f.p. 1925
5. Olssen, The Red Feds, p. 34 et passim
6. Emma Goldman, Living My Life vol. 1, Alfred A. Knopf Inc. 1931, Ch. 34
7 Michelle Leggott, The First Life: A Chronology of Lola Ridge’s Australasian Years, 22 April 2006, www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/features/bluff06/leggott.asp
8. Erik Olssen, ‘Tom Barker’, NZ Dictionary of Biography, online edition, www.dnzb.govt.nz/dnzb
9. A. Holdsworth to H. Roth, ‘Biographical notes – Tom Barker’, MS-Papers – 6164-007, Turnbull Library, Wellington
10. Verity Burgmann, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism – the Industrial Workers of the World in Australia, Melbourne 1995, p. 39, 95
11. Holdsworth, ibid.
12. H Roth, ‘New Zealand ‘Wobblies’ – the story of the Industrial Workers of the World’, Here and Now, March 1952, p 6-7
13. Holdsworth, ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. William Trautmann, Fifty Years War, p. 158
17. Holdsworth, ibid.
18. ‘Sandwich Islands’, Industrial Unionist, 1 May 1913
19. H. Roth, ‘Biographical notes – Percy Short’, MS-Papers-6164-092, Turnbull Library, Wellington
20. ‘Ki nga kaimahi Maori’, Industrial Unionist, 1 July 1913
21. ‘New Zealand notes’, Industrial Unionist, 1 August 1913
22. Holdsworth, ibid.
23. T. Barker, ‘Around NZ – Organiser’s Notes’, Industrial Unionist, 1 October 1913
24. Ibid.
25. T. Barker, ‘NZ organiser’, Industrial Unionist, 1 November 1913
26. ‘Ki te Iwi Maori Katoa’, Industrial Unionist, 13 November 1913
27. See, eg. Maoriland Worker, 21 September 1921, re departure of former Auckland IWW member Bob Heffron to Australia (where he later became Labor Premier of NSW).
28. H Roth, Trade Unions in New Zealand, AH and AW Reed, 1973, p. 42
29. Leo Woods to H. Roth, ‘Biographical notes – Woods, Leo John,’ MS-Copy-Micro-0714-26, Turnbull Library, Wellington
30. Len Gale, personal communications with author, 2006-7
31. Scott, Alexander, MS-Papers-0209, Turnbull Library, Wellington
32. Len De Caux, Labor Radical – from the Wobblies to the CIO, Beacon Press, Boston, 1970, p. 27
33. L. De Caux to B. Turner, 24 August 1979, MS-Paper-1981, Turnbull Library, Wellington
34. JB Hulbert, ‘The Popular Scapegoat,’ in My Garden and Other Verses, Wellington, 1922
35. Nadine LaHatte (nee Potter), to Mark Derby, email 1 June 2007

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Crosland Memorial lecture

This week I was very fortunate to have had the opportunity to attend Grimsby's Anthony Crosland Memorial lecture. If live in or around Grimsby and don't know what the Memorial Lecture is then I don't really blame you as this the first we've had for about five or six years and the last speaker was Roy Hattersly.

The Crosland Memorial Lecture is unsurprisingly a lecture held in honour of Grimsby MP and former Foreign Secretary Anthony Crosland, and is organised by the local Labour party though attendance is open to anyone and free (they pay for it via donations), for those unfamiliar with the work of Corsland, highlights include taking Henry Kissenger to a Grimsby Town (Mariners) match instead of having a meeting with him, though to be fair to him he only held that position for a year 1976-77 and died shortly after spending quite a bit of his time in the position quite ill so there wasn't any fundamental policy breaks from his predecessors in Callaghan's and Wilson's governments.

He was however extremely active outside of the Foreign office, other posts included Secretary of state for education and science, President of the board for trade and Secretary of state for local government. In fact his most memorable quote comes from his time overseeing education "If it's the last thing I do, I'm going to destroy every fucking grammar school in England. And Wales and Northern Ireland" Well said Tony well said. Outside of Cabinet entirely Crosland was also very influential his book the future of Socialism written published in 1956 caused quite a stir arguing for a mixed economy and a halt to nationalisation, in fact if Crosland were still a live today he'd probably be a Social Democrat, which is funny given that the man who replaced as Foreign Secretary was David "SDP" Owen.

The speaker this year was none other then Helen Clark former Labour Prime Minister of New Zealand and current head of the UN development Programme which puts here in the top 3 positions of power for that organisation. Now I don't wish Mr Hattersly any disrespect but theres a bit of a gap between the two, Former Deputy leader of the opposition, no one times 5, then former national leader and 20th most powerful women in the world.

Her Lecture concerned the issues of International development, the problems faced the problems yet to be faced such as climate change, and the solutions and there practical effects. When it came to the eradication of poverty and the Millennium development goals she mentioned that there doing well... so long as you include China, if you take China out of the analysis then the average falls short of the goals which is to cut absolute poverty by half, absolute poverty being those who live on a dollar and a half or less, however Ghana is also doing well in this area and many African states have seen a number of concrete improvements in infrastructure and services so its not all bad in that area, though relativistic poverty is a curse all over the globe and little is being done about that.

The questions section was a bit hit and miss one person raise the issue of population growth and what can be done about it, if you've heard about the "solutions" to over population you've probably been forced to suffer through some keyboard eugenicist ranting about sterilisation or some sort of death lottery. Helen's response was both more compassionate and made more sense, give women the choice in the matter. Simple really societies were sexual education is normal, where contraceptives are available and affordable and there's no impinging social factor against there use and coupled with decent health care to reduce death by pregnancy and the population levels stabilise and the growth rate goes down there by reducing the pressure on resources.

And its true the nuclear family model is the standard family model in the northern hemisphere and it wasn't always so, my Mother was one of eleven and myself am one of Five, hell in some nations its arguably worked to well with the population growth actually becoming a negative trend.

All in all a very good talk, it'll be interesting to see who they get next year (if any one).