Industrial Workers of The World Philosophy and Tactics - The Question of Political Action

The Question of Political Action

By the time of the 1905 founding of the Industrial Workers of the World, the question of whether unionized workers could secure significant change by political actions of their unions had been in contention for some decades. The question had split the National Labor Union in 1872. It created divisions between the membership and the leadership of the Knights of Labor, with the leaders favoring various political agendas including Greenbackism, socialism, and land reform. Labor historian Joseph Rayback believed that significant losses for organized labor in the 1890s pointed the way toward either socialism, or industrial unionism in order to maintain organized labor's momentum.

Yet Samuel Gompers, leader of the American Federation of Labor, opposed both courses of action. He and John Mitchell, head of the United Mine Workers, joined an alliance of conservative union leaders and liberal business men in forming the National Civic Federation (NCF). That organization's critics on the left believed that its goals were to suppress sympathy strikes, and to replace traditional expressions of working class solidarity with binding national trade agreements and arbitration of disputes.

By 1905, the NLU was history, and the Knights of Labor mostly a memory. Mitchell and Gompers of the AFL were beginning to build an alliance with the Democratic Party. While the focus upon political alliance by the AFL (at the perceived cost of class solidarity) was just one aspect of the differing union philosophies, it was a significant one. The formation of the Industrial Workers of the World was in many ways a direct response to the conservatism of the AFL, and its perceived failure to respond to the needs of western miners, lumbermen, and others. However, the political question would likewise play a central role in the internal disputes, and in the eventual evolution of the IWW itself.