The October Revolution transformed socialist politics throughout the world. At a time when the most terrible war in human history (up until then) raged, the working class in Russia had overthrown the Tsarist regime in February 1917 and in October had itself taken power under the leadership of the Bolsheviks.
The Revolution not only provided inspiration in dark times, but also provided vital political lessons for socialists everywhere, including the United States. Many Wobblies were eager to learn these lessons. Their belief had been that the One Big Union, the IWW, would be built up until it encompassed the whole working class and was strong enough to overthrow the capitalist class by means of a great general strike. Confronted with a general strike the capitalist class was expected to surrender.
What was missing from this strategy was an understanding of the role of the capitalist state in the class struggle. What the Bolsheviks argued was that the revolutionary movement would inevitably come under attack from the capitalist state as it grew stronger and in a revolutionary situation would have to destroy the capitalist state if it was to succeed. The armed bodies of men that were the guarantors of capitalist power would have to be confronted, some won over or others physically defeated. Failure to do this would result in the triumph of reaction and the unleashing of an anti-working class terror.
The general strike was not the way to achieve this. Troops and police would be turned loose to massacre the strikers. Instead it was necessary to destroy the capitalist state. The general strike was certainly a vital part of the struggle but in the end what was necessary was armed insurrection and the replacement of the capitalist state by workers’ councils. This was one of the great lessons of the October Revolution: workers’ councils would replace the capitalist state. The Soviets, as they were known in Russia, were not the creation of Marxist theorists, but of the Russian working class who invented them as the way in which the working class could exercise power. Not through reformist politicians in capitalist parliaments and congresses, but through their own directly elected representatives, subject to recall, could the working class rule.
For many Wobblies, the role of the capitalist state had been brought home forcibly by the scale of the repression that was unleashed against the American left in 1917 and that continued into the post-war period. The state that sentenced the IWW leadership to 20 years apiece on trumped-up charges, that had all but destroyed the reformist Socialist Party, would have to be smashed.
Another problem that the Wobblies had been wrestling with since 1913-1914 was the question of the uneven level of consciousness within the working class. For them the One Big Union was the instrument of working class liberation, but this belief had continually come up against the reality that for most workers the trade union movement was a way of improving pay and conditions under capitalism, not of overthrowing it. This was an important factor behind the IWW’s failure to consolidate its position even when it won strikes. The union grew, often by the thousands, when struggle raged, but in the aftermath there was a failure to consolidate the advances made.
What the experience of Bolshevism offered was a way of working with the uneven consciousness of the working class, a way of strengthening the position of the most advanced workers and increasing their influence within the class until they were able to lead it to revolution. This required a revolutionary party working within the unions.
Before 1917, as far as most Wobblies were concerned, a political party was either altogether unnecessary or else played a subsidiary, primarily propagandist role in the struggle. The October Revolution showed that there was another way and this alternative had led the workers to power in Russia.
And the post-war experience of the American working class seemed to show that the IWW had become a deadend for revolutionaries. There were massive working class struggles in the United States. In 1919, there were 3,630 strikes involving over 4 million workers. The employers and government responded with ferocious repression. One of the decisive battles, the attempt to unionise steel, led by William Z Foster, a former Wobbly and future Communist Party leader, went down to defeat, but only after 26 strikers had been killed, hundreds injured, beaten or shot and thousands arrested. In no other industrialised country was even basic union organisation resisted with such violence. A capitalist class that was prepared to shoot strikers down for trying to organise was certainly not going to surrender its wealth and power without a violent struggle, if necessary drowning the working class in blood. This was a crucial lesson.
The massive post-war strike wave largely passed the IWW by. Many Wobblies were involved in it, of course, sometimes even playing leadership roles, but they were mainly dual carders, members of both the IWW and of the union that dominated their workplace. These individuals were, of course, acknowledging the uneven consciousness of the working class in practice and many of them came to Bolshevism through the experience.
With both the example of Soviet Russia and their own experience of the class struggle in the United States to learn from, many leading Wobblies embraced Bolshevism. One of them was Bill Haywood. He had read John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World in prison. As far as he was concerned, the workers had taken power in Russia and now the task was to spread the revolution across the world. He told Ralph Chaplin that the Russian Revolution was “the greatest event in our lives. It represents all that we have been dreaming of and fighting for all our lives. It is the dawn of freedom and industrial democracy”. Some 2,000 Wobblies, a fifth of the membership at the time, were to join the Communist Party in the United States.
The failure of the Revolution to spread was, of course, to see the dashing of all these hopes and dreams and the coming to power of the Stalin regime. Workers’ power in Russia was to be replaced by a state capitalist tyranny over the working class that by the 1930s maintained itself in power by terror.
What of the IWW itself? The union still propagandised and fought for the One Big Union with its members often displaying considerable courage and ingenuity in the struggle. Despite this, when the great working class revolt of the 1930s came, the moment they had been waiting for, the IWW was once again bypassed. The great strikes and factory occupations were often led by men and women who had started out as Wobbly militants, by the likes of Harry Bridges and James Cannon, but by the time they came to transform the face of industrial America the day of the IWW had passed.