Yeah, I can see why I'm supposed to take the Wobblies seriously, the Industrial Workers of the World's "ONE BIG UNION" is, a hundred ten years after its founding, measured as 3,020 strong. I suspect that if you took out the Utah Phillips wannabees who joined up because they figured having the card was neat-o the membership would be considerably smaller. About the only phenomenon in contemporary leftist reverence I can think of that is less impressive is the record of Greens holding public office. To mention other counterproductive delusions of the left.
Reading IWW history as even they publish it, the internal divisions would seem to have been enough to seal its doom. A lot of that was inevitable, considering it seemed to revel most of all in the cult of macho rugged individualism. Such guys don't tend to produce durable cooperative efforts based in a non-hierarchical sharing of power and respect for differing opinions. Though, yes, there was martyrdom and illegal suppression. There was martyrdom of members and illegal suppression of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, too. Which group did something in politics that made peoples lives better?
And I suspect the takeover struggle by communists in the 1930s would have sealed the fate of the IWW if nothing else had happened. American communists are the most pudding headed incompetents and counter-productive frauds in the history of the American left. Little they had a hand in leading hasn't been at best a two-edged sword that eventually damaged the left, Including the sacred ACLU which is in the business of corrupting our elections and protecting broadcast lies in a way few other groups of the alleged left have. But I've been looking more at the life history of Roger Baldwin in my research into Corliss Lamont a bit more this past week so that's fresh on my mind.
Anyway, the fact is that whenever the left has managed to move the country it has been the religious left which has done it through invoking those religious beliefs I mentioned. There is absolutely nothing in materialist theory or evolutionary theory that has or will be trimmed to fit the same role in politics or the society from which political action arises. Materialism is only good for denying the reality of those things which real life proves are as real as physical objects. Their absence or presence makes all of the difference in reality as experienced by human beings*. It is only with religion that the elevation of human beings in politics finds any possible security, people have to BELIEVE IT in order for them to sacrifice their selfish interests in enough instances to make political change real instead of a complete pipe dream. There couldn't be solidarity for even five minutes, never mind forever without that belief being there and effective. I use the notable lack of solidarity in the membership and history of the IWW and other anti-religious "leftist" organizations as a lesson in what happens when people don't really believe those kinds of things as granted by their Creator. God, in a word. I have never seen another explanation of where those rights and moral obligations come from that wasn't either dishonest word-play or otherwise intellectually unsound and liable to atheist debunking when it served their self-interest.
* What human beings experience is the only basis for any reality that human beings can experience, we have access to nothing else. There is no disembodied "reality" that is separate from human experience, the conceit of materialists that they can access some higher reality is merely the willfully unrealistic, opportunistic and childish denial of that hardest of hard facts in intellectual life. Yet on that rests the entire intellectual enterprise of the materialists, the "physicalists" and the "naturalists". The "Humanists" claim to believe that man is the measure of all things while simultaneously trying to debunk the validity of human belief drawn from human experience when they don't like what people conclude from that belief. A mind divided cannot stand and the intellectual and political ideology that is so basically self contradicting cannot help but screw stuff up royally.
UPDATE: OK, if you're such a "solidarity forever, big supporter of the Wobblies" why have you never been a dues-paying, card carrying, putting your own sweet fat on the line for the workers member instead of a mere concert-going, Dreamed-I-Saw-Joe-Hill-Last-Night sing-along fantasy idolizer of it?
And I would love to see a list of famous members who died as paid-up members instead of former members of the thing. Look at how Eugene O'Neill ended up and his disillusioned vision of the left and fatalist disbelief in the potential of humanity to ever do anything better, the point of my link to my old post on that topic.
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