Collective Organization and the IWW

What is a collective organization? Collective means that it is the coming-together of multiple different people to act as one, organization means that it has a structure and an existence beyond the individuals involved.

In the IWW, we are far too much of an organization and not enough of a collective. Much of this has to do with the lingering effects, psychological as well as administrative, of being a tiny crew that bears the banner of a famous union. There is a very slight continuity between the current organization and the union in its heyday. That's fine, it's not important to get caught up in concerns about the "authenticity" of repping the IWW's name and vision. But  because the organization became a tiny crew of people who supported its ideals in the mid-century and has only slowly crept back towards functioning as a workers' organization within the past decade or so we have some serious problems to overcome.

The organization, being the thing that has a structure and exists beyond us, as an entity that we create and has its own culture and practices, which can be communicated to people, is moving in more or less the right direction, as most members would probably agree. We are taking on more fights, improving our practice and our ideas, attempting to nail down our administrative practices and become more effective. We are growing, building more members into the organization, who hopefully take on new work themselves.

One of the things that is an ongoing theme in our practice is our relationship to collectivity though. We are quite effective at articulating what it means to be a collective organization on the shopfloor: workers creating their own cultural practices of resistance, taking actions that threaten the boss's dictatorship over work, putting forward ideas of alternate models of how power should flow. It's clear to most people who attend an organizer training or who are brought into a good workplace campaign what exactly the collective experience or collective action means. Yet our weakness is in employing this same sense of collectivity to the organization beyond the shopfloor.

The incongruity between attending a shopfloor committee meeting and a branch meeting or between administering a shop committee and the International is pronounced. Instead of focusing on building peoples' abilities and consciousness, as a group, our administrative structures generally emphasize individuals. Committees, at both the local level and the international, tend to be centered around the few persons that serve on them and their particular visions. Membership outside of a shop committee becomes a question of an individual paying dues (or even signing up online, the most atomized practice of all!) not a group paying dues. In organizing committees we figure out how to keep people learning, keep the good ones involved and keep the difficult ones out until we work on them. In our administration we figure out how to keep people in at all costs, regardless of what they do, as long as they pay dues.

Whereas effective organizing committees pay much more attention to the skills and abilities, the social connections and personalities of its members, the branch pays more attention to who attends meetings, who pays dues regularly, who talks the most. Obviously, different branches and different committees are variable and not all of them fall victim to the same problems to the same degree. But as a general pattern, organizing committees are collective and administrative units are organizational.

A key task in the next few years must be for the organization to figure out how to take its collective approach to solving problems with the boss and turn it into a collective approach to solving questions of the class struggle on a class-wide basis. When we were a tiny organization whose primary requirement for entry was whether or not a person believed in the ideas of the IWW and revolutionary unionism, we were necessarily oriented towards individuals. But as we grow and as we begin actually engaging in widespread collective action and organizing on the shopfloor, we must figure out how to move away from being an association of individuals who believe in the IWW's ideas to becoming a collective organization of people who are doing the IWW's work. Factors like political vision, organizing experience, links through the class, internal hierarchies, class composition and beyond both play into this problem and are perpetuated (or suppressed) as a result of this individualized nature of the organization's life. How do we go forward together?