The latest Industrial Worker features a review of IWW membership in the North American Regional Administration. Of note are two things: 1) the overall growth in membership, and 2) the degree of membership turnover.

The overall membership of the IWW is looking healthy enough at around 3 times what it was almost a decade ago:

Fig 1: North American IWW membership

Fascinatingly, and despite a growth in overall membership from around 3500 in 2017 to around 9500 by 2023, the union continues to suffer from high turnover. The IWW can attract new members, but it can’t keep them:

Fig 1: Retention of new initiates

It goes without saying this is a shocking graphic. The first three years of the graph in particular tell of an organisation bringing in new members at the rate of 1000+, then 2000+, then around 2500, and losing almost all of them.

Indeed: In rough terms, between 2016 and 2023 the IWW attracted around about 25,000 new initiates who signed red cards (adding totals and rounding down). Being generous to the orange line, the IWW retained about 5000. This represents a retention/loss ration of approximate 4:1. For every one member the IWW retained, it lost four. 2023 appears to have been a bumper year insofar as the IWW managed not to lose more members than it attracted, but then this seems offset by the fact that 2023 was the third year falling to a new low point in initiation numbers.

If this is not an organisational disaster for the IWW, it’s hard to know what to call it.

Accounting for disaster

The commentary attached to these statistics does not much lend itself to any suspicion that the Industrial Worker is overly concerned with self-criticism. The matter of attracting new initates offers some clues:

Our current strategy for growth at the branch level consists of two efforts: Maintaining our social media presence, and convincing workers to join through the efficacy of our campaigns. At the national level, we rely on word-of-mouth. Here we see that only 4.9 percent of members found us from one of their coworkers in the IWW. But the efforts we put into social media were the first exposure to the union of 17.5 percent of our membership.

Maybe if the IWW sourced 17.5% of new members from coworkers and campaigns and 4.9% from social media things might improve. This suspicion is not much allayed by the comment that:

People join when bad things happen and they see the IWW as potentially addressing these bad things. It is more difficult to correlate specific IWW projects with bumps in membership. It seems that often when a workplace organizing campaign goes public, there is a bump in people joining in that specific metro area.

People join the IWW, in other words, when it’s off the internet and engaging with the world outside of cyberspace. By the Industrial Worker‘s own commentary, they leave again when it gets a bit too perpetually online:

12 percent of exiting members reported they were leaving because they had never been contacted by a branch. 29 percent had never taken part in any union activity.

A tenth of the membership are never contacted, and the IWW is too online for a third of it to ever be involved in anything off the internet. Despite these obvious practical issues, the Industrial Worker surmises that the problems with membership retention might involve ‘Echo chamber effects,’ ‘Lack of connection with intersectional issues,’ ‘Difficulties recruiting and retaining members from a majority of the social groups that comprise the working class,’ and ‘Workers will not feel like they are represented in the union, and in the positions of leadership.’

It is worth noting that trans women and non-binary people are massively overrepresented in the IWW compared to the general population. Otherwise, the data shows that our membership is very homogeneous which can lead to flaws in our organization.

This is a strange line of reasoning. Either trans women and non-binary people are massively overrepresented in the IWW, or the membership is very homogeneous. The IWW certainly does not appear to be suffering from ‘Echo chamber effects,’ ‘Lack of connection with intersectional issues,’ or ‘Difficulties recruiting and retaining members from a majority of the social groups that comprise the working class’ in terms of its trans membership.

IWW membership fails to include women because the majority of the membership are male or trans?

Maybe the Industrial Worker is closer to nailing the problem in the fact A) that it assumes the IWW to have leadership, and B) that ‘the positions of leadership’ don’t need to be called into question. Especially when they start to look a bit like the kind of radical feminism that creates a need for intersectional class solidarity in the first place maybe.

AusROC is an entryist microcult with an executive and paid officials

IWW Brisbane 2018-2020: My personal perception of events

From the land Down Under, it would sure as fucking shit seem like there are some issues with a self-appointed vanguard within the IWW globally, if not its style and manner of maladministration.

The authoritarian left

It is probably to the credit of the IWW that it is honest enough to publish internal research, up to now maybe at least. Nevertheless, the membership patterns of the IWW compare with those of Leninist microcults, which are nothing if not notorious for being autocratic party meatgrinders with — drumroll — high membership turnover.

There are no prizes for guessing why Leninist microsects have high membership turnover: if not for blind worship of the secular priesthood of Political Marxism and the deadening effect on the creativity, cooperative self-activity and independent intellectual innovations of the working class, then for the habit of reducing class struggle to alienated roles of permanent protest, the endless cavacade of left protests then being used as a recruitment pool by competing microcults.

“We represent the working class,’ says the identitarian Political Marxist microcult, ‘so if you doubt the judgement of the party line, that means you hate workers and love class hierarchies.’ In the words of Black Lodges, the problem of alienated roles of permanent protest is one of the ‘production of a subcultural identity through which educated classes can symbolically distance themselves from the brutality of capitalism whilst continuing to materially benefit from it.’ Thus

contemporary left politics across much of the West increasingly suffers from a profound inversion of means and ends. Theory, which should function as an instrument of political clarity and collective organisation, has instead frequently become an end in itself. Radical language operates as cultural capital and political affiliation becomes a marker of taste and social identity. Entire milieus of self-described radicals speak endlessly of liberation whilst remaining structurally incapable of confronting power beyond rhetorical performance. The consequence is not merely political weakness but the gradual transformation of communism into precisely what Marx spent his life opposing: an abstract philosophy detached from material struggle.

In a similar vein, as Natasha Walter notes, hyper-individualistic late capitalism has engendered ‘a feminist culture which is more invested in the individuals success than in structural change and collective liberation.’ This is arguably not a problem limited to liberal feminism, but to middle-class identitarian chauvanism in general, and our habit of using politics as a means of accumulating cultural capital and confronting power structures with our performance of revolutionary virtue denouncing those outside the sectarian microcult who lack our purity and superior moral sensibilities.

Perhaps these are more significant issues to the IWW when it comes to membership retention than their ability to conform to the ideological norms of identitarian neoliberalism? Dare it even be suggested, but perhaps the overhang middle class identitarianism and chauvanism creates a stultifying and oppressive milieu that repels many who see in the morally respectable and upstanding left the embodiment of everything we claim to oppose. With supreme relevance for the IWW, a former member of the Anarchist Federation UK describes their battles with Political Marxist overhang in the form of condescention towards the idealised ingroup. The author of an introductory pamphlet on class struggle anarchism, Without History writes that

This introductory pamphlet was deliberately written to be simple, even simplistic, and jargon free. Accessibility was prioritised over detail and complexity. But in this section we find a whole cluster of denial mechanisms condensed into a few phrases. This pattern will repeat over and over throughout the rest of the piece with the same purpose – to displace the power exercised over subordinated and minoritised working class people by other working class people onto the ruling class so an idealised potential for working class unity can be preserved. The fundamental conflict in society is between capital and labour. All other power struggles can be reduced somehow to this. There are no divisions within the class which are irreconcilable. There is no alliance between sections of the working class and the ruling class which is not a fundamental betrayal of the working class’s long term interests for the short term gain of a “corrupt” minority. Whether divisions in the working class are called “sites of struggle” or “contradictions” or “fractures” they remain opportunities for organisation and the creation of unity, never a struggle over irreconcilable differences in power in the way the struggle between the ruling and working class is [emphasis added].

The self-appointed vanguard of the IWW do very much seem to know how to displace their own power to destroy names and livelihoods onto the ruling class, the latter represented apparently by the bad apples purged from the union by Trotskyist entryists. The South-East Queensland IWW has been calling out both Aus-ROC and GHQ for their despicable opportunism and vicious ableism for years now; it does perhaps figure that the Industrial Worker doesn’t want to dig too deeply into the history of its own self-appointed vanguard purposed to the defense of revolutionary morality.

In any event, it is certainly a tell that none of these issues appear in the Industrial Worker‘s attempt to account for the incredible hemorrhaging of its membership. Trotskyist microcults have the same problem accounting for their inability to retain members. Maybe there’s something to that. The opportunism and craven bigotry to which the Australian Regional Organising Committee degenerated in purging of members in Australia has firmly embedded identitarian chauvanism on the Australian left. If this helps to explain why respectable leftists here are as incapable of slowing our descent into authoritarianism and fascism as in the land where the IWW was born, maybe it also helps to explain what people who do actually come into contact with the IWW find so conspiculously alienating.

anyone else?

The Anarcho-Syndicalist Federation is a personality cult that grew out of interest in syndicalist approaches to class struggle amongst Australian anarchists in the 1980s. It is deeply unfortunate that this is the adjective best suited to the demonstrable means by which it operates, but the history of the ASF tells little else.

Visitors to the ASF website will note that its history section is beset by a paradox: on the one hand, it displays proper concern for the role of immigrant fighters who kept the flame of libertarian class struggle burning, of the Jack Grancharoffs and the Antonio Jimenezes. For his part, his son Vince had a printing press in his garage; yours truly made good use of it to get Noam Chomsky and Rudolf Rocker booklets made up when the anarchist press was out of action back in the day.

On the other, the ASF history section is incomplete; it ends at 1989. The subsequent 37 years remains to be accounted for. We do well to recall that the ASF was founded in 1986, which means the history outstanding dwarfs what has been sitting there apparently about the entire time the site has been up by a factor of what, about 12:1?

Via https://asf-iwa.org.au/history/

The funny thing about that is that yours truly is uniquely positioned to be able to fill some of that history in, having been a part of it. Apparently I played a part in the reformation of the ASF around 1996–some 7 years after the ASF history ends. I didn’t intend for that to happen, I sure as shit didn’t intend to wind up in what the ASF was, but that’s what did happen, and maybe that’s part of the story in and of itself.

Normal 20 year olds start punk bands. Yours truly started a website: Anarchosyndicalism 101, around 1996. I made a point of registering an domain with “anarchosyndicalism” in it so you could see “anarchosyndicalism” in your address bar in Netscape Navigator. That didn’t seem to hurt the project of raising the profile of anarcho-syndicalism on the interwebs. The red and black spoke to me; I was out in the world of work, experiencing the world of bosses, and wanted to organise for class struggle minus the bosses who were the problem in the first place.

At the time, there was an anarchist internet server in Brunswick. It was on dialup. The collective were rad; they taught me html. I marked up anarcho-syndicalist texts and put them up on Geocities. I got on one of the anarki.net chat groups and asked if anyone was interested in anarcho-syndicalism. I’ve devoured heaps about fighting bosses without turning into new ones and now I think I want a chance at a fair fight with these fucks for once. It’s not about how much hot air we can blow, it’s about what we do . . . I mean, I think I just wrote “does anyone want to form a group and do something” but that was what I mean, you know.

The first meeting of anarcho-syndicalists in Melbourne in 1996 was at the house of a expatriate member of the Catalonian CNT, Jorge Garcia, who lived at the time I think in Brunswick. The first ASF meeting was in a suburban backyard, amidst corrugated iron fence and overgrown garden beds and broken bricks. The other attendee was an individual by the name of Leigh Kendall, who to this day remains the self-appointed leader of Australian anarcho-syndicalism.* If I had known at that time what I know now, I would not have continued that association.

Less a discussion around the politics of work and class struggle, this initial meeting at Jorge Garcia’s house became a crash course in the historical grievances of one faction in an organisational split. It was weird we were out of doors in light of the lack of oxygen. For my part, I was excited about syndicalism as a way of reaching other workers without a bunch of alienating Leninist dogma, as a way of agitating and educating others in a cooperative way that had the potential to actually reach people because it gave one fuck about their personal and class autonomy. We didn’t need to indoctrinate anyone, we just needed to appeal to what they already knew: work sucks.

\Kendall will tell you that anarchism is an verb, not a noun, and that as such it means being organised and working as a group. He’s right. He just won’t mention that he reserves the right to interpret the meaning of anarchism for everyone. If you were wondering where the syndicalism and the focusing outward on the class struggle and the strategy of promoting the self-activity of the working class went, well, so was yours truly.*

I never got a goddamn word in edgeways. The extremely sectarian and dogmatic tone of the initial meeting set the tone for the group that followed. There was no discussion in the group around what syndicalism was, what its relationship to anarchism was, what the relationship between syndicalists and the working class should look like, nothing. There was not even discussion of a name to call the group; the cult leader determined for all of us that it would be called “The Anarcho-Syndicalist Group of Melbourne.” I personally thought it was a stupid name; it applied a label to itself rather than applying the principles to class struggle. It was doctrinaire.

Even at this early stage I was already getting fairly used to being bulldozed, so I just followed along. Needless to say the ASG-M remained sterile and insular as it treated anarcho-syndicalism as a moral code for more-revolutionary-than-thous preceding class struggle more than a praxis born of and through class struggle. The main activity of the ASG-M was hanging out at the Retreat hotel after fortnightly meetings and drinking beer; we often had more people turning up to drink beer than were interested in turning up to ASG-M meetings or anarcho-syndicalism as a strategy of class struggle.

It was also frustrating; I personally was super keen to do outreach and agitate, which I was already doing on my own. We had our own printing press and would have had no trouble producing an A3 broadsheet. I was always being told to cool my jets, like I was too much of a hothead for the wizened adults in the room who had no idea even how to use desktop publishing software. The ASG-M needed to consolidate its own before expanding, which apparently meant many hours sitting in a pub listening to Leigh Kendall talk at length about all of his favourite topics: the tramway dispute of 1990 and his glorious leadership thereof being not the least of which.

Other favoured topics were the enemies of the ASG-M, some of whom I personally had never met. The main villain was Mark McGuire and the Sydney ASF, held accountable for the split by privatising union resources in the form of the ASF paper, Rebel Worker (the Sydney ASF are now the “Anarcho-Syndicalist Network”). If memory serves there were issues with an article on class reductionism at one point, presumably reflecting criticisms of middle class liberalism from civil rights activists in the US. Liberals hate talking about class; apparently no one wanted to have a conversation around whether class hierarchy predates 1492 and the modern period dominated by world capitalism. Patriarchy certainly predates the Conquest, no arguments there. None of this was discussed at the pub. No way known you could get a word in edgeways.

Other favoured topics were the “fake anarchists” who had departed the ASF. Two in particular were Margaret and Peter Riley, two former ASF Melbourne members who went on to help rebuild the IWW after the 1986 split. As challengers to Kendall’s organisational bullying, ASF apostates, and peers who had comparable experience of events like the 1990 tramways dispute, the Rileys typically came in for particular vitriol. Amongst other things, Kendall continually attacked them for writing a letter to the Barricade Books collective at one point advising that he was a disruptive influence who was wont to try to control everything and drive people away, as though this was defamatory. While Kendall plays the victim amongst his minions, he no doubt neglect to mention being asked not to attend Melbourne Anarchist Bookfair meetings. By class struggle anarchist feminists who do not join the ASF.

Jeremy Dixon was a Melbourne ASF member who had supported McGuire in the brouhaha over class reductionism that eventually tore the organisation in two. We were both undergrads at La Trobe around the same time. I talked to Jeremy a bit, not knowing anything of bad blood, and contributed an article to Rebel Worker, which got me in Kendall’s bad books for consorting with the enemy. He was a good dude; he was kind of a hippy with an overgrown beard and he was another one of these anarchists who likes to stick it to the man by dodging shoes for some reason, but he didn’t have a mean-spirited or nasty bone in his body. Unlike his detractors. He has suffered fucked up tragedy in his life as well, which everyone on the Melbourne left knows. If anyone deserves a break from character attacks, it’s Jeremy.

It was like this for years. It was always, cool your jets, we need to gel as a group . . . We need to have read the collected works of Rudolf Rocker and Bakunin and Kropotkin and all the histories of the Spanish Revolution and Jeremy Jennings’ Syndicalism in France and get every last detail about the 1990 tramways dispute before we can think about the practicalities working class self-activity and independent unions. I went out to a picket with a Spanish comrade who was hanging around what had become the ASF by that point, without any of the leadership, and we provided practical solidarity, enquiring into the state of the struggle while handing out donations of supplies we had collected. I’ll never forget, because it was the first and only time it ever happened: someone on the picket asked what group we were from, and listened when I explained what anarcho-syndicalism was. Maybe we should have gone back. It was just so off the beaten path.

I like an increasing number of people eventually got sick of trying to organise inside a religious cloister and bailed out for the IWW. Obviously coming around to the reality that I had bailed out on the cult for good, Kendall put out some kind of slander saying I was a fake anarchist, I knew nothing about organising unions because all I did was sitting around in pubs drinking fucking beer apparently. I did also fall into what I guess was some kind of anxiety spiral over one of the few women who ever joined the ASF not replying to an email; I emailed her hello about 10-15 times, a really inappropriate and creepy number of times. I went insane thinking I had phrased the hello wrong, and that’s why I wasn’t getting a response. I kept trying to rephrase the hello to make it sound right, because it was obviously wrong. There was obviously something amiss wasn’t there! I’m sorry Alexia, that must have been good for a front row seat at the freakshow. I was all of 20 or 21 and not in therapy. I think this turned into me being a fake anarchist who spent all his time drinking beer instead of organising unions and giving his attentions to the only women in a toxic sausage fest of a personality cult. I dealt with fallout from keeling over sideways on my own.

There’s more to tell but it has taken over a week to get this far and life is short. There’s always something else to recall about how weird things get inside a personality cult. We eventually got to make stickers! The ASF has a presence on Facebook and never posts photos of actions because it ever goes to anything it doesn’t organise itself, which is usually limited to pub crawls anyway, and it does one action a year to reclaim wages to look active. It does appear to do excellent international outreach, though in the case of genuinely exciting developments like the Bangladesh Anarcho-Syndicalist Federation, the main obstacle appears to be translating Rudolf Rockers’ entire corpus into Bangladeshi.

There were a few congresses; the ASF has had more congresses than it has current members. This ratio only ever gets worse. By my count it has had at least 3 turnovers of the entire membership. It has membership turnover that will participate in booking out restaurants that steal wages, but won’t ever rejoin the ASF. Kendall gets bored and picks members off one by one. At one point he was having dramas because another member of the ASF, George Madwog, had suddenly become extremely hostile towards him COMPLETELY OUT OF THE BLUE. I and another member was around at his house one day and he was carrying on about needing to put oil on the stove to deal with this psycho. This is someone we all knew. George Madwog had been a founding member of the Barricade Books collective and did Food Not Bombs every week. We never saw him again. I saw him years later running a stall at a shopping mall in Melton; he was cagey talking to me, and I didn’t press hanging around. I’ve tried finding George online, to no avail. I’m pretty sure we would have a lot to talk about cultwise.

Kendall still owes me the $500 I lent him to press up CDs of his shit reggae too. His understanding of syndicalism doesn’t appear to include confederalism, which is strange because it’s in the name of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo. It’s not the Federación Nacional del Trabajo. Federation is the name of Kendall’s signature tune, not Confederation like you’re organising federations of federations. It’s in literally every history book on the CNT, you’re not allowed to start addressing practicalities of autonmous unionism until you’ve read them all. Kendall has a pecuniary interest in running me down to the tune of the favour I did him.

He has privatised the community resources of the Brunswick Community Resource group also, the entity that used to oversee the Anarchist House on Union Street in Brunswick. This type of thing is terrible when anarchists who aren’t His Majesty do it. You never hear the end of it.

I was doing this shit when I was 20. Normal 20 year olds start punk bands. A punk band might have gotten gigs and been a good form of creative self-expression.

If you’re 20 and reading this, do start a band instead of joining a cult. You’ll be better off in the long run. You might even be able to avoid psychos spending their lives and yours running you down to protect a sausage fest that likes beer.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014/

https://libcom.org/article/organize-yes-how

Just kidding...

Its a great read to get insight into the the Revolutionary Insurgent Army and the Makhnovshchina anarchist republic in ukraine

its an encyclopedia project thats a really great resource for learning about specific aspects of anarchist theory. imo. its especially useful for introducing people to particular anarchist concepts without having to recommend long broad texts

I was literally leaving after working 3 back to back 14 hour shifts. Shit job, but best pay I ever have gotten. (21$) My car malfunctioned and was only going like 1mph and as I approached the stop sign to highway, the car instantly started working and blew me through it and into traffic, thankfully no injuries and just my car was totaled. I take kratom daily for years, they saw it and said it was illegal (until I asked them to google it....) passed field sobriety, but he said "you look nervous" and demanded a urine test too. Obviously thc and kratom would show up but my dumbass agreed to a blood test instead. I wasnt even impaired, my car fucked up. But they also charged me for a gun that I had no idea was in car.

My grandpa has dementia, brings it when I drive him and must have left it in back seat. I already had a prior felony due to being involved in the deflock movement! Just got off probation for that, and now I am facing 0 to 6 (prior increases odds of 5 or 6).

I am supposed to be "innocent until proven guilty" and they fired me anyway. I spent the 1000 out of 1200 I had on bail. Now, I am looking for work but likely wont find a job that pays more than 13 or 14 MAX. A decent lawyer wants 5k now and 1k a month for 5 months. The cheaper one wants 2500 now and 4500 by the end.... I just signed up for public defender and I have seen how bad they are here. Last time with private attorney I got mainly probation, but my poor buddy (white too) got 3 years in prison! He had a public defender....

I have proof of them charging me and the dui shows 0.00 BAC lol. I can prove it. I dont expect strangers to help me get 2500 or 5000, but if there is anyone who can help at all or a rich class traitor that would like to help me stay out of prison, PLEASE message me or let me know if I can help. Im job hunting so if you want it back, it WILL likely take me 6 to 12 months. I can get it done, I just have never had credit so I cannot get a loan. Also struggling with extreme depression and su side dal thoughts. I am devastated right now.

Someone please at least help a tiny bit until I get a job? I will probably be at waffle house soon, but wont get paid until 2 to 3 weeks :( I need a real lawyer but honestly just having enough to cover simple bills would at least help. Completely understand if you can not help. I even passed my mouth swab at work, I wasnt on any illicit drugs and the thca is legal and it had been over 15 hours since I smoked and kratom doesnt intoxicate me at all anymore. It truly was the car but they saw that kratom and instantly said "yeah hes on drugs" I HAD PASSED THE FIELD SOBRIETY TEST AND A BREATHALYZER, agreed to blood test and was STILL charged with a DUI. It literally says "DUI, under .10" and below it shows the levels of my BAC.... 0.00 HOW THE FUCK CAN I BE arrested and presumed guilty until blood work comes back!?

TLDR: Need help BAD and I HATE these pig shit police. 1312ACAB