USA, 1979
Color and b&w, 89’.
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Sandi SISSEL, Judy IROLA, Peter GESNER, Bonnie FRIEDMAN
EDITORS: Deborah SHAFFER, Stewart BIRD
NARRATOR; Roger BALDWIN.
CENTER FOR EDUCATIONAL PRODUCTIONS; FIRST RUN/ICARUS FILM
CAST:
Joe Murphy, Migratory Worker
Jack Miller; Migratory Worker
Nels Petersen; Migratory Worker
Nicolas Steelink; Migratory Worker
Samuel Krieger, Migratory Worker
Irma Lombardi, Silk Weaver
Dominick Mignone, Silk Weaver
Sophie Cohen, Silk Weaver
To characterize the Industrial Workers of the World as an anarchist union would be incorrect. Although the anarchist component was present and very active when the IWW was founded (as it is still now), it should be considered a non-reformist, non-hierarchical, progressist, self-managed coalition of the radical left. Democratic and autonomous, it comprises parlamentarian socialists, anarcho-syndicalists, trotskytes, revolutionary socialists, and communists. Some of the ideologies represented in it have prevailed at times over others, due to historical, political or geographical contingencies. The IWW has never adhered to the International Workingmen Association – openly anarcho-syndicalist – leading to the creation of more anarchistic organization in representation of the USA in the IWA, The Anarcho-Syndicalist Alliance. The IWW current platform is probably the key to its survival: the left is divided enough that the workers’ movement does not need to be divided even more than it is already against, after all, a common enemy.
This film is clearly conceived from a socialist perspective. No matter how accurate the research (there are wonderful archival excerpts from relevant footage of the first and second decades of the 20th century), there seems to be a deliberate effort to avoid emphasis on the anarchist component of the IWW. There is no mention, for example, of the IWW contribution (political, financial, “military”) to the Mexican Revolution, no mention of the column of volunteers who went to help the followers of the brothers Magón to create a socialist republic in Baja California in early 1911. No allusion to Frank Little, to Emma Goldman, to many anarchists of all origins who contributed enormously to create a spirit of mutual aid, of no compromise, of direct action, of grass roots federalism, which distinguish the IWW from any other union in the history of the United States.
Despite well-founded criticism and reservations from an anarchist point of view, the film is still very good for showing to new generations. In one century, take or leave a few years, the situation seems almost the same: unemployment, low wages, lack of social laws protecting the underprivileged. But, at least, the modern viewer can appreciate the struggles of yesteryear, the sacrifices of many were not in vain: the few conquests were gained by fighting an uneven and unjust battle against capitalism. And the State has always protected the latter using courts and police against dissent. In this sense, the film is powerful. It is vividly narrated by Roger Baldwin, the noted representative of the American Civil Liberties Union, with occasional musical comments by Utah Phillips, the IWW Troubadour, singing from his own or Joe Hill’s compositions.
We witness some of the victories and defeats of the IWW-led American proletariat: the strikes of Lawrence, Mass. of 1912 and of Paterson, NJ in 1913; the Everett massacre of 1916, and the 1917 strikes that culminated in the deportation of all foreign militants and the imprisonment of their American counterparts.
The narration is punctuated by several interviews of survivors, all of them octogenerians, including an Afro-American militant and some women. The former says that the IWW was the only union that willingly accepted black workers, while women feel that, at last, they were listened to and treated as equals. Someone forgot to say that already 30 years earlier, a black woman by the name of Lucy Parsons was active in anarchist circles and in founding unions in Chicago.
The film features also some amusing anti-Union cartoons produced by the bosses.
Despite the gaps previously underlined this documentary is a poignant portrait of the typical IWW militant, a worker who has no other home than county jail (as one of them used to say).
Pietro Ferrua