Join in the Grand Industrial Band: Contextualizing Contemporary IWW Cultural Initiatives

By Jackson Mann

“The laboring of American culture” is how historian Michael Denning described the aesthetic effects that Popular Front cultural organizing had on mainstream U.S. performing, visual, and media arts in his sweeping 1997 history of U.S. left-wing culture in the 1930s and 40s. According to Denning, these were the first decades in which the experience, ideas, and language of the working classes came to be represented in mainstream U.S. culture, which was “labored” as a result. This cultural victory was achieved through a coalition of workers’ arts organizations, associations of socialist and communist émigré artists fleeing Fascism in Europe, and industrial unions of creative laborers in the newly-developing Hollywood film industry, all of which were grouped around the then-ascendent labor movement, specifically the political bloc formed by the Congress of Industrial Organizations’ (CIO) association with the American Communist Party. Denning shows that this coalition understood itself as a “cultural front” within the broader Popular Front movement. 

But while “the age of the CIO” may have been the first time the US working class was able to enter mainstream cultural production and discourse, subaltern, working-class culture in the US had been developing for much longer. The organization that contributed the most, perhaps, to the development of pre-CIO, subaltern working-class culture was the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a militant industrial labor union founded in 1905 by a coalition of labor movement leaders that included Lucy Parsons, Eugene Debs, Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, Daniel De Leon, Thomas Hagerty, and William “Big Bill” Haywood, who represented the union’s original institutional backbone, the Western Federation of Miners. Over the next three decades, the IWW became famous for producing an extensive roster of what Daniel Gross calls “worker-scholar-poets,” rank-and-file organizers who doubled as theorists, songwriters, poets, authors, playwrights, and cartoonists. The IWW cultivated this milieu by operating a nationwide cultural-production apparatus that included dozens of newspapers, journals, and the extensive publication and distribution of sheet music and songbooks. Music was the spearhead of the IWW’s own cultural front, and it is through music that the IWW made its most durable impact on Leftist culture in the United States. Songs written by its organizers and members, and produced by the IWW cultural apparatus through its publications, became anthems of the US labor movement, and remain so to this day. Joe Hill, the Swedish-American IWW organizer, songwriter, cartoonist, and theorist, who was executed by the state of Utah under dubious circumstances in 1915, has become a revered icon in even the most conservative circles of US labor. His songs, written or commissioned for specific strikes or actions undertaken by the IWW, continue to resonate with left-wing labor activists today. Without the IWW, what Denning would later call the laboring of US culture in the 1930s and 40s would not have been possible.

In the popular imagination, the IWW has become the stuff of legend. The distance of history has transformed it into mythology, a process which has been exacerbated by the fact that most scholarship on the union has been conducted by folklorists. And indeed, by 1937, a little over 30 years after its founding, the IWW had become “a shell of an organization…” One would not be wrong to assume that soon after this the IWW disintegrated entirely, hastening its entrance into folklore. 

However, like its music, the IWW persisted, albeit mostly in the form of a perpetual rump organization. In 2016, the IWW had a membership of just under 4,000. Given that at its height it could boast a membership of 100,000, this may be seen as representative of the union’s complete marginality. Due to its legacy of cultural organizing, the IWW transformed from a militant industrial labor union into a small, left-wing cultural organization as its ability to organize workers at an industrial scale declined. 

The IWW’s most recent cultural initiative was the Greater Chicago chapter’s curation and release of a punk and hardcore music compilation, titled We Don’t Work May 1st, on May 1st, 2019. Because IWW music is the most enduring aspect of its labor culture, this release is a particularly interesting nodal point for analysis. In fact, this cultural commodity, i.e. this compilation of new original music, represents the possibility of a transformation in the cultural strategy of the contemporary IWW. While the IWW has, for the past several decades, been an organization concerned with re-interpreting and preserving its early-20th-century cultural legacy, the release of We Don’t Work May 1st, an album of contemporary, popular music, might be speculatively connected to the union’s renewed commitment to involvement in long-term labor organizing campaigns, and speak to the resulting changes in the structure, size, and make-up of its membership given the nature of these campaigns, themselves. To show this transformation, however, necessitates a brief overview of IWW cultural history, particularly its music, after the union’s first period.

IWW’s First Period & Second Period Folklorization

In 1948, the CIO had just experienced a disastrous electoral failure in its support for Henry Wallace and the collapse of its organizing initiatives in the South. It was also under increasing pressure due to the “Non-Communist Affidavit Requirement” of the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, and the growing right-wing radicalism of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Moderate elements in the CIO leadership responded to this political climate by initiating a massive anti-socialist and anti-communist purge of CIO leadership, staff, and rank-and-file members. Over the next two years, one million members were expelled from the organization.

While the CIO remained a powerful force even after this self-imposed blow, the IWW was almost entirely obliterated by the same events. Beginning in the 1920s, when the union’s first generation of leaders were either exiled, imprisoned, forced underground, or murdered, the IWW gradually lost strength and the organization seemed doomed to obsolescence by the 1930s. In 1946, however, the union still had a membership of over 20,000, most of whom were metalworkers concentrated in Cleveland, Ohio. But, between 1947, when the national leadership refused to sign the Non-Communist Affidavit, and 1950, the IWW’s remaining locals all voted to leave the union, fearing that the national leadership’s refusal to comply with Taft-Hartley would lead to a crackdown on their ability to organize. In 1955, the IWW “celebrated its fiftieth anniversary unable to engage in collective bargaining anywhere.” 

While it is tempting to see the end of the IWW’s first period as occurring  in the 1920s, when its original leadership was destroyed, it is more helpful to see 1947-50 as marking the end of this period. At this time, the IWW was transformed from a militant, industrial labor union with  a mass-membership, into a left-wing cultural organization. Without the institutional backbone of a working class mass-membership, all that remained of the IWW was its cultural apparatus. And without a mass-membership, even this infrastructure had withered to almost nothing. This distinction is important to understanding second period IWW music because without a mass-membership, the IWW represented no-one and, more importantly, produced culture for nobody in particular. This change in the nature of the organization left the cultural legacy of the IWW open to re-interpretation.

According to Franklin Rosemont, it was not until the 1960s that the IWW saw even a minimal resurgence in membership due to the interest it held for a subset of the youth counterculture movements of the era.  Even with this influx it remained a small, cadre organization. At this time, the IWW leadership began to push these newcomers to compose new songs for the Little Red Songbook, which had grown stale with an “overall lack of contemporary relevance.” Following precedent, attempts were made to write new lyrics to the melodies of contemporary popular songs, though these failed to achieve the mass appeal of the songs produced by previous generations of songwriters.

It was also during this period that the ‘folklorization’ of IWW culture began in both the academic and popular spheres. As a result of the work of prominent re-interpreters of IWW history, particularly folklorist Archie Green and singer-songwriter-activist Utah Phillips,IWW culture became associated with an academic definition of folklore that emphasized pre-industrial, non-economic musical production and oral transmission across generations.

The leaders and members of the IWW’s first period, according to Green, “paid little attention to academic issues in defining their music” which signaled its proximity to a form of extra-institutional cultural production that he would term “laborlore.” Though he never defines the meaning and scope of this designation, Green's insistence on the status of IWW musical production, and its cultural production more generally, as 'lore' paradoxically aligns it with the pre-industrial past.

This project was simultaneously carried out in the popular sphere by Phillips, who recorded or was featured on IWW repertoire records and wrote original songs in the stripped-down style of Woody Guthrie, the Popular Front songwriter-turned-folk-hero whose image would be iconic for the 1960s folk-revival movement from which Phillips emerged. Over the course of his life, Phillips became the most popular outwardly-facing representative of the IWW and its cultural legacy. His emphasis on working within the semblance of an oral folk tradition where he and his collaborators “can’t or won’t read music” had the effect of aesthetically-framing first period IWW music, itself, as folklore. In his reinterpretation of early IWW songs, Phillips also cast the strategy of contrafactum in IWW songs as universal, ignoring numerous songs that had both original lyrics and music. In doing so, Phillips misinterpreted the function that contrafactum originally performed. In his afterword to The Big Red Songbook, Phillips quotes a rank-and-file member who states that first period IWW songwriters “used common tunes that you might have heard in a church or in a bar.” From this quote it might seem obvious that IWW contrafactum should be understood as a use of then-contemporary popular standards as a building block in forging a militant left-wing subculture. However, by interpreting contrafactum as naive, unschooled creativity, Phillips comes to an entirely different conclusion. IWW songwriters were not engaging with the popular culture of the time, but were instead tapping into a pre-existing oral tradition. Therefore, according to Phillips, today’s activist-songwriters and activist-musicians should “learn these songs. Use them. Change them. Put them to work,” referring to a mostly-static repertoire of first period IWW music, itself conceived of as oral tradition.

One particular strategy that both Green and Phillips utilize to bolster this way of framing IWW music is to universalize the experience of one particular subset of the IWW’s mass membership during the height of the first period: the American “hobo.” Hoboes, migrant laborers that were common in the 1910s, were one of the “unorganizable” groups that the IWW worked with and they made up a large chunk of the IWW membership during the union’s most successful period (1910-1920). Much of Hobo culture, which should not be conflated with IWW labor culture, could indeed be described as folkloric owing to the oral nature of its transmission.

While labor leader and early member of the IWW Elizabeth Gurley-Flynn did once refer to Joe Hill’s music as “folk songs,” this was probably in reference to its mass-appeal among working-class audiences rather than the nature of its production, distribution, and transmission. Both Green and Phillips obscure the IWW’s modernist, world-building project by mapping folkloric notions, such as oral transmission, onto music that was semi-professionally composed and professionally published and distributed with the intention of creating a cohesive militant working-class subculture that could contest for subaltern economic power. The IWW music of the second period, then, is marked by the absence of this large-scale production and distribution of new music. Rather, the figures of the second period were engaged in an anti-materialist project of folklorization, which sought to transform the modernist, subaltern culture of the IWW into an oral tradition of folklore. With this historical context regarding the history of IWW music, how it has been framed, and how it has functioned in the popular imagination, in mind, it is possible to see the Greater Chicago IWW chapter’s release of We Don’t Work May 1st as a pivot away from the folkloric project of the past 60 years.

Contextualizing We Don’t Work May 1st

On May 1st, 2019, the Greater Chicago IWW released a 25-song compilation of local Chicago punk and hardcore bands titled We Don’t Work May 1st. The project was spearheaded by Paul Scanty, the Greater Chicago IWW’s Director of Education and Outreach, and Danny “Cheap Date,” the founder of Don’t Panic Records & Distro and a rank-and-file member of the IWW. The compilation was sold through the music distribution website Bandcamp.com and profits from the sales went directly towards a strike fund on reserve for future industrial actions by the Greater Chicago IWW. During an interview with Scanty and Cheap Date conducted by the author of this article, however, Scanty traced the genesis of the project to a period before either he or Cheap Date were IWW members. In fact, Cheap Date had been developing the idea of a Chicago punk and hardcore compilation, to be released by his record label, for several years prior to his joining the union and had mentioned the idea to Scanty at the time. In February 2019, Scanty, who by that point had joined the union, “approached [Cheap Date] about doing the comp [sic] for the IWW.” 

Cheap Date had already designated a number of bands for the compilation before it had transformed into an IWW-affiliated project. After deciding to make it an IWW initiative, however, Scanty and Cheap Date focused on contacting groups whose music was politically-aligned with the IWW’s beliefs. According to Cheap Date: 

“when we [Scanty and Cheap Date] first discussed this it was definitely… well, we want all these songs to be labor songs or, like, political songs or something that’s going to be left-leaning but… we really didn’t have time to ask bands to record songs specifically for this so the guidelines were… we want this to be new music and… we were reaching out to bands that had political songs.”

The majority of the songs do contain explicitly-political themes. These range from topics such as feminist empowerment (Underwire’s ‘Not Dating’ and Payasa’s ‘Muñeca’), anti-fascism (La Armada’s ‘Fire’), anti-racism, and LGBTQ+ inclusion (2Minute Minor’s ‘Unite the Crew’). There is even a song, ‘Written in Red’ by The Ableist, a band in which Scanty sings, written as a tribute to anarchist activist Voltairine de Cleyre, whose writings and oratory were in dialogue with the ideas of other turn-of-the-20th-century leftists, including the first period IWW.

Many of the songs also contain themes specific to labor. For example, pop-punk singer-songwriter Davey Dynamite’s ‘380 Times’ deals with the disparity between the wages of average employees and the giant sums given to corporate CEOs and shareholders:

Well I think this is going too far, I think they are getting away

with our future, our past, everything that we once had

And I work, and I like it, I haven’t had it bad so far

but my degree seems to be worth less than the paper it was printed on

And my friends, and my family, stuck working dead end jobs

what did they do to deserve it, a minimum wage barely helping at all?

Pull yourselves up by your bootstraps, is what they always say

they always forget to tell you, just how the boots get made

They are products of thievery, of telling the poor to be grateful

they are fine with you starving, as long as you’re willing and able

to work, three hundred and eighty times more than they do

to know, three hundred and eighty times more than they do

to starve, three hundred and eighty times more than they do

to make, three hundred and eighty times less than they do

Other songs deal with specific labor rights violations endured on contemporary job sites. For instance, The Just Luckies ‘Bossman’ deals with sexual harassment of workers by management:

Why do you think that you own me

and know me enough to touch my hair?

Creepy bossman with your ancient, ancient hands

creepy bossman with your ancient, ancient hands, oh

Don’t fucking touch me

don’t fucking touch me

keep your hands off my body

don’t fucking touch me

Cheap Date’s own group, The Cheap Dates, are also featured on the compilation. Their contribution, like Dynamite’s song, deals with the poverty wages earned by today’s working class, focusing specifically on the health issues that result.

Aspects of this initiative reveal a break from the folkloric framework that has dominated conversations about IWW music, and its culture generally, since the 1960s. Certain elements of this break represent a return to the modernist project of the first period, which sought to appropriate contemporaneous popular culture for political ends, while others break from it entirely. This is most obviously shown in the formal aesthetic qualities of the music itself. In his press release in the newly-reconstituted version of the IWW’s flagship publication, the Industrial Worker, Cheap Date claims that there “are bands of nearly every style of punk on here. Ska bands, hardcore bands, pop bands, folk bands, and crust bands.” In fact, Cheap Date understates the stylistic diversity of the compilation, which spans the numerous post-punk and -hardcore styles that have proliferated since the early 1980s, most of which remain culturally relevant today. The project’s engagement with culturally relevant musical styles signals a return to the goals of the first period. While we cannot be sure how, exactly, first period songs were performed in terms of instrumentation and performance arrangements, we can be sure that IWW songwriters of this era were attempting to work in contemporary and culturally-relevant styles since IWW contrafactum was “almost all… set to popular song hits of the 1900-1915 period, or to familiar gospel and revival hymns…”

The cultural relevance of the styles represented on We Don’t Work May 1st is the project’s most obvious break with the second period’s folkloric notions of repertoire and the resulting predilection for a historical performance practice that maintained anachronistic stylistic elements. However, while this focus on contemporaneity creates a bridge between We Don’t Work May 1st and first period IWW songwriters and composers, it also produces an element that is entirely novel. While contrafactum was an enormously popular trend in the first period, all of the songs on We Don’t Work May 1st (except for Shots Fired Shots Fired’s cover of Life Sentence’s ‘Problem’) are entirely original. This break in IWW tradition (though it must be stated that this tradition was never an institutionalized facet of the IWW cultural apparatus and was only articulated as such during the second period) can be attributed to the nature of post-World War II musical culture up until the present day, in which the popularity of original musical compositions over “standard” songs has increased.

These breaks were not conscious decisions made by Scanty and Cheap Date. When asked about how the IWW tradition of songwriting and musical composition, with all of its folkloric baggage, had influenced this initiative, Scanty stated that neither he nor Cheap Date had thought about this at all: 

“Did we see it in the context of, like, you know, new songs, or, a future generation of songs for the Little Red Songbook? No… Did our heads even go to a place of, like, ‘Oh, hey, this is a part of the history of making music that’s such a big part of the IWW…’ continuing that tradition? No.”

For Scanty and Cheap Date, it was not loyalty to continuing an organizational tradition, but their general knowledge of the IWW’s history of cultural production that led to their decision to transform what began as a general punk and hardcore compilation CD into an IWW initiative. In fact, the only other function of the compilation that was explicitly mentioned by Scanty and Cheap Date, besides raising money for the IWW’s strike fund, was to grow the Greater Chicago IWW’s roster of musically- and artistically-inclined members and organizers. 

Scanty and Cheap Date were not consciously deciding to break with precedent, but the idea that these changes in the cultural framing of IWW musical production were mere chance is unconvincing. A stronger theory pivots back to the earlier argument for placing the transition from the first- to the second-period IWW at the 1947-50 mark: it is changes in organizational activity and membership size and demographics that might be seen as initiating the re-evaluation of the function of cultural production in labor organizing by the IWW. 

Indeed, the past 5 years have seen the IWW actively organize workers for the first time in decades. As recently as October 2019, the IWW-affiliated Burgerville Workers Union, made up of employees of a large Pacific Northwest fast food chain, went on a four-day strike over failed wage negotiations. In addition to organizing workers in the fast-food industry, the IWW, through its Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC), was instrumental in supporting and publicizing attempts by incarcerated workers within the United States’ gargantuan (and now significantly privatized) prison system to go on strike in 2018.

It remains speculative to connect the IWW’s current, renewed commitment to industrial labor organizing campaigns with the reframing of its musical tradition evidenced by the We Don’t Work May 1st project. However, if the IWW begins to transform, through its organizing, from the cadre organization it has been for almost 60 years to a mass-membership, working class organization, it seems logical to assume that new attempts to reframe the IWW's cultural legacy in light of both contemporary political projects and the specificity of contemporary cultural production, consumption, and distribution will arise from within the ranks of the IWW's membership.

Conclusion

IWW culture, its framing, production, and the way it has functioned strategically in the union’s activities has changed immensely over time. This was due to changes in both the size and demographic composition of its membership, going from a 100,000 strong mass-membership working class institution at its height in the 1910s, to a regionally-bound but still robust labor union in the 1940s, to an isolated cadre organization which for decades had, at most, a few thousand members. 

As we have seen, two major cultural frameworks resulted from these periods. From the mass-membership industrial labor union there emerged a modernist project of culture-building which resulted in an enormous alternative cultural apparatus that produced newspapers, journals, and songbooks to disseminate a wealth of literature, visual art, and music produced by rank-and-file members, organizers, and union leaders across the country. From the cadre organization emerged a project of folklorization and invented tradition, where the artifacts of IWW culture were collected and transformed into static repertoires.

What makes We Don’t Work May 1st such an exciting release is that it represents the possibility of a third period of the IWW. The possibility of the IWW’s re-building itself as a mass-membership, working class organization committed to the labor struggle in the long term contains the further possibility for a reframing of its cultural tradition and a change in its contemporary cultural production strategy. Within these changes exists the potential for an entirely new type of militant, working class culture. The particular musical style, content, and formal qualities of first period IWW music were the result of IWW songwriters’ engagement in contemporaneous popular culture. Subaltern intervention into mainstream US culture today, which has changed considerably since the IWW’s heyday, may produce entirely novel results. If the We Don’t Work May 1st project is any indication, this culture has already begun to emerge. 

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