An Interview with the Haywood-Cannon Caucus of the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.): Part II
The Louisville Workers Brigade
1/5/2025
This is the second part of a two-part interview with the Haywood-Cannon Caucus of the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.). This second part of our interview covers the mission behind the newly established Haywood-Cannon Caucus. While the Louisville Workers Brigade does not agree with or endorse every single position of the IWW or the Haywood-Cannon Caucus, we appreciate their willingness to conduct this interview and applaud their organizing efforts for the working class. The links provided in this article have been provided by the Haywood-Cannon Caucus.
Could you tell us about the Haywood-Cannon Caucus? What are the reasons for your formation and what are your goals?
We've touched on some of the reasoning in previous answers for forming the Haywood Cannon Caucus within the IWW. As mentioned, the IWW is a shell of its former self, it has become complacent in its own ways tied to the ideological hegemony of anarcho-syndicalism within the union. Our total membership is as big as some union locals in the mainstream unions. Our national union administration is dysfunctional with local branches languishing as a result. We seek to offer a way out, a way to revitalize the union out of the quagmire its been stuck in for some time. You can read our founding statement to see what our program promotes to reform the union into being not just organizationally functional, but to make the union relevant to the US working class once again.
It has caused commotion and even hostility from some quarters in the union, but it has also drawn a lot of support from members across the country who recognize the problems we've highlighted. Not everyone in the caucus 100% agrees with the full program, but members involved agree with the majority of the points in the program. We are working to realize these points within the union, even though this is a new project and we're starting as a minority within the union.
Probably the most contentious point in our program is the revision of the IWW constitution which prohibits support for political parties. This goes back to early debates in the union between syndicalists and those who supported the ideas of IWW cofounder Daniel DeLeon. In the original IWW constitution it was recognized that the working class has to be organized both economically and politically. Syndicalists in the union fought to have affiliation or support of working class political organization removed from the constitution, triggering a split within the union between the proponents of DeLeonism (which called for ties between the union and a working class party) and the syndicalists who promoted the idea of "no politics" in the union. This "no politics" line has continued ever since, even having a regressive clause banning "non political sects" within the union, despite the obvious reality that there are political groupings operating within the union even before the Haywood Cannon Caucus was founded.
Beyond this we are calling for the formation of a dual card committee to coordinate among union members who're also in the mainstream unions to better realize the orientation of wobblyism within the broader labor movement. We're also calling for a reformation of our organizer training program to create an army of organizers versus the bottleneck we experience currently where only a select few are certified to hold organizer trainings for union members. We also seek to overcome the dysfunction of our union administration even if it means having a paid staff versus a common DIY attitude relying on the free labor of fellow workers to not only do their full time jobs, but to also do the duties of running the day to day tasks of the union which leads to burnout and high turnover of officer positions. There's a common fear that if we change the current structure and policy of the union we will become like the mainstream unions and engage in "business unionism" by creating another bureaucracy that will undermine our principles. To this we say that yes there's a potential for such a thing, but it's up to us as union members/employers of any officer to hold them accountable. We already have the organizational mechanisms in place to recall anyone we find unsatisfactory.
Beyond the above points we also seek to engage in a mass propaganda campaign to the US working class to promote wobbylism, as well as establish a streamlined political education program for our union members to understand how the capitalist mode of production functions and what the strategy is to realize the abolition of the wage system, aka communism.
What advice and encouragement can you give working people currently considering organizing at their workplace?
You have to be mentally prepared for a long term commitment to organize workers, even when this means the unorganized will only take tiny baby steps towards large scale organization and gaining class consciousness. We all want mass strikes right now, general strikes, all the sexy features we see from prior generations of class struggle, but the reality is we are in a historically weak position as the working class, both domestically and internationally. It's going to take a lifetime of struggle to change this current dynamic.
We would encourage anyone interested to join the union, sign up for an IWW organizer training, even if you are already a member of another union. And if what you've read here resonates with you, consider joining our caucus. It doesn't cost anything, just a general agreement with our program. Help us not only revitalize the IWW, but the working class movement in general.
Is there anything else you'd like to share with our readers?
After the 2024 election results it should be apparent that the working class is offered nothing but a deadend by both capitalist parties, their politics and much of the union leadership that tailed them. We need a real alternative, we need an independent working class movement and party. This is the primary task of the working class to address. And we can make steps right now to do this, both inside the unions and outside of them. We need to study past efforts by prior generations of workers on how they attempted this, both the positive and negative aspects.
It's not a coincidence or arbitrary that we name our caucus after Big Bill Haywood and James P Cannon versus some other figures who were IWW members like William Z. Foster and Earl Browder. Our namesakes represent a particular current that we argue correctly deal with several tendencies that deviate from the line of march towards communism, whether that be the political indifferentism of anarcho-syndicalists or the zigzagging of policy by Foster, Browder and Co. operating under the orders of Stalinism, the AFL leadership, and the degeneration of the revolutionary workers movement.
If you'd like to know more about the caucus and the lineage we identify with you can watch a recent event we hosted with historian Bryan Palmer featuring the political career of James P Cannon, as well as sign up for our study group on Cannon's summation of the IWW.