What can we say about Benjamin Ferguson’s letter about Karl Marx in the July/August Industrial Worker? To begin with, he’s bungled a fake Lenin quote (about hanging capitalists with the rope purchased from them), misattributed it to Marx, and then shrugged him off as “yet one more dead white European” while at the same time endorsing dead white Europeans Bakunin and Kropotkin. However, most egregiously in the letter is his rank dismissal of reading Capital, not only serving up the same old vague cliches about “direct action”, but also stooping to ugly we-don’t-need-no-book implications that the only people who read Marx aren’t working class. Does he think workers have no time to read with all the “direct action” going on?
Finally, his view of the IWW: “workers coming together industrially to democratically decide how to protect their interests and improve their lives” – leaves us with questions. How different is this from the rhetoric of other unions? Would these words be out of place in any other union publication? Would democratically-made General Motors cars compete with democratically-made Toyota cars under this IWW union model? Democratically-controlled asbestos plants?
Wobbling Towards Communism 