Half Baked Class Struggle at Whole Foods

As with every union, every action that it takes is a defensive action, each one a way to keep the capitalist mode of production going. This includes offensive action which necessarily become defensive ones in the course of time, such as the fight for wage increases or the making of work places more tolerable. The IWW, as with every other union, falls into this trap when it refuses to accept it’s own revolutionary program and the conquest of power by the proletariat in the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is due to, as we believe, the rejection of class as the motor of history, the rejection of historical materialism and the raising of bourgeois moralism such as the democratic principle, with the result of a goal of a decentralized, localized, struggle.

Let us take a recent example.

The IWW Whole Foods campaign has a goal of “raising the quality of life for workers today while laying the foundation for a future free of class exploitation”. In other words, the way that the IWW is organized predicates the future society, or lays the model for that future society. If we are to follow the general ideas in the union this involves co-ops and markets, decentralized units of localized activity, and so on. This is the socialism of the petite-bourgeoisie and even as revolutionary activity, it fails in an age when capital becomes ever more centralized.

For a more tolerable capitalism!

The token “free of class exploitation” is always thrown in as a way to legitimize every IWW campaign as way to somehow make the IWW seem different from any other union. A quick look at their demands reveals the usual vanilla union things such as fair wages, paid time-off, retirement plans and other things that will help the worker integrate more into the capitalism. None of the literature is promoting the idea of a world without wage-labor. This sort of thing is against the preamble, and it has become a joke. Even just taken at face value, which one is forced to do because it is accompanied by nothing but itself, the phrase doesn’t even amount to the abolition of class society.

This stems from a view of capital not as a social-relation, but as a subjective condition, such as here when they say “we practice solidarity with all people fighting for emancipation from the domination and oppression of capitalist society”. No longer is capitalism an objective process, it is now a subjective feeling of oppression. This fits perfectly with the current trendy Zeitgeist of socialism as work place democracy.

“Whole Foods has now increased its minimum hourly wage for all of its locations in Northern California and Reno to $12.75, and is transitioning to 2-week schedules for all employees in said region. Workers have been showing support for the union by wearing buttons to work, and no workers have been disciplined or terminated for engaging in union activity. This is a significant victory for the IWW and the working-class movement for emancipation. ”

Such a significant victory! The self congratulatory back slapping over this is the most obnoxious component. The IWW has long now just been a repository for those who take on “radical” as a lifestyle choice. As an aside, this $12.75 is below their original demand of $5, and is only slightly above the state minimum wage. A fact curiously missing from most literature produced by the IWW on the subject.

Three defects stand out from this. The main one is that there is no real emphasis on the abolition of capitalism, or even on class society despite what the token appeal might make one think. But this tied to the second: there is no call for the abolition of the wages system. Without the abolition of the wages-system the people behind this are just calling for the continued production and reproduction of the capitalist mode of production. Thirdly, the idea that the IWW is the form in which future society will take. What is this, one might ask? Again, the appeal to the democratic principle. Democratically managed and worker owned co-operatives. Couple this with the continuation of wage-labor, and through that, the continuation of commodity production, gives us nothing but the continuation of the capitalist mode of production (albeit apparently freed from the oppression and tyranny of evil capitalist over lords).

The same general themes appear constantly. As we have said in our previous articles, what the IWW should be doing, if it is what it pretends to be (the most advanced section of the working class), is emphasizing over and over the objective nature of capitalism and communism and that we are for the abolition of the wages-system, and point the way towards communism. Members have to go back to the books because it is apparent that none of the leading lights in the IWW understand what capitalism is.