bi-weekly Infoshop news pocast

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Infoshop News Show
March 5, 2006

The new installment of the bi-weekly Infoshop News podcast is now available for downloading and listening. The Infoshop News Show features news from the Infoshop News newswire, music, interviews and other features.

This edition features the last part of Infoshop's 2005 interview with Jon Bekken, who is a professor at Albright College and longtime editor of the Industrial Worker. In this segment he talks about the Industrial Worker newspaper, his work with the journal Anarcho-Syndicalist Review, and the current state of the alternaitve media movement.

In the first two parts of our interview with Jon Bekken, he talked about anarchist economics, the IWW centennial last year, and current IWW organizing campaigns.


Anyone else see that as very odd?

Do you not have to be an industrial worker to join the Industrial Workers of the World?

[which doctor]

The IWW is open to anyone, even students and self-employed people. In it's early years it even focused on unskilled workers. Noam Chomsky is even a member.

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It's certainly not supposed to be open to everyone. I used to be a member and the form I filled out asked if you had the power to hire or fire.

The proletariat can on certain limited issues be allied to the petite bourgeois, but they can't join a 'syndicalist' union. :o

Connolly and Haywood would be spinning in their graves.

[YSR]

Chill out. You can't join if you are a boss. That's the rule.

I don't think you can join if you're self-employed but they won't kick you out.

[which doctor]

Originally posted by Young Stupid Radical+Mar 7 2006, 10:29 PM--> (Young Stupid Radical @ Mar 7 2006, 10:29 PM) Chill out. You can't join if you are a boss. That's the rule.

I don't think you can join if you're self-employed but they won't kick you out. [/b]
Yes, bosses are the only people not allowed to join.


Originally posted by IWW Constitution+--> (IWW Constitution)No unemployed or retired worker, no working-class student, apprentice, home- maker, prisoner or unwaged volunteer on a project initiated by the IWW or any subordinate body thereof shall be excluded from membership on the grounds that s/he is not currently receiving wages.[/b]


IWW [email protected]
Members who become temporarily self- employed may retain their membership or apply for withdrawal cards, which are issuable also to those who must withdraw when they become employers.


IWW.org
Don't let the "industrial" part fool you. Our members include teachers, social workers, retail workers, construction workers, bartenders, and computer programmers. Only bosses are not allowed to join. You have a legal right to join a union and your membership is confidential. It is up to you whether you discuss the union with your co-workers. If you are currently unemployed, you can still join. We are a volunteer-driven union, and this means we, not union bosses, run the union.

[YSR]

"Industrial" in the unionizing sense doesn't literally mean "industry" as in heavy industry, but "industrial" as in organizing a whole industry, an entire shop.

EDIT: Whoop, I bet that looked really patronizing, which it wasn't supposed to be. Sorry comrade, I'm sure you know that already.

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You seem to be evading my point. I know that the IWW includes lots of different workers and organises on an industry basis, not 'trade' basis. I know that they have untraditional workers like a sex workers union (more power to em for that), but professors????!!!

[which doctor]

Originally posted by [email protected] 8 2006, 01:36 AM
You seem to be evading my point. I know that the IWW includes lots of different workers and organises on an industry basis, not 'trade' basis. I know that they have untraditional workers like a sex workers union (more power to em for that), but professors????!!!
It's building unity among angry workers and everyone who sympathizes with them. There is nothing wrong with that.

[YSR]

Of course professors. ANYBODY. That's the key to anarcho-syndicalist theory: people who work uniting. Period.

True, professors enjoy a better standard of living than say, your average sex worker or Starbucks barista (the IWW's latest nontraditional union venture) but I think it's the unity that Fist of Blood mentioned which is most important. Secondary strikes/boycotts are powerful (if illegal in the US. Not that we particularly care about that) and can only be achieved through labor solidarity at all levels.

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No, that's not anarcho-syndicalism as I understood it, which was to organise strategic industries to use as leverage to provoke an insurection. At least that was the case in Spain.

This is closer to DeLeonism / Industrial Unionism - the idea of organising all workers together and taking power that way.

So Professors are workers now?