Anarcho-Syndicalism and the IWW

The Industrial Workers of the World was founded in 1905 to organize workers according to industry, rather than craft, for revolutionary goals. Although the founders of the IWW included state socialists, by 1908 the organization had rejected alliances with socialist political parties and adopted several of the main provisions of anarchs-syndicalist ideology, while denying that the revolutionary labor movement had anything in common with the philosophical doctrines of anarchism. In this essay from 1917, Russian anarcho-syndicalist Maxim Raevsky argues that the theorists of anarchism (Bakunin, Kropotkin, and others) built all of their theories on the experience of the labor movemenet and considered their theories valuable only insofar as the masses recognized, in these theories, the systemization of their own hopes and aspirations.