Cover: via https://allamericandetox.com/blog/dopamine-addiction/
As they themselves have conceded, the North American IWW is experiencing catastrophic membership turnover. This is the kind of phenomenon we have no problem recognising as a symptom of a microcult that has outlived its usefulness when it manifests amongst the Trotskyist variety. Indeed, being a meatgrinder that attracts and systematically exploits and destroys useful enthusiasm for class struggle is one of their defining features.
The IWW still appears to be having trouble reconciling itself with this reality. This would seem to figure in light of their status as a colonised sock puppet. It would figure then that it spends more time grandstanding its revolutionary moral virtues than actually engaging in class struggle, which, if any of the interviews with former members who have left is anything to go by, appears to be one of the main reasons they piss membership like a stuck pig.
It certainly doesn’t stop them from degenerating into ableist hate speech whenever they see anything they don’t feel like hearing or knowing about right now. In response to a Class Autonomy post republishing an article by David Rovics, the automatic response of the more-revolutionary-than-thous from the labour studies club masquerading as a union is to medicalise comments they don’t like:
I have NO idea what’s going on also, so why not form moral judgements first and ask questions second. We’re pissing membership, what have we go to lose really
No one seems to know what the issue with David Rovics is either, beyond various opinions of people who A don’t like him and B seem more than happy to assume the worst about him as long as a toxic subreddit grants them license to degenerate into personality politics and shit-talking. This seems habitual. The IWW lost 20,000 members in 7 years, but at least your subreddit can readily identify someone who isn’t as revolutionary as thou.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvlWSnLxrrc
Some of us do, some of us talk shit about people who do on reddit
Not very surprisingly, the attacks on David Rovics turn into attacks on Class Autonomy; who doesn’t love a bandwagon:
Here we see a poster, who doesn’t identify themselves, putting shit on other people’s efforts because they don’t match their own perceived standards of revolutionary perfection (If people don’t submit original writing to Class Autonomy because it’s not REAL ANARCHISM (like more-revolutionary-than-thous who sit on reddit all day), you can hardly reprint it. Every other portal reprints material they like as well as original pieces; maybe Comix_Corp is just jealous they didn’t think of it first, or didn’t have the skills or imagination to put something like Class Autonomy together in the first place).
Comix_Corp doesn’t need to clarify if they do anything; it’s r/IWW after all. Again the bolted-on ability supremacism that gets a pass throughout the radical ghetto passes without comment; I don’t like the screeds that emanate from Class Autonomy, therefore they are deranged and the author is a crackpot. Comix_Corp does presume to speak on behalf of every last anarchist in Australia as well, like some queen bee advising against acknowledging freaks and losers in the schoolyard. Anarchy is nothing if not agro-shunning freakshows, outcasts and misfits.
For the record, Class Autonomy has also published original material from amazing anarchist writers like Yavor Tarinsky and Rasmus Hästbacka. Never let the facts get in the way of a good story though I always say, especially when we can’t match or better the efforts of others. Maybe we’re feeling a bit defensive about the substance of criticisms of the IWW and the anarchist ghetto we don’t feel like knowing about right now (why would anyone have anything bad to say about more-revolutionary-than-thous playing personality politics on the internet while Prairieland protesters are getting their heads around 50- and 100-year jail sentences).
It is also arguably telling that this thread gives space to an abuser to smear and defame. Kimbeaux07 naturally does not announce the fact, but is a former Class Autonomy collective member who became extremely abusive towards myself after I traveled interstate to go hang out with her, to the point I had to block her on email and social media, and eventually sever contact with her completely. She also attempted to destroy the SE QLD IWW site but neglected to empty the trash folder after deleting all the files. The other members of the former SE QLD IWW who are grouped around Class Autonomy have seen enough screenshots of her shit to know what she’s about. Yours truly is naturally a ‘baddie’ on the internet though.
The kind of revolutionary moralism that shows up on reddit is par for the course for a milieu that started off with 3,500 members 7 years ago, attracted 25,000 new members and then lost 20,000 of them. Maybe if they spent at least as much time trying to figure out how to retain members as they do policing revolutionary morality, they wouldn’t have a nazi government (throw nazi.us into your search browser) throwing our own into prison for a century (good thing the US isn’t going to last a tenth of that huh campers).
Running an anarchist news portal is where the real losers are though, just so we all know. Ditto putting shit on anyone trying to do anything and inciting others to shun them because it doesn’t suit our own standards of perfection. I guess we need only carry on winning with the winners on /r/ IWW. Stay inside the community of the moral elect and don’t talk to the freaks.
