Tom Barker and the Syndicalism of the Sea: The Underground Influence of the IWW

Presented by Paula de Angelis on October 2012 at the North American Labor History Conference, Detroit Michigan. https://nalhc.wayne.edu/

Cover: Tom Barker (3 June 1887 – 2 April 1970) was a New Zealand tram conductor, trade unionist, and socialist. He was born in Crosthwaite, Westmorland, England.^[1] He was a leading member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in New Zealand and Australia and the editor of the IWW paper Direct Action. // Wikipedia

The Industrial Workers of the World, initially established in the US in 1905, were internationalist in practice as well as principle, and significant actors in the world-wide syndicalist movement of the early twentieth century. The IWW has rarely been examined as an international movement. Although it is widely acknowledged as a key aspect of IWW organising practices and revolutionary philosophy, the US based literature generally studies the local or national significance of international class solidarity. IWW scholarship produced outside of the United States, which of necessity discusses the international spread of the IWW, tends to be comparative rather than transnational, and to discuss the political and ideological, rather than the industrial, connections.¹

While the transnational history of the IWW has received some attention in recent years, mainly in the context of the coal and hard rock mining industries,² the significance of marine transport workers as transnational actors for industrial unionism has never, so far as I have found, been considered directly in the literature, despite evidence of a widespread and lasting, though underground, IWW influence on the marine transport industry, and indications that its workers played a key role in the establishment of an IWW presence in ports all over the Americas, Europe and the British Dominions.³

Studies of the Marine Transport Workers Union that do exist focus, like most of the US literature, on the history of particular US locals such as the Philadelphia based Local No8, particularly noted for its success in organising amongst a racially mixed workforce, its large and loyal membership over the 1920s, and its unusually stable and long-running organisational presence.⁴ Yet it is clear that the IWW itself regarded the Marine Transport Workers Union, one of the most successful industrial unions the IWW established, as of significant strategic importance in building the world-wide One Big Union. It is also apparent that they considered the marine transport industry as a natural breeding-place of internationalism.⁵

Researching hidden and neglected history can have significant challenges, and one of the major ones here was to find a subject in the data collected. With a field and a topic and even a theoretical framework defined, there was a great deal of floundering, so to speak, in an ocean of scattered primary sources and passing references in the scholarship. It was the fortuitous discovery of “Story of the Sea” that provided a way to navigate these uncharted seas.

The Story of the Sea: Marine Transport Workers Handbook was initially published serially over most of 1921 in the Chicago-based IWW monthly publications One Big Union Monthly and Industrial Pioneer. The entire serial, much revised and expanded by Barker over the course of 1922, was published in 1923 in pamphlet form. The pamphlet version, discovered in the Australian National Library, was not signed, so it took some backtracking to confirm that it was actually written by Barker.

The editor of OBU Monthly signified that it was the first step in an ambitious education project, and that building “the new society within the shell of the old” necessitated workers not just getting control of the industry, but also “mastering its processes.” He wrote, “the I.W.W. has launched a program for the exhaustive study of the vital industries…” that involved “getting up handbooks describing the different industries, giving the history of their development, their importance to society, their present status in the complicated net-work of modern industrial life”. ⁶An ambitious program, certainly, and one that demonstrates the post-war recognition amongst the IWW that the syndicalist revolution was a long-term project.

The first chapters of The Story of the Sea provide a basically Marxist social and economic history of the maritime industry, mainly discussing industrial shipping between the late nineteenth century and the First World War, although the first chapter includes a sweeping world history of sailing, navigation, and shipbuilding up to the early nineteenth century. It proceeds to a country by country survey of the economic and industrial conditions in various ports and merchant marines, the syndicalist credentials of the marine workers there, the effects of traditional union and state influences, the chances for achieving international solidarity, and the possibilities for developing a local for the “One Big Union of the Workers of the Sea” in each instance, and concludes with a great deal of concrete advice on strategies and tactics for organising marine transport workers, based largely on

Barker’s experiences as co-founder and secretary of the MTWU branch in Buenos Aires from 1919 to 1920, which specifically took responsibility for protecting and organising the foreign-born seamen constantly arriving and leaving this busy international port. The doc workers and seamen of Buenos Aires were, in the early twentieth century, a well-organised and powerful force on the docks, with a strong alliance between the syndicalist dockworkers and the anarchist communities of the Boca and, unusually enough, solidarity between the skilled and unskilled workers of the industry.⁷ Barker was impressed with the class solidarity and direct action tactics of the Buenos Aires maritime unions. Argentine workers, to his mind, practiced successful industrial organisation, and Story of the Sea provides many an anecdote and example from his experiences that illustrate how thing should be done.

The Story of the Sea has provided a key text around which to construct a picture of the world of marine transport from the Wobbly perspective. It is not only his experiences as a marine transport organiser, however, that make Tom Barker a subject useful to the concerns of this research. His experiences in the years following the war, his contact with the IWW and the MTWU in the United States throughout the early 1920s, and his work as an international activist in Europe, and his personality all contribute to the story.

Tom Barker was a well-known IWW figure in Australian and New Zealand in the 1910s, but his experiences as a marine transport organiser and international advocate for syndicalism have received very little attention. This virtually un-noticed aspect of Barker’s life and work, however, is ideal for exploring the ways in which IWW internationalism operated in the marine transport industry in the early twentieth century.

The MTWU saw Barker’s work in Europe as a significant contribution to the international solidarity project.⁸ Indeed, the IWW as a whole apparently saw the marine transport workers as both responsible for the international spread of industrial unionism, and a natural vehicle for establishing international class solidarity amongst industrial syndicalists.⁹ Like Barker himself, they were well aware of the key importance of the marine transport industry for achieving their revolutionary aims, and the necessity of encouraging syndicalist practices amongst marine transport workers, both for immediate organising success and the eventual establishment of workers control of industry.

Barker’s experiences in the marine transport industry convinced him that establishing the One Big Union of the Sea was important not only to organising the industry itself, but also to the longer term aim of establishing working-class control of production in general, describing world transport as “the strategic point of international capitalism” and stating that “the proletariat can never assume control until it conquers the ocean routes and the ships that follow them”.¹⁰

Those familiar with Leon Fink’s recently published Sweatshops at Sea will be aware of the intertwined stories of internationalism and the nation-state that developed amongst the marine workers of the much more mainstream social-democratic version of trade unionism. Fink describes how the craft unions combined with reform movements in the maritime industry to establish a form of international maritime organisation based on co-operation between labour, capital and the state, a process that culminated in the the international maritime agreements of the International Labor Organisation in the mid-1930s.¹¹

Barker displayed the typical IWW disdain for both craft unionism and political reform in his trenchantly critical and occasionally vitriolic attitude to this version of international solidarity. He advocated an effective international organisation that both defended against, and would eventually be a power to overcome, the interlocking and international ownership structures of industrial shipping and their monopolies of port labour and transport in general. In typical IWW fashion, he saw the principle of international class solidarity as integral to both the day to day organisation of the maritime working-class, and simultaneously to the long-term goal of establishing workers control of industrial production in general. International class solidarity, to Barker, was best served by an alliance with the world-wide syndicalist movement that emerged from the industrial working-class in the early twentieth century, merged politically with revolutionaries in the communist and anarchist movements, and was particularly prevalent amongst dock workers and seamen.

The editors of Revolutionary Syndicalism characterised it as “a vision of the revolutionary power and creative efficacy of self-reliant workers” that formed a “distinctive minority tradition, whose vision, advocacy and faith found formal expression in a large number of countries’. It is this movement, in the early 1920s re-orienting itself around the momentous establishment of the successful but beleaguered Russian Revolution, that Barker identified with.

In February 1920, Barker worked his passage to London on a Norwegian ship. While he was there, he composed and published the serial version of The Story of the Sea and several other articles for the US IWW. Barker also found the time to wear several other hats over this period. He ran the London office of the Australian Workers Defence Committee, set up in order to free the Australian Wobblies imprisoned in the repressions of 1917, and stumped the country making speeches on behalf of his Aussie mates. He addressed transport workers unions wherever he went, and generally kept on the move, travelling- sometimes illegally- to conferences in Oslo, Berlin and Moscow as a delegate of the syndicalist Argentine Federation of Labor (FORA). He wrote several articles for IWW publications in the United States, and maintained contact with the US based MTWU leadership. Barker’s active participation in the international revolutionary movement, and his consistent commitment to syndicalist principles within it, make him a valuable subject for exploring the connections between revolutionary syndicalism and IWW internationalism.

It is also convenient for research purposes that Barker, primarily known as an organiser and soapbox orator, was a prolific and talented writer, and consistently worked as a publisher and editor. He maintained, throughout his life, an extensive private and organisational correspondence “with friends on every continent.”¹² Since many of Barker’s correspondents were important figures in labour and radical history, it is possible to find both public and private examples of Barker’s written work, in collections in the United States, Australia and New Zealand, and possibly even in London, where Barker settled permanently in the late 1930s. Tom Barker’s articulate and prolific written work provides a method for accessing a working-class perspective on maritime industrial capitalism that is often hidden from the view of the historian.

Barker’s autobiographical works have provided many of the details of those correspondence networks, and they also reveal a great deal about his personal choices and relationships over the course of his long and productive life.¹³ He appears to have been one of those rare individuals in radical politics whose working relationships and personal connections continually crossed sectarian and national boundaries. He actively worked on behalf of the Russian Revolution without ever joining the Communist Party. When he arrived in New York in 1921 to act as a recruiter for the Kuzbas Industrial colony, sectarian conflicts between the IWW and the newly-formed American Communist Party resulted in a lack of any official support for the colony, so he and American Wobbly Herb Calvert worked around the problem by appealing directly to American workers; nevertheless, he continued to contribute regularly to Industrial Pioneer until at least 1925.

Barker maintained lifelong friendships with card-carrying Communists as well as Labor Party ministers. In his transient and wandering early life, he was always had at least one travelling companion, often a fellow worker from his Australian and New Zealand experiences. Barker’s consistent and lifelong commitment to being a “gladiator for the working class”, and to the principles of industrial unionism, make him an excellent example of the way in which IWW practices and principles invested the radical worker with a broad political education and an adaptable set of agitational practices enacted regardless of industrial context or organisational affiliation, and enacted according to context. This may well provide one explanation for the tenacity of IWW ideals and practices within the marine transport industry over the twentieth century.

Whilst a transnational perspective has yet to be applied to the MTWU itself, there is a significant body of scholarship that has attempted to revision the world of the maritime worker as a unique environment, one where the work itself and the structure of the industry reinforce values of class solidarity and internationalism. There is a growing awareness amongst maritime labour historians that the structure of the industry and economy itself foster both internationalist and radical tendencies amongst its workers.

This researcher is not alone in considering The Many-Headed Hydra as a landmark text, and its theoretical approach and techniques for unearthing the hidden history of the working-class have directly inspired the framework for this project, which is also an attempt at writing maritime history “from below”.¹⁴ Industrial maritime workers, and indeed the IWW, are invisible for many of the same reasons as their ancestors from the eighteenth century-state persecution, the violence of abstraction, connections denied or not seen. The intent of this thesis is to write this sort of history within the steam, steel and coal-based world of industrial capitalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The maritime world has geographic and industrial features that have the effect of creating a unique working-class culture. Its transnational economic structure and work force create conditions where the need for international co-operation amongst workers is easily perceived, and the difficulties of applying national controls and discourses to the labour force in the face of this perception have contributed to the persistence of radical philosophies such as syndicalism in the industry. Maritime labour history in general is a marginalised field of history, due largely to the tendency in the discipline to accept national boundaries as natural to the study. Only relatively recently has there been a serious and widespread effort to view the maritime world, and the industrial working-class, in a transnational context. Tom Barker was, for a time, one of the “hidden and world-tramping army” of the MTWU.¹⁵ His story and his work, fascinating in themselves, provide a way of exploring and revealing this buried history.

Barker’s particular expressions of international solidarity, his participation in the syndicalist revolutionary movement. and his personal adoption of the values of industrial unionism serve as a demonstration of the ways in which IWW philosophy and practice had a much more profound influence on the industrial working-class than might be supposed from the size and longevity of the organisation itself. Ultimately, the intention of this research is to construct both The Story of the Sea and Tom Barker himself as a central focus for exploring the international history of the MTWU, which in turn will contribute to explaining one of those recurring questions of the twentieth century: why are marine transport workers so consistently, and often anomalously, syndicalist and internationalist?

Footnotes

1 The best critique of traditional IWW scholarship is Salvatore Salerno’s Red November, Black November, published in 1989. Salerno argues that the organisational and nativist assumptions of traditional labour or political scholarship on the IWW downplayed the influence of European anarchist ideas on the IWW and, and the impact it had on working-class and radical culture in the United States. Recent studies that analyse the IWW as a cultural and social movement have

done much to rectify this neglect. Nevertheless, despite the utility of this approach in understanding the true significance of the IWW as a movement rather than a union, most of these analyses still tend to concentrate on local communities and industries within the United States itself.

2 Andrews, Thomas G. Killing for coal : America’s Deadliest Labor War. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,2008. Stromquist, Shelton. “‘Thinking Globally; Acting Locally’: Municipal Labour and Socialist Activism in Comparative Perspective, 1890–1920.” Labour History Review 74 (December 1, 2009): 233–256. Useful transnational perspectives are also applied in Shor, Francis. “Left Labor Agitators in the Pacific Rim of the Early Twentieth Century.”

International Labor and Working-Class History 67 (July 1, 2005), and Van Der Walt, Lucien. “The First Globalisation and Transnational Labour Activism in Southern Africa: White Labourism, the IWW, and the ICU, 1904–1934.” African Studies 66, no. 2–3 (December 2007): 223–251.

3 Varney, Harold Lord. “The Story of the IWW.” One Big Union Monthly (January 1921), p41. Foner, Philip Sheldon. History of the Labor Movement in the United States: The Industrial Workers of the World, 1905-1917. Vol. 4. New York: International Publishers, 1965, p. Bird, Stewart, Dan Georgakas, and Deborah Shaffer. Solidarity forever : an Oral History of the IWW. Chicago: Lake View Press, 1985, p179. (Exceptionally, Linden, Marcel van der, and Wayne Thorpe. Revolutionary Syndicalism : an International Perspective. Aldershot, Hants, England; Brookfield, Vt., USA:

Scolar Press ; Gower Pub. Co., 1990 contains repeated references to IWW branches in various ports of Europe in the 1920s and 30s).

4 Arnesen, Eric. Waterfront Workers of New Orleans : Race, Class, and Politics, 1863-1923. Illini Books ed. Urbana:

University of Illinois Press, 1994.

Cole, Peter. Wobblies on the Waterfront : Interracial Unionism in Progressive-era Philadelphia. Urbana: University of

Illinois Press, 2007.

Kimeldorf, Howard. Battling for American Labor: Wobblies, Craft Workers, and the Making of the Union Movement.

California: University of California Press, 1999.

5 Smith, Vern. “Sea Power.” Industrial Pioneer (US) 2, no. 6 (October 1924), p6, and “”Indications of International

Solidarity.” Industrial Pioneer (US) 3, no. 8 (November 1925), p23.

6 One Big Union Monthly, January 1921, p17

7 Suriano, Juan. Paradoxes of Utopia : Anarchist Culture and Politics in Buenos Aires, 1890-1910. Edinburgh ;;Oakland

CA: AK Press, 2010. Thompson, Ruth. “Argentine Syndicalism: Reformism Before Revolution.” In Revolutionary

Syndicalism : an International Perspective, 167–183. Aldershot, Hants, England; Brookfield, Vt., USA: Scholar Press ;

Gower Pub. Co., 1990.

8 MTWU Bulletin, One Big Union Monthly, September 1920, p16.

9 Francezon, F. “The Shipping Octopus.” Industrial Pioneer (US) 3, no. 9 (January 1926): 6, 30–31.

10 Barker, Tom. The Story of the Sea: Marine Transport Workers Handbook. Chicago: I. W. W. Publishing Bureau, 1923, p54.

11 Fink, Leon. Sweatshops at Sea : Merchant Seamen in the World’s First Globalized Industry, from 1812 to the Present. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2011.

12 Barker, Tom. “Introduction”, Tom Barker and the I.W.W. Edited by Eric C Fry. Canberra: Australian Society for the

Study of Labour History, 1965.

13 Barker, Tom. Tom Barker and the I.W.W. Edited by Eric C Fry. Canberra: Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, 1965. Barker, Tom, and Tom Kaiser. “Self-Portrait of a Revolutionary : The Story of Tom Barker as Told to Tom Kaiser.” SSLH Bulletin (June 1, 1967): 18–27.

14 Linebaugh, Peter, and Marcus Buford Rediker. The Many-Headed Hydra : Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the

Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. London: Verso, 2000, p7.

15 Cited in Irvine, Andy. “Labour History in Song: Gladiators.” Labour History 94 (May 2008), p169.