American labour historiography has tended to assume, as Patrick Renshaw does, that the Locals of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) that appeared in countries like Canada, Britain and Australia 'slavishly followed all the American trends, debates, and schisms'.^[1] While it is true that the Australian, New Zealand and Canadian IWW Locals inherited their ideology and organisational principles more or less intact from their American parent after the founding conference in Chicago in 1905, intriguing contrasts nonetheless emerged in the application of these shared ideas and principles on the two sides of the Pacific Ocean. The Australian IWW, established in 1907, was especially distinctive. The most significant differences between the North American and Australasian expressions of revolutionary industrial unionism were: the degree of opposition to political action; the social position of their supporters; relations with existing trade union structures; the responses to the Great War; and the manner of their persecution.

Opposition to political action

To the American IWW, political action was less a practice to be rejected as a matter of principle but an irrelevancy, because those to whom the IWW most clearly appealed had no political means, because they were estranged from the electoral process by the racial, linguistic and residency requirements for voter registration. Accordingly, the American IWW, while rejecting control by political parties, never expressly condemned political action and many American Wobblies were active members of parties such as the Socialist Party.^[2] In 1908 the American IWW had split over the issue of political action. Those who believed the IWW should remain unaligned with any particular political party were in the majority; they remained headquartered in Chicago and became what is commonly known as the IWW. The minority under Daniel De Leon argued the IWW should engage in parliamentary politics by linking up with the Socialist Labor Party, and these 'De Leonites' set up a rival IWW based in Detroit; and this division was replicated in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Britain. Yet even the Chicago IWW was 'non-political' rather than 'anti-political'. J.R. Conlin insists too much has been made of the deletion of the political clause in 1908; equally significant was the rejection without discussion by the 1911 Chicago IWW Convention of an amendment to the Preamble that referred to 'the futility of political action'.^[3] The situation in Canada was similar, according to A. Ross McCormack:

Like their fellow workers south of the forty-ninth parallel whose attitudes have been described by Dubofsky and Conlin, the Wobblies in western Canada were essentially non-political rather than anti-political; their syndicalism was empirical. The IWW disdained political action because the great majority of its constituency was, what Wobblies called, constitutionally 'dead.' Either because they had not been naturalized or because they could not meet residence requirements, most itinerant workers were without the franchise.^[4]

Mark Leier likewise explains that one reason the Canadian IWW eschewed the ballot box was that its members, usually migrant workers who could not meet property and residency requirements, and immigrant workers who were not citizens, could not vote. For instance, during the 1909 British Columbia election, the Industrial Worker commented on the Socialist Party of Canada's call for electoral support by pointing out that, of the 5,000 Wobblies in the area, only 75 were eligible to register and vote.^[5]

     Göran Therborn's examination of the onset of democratic processes in the current OECD countries shows that Australia and New Zealand, important racial restrictions apart, were the first of the modern OECD countries to achieve the four defining variables of a bourgeois democratic political order: a representative government elected by an electorate consisting of the entire adult population, whose votes carry equal weight and who are allowed to vote for any opinion without intimidation by the state apparatus. Australia attained this situation in 1903, New Zealand in 1907, Canada in 1920 and the USA about 1970.^[6] The preconditions for working-class representation in Australasian parliaments were established prior to the period of ascendancy of the IWW; in Canada and the USA such circumstances did not pertain at the time and, indeed, have barely materialised subsequently in Canada and not at all in the United States.

     In New Zealand, in 1890, organised workers won unprecedented political gains when six unionists were elected to the House of Representatives and another 30 members enjoyed union support. These men ensured the newly elected government responded to the demands of labour and the new government became known as Liberal-Labour or 'Lib-Lab', passing laws that cemented workers' loyalty and improved their lot. Over the ensuing decades, most working-class families remained loyal to the Lib-Lab coalition.^[7] The New Zealand labour movement was therefore less politically advanced than its Australian counterpart, with a false start in 1904 with the formation of an Independent Political Labour League, which became the United Labour Party in 1910 but subsequently foundered and split.^[8] Only after workers experienced significant industrial defeats between 1908 and 1913 and the conservative Massey Government was particularly harsh on striking workers did the New Zealand Federation of Labour become converted to the need for political representation independently of the Liberals, leading to the establishment in 1916 of the New Zealand Labour Party that has endured to this day.^[9] The situation in New Zealand thus bore more resemblance to that in Britain, with a similar experience of parliamentary cooperation with Liberals. It is thus hardly surprising that in both Britain and New Zealand, the Detroit IWW Clubs were stronger in relation to the Chicago IWW Locals than in Australia, because they were able to argue that political action could indeed be highly productive if pursued independently of Liberals.^[10]

     In Australia, on the other hand, independent political action had already been tried and found wanting. Len Richardson notes that in New Zealand it was miners who had worked previously in Australia who were most sceptical about the prospects of keeping honest any workingmen elected to parliament, pointing to the ALP's endorsement of compulsory military training to press their point.^[11] Australia, even more than New Zealand, was a white democracy, with labour parties viable because of this democratic status, many years before the USA and Canada with significantly better-developed economies. Also significant was the relative ease with which the migratory worker could secure electoral registration in Australia; electoral registration was even compulsory under the Commonwealth Electoral Act and fines were administered to those who did not register, a decided contrast to the situation in North America. It was alleged that the IWW encouraged workers to avoid registration and many Wobblies did choose to avoid electoral registration and were accordingly fined under this Act.^[12] However, disenfranchisement was their illegal choice; it was not imposed upon their kind, as in the USA and Canada. With workers in Australia forcibly enfranchised, Labor Parties were spectacularly successful in comparison with similar parties elsewhere in the world, forming government briefly in Queensland in 1899 and federally in 1904. During the heyday of the Australian IWW, Labor was in government federally in 1908-09, 1910-1913 and 1914-1917. It was also in government for much of this period in most of the six States.

     The IWW was able to point to the behaviour of Labor governments to warn against political action. 'I was absolutely convinced,' explained leading Wobbly Tom Barker, 'particularly after seeing [Labor] politicians in both New Zealand and Australia that a strong and even ruthless working-class body was necessary to see that people were properly protected and properly paid.'^[13] The IWW claimed the doings of the New South Wales McGowen Labor government should 'serve as a warning to the working-class, not alone of this country but of the whole world.'^[14] Direct Action had a running commentary on the futility of political action, sell-outs and betrayals by Labor politicians, their huge salaries and perks, and so on. The defining message of the IWW was that Labor politicians could not be trusted. The best-known song of the Australian IWW was 'Bump Me Into Parliament', which ridiculed the pretence of Labor MPs to advance working-class interests while enjoying so much the pomp and circumstance of parliamentary life.^[15] Also to 'Yankee Doodle' was a less well-known Australian IWW song, 'Hey! Polly,' which began:

The politician prowls around,

For workers' votes entreating;

He claims to know the slickest way

To give the boss a beating.

Chorus:

Polly, we can't use you, dear,

To lead us into clover;

This fight is ours, and as for you,

Clear out or get run over.^[16]

Australian Wobblies were in a peculiarly strong position to make judgments about the experiment of working-class parliamentary representation, to indulge effectively in polemical abuse, based on concrete evidence about the performance of Labor representatives: 'Workers of Australia, you have raised up unto yourselves gods, in the shape of Labor politicians, and behold events have proved that their feet are but of clay.'^[17] The Australian IWW was not just abstractly but empirically anti-political.

     The strength of the IWW in the USA and Canada stemmed from discontent with the weak, conservative, craft-based and ineffective nature of existing forms of trade unionism and not from disillusion with parliamentary politics, which had not been seriously tried. In Australia, by contrast, it was the precocious nature of the political labour movement that explains the appeal of the Chicago IWW to militant workers in this period. The Australian IWW was able to recruit from amongst the most disaffected Labor voters, because it expressed and reinforced the strong feelings of resentment felt by many militant workers towards their elected representatives, resentment that increased as politicians became more and more influential within the labour movement. So the Australian IWW, operating in a country with a comparatively democratic franchise and compulsory electoral registration, was more expressly and truly anti-political, a stance informed by the experience then unique to Australia of the inability of Labor governments to unmake capitalist social conditions.

The social position of their supporters

In all four countries, miners, transport and construction workers were an important component in the IWW membership base. Another common element was the migratory rural worker: in railway construction, lumber, wood and various sorts of agriculture; in Australasia also those in the pastoral industries of sheep and cattle grazing. McCormack observes such similarities across North America: 'the IWW in western Canada organized the same constituency as that of western American Wobblies, unskilled, itinerant workers—loggers, harvesters, longshoremen, construction workers.'^[18]

     Despite these commonalities between North American and Australasian Wobblies, the economic, political and social position of the itinerant worker was significantly different in the two realms. In stressing the hobo characteristics of the Wobblies, North American accounts have in mind a social aberration, whether romanticised or pathologised;^[19] or rationalized, as in Richard Rajala's argument that Wobbly mobility should be understood as a reasonable response to the vagaries of the labour market.^[20] David Schulze refers to the relatively large group of unskilled, migrant, and largely immigrant workers in early twentieth-century North America, employed in seasonal, labour-intensive industries, who were largely ignored by craft unions and too transient to be easy converts to Socialist parliamentarianism. 'The social and economic marginalisation of this segment of the working class was particularly well-suited to IWW radicalism …'^[21] He attests, too, to the divisions within the Canadian working class, between the more respectable, urban, craft-oriented sections and those to whom the IWW appealed: the 'rough labour element'.^[22] He argues further that, although IWW radicalism was a mobilizing force, 'it could not overcome this constituency's objective weaknesses'; their political force was only equal to their threat to public order, given their social and economic marginality.^[23]

     Mark Leier's study of the Vancouver Free Speech Fights of 1909 and 1912 draws a similar picture of a segmented labour movement, with the IWW speaking for those whom the city authorities and 'the respectable labour leaders' of the Vancouver Trades and Labour Council both saw as 'undesirables'.^[24] McCormack also notes the distance between Canadian Wobblies and the mainstream labour movement:

By the very nature of its tactics and doctrine, the IWW was isolated from workers organized by the American Federation of Labour (AFL) and the Trades and Labour Congress (TLC). This condition was substantially reinforced by the nature of the Wobblies' constituency; unskilled, unorganised and un-British, the itinerants never constituted a part of the labour movement.

For example, the Winnipeg Trades Council was unaware of the existence of the north-end IWW Local of 400 Ukrainians and Poles.^[25]

     Within the Australian labour movement, by contrast, the itinerant 'bush' worker was more revered than reviled. Far from being neglected by Australian unionism as their equivalents were by the American Federation of Labor, itinerant workers were amongst its strongest participants and were especially active in the new unions formed late in the nineteenth century. Unlike the American and Canadian hobo, largely ignored by institutionalised labour, the 'nomad' was respected within the Australian labour movement: witness Lawson's poem about the itinerant worker whose body was identified by his union card.

     Encapsulated in the labour pantheon, the nomad was honoured also in the wider society, as Russel Ward famously argued in The Australian Legend in 1958: the mores of the nomadic rural proletariat worked upwards and outwards until they became the principal ingredient of a national mystique: loyalty to one's mates; antagonism towards authority; and contempt for middle-class virtues such as sobriety, industry, formal education and religious observance. The relatively higher standing of itinerant workers in Australia reflected the difference between Australian and American economic structures: Australia was primarily an extractive and large-scale grazing economy absolutely dependent on the labour of migratory workers; the USA was a more industrialized economy in which transient workers played a vital but far smaller role.

     Because of the significant position of the itinerant worker in Australian society at this time, the antipodean Wobblies have even been cited by P. J. Rushton as representatives of the national character, 'part of a larger legend', because they not only recruited many of their members from amongst the nomadic rural proletariat but manifested many of the attitudes and values of the national character based on this mythologised worker.^[26] The Australian IWW was a quintessentially Australian organisation; unlike its American progenitor and its Canadian counterpart, it was in tune with stereotypical national characteristics. Australian Wobblies thus blended easily against the background of labour movement and national types. They were able to play on accepted themes dear to the national character. The inventive genius of Wobbly argot easily absorbed local cultural mores. In particular, the capacity of the antipodean Wobblies to mount their critique of Laborism was facilitated by the greater standing within their societies of the footloose worker.

Relations with existing trade union structures

Given this degree of alienation of North American Wobblies from the mainstream labour movements, the IWW Locals in the USA and Canada considered that 'boring from within' the established trade unions was largely futile. North American Wobblies therefore created new unions in competition with the existing unions, a tactic known as 'dual unionism'. The Australasian IWW Locals, by contrast, had little choice but to 'bore from within.' Dual unionism remained a long-term aspiration, but not an immediate tactic; so they bored from within with propaganda about the need in due course for building from without.

     This significant departure from North American IWW practice was an adaptation to Australasian circumstances. Figures indicate that in 1916 union density was 47.5 per cent in Australia and only 12.2 per cent in the USA.^[27] By 1913 New Zealand was the third most unionised country in the world.^[28] The Australasian IWWs were operating in an environment where the labour movement was extremely well-organised by international standards. New unions of semi-skilled and unskilled workers had developed in both Australia and New Zealand, and it was these new unions that became the backbone of the labour movement in these countries, working cooperatively with the older craft unions but in many ways outflanking them as the locus of power within these much less stratified labour movements.

     The Australasian IWWs were not, like the North American, aiming to organize workers neglected by trade unionism; they were hoping, rather, to change the basis on which all workers were organized. Thus most Wobblies were members, also, of established trade unions. Within these unions in both Australia and New Zealand, Wobbly activists criticised craftism and sectionalism, and in particular the emergence of a trade union bureaucracy, especially when it was numerous and better remunerated than the workers it serviced. They nonetheless worked productively within these unions, their most critical instincts tempered by their recognition that the tactic of boring from within could only succeed if relations with other unionists were reasonable. It is interesting that, in private IWW correspondence seized by police, Wobblies advised each other not to alienate craft unionists.^[29] Tom Barker expressly warned the miners establishing the Tottenham Local in 1915 not to 'antagonise the crafties', for 'they are the material we have to work upon, and therefore every care should be taken to keep their good will'.^[30] A security file on the IWW noted that 'there has been a growing movement on the part of the I.W.W. men to join Unions so that the principles of their organization might be more widely promulgated'.^[31]

     It was indeed by such means that Wobbly ideas spread within the Australian labour movement. Military intelligence regretted that IWW theories had 'struck deep into the militant unions'.^[32] New South Wales Labor Premier Holman regretted 'the secret but steadily growing influence of the Industrial Workers of the World over union organisations'.^[33] Jimmy Seamer, a mining industry unionist of the time, recalled: 'You met Wobblies wherever you went ... All militants followed the Wobblies ... They had a foot in everywhere.'^[34] Wobbly support subsisted in unstructured, informal and ground-level networks of militancy within mainstream trade unions, which enhanced the influence, effectiveness and resilience of the IWW.

     In New Zealand the IWW operated as a left grouping within the New Zealand Federation of Labour, known as the Red Fed. This was not a narrow craft-conscious federation but a militant one based on less skilled workers, especially miners, shearers, construction workers, general labourers, waterside workers, who were becoming increasingly critical of arbitration and faith in parliamentary action; and which achieved considerable success in winning improved conditions and rates of pay. The argument within the Federation was whether or not the entire Federation should be remodelled on the lines of the IWW: should all unions in each industry surrender their local autonomy and become one centralised national industrial union, ultimately allowing for the formation of One Big Union throughout the entire country—the ultimate purpose of the IWW.^[35]

     The main issue within the Red Fed was arbitration. Because the New Zealand Labour Party was less precocious, the IWW there was less able than in Australia to focus on the duplicity of Labour politicians, but it could home in on the perceived shortcomings of arbitration from a militant working-class perspective. The Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act of 1894 was the foundation of the Lib-Lab alliance and a new system of industrial relations: the establishment of a court of three (a neutral judge and one elected by unions of workers and other by unions of employers) armed with power to bring down legally binding awards. A similar regime was established in Australia, but not until 1904 and the system was more entrenched in New Zealand. Militant workers were tired of the delays and felt they could get even better results through collective bargaining. Within the Red Fed the IWW pushed for industrial action outside of the arbitration system, to 'toss every agreement to Hell'.^[36] According to Erik Olssen, this argument was particularly pushed in New Zealand after 1911 when certain North American Wobblies arrived.^[37] Foremost among these was John Benjamin King, who worked his way to Auckland as a stoker, perhaps, muses Olssen, to see for himself the country with the famous labour laws, for the success of such legislation was a contentious issue in the American debate about political action.^[38] Just as Australian Wobblies condemned political action on the basis of experience, the New Zealand IWW decided on the evidence before it that the country's Arbitration Act was the 'last refuge of capitalism'.^[39]

     The effects of the Australasian IWW Locals' decisions to make a political virtue out of industrial necessity were significant. In relegating dual unionism to the realm of long-term aspiration and boring from within in the meantime, Wobblies down under secured considerable protection. They did not experience the same degree of violent employer resistance encountered by their fellow workers across the Pacific in forming an embryonic dual union structure. The notorious brutalities inflicted on American Wobblies were not experienced by Wobblies in Australasia, where industrial relations were conducted with a comparative gentleness, disdaining use of gun and lynchings, resorting merely to dismissals, blacklisting, police interference with strikes and the occasional arrest. Australasian employers could not easily isolate and physically intimidate Wobblies, because they worked under the cover of a strong trade union movement that, in Australia, had the added respectability of sponsoring one of the two parties of government. Where American Wobblies were confronted physically by employers and their thugs, Australasian Wobblies were simply hemmed in by the trade union movement itself.^[40]

The significance of anti-war campaigning

The IWW in New Zealand reached its zenith between 1911 and 1913 then largely self-destructed with the disappearance of significant Wobbly leaders to Australia, such as King in 1912 and Barker in 1914.^[41] In Canada, too, by the beginning of the War the IWW was on the decline, its membership falling and its locals disintegrating. This collapse had resulted from employer opposition, earlier instances of government repression and economic depression, especially the ending of the railway building boom, which produced the dispersion of the construction workers.^[42] In both these countries, the IWW was already too weak to be affected greatly by the issue of militarism; and IWW responses to the Great War made little impact on society. This was not the case in the USA and Australia. In the USA, the IWW was internally riven over the question of the war. Most American Wobblies believed there was a serious danger that anti-war activity would distract from organisation at the point of production and invite government repression. This position encouraged American IWW reticence on the war and withdrawal of anti-war pamphlets it had initially produced.^[43] Overall, as Melvyn Dubofsky states, the American IWW 'did nothing directly to interfere with the American war effort.'^[44]

     By contrast, in Australia, no organisation opposed the outbreak of the Great War as promptly and vociferously as the IWW. The front page of Direct Action for 10 August 1914 declared:

WAR! WHAT FOR? FOR THE WORKERS AND THEIR DEPENDENTS: DEATH, STARVATION, POVERTY AND UNTOLD MISERY. FOR THE CAPITALIST CLASS: GOLD, STAINED WITH THE BLOOD OF MILLIONS, RIOTOUS LUXURY, BANQUETS OF JUBILATION OVER THE GRAVES OF THEIR DUPES AND SLAVES. WAR IS HELL! SEND THE CAPITALISTS TO HELL AND WARS ARE IMPOSSIBLE.

On 22 August Tom Barker urged: 'LET THOSE WHO OWN AUSTRALIA DO THE FIGHTING. Put the wealthiest in the front ranks; the middle class next; follow these with politicians, lawyers, sky pilots and judges. Answer the declaration of war with the call for a GENERAL STRIKE.'

     The Australian IWW was aware of the arguments that had motivated American IWW quietude on the issue of the war and was alert to the possible dangers of anti-war mobilisation. Yet, unlike its American progenitor, it threw itself wholeheartedly into campaigning against the war and Australian involvement. In so doing, it increased rather than diminished its opportunities to organize at the point of production, because its anti-war activity won it many supporters amongst workers inclined to be critical of the senseless slaughter. The threat of conscription in particular gave the IWW its greatest opportunity to have its voice heard. It expanded rapidly in this period.^[45] 'Great crowds used to come to our anti-conscription meetings,' Tom Barker recalls, 'up to a sixth of the population of Sydney gathering around and trying to hear the speakers.'^[46]

     Just as the IWW became established in the patriotic mind as the source of disloyal infection, so also was it confirmed in the radical working-class mind as the centre of anti-militarist resistance. As the labour movement divided over the issue of the war and Australia's involvement in it, ultimately tearing itself apart over the question of conscription in 1916-1917, the role of the IWW in encouraging this regrouping into left/anti-conscription and right/pro-conscription forces, was crucial. By November 1916 Labor Prime Minister Hughes was complaining that the IWW was 'largely responsible for the present attitude of organised labor, industrially and politically, towards the war.'^[47] Three-quarters of the Labor politicians in federal parliament indicated they would refuse to pass a Conscription Act. For this Prime Minister Hughes blamed the IWWs, 'foul parasites' who had 'attached themselves to the vitals of labour.'^[48] He appealed to 'organised labour' to cast out from its midst those who dominated the anti-conscription wing of the movement: 'Extremists—I.W.W. men, Revolutionary socialists, Syndicalists, 'red-raggers' ... who seek to use labour for their own purposes.'^[49] Hughes' desire to beat back all IWW influence from within the labour movement sealed the fate of those he blamed for fomenting opposition to him and his kind from within that movement.

The manner of persecution

As the American experience suggests, the Australian IWW would have been suppressed regardless of its position on the war, so its stricter adherence to the IWW's internationalist principles was not the principal cause of its undoing. The Australian IWW was persecuted not because it opposed the war, nor because it constituted a serious threat to the established order, but because it provided a focal point of far-left opposition within the labour movement, and an expanding one, to the right-wing of that movement. According to a contemporary observer, the right of the labour movement resented the IWW for its 'determination to make workers believe their representatives in Parliament are all unmitigated scoundrels'.^[50]

     Given the near disintegration of the IWW Locals in Canada and New Zealand by 1914, there was little need for wartime governments in these countries to engage in concerted repression of the IWW. This was not the case in the United States and Australia, but there were fundamental differences in the manner of their destruction.

     In the USA it was employer-sponsored lynch mobs that inflicted the most serious damage upon American Wobblies, backed up by extreme measures against 'criminal syndicalism' enacted in twenty states and two territories between 1917 and 1920.^[51] In Australia, the repression of the IWW was engineered by the right-wing of the labour movement—in government— to prevent the formation of revolutionary industrial unions that would seize control of the labour movement, if not of the means of production. Labor governments at federal and state level utilized the paraphernalia of patriotism, casting the IWW as an enemy agent, to contest the radical economic and social ideas espoused by the IWW that were becoming increasingly influential within the labour movement. So, while the Australian IWW did not endure the privatised retribution inflicted upon their American fellow workers—the beatings, the lynchings, the intimidation and torturings by individual loyalists—the state-sponsored suppression of the Australian IWW, which occurred in advance of American criminal syndicalism legislation, was sufficiently draconian to achieve the eradication of the IWW as a viable organisation.

     This was assisted by the framing of twelve Wobblies and their trial late in 1916 for treason-felony: plotting arson on Sydney business premises. With public hysteria aroused by this case, the Hughes National Labor government enacted the Unlawful Associations Act, passed on 19 December 1916, under which any member of the IWW could be imprisoned.^[52] In the next few months, 103 Wobblies were imprisoned, usually for terms of six months with hard labour, and many more were sacked from their jobs. Twelve foreign-born Wobblies were deported; at the same time, United States authorities were shipping some American Wobblies to Australia.^[53] The ships passed each other in the Pacific.

     The final irony was that the labour movement, whose more right-wing political representatives had suppressed the IWW, was also responsible for releasing the Twelve, testimony to the degree to which the strategy of boring from within had enabled Wobblies to become accepted as a legitimate part of the wider labour movement. The agitation on their behalf was so strong that the movement to release them spread outward from the Wobblies themselves to embrace all manner of labour organisations: trade unions; labour and trades hall councils and regional industrial councils; left-wing parties; and even sections of the Labor Party.^[54] Union after union committed itself in support of the release campaign and to industrial action if necessary. The Twelve were released in stages by a New South Wales Labor Premier during 1920 and 1921, bowing to the strength of the mainstream trade union campaign to defend those whom they saw as their most militant but also their own. Labor News boasted moreover that the liberated men owed their freedom to the fact that Labor was in power.^[55] It is unlikely that any of the Twelve, in departing Long Bay Gaol, were cursing 'crafties' or singing 'Polly, We Can't Use You Dear'.

     Though the Australasian and Canadian IWWs were direct transplants from their country of origin and remained recognizable as such, they adapted to local circumstances. The extent to which they flourished and the ways in which they did so in these different settings depended on distinctive attributes developed in intelligent response to the environments in which they operated. Had these IWW outposts been obliged to toe a Chicago line, their local impacts would have been less remarkable. As we remember 100 years of revolutionary industrial unionism in Australia, it is worth noting this contrast with the Communist movement that succeeded it and to celebrate the significance of the IWW's commitment to freedom of working-class manoeuvre.