International Workers' Association - Ideology

Ideology

Further information: anarcho-syndicalism

The IWA programme promotes a form of non-hierarchical industrial unionism which seeks to unite all workers within a given industry under one banner linked explicitly to a coherent set of economic and political aims.

This single organisation, co-ordinated on the basis of anarchist federalism is designed to both contest immediate industrial relations issues such as pay, working conditions and labor law, and pursue the reorganisation of society into a global system of economic communes and administrative groups based within a system of federated free councils at local, regional, national and global levels. This reorganisation would form the underlying structure of a self-managed society based on pre-planning and mutual aid — the establishment of anarchist communism.

The IWA's Principles, Goals and Statutes state its role as being: "To carry on the day-to-day revolutionary struggle for the economic, social and intellectual advancement of the working class within the limits of present-day society, and to educate the masses so that they will be ready to independently manage the processes of production and distribution when the time comes to take possession of all the elements of social life."

The IWA explicitly rejects centralism, political parties, parliamentarism and statism, including the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat, as offering the means to carry out such change, drawing heavily on anarchist critiques written both before and after the Russian revolution, most famously Mikhail Bakunin's suggestion that: "If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself."

It also rejects the concept of economic determinism from some Marxists that liberation would come about; "by virtue of some inevitable fatalism of rigid natural laws which admit no deviation; its realisation will depend above all on the conscious will and the use of revolutionary action of the workers and will be determined by them."

Instead emphasis is placed on the organization of workers as the agents of social change through their ability to take direct action:

Only in the economic and revolutionary organizations of the working class are there forces capable of bringing about its liberation and the necessary creative energy for the reorganization of society.

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Revolutionary unionism asserts itself to be a supporter of the method of direct action, and aids and encourages all struggles that are not in contradiction to its own goals. Its methods of struggle are: strikes, boycotts, sabotage, etc. Direct action reaches its deepest expression in the general strike, which should also be, from the point of view of revolutionary unionism, the prelude to the social revolution. —Statutes of the IWA