Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology

by Franklin Rosemont and Joyce L. Kornbluh

Book Overview

Welcoming women, Blacks, and immigrants long before most other unions, the Wobblies from the start were labor's outstanding pioneers and innovators, unionizing hundreds of thousands of workers previously regarded as "unorganizable." Wobblies organized the first sit-down strike (at General Electric, Schenectady, 1906), the first major auto strike (6,000 Studebaker workers, Detroit, 1911), the first strike to shut down all three coalfields in Colorado...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1604864834
• ISBN13: 9781604864830
• Release Date: September 2011
• Publisher: PM Press
• Length: 472 Pages
• Weight: 1.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 7.0" x 10.0"

Customer Reviews

Still the Best on the IWW

This work is simply unsurpassed as the best available on the IWW. Well written and very well illustrated, it's also a fine piece of scholarly research that remains accessible to nearly any reader who wants to know what real unionism once was--and it was not the Corporate State unionism of today. Not a single labor leader of any importance in the US believes that "The employing class and the working class have nothing in common" (the opening of the famous IWW preamble. The Labor Bosses of today deny that there are even significant contradictions with employers, thus deceiving the people who join unions thinking that is the very reason they send dues. The IWW's were internationalists, anti-racist, direct action oriented, and courageous--and Kornbluh's brilliant text, poems, songs, and photos will show you what they did.

"a peerless collection" is right

It would be hard for anyone interested in radical labor history to ask for more from a book than comes with Rebel Voices. This collection is absolutely filled with songs, essays, poems, art and political cartoons from the Wobblies during their most crucial and influential years, and covers many major figures from Joe Hill to Sacco and Vanzetti, as well as the lesser known workers fighting for justice in the 20th century.

They Had The Best Songs

"Rebel Voices" is a peerless collection of primary evidence on the Industrial Workers of the World, or Wobblies, our most exuberant labor radicals. It preserves a most diverse array of material, including pamphlets, newspaper articles and court transcripts, but also less conventional sources such as flyers, broadsheets, cartoons, and labor ballads. Kornbluh portrays the IWW as a dynamic, vital force fighting for workplace democracy and civil rights from 1905 to 1917, an era of bleak prospects for labor. The IWW ultimately succumbed to concerted government repression: violence, propaganda, punitive trials, and deportations. Many of the Wobblies' goals were later achieved through reform during and after the New Deal, but they left an inspiring activist legacy. The pictorial matter and music are especially revealing, and help illustrate the old adage that the government and bosses may have the money, guns and victories, but the workers have the best songs. Cf. M. Dubofsky, "We Shall Be All," a thorough narrative and analysis. More recent studies include G. Hall, "Harvest Wobblies," N. Sellars, "Oil, Wheat & Wobblies" and J.A. Lukas, "Big Trouble."