Industrial Workers of the World organizational evolution

The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) is a union of wage workers which was formed in Chicago in 1905. The IWW experienced a number of divisions and splits during its early history.

When the office of the IWW president was abolished at the convention in 1906, deposed President Sherman and his supporters, many from the Socialist Party and the Western Federation of Miners, formed a rump IWW, which ceased to exist after about a year.

After the 1908 convention of the original IWW, at which Socialist Labor Party (SLP) head Daniel DeLeon was barred from voting via credentials challenges, DeLeon and the SLP bolted to form another rump IWW, which came to be called the Detroit IWW. In 1915, the Detroit IWW changed its name to the Workers' International Industrial Union (WIIU). The WIIU continued its close relationship with the SLP, but ceased to exist in 1924.

There was another division within the original Chicago IWW which caused political infighting for many years, and finally split the organization in 1924. This time, the two groups were referred to as the centralizers and the decentralizers. This split was in part responsible for a serious decline in membership — a decline from which the organization has never fully recovered. The decentralizers' faction ceased to exist as a separate group in 1931.

For the existing IWW, the results of the splits were, in part, the abolition of the office of president; the departure of the Socialist Party and the Socialist Labor Party; a constitutional provision barring alliance with any political party; a reliance on direct (economic) action rather than political petition; and a focus on using creative tactics to organize low-wage, itinerant, unskilled, migratory, and immigrant workers.

The divisions in the early days of the IWW were based upon differing philosophies and ideologies, and to a considerable extent these differences could be traced to regional particulars.

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