Rebel Voices

An IWW Anthology

edited by Joyce Kornbluh

with an introduction by Fred Thompson
with contributions by Franklin Rosemont

Publication date: January 1998
Paperback: $24.00
Hardcover: $60.00

No group in American labor history has exerted so profound, widespread and enduring an influence as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), known as the Wobblies, founded in Chicago in 1905.

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 sitdown 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 (1927) and the first "no-fare" transit-workers' job-action (Cleveland, 1944). With their imaginative, colorful and world-famous strikes and free-speech fights, the IWW wrote many of the brightest pages in the annals of workingclass emancipation.

Wobblies also made immense and invaluable contributions to workers' culture. All but a few of America's most popular labor songs are Wobbly songs. IWW cartoons have long been recognized as labor's finest and funniest.

The impact of the IWW has reverberated far I beyond the ranks of organized labor. An important influence on the 1960s New Left, the Wobbly theory and practice of direct action, solidarity and "class-war" humor have inspired several generations of civil rights and antiwar activists, and are a major source of ideas and inspiration for today's radical environmentalists. Indeed, virtually every movement seeking to "make this planet a good place to live" (to quote an old Wobbly slogan), has drawn on the IWW's incomparable experience.

Originally published in 1964 and long out of print, Joyce Kornbluh's Rebel Voices remains by far the biggest and best source on IWW history, fiction, songs, art and lore. Besides the full text and illustrations of the original, this new and expanded edition includes thirty-two pages of additional material: a new introduction and updated bibliography by oldtime Wobbly organizer and scholar Fred Thompson; an informative essay on Wobbly cartoons and cartoonists by Franklin Rosemont; more than three dozen additional cartoons and drawings; and a useful index.