Oh man, when I read that this was the question for the blog this week, you have no idea how excited I was. It's no secret that this is something that I am really passionate about. I spend all day every day thinking about this topic, so please excuse me if this gets a little long.
I joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in mid-2010, but I had been in the process of becoming more radicalized for a while. But joining the union was a big turning point in the development of my class consciousness and my understanding of how, in the words of Weber, "the order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concered with economic acquisition, with irresistible force." (123). The IWW is often called a radical or militant union, usually because the tactics that we use and have used over the course of our 106 year history are new, revolutionary, and many times much more intense than those used by more traditional unions. We also stand for ideals that are considered more "radical" or "revolutionary". For example, in the preamble to our constitution, it states, "Instead of the conservative motto, 'A fair day's wage for a fair day's work,' we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, 'Abolition of the wage system.'" The entire point of the IWW, and the labor movement in general (at least pre-WWII), is to break free of the "iron cage" that has entrapped the working-class. This reminds me of the traditionalist vs. capitalist thinking regarding wages that Weber discusses on pages 23-25.
However, there are even aspects of this that unknowingly fall into the category of "callings", in the sense that Weber discusses, namely "the valuation of the fulfilment of duty in worldy affairs as the highest form which the moral activity of the individual could assume." (40). "It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism," a line from the preamble, has its roots in the Marxist idea of the mission of the working-class. But upon closer inspection after reading Weber, I have thought about this in a new light. This idea of a "mission" is very similar to Luther's "calling", regardless of Marx's stance on religion. This shows how deeply these protestant ethics and the spirit of capitalism have permeated our culture in ways we rarely realize, and particularly within groups that are generally extremely conscious of the influences of capitalism.
I know this totally sounds like I am just trying to play up my union in this, but I promise, it has a point. For one, since the ideas of the IWW are so close to my own, it makes sense to quote our documents to help explain my own beliefs surrounding this issue. Also, the points I brought up about callings in the last paragraph lead into my own personal story. At other points in my life, I have felt as if I had "found a calling", whether it was as a jazz musician when I was a huge band nerd in high school, or as an advocate for a local food chain when I first started working at the Co-op 2 years ago. But to be honest, I have never put as much energy into my "calling" as I have as an organizer and member in the IWW. Seriously, if I was actually getting paid for this, I would be completely indistinguishable from the capitalist that Weber says, "...make[s] it the sole purpose of his life-work, to sink into the grave weighed down with a great material load of money and goods, seems to him [the pre-capitalist] explicable only as the product of a perverse instinct," (33) or "[has] an unusually strong character [that] could save the entrepreneur of this new type from the loss of his temperate self-control and from both moral and economic shipwreck." (31). As much distain as Wobblies hold for capitalism and its spirit, our actions reek of Benjamin Franklin's ideal capitalist, described by Weber of page 33, who "gets nothing out of his wealth for himself, except the irrational sense of having done his job well." Of course, the word "wealth" would have to be replaced with "the overthrow of capitalism and neo-liberalism", but the sentence still stands. The same force that drives the bourgeois-capitalist to ever-higher profitability also drives my Fellow Workers and I to go to the measures that we do for the purpose of furthering the class struggle.
The biggest realization that I came to through reading Weber (and only worked out more through writing this blog post), is that however much anarcho-syndicalists like myself think we are conscious of the political and economic implications of our words and actions, we are still highly influenced by the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. We don't realize it for two reasons. The first is that we are incredibly self-assured in our beliefs, and often forget to step back and check ourselves. The second is that, since we have been raised in this Western, capitalist, and liberal culture, we are no less trapped in the prevailing mentalité than even the least class-conscious person in the country. Coming back to the preamble to the IWW constitution for a second, the first line reads, "the working class and the employing class have nothing in common." I do agree with this statement in many ways, and I could write 100 blog posts discussing why, but after reading and thinking about Weber's ideas in relation to the IWW, I no longer believe that the line in the sand is as deep as I used to think. We clearly have somethings in common: our commitments to our callings, our entrapment in the "iron cage", and our deep roots in the protestant ethic.
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