On Tuesday 27 June 1905, Bill Haywood of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) called the first and founding convention of the IWW to order. He told the 200 delegates and observers assembled in Brand’s Hall, Chicago, that they had come together “to confederate the workers of this country into a working class movement that shall have for its purpose the emancipation of the working class”. It was their intention to give the working class “control of the machinery of production and distribution, without regard to capitalist masters”. They recognised that “there is a continuous struggle between the two classes”, the capitalist class and the working class, and consequently “this organisation will be formed, based and founded on the class struggle, having in view no compromise and no surrender”.

The convention brought delegates from 43 organisations representing some 60,000 workers together with a number of individuals, including Lucy Parsons, the African American anarchist and widow of one of the Haymarket martyrs (four US political prisoners who were hanged in Chicago in November 1887); Mother Jones, the mineworkers’ organiser; and Eugene Debs, the leader of the left wing of the reformist Socialist Party and himself a veteran trade unionist. Also attending the convention was Daniel De Leon, the autocratic leader of the Socialist Labour Party (SLP), a theoretically rigid and sectarian Marxist organisation. They gathered in response to what they saw as a crisis within the US labour movement where the conservative union leaders of the American Federation of Labour (AFL) were failing to defend the working class against the attacks of a rapacious, brutal capitalist class.

One place where the IWW had been successful was in Goldfield, Nevada, where the WFM had established an IWW local and unionised the whole town, starting with the newsboys. As the IWW newspaper proclaimed they had organised “miners, engineers, clerks, stenographers, teamsters, dishwashers, waiters”, all into One Big Union. Wages were driven up across the board and conditions improved, including the introduction of the eight-hour day. On 22 January 1906, the town shut down for two hours while a great rally was held, commemorating the “Bloody Sunday” massacre in St Petersburg the previous year, and pledging support for Haywood and Moyer. Vincent St John, one of the IWW leaders, told the crowd: “We will sweep the capitalist class out of the life of this nation”. This was the IWW dream successfully realised in one town.

In 1909, the socialist publisher Charles Kerr published Connolly’s powerful, closely argued pamphlet Socialism Made Easy, which combined propaganda for the socialist cause with a call for Industrial Unionism as the way forward. He insisted that “it is not the theorists who make history; it is history in its evolution that makes the theorists. And the roots of history are to be found in the workshops, fields and factories”. For Connolly, the real battle was not that fought at the ballot box but was “the battle being fought out every day for the power to control industry and the gauge of the progress of that battle is not to be found in the number of voters making a cross beneath the symbol of a political party, but in the number of these workers who enrol themselves in an industrial organisation with the definite purpose of making themselves masters of the industrial equipment of society in general”. This battle had a “political echo” though and the fight at the ballot box had to be fought. Nevertheless, the Socialist Party had to be subordinate to the Industrial Unions because, he insisted, it was they that “in the fullness of time will overthrow that political system, and replace it by the Industrial Republic”. Socialism Made Easy sold over 40,000 copies in the United States.