Tom Barker and the Syndicalism of the Sea: The Underground Influence of the IWW.

February 26, 2026

Tom Barker and the Syndicalism of the Sea: The Underground Influence of the IWW.

Presented by Paula de Angelis on October 2012 at the NALHC, Detroit Michigan

The Industrial Workers of the World, initially established in the US in 1905, were

internationalist in practice as well as principle, and significant actors in the world-wide

syndicalist movement of the early twentieth century. The IWW has rarely been examined

as an international movement. Although it is widely acknowledged as a key aspect of IWW

organising practices and revolutionary philosophy, the US based literature generally

studies the local or national significance of international class solidarity. IWW scholarship

produced outside of the United States, which of necessity discusses the international

spread of the IWW, tends to be comparative rather than transnational, and to discuss the

political and ideological, rather than the industrial, connections.^¹

While the transnational history of the IWW has received some attention in recent years,

mainly in the context of the coal and hard rock mining industries,^² the significance of

marine transport workers as transnational actors for industrial unionism has never, so far

as I have found, been considered directly in the literature, despite evidence of a

widespread and lasting, though underground, IWW influence on the marine transport

industry, and indications that its workers played a key role in the establishment of an IWW

presence in ports all over the Americas, Europe and the British Dominions.^³ Studies of the

Marine Transport Workers Union that do exist focus, like most of the US literature, on the

history of particular US locals such as the Philadelphia based Local No8, particularly

noted for its success in organising amongst a racially mixed workforce, its large and loyal

membership over the 1920s, and its unusually stable and long-running organisational

presence.^⁴ Yet it is clear that the IWW itself regarded the Marine Transport Workers Union,

one of the most successful industrial unions the IWW established, as of significant

strategic importance in building the world-wide One Big Union. It is also apparent that they

considered the marine transport industry as a natural breeding-place of internationalism.^⁵

Researching hidden and neglected history can have significant challenges, and one of the

major ones here was to find a subject in the data collected. With a field and a topic and

even a theoretical framework defined, there was a great deal of floundering, so to speak,

in an ocean of scattered primary sources and passing references in the scholarship. It

was the fortuitous discovery of “Story of the Sea” that provided a way to navigate these

uncharted seas.

The Story of the Sea: Marine Transport Workers Handbook was initially published serially

over most of 1921 in the Chicago-based IWW monthly publications One Big Union

Monthly and Industrial Pioneer. The entire serial, much revised and expanded by Barker

over the course of 1922, was published in 1923 in pamphlet form. The pamphlet version,

discovered in the Australian National Library, was not signed, so it took some backtracking

to confirm that it was actually written by Barker. The editor of OBU Monthly signified that it

was the first step in an ambitious education project, and that building “the new society

within the shell of the old” necessitated workers not just getting control of the industry, but

also “mastering its processes.” He wrote, “the I.W.W. has launched a program for the

exhaustive study of the vital industries...” that involved “getting up handbooks describing

the different industries, giving the history of their development, their importance to society,

their present status in the complicated net-work of modern industrial life”. ^⁶An ambitious

program, certainly, and one that demonstrates the post-war recognition amongst the IWW

that the syndicalist revolution was a long-term project.

The first chapters of The Story of the Sea provide a basically Marxist social and economic

history of the maritime industry, mainly discussing industrial shipping between the late

nineteenth century and the First World War, although the first chapter includes a sweeping

world history of sailing, navigation, and shipbuilding up to the early nineteenth century. It

proceeds to a country by country survey of the economic and industrial conditions in

various ports and merchant marines, the syndicalist credentials of the marine workers

there, the effects of traditional union and state influences, the chances for achieving

international solidarity, and the possibilities for developing a local for the “One Big Union

of the Workers of the Sea” in each instance, and concludes with a great deal of concrete

advice on strategies and tactics for organising marine transport workers, based largely on

Barker's experiences as co-founder and secretary of the MTWU branch in Buenos Aires

from 1919 to 1920, which specifically took responsibility for protecting and organising the

foreign-born seamen constantly arriving and leaving this busy international port. The dock

workers and seamen of Buenos Aires were, in the early twentieth century, a well-

organised and powerful force on the docks, with a strong alliance between the syndicalist

dockworkers and the anarchist communities of the Boca and, unusually enough, solidarity

between the skilled and unskilled workers of the industry.^⁷ Barker was impressed with the

class solidarity and direct action tactics of the Buenos Aires maritime unions. Argentine

workers, to his mind, practiced successful industrial organisation, and Story of the Sea

provides many an anecdote and example from his experiences that illustrate how things

should be done.

The Story of the Sea has provided a key text around which to construct a picture of the

world of marine transport from the Wobbly perspective. It is not only his experiences as a

marine transport organiser, however, that make Tom Barker a subject useful to the

concerns of this research. His experiences in the years following the war, his contact with

the IWW and the MTWU in the United States throughout the early 1920s, and his work as

an international activist in Europe, and his personality all contribute to the story.

Tom Barker was a well-known IWW figure in Australian and New Zealand in the 1910s,

but his experiences as a marine transport organiser and international advocate for

syndicalism have received very little attention. This virtually un-noticed aspect of Barker's

life and work, however, is ideal for exploring the ways in which IWW internationalism

operated in the marine transport industry in the early twentieth century.

The MTWU saw Barker's work in Europe as a significant contribution to the international

solidarity project.^⁸ Indeed, the IWW as a whole apparently saw the marine transport

workers as both responsible for the international spread of industrial unionism, and a

natural vehicle for establishing international class solidarity amongst industrial

syndicalists.^⁹ Like Barker himself, they were well aware of the key importance of the

marine transport industry for achieving their revolutionary aims, and the necessity of

encouraging syndicalist practices amongst marine transport workers, both for immediate

organising success and the eventual establishment of workers control of industry. Barker's

experiences in the marine transport industry convinced him that establishing the One Big

Union of the Sea was important not only to organising the industry itself, but also to the

longer term aim of establishing working-class control of production in general, describing

world transport as “the strategic point of international capitalism” and stating that “the

proletariat can never assume control until it conquers the ocean routes and the ships that

follow them”.^¹⁰

Those familiar with Leon Fink's recently published Sweatshops at Sea will be aware of the

intertwined stories of internationalism and the nation-state that developed amongst the

marine workers of the much more mainstream social-democratic version of trade

unionism. Fink describes how the craft unions combined with reform movements in the

maritime industry to establish a form of international maritime organisation based on co-

operation between labour, capital and the state, a process that culminated in the the

international maritime agreements of the International Labor Organisation in the mid-

1930s.^¹¹ Barker displayed the typical IWW disdain for both craft unionism and political

reform in his trenchantly critical and occasionally vitriolic attitude to this version of

international solidarity. He advocated an effective international organisation that both

defended against, and would eventually be a power to overcome, the interlocking and

international ownership structures of industrial shipping and their monopolies of port

labour and transport in general. In typical IWW fashion, he saw the principle of

international class solidarity as integral to both the day to day organisation of the maritime

working-class, and simultaneously to the long-term goal of establishing workers control of

industrial production in general. International class solidarity, to Barker, was best served

by an alliance with the world-wide syndicalist movement that emerged from the industrial

working-class in the early twentieth century, merged politically with revolutionaries in the

communist and anarchist movements, and was particularly prevalent amongst dock

workers and seamen.

The editors of Revolutionary Syndicalism characterised it as “a vision of the revolutionary

power and creative efficacy of self-reliant workers” that formed a “distinctive minority

tradition, whose vision, advocacy and faith found formal expression in a large number of

countries'. It is this movement, in the early 1920s re-orienting itself around the momentous

establishment of the successful but beleaguered Russian Revolution, that Barker

identified with.

In February 1920, Barker worked his passage to London on a Norwegian ship. While he

was there, he composed and published the serial version of The Story of the Sea and

several other articles for the US IWW. Barker also found the time to wear several other

hats over this period. He ran the London office of the Australian Workers Defence

Committee, set up in order to free the Australian Wobblies imprisoned in the repressions

of 1917, and stumped the country making speeches on behalf of his Aussie mates. He

addressed transport workers unions wherever he went, and generally kept on the move,

travelling- sometimes illegally- to conferences in Oslo, Berlin and Moscow as a delegate

of the syndicalist Argentine Federation of Labor (FORA). He wrote several articles for

IWW publications in the United States, and maintained contact with the US based MTWU

leadership. Barker's active participation in the international revolutionary movement, and

his consistent commitment to syndicalist principles within it, make him a valuable subject

for exploring the connections between revolutionary syndicalism and IWW

internationalism.

It is also convenient for research purposes that Barker, primarily known as an organiser

and soapbox orator, was a prolific and talented writer, and consistently worked as a

publisher and editor. He maintained, throughout his life, an extensive private and

organisational correspondence “with friends on every continent.”^¹² Since many of Barker's

correspondents were important figures in labour and radical history, it is possible to find

both public and private examples of Barker's written work, in collections in the United

States, Australia and New Zealand, and possibly even in London, where Barker settled

permanently in the late 1930s. Tom Barker's articulate and prolific written work provides a

method for accessing a working-class perspective on maritime industrial capitalism that is

often hidden from the view of the historian.

Barker's autobiographical works have provided many of the details of those

correspondence networks, and they also reveal a great deal about his personal choices

and relationships over the course of his long and productive life.^¹³ He appears to have

been one of those rare individuals in radical politics whose working relationships and

personal connections continually crossed sectarian and national boundaries. He actively

worked on behalf of the Russian Revolution without ever joining the Communist Party.

When he arrived in New York in 1921 to act as a recruiter for the Kuzbas Industrial colony,

sectarian conflicts between the IWW and the newly-formed American Communist Party

resulted in a lack of any official support for the colony, so he and American Wobbly Herb

Calvert worked around the problem by appealing directly to American workers;

nevertheless, he continued to contribute regularly to Industrial Pioneer until at least 1925.

He maintained lifelong friendships with card-carrying Communists as well as Labor Party

ministers. In his transient and wandering early life, he was always had at least one

travelling companion, often a fellow worker from his Australian and New Zealand

experiences. Barker's consistent and lifelong commitment to being a “gladiator for the

working class”, and to the principles of industrial unionism, make him an excellent

example of the way in which IWW practices and principles invested the radical worker with

a broad political education and an adaptable set of agitational practices enacted

regardless of industrial context or organisational affiliation, and enacted according to

context. This may well provide one explanation for the tenacity of IWW ideals and

practices within the marine transport industry over the twentieth century.

Whilst a transnational perspective has yet to be applied to the MTWU itself, there is a

significant body of scholarship that has attempted to revision the world of the maritime

worker as a unique environment, one where the work itself and the structure of the

industry reinforce values of class solidarity and internationalism. There is a growing

awareness amongst maritime labour historians that the structure of the industry and

economy itself foster both internationalist and radical tendencies amongst its workers.

This researcher is not alone in considering The Many-Headed Hydra as a landmark text,

and its theoretical approach and techniques for unearthing the hidden history of the

working-class have directly inspired the framework for this project, which is also an

attempt at writing maritime history “from below”.^¹⁴ Industrial maritime workers, and indeed

the IWW, are invisible for many of the same reasons as their ancestors from the

eighteenth century-state persecution, the violence of abstraction, connections denied or

not seen. The intent of this thesis is to write this sort of history within the steam, steel and

coal-based world of industrial capitalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth

centuries.

The maritime world has geographic and industrial features that have the effect of creating

a unique working-class culture. Its transnational economic structure and work force create

conditions where the need for international co-operation amongst workers is easily

perceived, and the difficulties of applying national controls and discourses to the labour

force in the face of this perception have contributed to the persistence of radical

philosophies such as syndicalism in the industry. Maritime labour history in general is a

marginalised field of history, due largely to the tendency in the discipline to accept national

boundaries as natural to the study. Only relatively recently has there been a serious and

widespread effort to view the maritime world, and the industrial working-class, in a

transnational context. Tom Barker was, for a time, one of the “hidden and world-tramping

army” of the MTWU.^¹⁵ His story and his work, fascinating in themselves, provide a way of

exploring and revealing this buried history.

Barker's particular expressions of international solidarity, his participation in the syndicalist

revolutionary movement. and his personal adoption of the values of industrial unionism

serve as a demonstration of the ways in which IWW philosophy and practice had a much

more profound influence on the industrial working-class than might be supposed from the

size and longevity of the organisation itself. Ultimately, the intention of this research is to

construct both The Story of the Sea and Tom Barker himself as a central focus for

exploring the international history of the MTWU, which in turn will contribute to explaining

one of those recurring questions of the twentieth century: why are marine transport

workers so consistently, and often anomalously, syndicalist and internationalist?

1 The best critique of traditional IWW scholarship is Salvatore Salerno's Red November, Black November, published in 1989. Salerno argues that the organisational and nativist assumptions of traditional labour or political scholarship on the IWW downplayed the influence of European anarchist ideas on the IWW and, and the impact it had on working-class and radical culture in the United States. Recent studies that analyse the IWW as a cultural and social movement have

done much to rectify this neglect. Nevertheless, despite the utility of this approach in understanding the true significance of the IWW as a movement rather than a union, most of these analyses still tend to concentrate on local communities and industries within the United States itself.

2 Andrews, Thomas G. Killing for coal : America’s Deadliest Labor War. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,2008. Stromquist, Shelton. “‘Thinking Globally; Acting Locally’: Municipal Labour and Socialist Activism in Comparative Perspective, 1890–1920.” Labour History Review 74 (December 1, 2009): 233–256. Useful transnational perspectives are also applied in Shor, Francis. “Left Labor Agitators in the Pacific Rim of the Early Twentieth Century.”

International Labor and Working-Class History 67 (July 1, 2005), and Van Der Walt, Lucien. “The First Globalisation and Transnational Labour Activism in Southern Africa: White Labourism, the IWW, and the ICU, 1904–1934.” African Studies 66, no. 2–3 (December 2007): 223–251.

3 Varney, Harold Lord. “The Story of the IWW.” One Big Union Monthly (January 1921), p41. Foner, Philip Sheldon. History of the Labor Movement in the United States: The Industrial Workers of the World, 1905-1917. Vol. 4. New York: International Publishers, 1965, p. Bird, Stewart, Dan Georgakas, and Deborah Shaffer. Solidarity forever : an Oral History of the IWW. Chicago: Lake View Press, 1985, p179. (Exceptionally, Linden, Marcel van der, and Wayne Thorpe. Revolutionary Syndicalism : an International Perspective. Aldershot, Hants, England; Brookfield, Vt., USA:

Scolar Press ; Gower Pub. Co., 1990 contains repeated references to IWW branches in various ports of Europe in the 1920s and 30s).

4 Arnesen, Eric. Waterfront Workers of New Orleans : Race, Class, and Politics, 1863-1923. Illini Books ed. Urbana:

University of Illinois Press, 1994.

Cole, Peter. Wobblies on the Waterfront : Interracial Unionism in Progressive-era Philadelphia. Urbana: University of

Illinois Press, 2007.

Kimeldorf, Howard. Battling for American Labor: Wobblies, Craft Workers, and the Making of the Union Movement.

California: University of California Press, 1999.

5 Smith, Vern. “Sea Power.” Industrial Pioneer (US) 2, no. 6 (October 1924), p6, and “"Indications of International

Solidarity.” Industrial Pioneer (US) 3, no. 8 (November 1925), p23.

6 One Big Union Monthly, January 1921, p17

7 Suriano, Juan. Paradoxes of Utopia : Anarchist Culture and Politics in Buenos Aires, 1890-1910. Edinburgh ;;Oakland

CA: AK Press, 2010. Thompson, Ruth. “Argentine Syndicalism: Reformism Before Revolution.” In Revolutionary

Syndicalism : an International Perspective, 167–183. Aldershot, Hants, England; Brookfield, Vt., USA: Scholar Press ;

Gower Pub. Co., 1990.

8 MTWU Bulletin, One Big Union Monthly, September 1920, p16.

9 Francezon, F. “The Shipping Octopus.” Industrial Pioneer (US) 3, no. 9 (January 1926): 6, 30–31.

10 Barker, Tom. The Story of the Sea: Marine Transport Workers Handbook. Chicago: I. W. W. Publishing Bureau, 1923, p54.

11 Fink, Leon. Sweatshops at Sea : Merchant Seamen in the World’s First Globalized Industry, from 1812 to the Present. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2011.

12 Barker, Tom. “Introduction”, Tom Barker and the I.W.W. Edited by Eric C Fry. Canberra: Australian Society for the

Study of Labour History, 1965.

13 Barker, Tom. Tom Barker and the I.W.W. Edited by Eric C Fry. Canberra: Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, 1965. Barker, Tom, and Tom Kaiser. “Self-Portrait of a Revolutionary : The Story of Tom Barker as Told to Tom Kaiser.” SSLH Bulletin (June 1, 1967): 18–27.

14 Linebaugh, Peter, and Marcus Buford Rediker. The Many-Headed Hydra : Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the

Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. London: Verso, 2000, p7.

15 Cited in Irvine, Andy. “Labour History in Song: Gladiators.” Labour History 94 (May 2008), p169.The Industrial Workers of the World, initially established in the US in 1905, were