This is a rough translation of part of an article that was put up on the USI website before the last IWA congress and now appears to have been removed. Presumably it was a response to the proposal to expel USI and FAU from the IWA - which ended up being rejected. The rest of the article gave a brief and uncontroversial history of the IWA.
Unfortunately in recent years the IWA has been living the contradiction of being less and less an association of free unions and more and more a coordinator of specific small anarchist (or which allegedly are considered as such) political groups which, often with very few members (perhaps only a few), present themselves as “sections” of the IWA, gradually transforming the association into something very distinct from its origins. All this is creating, in the name of a supposed anarchist “orthodoxy” of a small group of people, serious problems for the components of the IWA that operate on the terrain of the revolutionary unionist and class struggle. The continuous attempts to limit membership of the IWA to anarchist militants only (rather than every worker who accepts the statutes, the way it always was), and the obsessive closure towards other experiences of struggle and organisation, are in fact distancing many forces of alternative and libertarian unionism from the orbit of the IWA.Despite this internal situation the IWA continues to be a pole in the world with enormous potential for organisation and development. It is enough to think of the recent request for affiliation presented by strong unions from Pakistan and Indonesia. These unions surely have practices and trajectories different from the classic ones of the IWA, but an interchange of opinions and a profitable and supportive relationship would permit the association to introduce itself in the areas that are strategically most important and “hot” of world social conflict. The attempt in Manchester to expel two of the founding sections of the IWA, which are today combative unions present in the social struggles of their respective countries, (the German FAU, “guilty” of the orthodoxy of maintaining relations with some unions already expelled from the IWA, and the Italian USI, “guilty” of having chosen to concede autonomy to its union branches, in particular in public health, in the choice of whether or not to participate in the rsu [works councils similar to the Spanish comités de empresa], which if it happened would worsen the crisis in the International once and for all, distancing it even more from reality. The next congress then could be decisive for understanding where the historic association is heading. There is no lack of signs of optimism. Among them what stands out is the “new wind” which is blowing in Spain, where the CNT in recent months has been the protagonist in major union struggles taken forward by new and active generations of young anarcho-syndicalist workers.
If the IWA knew enough to understand the complexity of the modern world, instead of shutting itself away in sterile sectarianisms, it would surely again have the guts to compete in today’s history. Without abandoning its principles it will have to open itself up to the debate with all the realities that, by different paths, follow the aim of social emancipation. To reverse then the tendency to exclusion in order to work in a wider organisation.
So should the IWA still aim to be an association of revolutionary unions - or should it be more of a grouping of political organisations?
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Seems that, at least in theory, that the IFA already meets that definition. Course, there isn't a US affiliate, so I have no experience with it. Thanks for posting this though, very informative.