The Internationalist Workers’ Organization (IWO) is a worker-based international political movement that has emerged from a long experience of workplace organizing and from a conscious critique of both the bureaucratic left and the institutions that channel working-class struggle into controlled forms. Our history begins in Iran, but for readers in Sweden it is essential to understand what we developed in exile and, above all, on the concrete terrain of the Swedish class struggle: the struggle in the workplaces, the conflict with trade-union control, and the attempts to build independent workers’ nuclei capable of organizing struggle beyond the rituals of negotiation.
After the repression of the 1980s, we continued for a long period as independent workers’ groups in Iran. When we were forced to leave the country and ended up in Turkey in 1991, a new phase of organizing emerged: we took the initiative in a broad and radical protest and self-organization movement among Iranian refugees. This movement was organized from below, independent of party membership and bureaucratic apparatuses, through a coordinating body that developed practical experience in collective action, negotiations, and mass mobilization. For us this was not a “side track,” but a continuation of the same principle: organizing through the organs of those directly involved and through common struggle, not through lobbying or representative elites.
When refugees were later transferred to third countries, our work became concentrated on developing an independent working-class line in Europe. This did not simply mean offering “support” in an abstract sense, but engaging in a conscious strategic struggle: what does independent class organization mean in a European context where trade unions dominate, where strikes are often reduced to controlled instruments of negotiation, and where laws and institutions limit the forms of struggle? Our experience led us to conclude that workers’ struggle in Europe – and particularly in Sweden – is largely confined within trade-union and legal frameworks that transform workers’ energy into manageable conflicts. Even where more radical or “independent” union forms exist, the struggle risks remaining subordinated to the logic of negotiation.
Against this background, we began in Sweden to work toward building cadres and local workers’ nuclei in and around workplaces, with a clear objective: to organize struggles that are not dependent on the control of the established union apparatuses. In the text you are now reading we describe how such nuclei were able to develop methods that combine sustained struggle with public mobilization, how conflicts could be brought into the public space and become a social question, and how a broad solidarity movement could be built around the workers’ own demands. These experiences shaped a central principle in our practice: that class struggle must be able to break out of the institutional “peace” maintained through negotiation systems, labour-law restrictions, and social norms of “order.”
At the same time, our theoretical work developed as a means of practical organization rather than as an academic identity. We have criticized the ideological self-closure that characterizes many exile groups and also parts of the European left-communist milieu. We have also maintained the historical lessons associated with the communist left’s critique of parliamentarism, nationalism, and trade-union integration, but without turning these lessons into dogma. On the contrary, one of our central arguments is that strategy must be reconsidered in light of capitalism’s structural transformations, the character of the crisis, and the real conditions of workplace struggle in our time.
IWO emerged publicly on May Day 2001 as an expression of this continuity: from workplace organizing and independent networks, through the self-organization of refugees, to the development of a practice in Sweden that seeks to unite strategy, methods of struggle, and class independence. For us, organization is neither a question of bureaucratic titles nor of hierarchical apparatuses; it is a matter of building a living class force through long-term work, political clarity, and the practical capacity to expand struggle beyond the limits imposed by capital and its institutions.
