A Tradition of Struggle from Below: IWO’s Historical Path Toward International Organization
The Internationalist Workers’ Organization (IWO) is a working-class–based international political movement that emerged from long experience in 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 within the concrete terrain of Swedish class struggle: workplace battles, conflicts with trade-union control, and efforts to build independent workers’ nuclei capable of organizing struggle beyond ritualized negotiations.
After the repression of the 1980s, we continued for many years as independent workers’ groups inside Iran. When we were forced to leave the country and ended up in Turkey in 1991, a new phase of organizing began. We initiated a broad and radical movement of protest and self-organization 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 “detour,” but a continuation of the same principle: organization through the self-activity of those directly concerned and through collective struggle—not through lobbying or representative elites.
When refugees were later transferred to third countries, our work focused on developing an independent working-class line in Europe. This did not merely mean offering “support” in an abstract sense, but engaging in a conscious struggle over strategy: what does independent class organization mean in a European context where trade unions dominate, where strikes are often reduced to controlled bargaining tools, and where laws and institutions restrict the forms of struggle? Our experience led us to conclude that workers’ struggles in Europe—and particularly in Sweden—are largely kept within trade-union and legal frameworks that transform workers’ energy into manageable conflicts. Even where more radical or “independent” union forms exist, struggle risks remaining subordinated to the logic of negotiation.
Against this background, we began working in Sweden to build cadres and local workers’ nuclei in and around workplaces, with a clear objective: to organize struggles that are not dependent on the control of established union apparatuses. In the text you are now reading, we describe how such nuclei were able to develop methods combining sustained struggle with public mobilization, how conflicts could move into urban space and become matters of broader social concern, and how wide solidarity movements could be built around workers’ own demands. These experiences shaped a central principle of our practice: that class struggle must be able to break out of the institutional “peace” maintained through bargaining systems, labor-law restrictions, and social norms of “order.”
At the same time, our theoretical work developed as a tool for practical organization, not as an academic identity. We have criticized the ideological self-enclosure that characterizes many exile groups and even parts of the European communist left; we have also upheld the historical lessons associated with the communist left’s critique of parliamentarism, nationalism, and trade-union integration—without turning those lessons into dogma. On the contrary, one of our central arguments is that strategy must be reassessed in light of capitalism’s structural transformations, the changing character of crisis, and the concrete conditions of workplace struggle in our time.
IWO publicly emerged on May 1, 2001, as an expression of this continuity: from workplace organizing and independent networks, through refugee self-organization, 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 matter of bureaucratic titles nor hierarchical apparatuses; it is a matter of building living class power through long-term work, political clarity, and the practical capacity to expand struggle beyond the limits set by capital and its institutions.