Page:William Z. Foster - The Revolutionary Crisis of 1918-1921 (1921).djvu/62

 progress effectively in every nook and corner of the labor movement. The French militant minority is the best organized of any in the capitalist world.

After it had passed its crisis of dual unionism in the fall of 1920, the C. S. R. made rapid headway and soon won over large sections of the trade unions. This startled the yellow bureaucrats and they renewed their offensive against it. Seeing that the militants would not oblige them by quitting the unions voluntarily, they decided to throw them out. Hence, the executive committee of the C. G. T., upon the motion of Dumoulin, himself formerly a militant, declared for the expulsion of every organization having direct affiliation with the C. S. R. The pretense was that the latter body, especially because of its per capita tax system, constituted a rival to the C. G. T., a dual movement in fact. One after another, the national unions endorsed the actions of the C. G. T. and finally even the Amsterdam International of Trade Unions took a hand in the matter by blessing the campaign of expulsion. Then began the great struggle of the conservatives to expel the revolutionists, and of the latter to say in the unions.

This struggle, which is still going on, has become so intense that the issue now is "shall the French trade union movement be split, or not?" The yellows say, "Yes," and the reds, "No." The former realize fully that they are doomed if the revolutionists are allowed to remain among the masses. Therefore, they are determined to get rid of them, even if they have to wreck the labor movement in order to do so. And by the same token, the revolutionists know that their strategic place of advantage is in the mass organizations, and they are equally determined not to be driven out into sterile isolation. The capitalist press and all the crooked politicians in the country are openly on the side of the reformists in their efforts to split the C. G. T.

The first guns in the actual campaign of expulsion