Page:William Zebulon Foster - Strike Strategy (1926).pdf/15



FIRST consideration in strike strategy is the development of unity and solidarity among the workers involved in a given action against the employers. Potentially the workers constitute a tremendous force. The 26,000,000 or more organizable workers, when once united, will be irresistible. They will eventually sweep away the capitalist system.

But the obstacles to this unity are many and deep-seated. It is more than a problem of simply bringing the masses into the unions and strikes. There are fundamental divisions in the ranks of the workers themselves that have to be overcome. The working class is far from being a homogeneous mass. It is divided against itself in regard to race, nationality, color, creed, age, sex, skill, etc.

The differences among the workers in these matters are of themselves great obstacles to the complete unification of the working class in its struggles against the employers. But the problem is still further complicated and rendered more difficult because the employers have learned skillfully to play upon these differences and to split up the workers disastrously on the basis of them.

Moreover, the employers are ably assisted in this policy by the reactionary trade union bureaucracy, who divide the workers' ranks by cultivating craft interests, betraying the unskilled, playing one nationality off against another, excluding from the unions Negroes, young workers, and women, etc. All these tendencies are fatal to success in strikes.

Our strike strategy must be skilled in checking and counteracting all such splitting tendencies and in uniting