Page:William Zebulon Foster - Strike Strategy (1926).pdf/23



FUNDAMENTAL necessity to a successful strike strategy is the building and functioning of an effective trade union leadership. The workers' necessity for a firm, courageous leadership is a burning one. The very nature of their struggle against the capitalists and the state demands centralization and discipline, which involves the transference of great power into the hands of those who stand at the head of the unions. One cannot fight the class war on the basis of referendums.

Even as a military army, the workers' organizations must be headed by a capable general staff. Because of their capitalistic environment, the workers are afflicted with many destructive illusions, political, economic, patriotic, religious. These make them a prey of various breeds of misleaders. Hence, the tremendous importance of developing an honest, well-knit, and thoroly capable leadership, able to point the way ideologically to the workers as well as give them organizational direction in times of strikes.

The problem of leadership may be considered in two phases. There is the basic question of group leadership, and then the subsidiary question of individual leadership. Let us approach the subject thru the latter phase.

he present-day leaders of the trade unions are cut of one pattern in their colorlessness and insipidity. They are dry-as-dust bureaucrats, ignorant and unimaginative. They are almost totally without idealism and true proletarian fighting spirit. They receive no inspiration from the