Page:William Zebulon Foster - Strike Strategy (1926).pdf/53

 a strike, which we could also have done in committee, we did it dramatically by taking a spectacular mass strike vote all over the country. This exercised an enormous effect in acquainting the steel workers with what was going on and in rallying them into the struggle.

Just another example from the 1917 campaign to organize the packing workers: The campaign, in its early stages, had come to a halt. It threatened to collapse. The workers, discouraged from long years of oppression and union misleadership, refused to respond to ordinary organizing methods. They wanted a definite sign from us that we had some power and that we meant business.

We sensed this, and in response announced the holding of a national conference of packing house workers in the near future to formulate demands to be presented to the packers. This was blazoned in the capitalist press as presaging a national general strike in the industry. The effect upon the workers of this dramatic maneuver was electrical. They poured into the unions in tens of thousands. It was the turning point, the thing that made this historic campaign a success. It was also a good example of effective offensive tactics.

Strike dramatization, when skillfully carried out and not of a character which merely provokes capitalist counter-attacks, is highly beneficial in many ways. It enormously stimulates the morale of the strikers. It tends to rally masses of other workers to support the strike morally, financially, and otherwise by making the class character of the struggle stand out in graphic clearness. It often checks the attacks of the employers who, preferring always to work in silence and darkness in crushing the revolts of their workers, usually shrink back from the blaze of publicity, unless they are of the most powerful capitalist combina-