Page:William Zebulon Foster - Strike Strategy (1926).pdf/58

 the striking workers are desperately poor, where the employers ruthlessly violate the so-called civic liberties, or where a gigantic and hated trust is involved, they are often moved somewhat in sympathy for the strikers. Their petty bourgeois sentiments of humanitarianism, legalism, and competition are touched. But even in such strikes they give little or no active support. Their chief contribution is to help create a "public opinion" favorable to the strike.

Right wing trade union leaders enormously overestimate the value of such a sympathetic public opinion. In order to secure it they always cut the heart out of their strikes, catering to every petty bourgeois conception. The left wing will make no such mistake. While realizing that a favorable public opinion is a valuable asset and while maneuvering skilfully to create it, the left wing must never forget that the strike can only be won by a successful fighting policy. It will not sacrifice the substance, a real fight, for the shadow, a favorable public opinion.

In their anxiety to pursue this shadow of "public opinion" right wing leaders make a fetish of legalism, and cringe before this fetish, apologetic and timid, often even joining the capitalists and their’ controlled press in attacking the workers' disregard of the property rights of the employers. The workers, however, when aroused to struggle in strikes, often take little account of capitalist-made legal "rights," and American labor history is filled with instances of militant action of strikers. More than in any other country, perhaps, has sabotage been used by American strikers in their bitter battles with the employers.