Page:William Zebulon Foster - Strike Strategy (1926).pdf/59



The most powerful of all the weapons employed by the capitalists in ordinary strikes is that of hunger. They seek to starve the workers, their women and their children; to shut off their supply of life necessities until their courage is broken and they come back to work upon the employers' terms, defeated. It is a cold and brutal business, but it is one of the many barbaric many the employers use to maintain their power to rob and exploit the workers. Starvation in all its forms in strikes is a morale breaker, a scab breeder.

There are many kinds of scabs, each of which has to be dealt with in its own way. There are professional scabs, there are good-job scabs who fear the loss of their preferred positions, and there are weakling scabs who simply have not the courage or intelligence to fight. But the most menacing and terrible scabs are hunger scabs, those sincere workers who are driven back to work because they lack the physical necessities of life to continue the fight.

This is the form of scabbery that breaks strikes, especially among the unorganized and unskilled, and this danger the strike strategist must find ways and means to prevent. To do so confronts him with a maze of very difficult financial problems. Here only a bare outline of a genre policy can be indicated.

This problem raises the general question of the role of the workers' funds in strikes. The question has often been put thus: Can the workers win strikes with money?