Page:William Zebulon Foster - Strike Strategy (1926).pdf/62

 several unions are engaged in a joint struggle against the employers. Nothing is so demoralizing to a strike as to have certain categories of workers receive regular and large strike benefits while others get few or none.

In any event, whether a given left wing strike be of organized or unorganized workers, it is certain that there will be a most urgent need of money in large quantities. Hence, the strike strategy must develop the most effective ways and means of mobilizing the financial reserves of the workers in support of strikes. This involves problems of publicity, of dramatizing the strike, of spreading a network of relief committees throughout the local and national labor movement, of insisting that other unions regularly assess themselves for the strike, of floating rank and file strike loans, etc.

Strike relief work, which offers a splendid means for the left wing to establish its organization and prestige in the unions, must be accompanied by a penetrating propaganda carefully calculated to drive home to the workers the real economic and political significance of the struggle and to awaken their class consciousness. Ordinarily the strike relief committees can best be organized under the auspices of either the strikers' unions or of the sections of the labor movement being appealed to. In several strike situations in this country the International Workers' Aid has done good service.

The employers use many weapons to crush strikes; starvation, demoralizing propaganda, playing off one section of workers against another, bribing of leaders, etc., and to all these methods and interspersed with them they add sheer terrorism. With plain force they seek to break the workers' ranks and drive them back to work. They always have their own private armies of plug-uglies and provoca-