Page:William Zebulon Foster - Strike Strategy (1926).pdf/70

 unity of the strikers in the face of innumerable splitting and disintegrating tendencies. The fighting policy of the employers aganst the workers is well-expressed by the time-honored axiom of all strategists, "Divide and Conquer." And their ways to divide and weaken the workers are many, devious, and difficult to defeat.

In the foregoing we have indicated some of the more important of these ways and how to checkmate them. The employers play skilled against unskilled, native workers against foreign-born, whites against blacks, unemployed against employed, adults against youth, men against women. And in all these maneuvers they receive practical assistance from the reactionary policies of the present trade union bureaucracy.

The employers seek to demoralize the workers intellectually by injecting the poison of patriotism in their ranks and by cultivating religious prejudices among them. They starve the strikers and their women and children; they terrorize them with the courts, the army, the police, and various kinds of private thugs. To all these methods they add bribery, in the shape of cash payments to leaders, and of illusory concessions to the workers, such as company unions, welfare systems, temporary wage increases, etc.

They plant their provocateurs and detectives in the ranks of the workers to mislead and betray them. They try to force them back into the mills or shops with "Citizens' Committees" and "Back-to-Work" organizations. Their nondescript politicians and go-betweens try to poison the strikers' spirit in a hundred insidious ways. In their quiver the employers have many deadly arrows of disruption to shoot into the ranks of the workers.

To defeat the employers' many-phased policy of driving wedges between the different categories of workers, of starving, terrorizing, demoralizing, and bribing them; to