Page:William Zebulon Foster - Strike Strategy (1926).pdf/78

 political character partial settlements are only justifiable in case of bad defeats, when it is a case of merely trying to save the pieces.

A form of partial settlement that the employers often favor follows along craft lines. These settlements enable them to pit the skilled workers against each other and against the unskilled. Right wing leaders habitually make partial settlements of this character. The left wing must resolutely oppose them. They are fatal to the growth and progress of the labor movement.

Strike strategy under present conditions in the United States must include definite policies regarding the making of trade union agreements. For many years the ultra-leftists, best typified by the I. W. W., have emphatically opposed in principle the signing of any trade union agreements whatsoever. They maintain that such documents constitute agreements of the workers to abandon the class struggle for the periods they are in force. They advocate merely oral agreements.

This incorrect attitude, which is one of the many forms of the ultra-leftism which has prevented the I. W. W. from expanding, is a reaction against the wrong policies of the right wing trade union leaders in making trade union agreements. The latter, with their class collaboration conceptions, believe that such agreements actually end the struggle for the while. They hold trade agreements to be sacredly inviolable. By signing up their various craft contracts to expire at different dates they use them as justification for one union scabbing upon another. Thus they have tended to discredit trade union agreements in principle.

But the strike strategy must not be determined by such flimsy arguments as those of the I. W. W. Trade