Page:William Zebulon Foster - Strike Strategy (1926).pdf/87

 the trade unions, and of such other bodies, political, T. U. E. L., defense, etc., that were built up before or during the strike, it is fundamental, in organizing the retreat, to maintain organized ideological contact with the defeated strikers.

It was to organize our retreat that we elaborated an enormous propaganda organization after the ill-fated steel strike to keep in touch with and influence the ex-strikers. The plan was to publish a weekly bulletin and distribute 150,000 copies of each issue, for which a crew of a dozen organizers was to be kept in the field stationed in the important steel centers. “Money sufficient to finance the campaign for at least three years was in hand, left over from the strike fund.

The plan was adopted and the campaign started. But the reactionaries killed it by deliberately breaking up the committee in charge. With such a gigantic propaganda campaign in effect the steel workers would have realized that the unions had not abandoned the struggle, the fighting spark among them would have been kept burning and, at the end of a year or two of systematic effort, eventually fanned into a great flame of organized resistance.

To consolidate the victory in case of success is no less urgently necessary for the workers than to organize their retreat in the event of defeat. It is not enough simply to win good settlement terms from the employers at the final conference table. Such terms amount to little unless they are followed up by the thorough organization of the workers involved and the systematic utilization of their victory to stimulate vast masses of other workers into action.

More than once the left wing has won major strikes only to find later that they have degenerated into little