STRIKE STRATEGY
They are unwilling and incompetent to practice an aggressive and effective strike strategy. They are reactionary, corrupt, and ignorant. They refuse to fight the employers.
Their conception is not to build the trade unions into fighting organizations, but to reduce them through the B. & O. plan and similar schemes into mere instruments to increase the capitalists' profits by the speeding up of the workers in industry. And the Socialist trade union leaders are hardly one whit better than the old line Gomperites. The bureaucracy tends to discard the strike weapon altogether.
More and more this reactionary leadership is proving its incapacity to lead the workers' struggle. It cannot organize the unorganized, it cannot conduct strikes successfully. It betrays and sells out every real fight made against the bosses. Under its control the trade union movement loses strike after strike, its membership falls, its morale declines, and the workers are in retreat before the attacks of the militant employers.
A real strike strategy must succeed in defeating this treacherous and incompetent leadership and in replacing it by a militant, fighting left leadership. This means a fight for control all along the line, during, before, and after strikes, by the organized left wing against the organized right wing. This fight manifests itself in a maze of forms and presents the greatest difficulties. How to conduct it constitutes a whole section of the general left wing strike strategy. Let us, for brevity sake, confine ourselves to that part of this fight which actually takes place during strikes.
A Dangerous Illusions
First, let us dispel the illusion that the left wing cannot and must not fight the right wing during strikes. There are some left wingers who, victims of this illusion, claim that "the workers cannot fight on two fronts at the same
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