STRIKE STRATEGY
combinations of the industry by the organization of the independents, etc., but they must also know when and how to deliver the real thrust at the heart of the opposition. The employers are careful to protect themselves against such deadly thrusts by splitting up the workers' army and making it waste its forces in isolated engagements, a policy in which they are helped by the craft and localist conceptions of the reactionary craft union leaders.
In the steel campaign of 1918–19, for example, the Cambria Steel Company, working no doubt in close understanding with the United States Steel Corporation, tried to force a strike in its big Johnstown plans by ruthlessly discharging some 3,000 of its workers for belonging to the unions. The workers, 22,000 strong, under local leadership (which later proved to be permeated with company agents) voted almost unanimously for a strike.
But the national leadership knew that a strike in Johnstown must fail and that it would ruin the whole national campaign. We realized further that the real enemy to be defeated was the United States Steel Corporation and that the battleground had to be in its mills all over the country. Therefore, we refused to take up the gage of battle offered us at Johnstown. We ordered the Johnstown workers to take the company’s blow, to hold their ground at all costs for a few months until we could mobilize the steel workers nationally, who were then rapidly organizing.
This they did heroically in a most difficult situation and in the face of the bitterest opposition from the company. Thus we avoided this threatened serious breach in our ranks, and we were enabled, shortly afterward, to throw our whole army in one grand offensive against our real enemy, the United States Steel Corporation.
(3) The working class strike strategists must always bear in mind the existing or prospective general and local political situations. They are often decisive in strikes. In
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