STRIKE STRATEGY
this fact. There is too much fight involved in it to suit them. Hence their organizing campaigns are mostly abstract and lifeless. In a situation demanding the quick building of a skeleton of a union and the early launching of a strike they waste their efforts trying to perfect an organization in detail before beginning the wage struggle. They overstress mere organization and understress the thing that labor organization is built for, the fight to defend the workers' interests. To quote from my pamphlet, "Organize the Unorganized:"
The future trade unions of the great unorganized industries will be born in the heat of the struggle against the employers over the demands of the workers. The organization campaign which does not voice the demands of the workers and envisage an early struggle in defense of them is doomed beforehand to failure.
Programs of demands for organization campaigns and strikes must be concise, expressed in simple, understandable slogans, and must touch the burning grievances and necessities of the workers’ life in the industries. There is enormous organizational and inspirational power, for example, in such graphic and vital slogans as the 8-hour day and the 5-day week. As stated above in our discussion of the general strike, the workers, especially the backward American working class, will not fight militantly for far-fetched demands that they do not understand or do not consider practical.
Realizable Demands
The workers have a sense of realism which must always be taken into consideration. While they must be tanght the necessity for the eventual complete expropriation of the capitalists, and although they will accept this idea readily, it is no sign of good leadership to put forth as immediate demands propositions outside of the realms of possible
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