STRIKE STRATEGY
more advisable to try to choke out the movement quietly than to smash it in open struggle. Therefore, they set their stool-pigeons, well-organized and strategically situated, at a policy of systematic obstructionism. These worthies oppose the honest leaders, spread defeatism among the workers, and block every effort to build or vitalize the movement. In this way many a promising movement has been killed.
The employers, to facilitate the slow strangulation of the movement, do not discharge or otherwise victimize leading workers, fearing thus to galvanize the whole body of workers into action. Under these circumstances, the left wing must carefully analyze and militantly expose the harmful tactics of the detectives. It must fight for the democratization of the leading committees. Upon every possible occasion it must force the doubtful characters before mass meetings of the rank and file to defeat their reactionary policies. When the leading union committee is controlled by under-cover men, as will often happen, ways must be found to crystalize the honest forces in the union to drive them out or to gradually build a substitute leading body out of some other committee.
Provoking Premature Strikes
Where a movement is going ahead effectively and the choking process can not succeel the employers may decide to kill the union by a premature strike. Then the under-cover men become provocateurs, demanding a strike to adjust some discharge case or other grievance carefully rigged up by the employers. As strike provocateurs, the under-cover men are especially dangerous. They pretend to be the defenders of the rank and file. But the left wing must learn to keep its head and not allow the workers to be stampeded into hopeless strikes.
In flourishing organization campaigns, such as those
66
