Page:William Zebulon Foster - The Bankruptcy of the American Labor Movement (1922).djvu/67

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BANKRUPTCY OF THE LABOR MOVEMENT

If the labor movement is to be saved the regenerating force must come from the organized rank and file militants. They must surge up from the bottom and compel the static leadership into vigorous, intelligent action, or remove it drastically.

It is fortunate, indeed, that just in this critical situation, when their services are so badly needed, the militants are at last freeing themselves from the dual unionism which has cursed them and the whole labor movement for a generation by keeping the reactionary elements in power. They are organizing for action in the Trade Union Educational League, and they are finding the American working class, naturally militant and aggressive, more than eager to accept their program. Now the key to the situation is for the revolutionaries and progressives generally to rally around the League and to carry on a vigorous campaign for its policies of industrial unionism through amalgamation, independent workers' political action, affiliation with the Red International of Labor Unions, and all the rest. If this is done it will not be long until the death clutch of the Gompers bureaucracy is broken and the American labor movement, undergoing a profound renaissance, takes its place where it properly belongs, in the vanguard of the world's workers.

THE END