The progressive disuse of the weapon of strike was not to the liking of one school of thought, the school of thought of communists and Marxists. They are wedded to the doctrine of class war and a strike of industrial workers is to them not so much an attempt to secure some improvement in their condition but a skirmish in the ultimate class war which is to overwhelm the capitalists and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat. A strike is useful and valuable not because it secures some concessions but because it sharpens the class-consciousness of workers and weakens the position of employers. Those elements could not take kindly to the attempts of workers to secure concessions through representations and negotiations and legislation. They were full of contempt for those attempts and regarded those who were engaged in them as having committed the cardinal sin of class-collaboration. Advocates and followers of that school of thought are to be found in all countries. They try in their own way to emphasise the importance of strikes and to foment them wherever possible. Economic distress and the obduracy of employers help them many a time. But on the whole their influence is waning and, workers do not respond too readily to their calls for a strike.
The surprising thing, however, is that these advocates of strikes and class war abolish the workers' right to strike as soon as they get into power in any country. In Soviet Russia the right to strike was abolished as soon as the communists established their rule. The same has been the experience in all other countries under the rule of the communists. The abrogation of the right to strike was not, it is now clear, a short-term temporary measure. It is a permanent feature of the communist system of government. It is not only strikes which are banned. Independent organisations of workers and other sections of the people are also banned. Under communism, there is no place for free and independent trade unions. Trade unions exist in name in Soviet Russia, but the only function that they can perform is to act as an agency of the Government for enforcing discipline and the fulfilment of plans and for the distribution of social welfare benefits. They cannot act as independent bodies for the protection and advancement of workers interests. It is necessary, therefore, to remember that the right to organise and the right to strike exist only in democratic countries. Those who feel attracted by communist slogans and by rosy pictures of life under communism may keep that fact in mind before they allow themselves to be dragged into the communist net.