Beginning on May 1st what should have been a day of international worker solidarity gave way to another pathetic display of union opportunism. In the current imperialist phase of capitalist decay, many unions, once organized by workers themselves to defend the immediate needs of the working class have been integrated into the legal regulatory regime of the capitalist state, working with boss-linked leadership to discipline and corrupt labor for the needs of national capital. The regime union mechanism functions to channel legitimate class antagonisms around declining wages into a mutual pact with capital to conquer imperial spoils while leaving the broader structure of exploitation of the vast majority of workers intact. These maneuvers pacify combativity, severing any possible link with the lower-paid, unorganized sectors, and burying class consciousness beneath nationalist duty. Under the guise of “solidarity”, union leaders appeal to workers across the globe.

Between early May and early June 2025, two major strikes disrupted key segments of the U.S. war industry. At Pratt & Whitney, nearly 3,000 machinists from IAM Locals 700 and 1746 struck for three weeks, halting production of the F135 jet engine used in the F=35 stealth fighter and a variety of other warplanes. The strike disrupted deliveries and contributed to a breakeven quarter for parent company RTX, with CEO Chris Calio admitting that F135 shipments were affected. Workers won a 6% wage hike in the first year, improved pensions, and contractual protections ensuring that military engine production would remain at their Connecticut facilities through 2029.

Simultaneously, over 900 UAW members struck at Lockheed Martin plants in Orlando and Denver, both integral to F=16 fighter jet manufacturing, demanding better wages and the elimination of an extended tiered wage system. The strike lasted just over one month. While neither the UAW nor IAM coordinated these labor actions, their near-concurrent timing briefly disrupted the defense production chain. Yet, despite their material leverage, both strikes were ultimately contained within regime union channels and national frameworks, with UAW President Shawn Fain explicitly aligning the strike’s purpose with the interests of U.S. imperialism, describing it as part of the patriotic “arsenal of democracy”. Thus the dopey jingoism of Feign masked as high ideals is merely the cover for the corruption of the workers to maintain within the narrow self-interest and gaining its “fair share” of the blood drenched profits of U.S. imperialism. While Fain celebrates his role in securing the capitalist democratic states arsenal of mass proletarian slaughter, and endorses tariffs as patriotic necessity, his alleged “anti-fascism” is in fact precisely a replication of the state policies and rhetoric of fascistic syndicalism under Mussolini’s regime, and later the embraced by the American capitalist class within the New Deal, assisted as they were by the corruptive Stalinist popular front policies which played a key role in dismantling the independence of the proletarian class defensive organs in the United States.

In Iran proletarian struggles have erupted into spontaneous revolt. Beginning May 19 with truckers in Bandar Abbas, the wave quickly spread to 150+ cities, engulfing Tehran, Mashhad, Karaj, and more. These workers—truck drivers, bakers, farmers, nurses—struck without union sanction, galvanized by fuel price spikes from $0.04 to $1.90 per liter, 35–50% inflation, unpaid wages, and insurmountable living costs. Their resistance is unmediated class defiance—an organic rebellion against both imperialist pressure and pro-capital domestic regimes.

Likewise, as we have already mentioned, in late March and April, Chinese workers at BYD plants in Wuxi and Chengdu walked out in protest against wage cuts, cancelled bonuses, and deteriorating conditions after a Jabil takeover. These were joined by struggles among migrant laborers, teachers, and factory workers demanding unpaid wages, particularly as local production slowed under rising Sino–U.S. trade tensions. These collective acts of proletarian revolt, though operating under ruthless capitalist states, signal the possibilities of spontaneous global proletarian class upsurgence in the future, which must of course coalesce into a future united front for the class union..

Together, these episodes illustrate how unions can become shock troops of war production; the latter, how proletarian unity and solidarity arises without official mediation, across unorganized sectors acting out of a spontaneous class instinct as a result of material conditions. Yet still, these forces must develop and then coalesce to organize a mutual defense linking workers across continents and sectors, transcending contractual confines and nationalist illusions, and aimed at a unified defense against deepening wage slavery. Only such material solidarity, led by the class political vanguard of the International Communist Party can, when the moment is right, convert isolated battles into revolutionary conquest of power.