With the Trump administration at the helm of the bourgeois state in the United States, unleashing a wave of repression on immigrant workers and the working class broadly, Labor Notes, a labor organization that promotes union reform and union democracy while also promoting increased use of strike action and new organizing drives, has published what it presents as its contribution to the “debate and discussion” of how the working class and U.S. labor movement can respond, in a series of articles entitled “How Can Unions Defend Worker Power Under Trump 2.0?”. Labor Notes frames the question this way: “authoritarian consolidation of power is testing unions. What can unions do to survive in the second Trump presidency? What tactics and strategies can help organize more new members and best survive an all-out assault on labor and other rights?”

The answers presented in this series of articles follow familiar paths of opportunism, long familiar to the Party, which are often sold to the working class as solutions to its increasingly desperate situation. These include embracing electoralism and the supposed need to defend democracy in the face of “authoritarianism” and “Trumpism”.

As the overtly fascistic side of capital, embodied in the Trump administration and the MAGA movement within the Republican Party, working hand-in-hand with its “democratic” companions, takes its turn managing capitalism in the United States, it brings with it the increased centralization of state power and the economy, overt bigoted nationalism, a quickened disintegration of the middle class and petite bourgeois in favor of mega-conglomerates of capital, and intensified state repression against the working class, especially immigrants. In response, the labor left grows disquieted and revisits the call made by UAW (United Auto Workers) leadership and President Shawn Fain for a general strike in 2028, through aligning labor contract expirations around May 2028. This call came on the heels of the 2023 United Auto Workers strike, which inspired the U.S. labor movement with its “rolling strike” against the three major automakers: Ford Motor Company, General Motors, and Stellantis.

This call is shrouded in ambiguity and raises serious questions, since the UAW has not committed significant resources to organizing it, including establishing a central body to coordinate the effort, instead seeming to rely on other unions to answer the call spontaneously. As May 2028 approaches, the plan of action remains ambiguous and commitment half-hearted. Still, a limited but substantial number of unions have signed onto the call to align contract expiration dates for a mass strike on and around May 1, 2028, including the American Federation of Teachers. For that reason, it is important to examine this initiative closely.

As we enter 2026 with only a small minority of unions having actually lined up their contracts, any potential general strike is likely to be lackluster. Moreover, UAW leadership has framed the strike as necessary to “defend democracy”, sabotaging it from the outset by anchoring it in opportunist, cross-class collaboration. This opportunism must be opposed by all class-unionist forces to keep any general strike on a combative class basis, so it can truly defend the working class and land a real blow against the capitalist class.

Labor Notes: Selling Workers on the Futile Defense of Democracy and an Electoralist Path

In this recent series, and in other pieces published by Labor Notes, the problems faced by the working class are offered some practical solutions, like increased unity of action across unions. However, the series falters as the problems facing the working class are framed as “corporate greed”, “the billionaire takeover”, “creeping authoritarianism”, and “Trumpism”. The solution? Let’s fight for more democracy! How do we get there? By placing workers’ hopes in bourgeois social-democrat politicians (e.g. the Mamdanies and AOCs), activism (e.g. the unforceable petitions), and interclassist organizations (e.g. single issue coalitions).

As one Labor Notes article puts it: “To every major American institution, one question will be posed over and over in a friendly but pointed manner: which side are you on, the people or the autocrats?” This obscures the class nature of the workers’ struggle. Workers are told it is the ambiguous “people” vs “autocrats”, rather than the clear, materially grounded enemy of the working class: the capitalist class, the class that has the exclusive authority of the companies, industries, and banks, which exploits the value created by the working-class. To identify the enemy of the working class as anything other than the capitalist class is to weaken the struggle by misdirecting and confusing it.

Simply put, democracy is nothing but the governing form of the capitalist class’s dictatorship in times of “peace”, a game of parliament which is favorable to interests of the capitalists whose economic privileges allow it to always direct it in its favor, when capitalism can afford to exist without the iron fist of fascism.

And the democracy we are being called to fight for is itself fascistic. The capitalist class continually requires the centralization of state power and the economy to reign in the antagonisms of its “sacred order” including the incorporation of unions into the state, so that society can be managed as a single unit with minimal resistance from the working class and the petite bourgeois, in order to manage crises and keep accumulation going. This is highlighted by our Party: “after World War II: the “democratic” states defeated the “fascist” ones, but fascism defeated democracy, and all countries became, some quickly, other slowly, more “fascistic”.

Under this democratic-fascist state, leaning from time to time to more or less into its democratic veneer, working-class exploitation continues, and the imprisonment and violence against immigrants remains the same. In the “oh so wonderful time!” of the Obama administration, often held up as the peak of U.S. democracy, 3.1 million deportations took place, an astounding historical number. Surpassing the 2 million of the Mexican Repatriation of the 1930s under the Republican presidency of Hoover. Under Obama, immigrants deported during these supposed times of “peace and democracy” suffered at the hands of the state’s immigrant-policing apparatus and its prisons, just as they have suffered under times of “fascism”.

As the Party makes clear: “The real fight against fascism is the fight against democracy, the fight for the reconstitution of the proletarian class movement, with its class program and its class organization, the communist party. For many, this takes too long: “Fascism is coming, let’s quickly unite all men of good will to fight it, now,” they say. But in reality, such people are nothing other than defenders of capitalism.”

It must be asked: how shall the working class obtain this supposed defense against “authoritarianism”? Labor Notes highlights the utility of a general strike, which will be further discussed in this article. Alongside the general strike, support for the Democratic Party, presented as the “defenders of the working class,” is urged, as well as the working class’s subordination to its appendages, including No Kings and the 50501 movement.

In addition to backing traditional Democrats, Labor Notes, the labor left, and opportunists of all flavors and persuasions have ecstatically celebrated recent electoral victories by social democrats, touting them as working-class saviors, including so-called “movement mayors” like Mamdani in New York and Johnson in Chicago, who spoke at the 2024 Labor Notes conference. The Party wrote that the endorsement of such politicians by the labor left and others “underscores the delusional outlook of social democrats who view the bourgeois state as a neutral arbitrator between labor and capital”...“Mr. Mamdani is a part of a larger trend within the Democratic Party to return to [a] social democratic phase. The goal is to rejuvenate dependence on the holy bourgeois state and faith in the name of its lord, profit; to prepare for sacrifice on the futuristic battlefields of tomorrow.” For Labor Notes to promote such a view, and to sell the working class on the path of electoralism, weakens the struggle and delays the class’s return to combativity by selling it a dead-end path of putting workers’ faith in the ruling class Democratic Party and their social-democrat faction.

We are then told “of the many good reasons why [we] shouldn’t give up hope, the first is that popular resistance is growing, as seen in the recent Indivisible-initiated No Kings day protests”. And what should the working class do? “Our best bet might be to launch a concerted organizing campaign culminating in a “No Kings, No Business As Usual” day of action.”

Underscoring the falsity of this statement is the fact that Indivisible’s No Kings actions have not impeded the Trump administration’s and the capitalist class’s attacks on the working class in the slightest, from the arrests of immigrants to the slashing of social spending.

This quote also makes it clear that elements of the labor left seek to chain the working class to a popular-front project that absorbs class combativity into inter-class politics aimed at stabilizing the bourgeois state, subordinating workers’ demands, and diverting struggle away from class unionism and the power of the general strike.

As we stated, “The Democrats work to build a popular front of opportunist union leaders, social democrats, NGO’s and liberal billionaires, it aims for the apparently noble goals of restoring American democracy from authoritarianism, reasserting the “rule of law” against lawlessness, and preserving an imaginary pure petite-bourgeois capitalism from oligarchy, which really only means securing and repairing the bourgeois state after the crash so that capital accumulation can continue unabated in its exploitation in its next evolution.” And from the Party’s intervention at the No Kings protests, we declared “These coalitions, in the name of inclusivity across the political spectrum, compromise and subordinate the workers’ movement and its demands. They cater to the comfort and preferences of those who would forever tie workers to the inherent sufferings imposed by the capitalist state. The capitalist state will never yield any true, meaningful, long-standing change without being confronted by genuine worker power. Only the class union and unconstrained general strike action can achieve this.”

General Strikes and May Day 2028

We must expose the opportunist currents shaping calls for a general strike in the United States, including the May Day 2028 initiative promoted by UAW leader Shawn Fain, which urges unions to align contract expiration dates around May 1, 2028 in order to stage a mass strike within the legal framework that constrains workers in the U.S. The demands tied to this effort remain unclear and scattered, ranging from Medicare for All (i.e. universal healthcare) and “protecting democratic institutions” to a shorter work week, retirement security, and other claimed improvements to workers’ lives.

While the Party supports and leads growing unity of action, coordination among working-class organizations, and generalized strike action, it is imperative that such action be pursued on a class-unionist basis and not remain on opportunist and collaborationist terrain by those who seek to preserve labor peace in order to maintain the ruling class’s regime of profit accumulation. Such opportunist and collaborationist elements must be opposed and overcome by all class-combative forces, and those class-combative forces must be united.

It is important to highlight that Shawn Fain and UAW leadership are fervent supporters and servants of the ruling class’s Democratic Party, which has committed innumerable attacks and violence against the working class, from facilitating deportations of immigrant workers to working with collaborationist union leadership to prevent worker strike action and force concessions to the capitalist class onto workers. For example, during the potential 2022 railroad workers strike, the strike was ended before it even began by Congressional intervention led by the Democratic Party and the collaboration of union leaders.

At the 2024 Democratic National Convention, Shawn Fain spoke, claiming “This election comes down to one question. Which side are you on? On one side we have Kamala Harris and Tim Walz who have stood shoulder to shoulder with the working class...For us in the labor movement, it’s really simple. Kamala Harris is one of us.” One of us? Once again, opportunism seeks to obscure clear class lines to confuse and misdirect the struggle of the working class.

Independent, combative working-class organization and action are necessary for a general strike to become a real, damaging blow against the ruling class. But in a democratic-fascistic state, truly independent worker action is only tolerated up to the point where it threatens profit accumulation and risks breaking the grip of opportunist forces inside the class. One only needs to remember the 2023 UAW “Stand Up” Strike that was limited to a few plants, avoiding the full mobilization of workers despite their willingness! For that reason, an opportunist leadership like Shawn Fain and the UAW would likely derail any genuine move toward generalized action the moment it begins to pose a real threat to the ruling class.

Objectively, such a mass, generalized strike, which has served as a critical weapon in the struggle of the working class in the United States and beyond, is difficult to achieve at this point through the tactic of aligning contract expiration dates. First, it relies on labor law and the state, designed to restrain class combativity and maintain labor peace. Second, most workers don’t have contracts to align in the first place. Third, labor contracts renew every few years and, at this point, most labor contracts are going to expire past this date, weakening a potential strike around May 2028 due to the limited section of unions and workers committed to striking then.

In addition, 90% of workers in the United States remain unorganized, leaving many workers without the ability to take collective action. It is important, as Labor Notes has done, to encourage unorganized workers to organize, though in most cases within an overly legalistic context relying on bourgeois state guarantees that, at the end of the day, corral workers to certain confines of action, aiming toward a false labor peace asserted by the state, union leadership, and the ruling class. Organizing unorganized sections of workers on a class-unionist, class basis will prove critical to the success of wide, coordinated strike action and a return to class combativity, organizing work that is often neglected and under-resourced within the established unions.

It is also critical that a general strike remains that: a strike. As noted in one of the Labor Notes articles: “the most powerful tactic for expressing…broad anti-authoritarian alliance is a broad-based general strike – sometimes called a civic shutdown – that includes not only workers, but also supportive local governments, churches, media institutions, professional associations, and even some businesses.” Setting aside the problems with selling workers the necessity to defend democracy, it is increasingly apparent that the labor left often views a general strike as something to take place outside of the working class, involving interclassist organizations, including community and activist groups and churches, and local governments, which only serve to water down the power, class combativity, and content of such a strike. This further disconnects the working class from its combative footing by muddying the very definition of what a strike is.

A strike is one of the greatest weapons the working class has against the bourgeoisie because it stops the lifeblood that keeps capitalism and the bourgeoisie alive: the value workers’ labor creates. This is where the power of a strike lies. And in particular, a general strike is when workers, across a multitude of unions and industries, “collectively withhold their labor-power in order to overwhelm the bourgeois repressive apparatus and force concessions by paralyzing the reproductive cycle of capital”. To create confusion about this is to sabotage and weaken a strike by involving futile elements such as activist organizations and churches, tactics (including consumeristic tactics like boycotts), and demands foreign to class combativity due to their separation from the material basis of wage earners as a class.

Leading such a strike into opportunist demands, such as the strengthening of democratic institutions, the implementation of particular social services, and “taxing the rich”, ultimately weakens the strike and its coercive power on the capitalist class. It does so by demanding reforms that reinforce the role of the bourgeois state, reforms historically used to pacify the working class by temporarily granting a slight reprieve from the misery of capitalism. Historically, this happened, for example, in the New Deal, which came on the heels of heightened strike activity and proletarian combativity, granting programs such as Social Security and legal guarantees to unions in order to pacify and control the working class.

Demands for increased wages and the shortening of the working week without lowered wages should be foregrounded because winning these demands hurts the ruling class where it hurts the most: their profits, by claiming a larger piece of the pie and depriving the capitalist class of large amounts of the working class’s labor time. In addition to this, demands for increased wages and the shortening of the working week unite the working class across the board. Positively, demands such as a 32 hour work week are in the mix of discussion connected to the effort to organize a general strike on May Day 2028, which would certainly be a class-combative demand for the U.S. working class and internationally to take on.

The Only Way Forward Is Class Struggle

In conclusion, the labor left, including Labor Notes, works to corral the most combative sections of the working class back into the collaborationist union line and agenda. This echoes a well-known lesson from the international working-class struggle and its Party: the treachery of the social democrats in the wake of the great post–World War I revolutionary wave, and the fact that they have often proven to be among our greatest enemies. They posture as militants and trade in radical slogans, only to act as a poisonous force by selling the working class labor peace, incrementalism, and the defense of the nation and democracy.

In the face of capitalism’s continued disintegration and increased recourse to state repression and the centralization of state power, furthering the liquidation of the middle class, the labor left seeks to sell the working class on the need to defend democracy by poisoning its struggle with electoralism and activism. By extension, it weakens one of the working class’s greatest weapons, the general strike, by imposing opportunist demands, promoting consumeristic tactics, and drawing in non-working-class elements, dragging the strike onto a non-class basis. Such opportunism must be opposed and overcome by combative working-class forces, forces that must ultimately unite to support the return to class combativity among the working class.

While only the future will tell what becomes of the May Day 2028 general strike initiative, one thing is certain: if the working class is to defend its conditions with generalized strike action against the attacks of the capitalist class, it must fight for such strike action to be on a classist basis, including in its tactics and demands. The hard work of building coordination on ever larger scales must also be undertaken, as the objective conditions for such class-combative action mature. This includes the necessity for all workers to organize their workplaces and to bring together worker organizations to coordinate collective power to increase their economic leverage and power to coerce the capitalist class into meeting demands for increased wages and the shortening of the working week without a decrease in wages.

As was put forth in the Party’s leaflet, “No Kings” demonstrations: The Necessary Direction of Struggle: Class Unionism:

“General strike action must be the product of coordinated efforts prepared to turn out and sustain such an immense show of strength. It is critical to organize unions (with or without governmental or boss recognition or contracts), build class struggle caucuses in your unions that influence the broader base within, call a meeting of workers across unions into assemblies where these groups who would have you compromise the necessary aims of the worker’s struggle are absent, their so-called solutions poisoning and paralyzing the body of the workers movement.

Workers! Exit the squirrel cage of symbolic actions and activist coalitions based on compromise with those who would have you throw your bodies on the line in service of the next capitalist politician or return to the normalcy of the so called ‘lesser evil’, and the ridiculous notions that this fight can be fought without clear organization and leadership. Only the International Communist Party, the only party unwilling to compromise and capable of achieving the emancipation of the international working class can provide this leadership. As we have argued for over a century, fascism and democracy, are sides of the same coin, one way or another this capitalist system will continue to exploit, murder, perpetuate genocide and otherwise bring us under their yoke by whatever means necessary to generate their profits. Workers cannot afford to repeat the mistakes of old.

Towards the worker organizations capable of coordinated general strike action!

Towards the building of the class union!”