On Friday, February 6, an international strike of dockworkers from five countries—Italy, Spain, Morocco, Greece, and Turkey—took place against war, arms trafficking, and rearmament, involving some twenty ports. At least, that was the case according to official statements and intentions.

The initiative was promoted by the Italian union, Unione Sindacale di Base (USB) and stemmed from an international meeting held in Genoa on September 26–27, which in turn was preceded by a meeting in Athens in February 2025.

Among the main trade union forces promoting the initiative—in addition to and beyond the USB—is the ENEDEP union, which organizes dockworkers at the terminals managed by the Chinese company COSCO in the port of Piraeus, Athens. ENEDEP has been able to carry out hard-hitting strikes—which we have reported on in our press—with a level of participation and strength among dockworkers that the USB has not yet been able to match. These were strikes against the exploitation imposed by COSCO, a company owned by the Chinese state, a fact that is relevant to the topic of this brief note.

The meeting in Genoa at the end of September took place in the midst of mobilizations against the war and genocide in Gaza, which culminated in the general strikes of September 22 and October 3. Present were—among others—representatives of ENEDEP, the Basque union LAB, and the Port Workers’ Federation of the French CGT. The latter was represented by a leader of the Marseille dockworkers, a member of the militant minority within the CGT known as Unité CGT, whose leader, Olivier Mateu, served as secretary of the CGT’s territorial branch in the Bouches-du-Rhône department—whose capital is Marseille—the UD CGT 13, until the congress last October.

In this case as well, relations between the USB and representatives of Unité CGT have roots dating back at least to the strikes in France against pension reform in the first four months of 2023, when some USB dockworkers from Genoa participated in one of the demonstrations in Marseille.

During that intense workers’ struggle, the 53rd CGT Congress took place in late March, the outcomes of which were in some cases also relevant to what we are writing here.

However, the CGT did not participate in the February 6 strike, neither in Marseille nor in other ports, despite Unité CGT having promoted the action: the February issue of “Unité”—the current’s newsletter—features an article on the strike and carries a front-page photo of one of the USB dockworkers from Genoa, confirming the ties between the Italian grassroots union and this current of internal opposition within the CGT, the regime’s union.

The appeal published on December 23—“Dockworkers Do Not Work for War”—in preparation for the strike contains some commendable statements, such as, among its objectives, “opposing the EU’s rearmament plan” and “block all arms shipments from our ports to the genocide in Palestine and to any other war zone,” and the action itself—an international strike uniting workers across artificial national divisions—is significant.

However, the focus placed on the Palestinian issue—regarded as almost exclusively central—undermines the proclaimed proletarian internationalism of this trade union action. Not because it is not right and necessary to oppose the war unleashed on Gaza and still dragging on, but because it is viewed as an exclusively local and national conflict, rather than one between two fronts of imperialist states, between which the Palestinians are crushed. Thus, inevitably, one does not take the path “against the war in Palestine,” but the one leading to “yes to imperialist war,” to “liberate Palestine.”

The conflict in Gaza is part of the general inter-imperialist clash, not an isolated case but a link in the chain of conflicts leading toward the third imperialist world war.

The asymmetry of forces must not deceive us. Hamas, and the other militias allied with it that governed Gaza and still partly control it, are puppets of the regional imperialist powers—Iran, Turkey, Qatar—which exploit the blood of the Palestinian proletariat for their capitalist interests. The truce agreement between Qatar, Turkey, the United States, and other Arab countries was the most striking confirmation of this.

The USB leadership, on the other hand, has always refrained from denouncing the actions of the militias affiliated with Iranian imperialism—operating in Gaza (Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad), in Lebanon (Hezbollah), in Yemen (Houthis), in Syria, and in Iraq—as acts of war by that imperialism. These mercenary gangs, some of which are very well-equipped and organized, had and have the objective of defending the capitalist interests of the Iranian bourgeois regime, coming into conflict or reaching agreements with other regional imperialisms, including, of course, the Israeli one, and with the U.S. one backing them.

Because in the inter-imperialist conflict, Iran and its so-called proxies, backed by the Chinese imperial giant, represent, for now, the weaker side, and also because China continues to usurp the name of communism, the USB leadership substitutes class struggle with geopolitics, and anti-capitalism with anti-Americanism.

Last December, the USB leader responsible for the union’s international relations traveled to China as a guest at a conference organized by the Chinese Marxist Academy of Social Sciences.

Moreover, the support given by USB leaders to the “Chinese path to the falsification of socialism” clashes directly with the struggle of the Piraeus dockworkers against the ruthless exploitation by a state-owned company. And also with the fact that China is Israel’s second-largest trading partner, where it has made massive infrastructure investments, such as in the port of Haifa, and sells surveillance systems used to spy on and target Palestinians. The same systems, according to “Le Monde” on March 2, are sold to the Iranian regime to monitor and suppress uprisings in that country.

It is no coincidence that one of the top leaders of the Greek trade union PAME—of which the Piraeus dockworkers’ union ENEDEP is a member—in an article published in “Unité” last February in his capacity as deputy secretary of the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), defines China, as well as Russia, as an “imperialist center”: “The working class has no reason to align itself with the interests of an imperialist center, whether represented by the United States and the EU or by China and Russia” (“Trade Unionism at a Crossroads: Class Struggle or Imperialist Integration? The Role of the ITUC” – George Perros, “Unité” No. 7, February 2026).

However, it is precisely within the WFTU that the opportunism masquerading behind a false proletarian internationalism is most clearly evident, bending it to the interests of a section of the imperialist countries.

At the aforementioned 53rd CGT Congress, held from March 27 to 31, 2023, the most militant factions, mainly organized within the Unité CGT wing, achieved surprising results. The report on the CGT’s activities presented by the outgoing majority was rejected by 50.32% of the votes. But an amendment presented by Unité CGT, calling for the union to leave the openly collaborationist international trade union confederation—the ITUC—and join the World Federation of Trade Unions, received a much lower number of votes. This was also due to the speech by Sarah Selami, an Iranian trade union activist in exile in France, who read a message from the Tehran tram workers’ union (Sherkat-e Vahed, Sandikaye kargarane sherkate vahed – Union of Workers of the Tehran and Suburbs Bus Company) in which, among other things, she stated:

“Our warm greetings to all French workers, who have always been among the pioneers of the struggle against the global capitalist order (…) The brutality of the [French] police toward protesting workers demonstrates that, when the profits of the capitalists and anti-worker laws are at stake, there is no substantial difference between the capitalist states of the world (…) Three of our well-known activists—Reza ShahabI, Davood Razavi, and Hassan Saeedi—had already traveled to France at the invitation of French trade unions (…) All three have been imprisoned again for several months (…) We expect nothing from the capitalist states and powers that pursue only their own interests. We rely solely on the strength of the working class in Iran and on the support of workers’ movements around the world, such as yours, dear comrades in France. Victory to the working class in France, in Iran, and around the world. Long live international workers’ solidarity. Tehran, March 27, 2023.” How relevant today!

Sarah Salemi then went on to describe the struggle of the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement and its ruthless repression:

“This uprising is the continuation and culmination of struggles that have been underway for some time. I will mention the most important and recent ones: the mass movement of winter 2017–18 and then that of fall 2019, whose slogan was ‘bread, work, freedom,’ reflecting the anger of a large number of exploited and unemployed workers neglected under an unbridled ultraliberal order (...)

“Several trade union organizations, both global and national, have offered their support (…) Almost all of them, except for the World Federation of Trade Unions (…) whose silence regarding the events that have shaken Iran for more than six months is deafening. It is the same silence it observed regarding the movement of autumn 2019 and the bloody repression that followed. But when one considers the close ties this organization has maintained for several years with representatives of the Iranian Islamic regime, the reasons for this complicit silence become clear. In fact, one of the leaders [Ali Reza Mahjoub, ed.] of the Workers’ Houses (Khane-ye Kargar) has been a member of the WFTU Presidential Council since May 2022 (…) The main activity of the Workers’ House, alongside the Islamic councils in enterprises (Shora-ye Eslami), consists of controlling and repressing the labor movement, preventing the formation of independent unions, and signing the agreement on the poverty-level minimum wage every year during tripartite negotiations. A group that is not a union but an ideological-political party, linked to the Islamic regime, sits as a representative of Iranian workers within the WFTU.”

The World Federation of Trade Unions, therefore, does not only bring together class-based—that is, militant—unions around the world. The criterion is quite different: it brings together unions led by political groups that oppose only U.S. imperialism and its allies. In countries where bourgeois regimes are adversaries of U.S. imperialism, it does not accept militant unions but rather collaborationist, regime-aligned, even state-controlled unions, such as those in Iran, and excludes the militant unions persecuted by those regimes!

This happens because these opportunist union leaders subordinate the class struggle to so-called geopolitics.

And this also explains why, during the international dockworkers’ strike on February 6, a relationship was established in Turkey with the Liman-İş union—the dockworkers’ union federation affiliated with the Hak-İş trade union confederation, a Turkish regime union with an Islamist ideology, even further to the right than the largest Turkish regime trade union confederation, Türk-İş—against which the more militant trade union confederations DISK and KESK have been in opposition for decades—and which considers the strike a tool to be used as little as possible. In fact, on February 6, it carried out a purely symbolic action. This Turkish regime-aligned union joined the initiative solely because it helped pit workers against the bourgeois state of Israel, as desired by the Turkish bourgeois regime!

We communists know and warn workers that political-union opportunism—which is also espoused by the leaders of the USB union—will, when regional imperialist conflicts erupt into the third imperialist world war, call on workers to take sides with one of the two parties, the anti-American one; in other words, they will call them to war.

Already today, in the face of the U.S. and Israeli attack against Iran, they are taking a stand in defense of the Iranian regime, hiding this stance behind the slogan: “in defense of the Iranian people.” But the Iranian working class, driven into the hell of imperialist war by the global capitalist system as a whole, and above all by its own bourgeois regime, has only one way to defend itself: to lose the war as soon as possible—certainly not to die defending a regime that only a few weeks ago was still massacring them with bullets in the streets.

In every country, the working class has no bourgeois regime to prefer and for which to shed its blood. Its sole struggle is for its immediate interests—economic, trade-union—and for the revolutionary conquest of political power: not war between states but the social struggle that becomes revolution.

Revolutionaries, communists, distinguish themselves in this: they do not call on workers to defend the bourgeois homeland but, on the contrary, hope for the military defeat of their own capitalist regime, because they know that this will weaken it in the face of the rising workers’ struggle for power.