We must fight for an actual general strike! An indefinite strike that halts production, paralyzes profit, and demonstrates the power that a united workers’ movement has. This action is the workers’ strongest weapon for defending against attacks on living standards and resisting violent mass deportation. The general strike will bring in busboys and bus drivers, domestic workers and natives, the organized and unorganized.

While we applaud the fighting spirit of workers across the United States and are encouraged by their willingness to engage in collective action, it won’t do to settle for any distortion of what a general strike is. A general strike is not a one day “economic shutdown” that is pushed by capitalist politicians or employers through calls for individuals to not shop, not go to school or work, or bosses shutting down their own shops for the day and locking out workers.

A general strike is when workers, arm in arm, take a stand against the capitalists and the state through a collective withholding of their labor-power under the leadership of explicit workers’ defensive organizations. It cannot come from decentralized networks of individuals that do not collectively commit to strike.

The interclass groups that lead these efforts seek to direct genuine anger into voting for the Democrats Party, strengthening capitalism and delaying the workers from organizing a militant, organized defense.

Both Democrats and Republicans use ICE and deportations to regulate the labor market, cyclicly opening and closing borders in order to secure the exploitation of precarious workers for low wages while undercutting domestic workers wages. Immigrant and domestic workers must unite in common defense of wages and living standards across borders!

When the established labor unions tell workers that they cannot violate the no-strike clause in their contracts, as they did during the protests in Minneapolis, they undermine the very action required for a real general strike. Mere protests without indefinite strike action, which can leverage the labor-power of large swathes of the working class, channels the rightful rage and pain of workers towards temporary symbolic action behind demands that are neither truly fought for, nor something capitalism will ever yield without extreme struggle; at best, it results in a temporary reform that can be easily revoked as class tensions subside. By telling workers to follow Democratic Party-linked groups, they funnel the energies of the class into class collaboration and abandon what really gives workers power: the strike.

Simply calling for “more organizing” and “more numbers” isn’t enough. We must restore the meaning and power of the general strike with a radical change in tactics.

We need to abandon the united front from above with interclass political and activist groups that misdirect the struggle and work towards a united front from below, i.e. one that combines all worker’s defensive organizations towards collective strike action.

This means forming class struggle formations or workplace committees, inside or outside existing unions, among the organized and unorganized, committed to increasing the strength of the struggle to achieve the immediate demands of workers without holding back from taking action that would break the suffocating rules of the National Labor Relations Board which are designed to contain the working class from leveraging its full strike power. We must reject compliance with the no-strike clause in contracts and organize towards collective action across sectors, unions, and borders by organizing in solidarity for May 1st, 2028 alongside the unions that have already taken this step, or organize a real general strike much sooner.

Out of this united front must come the combination of workplace committees, unions, and workers into a single class trade union that includes all workers against the wage system. Only the international unity of workers, organized in these class unions and led by the communist party, can destroy the capitalist system that produces ICE, prisons, deportations, and poverty.

For a real general strike directed by workers’ organizations that coordinate collective mass strikes!
Against united fronts with interclass capitalist groups!
For the class union!