With less than a month until May Day, workers around the world are preparing to mark International Workers’ Day amid a growing economic crisis and increasing militarism. Last year witnessed one of the largest May 1 mobilizations in the United States in years, showcasing a working class capable of standing up to Trump. This year’s call to action carries an even more urgent and specific charge than in years past. The workers’ movement worldwide — and especially within the United States, the heart of the imperialist beast — must be fiercely and uncompromisingly anti-imperialist.
So far, the year 2026 has already seen a devastating display of U.S. imperialist hegemony’s decline under Trump. (This follows last year, when Trump bombed seven different countries.) In a demonstration of what Trump calls the “Donroe doctrine,” the U.S. abducted the president of Venezuela, effectively turning the country into a semicolony. Trump continues to deprive the Cuban people of oil, leaving over 10 million without power. The United States and Israel have launched a deeply unpopular war on Iran and Lebanon, killing thousands, displacing millions, deepening a global economic crisis, and exposing their own weaknesses in imposing their imperialist agenda.
The same machinery that wreaks destruction abroad militarizes our streets at home through ICE and DHS — raiding workplaces and schools, detaining workers, parents, and children in inhumane conditions, separating families, attacking protesters and legal observers, and terrorizing communities. The wars abroad and the repression at home are two sides of the same imperialist coin.
The most dystopian aspect is that the working class is compelled to pay for the very weapons that attack us, our neighbors, and our class siblings. Under a proposed Trump administration plan, the U.S. military budget would increase by a staggering 42 percent, reaching $1.5 trillion for the coming fiscal year.
Money for military budgets doesn’t grow on trees — it comes directly from cuts to food, housing, education, health care, and childcare. With the $200 billion that Trump is currently preparing to request from Congress for Pentagon funding, the U.S. could cancel all medical debt or provide free lunches to all public school students. As usual, Trump said the quiet part out loud: “It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare.”
Now, as it was a century ago, it is the working class that pays for the ruling class’s wars.
But U.S. workers have far more in common with workers in Tehran, Beirut, Havana, and Caracas than with any billionaire, capitalist politician or representative of “our own” ruling class.
While the U.S. working class pays through our pocketbooks, the people of Iran, Lebanon, Cuba, and beyond pay with their lives. We must seize every opportunity to explain that every dollar allocated for a new fighter jet is a dollar stolen from a school or a hospital. We must refuse to let our unions stay silent while the U.S. devastates the lives of our class siblings around the world. U.S. imperialism does not liberate people — it only shackles them further. A population under external attack has less room, not more, to combat its own ruling class. And when U.S. imperialism is strengthened, the working class everywhere is weakened.
Labor Must Break with Imperialism and Its Parties
The brutality of imperialism is not exclusive to Trump. He is a morbid expression of U.S. imperialism’s decline since World War II — a system built on resource plundering, hyperexploitation, and misery, imposed through coups, counterrevolutions, and extortion by financial institutions like the IMF, all cloaked in the narrative of “spreading democracy.” But, like rainbow capitalism, progressive imperialism is a myth. Whether under FDR, Nixon, Obama, or Trump, the role of the U.S. in the global order has been, and remains, to extract, exploit, and conquer.
That system — upheld by both Republicans and Democrats — is in crisis. While Trump accelerates the decline of the U.S. role in the global order, no amount of progressive rhetoric can reverse that historic trend. Especially in the heart of imperialism, we must break the chauvinist logic that binds labor to the so-called national interests of our own country and expose them as the interests of the ruling class alone.
This May Day, let’s fight to unite our struggles with those of workers around the world — especially those whose lives are devastated by the imperialist government that rules us. The recent “No Kings” protests revealed a massive anger at the ruling class within the U.S. Signs against the war, ICE, and Trump’s complicity with Epstein were everywhere, expressing a clear link between a ruling class that abuses with impunity and a foreign policy that kills with impunity.
In preparation for this year’s May Day, the May Day Strong coalition of unions, left organizations, and nonprofits has been hosting mass online calls with the slogan “workers over billionaires,” centering demands to tax the rich, kick ICE out, and “expand democracy.” In the spirit of the fight against ICE in the Twin Cities, it has echoed calls for workers, students, and communities across the country to participate in a day of no work, no school, and no shopping.
May Day Strong has acknowledged the war by including “invest in people, not wars” in its list of demands. Even the American Federation of Teachers’ pro-Israel president, Randi Weingarten, spoke out against the war in Iran during one of these mass calls. The fact that even union leaders like Weingarten are opposing the war reflects the masses’ rejection of it and the deep, lasting impact that the movement for Palestine has had on the working class.
But while some unions have issued anti-war statements or cosponsored scattered protests, the labor movement has not been leading the anti-war movement in the streets, nor mobilizing the sleeping giant of workers to fight with our own methods in our workplaces and on the streets against the war.
Why Isn’t Labor Organizing the Fight?
The answer lies in the union leadership’s long history of ties to the parties of capitalism — from the consolidation of labor bureaucracies after the New Deal to the anti-strike “labor peace” agreements during World War II to their total capitulation to the bipartisan anti-worker attacks of neoliberalism. With their extensive ties to the parties of the bosses, labor bureaucracies tend to benefit from the same capitalist stability that the bosses enjoy.
Thus, even the most progressive labor leaders have worked to restrain the independent strength of the working class rather than unleash it. We see this now in how the anger over the war on Iran has been channeled into calls for Congress to pass the War Powers Act or invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office. The leaderships of our unions and nonprofits aligned with the Democratic Party will do everything in their power to silo our fights, take them off the streets, and channel them back into voting blue in November — leaving intact the system that generated these crises and attacks.
But as the neoliberal project falters and U.S. imperialism reveals its own limits, capitalist stability is no longer guaranteed. In the past year, we’ve seen how Trump’s outrageous attacks have pushed the consciousness of the working class beyond the limits imposed by the bureaucracies, putting the “general strike” back on the table — not only to make bread-and-butter demands but also to stand against ICE and in solidarity with our immigrant neighbors. Like the 2 million workers who paralyzed Italy in a general strike for Palestine, the working class is increasingly recognizing its capacity to fight for political demands.
Strategic debates are sharpening around how to organize this fight. It’s significant that the call for “no work, no school, no shopping” skirts the critical question of what it would take to organize a true general strike — including breaking labor laws written by the bosses, like New York’s Taylor Law or national laws like Taft-Hartley. But as socialists, we must make one thing clear: organizing independently of the parties of capital isn’t a question of “political purity” — it’s an existential question for our movement.
A Movement Led by Workers and Young People
We constantly see how imperialist governments, in the interests of a greedy minority, provoke wars, send thousands of people to their deaths, and leave behind scars that last for decades. We’ve seen this before. As my railway worker comrade Anasse Kazib put it — describing the eve of World War I, when the German Social Democratic Party voted for war credits, siding with their “own” nation rather than the world’s working class — “If we are not profoundly internationalist today, we will be nationalist tomorrow, willingly or unwillingly.”
`As workers and youth, we have more power to stop this than we realize. The fight against ICE in Minneapolis demonstrated what is possible and has put the need for self-organization and working-class methods back on the agenda. And the courageous student walkouts across the country against ICE have shown the incredible potential for worker-student solidarity.
In this spirit, May Day Strong should call for unions to organize democratic spaces and assemblies in the lead-up to May Day for workers to gather, democratically discuss demands, and vote on how to fight these attacks. The Minneapolis workers’ assemblies have provided an example of what this could look like. As rank-and-file workers, we must urge our unions to organize and mobilize their vast memberships for May Day. But we shouldn’t wait for our unions to do it for us, nor passively accept directives from above about what we are fighting for and how to fight. In the absence of workers’ democracy in our unions, we must fight for it ourselves, from the bottom up, by organizing committees in our schools and workplaces — and impose it from below.
To defeat the ruling class’s wars, we need a movement led by workers and youth that uses the methods of class struggle — protests, walkouts, and strikes — and that places no faith in the parties or institutions of capitalism. This International Workers’ Day, we must embody the central slogan of our movement. Across immigration status, race, gender, borders, and all divisions imposed on our class, an injury to one is an injury to all.We invite you to march with us this May Day under the slogan of full rights for immigrants, abolish ICE, and defeat the U.S. imperialist war on Iran.
The post This May Day, the Working Class Must Defeat the Ruling Class’s Wars appeared first on Left Voice.
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