Tempest Magazine

Abolition, as Angela Davis reminds us, is based on the radical notion that institutions like the police, courts, and prisons are not isolated problems that might be fixed by reforming away their most harmful and violent elements. They are constitutive of capitalism, so can only be undone through a complete transformation of society. It is only through such a process of revolutionary change that real alternatives to punitive and carceral forms of justice might be created. In the process of political struggle different ways of relating to each other begin to develop, new social forms of organization are produced, and qualitatively different alternative futures begin to emerge as material possibilities. Abolitionism, in this sense, is a negative resistance to the oppressive and exploitative relations of the present as well as a positive force capable of expanding the horizon of what a future society might look like.

Revolutionary Forgiveness: Beyond Moralism, Toward Liberation by D. K. Renton begins from the abolitionist position that recognizes that “if every intimate harm is to be met with the incarceration of the perpetrator, then a series of abuses will follow” (1). Of course, an abolitionist stance does not mean ignoring immediate social harms both within left-wing movements and in society more broadly. Revolutionary Forgiveness insists that leftists must begin to create meaningful alternatives to the carceral system and that one possibility is to be found in revolutionary forgiveness. More than a moral commitment to magnanimity, revolutionary forgiveness for Renton is a political and ethical practice in which perpetrators of social wrongs are only forgiven once the social relations that allowed those harms to occur have been (or are in the process of being) transformed. Only then will the victims have gained the social power necessary to actively choose to forgive the offenders, allowing them both to reintegrate fully into society.

Connecting forgiveness with social justice goes beyond individual accountability. However, as Renton emphasizes, the perpetrator taking responsibility for the harm they have caused is an integral part of revolutionary forgiveness. Justice at the individual level is directly tied to revolutionary transformation, the complete reorganization of all social relations, and the creation of new revolutionary institutions. Importantly, though, Renton is not content to wait until after the revolution for the process of forgiveness to begin or new ways of dealing with harm to develop. Instead, he insists that alternative and truly democratic ways of dealing with social injustice can – and must – be developed in the present, in concert with resistance against capitalist exploitation and oppression. Drawing from the writings of György Lukács, Renton argues that “the means chosen to achieve socialism [must be] indivisible from the ends” (64).

No forgiveness without justice

Stressing the necessary relationship between means and ends need not reduce politics to an attempt to create a post-revolutionary future in the present. At its worst, prefigurative politics places change at the individual level above social transformation. But prefiguration does not mean living exactly as we would like to in a post-revolutionary situation while ignoring the social relations of the present. Instead, Renton rethinks prefigurative politics through a revolutionary lens by emphasizing that through the process of struggling against present conditions, people begin to create new ways of relating to each other and the world. Revolutionary transformation occurs through what Alan Sears, in his recent book Eros and Alienation, calls concrete utopian practices. By engaging in political movements, people begin to become aware of their own collective power and, in the process, start to create new forms of democratic organization, new forms of revolutionary infrastructure, and new political institutions.

As Renton reminds us, Marx saw political experimentation with new ways of organizing society’s life activity as an essential part of the revolutionary process. Critical of the utopian socialists of his time who tried to create an ideal society based on a preconceived vision of the future, Marx states in The Civil War in France that the working class will have to “work out their own emancipation” for themselves, a project which requires them “to pass through long struggles, through a series of historical processes, transforming circumstances and men.” Revolution, for Renton as for Marx, is not a one-time event. It is an ongoing and non-linear process which includes political experimentation, defeats, and discovering new practices along the way.

Revolutionary forgiveness represents a distinct approach, one which Renton clearly differentiates from other theories of forgiveness, including those of philosophers Jacques Derrida and Hannah Arendt. Derrida’s notion of forgiveness is based on the moral claim that forgiveness is the right thing to do regardless of the circumstances surrounding it. Such an unconditional view of forgiveness is, as Renton describes it, a “wager on the possibility of the offender’s redemption, prior to the moment when the perpetrator has changed heart” (27). While revolutionary forgiveness is also a wager in the sense that it is part of a broader revolutionary process, the outcome of which cannot be certain, Derrida’s wager is completely disconnected from justice as it does not depend on either a commitment to individual change by the perpetrator or broader social transformation. Renton insists that the decision to forgive must rest with the victims, including the ability to refuse forgiveness.

As a case in point, the book examines the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, an attempt to respond to the great social harm of apartheid with accountability and forgiveness. Those involved in the crimes of the apartheid state met with victims and listened to them describe the harm they endured. The Commission implored perpetrators to come forward and victims to begin to forgive. All of this occurred as a part of a process of forming a post-apartheid state grounded in multi-racial democracy. However, as Renton argues, post-apartheid South Africa left racial and class inequality largely in place: “It is a story of what happens when you tell a people to forgive, but without granting them in return the social revolution whose victory would dull the acrid taste of seeing culprits go free” (40). While the post-apartheid state has granted formal equality, South Africa remains a class society and so continues to be segregated along class and racial lines.

As Massimiliano Tomba demonstrates in Insurgent Universality, a truly democratic society cannot emerge from formal rights granted from above by a nation-state, as this will always exclude the most marginal elements of society. Instead, a politics of universality must be directed by self-organized activity and struggle from below. Renton shows that this process was blocked by South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, where the state prompted victims to forgive their oppressors without granting them the true social equality needed for the people to dictate their own terms. Of course, there is no guarantee that former oppressors will not betray their promises to change and attempt to retake their positions in power if given the chance. But unlike Derrida’s unconditional moral claim, Renton insists that forgiveness can only truly occur as part of a broader process of social transformation, where the victims hold the social power necessary to ensure reconciliation actually takes place.

Unlike Derrida’s, Arendt’s notion of forgiveness centers the experiences of victims by arguing that it is only through forgiveness that a victim of harm is able to move beyond their feelings of shame, guilt, anger and resentment. By forgiving the perpetrator, the victim transfers the burden of the past from themselves to the offender, allowing themselves to begin to fully heal while also permitting the perpetrator to reintegrate into society. However, like Derrida’s, Arendt’s view of forgiveness does not require any substantial transformation, either socially or on the part of the offender. As Renton states, “Forgiveness in Arendt’s terms does not require that an offender make reparation, not even that the wrongdoer restore the victim at least to the nearest available approximation of their lives before the pattern of social harm began” (242).

Once again, forgiveness is disconnected from justice. This lack of justice is unacceptable on an individual level as Renton shows in the case of Eleanor Marx’s abuse at the hands of socialist Edward Aveling. Subject to a pattern of emotional abuse, Eleanor Marx continually forgave Aveling but remained committed to their relationship. But her forgiveness did not allow her to move on from the past. Instead, she remained trapped in a situation of unequal power and abuse. On March 31, 1898, Eleanor Marx committed suicide by cyanide. According to all accounts by biographers of Marx, Aveling “was the effective but not the immediate cause of her death.” While Aveling, by most accounts, did not murder Marx (though, as Renton shows, the biography of Aveling written by Deborah Levin states that Aveling murdered Marx), he was culpable in her suicide.

Eleanor Marx was never able to achieve justice. Her death was a result of a pattern of abusive behavior that she was not able to escape from. Her attempts to forgive Aveling did not protect her. Separated from justice, forgiveness is not possible. Despite Marx’s efforts to forgive Aveling, a meaningful process of forgiveness could not have occurred unless she removed herself from the abusive relationship and began to heal. That process never happened.

The lack of justice is even more unsupportable at the social level. For example, demanding that Palestinians forgive those who have enacted genocidal violence without any reparations or justice “would be a cruel joke” (245). As Renton argues, the struggle for a free Palestine requires going beyond the reparations given to the victims of South African Apartheid. Palestinian liberation will only be fully achieved through a complete transformation of the capitalist system that underpins settler colonialism and imperialism today. Moving on from the past can only occur once revolutionary justice has been achieved.

The need to forgive

It is for this reason that Renton stresses that “the sequence is crucial: I want the oppressed to be compassionate after they have destroyed the citadels of the rich and removed those who occupy them” (2). However, at other moments Renton insists that forgiveness can (and, indeed, must) be a part of the process of social change. There is an undeniable tension here, between the need for revolution to occur prior to forgiveness and the notion that forgiveness must be a part of social transformation. Rather than eliding this tension, Renton defines revolutionary forgiveness as a process that must be combined with social struggle if it is to be at all. But it can also be an integral part of the process of social change, transforming relationships between people in a way that strengthens our movements by beginning to mend the harm done by violent and oppressive behaviour internal to our communities.

He draws on the example of Prisoners Against Rape (PAR), a Black collective composed of prisoners convicted of rape at Lorton Reformatory in Virginia in the late 1970s to early 1980s, to demonstrate the possibility that forgiveness can occur in the present, if it is a part of our political practice. Members of PAR contacted the DC Rape Crisis Center as part of an effort to change both themselves and society. They read feminist and anti-racist theory, wrote letters for feminist newsletters in which they defined rape as a systemic form of violence emerging from unequal power relations between men and women, and called for non-carceral forms of dealing with acts of violence. Their commitment to meaningful change is what convinced feminist activists to take them seriously and begin to forgive them. But this process of forgiveness was only possible because society as a whole was beginning to change. Feminist struggles had begun to win meaningful victories, such as the recognition of marital rape beginning in 1978. As Renton states, “In that context, women activists could afford to be more generous – because they could imagine a world after rape” (202).

Rather than an act that occurs only after the revolution, forgiveness represents an essential component of our movements. This must be the case because individual and social change are not mutually exclusive processes. As Hannah Proctor argues in Burnout, finding new and non-carceral ways of dealing with oppressive behavior in leftist movements cannot wait. Pushing individual and collective change off to a post-revolutionary future allows for the reproduction of oppressive behavior in left-wing spaces. But while Proctor insists that we confront oppressive relations in our organizing, she maintains that we must do so in a way that recognizes the contradictions internal to social movements attempting to overcome oppression and exploitation while still bound up in the social relations of capitalism.

While we should all strive to live up to the political and ethical ideals we hold, it is important to recognize that individual change is often slow, imperfect, contradictory, and non-linear. Proctor asks: “Can political movements make space for psychic ambivalence, inconsistency and contradiction rather than viewing them as antithetical to their goals?” (102). Instead of responding to any violent or oppressive behavior with ostracization or incarceration, Renton, like Proctor, allows for the possibility of redemption as part of a project of achieving justice. The refusal to forgive despite meaningful commitment to change on the part of the perpetrator results in unjust outcomes for all. Indeed, it reproduces the moralism of the carceral state, which views all acts of crime as punishable and labels those who commit crimes as deviant criminals, regardless of the historical, economic, or political circumstances which led them to those actions.

Of course, this does not mean that instances of abuse should be ignored or minimized in order to avoid fragmenting an already relatively weak Left. Renton himself has been a consistent critic of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) for their cover up of rape in the party and the role of party leadership in attempting to minimize the effects of the ensuing organizational crisis. While he does not interrogate the specifics of the SWP in detail here (Comrade Delta, Renton’s account of the events is forthcoming in September 2026), Renton shares an interaction with a party member who supported the leadership against the oppositional movement – including Renton – demanding accountability. This party member approached Renton, suggesting that the offender be removed from his role in the leadership of the party. However, he would remain a member of the party, paid by party-led campaigns.

Unsurprisingly, Renton was unconvinced that this would be a way forward, either for the victims or for the party. But what would have allowed for a process of forgiveness to occur? Renton does not specify exactly, but proposes that a statement of guilt from the perpetrator and an admission by the party for its role in the cover up, accompanied by meaningful attempts by the perpetrator to mend the harm done to the victims and by the party to ensure that similar incidents in the future would be handled in a way that prioritized the interests of the victims, would perhaps have allowed for a process of forgiveness to occur. However, without such attempts to achieve a just outcome for the victim, Renton insists that forgiveness could never occur: “When it comes to rape, just as with any other violent crime of a similar seriousness, the instinct to choose a punishment acceptable to an unrepentant perpetrator is both wrong and offensive” (11).

Renton’s notion of revolutionary forgiveness is not an easy thing to achieve. But a process of healing and forgiveness will be necessary in order to move forward with our vision for a different future. Rather than viewing the past as a static and finished entity, Proctor argues that our relationship to our history shapes how we will act in the future. Instead of using forgiveness as a way to forget the past as Arendt would have us do, revolutionary forgiveness – understood as part of a broader movement for radical social transformation – allows for the redemption of the past. By remaining committed to a vision of a different future, past actions which caused harm or trauma might be forgiven, political mistakes might be overcome, and wrongs might be righted. Through the process of revolution both the past and the future are made to be qualitatively different.

The redemption of the Left

The redemption of the past will occur, as Daniel Bensaïd argues in Marx for our Times, through the realization of the future our ancestors struggled for. But revolutionary forgiveness redeems our past in another way. As Renton points out, the history of communism is stained with the blood of the Stalinist purges in Russia, the repression, expulsion, and murder of anti-Stalinist dissidents. But instead of turning away from revolutionary politics, Renton insists on a renewed commitment to the possibility of socialism from below, which would realize the emancipatory promise contained in the Russian Revolution. Of course, there is no guarantee that we will live to see such a future and in this sense Renton’s notion of revolutionary forgiveness is, like Derrida’s and Arendt’s, a wager on the possibility of a different future. But unlike the other two, Renton links forgiveness with revolutionary change and maintains that it is only through the process of revolution that our past might be fully redeemed.

Renton follows Lukács in describing Soviet Russia under Stalin as a society based on political violence, ongoing oppression, and class domination. He argues that rather than abandoning revolutionary politics, Lukács remained committed to a view of communism that did not separate means and ends. A liberatory society, for Lukács, could never be achieved through non-liberatory means. This commitment resulted in Lukács being jailed in Moscow by the People’s Commissariat for State Security. Despite the repression of the Soviet State, Renton argues that Lukács consistently criticized Stalinism against his own material interests and safety. Renton states that “it was Lukács’s tragedy that – by living long enough to see Stalin replacing Lenin as the leader of the USSR – his jailers came from the ranks of his comrades” (69). Remaining committed to revolutionary communism resulted in Lukács’ imprisonment.

However, Renton does not comment on what Michael Löwy views as the true tragedy of Lukács: the repudiation of his own commitment to revolutionary socialism in 1926 resulting in a turn towards a “realist” politics and an acceptance of Stalinism. In an essay on “Lukács and Stalinism,” Löwy shows that Lukács began to accept the relative stability of global capitalism, causing him to modify his theoretical and political views, including agreeing with Stalin on the need for socialism in one country. According to Löwy, Stalinism from Lukács became “a ‘necessary phase’, ‘prosaic’ yet with a ‘progressive character’, in the revolutionary development of the proletariat seen as a unified whole.” While critical of some elements of Stalinist Russia, Lukács was unwilling to fully endorse the Left Opposition, unlike others within the movement. While he did not uncritically accept the Stalinist political line he nevertheless stood by its basic tenets.

While Renton presents the fact that “Lukács remained loyal to the state that had imprisoned him” as evidence of his ongoing commitment to communism, Löwy highlights the ways in which Lukács turned away from his earlier views on revolution in favor of the more “realistic” project of reconciling bourgeois culture with Soviet Communism. This shift to realism represented a break with his original commitment to revolutionary socialism. While he did not abandon communist politics entirely, he nevertheless accepted that if revolution was not imminent the best course of action was to support Stalinism.

However, as both Renton and Löwy show, Lukács returned to his revolutionary commitments in 1968, supporting the Czechoslovakian workers’ resistance to Soviet rule. As Löwy demonstrates, Lukács’ post-1968 writings show a renewal of his earlier work and devotion to revolutionary socialism from below, including support for the growing student movement and anti-imperialist struggle in Vietnam, as well as a critique of Soviet bureaucracy. In doing so, Lukács was able to redeem his own past, restoring the hope in a revolutionary future despite the many defeats of the communist movement.

Hope in forgiveness

Incorporating a fuller examination of Lukács’ political trajectory helps to situate revolutionary forgiveness as part of a project of total transformation, both individual and social. As Renton argues, an ongoing relationship with past movements like the Russian Revolution is important so as to avoid repeating the errors of our forebearers. But remaining open to a relationship with the past also reveals the ways in which our ancestors like Lukács, while not free from contradiction, committed themselves to revolutionary socialism. By renewing that commitment in the present, we might redeem the failures and defeats of the past, allowing for the full realization of the future that the Russian Revolution was not able to fulfill.

It is only by completely transforming the world that forgiveness can be finally tied to justice. Revolutionary forgiveness can only occur when the oppressed have seized control of the power necessary to ensure that their former oppressors cannot restore the unequal power relations of capitalist society. But revolution is not simply a final event, a moment in the future that we wait to come to us. It is a process of transformation. If it is to be truly revolutionary, forgiveness must occur as a part of that revolutionary process. It cannot wait until after the revolution because it is a necessary part of the social and individual changes that we enact as we struggle to transform the world. We must be able to forgive ourselves, our comrades, and our ancestors for the mistakes we have all made so that we can continue to participate in the social movements we are a part of. If we cannot forgive ourselves, our commitments to revolutionary politics might waver, causing us to accept either Stalinist realism (as Lukács did for a time) or reformist realism. And if we do not forgive ourselves, we certainly will not be able to forgive those who acted in the interests of capital. In order to move towards a different world, we need to insist on the possibility of a completely new and non-carceral future, one where all people begin to relate to each other not as boss and worker, colonizer and colonized, oppressor and oppressed, but as human beings committed to a collective project of human freedom and self-realization. Revolutionary Forgiveness represents an important contribution to that process and will be valuable to anyone committed to truly revolutionary theory and practice.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: Haymarket Books; modified by Tempest.

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On a Sunday in late March, more than four dozen United Automobile, Aerospace, and Agricultural Implement Workers (UAW) union members joined a Zoom training put on by Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD), a UAW caucus. A year prior, in 2025, UAWD went through a divisive public split between reformers closely aligned with UAW President Shawn Fain and those who sought an independent caucus with a class-struggle focus. Coming out of that period, UAWD, in its current form, has set out to concretize and develop its organizational ideas.

The March training, called “Class Struggle Unionism 101 Training,” was part of those ongoing efforts. It aimed to provide new rank-and-file organizers with basic skills “to build strong teams, develop an escalation plan, and win fights against the boss,” according to the meeting’s billing.

For anyone who’s attended an introductory labor organizing course like those hosted by Labor Notes, the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, or other left-leaning labor groups, large chunks of the presentation would be familiar. The training explained the historical role of unions in the U.S., showed the century-long downward trend of unions with a graph charting union density against broader income inequality, and spoke to the crisis faced by workers everywhere and the need for them to organize, now more than ever.

The second half of the presentation presented tried-and-true organizing strategies for the shop floor, beginning with coworker support mapping and tactical issue escalation schema. These modes of organizing are now common in any union organizing training aimed at empowering workers.

It was the first half of the UAWD presentation that one won’t find offered in the typical union organizing space today. It discussed the fundamentals of class struggle–a deliberate framing that placed workers at odds with the owners of the means of production. UAWD co-chair Nolan Tabb, a long-time member of Local 281 at John Deere in Davenport, Iowa, identified what class-struggle unionism boils down to in one word: power.

“Class-struggle unionism recognizes that, at the end of the day, it’s all about power: who has it, who doesn’t; how we build it, how we use it,” Tabb said during the Zoom training. The dynamic, he went on to explain, was a struggle between two competing classes, those that work and those that rule, with goals that work directly against each other.

“These opposing interests can’t be reconciled, and they can’t coexist. That means we have to fight,” said Tabb.

This rhetoric of boss antagonism and worker power fills speeches made by labor leaders and their supporters, all of whom are eager to capture the current moment of enthusiasm. For example, UAW President Shawn Fain has blasted “corporate greed,” “company unionism,” and pledged to fight for “the good of the entire working class.” The result is that hearing terms like “rank-and-file organizing” and “class warfare” now make it hard to pin-down a meaningful idea. This doesn’t appear accidental. The rhetoric of the labor bureaucracy and its backers gets defined on the shop floor and in meetings of the local. It’s made real in the power union members are invested with, in their day-to-day work space, in the say they have over working conditions, and in the role they have in building the union itself.

UAWD clearly sees a gap (or a chasm) between the words of union leaders and the deeds of the union as it operates in reality. Whereas generations of business-friendly unionism have reduced most labor battles to so-called “bread-and-butter issues” of wages and benefits, the focus on class-struggle unionism that UAWD advocates for harkens back to the heyday of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the early 20th century and the battles over virtually every aspect of working conditions. Not only are economic demands on the table, but the decisions about hours and shifts, safety and production output, and even what goods and services are actually produced.

The idea that owners had the “right” to run their companies however they like? Tabb called that idea “bullshit.”

Over the last year, UAWD has worked to mold itself into something that stands in contrast to much of today’s structured labor organizing efforts: avowedly militant, steeped in broad class solidarity, and focused first and foremost on workers themselves as the central figures–both to be organized and to be empowered, on the job and in the union. Those involved in these efforts are not shy about their struggles. Nor do they grandstand about outcomes; if anything, they’re hyperrealistic about the challenges ahead and the potential for failure.

UAWD has worked to mold itself into something that stands in contrast to much of today’s structured labor organizing efforts: avowedly militant, steeped in broad class solidarity, and focused first and foremost on workers themselves.

A year after the split, despite the difficulties, today’s UAWD is providing both a new and revived historical model for organizing, one that has the potential to challenge the way business is done in the C-suite and the union hall alike.

Left evolution

The split that divided UAWD in 2025 was never inevitable. But in hindsight, a number of factors made it much more likely.

Since the late 1940s, the UAW existed under the one-party rule of the Administrative Caucus, which began with Walter Reuther. It ended when federal prosecutors put away a baker’s dozen UAW leaders, including the president of the international, on corruption charges in 2020. This opened a window of opportunity that reformers, led by UAWD, quickly took advantage of in 2021 by winning a union-wide referendum to change the voting process for union leadership to a one-member-one-vote system. The success of that campaign led the fledgling UAWDto assemble and lead the campaign for a new leadership slate that saw Shawn Fain and a number of others elected as reformers.

Yet the questions of UAWD’s politics–what the caucus, only a few years old, would stand for following its successful campaigns–began to crystallize during the first major test of Fain’s leadership. In Summer 2023, Fain took the union into conflict with the “Big 3” automakers during a series of simultaneous contract negotiations–a bold first. Ultimately, the union would secure tentative agreements from all three companies. What role, then, would UAWD play, if any, to help the union’s leadership secure support for the proposed contracts?

Two competing views began to develop, although not yet with clearly defined groupings or fully-formed strategies, setting the stage for the tension within the caucus. One tendency adopted a loyalist reform stance that sought to keep itself and the caucus close to Fain and the rest of the new leadership, while prioritizing union reform. In contrast, another tendency sought to maintain UAWD as independent of leadership and, instead, beholden only to members. They would come to identify themselves almost a year later as the class-struggle wing.

Two competing views began to develop…setting the stage for the tension within the caucus. One tendency adopted a loyalist reform stance…In contrast, another tendency sought to maintain UAWD as independent of leadership.

At the end of August 2023–weeks before the Big 3 strikes began–a resolution was put forward within UAWD that called for weekly membership meetings as long as a strike continued, as well as members’ meetings to discuss and debate any tentative agreement. Ultimately, the resolution passed, but the internal debate foreshadowed the groupings that would come to define the split, with those eager to show independence strongly supporting the measure, hoping to empower rank-and-file workers to make their own call on any agreement, and those opposed more concerned about the impact on Fain and the rest of UAW leadership.

By early 2025, the year-plus of internal conflict within UAWD was reaching a crisis point. A few months earlier, at the annual UAWD convention, a slate close to the union’s leadership won a majority of the caucus’s steering committee. Fain himself made an appearance. Members of the class-struggle wing claimed the win was bolstered by paper members and support from more progressive members of the Administrative Caucus, the long-time leadership caucus UAWD worked to defeat in the 2022 election, who had come to align with Fain in the years since.

Disagreements about the future of UAWD persisted. The class-struggle wing continued organizing around its priorities and winning when it did so. This was made possible by the fact that it aligned with the vast majority of the caucus’s active members in manufacturing and other sectors. The pro-Fain reform wing would later point to debates during this period as being highly politicized and designed as “a political litmus test,” with the debate over support for Palestine, in their words, an example of high-minded union activists who had lost sight of the shop floor.

Yet the class-struggle group took on a full array of issues, including support for Palestine, that were important to workers, and won. They took on the Federal monitor over his improper interference in UAW’s internal policy decision making, calling his actions “an example of the government and the billionaire class working to undermine our union’s political independence”. They spearheaded resolutions that rescinded endorsements for two UAW leaders, Margaret Mock and Rich Boyer, over failures in office. They anchored UAWD’s Electric Vehicle committee, which raised awareness about mass layoffs. They argued against Fain’s support of Trump’s tariffs in trainings, voted down a resolution to disenfranchise non-manufacturing workers, and launched a campaign to organize for a bottom-up general strike in 2028.

On March 26, 2025, a majority of the UAWD steering committee, all Fain-backing reformers, released a statement. Members of the caucus could “no longer work together toward common goals,” they said. While they believed in the need for a caucus like UAWD, the current group had become “one that is constantly engaged in insular debate that distracts from the work of building the union.” The class-struggle wing issued a rebuttal to the claims of the steering committee majority and reaffirmed the principles of class-struggle unionism.

At the UAWD membership meeting the following month, the steering committee majority pushed through its resolution to dissolve the caucus. Members of the class-struggle wing later found at least seven caucus members, including Ben Rosenfield—a member of the Association of Legal Advocates and Attorneys, UAW Local 2325—who appeared blocked from access to the Zoom meeting where the vote took place. Rosenfeld later asked: “How can such a vote be seen as legitimate?” The activists also detailed a long list of issues and procedural violations by the leadership of UAWD during the meeting, including allowing a majority vote to pass the dissolution proposal, despite bylaws calling for a supermajority. Ultimately, thanks to undemocratic tactics like those faced by Rosenfield, the class-struggle wing believes that a swing of more than two-dozen votes went towards dissolution, which was more than the 23-vote margin by which it passed at the meeting.

Ultimately, thanks to undemocratic tactics… the class-struggle wing believes that a swing of more than two-dozen votes went towards dissolution [of UAWD].

“In all aspects, in all angles, it was a coup; that’s what it was,” said Tabb.

Regroup, refocus

Today, UAWD is the project of the class-struggle unionism faction and the majority of UAWD’s pre-split active membership, while those committed to continuing the reformist tack that is aligned with UAW leadership split off to create a new organization called UAW Member Action. The postdiluvian afterlife of each caucus provides a window into what separates both the theory and the practice of class-struggle unionism from mainstream union organizing found in most labor spaces today.

On UAW Member Action’s website, the caucus states it is a “union-wide network of members supporting each other to stand up to employers, grow as activists and organizers, and carry on the transformation of our union at every level.” Its bylaws have a heavy focus on the collective bargaining process and the role of contracts between workers and management. Under its “Resources” section these priorities– “UAW Contracts,” “Contract Negotiations,” “Grievance Handling”–are alongside support for the union’s bureaucratic structure: “Stewards Network,” which looks to connect officials to “troubleshoot handling grievances, building member involvement, and enforcing our contracts;” and “Running for Union Office,” a how-to if one is considering a position.

The contrast between the public presentations by UAWD and Member Action points directly to the gulf between the now-separate aims and agendas. UAWD member Nevena Pilipović-Wengler, out of Local 22 in Detroit, sees the two groups as coming out of “fundamentally different starting points.” She noted that the word “class,” working or otherwise, appears nowhere in Member Action’s bylaws or on its website.

“We have two very different projects. They think having elected positions locked down is what will lead to victories for the working class. We believe that it actually starts on the shop floor and through the politics of challenging capital, like fighting layoffs and overloaded jobs, and ending forced overtime,” Pilipović-Wengler said. “I think Members Action is thinking about reform within the constraints of labor law and within the constraints of capital. I don’t think they’re interested in increasing worker control of not just the shop floor, but in the larger production process.”

Multiple requests to speak to someone from Members Action for this piece received no acknowledgement or response.

A class-struggle focus, UAWD argues, rests on the belief that workers themselves–not management, not union leadership–are where all organizing should begin and end. Critically, the focus is not simply on the four corners of a contract, or on the most efficient ways to handle the grievance process, or even on wages and benefits.

Class-struggle unionism begins with a different analysis entirely, one familiar to many of the Left. Yet the focus on “class-struggle” versus an overt socialist framing is intentional. While the “big picture” class-struggle discussion reads like a typical Marxist analysis of the extractive labor-value relationship between workers and capitalists, the class-struggle focus brings the larger picture framing down to the quotidian concerns most workers face. This is praxis for those not necessarily soaked in or sold on socialism, but who comprehend the curse capitalism sets upon us.

UAWD sees its work within the widening gap between the real-world experience of workers under capitalism and the unsatisfactory solutions offered by the reformist labor organizing efforts of UAW Member Action and others.

The theory rests on five core values presented in the UAWD Member Platform. The first is worker control. It is workers, not managers or owners (nor union bureaucrats) who should be in control–from the shop floor on up to how production and the supply chain are managed. But that first step is critical in this formulation; it’s not expressed in grandiose statements as much as through the slow, difficult, uncertain process UAWD is in now, of trying to develop UAWD chapters within locals across sectors.

“If the workers were to step outside with the bosses, the workers would win that fight,” Josh Trombley, a UAW Temp Organizer based in Region 9A, said during the UAWD presentation. “You and your coworkers are the drivers of change. Our power comes from working together with our coworkers. Our power doesn’t come from our bosses, the government, from union staff, or even elected union leaders…you must be the ones to actually take action.”

The next is militancy. Union leaders, in particular, are fond of tough talk about the power of unionized workers, but the reality is that militancy has become a dirty word in business unions. Class-struggle unionism seeks to return the willingness to be overtly confrontational to the core of worker organizing. Wildcat strikes, sitdowns, slowdowns–these and more need to be on the table for workers, even as UAWD acknowledges most workers aren’t yet ready to take militant action.

The third is working class solidarity, one that extends beyond a local or a sector, that stretches beyond borders and industries. Democracy is the fourth value, placing decision-making in the hands of workers, not as an ideal but as “a strategic form of organizational power building,” according to the UAWD website. Lastly, independence–from not only union leadership, but more broadly in mainstream politics as a key towards charting a different and better course.

UAWD organizers are okay if this means not everyone is on board. UAWD co-chair Andrew Bergman, based out of General Motors Local 22 in Detroit, explained this understanding as one of concentric circles. Too small a circle, like the one a socialist-explicit formulation might create, would likely be focused on distant, abstracted political goals, failing to attract enough people or to meaningfully advance shop-floor activity or class-struggle politics, especially given UAWD’s goal of building organized branches within UAW locals across sectors.

Too big and broad a focus, which Bergman likened to the way UAWD operated prior to the split, would have the opposite issue: it could attract a broader group of people, of both viewpoints and numbers, but it would struggle to articulate a core motivation for action that would translate to local organizing.

“After the split, we realized that it wasn’t just our internal structure that allowed UAWD to be captured by the leaders we elected, it was our unclear political goals: a vague, apolitical notion of democracy and reform,” said Bergman. “In that way, having a smaller group of only a couple hundred more committed cadre was almost a good problem to have, because it meant we needed to be long-sighted and not imagine we already had the ideas, formations, or members necessary to race to the finish line.”

In that Goldilocks space is class-struggle unionism.

If there’s a specific dividing line between the class-struggle approach and what most labor organizing efforts look like these days, it’s in the relationship between workers and the union itself. This broad generalization has ample caveats. But it means that, whereas most organizing is focused on the structures of the union itself–the need for ratification through the approved legal process, the focus on their bureaucratic structure, the solutions to workers’ problems through contractual negotiations alone–are taken as givens, necessities, rather than choices made.

If there’s a specific dividing line between the class-struggle approach and what most labor organizing efforts look like these days, it’s in the relationship between workers and the union itself.

Tapping a more radical tradition, class-struggle unionism necessarily rejects this framing. But it also goes further, making the union itself a space of contest and struggle, where organized workers must also fight to make their goals real in the face of an entrenched bureaucracy that is more interested in labor peace than worker control. These battles come at every level, from the struggles on the shop floor created by both management and union officials, to the loftier goals of a union that fights against state violence or for control over the means of production–something that seems today wildly out of reach, but which locals within UAW itself fought for at times in the early 20th century.

As Judith Stepan-Norris and Maurice Zeitlin note in “Left Out: Reds and America’s Industrial Unions,” in the 1930s and 40s radical organizers in UAW Local 600 at the Ford River Rouge plant–the largest industrial manufacturing complex the world had ever seen–were unwilling to cede conditions on the shop floor, and beyond, to control from above: “For working-class radicals or socialists, ‘management rights’ [‘to decide not only what they produce but how they produce it’] are neither ‘inherent’ nor legitimate; on the contrary, such alleged rights constitute, in their view, a quasilegal form of illegitimate class power.”

For UAW organizers of the day, Stephan-Norris and Zeitline write, this “struggle over the frontier of control in American industry” opened up the possibility of a formalized relationship between labor and management that put workers in control of greater parts of their work life and, intentionally, raised the specter of the ability to gain control of a bigger swath of the broader social system as a whole. Quoting a management expert who interviewed radical workers at the time, those interviewed indicated that, “[i]n both spheres [state and industry] they see the necessity of controlling authority in the interests of those who take the orders.”

This, then, is the shared spirit class-struggle unionism seeks, at least in theory, to embrace. In today’s labor dynamic, this means a battle not only with the ownership class, but with business unionism that long ago yielded to the interests of capital.

Comparing notes

UAWD is not alone among militant efforts within major trade unions. However, there is a contrast of styles in these efforts, with different priorities and tactics allowing for a useful comparison of strategies that ultimately have similar, if not mirror, end goals.

Shortly before Shawn Fain led UAW through its contract process with the Big 3 automakers in 2024, labor supporters were focused on another major contract battle. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, led by the pugnacious Sean O’Brien, was poised for negotiations with UPS.

UPS is the single-largest employer of Teamsters in the country. The approximately 300,000 Teamsters working at the company account for roughly a third of all the union’s members in the U.S. The looming contract fight presented a rare and unique opportunity to see a major union fight to undo years of givebacks and clawbacks from one of the most recognizable companies in the world.

For part-timers, who make up more than 60 percent of the unionized workforce at UPS, this was also a moment of much-needed action. Conditions for part-time workers were far worse than those of full-time UPS employees, and many part-timers saw O’Brien’s bombast ahead of threatened strikes as an encouraging sign that he would fight for them.

The strike never came. The tentative contract agreement, hammered out between UPS and union leadership behind closed doors, failed to live up to expectations for many, including part-time workers. Ahead of the ratification vote, a group of these workers formed a new caucus, Teamsters Mobilized, to urge their coworkers not to accept O’Brien’s deal. They, too, faced a split with a reform faction within the Teamsters that had become closely tied to the union leadership: Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) had helped propel O’Brien to victory and were unresponsive to concerns about the plight of part-time workers in the bargaining process, leading some of them to form Teamsters Mobilize.

The contract ultimately passed, but Teamsters Mobilize continued to grow as a force of its own. Today, it has expanded beyond its core of part-timers to include a broader base of Teamsters across sectors. As the caucus has developed and grown, the group has retained a militant formation with an activist focus. This has meant pushing the Teamsters on issues around Palestinian solidarity and anti-ICE efforts. It has also meant taking aim at the Teamster leadership, especially O’Brien, whose active flirting with Trump and bizarre rightward shift provide ample fodder.

Jess Lister has been with Teamsters Mobilize since the beginning. A part-time UPS worker in Georgia, Lister sees the organization’s focus as addressing a set of needs for a broad set of people.

“We all had these big ideas, even back then, about what Teamsters Mobilize could possibly lead to. We wanted it to be Teamsters, all industries, both part-time and full-time,” she said. “I think we would all agree that we’re thrilled with the growth.”

Teamsters Mobilize operates at a high elevation. Group chats, with participants from across the country, provide central spaces for dialogue, information sharing, and planning. Political discussions, even arguments, get hashed out largely online. There are no Teamsters Mobilized local chapters to speak of; the closest formation is the unofficial SoCal Teamsters Mobilize grouping in California. While only Teamsters can be members, like-minded members of other unions or even non-union individuals have opportunities to be involved in the work. The group is currently going through a process of determining a membership-dues schedule.

“So many of these people thought we were a flash in the pan,” Lister said. “The fact is that not only are we still around; we’re actually doing a lot.”

Lister said that some discussion has occurred about developing more location-specific structures, likely by region. The focus currently is on utilizing online and social media channels as Teamsters Mobilize’s primary arena of agitation. This is conducted overwhelmingly on Instagram (the group is also active on Facebook). Their nearly 2,400 Instagram followers have seen a growth of content that features Teamsters Mobilize members at events, speaking directly to the camera about issues, and critiquing the regressive moves of the O’Brien administration, all in unvarnished left language.

For Lister, this is a strategy of growth grounded in principles that can help rebuild a militant labor movement.

“Anybody that wants to expose something, or bring awareness to something–or even a win, like, ‘I’ve accomplished this in my union, this is how I did it’–we want to put out more material educating people and bringing awareness to different things,” she said.

Chantelle Schultz has a particularly unique vantage point. She was an early member of Teamsters Mobilize as a part-time UPS worker in New Jersey. The Maoist Communist Union member is now with UAW Local 2179 in the Strand book shop’s warehouse, while continuing to work with Teamster Mobilize as a supporter.

Schultz is a firm believer in how Teamster Mobilize is looking to advance its purpose–and sees those efforts as something UAWD should likewise embrace.

“TM has had a particular emphasis on putting out media–instagram posts, blog posts, articles–to reach Teamsters members to talk about what the issues are that we face as workers, to talk about the issues of class collaboration in our unions, how the union leadership collaborates with the capitalist class and tries to get us to believe the lie that as workers we can have class harmony and shared interests with the capitalists and so on,” Schultz said, adding that there was a specific focus on addressing “working class position on all these issues that we see in society, economic and political” that include the war in Iran, the genocide in Gaza, and U.S. imperialism.

Schultz has been a member of UAW for a short period–since the autumn of 2025–and involved with UAWD for only a few months, but sees a qualifiable divide in the two organizational focuses. She sees that “there is an idea in UAWD that we should only focus on shop-floor organizing right now, and that we shouldn’t try to do national-scale organizing, or national-level campaigns, or spend much time on exposing what’s going on at [upcoming international union elections].”

“I think this is a mistake,” she said.

The “larger issue” of UAW’s overall business unionism orientation is tied directly to the issues on the shop floor: “We’re only going to be able to get so far in terms of organizing on the shop level if it’s not connected up on the national scale…In order to really fight for some principles about waging the class struggle, we need to not only think about our struggle as UAW members being on a national scale, but really as the class as being on the national scale.”

The solution? Be more like Teamster Mobilize: see social media as a vital arena for member outreach and propaganda, focus on broader sets of political and economic issues, and pick a fight with UAW’s leadership.

“There’s a difference in how much TM and UAWD have respectively criticized the international leadership of the two unions,” Schultz said. “Teamsters Mobilize…has put out very consistent, scathing criticism of O’Brien and the union leadership. TM sees this as absolutely necessary to expose him for what he is and to develop the necessary consciousness amongst Teamsters members to wage a militant fight. I think UAWD should have been putting out consistent criticism of Fain and other UAW leadership.”

This tactical focus is a familiar one to anyone who engages on social media with issues on the Left. Groups aplenty have developed outsized online presences that see combat by online posting as not only a legitimate way of advocating for their issues, but as the most effective. Outrage and frustration are easy to both find and stoke online, and this tactic seeks to connect with those most impacted by the messaging and the targets, in the hopes of persuading them to join in the fight.

It would be foolhardy and counterproductive for any group, be they an activist organization or a militant union caucus, to ignore the very real power social media plays these days in the lives of everyone, and most notably among younger generations. The question is not do or do not, but rather what are the political aims? Who are you trying to organize? What are the outcomes you’re looking to realize along these tactical lines?

Every set of choices has pros and cons. Here, the answer to the above points to two different projects. Teamsters Mobilized is a highly dispersed organization, one that was described as a reform-focused group by Jess Lister. Their aims are upwards; the fight focuses mainly on top union bosses and their allies, the capitalist ownership class, and the political actors who support them. The demands on these power structures hope to find resonance with individuals online, both Teamsters and others, who seek to join the fight.

This is a well-worn tactical array. Most issue-based nonprofits, and more than a few left groups, utilize a similar playbook of online-first advocacy around big-picture issues. The challenge (or problem, depending on one’s point of view) is that there isn’t a track record for success. Targeting individuals like union bosses doesn’t mean the next person is going to be any better. Building a network of individuals spread out all over the country means that very little collective action on physical ground is possible.

And while online advocacy is an indispensable part of any contemporary political fight, success in the digital realm is not a stand-in for success in the real world. Teamsters Mobilize has an Instagram account with 2,500 followers as of this writing. Some of their videos have gotten more than 400 likes at times, but many others received less than 200. In a world where interactions in the thousands are a baseline for meaningfulness, this strategy has a significant threshold yet to be met.

While online advocacy is an indispensable part of any contemporary political fight, success in the digital realm is not a stand-in for success in the real world.

As it pertains to UAWD, these issues, as realistic as they are, are almost insignificant. They aren’t targeting the same priorities. Rather than making the powered elite the specific target, the class-struggle perspective goes in the opposite direction, placing the organizational priority on organizing, developing, and growing shop-floor worker power. While both objectives are the overthrow of the extractive capitalist order, the focus on workers has the longer, more uncertain prioritization of a working-class movement built out of the shop floors, offices, and institutions that workers toil in every day.

The difficulties down this path are not lost on UAWD organizers.

“Our coworkers often see the bureaucracy as ineffective in providing an expected service, but don’t yet see our union as capable of waging or winning militant fights, even though they’re often ready to fight the bosses themselves,” UAWD’s Bergman said. “The challenge is to build up rank-and-file political and organizational capacity for collective struggle, which we’re working to anchor through local chapters and class struggle propaganda. We believe that when our coworkers are engaged in struggle and see their elected leaders collude with management to undermine them, then our critiques of the bureaucracy will resonate much more broadly.”

The future is uncertainty

As of early June 2026, UAWD has approximately 200 dues-paying members. There are currently three chapters organized with union locals across the country, with a number of additional ones in the pipeline. To better serve its educational and propaganda purposes, it launched a new publication, Daily Struggle, last October, because, as an editorial note in the first issue stated, the “lack of any serious response by organized labor to the attacks on our unions, our rights, and the very principles of democracy and equality since the start of Donald Trump’s second term points to the need for a renewal of independent working-class militancy.“ Recent articles include a look at commitments by UAW Local 2325, the legal services workers in New York City, to authorize a strike to resist ICE, and a critique of the grievance process and how it can be used in more militant ways. UAWD recently published its second issue.

Labor organizers, staff, activists, and press will gather in mid-June for the annual Labor Notes conference in Chicago. During the registration process, Labor Notes informed Teamsters Mobilize steering committee member Colleen Donovan that they were refunding her registration, in effect banning her from the conference. TM has spent weeks highlighting the decision, conducting an online campaign on social media over Donovan’s ban, and has plans to host actions during Labor Notes. UAWD has minimal plans for Labor notes, with those members attending focusing on connecting with rank-and-file UAW members present and sharing copies of Daily Struggle.

For UAWD, a larger organizational get-together looms. UAW is holding its annual constitutional convention in Detroit immediately after Labor Notes this June. The caucus has released its “Class Struggle ConCon Program” ahead of the event. Two priority amendments have been put forward. The first calls for the union to actively fight layoffs–the Big 3 are estimated to have cut more than 20,000 jobs so far in 2026–by demanding work sharing across individual bargaining units. The second would call for the abolition of ICE and other attacks by the state on workers.

UAWD organizers know they are far from having the internal strength to push a union as big as UAW to not only left political priorities like standing up to ICE but to even to take a more aggressive stance towards work losses. Winning amendment fights isn’t the goal right now; being able to argue for these kinds of ideas and actions among the wider union membership is a win of its own kind.

“We put [the amendments] forward knowing they weren’t something we could win, but we wanted to show people what workers could demand if we wanted to,” said Margie Thornton, the recording secretary for UAWD and a member of the legal services UAW Local 2320 in Colorado.

The hope is that the path forward of leading by example within the larger union context, developing a working class propaganda arm to speak directly to workers on the shop floor about shop floor issues, and continuing to develop local UAWD chapters inside UAW locals is the right one.

Navruz Baum works in legal services as a paralegal and is a member of UAW Local 2325 in New York City. He is a veteran of the split last year and, since then, has been actively developing a UAWD chapter with his coworkers in Local 2325.

For him and other UAWD organizers, this will remain the priority.

“Our chapters are very, very young. I think we chartered our first chapter, like, two months ago. We’re still very much implementing and growing this strategy,” he said.

Despite these still early and modest beginnings, Baum feels that UAWD has “an outsized presence” within the larger UAW universe–through their policy activism, Daily Struggle, and influential members on shop floors. Even so, there is little appetite to leverage what resources there are to pick fights with the powers that be in the union.

“The focus is very much on growing a base for class-struggle unionism. We’re going to do what we can with these moments, and we’re bringing our program to the [UAW constitutional convention], but the forces that are against, the more conservative unionism, they’re much stronger than us in the UAW. They have firm control of the bureaucracy, of the [union’s leadership]; there’s a lot stacked against us. We’re not under any illusions about that,” Baum said.

This goal–the hope–is that this slow-boil process will spread, creating ever-more pockets within locals committed to the vision of class-struggle unionism, until a critical mass can take the fight to the next level–and beyond.

“We really see these moments as a means, not the end. Winning a battle over an amendment, or even winning control of the UAW–these aren’t the big goals,” Baum said. “At the end of the day, the big goal, the big strategy, is to win the working class over to class struggle.”

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: Unite All Workers for Democracy; modified by Tempest.

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In the fall of 1978, the National Front (NF), a growing neo-Nazi organization in Britain, was prepared to stand 318 candidates for Parliament. In local London elections, it had received 119,000 votes out of 2.2 million in May. The NF had gained a reputation of challenging immigrants and minorities in street battles and organizing mass marches through minority neighborhoods. There was a very real danger that the NF was on the verge of legitimacy.

Not since Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists clashed with  over 100,000 counterdemonstrators in the 1930s in what became known as “The Battle of Cable Street,” had Britain been threatened by such an aggressive ultra-right organization. With street confrontations growing and electoral challenges growing increasingly threatening, the need to unite an opposition was paramount. To answer that need, the Anti Nazi League (ANL), in alliance with movement organizations, trade unions, neighborhood coalitions, churches, and thousands of individuals, was formed to challenge the NF. Geoff Brown’s timely book, A People’s History of the Anti Nazi League,  offers a wealth of first-hand accounts from those who came together to stop the NF before it achieved a foothold within the power structure of Britain.

A decade before the NF rose to prominence, Enoch Powell, a Conservative member of Parliament, delivered an alarming speech about the dangers of immigration, which he saw as a madness leading to “the white population…made strangers in their own country.” In what became known as the “rivers of blood speech,” Powell incited a subsequent period of racial violence and reactionary mobilizations, including strikes. Powell’s legacy is often the starting point for today’s racists, such as Tommy Robinson. Robinson recently led a massive anti-immigrant march in London that echoed many far-right themes of the past.

U.S. history is littered with racist marches and antisemitic attacks by Nazis and co-racists like the Ku Klux Klan. Spurred by Trump’s anti-immigrant policies, we are again facing reactionary mobilizations. In 2017, Nazis appeared in Charlottesville, North Carolina, in their largest numbers since World War II. Nazis, together with the KKK, neo-Confederates, and Far-Right militias gathered in an action billed as “Unite the Right” to “protect a Confederate statue.” They paraded with torches, shouted antisemitic slogans, and gave the Nazi salute. A woman was killed when a Nazi drove his car into the counter-protesters.

As the World War II generation disappears and the history of that period becomes less compelling, Nazis are showing signs of growth in several countries. Unbound by the history of their Nazi heroes, they are more confident in demonstrating their hatred. A recent Trump nominee for U.S. attorney was forced to withdraw his nomination when boastful Nazi praises were found in his text messages. Perhaps more alarming was the revelation of a recent group chat of young Republicans that was filled with racist, sexist, and anti-gay rhetoric, and included one participant championing his hero, Hitler. These “leaks” indicate a less circumspect extreme Right willing to embrace Nazism with all that it implies, including Holocaust denial. According to yearly reports from both the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League, there has been a 60 percent growth in active neo-Nazi clubs since 2023, from 49 to 78 clubs. The number of violent attacks initiated by these clubs in that period has also grown. Some of their members are believed to have taken jobs in ICE and Border Patrol. These signs of far-right growth cannot be ignored. As Brown’s work makes clear, building a militant and wide-ranging resistance to Nazis and other racist formations is essential if they are to be stopped.

In August 1977, 500 members of the NF attempted to march through Lewisham, a mostly Black district of London, guarded by 4,000 police officers. They were met by a counter-demonstration of nearly 5,000, representing a coalition of 23 organizations, including unions, neighborhood groups, and Left parties, such as Brown’s own Socialist Workers Party (SWP).

Before the ANL, the Anti-Racist, Anti-Fascist Coordinating Committee struggled to build an anti-racist coalition.  Representatives of the coalition held many debates. Some wanted to remove “fascism” from the targeted racists and organize an event away from where the Nazis were to march:

Believing that there was no possibility of persuading people to confront the Nazis, the Communist Party proposed some kind of music event on the other side of the borough: music, poetry, cultural events, and prayers. At this a vicar leapt to his feet to say, ‘Oh for goodness sakes, what’s the point of that?’

In the end, the coalition endorsed confronting the NF, and while the numbers were different (5,000 vs. 100,000 in 1936), the participants had no doubt that they had succeeded in halting the NF’s ability to march through the district.

While Lewisham was a success, it was not the end of the NF. Intending to stand 300-plus candidates in the next general election, the NF upped its vicious attacks on minorities and boasted that they could not be stopped. Something more was needed, a broad-based national organization that could provide leadership in standing up to the NF. However, it would not be easy to put together such an organization. Even in the wake of the Lewisham success, the Left was still divided on how to stop the Nazis. Nevertheless, the SWP which  had gained credibility in helping to organize the confrontation in Lewisham, believed that nothing less than a nationwide united front of organizations and individuals committed to exposing and stopping the growing NF threat was paramount. Brown summarizes, “The new initiative had to include both identifying the fascists as Nazis—that they came from the same tradition that led to the Holocaust—and mobilizing the largest possible number in opposition to the fascists in whatever ways was necessary.”

Jim Nichol, the SWP national secretary,branded the proposed national formation with the name “the Anti Nazi League.” Nichol was tasked with “selling” the new organization to a broad number of prominent individuals and organizations, from religious groups to the Far Left. The main goal was to stop the NF. Church officials, leaders of minority communities, a prominent journalist, Mary Holland, of the Observer, as well as “a hardline” CP member and solicitor for the ANC, Michael Seifert, were all asked to take part. Nichol was able to convince them to come on board and helped establish a legitimacy for the proposed ANL. The battle of Lewisham had propelled anti-fascism to the front pages.

After many one-on-one discussions with key activists and organizational heads, it was time to launch the ANL. As its founding document made clear:

For the first time since Mosly in the thirties, there is the worrying prospect of a Nazi party gaining significant support in Britain…Like Hitler with the Jews the British Nazis seek to make scapegoats of black people. …If their evil propaganda takes root we will be facing an alarming development in Britain, which affects every one of us. …In every town, in every factory, in every school, on every housing estate, whenever the Nazis attempt to organise, they must be countered.

The ANL’s program was an all-out campaign, including distributing millions of leaflets to mass gatherings to stop NF marches. From pulpits to street corners, from factory floors to union halls, from schools to housing estates, ANL activists took the fight to as broad a constituency as possible. This was to be a “united front” of all organizations and individuals who saw the danger posed by the NF. Inspired by Trotsky’s writings on how to stop the Nazis in the thirties, the comrades in the SWP saw the need to expand beyond the labor movement and include all who had an interest in stopping the rise of Nazism. The unifying slogan and sole agreement to join the ANL was, “They shall not pass.”

…the comrades in the SWP saw the need to expand beyond the labor movement and include all who had an interest in stopping the rise of Nazism. The unifying slogan and sole agreement to join the ANL was, “They shall not pass.”

During the existence of the ANL there were many confrontations with the NF as they attempted to march, harass, and intimidate their opposition. Brown’s history of this period is shaped by input from those who participated in building the ANL as well as allied organizations. For example, the year before the emergence of the ANL, a group of musicians had coalesced to oppose racist attacks after headline musicians Eric Clapton and David Bowie had attacked immigrants. Clapton had demanded at one of his concerts for all the immigrants in the audience to leave. “I don’t want you here in the room or in my country.” The same month, David Bowie told Playboy magazine that “Britain could benefit from a fascist leader…Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars…You’ve got to have an extreme right front come up and sweep everything off its feet and tidy everything up.”

In response to Clapton’s and Bowie’s racist attacks, Red Saunders, a theater promoter, drafted a letter which he circulated to the entertainment press calling for a strong response to the racism of these entertainers and asking for all who agreed to sign in favor of a rank-and-file organized one-off concert, Rock Against Racism (RAR). So successful was the response that RAR became a leading anti-racist organization, producing numerous concerts and providing the inspiration for the ANL. Together Rock Against Racism and the ANL organized two national carnivals, attended by tens of thousands of young people of all racial backgrounds. Brown notes, “RAR and the ANL became inseparably intertwined.”

Key to building the ANL were the many small meetings and one-on-one conversations stressing the danger posed by the NF. Underlining that the NF and Nazism were one and the same helped to negatively brand NF candidates. From the RAR concerts and the many small meetings, a network of anti-fascists emerged ready to stand up to the NF when it appeared in the streets. As a result, these confrontations attracted more participants. Brown’s book is an excellent resource for understanding the dynamics of a mass movement built around one commitment: “They shall not pass.”

While the SWP as an initiating organization was often accused of using the ANL for its own purposes, it was the Labour Party that grew substantially during this period, even moreso than the SWP. In fact, as noted by one Labour Member of Parliament, “The ANL steering committee meeting in the House of Commons had twice as many Labour MPs on it as SWP members.” What’s important to understand is that the ANL was a broad, single focus united front organization that exposed and stood up to the NF before it could gain a solid foothold in British society. Which organization grew out of its participation was secondary to this historic undertaking.

The SWP’s initiative helped introduce a new generation to the dangers of Nazism. The effort helped shift politics to the left, which benefited the Labour Party in subsequent elections. The NF was pushed to the margins. Nevertheless, the conditions which gave the NF a platform continued to be fueled by the policies of both Labour and Conservatives and have produced another current period of racist activity and organizations targeting the least powerful on an international scale. This makes A People’s History of the Anti Nazi League a timely resource for those organizing to stop neo-Nazism.

As Brown concludes, “The crisis of the liberal centre is once again opening the door to the far right and fascists. …Yet not all is lost—far from it if we act decisively.” Toward that goal, his book offers a wealth of lessons—both positive and negative—to help guide a new anti-Nazi movement.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”

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David Camfield: If you’re serious about socialist politics, you recognize that socialists need to work together. For a socialist not to be a member, or at least a supporter, of any socialist political organization is a sign that either they’re living somewhere where there’s no group that’s worth joining—which is sadly true in too many places today—or that they’re not serious about being politically active.

But does the need for socialists to be organized to be as effective as possible mean that socialist groups today should consider themselves to be parties or the beginnings of parties? How can we best work towards socialist political organizations that genuinely deserve to be called parties? These are the questions that this episode’s guest Charlie Post and I are going to discuss.

So Charlie, would you introduce yourself and tell listeners about your political background, particularly with respect to these issues?

Charlie Post: Okay. I’ve been living in New York for about 40 years now. I’m originally from New York, and being that I’m a bit older than you, I’m actually part of the tail end of what was sometimes called the “Generation of 1968.”

I radicalized as a young teenager around Vietnam and the Black struggle in the U.S. and became a Marxist in the wake of the postal wildcat strike of 1970, where, for the first time, I saw the capacity of industrial workers to exercise much more social power than students and others. And I saw the effects of collective struggle on working-class consciousness.

That was around the time I was 16, and I started looking for a Marxist group to join. Shortly after I turned 17, I ended up in the youth group of what was then the largest Trotskyist organization in the United States, the U.S. Socialist Workers Party, which had very different politics than the British Socialist Workers Party, which most people are familiar with.

I was involved in a series of debates and was expelled in 1974. Afterwards, I was involved in various attempts to create groups and ended up coming around, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a group of comrades who were both coming out of my political tradition—which was the European-based Fourth International and the U.S. International Socialists—called Workers’ Power.

Then from there, Workers’ Power became involved in a regroupment of three small socialist groups in 1986 that formed Solidarity, of which I was a member until 2015. There was a period of time when I didn’t feel I could actually join a group and be a committed member, but I became one of the founding members of the Tempest Collective, of which we’re both members.

The attempts by various Trotskyist groups that were committed in one way or another to the politics of revolutionary socialism from below to transform small groups of former students into either the core of a revolutionary party or a revolutionary party with real influence among working people were failures.

But every other current on the Left was also unable to make that transition, including the much larger and more influential currents influenced by Maoism and Marxism-Leninism. Part of the foundation of Solidarity was a recognition that this model of building socialist groups was a dead end.

And over time, through discussions within Solidarity and our experimentations and practice, another comrade and I wrote a pamphlet for the organization called “Socialist Organization Today.”. In the pamphlet, we try to explain why the various attempts of small groups to transform themselves into the core of or an actual revolutionary party failed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and why a different model of revolutionary socialist organization was necessary.

While I left Solidarity for very specific political reasons that had more to do with its political perspective than it did with its organizational perspective, I felt comfortable being part of the group of comrades who formed Tempest. Many of them came out of the International Socialist Organization (ISO) in the United States, and they, too, recognized the limits and failure of what they labeled the microsect model

So, my thinking on this question of socialist parties has been shaped by a little over five decades of political activity and an attempt to understand why—despite the best efforts of very committed, very honest revolutionaries in the late 1960s and early 1970s—the effort of socialist formations to actually become significant organizations that were able to influence the course of working-class struggles failed so miserably. This is why we must ask what revolutionary socialists need to do today to prepare for that eventuality, without pretending to be it in miniature.

DC: Thanks for that. We’ll pick up on some of these things you’ve talked about as we go. I should mention that, for my part, the first socialist group I was in was the International Socialists, which I joined in 1988 and left early in 1996, along with a minority of other IS members who, with some other socialists, then formed the New Socialist Group, which formally dissolved in 2017.

In the early 1990s, the IS had become more aggressively self-promoting, declaring that it was beginning to build a revolutionary party. And this was a shift that was happening across the international network headed by the Socialist Workers Party in Britain, a network called the IS Tendency. The Canadian IS was its affiliate.

That shift led to changes in the group that a couple of years later led to the split that I was part of. The New Socialist Group, which I was in, rejected the idea that tiny socialist groups should try to organize “as if” they were socialist parties, but only smaller— the micro-party or micro-sect model. Some people also call that vanguardism.

So, to start, there’s some debate among socialists about whether socialist parties are even needed for the transformation of society. There’s more debate, though, about what kind of party would be needed. Then, there’s even more debate about how to work towards the creation of such parties.

Before we talk about those things, though, we need to clarify what exactly we mean by a revolutionary socialist party, since I think there are a lot of misunderstandings about that. What’s your take on that?

CP: A revolutionary socialist party is an organization that actually organizes a substantial portion of the most militant and radical working-class people in a given society and an organization that has the ability to influence the course of social and class struggles. I believe such a party is necessary. I believe organization is necessary because I believe that working-class consciousness always develops episodically and unevenly. And this comes from the basic tenet of socialism from below: It’s through the self activity of working people coming together—striking in a workplace, confronting a landlord, opposing an imperialist war, confronting the state and capital—that these people develop radical consciousness, a notion that their interests are fundamentally different and opposed to those of capital and the state, and that there is a need for a fundamentally different type of society now.

Working people in their vast majority cannot be always engaged in struggle, particularly strike activity, because as Marx tells us, we’re separated from the means of production and we need to sell our labor power and go to work for capitalists and be exploited in order to survive. This means that working people enter struggle episodically and that consciousness develops unevenly.

Without organizing those who’ve come to similar conclusions, these lessons and ideas dissipate. So, I believe that a revolutionary socialist party is necessary, but it has to be a party that actually has real roots in a large layer of the working class that is actually radicalized. And it’s because that layer doesn’t exist, for very specific historical reasons, that I believe that many of the previous attempts to turn small groups into revolutionary parties have failed.

DC: So let’s dig into the history of socialist party-building and go back to its beginning in the late 1800s. Do you want to start taking us through some of that history?

CP: You begin to see the emergence of independent working-class and socialist groupings as early as the 1860s and 1870s. Many of these get grouped together in what was called the International Workingman’s Association, or the Socialist and Labor or First International. Many of these parties and organizations were relatively small, a few thousand members, but they had real roots among the more militant, the more radical layers of workers.

Most of them did not survive the economic downturn of the late 1870s-early 1880s. Now, in the period of the 1880s and 1890s, there was a long period of relative capitalist stagnation—low profits, continuous recessions, etc. In this period there was also wave after wave of working class struggles.

Most of them were defensive in relation to wages, working conditions, and the like. These struggles happened in a number of countries, particularly in capitalist Europe, with Germany being the most important. But we also see them, to some extent, in France, Italy, and the United States, where we see the emergence of small mass parties, with 20,000 to 50,000 members, and some ability to actually contest elections and elect working-class representatives to various legislative or parliamentary bodies.

A revolutionary socialist party is an organization that actually organizes a substantial portion of the most militant and radical working-class people in a given society and an organization that has the ability to influence the course of social and class struggles.

These small mass parties, outside the U.S., were based on relatively small minority or non-majority unions, most of them organized along industrial lines, but generally whose members were radicalized skilled workers, machinists, etc. In other countries—France, Spain, Portugal, and other parts of the world—we also see the emergence of mass trade unions that present themselves as revolutionary. You see the growth of what’s sometimes called revolutionary syndicalism.

Capitalism entered a period of growth and high profitability between the mid 1890s and the First World War. In this period, we see the emergence of truly massive working-class parties and radical political organizations out of a wave of strikes, first in the 1890s, then around 1905-1907, the most visible manifestation being the Russian Revolution of 1905-1906. Then, there’s a wave of strikes between 1911 and 1914, which confronted issues of de-skilling.

Mass parties, the largest being the German Social Democratic Party, emerged from these strike waves. As hard as it will be for those who are familiar with German social democracy today to believe, the Party presented itself to the world as a revolutionary party, as a party intent upon the destruction of capitalism and its replacement with socialism. We see similarly sized parties to some extent in France and Italy, and smaller organizations in the underground in the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Canadian state.

These parties brought together two distinctive groups of workers. On the one hand, the activist core of these parties was a layer of militant workers– a real workers’ vanguard of shop floor and community leaders. These were the women and men who attempted to continue the struggle between mass upsurges and who actually could lead real working-class struggles. On the other hand, these social democratic parties also included a growing layer of full-time officials in the newly legalized trade unions and of elected officials, party functionaries, journalists, etc. whose livelihood depended on the growth and stability of the parties and unions.

Tensions emerged between a revolutionary left wing, based on the militant worker activists, and a more reformist right wing and center, based in the union and party officialdom. The first manifestation of this conflict emerged in German social democracy in the late 1890s, in the debates between the majority of the party and the revisionists around Eduard Bernstein. By 1910, 1911, we see a three-way differentiation between a right wing of trade union and party officials, who openly abandoned revolutionary politics; a center around Kautsky, which claimed to be Marxist and revolutionary; and a left wing that argued for a break with the formists and for preparing the working class today for revolutionary struggle through mass strikes.

On the revolutionary Left, you start to see people like Rosa Luxemburg in Germany and Poland, Antonio Gramsci and Amadeo Bordiga in Italy, and what becomes known as the Bolshevik faction of Russian social democracy. We also see in this period the growth in many countries of revolutionary syndicalism, of attempts to build unions that are not only trying to organize workers around their immediate interests— their wages, hours, and most importantly working conditions—but also that are explicitly revolutionary and anti-capitalist. The best known to people in North America is the Industrial Workers of the World, the Wobblies. Later in Canada, there was also the One Big Union.

The First World War creates a schism within the mass political and industrial organization. The question of whether or not to support your capitalist government in imperialist war leads to splits in these mass organizations. This rupture crystallized in the years after the Russian Revolution. The Bolsheviks were a unique formation in the pre-1914 period. Because Russia was an absolutist autocracy, there was no space to consolidate a layer of officials either in trade unions or parliament. Unions were illegal for the most part, and parliament was an empty shell in Russia. So, the Bolsheviks, I would argue, unintentionally built an organization of the most radical and revolutionary workers independent of the reformist officialdom.. By 1913, they recruited most of the leaders of the big strike waves in the big factories in Moscow, Petrograd, and other Russian industrial centers.

The Russian revolution forced socialists and radicals all over the world to make choices about their organizational affiliation. By 1921, the radical workers’ vanguard had formed independent parties in a number of countries. The largest was the Germany Communist Party, with some  400,000 members. I once did a calculation and found that that would be the equivalent of 1.2 million workers in the United States, and it was mostly made up of industrial workers and their family members, particularly in the metal working industries, longshore and mining. We see smaller mass parties in Italy and  France, and smaller Communist Parties in countries like Britain, the United States, and Canada.

Even these smaller parties gathered together thousands of experienced working-class militants, both from the left wing of the socialist parties that existed in these countries and from the ranks of revolutionary syndicalists. Through the 1920s, these parties struggled with varying degrees of success to displace social democracy, reformism as the main voice of the working class.

They had some degree of success depending on the pace of the class struggle, but they had through the 1920s, organized and consolidated a layer of radicalized, revolutionary minded workers. So, just to give you an example on the smaller end of things. By 1928, on the eve of the Great Depression in the United States, the Communist Party had gone through several very damaging splits, but it still had a membership of 10,000 to 15,000 workers, which today would be a hundred thousand. It was the largest organization of radicalized revolutionary workers in the United States.

Now, the big problem was that these Communist Parties, which had been grouped together in a new International, the Communist International, the Third International, that increasingly dominated by and eventually subservient to the emerging new ruling class in Russia. As the Russian revolution was isolated and council democracy and party democracy were strangled in the Soviet Union, a new ruling class emerged around the officialdom of the Party and the state. This officialdom justified itself as building socialism in one country. This ruling class transformed  the Communist Parties from instruments of world revolution, which needed to be rooted in their national realities to advance the class struggle, into what Trotsky called “border guards for the Soviet Union.” The role of revolutionaries outside the “socialist fatherland” was now preventing the capitalist powers from strangling the Stalinist ruling class’s attempt to build so-called socialism in one country. This led to tremendous distortions and errors in political orientation.

From 1928 to 1933, the Communist Parties proclaimed that capitalism in the West was entering its terminal crisis.And in this terminal crisis, the only thing that kept capitalist capitalism in power was social democracy. Communists around the world labeled the social democratic parties “social fascist” and argued that they were, in fact, the main enemy, not actually growing fascism in countries like Germany.This policy led to sharp divisions in the labor movement and the inability, particularly in Germany, to mount a united front in the streets—not in the ballot box, but in the streets—to stop the fascist gangs.

When Hitler took power,  the German Communist Party firmly believed that he  would last a few weeks and then they would come to power within a year. Hitler was able to demolish the oldest, largest, and best organized working-class movement in the world. The mass parties, both of social democracy and Communism and the largest trade union movement in the world were completely destroyed. By 1934, the Communist International  finally realized that it had a very potent threat practically on its borders in fascist Germany and fascist Italy, and began to search for an alternative strategy to protect itself.

After a couple of years of experimentation, they hit upon what is known as the Popular Front strategy. The Popular Front saw the Communist Parties adapting the Social Democrats’ strategy for fighting fascism and reaction. Rather than organizing working-class unity in the streets and on the picket lines.to confront fascist gangs and capital, they looked to electoral alliances, both with the reformist political parties like social democracy, and  with liberal capitalists.This strategy turned away from building rank and file movements in workplaces and  unions, while Communists aligned with progressive trade union officials. In Spain the Popular Front led to disaster– to  the derailing and defeat of an actual workers’ and peasants’ revolution. In France , there were mass strikes and factory occupations in 1936, which the Communist Party disorganized.

The popular front strategy adopted in 1935-1936, shaped the political and sociological transformation  of the Communist Parties for the next.70 years. Particularly after the Second World War, when they grew to mass scale in countries like Italy and  France because of their role in the Nazi resistance, becoming essentially parties of left-wing reform, not revolution. They recruited and educated workers in the ideas that  “revolution is somewhere off way in the distance.And what we need to do today is build a progressive alliance in one form or another,” which included not only reform socialists, but also trade union officials and certain liberal capitalists—those who are willing to “defend democracy”  and enter diplomatic alliances with the Soviet Union.

This changes both the political coloration of the Communist Parties and also their sociological character. Before the mid thirties, the Communist Party recruited the most militant working-class people who were intent upon finding every possible way to advance the struggle against the boss, the landlord, the state, and who, particularly in the workplaces, saw themselves as independent of the full-time officialdom of the unions, which they saw, correctly in my opinion, as inherently conservative. After 1935, 1936, as the Communist Parties began to become integrated into that trade union officialdom–  in some countries leading the left wing of the officialdom in Britain and the US; and  in other countries becoming the officials of the largest trade union federations in France and Italy.

At that point, people who joined the Communist Parties were no longer the most uncompromising workplace militants who were willing to do anything possible to stop the boss, including confronting their union leaders. Instead, the Communist Party becomes a vehicle to be recruited into the labor officialdom. If you join the party, you can become a shop steward and get time off from work. If you follow the “line” you could  move up and become a full-time official of a local or an international. Thus, the Communist Parties by the late 1950s, early 1960s, were no longer mass organizations of revolutionary-minded workers, but organizations that primarily attracted  workers who were attracted by a left-reformist politics and many became left-leaning trade union officials.

Now this, in my opinion, poses a huge and unacknowledged problem for the layers of young people who radicalized from the mid 1960s to the mid 1970s. These are people who radicalized in the wake of the Cuban and Algerian revolutions and the Chinese “cultural revolution,”  and in opposition to the US war in Vietnam, in anti-racist struggles. By the late 1960s, these young radicals were orienting toward the  growing wave of working-class militancy in the wake of the French May-June events and the strike waves that swept the global North.  Even in the U.S. and Canada, which have the more politically conservative labor movements,you see sharp increases in strike activity, much of it opposed by the official leaders of the unions. In this cauldron,thousands of young people, mostly college students and ex-college students but also some young workers who were increasingly alienated by the war, racism ,and by the incredibly alienated, degraded work they had to do in factories, began to move left.

And many of them correctly said, Okay, if we’re serious about revolutionary politics, we’ve got to form organizations, and we eventually have to build a party. Now, most of us at that point, and I will include myself as a somewhat naive late-teen, early-twenties person, believed that we were in a new epoch of world revolution equivalent to what swept across the world from 1917 to 1923. We were convinced that we were going to see, especially as the global economic crisis took hold through the early 1970s, growing class battles. The labor officials would be unable to deal with the capitalist offensive, and that this would create opportunities to build new mass revolutionary parties.

What we didn’t acknowledge was that there had been a break in the history of what we can actually call a workers’ vanguard, the layer of radical and revolutionary minded workers that had been created and recreated the class battles from the late 1870s-1880s through the 1930s. That layer had been disorganized, both politically and ideologically by Popular Front politics and sociologically by its increasing integration into the trade union officialdom.

So what you see again in the late 1960s and early 1970s is dozens of groups throughout the capitalist world, whether they are leaning towards some variant of socialism from below or some version of Marxist-Leninism, usually inspired by Maoism and the Chinese Revolution, throw themselves into working-class struggles and “centralize” themselves. Others were inspired by variants of socialism from below. All of them “Bolshevized” their organizations— become really tough, clamp down on internal discussion, and build  an “authoritative,” actually authoritarian, leadership. They believe that if they just pursue their” line and act as parties in miniature, as micro-sects, they would become mass parties. With very few exceptions, these end in disaster.

The two groups that were able to get through this period and have some cadre and some base among a much thinner layer of workers were the Ligue communiste révolutionnaire in France—which maintained 1000-2000 members, the equivalent of 5,000 to 10,000 in the U.S., before growing to over 3,000 in the wake of the 1995 mass strikes—and what becomes the British Socialist Workers Party, which also had several thousand members and some real influence in British society. Now, for a variety of reasons, these groups shrank radically in the early part of this century.m

For the most part,most of my generation, people who had gone into party building activity, whether of a Trotskyist variant or a Maoist variant, ended up by the 1980s either leaving politics completely or simply becoming reformist socialists. By 1985, almost everyone I knew who had been a Maoist back in the 1960s and 1970s was eagerly supporting Jesse Jackson’s run in the Democratic primaries.People who had believed that every trade union official above a shop steward was automatically a sellout were now pursuing careers in the  trade union officialdom, either as elected officers or as staffers.

The crisis of the revolutionary Left and the reformist Left’s embrace of neo-liberalism opened a period of experimentation from the 1990s onward, during which we see  the emergence of new “broad” parties that reject neo-liberalism and, in a few cases, capitalism.. The most successful of these was the Workers’ Party in Brazil, which emerged out of struggles in the 1970s and 1980s, in the workplaces, in the favelas, etc.. They looked in some ways, like pre-war social democracy. They brought  together radicalized layers of workers and intellectuals and some left-leaning trade union officials, parliamentary politicians, etc. We also saw the emergence of the Party of Communist Refoundation in Italy, and Die Linke in Germany. All of these groups were attempting to respond to both the failure of previous revolutionary party-building movements and the crisis of reformism. In the  early 1990s, both the social democratic parties and what’s left of the Communist Parties after the collapse of “actually existing socialism,” are no longer even capable of successfully fighting for reforms. For periods of time, these “broad Left” parties had some resonance, but all of them went through their own crises as tensions between the two wings—the radicalized, revolutionary minded base, and their officials—lead them into an impasse.

Now, I firmly believe that these sorts of broad parties will continue to emerge because the material conditions for the revolutionary Left to transform itself into a mass independent revolutionary party simply don’t exist; and the official parties of the labor movement and the Left have abandoned the struggle for reform.Today, we see the revival of Die Linke in Germany after they threw out some of their most extreme right-wing elements. In Britain, there’s Your Party, which seems to be intent on aborting itself before it’s ever born.

Just to sum up, and this is a sort of broad sweep: from the 1870s to the 1930s, we see, through continuous waves of working-class struggles, the emergence of a true mass working-class vanguard of radicalized workers who are active in their neighborhoods, their workplaces, etc., who formed the left-wing before the First World War of social democracy, and then became the mass base of Communism in the 1920s and 1930s. As the Communist Parties are bureaucratized, Stalinized, subordinated to the ruling elites—the ruling classes in the Soviet Union and then later China, etc.— they, even while going on zigs and zags through ultra-leftism, fundamentally begin to move in a reformist direction and become themselves very similar to the mass social democratic parties.

This not only politically disorients radical workers, it transforms them sociologically from workplace and community fighters into candidates to become full-time officials. This throws up a tremendous obstacle to the party-building efforts of the 1960s and 1970s. And since then, what’s left of the revolutionary Left has tried to figure out how to proceed in a situation that all of us find, in many ways, unexpected.

DC: That’s a very helpful overview of a lot of history, so thanks for that, Charlie. Let’s go back now and just pick up on the thread about the so-called party-building groups that started to emerge in the late 1960s. As you said, most of those groups had either collapsed or shrunk dramatically by the early 1980s, and these groups attracted lots of very committed young fighters of your generation.

Why do those groups do so poorly? Today many people who went through that experience and lots of people who didn’t but watched them would say it was because any kind of revolutionary politics is wrong. But I think that’s not a very helpful explanation.

CP: It’s not because revolution is impossible, and it’s certainly not because a revolutionary transformation of society is not necessary to the future survival of our species. The “microsect” strategy fails for a variety of reasons. The most fundamental was that the human material, the layer of radicalized workers, working people, that would be the base for a real revolutionary socialist party— rooted in that significant minority of workers who actually can play leading roles in struggles—had ceased to exist. Now, it didn’t help that most of the party-building groups made all sorts of subjective errors. In North America, the majority of these groups openly identified with one strand or another of socialism from above, some variant of Stalinism, mostly pro-Chinese Stalinism, some pro-Cuban, but they were basically Stalinists. They had, as a result, a limited repertoire of how to relate to actual struggles they might be involved in. These groups would swing wildly between ultra-left abstentionism and adaptation to whoever was leading the struggle.

For the Trotskyist groups, who had ostensibly better politics, they shared with the Maoist and Stalinist groups a notion that, in order for us to win leadership in this growing layer of radical workers, we had to be organizationally and politically homogeneous. Internal debate and discussion was not seen as a sign of the health of a group that was rooted in reality and was grappling with new challenges, but instead as deviations.But again, the fundamental problem was that the human material for these projects didn’t exist. And that only actually worsens their commitment to an ideological purity and an organizational despotism in order to make up for that fact.

Rather than acknowledging that what they were trying to do might not be possible in their particular historical moment,they began to beat up themselves and their members by saying, you’re not trying hard enough,you’re not disciplined enough, you’re deviating from the line.  Most of the people who went into these projects had incredibly unrealistic expectations, and I have to include myself here as well. I firmly believed until the  late 1970s that we were on the verge of the most important political recomposition of the working class since the Russian Revolution. I was convinced there would be mass splits in the social democratic and Communist parties in Europe, and that one or another variant of socialism from below would emerge as a mass current. A very small minority of comrades and I were able to adjust our expectations while maintaining a revolutionary politics, a politics that understood that, even in a period of working-class retreat, the difference between reformists and revolutionaries matters in terms of how you conduct even those defensive struggles.The vast majority of the people I radicalized with weren’t able to make that transition, and most of them left politics completely because they thought it was simply pointless. And the majority who remained political adapted to a social democratic or reformist realism.

DC: I think that really highlights the importance of having a historical and materialist understanding of the working class, not treating the working class as an abstraction that jumps from the pages of Marx’s Capital into social reality. There’s a very complex process the working class goes through in terms of how forms of organization develop, how relationships within the class and among different sections of workers are made and then remade, and so on. And so  we have to be much more concrete in how we think about the working class.

We’re trying to contribute to the self-organization and self-emancipation of that class, but again, the working class is not an abstraction and we have to recognize the ground on which we fight— not just in terms of how capital is organized and what’s happening to capitalism, but also where the working class is in relation to all of that.

CP: Right. Despite waving the selected works of Lenin, people in my day ignored his most important contribution, which is that the “living soul” of Marxism is the concrete analysis of the concrete conjuncture–the actual balance of class forces and state of working-class self-organization and self-activity.

DC: Unfortunately, most of what’s there on the far Left today has not learned useful lessons from the experience of the generation that you’ve just talked about. The most visible far-left groups either organize using the kind of micro-party model and proclaim themselves to be parties, like  the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) in the U.S. and the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP)  in the Canadian state, or they use the micro-party model, what they would call building a Leninist organization, while recognizing in some sense that they’re not yet what they see as a party. For example, Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) and Left Voice voice in the U.S. and the International Socialists in Canada, I think would all fall into that category.

This party-building approach generates very strong pressures to act in sectarian ways that don’t actually help advance the struggles of working-class and oppressed people, but which may be good for that group in a narrow sense— boosting the group’s profile, recruiting more members, and so on.

And for those groups on the far left that do have at least some commitment to the idea that the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself, it leads to making the group the center of politics instead of thinking and acting in terms of what that group can do to contribute to the long, complex, messy, and non-linear process of the working class becoming a force that can change society.

And here I think we should also mention that, in a society that is shaped by sexism, racism, and other forms of oppression, all organizations are going to be  scarred by those forms of oppression. Of course, all those of us who are members of these kinds of groups are products of the same society like everybody else, no matter how much or how sincerely people oppose oppression.

Far-left groups that use the micro party model are, I think, especially prone to dealing badly with oppressive behavior, especially by their leaders. I and three other former members of the New Socialist Group wrote a public letter about this in 2019. We argued then that:

There is often a connection between the micro-party approach and inadequate responses by a socialist group to oppressive actions by members. This approach tends to inflate the importance of the group in the minds of its members. Preserving the group often becomes an end in itself. When people make the stability or preservation of the leadership and its “Leninist” authority their top concern, they may avoid suspending or expelling members, especially “leaders,” for oppressive behavior.

Organizing on micro-party lines with a “fetish of leadership” can fuel an abusive group culture. That kind of culture reproduces rather than challenges our societies’ oppressive forms of behavior. And socialist groups that treat their own expansion as what matters most are usually resistant to opening themselves up to struggles against oppression, learning from them, and changing.

CP: Yes, and you were writing in response to the crises of two of the largest revolutionary organizations in the English-speaking world: the Socialist Workers’ Party of Britain, which had lost a significant layer of its membership because it covered up the fact that a member of its Central Committee was involved in sexual violence and sexual abuse, and the International  Socialist Organization (ISO) in the U.S., which implodes precisely because its leadership had covered up a rape by someone who, at that the time they were involved in the sexual assault, was one of the leadership’s favorites.When this came out, it created a tremendous level of demoralization. While the British Socialist Workers Party survives in a shrunken form today, the International Socialist Organization had no choice but to dissolve itself,

DC: So, these are particular forms of the debacle of the micro-party model.

What’s the alternative to the micro-party model? That’s the key question that comes up in the U.S. today, as you know very well. There are a lot more politically active people who consider themselves socialists who are part of the Democratic Socialists of America than who belong to all the other socialist groups combined.But DSA is politically really pretty broad. Why not, in the U.S.,just join and build DSA and perhaps one of the many political caucuses within DSA that supports a more defined kind of socialist politics?

CP: DSA was a small and moribund social democratic organization prior to 2017. One of its younger members, who joined sometime around 2010, said it was a socialist version of the American Association of Retired People (AARP), which is a nonprofit that collects dues from its members, doesn’t expect them to do anything, and sends them a newsletter.

DSA explodes as a small mass organization reaching 90,000 members—not because of the 2016  Sanders campaign, as most DSA leaders claim, but in response to  Trump’s first election., And at that point, I was one of the people on the far left saying that the revolutionary socialist Left had to relate to this, possibly join it as a grouping with a coherent worldview and with some proposals on how to move DSA forward. The alternative, I believed,  would be DSA’s reversion into a staid, reformist, electorally-oriented grouping. Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum, so there had to be revolutionaries posing the alternative of building DSA into an activist organization that was really committed to workplace, community, anti-war, anti-imperialist organizing.

Now, I believe that, from 2017 to early 2020, there were a lot of opportunities to work in DSA. And, in fact, when Tempest first formed and for a period of time thereafter,  I’d say a majority of our comrades were members of  DSA.We worked in various DSA branches trying to push for the idea that DSA should not be involved in the DemocraticParty and that members should be educating and agitating for an independent workers’ party. We agitated for DSA to  orient itself towards building effective rank and file organizations and unions, rather than looking to left-leaning officials who might be friendly to DSA politics.

Now, there was space for all of that for quite a while, and some currents did grow. The problem was that none of these currents had enough size, political coherence, and weight to really have much of an impact. A turning point came in 2021-2022 In 2018, a number of DSA members and DSA-endorsed candidates won Democratic primaries and actually got elected to the House of Representatives in the U.S.—the so-called Squad, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez being the best known. There was also Rashida Tlaib and an African American congressperson from the Bronx and part of the suburbs outside of New York named Jamal Bowman, who was also elected. Now all of these candidates, in order to get DSA endorsement publicly endorsed Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions  against Israel and pledged to promote those politics.Bowman, almost as soon as he’s elected, ends up voting to fund the Iron Shield missile system that essentially allows the Israeli state to rain terror on Palestinians and on its Arab neighbors without much worry about them sending missiles in and actually hitting Israeli targets.

This sparked a tremendous debate in DSA, and our comrades played a big role in initiating a movement in various branches calling for, at the minimum, Bowman to be censured, if not expelled, from DSA for basically disregarding the politics of the organization. In other words, this was an attempt on the part of the members of DSA to hold their electeds accountable. The DSA leadership, including those who claimed to be on the left of the DSA leadership, responded by saying, “Our main priority is to support Jamal Bowman.” And they ended up basically making a number of organizational moves against centers of opposition on this question. In particular, they shut down the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Working Group, which had been involved in the call to expel Bowman and basically removed its leadership and appointed a leadership that would not openly criticize Bowman.

In the wake of that, thousands, probably up to 20,000 members of DSA, left the organization, stopped paying dues, stopped going to meetings, etc., By 2022,  when several DSA members and Sanders supported Biden’s breaking of the railway strike, there was practically no opposition.

And what you started to see in many of the branches is that they became more and more bureaucratic and authoritarian. So, for example, our comrades were very active in the New York City Labor Branch of DSA, which had been a place where people involved in organizing rank and file caucuses in various public sector unions had been very active in talking about their work and trying to coordinate it. Increasingly, the leadership of that branch was appointed by the citywide leadership, which is very conservative, and branch discussions no longer included discussions of the fight in the teachers union or the fight in the big public employees unions but what candidates DSA was going to support for state assembly and city council. It became more and more narrowly electoralist.

Today in New York Tempest, we’re beginning to reassess this. There seems to be, in the wake of the election of Zoran Mamdani as New York City mayor as an open member of DSA, some ferment within New York City DSA. A few weeks back, the leadership of the branch held a meeting during which they instructed people not to share any information online. And if they did, they’d be expelled from DSA. Despite that, information from the meeting was shared, and DSA’s line was, “Our job, once Mamdani is elected, is not to hold him accountable, but to help him govern,” which means they will help cover for him as he retreats in the face of pressure from the Democratic Party and capital.

Now, there seems to be a considerable minority of members in New York CityDSA who are not going along with this. And that’s something. So, we’re beginning to reassess. For me, it’s a tactical question. DSA is, in its majority, a social democratic organization, which in the United States means that it doesn’t even advocate its own political electoral party.It tries to remake the capitalist Democratic Party. DSA, as an organization, has come to see electing people as taking power. All other forms of political organizing get subordinated to that.

But there have been times, particularly from 2017 to 2021, where it attracted a lot of radicalized people who wanted more than that, and there might be some opportunity today.The problem is  something we saw with many of these caucuses that formed in DSA. As the group shrank in the early 2020s and there was less opportunity to actually influence new people, these groups became sort of power groups concerned solely with winning positions on leadership bodies rather than organizing politically, which is always the problem with revolutionaries working in larger, predominantly reformist organizations. But again, it’s a tactical question. There may be openings in DSA in the coming year or so in New York. We’ll see. I am, in principle, not opposed to it. In fact, I actually thought that it was imperative that revolutionaries join DSA and promote our ideas within DSA when it was a growing radicalizing group.

DC: I should add that in  the Canadian state, we don’t have anything  like DSA, and there’s a certain amount of unfortunate DSA envy among people on the Left here (and in the UK too). What we have is the New Democratic Party, which is a weakened social democratic party that has really adapted to neoliberalism. The European term social liberal fits pretty well for it, although there certainly are people who are NDP members who are more left wing than that. There’s currently an election process for the new leader of the federal NDP where there is one or possibly two Left candidates running.But at the grassroots level, NDP constituency associations are not, with very few exceptions, activist organizations or places that attract people who are looking to do more than be involved in some way around elections. In Quebec,there’s also Québec Solidaire, which is a left-wing party that was originally formed as an alternative to the nationalist Parti Québécois and more right-wing parties. And Québec Solidaire originally talked about being a party of the ballot box and the streets, combining both elections and non-electoral work, although it, I think,fundamentally leaned in an electoral direction. It became more successful in electing more members of the National Assembly in Quebec but has also moved to the right through that process, with more influence of the MNAs and their staff and so on within the party apparatus.And so, although it certainly remains a not insignificant organization, there’s not very much of the “party of the street” – it has a fundamentally  electoral approach.. The Left has had a difficult time organizing itself in relation to Québec solidaire.

If people who’ve been listening to this discussion have been listening carefully, you recognize that Charlie and I understand that it’s a mistake to think that the only options people have when it comes to socialist organization are, on the one hand, broad organizations like the DSA with members that range all the way from moderate reformists to revolutionaries, and on the other hand, micro-parties and other far-left groups organized along those lines.

There have been, and there still are revolutionary socialist groups that reject the micro-party model.  Affirming the commitment to the revolutionary transformation of society, these groups try to organize in ways that make sense where they are. In the spirit of what British socialist Duncan Hallas once wrote, which is that “organizations do not exist in a vacuum, they’re composed of actual people in specific situations attempting to solve real problems with a limited range of options open to them.” And one of those groups that tried to carve out a different path was the one that you were in, Charlie, Solidarity. And Solidarity was certainly an influence on the New Socialist Group in Canada.

Can you share some thoughts about the strengths and weaknesses of Solidarity in the years that you were a member, between 1986 and 2015?

CP: Throughout the history of Solidarity, there was an extremely strong and healthy commitment to training comrades to be activists and militants, particularly at the workplace.

Two of the groups that we had that came together to form Solidarity, Workers’ Power and the International Socialists, had a decade or more of experience doing workplace activism as revolutionary socialists. And there was a layer of comrades who were my age and a bit older who were very excited about training younger people to continue doing that work.

And in the early years, I’d say up until about 1993 there was also a continued strong commitment to training people in the broad politics of revolutionary socialism from below on the need for revolution, the need for class independence, the importance of anti-oppression struggles, etc.

Over time, and this became more and more evident in the later  1990s and then later, particularly in the 2000s, Solidarity was unable to maintain those two strengths, both a commitment to a training people in revolutionary politics combined with grappling with the world as it is today—attempting to understand the nature of the economic crisis, the nature of the restructuring of the working class and the oppressed, etc. We were doing both of these, I’d say,until the mid 1990s. I think we began to abandon the second, and that had an effect on how we trained people as activists. Our commitment to maintaining revolutionary politics and training people in these politics weakened over time, and this affected how we were training people to do day-to-day organizing.

The weakening of our commitment to training people in revolutionary politics had two sources. One source was the demoralization of a layer of older comrades of my age and older about the prospects of revolutionary politics.A number of them, including leading comrades, came to the conclusion that the idea of revolution was simply unrealistic and that the best we could hope for was to build left reformism

At the same time, we had projected ourselves as a regroupment organization—an organization that would bring together people from a variety of political traditions and try to cohere something new. Initially, in the mid 1980s, we thought we could include some of the people coming out of the Maoist milieu, who had drawn conclusions about micro-sects and about Stalinism. Those folks never showed. And by the early 1990s, regroupment came to mean integrating layers of people who had come out of primarily the crisis of the main Trotskyist organizations in the United States who had not drawn lessons about the micro-party.These are people who thought that their previous organization had gone wrong because of some ideological deviation and unclarity about what Trotskyism is, rather than thinking that the project was flawed because the layer of working people that would be the basis of a revolutionary party simply didn’t exist.

So, we had a layer of older comrades who were saying all this stuff about how the restructuring of the working class, the restructuring of the economy, etc. was not that important anymore. They were saying that we just had to do practice. But other folks were going, all we need to do is read Trotsky and memorize the Transitional Program and be able to spit it out and we’ll be fine.

The result was we would periodically recruit layers of young people who would either become good workplace militants but drift to the right, politically adapting to the trade union officialdom, or who would try to transform the group into a more coherent, revolutionary group that did real activism but would leave.

And by 2011, to be quite honest, I had been trying to keep the group on what I saw as a reasonable path. I’d been very active through the 1980s and 1990s in my branch in New York, which at points was fairly successful, had up to 40 or 50 people, which for us was large. And I served in national leadership from 2000 to about 2008.I came to the conclusion by 2011 that the group was going nowhere, and I was pulling back from my activity. For personal reasons. I  dropped to a sympathizer in 2013, but then in 2015, the group, which had shrunk tremendously from 350 to 400 members to at most 100 members on paper and 30 active— voted to  participate in the Sanders challenge in the Democratic primary, at which point I left and decided that this group had reached its limits and wasn’t going anywhere. Now, Solidarity still exists. They still have some very good comrades who I have tremendous personal and political respect for,but they don’t seem to be a vibrant organization that’s recruiting new people, that’s capable of having an impact on the Left, not on the world, but at least on the Left. So, for me, the big failure of Solidarity was its inability to define what broadly it means to be a revolutionary socialist group and also the boundaries of being a revolutionary socialist group, and then the concomitant failure to train new members in the fundamentals of these politics while encouraging them to think about the world and think about their activity as revolutionary socialists.

And what we ended up with was that the group—politically, not organizationally— liquidated itself into a more amorphous left-reformist current.

DC: Thank you for that. It’s a sad story, but an instructive one. And it brings us to the question of the Tempest Collective, of which you’re a member. I’m also a member.

It’s a U.S. organization that also welcomes members in the Canadian state, and Tempest is trying to build a socialist group that rejects the micro-party model and tries to avoid repeating the problems of Solidarity and other really loose groups.

The Tempest website puts it this way:

We need new forms of revolutionary organization that can better meet this moment, that can bring fresh eyes to how we make revolutionary organization relevant to what’s happening and what needs to be done. We do not claim to have the answer to how a new revolutionary organizational form will come about. We want to contribute to the process of figuring out how to strengthen organized socialist forces in this era of worsening crises, a process that is underway in many different publications and organizations.

And, of course, there are groups in other countries with a similar approach to Tempest.

So, just to wrap up, what do you think is the most important thing for people in very small groups like this to bear in mind about how we approach building a socialist organization?

CP: I think the most fundamental thing is to be aware of and have a real grip and analysis of the pitfalls of ideological and political and organizational looseness. This is the notion that all we have to do is be active. We don’t really need to develop our thinking as revolutionary Marxists. We need to reject that, which, I think, was the problem with Solidarity. And at the same time, we need to reject the micro-sect model, which was the problem with the ISO. Tempest was formed  mostly by people who survived the breakup of the ISO and a small number of us who survived as revolutionaries from the disorganization of Solidarity.

We know these are the two directions. We don’t want to go on the broad path in the middle. We have at best a compass but not a roadmap. Tempest comrades joked at our founding conference that we’re building the plane while flying it. This is an experiment, and I have been very pleased by how Tempest has collectively attempted to find our way.

We were willing to be active in DSA as revolutionaries but not as sectarians who were going there to lecture people on the correct program. We are seen as good workplace activists, as good social movement activists, but also as people who have a clear politics. We related to Bernie, AOC, and now Mamdani not by being purist or sectarian. Rather than simply denouncing, we’ve tried to understand the support for these left-wing Democratic Party politicians as a sign of people searching for a left-wing, collectivist, solidaristic alternative to the crisis, to capitalist politics and to rightwing populism, while  the same time arguing honestly that the Democratic Party is a trap for revolutionaries and for radicals.

There is no guarantee that we will be successful. The pressures on small groups to adapt to either sectarianism, a comfortable micros-sect model, or to just adapt to the milieu you’re in are very strong. But I’ve been very happy so far and very pleased with the way in which our collective has responded to political pressures and continued to grow, integrate new people, etc. And to be honest, it is also one of the most internally healthy organizations I’ve been in since Solidarity in its early days. We have really good, honest, healthy debates about real questions facing revolutionaries.

As Solidarity became depoliticized, not only did the discussion level drop to the mundane:,What do we do next? Not in terms of,  What is to be done, but rather, What do we advocate tomorrow? And it became an incredibly personalized and toxic atmosphere, as bad as what comrades described in the micro-sects.

So, Tempest has succeeded so far, but, again, we know what our guardrails are— the micro-sect, on the one hand, and political adaptation, on the other. On that broad path, we at best have a compass. We don’t have a roadmap.

DC: And I think we can say that the fate of Tempest and all other attempts to build non-sectarian, revolutionary socialist organizations of one kind or another is really deeply wrapped up and shaped by the fate of the working-class and social struggles that are happening and will happen in the future. Those are the powerful forces that will ultimately blow an organization one way or another.

The best you can do is try to understand where those forces are blowing and where they’re moving, and how you can most effectively try to navigate through that. Our fate is not going to be something that we make in a vacuum but in the circumstances we find ourselves thrust into.

CP: You actually do need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”

The post Party time?  appeared first on Tempest.

Our comrade Kim Moody tells us that union coverage in the U.S. is up. This development is only to be welcomed by all self-defined socialists, especially those who still conceive of working-class self-activity, self-education, and self-organization, particularly at the point of production, as indispensable for social revolution. But to celebrate this development too quickly and too easily, without a socially and materially grounded sense of what union membership means, is to miss the forest for a few still maturing saplings.

The reformist left tends to equate union membership with union militancy—as if the first automatically leads to the second. There are contradictions aplenty at play here, of course. One can certainly support electing Democrats and engaging in militant activity at the same time. But, at the end of the day, this equation is the germ of a strategy that submits class struggle to an electoralist strategy. Strikes and other stoppages need not last too long, be organized by rank-and-file workers, or be organized and translated into independent working-class infrastructures of dissent to build an electoralist “movement.” In fact, once absorbed into such a movement, working-class struggle is to be managed, turned on and turned off like a faucet, by those above, and dampened.

Unfortunately, then, there is no straight and easy path from union coverage to labor militancy. In fact, while coverage is up, strikes remain low. How we explain this contradiction, this gap between coverage and militancy, has real consequences for how we respond to it as a socialist organization rooted in the tradition of working-class self-emancipation and socialism from below. In what follows, I’ll go through some flawed analyses, turning to thinkers much smarter than myself to dispute them, talk a little bit about what hasn’t changed, and make some concrete, if not entirely worked out, proposals for how Tempest might respond.

Unfortunately, then, there is no straight and easy path from union coverage to labor militancy. In fact, while coverage is up, strikes remain low. Bad Analyses and Good Rebuttals

Narratives that attempt to explain the decline in both union density and militancy over the last few decades by simply saying that capitalism has changed are legion. We can find them in Brenner’s recent work on “secular stagnation” and in the work of some of his students, particularly Aaron Benenav; in the thought of “left-wing communists” like Josh Clover, who suggests that we have entered a new phase of capitalism based entirely on circulation and that, therefore, struggles at the point of production are subordinate, and should be politically subordinated, to riots that will grow until they explode into some sort of undefined commune; and in recent “techno-feudalist” accounts that claim that capital has transformed into a mode of production based predominately in techno rent-taking. These arguments simply don’t hold up.

It is, of course, obvious that capitalism has changed and continues to change. Capitalism is, in fact, marked by a dynamism and turbulence unseen in other modes of production. And this is because of what Anwar Shaikh describes as its “central regulating mechanism” of “real competition.” However, while dynamic, turbulent, and productive of heterogeneity—among firms, within the working class, between nations, etc.—capital is also a social relation with strict rules of reproduction. Its engine and goal is profitability. It is driven by and dependent on it. This has not changed.

Thinkers have similarly blamed the decline of the labor movement on deindustrialization, noting that, if functional and militant unions were full of industrial workers, our shift to a “service” economy necessitates both union decline and a search for new models of organizing and militant activity no longer tied to the millstones of the strike, stoppage, or slowdown. I won’t go into this here, but, as Michael Roberts notes, globally, the world has not deindustrialized. Nor does the growth of the service sector explain the decline of the labor movement. This sector is not inevitably stagnant or unprofitable, as some claim. It is a poorly defined industry, and one that also includes essential components of production.

The relative growth of the service sector does not signal capital’s retreat or exhaustion but rather its extension. Additionally, as Roberts explains, while industrial employment has dropped in the “mature capitalist economies,” it rose globally, between 1991 and 2012, by 46%. And these drops in the mature capitalist countries cannot be explained without attention to productivity increases imposed by capital and largely accepted, sometimes even embraced under the fiction of labor-management cooperation, by unions.

Along with all of this, more and more people have been thrown onto the labor market the world over. This ongoing process of proletarianization is unsurprising. And it points to the fact that developing organs of working-class struggle, self-organization, and self-education, which have always been helped along in one way or another by socialists, is still crucial.

…Developing organs of working-class struggle, self-organization, and self-education, which have always been helped along in one way or another by socialists, is still crucial.

The working class is not dead, nor is its most important weapon, the strike. Those who claim that the decline of the labor movement in the U.S. is based solely on major shifts in capital’s functioning ultimately turn what is a political issue—the disorganization of a militant layer of the working class and the Left—into an inevitability. This lets those of us on the Left off the hook.

The Necessity of Exploitation, Then and Now

Capital continues to create profit and chase profitability by way of exploitation. This is not a negotiable feature of capitalist social property relations. It is foundational. As Shaikh explains, under capitalist “real competition,” “cost-cutting becomes a central concern.” This is:

because prices are ultimately limited by costs. Costs, in turn, depend on the length and intensity of the working day, the wages paid to workers, and the technology in use. Hence, struggles between capital and labor over wages and working conditions are immanent in the drive for profit. So too is never-ending technical change, whose principal purpose is to reduce costs.

This means that capital is also compelled to respond to crises of profitability by increasing surplus value through raising the rate of exploitation. What generated the recovery that we know of as the neoliberal boom was not only the destruction of inefficient enterprises through bankruptcies, mergers, acquisitions, and the like, but also the brutal projects of holding down wages, increasing productivity, and lowering expectations in relation to living standards, including offloading social reproduction onto the family. This takes place at the point of production, of course, but it also reaches beyond it. When in the midst of crisis, as we now are and have been for some time, capital and capitalist states also impose austerity.

Those of us in Tempest already know all of this. But given the state of things—capitalism’s long depression, the global rise of the Right, the ever-intensifying attacks on working and oppressed people, and the sharpening of inter-imperial rivalry, to name only a few morbid symptoms—it can be all too easy to lose sight of the functioning of capital as capital. Capital is doing what it does and what it must. It is seeking profit and chasing profitability at the expense of working-class living conditions. What we’re living through, then, is not an aberration. Crises are regular and recurring features of capitalism, and so, too, are authoritarian responses to these crises. As Jeffrey Webber and Todd Gordon put it, “there is an authoritarian disposition at the core of capitalism, a tendency integral to its very nature as a system of exploitation, oppression, and alienation.”

This is why militant working-class struggle remains not only important to resisting capital and the capitalist state’s authoritarian turn but also non-negotiable, a lynchpin of political struggle that cannot be ignored. Trump is a nightmare. But he doesn’t represent as much of a rupture as he seems to. Ultimately, he is the head of a capitalist state that is trying desperately to both leap out of a crisis of profitability and to convince working people that the crisis of social reproduction we face is the fault of other working and oppressed people.  But under Donald Trump, the next president (likely a Democrat), and leaders the world over, whether of the Right or center, workers still work and will still work. We’re compelled to work to survive in a market-dependent world. If anything, the global economic crisis in which we remain mired means more austerity, more work for less, under the rule of right or center. Exploitation will not go away, and it has not gone away.

There has certainly been a full-throated abandonment of the so-called rules-based liberal order—even if, at base, this order was itself always a regulating fiction. Inter-imperial rivalry is, of course, both more intense and therefore more visible. And the rise of the Right the world over is both a central problem for the global Left and the oppressed and the exploited, and a serious obstacle to our organizing.

However, there is a tendency, even on the Left, to treat these phenomena as if they represent a serious departure not just from the capitalist status quo of the past fifty years or more but also from the orthodoxies of capitalism more generally. Terms intended to clarify the unprecedentedness of the Trumpian moment proliferate: neo- and post-fascism, authoritarian nationalism, plain-old fascism proper, political capitalism, U.S. Bonapartism, and so on. It is important, of course, to outline the specificities of our moment as clearly as possible. But there is a temptation built into these debates, I think, and that is to present Trump and the global Right as if they represent a kind of irregularity.

We should remember, though, that:

For much of the twentieth century, the U.S. was a deeply authoritarian society. In parts of the country, it was a one-party state. Many of its policies were inspirational to European fascist regimes. Yet it was all established and maintained without any open coup, any apparent “revolution”, or any Nazi-style party in uniforms: it always called itself democracy, not totalitarianism. The American authoritarian tradition, on which Trump draws, operated through a patchwork collaboration of state institutions, bosses, right-wing union officials, and private thugs.

Trump’s is an attempt to reconstitute this tradition of open racism, assaults on the heterogeneous working class, and crackdowns on left-wing activists and movements, immigrants, queer folks, women, and the poor. This reactionary tradition was only buried, to the limited extent that it was, by mass struggles from below.

And it was precisely the gap that developed between the organization of workers as workers, at the point of production and beyond it, and efforts to expand these gains that allowed for something like Trump’s traditionalist return with many twists. This happened not only because of assaults from above but also because of failures from below—namely, the cleaving of workplace struggle and its disciplining on the part of union bureaucrats in league with so-called progressive capitalist and convinced of the efficacy of labor-management cooperation. The largest organ of the organized Left in the U.S.—the Communist Party—took a similar tack as it embraced the Popular Front strategy.

The crisis of working-class militancy, then, is a political one. Therefore, the reconstitution of a militant layer of workers will require a lot of political work. But it also contains within it the germ of revolutionary possibility.
Because capital can only change so much, because it is driven by profitability, the best way to threaten and cajole it, and the states that depend upon and smooth its way, is still to threaten its livelihood, even if only in the short term. Whoever is in office in whatever capitalist state, this holds. That doesn’t mean that we can collapse national and historical specificities into a unilinear march toward revolution. Rather, the realization that it will take a fighting labor movement to compel both meaningful reforms in the here and now and in the future should force us to take stock of specificities, of real obstacles to and opportunities for organization in the U.S. and elsewhere.

New Epoch or Crisis

Responses to crisis matter, of course. But the response by authoritarian nationalists and centrists or liberals has largely been the same. If the first engage in revved up scapegoating, the use of state force, etc., the second do so with a more human face, until the genocide of Palestinians perpetrated by the Israeli ethno-state is on the table. Then the mask slips off.

The Right, the world over, benefits from the economic crisis and the lack of serious left-wing opposition. But, like the center, it flails in the face of this crisis, even if in more openly cruel and reactionary forms. We shouldn’t collapse all capitalist regimes into one another, of course. There are serious differences. Workers are “better off” in a relative, and very qualified sense, under less right-wing administrations. As Avery Wear argues, in the current climate, the argumentative way forward in the U.S. is not claiming that both parties of capital are simply mirror images. Rather, it is that, whatever the differences, “the Democratic Party… because it is a party dominated by the capitalist class, sabotages our class’s fight against the authoritarian and reactionary tendencies of the Republicans.” Even those of us who fall on the side of what Wear calls the “classic” argument, represented by something like Hal Draper’s “Who’s Going to be the Lesser Evil in 1968?,” should heed Wear’s advice.  Even if in fits and starts, people are moving. There is a nascent but broad resistance constituting itself, however unevenly. And while many of its members are still willing to vote Democrat in order to unseat Trump, they’re also willing to take to the streets against ICE, against Trump’s attempt to further consolidate his power and push at the edges of his authoritarian liberalism.

Even as we work with and in this broad resistance movement, we should never recoil from the project of reorienting these spaces to independent working-class action and mass mobilization, not as opposites but as both integral parts of class struggle that must be united. Therefore, even if they’re real and meaningful, differences between the capitalist parties shouldn’t be fetishized either.  When it comes to working people and the heterogeneous working class, they’re far too similar.

…Even if they’re real and meaningful, differences between the capitalist parties shouldn’t be fetishized

Both parties have responded to the crisis of profitability by displacing it onto immigrant workers, gender minorities, the houseless, the racialized, and the oppressed more generally. The Democrats’ rhetoric of moral superiority has come to equal itself as, well, empty rhetoric in the face of their full-throated support of Israel. Spending on ICE swelled under Democrats, too. Trump did not create these armed goons out of thin air. Nor is mass deportation a Trumpian invention. It was also a bedrock of the Obama and Biden administrations. Trump has certainly adopted it with more public-facing cruelty and authoritarian verve. But what we’re seeing is the intensification of an already-existing (and bipartisan) attack on immigrants.

Just look at the way Harris’s “resounding defeat by voter abstention” was blamed on “whatever marginalized group refused to sufficiently support” her “right-wing, blood-soaked, imperialist presidential bid.” This blame has been extended to immigrants, Latinx voters, trans people (and the Democrats’ supposed courting of them), Arab and Muslim voters, those who refused to support Harris’s gung-ho approach to changing absolutely nothing in the midst of a U.S.-backed genocide of the Palestinian people, and so on.

Harris’s campaign, and its possible if suicidal resumption in 2028, even if simply the product of centrist Democrat delusion, still speaks to the fact that the official opposition in the U.S., whatever their rhetoric, will continue to wage war on working and oppressed people, both in the U.S. and globally.

Even if the Right is openly pursuing imperialist aggression and much more openly attacking working-class and oppressed people than the supposed opposition, we should also avoid the trap of treating these real historical shifts as if they represent the abandonment of capital’s central logic and drive. We should be careful that, in trying to make sense of the dynamism of capitalism, we’re not falling into the traps of thinking of capitalism as progressing through “phases,” each marked by a different logic of accumulation. The authoritarian turn has not veered away from capitalism. It is latent within capitalist social relations themselves.

Even as they mobilize, unions in the U.S. still bank on the Democratic Party and on the capitalist system itself. Mass disruptive struggle may have moved into the realm of possibility with Trump’s assaults on workers, but it is yoked to an unbroken business unionism in the workplace. Struggles are limited, contained within the bounds of collective bargaining, and mainly concerned with wages and benefits rather than with the conditions of work itself.

Toward a Limited Response

Workers are clearly being drawn to unions as defensive organs, not only in relation to attacks on wages, benefits, and the conditions of work but also, importantly, in an attempt to defend themselves and their immigrant colleagues from (some of) the forces of the state, revved up by Trump’s authoritarian nationalism. In the last year, we’ve seen unions and their members take to the streets in LA, Minneapolis, and elsewhere. This is an incredible development. Even unions and locals that had become sclerotic through years of bland business unionism have turned out and have organized members to turn out to No Kings protests. And while what happened in Minneapolis was not a general strike, “it served as a starting line for new organizing efforts that can carry the movement forward on more than just momentum.” Additionally, calls for organizing around May Day 2026 drew serious attention from working-class folks in the U.S. Even if the May Day events were smaller than expected, the character and infrastructure initiated in their planning are significant. These are openings that we can’t dismiss as insufficient, even if they are insufficient. As the Tempest National Committee explains: “We can draw inspiration from the anti-ICE movement and commit to building the kind of sustained, ongoing organizing in workplaces, schools, and neighborhoods that will increase our capacity and power.”

Much of this organizing was and is being done by rank-and-file workers. But there is also a schism between these, what we might call, being unfortunately imprecise, politically or outwardly-directed organizing projects, and organizing at the point of production, in the workplace, whether the factory, the schoolhouse, the warehouse, etc. Joe Burns describes this phenomenon as “labor liberalism,” distinguishing it from business unionism, but the two are relatively compatible, especially in times of crisis.

This kind of organizing threatens to replace organizing workers at work and as workers—capable of threatening the capitalist pursuit of profitability by way of conscious stoppage—with organizing members to be mobilized outside the point of production, and at will, turned on and off like a faucet. A personal example: I’m a non-tenure instructor at Howard University. Over the past year, our SEIU local has invited us to national No Kings protests and anti-ICE actions, but they also swooped into our workplace during negotiations, refused to openly bargain, even though it was the will of the majority, and actively impeded our attempts to build solidarity with other university workers. What we won is a contract that, in the midst of crackdowns on academic freedom, ultimately invests the university administration with more power over our work and our jobs more generally.

As socialists grounded in and carrying forward the tradition of socialism from below, we know that to bring about real and meaningful change, we need not only bodies in the streets but also militant workers in all kinds of workplaces. Whatever the administration, whoever the leader, capital and the capitalist state can be compelled when workers threaten to raise costs.

Whatever the administration, whoever the leader, capital and the capitalist state can be compelled when workers threaten to raise costs.

At the national level, Tempest already houses a Labor Working Group (LWG), and local LWGs and Direct Action Working Groups exist in some branches. The national Education Working Group recently completed an education series on multiracial organizing, focusing on both unions and social movements. All of this work is necessary. Much of it is excellent. But we need to develop a more coherent and intentional project of worker education—one that unites Tempest’s national resources and expertise with the embeddedness of many of our members in their own unions and local labor movements more generally.

Some less-than-concrete ideas:

1) The creation of a pool of Tempest members and collaborators willing to write on organizing strategies and tactics and on various forms of disruption. Such writings could take the form of pamphlets, leaflets, or short articles for the website. And they could focus on more abstract or theoretical questions, historical examples of working-class action, or both.

1. A specific series of labor pamphlets, leaflets, or short articles that Tempest members can print, share with their union comrades (electronically or otherwise), hand out, or put up at work, etc. These could be thought of as a kind of Organizing 101 series. Whatever lessons are presented should be drawn out for a non-socialist audience, and there should be a persistent effort to connect past historical examples to present situations.
2. Tempest members who are involved in union struggles should be encouraged to write about their experiences, and those who have been involved in struggles past or who have some historical knowledge of these struggles, why they matter, and what lessons we can draw from them, should be encouraged to share their knowledge.

2) The development of educational materials that Tempest members can use in their unions: These materials could take the form of reading lists or syllabi, perhaps based around specific themes; pre-made but editable presentations or scripts for talks, especially on themes, lessons, or concepts that are applicable across different sectors of work; reading and study questions that Tempest members can use to facilitate reading and discussion groups in their unions; and the like.

3) A series of presentations, presentation scripts, education documents (pamphlets, articles, etc.), or reading/discussion group outlines that take up the hard work of actively building solidarity among working people the world over: These will provide an alternative to the kind of passive or reductive solidarity of the class reductionists, focusing on the necessity of fighting racism, standing up for immigrant workers, and building international solidarity not by ignoring oppression, but by actively fighting it.

4) A series of presentations, documents, etc. on the relationship between social movements and broader struggles against oppression and the labor movement.

5) The development of local labor schools or other educational infrastructures: These could host speakers from the collective as a whole—virtually or in person—even if the unions or sectors involved will differ depending on location, the embeddedness of Tempest members, etc.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: Bastian Greshake Tzovaras; modified by Tempest.

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On April 11 2026, union members from Los Angeles and San Diego crossed the border into Mexico to attend the first Crossborder Labor Summit (Encuentro Binacional) in Tijuana since the late 1990s, organized by the Casa Obrera de Baja California, and hosted by the Telephone Workers Union of Baja California and Sonora (SINDETEL).

Flyer for the April 11 2026 Crossborder Labor Summit.

In recent years, there has emerged an increasingly combative, independent, and organized labor movement in Mexico’s maquiladora industry. It has resulted in largescale wildcat strikes like those of Matamoros workers in 2019, as well as in independent union campaigns in more established industries. Within this context, Casas Obreras, labor organizing centers, emerged as leading hubs of activity in Mexico’s main industrial regions.

The Casas Obreras have been supporting independent, democratic unions that challenge the traditional top-down unionism that has characterized Mexican labor for decades. For example, in 2022 the Casa Obrera del Bajio helped coordinate the victory of the newly organized National Independent Auto Workers Union (SINTTIA) at General Motors in Silao, Guanajuato. In 2024, the Casa Obrera de Baja California, supported the campaign by Luxshare workers to unionize their factory, the first successful independent campaign in the region since 1998. Most recently, they helped the Supply Chain Transporters Union, (SITRABICS) win the right to represent cross-border truckers.

The April meeting in Tijuana created a place for union workers from Los Angeles and San Diego to meet union workers on the Mexican side and learn about labor issues that affect workers on both sides of the border. The event was kicked off with a welcoming message by the Casa Obrera providing a historic background of the Mexican labor movement and labor organizing in Tijuana’s maquiladora industry. Organizers with the Labor Solidarity Action Network (LSAN) opened with a message of solidarity and critical analysis of Trump’s attack on labor and our democratic rights in the US.

Los Angeles brought a contingent of members from the United Steelworkers (USW 675 and USW 137M), SEIU 721, and a few educators. In San Diego, LSAN and SEIU 221 coordinated to bring a large contingent of educators from AFT 1931, AFT1474, UAW 4811 and the CFA. Others came from the flight attendants union, healthcare workers, and state employees. Members of the Tempest Collective, Socialist Horizon, and the Zapatista-affiliated Congreso Nacional Indigena were also in attendance.

Eddie Contreras, a member of USW Local 675, and worker for Savage Infrastructure at the Marathon refinery in Wilmington, CA was also in attendance at the labor summit. He and his coworkers recently organized a union at that workplace and successfully negotiated a first contract. He was impressed by the turnout and saw opportunities for collaboration: “The workers can all learn from one another. Maybe there’s something we tried at my job that they might want to try. Maybe there’s something they tried that we can try at my job.”

Mexican unions in attendance included the SINDETEL, SINTTIA, SITRABICS, UNTA (app/gig workers) and SINDJA, the National Independent Democratic Agricultural Day Laborers Union. UNTA members shared recent organizing updates and some success organizing app and delivery workers. SINDJA members attended the congress to express solidarity and thanks for past support in their own unionization campaigns in the agricultural fields of San Quintin, Baja California.

Based on the testimonies from Mexican workers, we learned of the difficult organizing conditions at such factories as Prime Wheel in Tijuana, maker of aluminum and alloy wheel rims, where workers have been organizing for democratic union representation. Since 2024, workers have called for justice and investigations of the disappearance of Servando Salazar Cano, a worker at Prime Wheel who was leading a unionization campaign in the plant but who mysteriously disappeared in the factory and has never been seen again. His body hasn’t been found, either, and his widow has called on authorities to carry out forensic investigations and accountability.

Alarmingly, journalists, environmental activists, and labor organizers in Mexico are at high risk of violent retaliation or human rights violations for carrying out advocacy work. In recent months, workers at the Camino Rojo mine in Zacatecas denounced management’s negotiations with the Sinaloa cartel to harass and intimidate a unionization drive. Since the case broke, the mining sector, led by Canadian companies, has been under scrutiny for sabotaging union elections. Orla Mining, the parent company of Camino Rojo, was forced to fire top executives thanks to a rapid response clause negotiated in the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

During the first half of the meeting, workers from both sides spoke about union elections. During the second half of the meeting, attendees split into working groups to discuss a series of questions focused on the common interests of workers in Mexico and the US. Participants discussed campaigns where US-based unions could support Mexican unions leading the independent labor movement through boycotts, protests, or public pressure campaigns. All working groups agreed to continue coordinating these campaigns and to meet once a year at a similar summit to assess progress and collaboration.

Attendees at the Crossborder labor summit, April 2026.

At the end of the Labor Summit, many participants had discovered common ground and common workplace issues. Jordan Dearden, the First Vice President of USW Local 675, who works as an Instrument Technician at the PBF refinery in Torrance, CA, stated,

The issues we’re having north of the border are the same issues as south of the border. It’s not a border thing. It’s just where you are; you need safer working conditions, better benefits, you know, equal pay for equal work. The issues that we have as workers are the same.

He also pointed out the importance of organizing crossborder meetings at a time when the Trump Administration continues to divide workers with anti-immigrant racism: “I think anytime you’re able to meet and work on a grassroots level, that’s really what impacts. This is how we change things.”

Since the April meeting, organizers on both sides have continued to coordinate efforts and disseminate information about this initiative to labor networks in Tijuana, San Diego, and Los Angeles. In recent weeks, the focus has been on contract negotiations at the Luxshare plant in Tijuana, where in 2024 SINTTIA won the first independent union in the region since 1998. The Luxshare workers, Casa Obrera de Baja California, and its allies hope to continue the string of independent, democratic, union victories.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: Héctor Rivera and Hannah M; modified by Tempest.

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As the Tempest editors were preparing this article for publication, the Russian state designated those associated with the website Posle as a “foreign agent.” Russia’s “foreign agent” law is highly repressive, and places the editors at significant risk of criminal prosecution and other threats to their basic civil rights. Russia’s law is a model of what Human Rights Watch has identified as a critical tool in the authoritarian playbook. “The primary target of these laws are civil society and media organizations” whose activities are “aimed at influencing public policy…[and] organizing public debates, events, rallies and demonstrations.” Thus, among other purported sins, the Putin regime has based its decision on Posle’s alleged “promotion” of “LGBT relationships”. This is part of a broader attack on democratic rights internationally. It has its own parallels in the U.S., as the authoritarian creep has been escalated by Trump. Tempest stands in unconditional solidarity with Posle and its editors. We see in Posle fellow “agents”, not of any state, but of a democratic project of international solidarity which is the antidote to a future of unbridled capitalist barbarism. 

Ashley Smith: The U.S. and Israel have expanded their joint genocidal war on Gaza into Lebanon and Iran. They expected a quick victory, but it has turned into yet another disastrous forever war. The Iranian regime has launched asymmetrical warfare; it has struck the region’s oil infrastructure, shut down the Strait of Hormuz, and thereby disrupted the flow not only of oil but also petrochemicals, fertilizers, and helium, which is essential for the manufacture of microchips. While stagflation threatens every corner of the world economy, it appears that Russia has benefited from the war: President Trump has lowered sanctions on Russia oil and increased fossil fuel prices have poured profits into Putin’s coffers. Is this an accurate assessment? What impact is this having on the Russian economy?

Posle: Indeed, in the short term, Russia has benefited from the surge in oil prices and lifting of sanctions. For example, Russian budget revenues from oil exports in April doubled compared to March. However, these additional revenues are not enough to halt the catastrophic rise in the budget deficit (for instance, the deficit currently stands at 2.5%, exceeding the government’s planned threshold of 1.6% for this year).  This has a  negative, knock-on impact on other government spending and the strength of the rouble.This adds further pressure on the creaky financial system.

Furthermore, almost all of the windfall profits were channeled to oil companies to modernise infrastructure (which has been severely damaged by effective attacks from Ukrainian missiles). It is worth noting that Ukraine’s attacks targeting oil refineries and oil loading terminals have seriously undermined Russia’s ability to export raw materials. In recent months, ports on the Baltic Sea, for instance, have reduced oil shipments by a third.

At the same time, a sustained increase in oil prices will inevitably lead to a decline in global oil consumption, which could seriously damage the Russian economy that is already in recession. Therefore, the ongoing war in Iran and the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz are not in Russia’s economic interests, although they undoubtedly offer it political advantages.

AS: Trump’s war on Iran has further disrupted the so-called rules based order, already discredited by the U.S. and Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and Russia’s imperialist war on Ukraine. Trump launched the attack on Tehran without consulting or even alerting Washington’s NATO allies. Now that alliance is fraying with Trump increasingly threatening to pull U.S. troops out and abandoning support for Ukraine. As a result, Europe, especially Germany, is rapidly re-arming. Given this reality, what do you believe is the current perspective of the Putin regime regarding the inter-imperial rivalry within Europe, and that between NATO and Russia, and Ukraine’s struggle for self-determination?

Posle: In fact, declining support for Ukraine in the U.S. and America’s further distancing from European security issues due to the war in Iran represent Putin’s main political gain to date. In this sense, it is clear how the interests of Russia and its population (suffering from a falling standard of living and intensifying missile attacks) diverge sharply from those of Putin and his regime, which is prepared to prolong the conflict in order to achieve its geopolitical ambitions. These objectives include crushing Ukrainian resistance (at the cost of tens of thousands of Russian soldiers’ lives) and destabilising Europe in order to expand his influence across the post-Soviet space and in Eastern Europe.

Currently, the situation around Armenia is escalating, where President Pashinyan is seeking to gradually withdraw the country from the CSTO (a pro-Russian military bloc) and strengthen cooperation with the EU. Tensions are also rising with the Baltic states, which are becoming increasingly targeted by Russian military sabotage. All these developments are of great significance to Putin, as they raise questions about the reality of NATO’s support for its members and allies.

If aggression against Iran escalates, the U.S. will continue to rapidly reduce its presence in Europe, and NATO risks turning into a “paper tiger,” whose members’ mutual commitments are worthless. It is clear that these challenges not only lead to the remilitarisation of Germany, but also call into question the entire ideological model of the German state, built upon the trauma of Nazi militarism and the colossal sacrifices of the Second World War. All these values are threatened today, as demonstrated by the growing support for the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which has effectively become the country’s most popular party.

In these circumstances, the German Left must certainly fight against the danger of fascism and militarisation, but not by ignoring the Russian threat facing Eastern European countries. On the contrary, only consistent support for Ukraine can curb the ambitions of Putin’s regime and, consequently, the need for Germany’s remilitarisation, which ultimately plays into the hands of the far right.

AS: In another development that impacts Russia, voters kicked out Victor Orbán after 16 years of his increasingly authoritarian rule in Hungary. He was an ally of Putin who had blocked the EU’s $106 billion loan package to Ukraine. What is the significance of Orbán’s defeat for the Putin regime?

Posle: This is certainly a serious setback for the Kremlin, as Orbán served as its chief agent within the EU. Today, the only country remaining in this role is Slovakia, which is led by the right-wing populist Robert Fico. He, like Orbán, holds anti-Ukrainian views and is focused on securing supplies of cheap Russian gas. This model of Russian influence clearly demonstrates how the Kremlin has turned energy supplies into a powerful political weapon that it will continue to wield against other European countries.

Orbán’s defeat resulted from the fatigue of Hungarians (and particularly the youth) with his corrupt and authoritarian rule; however, it does not, in our view, signal the beginning of the end for far-right populists on a pan-European scale. On the contrary, this trend continues to gain momentum, and the Kremlin is placing its main bets on it – including in countries such as Germany and France.

AS: The war in Iran will also impact Russia and China, both of whom have supported Tehran in various ways. With oil supplies disrupted by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, will China turn more to Russia for its oil and natural gas supplies? What will this do to their so-called “friendship without limits”? What will their policies be toward Iran? How will this scenario impact Russia and China’s rivalry with the U.S. and Europe?

Posle: The loss of Iran as a reliable oil provider (as was previously the case with Venezuela) has indeed made China more dependent on Russian supplies. Furthermore, the failure of “Operation Epic Fury” in Iran has highlighted the vulnerability of U.S. military power. Nevertheless, a distinctive feature of Putin’s position remains his efforts to develop a bilateral dialogue with Trump, despite his “friendship” with China. It is telling that Russian diplomacy, whilst repeatedly condemning the “war started by the U.S. and Israel,” has emphasised “Russia’s commitment to providing goodwill services to the parties.”

Putin and other Kremlin officials have consistently stressed that, despite its alliance with Iran, Russia is distancing itself from the conflict and prefers to play the role of mediator. Just recently, Putin repeated his proposal to transfer enriched uranium from Iran to Russia. It appears that following the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, Russia is not ready to become seriously involved in conflicts in the Middle East and is seeking to focus on Ukraine and European affairs.

AS: What is the impact of these inter-imperial and macro-economic dynamics on Russia’s ability to continue its invasion of Ukraine?

Posle: Almost five years of war in Ukraine have severely undermined Russia’s economic and human resources, but this has not yet affected Putin’s desire to “achieve the objectives of the special military operation” at any cost. Recently, Kremlin spokesperson Peskov stated that the withdrawal of the Ukrainian army from the Donetsk region is not a matter for possible negotiations with Kyiv, but a precondition for them.

In other words, once Ukraine voluntarily cedes part of its territory, further demands are likely to be made. It is clear that the Kremlin is not interested in a ceasefire and is planning a major offensive in the Donbas this summer and fall. The aim of this offensive is not only military but also political – it is necessary to convince Trump that Russia continues to dominate on the battlefield, and therefore the U.S. must increase pressure on Kyiv, forcing it to accept the Kremlin’s terms.

Putin’s plan clearly highlights a conflict between his personal ambitions and the interests of the Russian people. The Russian army’s losses on the front line have reached their highest level this year – for example, in the second half of April alone, around 4,500 soldiers were killed (in total, at least 350,000 Russians have died over the five years of the war). The number of civilian casualties is also rising due to Ukrainian missile strikes on military and energy infrastructure (though this is completely incomparable to the casualties of Russian strikes on Ukrainian cities).

Ordinary Russians are paying this price for Putin’s desire to tell Trump about his army’s advance of a few dozen square kilometres. The gap between the perception of the war in the Kremlin and among ordinary people keeps growing rapidly.

Ordinary Russians are paying this price for Putin’s desire to tell Trump about his army’s advance of a few dozen square kilometres. The gap between the perception of the war in the Kremlin and among ordinary people keeps growing rapidly.

AS: Now, let’s turn to the domestic impact of all this in Russia. Ukraine has persisted in resisting Russia’s invasion and is militarily striking increasingly deep into Russia. As a result, Russian casualties have mounted at what appear to be an escalated rate during the recent spring offensive. Meanwhile, due to sanctions, and the dynamics of the war economy generally, economic conditions have worsened. There are signs of increasing dissent, expressed in a deflected way by quisling politicians and influencers. What is the domestic political situation in Russia? What should we make of the various expressions of discontent by public figures? Is this a sign of mass discontent developing among workers and the oppressed within Russia? How stable is the Putin regime?

Posle: Indeed, the first half of 2026 was marked by rising inflation and a fall in living standards. It is fair to say that the effect of the “military Keynesianism” associated with the sharp rise in public spending at the beginning of the war has now run its course. Even according to government forecasts, inflation this year will stand at 5.2 percent, whilst wages will rise by 2 percent. At the same time, the Kremlin intends to offset the growing budget deficit, as mentioned before, by increasing taxes on small businesses, as well as by cutting welfare programmes and infrastructure projects.

Against this backdrop, earlier this year, the Russian authorities took entirely unprecedented measures to restrict access to the internet in the country. Specifically, they attempted to block Telegram (used by 105 million Russians – that is, the majority of the population) and VPNs (used by around 40% of Russians to bypass blocks on Instagram, YouTube and other platforms). Furthermore, in Moscow and other major Russian cities, wireless internet was frequently cut off entirely, causing immense damage to the economy and resulting in a dramatic increase in cash withdrawals from banks.

Behind all these measures, which have provoked widespread discontent, stands the Federal Security Service with its “sovereign internet” project, entirely controlled by the authorities. The official reason for all these restrictions, according to the authorities, is to prevent attacks by Ukrainian drones, a claim that seems highly implausible given that the increase in internet restrictions has coincided with an intensification of Ukrainian strikes. A mood prevails in the country that those in power are preoccupied solely with their own war and constant prohibitions, and are not interested in how ordinary people live.

These sentiments were further fuelled, in particular, by government attempts to cover up an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease among cattle in Siberia and other regions. This move was prompted by the fact that Russia remains a significant international meat exporter. As a result, the Russian authorities seized and slaughtered tens of thousands of cattle and pigs belonging to farmers without any explanation or compensation for the damage. In several cases, this has already led to direct clashes between the police and rural communities. Nevertheless, to date, countries such as China and the U.S. have effectively acknowledged the existence of this dangerous epidemic in Russia, which will inevitably lead to a ban of Russian meat exports.

All these factors are clearly leading to a loss of trust in the authorities and increasing discontent. However, by now, any possibility of legally expressing any dissent has been completely eradicated in Russia. For example, young activists who tried to organize a protest against the shutdown of Telegram, as well as dozens of farmers attempting to protect their cattle from slaughter, have been arrested and subjected to heavy police pressure.

Increased repression and government attempts to restrict the flow of information are an answer to the growing discontent. Whereas previously the regime largely enjoyed legitimacy among the population as a guardian of the stability of everyday life, it now relies more and more on fear of the police and secret services. In this sense, Putin may be moving towards the Iranian model, where a regime that does not enjoy the support of the majority retains power through violence.

As for the mood among the political and business elite, they are, of course, dissatisfied with the endless continuation of the war, the economic downturn, internet restrictions, and the growing power of the security services. However, contrary to the rumours being spread by a range of Western media outlets, there is not a conspiracy brewing against Putin.

Whereas previously the regime largely enjoyed legitimacy among the population as a guardian of the stability of everyday life, it now relies more and more on fear of the police and secret services. In this sense, Putin may be moving towards the Iranian model, where a regime that does not enjoy the support of the majority retains power through violence.

This is the case for a few reasons. First, the fear of repression among the elite makes them divided and suspicious. It is worth recalling that over the past year, the number of arrests of government officials has risen sharply: dozens of employees of the Ministry of Defence (including several former deputies to Minister Sergei Shoigu) have been arrested, as well as representatives of other departments. In 2024, Transport Minister Roman Starovoit committed suicide due to the threat of arrest, whilst Deputy Minister of Natural Resources Denis Butsaev fled to the US. Several prominent businessmen suspected of political disloyalty have lost their property and their freedom (for example, this happened to Vadim Moshkovich, the owner of one of the country’s largest agricultural companies).

Second, the agenda and prospects of such a conspiracy are unclear in the current circumstances, as this elite has no common clear vision of an alternative foreign policy direction or conditions for ending the war. It also does not possess any legitimacy in the eyes of the population.

Finally, Putin’s disappearance could trigger large-scale conflicts within the Russian elite over control of property. Having destroyed all the country’s political institutions over the 25 years of his rule, Putin himself has become the sole factor maintaining a relative balance of interests within the ruling class. And that is why the elite fears his departure more than the continuation of his destructive military adventures.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: ARTIST NAME; modified by Tempest.

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Sandra “Sister” Hunter Reed, a decades-long activist and death penalty abolitionist, passed away on April 18, 2026, in Bastrop, TX, where she was born. Sandra was the mother of six sons, the most well-known of whom is Rodney Reed, wrongfully-convicted and incarcerated on Texas’ death row since 1998. Sandra organized for decades to win her son’s freedom and for an end to the death penalty, a leader on the front lines in the state she described as the “belly of the beast.”

Rodney was convicted of the 1996 rape and murder of Stacey Stites in Bastrop despite overwhelming evidence of his innocence. Engaged to a police officer, Stacey was in a relationship with Rodney, who is Black; Stacey’s fiancée was an open racist who knew about their relationship. Yet prosecutors hammered at the racist assumption that Rodney’s relationship with Stacy, who was white, must have been nonconsensual. This claim was offered as the sole “evidence” in the crime and Rodney was convicted by an all-white jury and sentenced to death.

From left to right, Walter Reed, now deceased, the father of Rodney Reed (center), and Sandra Reed.

Rodney’s conviction—and the implementation of the death penalty in the U.S. today—echoes the era of Southern lynchings and a so-called justice system that denies justice for Black people and people of color. “Until a person is in our place, you can’t really describe it,” Sandra said in an interview. “It’s a hard pill to swallow—the corruption and injustice that’s dwelling in my son’s case.” Despite this, Sandra said that “Rodney’s handling things very well—he’s remaining strong for himself. The truth keeps us all strong and believing that justice will prevail.”

George W. Bush and Rick Perry—both former governors—built their national profiles on “tough on crime” agendas, including accelerating the pace of executions at a brutal rate. Texas’ death row today, although less busy than under Bush and Perry, retains a barbaric track record: exactly 600 people have been executed since the death penalty was reinstated in 1982, and 59 percent of those on death row are people of color. Black people are 12 percent of the state’s population yet make up over 40 percent of the executed.

In the face of this overwhelming opposition, Sandra was an unceasing activist and brought many into the movement. She began organizing with the Austin chapter of the national Campaign to End the Death Penalty (CEDP) in 1999. She later joined the CEDP’s national board, serving alongside other abolitionists including exonerees Yusef Salaam of the formerly-known Central Park 5, and Shuja’a Graham, exonerated from California’s death row,

In a statement shared at her memorial service, Lily Hughes, a former national director of the Campaign to End the Penalty based in Austin, TX, reflected on the joys of Sandra’s friendship and the work they shared for close to three decades:

Sandra was a fierce advocate for Rodney and for so many other wrongfully convicted death row prisoners and victims of the criminal “injustice system.” She spoke at rallies, marches, meetings, and conventions in Texas and all over the country. She was a powerful voice in the abolition movement.

Sandra was so brave. She hated flying, but still she flew around the country to speak out. She disliked the limelight, yet she spoke in front of huge crowds of people. When she took the podium, she commanded the attention of all with her Grace and passion.

Sandra was so loving and supportive to her family, friends, and fellow activists. She welcomed everyone into the movement, into her community and into her home with open arms.

The campaign for Rodney has been a very long, hard road. He and his family suffered the torture of three scheduled execution dates. He has fought for many years for DNA testing of the murder weapon, a leather belt used to strangle Stacey Stites. Despite finally winning a favorable ruling with the U,S. Supreme Court in 2023, when the Court ordered the evidence to be tested, the state of Texas continued to block Rodney’s request, shifting the goal posts to argue against DNA testing on new grounds. Rodney once again fought for his case to be heard by the highest court but in March of this year, just weeks before Sandra’s death, the Supreme Court dealt his case a major blow when it refused to hear his latest appeal.

Sandra was so well-loved for her warmth, humor and generosity, and for her ongoing activism despite serious health problems in later years; her passing leaves a hole not easily filled. She was a crucial voice in shining a light on the realities of criminal “justice” in the rural South and for keeping the movement for social justice at the center. In 2009, standing alongside exonerees and family members, she joined historian Howard Zinn and writer Dave Zirin onstage at the University of Chicago for the CEDP’s national convention. “I’m in this fight for life,” she declared to the over 1,000 audience members.

Because of Sandra, many others made that same commitment. She will be in our hearts always. Sandra Reed presente!

How to support Rodney Reed:

Rodney urgently needs movement support to stop his execution from moving forward and to finally free him from decades behind bars. With the recent Supreme Court ruling against him, the way is clear for Texas to set another execution date. Please take some of these steps to join this fight:

• Sign and share the petition
• Follow the Reed Justice Initiative for updates and actions.
• Watch and share the documentary State vs Reed streaming on YouTube
• Across the country, the pace of executions has begun to pick up after a period of decline. Donald Trump is a strong supporter of capital punishment, potentially threatening those on federal and military death rows. Find out about and support ongoing campaigns including Rodney’s at Death Penalty Action.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: ARTIST NAME; modified by Tempest.

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A stabbing is an intimate kind of violence. It is physical and deliberate, requiring proximity and often, the touch of skin against skin. So, when University of Washington student Juniper Blessing, a young transgender woman, was stabbed 40 times and left in an apartment complex laundry room to die, there is no doubt her killer, motivated by the toxic mixture of hatred and shame, felt life slip from her precious body.

Intimate violence cannot be separated from the violence mediated through the state. This is not a mechanical process, however, and state policy does not directly produce interpersonal harm. Still, the terms set by the state, the violence it permits and condones, define the boundaries of what becomes possible. One flows from the other.

Juniper was murdered just days before the Trump administration issued sweeping grand jury subpoenas to hospitals across the U.S., including NYU Langone, for providing what it calls “sex-rejecting” procedures. As S. Baum has reported, these subpoenas are unprecedented in scope. They demand patient-identifying information, parental consent forms, employee records, and target doctors, nurses, billing staff, administrators, and even volunteers in an effort to intimidate and criminalize the provision of care.

Juniper was not a trans minor. At nineteen (that arbitrary marker), she had survived childhood by a single year, achieving what the state increasingly seeks to prevent. For that defiant act of claiming trans personhood, her life was taken.

She had survived childhood by a single year… For that defiant act of claiming trans personhood, her life was taken.

There is no end to state violence; there is no limit to what the state will do to preserve corporate profits, stabilize the position of those in power, and, at present, shore up its authoritarian rule. One of its most enduring expressions of that effort is the systematic withdrawal from collective care.

Even before the Trump administration took power, the U.S. health care system was already in crisis and failing to meet basic needs. Decades of neoliberal policy have hollowed out public health infrastructure, privatized care, and priced many out of access to care altogether. This is a system that sorts people into categories of the deserving and the disposable. Producing a hierarchical matrix based on race, immigration status, religion, gender, and sexuality, it tells us that some bodies are worthy of care and others are not. Transness is now central to this ideological taxonomy.

This is a system that sorts people into categories of the deserving and the disposable… Transness is now central to this ideological taxonomy.

MAGA pundits recognize the widespread anger and dissatisfaction with the health care system, but they have redirected that ire away from insurance executives and hospital administrators, obscuring the steady erosion of health care as a public good. This displaced blame requires a scapegoat, and so a fraudulent narrative about a supposed transgender industrial complex where reckless health professionals manipulate children into receiving gender-affirming care emerges as the Right’s justification for systemic neglect.

This right-wing narrative is strategic and false. Gender-affirming care represents a tiny fraction of health care spending, and for many trans people, access to that care requires enormous sacrifice. Even after navigating a bureaucratic labyrinth of insurance, those who pursue medical transition are often saddled with untenable debt. Nevertheless, the narrative is mobilized to divert public anger away from state abandonment, the systemic withdrawal of resources for public goods, and toward a manufactured enemy.

Because the health sector has been a consistent site of resistance to neoliberal austerity, anti-trans attacks are also about disciplining health workers. Major work stoppages have occurred across the industry, including a 301-day strike at St. Vincent Hospital in Worcester, MA (2021), a Minnesota Nurses Association strike involving 15,000 workers (2022), a 75,000-member Kaiser Permanente strike across six states (2023), and a New York State Nurses Association strike involving 15,000 workers (2026). In fact, more than 100 nursing strikes have occurred between 2020 and 2026, involving at least 127 hospitals nationwide. Issuing subpoenas, passing legislation, and wielding threats of prosecution, the state seeks to break the relationship between patients and caregivers and to prevent broader demands for a more just and universal health system.

It is here that the entanglement of state violence and intimate violence is revealed. A state that declares trans youth should not exist, a state that undermines their care, and criminalizes their parents and providers, sets the terms for which lives are considered deserving and which become disposable. In a process that marks trans life as illegitimate, state disavowal grants permission, giving a wink and a nod to the Right’s vigilante terror.

As details about Juniper’s killer emerge, we may find that he does not neatly fit within the category of the Right. But even so, the residue of the Right’s vicious anti-gender politics continues to circulate, influencing the thinking of those even beyond the MAGA faithful. In fact, early reports suggest Juniper’s killer was stalking several women, both cis and trans, which also illustrates the way transmisogyny extends beyond trans women endangering cisgender women as well.

The same logic that seeks to prevent trans children from becoming trans adults leaves those adults vulnerable to unspeakable violence.

While we cannot claim that MAGA’s anti-gender movement murdered Juniper in a direct or immediate way, the regulation of trans youth, the effort to prevent transition, to surveil families, to criminalize care, also produces a world in which trans adulthood becomes precarious and exposed. The same logic that seeks to prevent trans children from becoming trans adults leaves those adults vulnerable to unspeakable violence.

If we want to confront this violence, we cannot see gender politics as separate from the wider resistance to Trumpism and the authoritarian Right. The same system that withdraws support, that redirects tax dollars from care infrastructures and towards militarization and war, creates the conditions for gendered violence. Indeed, the contemporary anti-trans turn is in many ways a reactionary political response to neoliberal crisis, mobilizing gender discipline to stabilize social reproduction, redirect economic grievance, and legitimate continued disinvestment in collective care. In this moment, gender violence functions as a coercive tool where a withered social safety net has driven a return to rigid gender norms. When the state abdicates responsibility, the family must fulfill the remaining need.

As news of Juniper’s death continues to move across the media landscape, they will simultaneously be portrayed as villain and victim, as an object of pity and a figure of blame. These are abstractions. In reality, trans individuals are ordinary people navigating a brutal and precarious moment, often with an extraordinary level of poise and restraint. Comrades, we need you. Juniper needs you.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”

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Europe’s far right is on the rise. Right-wing populist movements have recently undergone an exponential growth in public support and a systematic rise to power within mainstream political platforms, securing about 25 percent of seats in the European parliament in 2024 (European Parliament, 2024). Despite their promotion of traditionalist views of gender and active opposition of feminism and “gender ideology,” right-wing conservative parties across Europe have been relying on a paradoxical weaponization of feminist ideas to defend the supposed superiority of Western values and target migrant communities (Vieten, 2025). This selective invocation of women’s rights, used to ostracize and alienate ethnic and religious minorities, was conceptualized by British sociologist Sara Farris as “femonationalism” (Farris, 2017). Farris argues that femonationalism reinforces negative stereotypes about Muslim immigrants and informs policies and laws, leading to systematic discrimination and hostility towards these communities that become a target for a hate campaign.

The Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), a political party founded in 2013, has become one of the most influential forces in contemporary German politics, despite being officially categorized as “right-wing extremist” in a report issued by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Notably, the AfD has one of the lowest proportions of female membership compared to its opponents, yet women still hold positions of power where they enjoy a certain degree of visibility and renown in its public image and political communication. This paradox raises a central question: How does the AfD actively shape the boundaries of women’s political representation while advancing anti-feminist and anti-immigrant agendas? More specifically, how does gender function as an integral element of the party’s nationalist project rather than a contradiction to it? The concept of femonationalism illuminates how the selective invocation of women’s rights becomes a mechanism for legitimizing xenophobic and exclusionary policies.

The stakes here are high. Populist far-right groups in Western Europe have been able to attain an enormous amount of power and political capital in recent years. Germany’s AfD has gained immense public support during the 2025 national elections, becoming the second-largest political force in the country. This marks a significant shift that suggests a resurging normalization of right-wing populism within the country’s parliamentary politics (Arzheimer, 2015). According to a 2025 report, the share of women among political party members in Germany as of December 2021 varied by party, with the Green Party having the highest number of female members at roughly 42 percent, followed by 37 percent in the Left party and 33 percent in the SPD (Statista, 2025). The AfD share of female members was the lowest at only 18.7 percent. Despite this severe gender imbalance, women continue to be strongly featured at the forefront of the AfD’s public image, embroidering a perceived sense of progress that sharply contradicts the party’s conservative agenda. Porzycki (2025) argues that radical-right parties often use their female members and leaders to portray themselves as modern and moderate in the public eye, a method that is commonly referred to as strategic image management. Yet at the heart of this strategy, there lies a clear irony: While women in the AfD are enabled and encouraged to acquire positions of power within the public political sphere, their presence in these spaces is leveraged to advance anti-feminist agendas. These women typically target female voters by appealing to their concerns about issues of safety and protection. As showcased by the concept of “the heartland” in populist German politics, radical-right parties equally appeal to nationalist fervor through a carefully curated vision of Germany that is partially fueled by a chronic idealization of the country’s problematic past (Porzycki et al., 2025), dismissing the inflammatory nature of such an ideal in the context of a “post-nazi” Germany.

As a language that makes it easy to create compound words, German has a surplus of derogatory terms used to refer to migrants and asylum seekers of ethnic descent. Terms like Überfremdung (Over-foreignization), Asylkriminalität (Asylum Criminality), Schuldkult (Cult of Guilt), and Parallelgesellschaften (Parallel Societies) are often used in political and online discourse to dehumanize migrants, criticize the nation’s culture of memory/remembrance, and generate panic within German society, thus creating further polarization in both official and unofficial public opinion. In fact, this misleading and offensive manipulation of language occurs so often that there is a German linguistic initiative that annually selects a word or a phrase deemed inappropriate and commonly misused, in order to raise awareness about inflammatory language posing a threat to democracy and human dignity. Unwort des Jahres (Non-word of the year) dates back to 1991, the year it was launched to draw attention to questionable use of loaded vernacular. In response to the resurgence of Germany’s far right, numerous “Unwörter” selected by the Unwort des Jahres’s independent panel have been linked to political actors such as the AfD, whose frequent use of populist neo-nazi lingo has left its permanent trace on contemporary trends in German slang. In 2024, Biodeutsch (Bio-German) was named “non-word” of the year, referring to people with German citizenship who do not have an ethnic German background. This further illustrates the importance of language in political discourse, particularly in the context of political mobilization. As exemplified by the German far right, language possesses a transformative capacity, enabling the establishment of a normalization of narratives previously considered extremist (Zajak et al., 2025).

The AfD utilizes a racialized ideal image of the “emancipated white woman” to frame Muslim women as inherently oppressed, unfree, and therefore incompatible with German society.

Doerr (2021) empirically investigates the construction of migrant Muslim communities as a “threat” to German society and to the supposed homogeneity of its native culture. The study emphasizes the role of the AfD in propagating a stereotypical image about these communities through physical street advertisements, digital platforms, mobile displays, and both national parliament elections and state-level campaigns. Doerr essentially argues that the AfD utilizes a racialized ideal image of the “emancipated white woman” to frame Muslim women as inherently oppressed, unfree, and therefore incompatible with German society. A primary example of this is the 2017 AfD campaign poster which exhibited an image of three white women in bikinis, accompanied by a slogan that reads: “Burkas? Wir steh’n auf Bikinis (Burkas? We prefer bikinis)” (Doerr, 2021). While the bikini is meant to symbolize freedom of choice and self-determination, Doerr (2021) argues that the AfD deploys a sexualizing chauvinistic male gaze that partially targets young male voters, portraying German women as governable subjects in need of protection from the likely dangers of Muslim invasion. Similar patterns emerge when we analyze speeches and press releases from the party, as its members consistently claim exclusive ownership of women’s rights and leverage gendered issues of public safety to amass voters and public supporters.

Women as victims of migration

One of the most assertively direct iterations of femonationalist ways of arguing is evident in Alice Weidel’s October 2025 press release titled: “More and more women live in fear—The AfD is ready to restore security” (Alternative für Deutschland, 2025). The title itself claims a causal chain before presenting any empirical data to support such a fallacious assertion: German women are unsafe in the public sphere and only the AfD is capable of reimposing order and security. Weidel states, “More than half of all women in Germany no longer feel safe in public spaces. This alarming figure from the representative Civey survey is further proof of the government’s failure in migration and security policy.” This statement proceeds without delay to pin the blame of a security issue on a particular ethnic minority: Syrians. She continues, “As the Federal Ministry of the Interior had to admit, between 2015 and 2024, according to official data, 135,668 Germans were victims of crimes committed by Syrian suspects.” The juxtaposition of women’s nocturnal fear with failure in border policy lacks empirical support from scholarly research. The primary objective of such a statement, however, is to evoke emotional responses rather than logical reasoning. According to Farris’s framework, this is a classic femonationalist move, as it reduces women to a quantifiable populace of nationalist subjects whose survival ostensibly counts on the AfD’s electoral victory. Weidel specifies that “the ones who suffer most are especially young women and children, who are often defenselessly exposed to violent assaults” (Alternative für Deutschland, 2025). Such word choices perform a crucial role, as they highlight the vulnerability of German women in the face of a persistent influx of migrants who are, in the eyes of Weidel and her fellow party members, the sole perpetrators and aggressors against such a precarious demographic. At the same time, these outlandish claims carry out the ideological work of concealing migrant and racialized women from the AfD’s ostensibly feminist narrative on women’s public safety issues. In a manner that can only be described as dehumanizing, these women are deemed unworthy of protection or dignity. The only presence that the ethnic/racialised woman is allowed in the AfD’s official pseudo-feminist discourse is one where she is depicted as a rhetorical device or an object with no agency, used only to advance the party’s xenophobic and racist agenda.

The AfD’s selective protective paternalistic narrative is deeply rooted in Samuel Huntington’s post-cold war “clash of civilizations” theory, which was subsequently adopted by contemporary political figures like Thilo Sarrazin whose essentialist views on migration and social integration have consistently contributed to the normalization of such exclusionary discourse within mainstream politics (Sprengholz, 2021). This view promotes a rigid concept of cultural identity, which is ultimately weaponized to exclude migrant communities deemed ‘incompatible’ with the host culture. Within this theoretical structure, gender is once again weaponized under the assumption that German society has already achieved absolute gender equality, thus instrumentalizing this flawed premise to draw racialized boundaries of citizenship and belonging that exclude all non-white Germans. The paradox herein is clear as day: Whereas anti-migration policies are presented as effective solutions to a gender-related issue, they often exacerbate gender inequalities by aggravating socioeconomic vulnerabilities among migrant women, with little regard to the consequences of such laws against non-constituent, non-white, non-Western —mostly Muslim—women.

Whereas anti-migration policies are presented as effective solutions to a gender-related issue, they often exacerbate gender inequalities by aggravating socioeconomic vulnerabilities among migrant women, with little regard to the consequences of such laws against non-constituent, non-white, non-Western —mostly Muslim—women.

This sentiment is reverberated in one of Alice Weidel’s most controversial press statements as she states: “The alarming scale and the high proportion of foreign suspects in sexual offenses against women are a warning signal. Since the Union opened the gates in 2015, especially to men from societies shaped by archaic and misogynistic norms, women have become fair game” (Weidel, 2024). The language used in this context is extremely offensive and dehumanizing, as the term Freiwild in German implies that women have been left unprotected and “available” for harassment and sexual violence due to the absence of stringent border measures. This kind of alarmist and sensitive language aligns with the AfD’s broader strategy of appropriating feminist rhetoric in the Bundestag —the federal parliament of Germany—to conceal its anti-feminist position and divert the public’s attention from its own conservative and traditionalist views of gender (Sprengholz, 2021). Analogously, internal conflicts within the AfD regarding the party’s stance on homosexuality are omitted from official statements (Arzheimer, 2015).

The racialization of sexism and male violence

The phrase “men from societies shaped by archaic and misogynistic norms” (Weidel, 2024) betrays a form of cultural essentialism that homogenizes entire societies and depicts them as inherently regressive and backwards, thus establishing a civilization hierarchy placing German culture and people above racialized migrant men and their cultures. In 2018, Alice Weidel used the term Messermänner auf Sozialhilfe or “Knife-wielding men on welfare” in reference to high-profile knife crimes that the country has witnessed, calling for waves of mass deportations of asylum seekers and refugees. In media coverage of stabbing crimes in Germany, systematic regularities seem to be permanently present across different outlets as reporting often emphasizes the ethnic background/origin of the perpetrators, thus constructing alarmist narratives that villainize and alienate migrant communities.

Similarly, AfD board member Dennis Hohloch claimed that “multiculturalism means a loss of traditions, a loss of identity, a loss of home, murder, killing, robbery and gang rape” (Baumgärtner et al., 2025). Scrinzi (2023) refers to a political and social process called “the racialization of sexism” through which misogyny is ascribed to racialized migrant communities and is therefore externalized and treated as an issue of foreign origins. While predominantly employed by right-wing political actors, racialized gender-based framings have also been passively endorsed by left-wing movements and secular groups. In France, for instance, the movement Ni Putes Ni Soumises (Neither Whores Nor Subaltern), dubbed progressive, played a crucial role in detaching gender-based violence from “middle-class white masculinity” (Scrinzi, 2023, p. 48). Despite it being spearheaded by French women of North African origins, the movement’s framing of sexual violence against women as a problem associated with Islam and the nation’s immigrant population greatly helped construct a narrative positioning racialized men as the hypersexualized aggressors of white women and the inherent oppressors of racialized women (Scrinzi, 2023, p. 49). Such accounts revive the ideological frameworks that colonial powers once used to rationalize territorial conquest and economic extraction of goods from the Global South. By failing to address gendered suburban violence as a multifaceted systemic issue and choosing to pathologize Islam instead, the Ni Putes Ni Soumises movement engages in a form of “carceral feminism” used by the republic to justify state racism and fortify the racist apparatus of the prison-industrial complex. The NPNS’s call for banning the veil is a prominent example of how femonationalist movements, emerging from Western feminisms, often reproduce racist and neoliberal narratives that either victimize or pathologize Muslim women (Farris, 2017, p. 62).

Far-right pro-natalism and women as “breeding machines”

The racialization of sexism constitutes a key element of the AfD’s populist mobilization strategy, which allows it to adopt a feminism that claims to protect German women while actively supporting policies that undermine their basic rights, such as access to abortion. This dynamic is closely intertwined with far-right pro-natalist rhetoric, which treats women’s bodies as reproductive tools tasked with “resisting” demographic change that is seen as a direct consequence of migration, thereby reducing women to agents of national preservation rather than autonomous rights-bearing individuals.

A 2017 campaign poster for the AfD made a huge commotion nationwide due to its disturbing message; The poster features the image of a pregnant white woman lying in a field of flowers with a bold-fonted caption that reads: “Neue Deutsche? Machen wir selber (More Germans? We’ll make them ourselves).” Critics have argued that this slogan was entrenched in the xenophobic nativist rhetoric, which deliberately excludes racialized communities from Germany’s national fabric. However, few were able to point out the misogynistic undertones hidden in plain sight. Such language and imagery exposes a pattern within populist right-wing politics that reveals a strong commitment to a pro-natalism that treats women as “breeding machines” for the “right” kind of citizens.

AfD politician Mariana Harder-Kühnel shared an official statement as a response to the German government’s 2024 family report, criticizing its failure to address “a long-known demographic crisis” and its reverberations on the skilled-labor market which has been witnessing a severe shortage of domestic workers (Alternative für Deutschland, 2024). Harder-Kühnel argues in favor of kontrollierten Bevölkerungsentwicklung liegen (controlled population development), presenting it as a more potent cure for the country’s economic and demographic woes than immigration ever was. Within this particular statement, Mariana Harder-Kühnel strategically deploys a language of pseudo-feminist “choice” that conveniently and suspiciously aligns with her imperative. Despite her insistence on the implementation of pro-choice-in-parenting policies, she fails to admit the coercive nature of her proposed measures she is suggesting (for example, the ban on abortion, promotion of the traditional family, and opposition to children’s rights in the constitution).

The leveraging of traditionalist domestic ideals to nurture white supremacist and nativist agendas is inseparable from the gendered pro-natalist language that blames women for social decline, therefore coercing them into abandoning their natural right to reproductive choice.

The AfD’s documented efforts of promoting familialism – a state-driven ideology that treats the nuclear family as the foundation of the national community and the main mechanism for social cohesion and welfare – and mobilizing post-feminist common sense narratives (Sprengholz, 2021) suggest that its pro-natalist agenda is inherently ideological and ethnonationalist in nature. This problematic language has been linked to the party’s electoral success, particularly in East Germany which has experienced a dramatic long-term population decline since the 1990 reunification (Höhne et al., 2025). The party has been relentless in its efforts to advance traditionalism, fueled by a commitment to preventing demographic collapse and ensuring the dominance of the so called “Aryan” race, a term so commonly misused that it has become synonymous with Nordic racial grouping, despite historically referring to ancient Indo-Iranian peoples. The leveraging of traditionalist domestic ideals to nurture white supremacist and nativist agendas is inseparable from the gendered pro-natalist language that blames women for social decline, therefore coercing them into abandoning their natural right to reproductive choice. While online discourse around reproductive health seems to be primarily focused on the United States, pro-natalist ideas in Germany stem from the party’s proper ideological evolution and the country’s homegrown völkisch (folkish/ethnic) nationalism (Heinemann, 2022). Pro-natalism comprises political, religious, and socioeconomic pressures that undermine women’s reproductive autonomy and freedom of choice, often culminating in legislative restrictions on contraception and abortion access (Bajaj & Stade, 2022). It is no surprise therefore that right-wing factions often adopt the infamous alarmist “fertility crisis” narrative to push for more control on women’s bodies.

Conclusion

The AfD’s rhetoric and actions push the boundaries of Western democracy and free speech and confirm the significance of language in politics, yet femonationalism extends far beyond German populist politics. Radical-right populism heavily relies on antagonistic framing and the strategic invocation of gender, which allows politicians to align themselves ideologically with their target audience, or at the very least to shift public discourse, normalize racist rhetoric, and strongly dominate the media landscape.

Works Cited

Alternative für Deutschland. (2025, October 28). Alice Weidel: Immer mehr Frauen leben in Angst – Die AfD ist bereit Sicherheit wieder herzustellen. Alternative Für Deutschland. https://www.afd.de/alice-weidel-immer-mehr-frauen-leben-in-angst-die-afd-ist-bereit-sicherheit-wieder-herzustellen/

Alternative für Deutschland. (2024, May 15). Mariana Harder-Kühnel: Familienreport 2024 enthält kein Konzept zur Lösung des Geburtenmangels und der Demografie-Katastrophe. Alternative Für Deutschland. https://www.afd.de/mariana-harder-kuehnel-familienreport-2024-enthaelt-kein-konzept-zur-loesung-des-geburtenmangels-und-der-demografie-katastrophe/

Arzheimer, K. (2015). The AfD: Finally a Successful Right-Wing Populist Eurosceptic Party for Germany? West European Politics, 38(3), 535–556. https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2015.1004230

Bajaj, N., & Stade, K. (2022). Challenging pronatalism is key to advancing reproductive rights and a sustainable population. The Journal of Population and Sustainability, 7(1), 39–70. https://doi.org/10.3197/jps.63799953906861

Baumgärtner, M., Müller, A., Siemens, A., & Wiedmann-Schmidt, W. (2025, May 14). Compendium of Extremism: A Look inside the Report Documenting the AfD’s Right-Wing Radicalism. DER SPIEGEL, Hamburg, Germany. https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/compendium-of-extremism-a-look-inside-the-report-documenting-the-afds-right-wing-radicalism-a-de2ab5b5-623e-4100-addb-d1e44c298305 b

Doerr, N. (2021). The Visual Politics of the Alternative for Germany (AfD): Anti-Islam, Ethno-Nationalism, and Gendered Images. Social Sciences, 10(1), 20. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci10010020

European Parliament. (2024, September 13). 2024 European elections: 15 additional seats divided between 12 countries | News | European Parliament. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20230911IPR04910/2024-european-elections-15-additional-seats-divided-between-12-countries

Fangen, K., & Lichtenberg, L. (2021). Gender and family rhetoric on the German far right. Patterns of Prejudice, 55(1), 71–93. https://doi.org/10.1080/0031322X.2021.1898815

Farris, S. R. (2017). In the Name of Women’s Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism. Duke University Press.

Heinemann, I. (2022). Volk and Family: National Socialist legacies and gender concepts in the rhetoric of the Alternative for Germany. Journal of Modern European History, 20(3), 371–388. https://doi.org/10.1177/16118944221110713

Höhne, B., Kölzer, J., & Träger, H. (2025). Geography of Shrinkage: Local Population Decline and Electoral Support for the Anti-establishment Parties AfD and BSW in East German State Elections. German Politics, 34(3), 449–477. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644008.2025.2489409

Porzycki, V., Oshri, O., & Shenhav, S. R. (2025). What you see is not what you get: The incorporation of women in radical right parties. European Union Politics, 26(3), 477–500. https://doi.org/10.1177/14651165251340336

Scrinzi, F. (2023). The Racialization of Sexism. Routledge. https://www.perlego.com/book/4270023

Sprengholz, M. (2021). Post-feminist German heartland: On the women’s rights narrative of the radical-right populist party Alternative für Deutschland in the Bundestag. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 28(4), 486-501. https://doi.org/10.1177/13505068211007509 (Original work published 2021)

Statista. (2025, November 29). Share of women among political party members in Germany 2021. https://www.statista.com/statistics/955972/women-share-political-party-members-germany/?srsltid=AfmBOooYDhCC25ugDxGodJBVoMKgVeAutFUSDA4IqRS4lnwnpqRK5Bd7

Törnberg, P., & Chueri, J. (2025). When Do Parties Lie? Misinformation and Radical-Right Populism Across 26 Countries. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/19401612241311886

Vieten, U. M. (2025). The Far-Right, Gender In/Equalities and Liberal Feminism: Scrutinising EU Narratives of Gender Equality in Italy, France and Germany. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/07256868.2025.2592306

Weidel, A. (2024, November 20). Alice Weidel: Migrationskrise macht Frauen zu Freiwild. presseportal.de. https://www.presseportal.de/pm/110332/5913293

Zajak, S., Meuth, A., & Best, F. (2025). The Dynamics of (De-)Normalization of the far Right: perceptions in the German population. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-025-09532-6

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: Olaf Kosinsky; modified by Tempest.

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San Francisco/SFO Airport

Tempest members joined hundreds of workers and community members in support of SEIU-USWW SFO airport workers as they campaigned around raising minimum wages to $30/hr. The action blocked vehicle access to the International Terminal starting at 11 AM. As first vice president, Sanjay Garla reported, LAX workers recently won $30/hr minimum wage, and SFO workers deserve the same. Garla also emphasized that in order for SFO to be safe for workers and passengers, we must demand “ICE out of SFO.”

SEIU United worker Carlos Sabata, in their first ever public speech, emphasized the international character of airport workers in the context of the international history of May Day, rousing the crowd with chants of “we are not invisible” and “we are not replaceable.” The crowd marched inside the terminal before twenty-five people were arrested, blocking the road in a planned civil disobedience action, including local politicians and labor leaders.

A few thousand joined two afternoon demonstrations and marches along Market Street at Civic Center and Embarcadero. The demonstrations were not huge, but they were spirited and full of unions, community groups, and left organizations. Some students walked out at a few high schools, and some educators joined them. Downtown High School educators shut down the school with a wildcat strike.

Oakland/OAK Airport

Oakland witnessed an unprecedented commemoration of May Day today. The day started with a rally at the ILWU Local 6 union hall near the Oakland International Airport at 9 AM. Over 500 people packed the union hall and pledged to join the “joyous rebellion” at the airport. This event was cosponsored by several organizations, including ACCE, Bay Resistance, Indivisible East Bay, AROC, Palestinian Youth Movement, USPCN, East Bay DSA, etc. The coalition partners planned for this action months in advance. Along with the May Day demands of “Tax the rich,” “End US wars,” and “Abolish ICE,” the coalition agreed to uphold the demands of the Oakland Arms Embargo campaign to hold the Port of Oakland, which administers both the seaport and airport, accountable for sending weapons to Israel.

At the electrifying gathering at the ILWU Local 6, the protesters formed two groups. One group joined the car caravan and the other was bused to the airport. Around 300 participants, who were bused to the airport, formed a picket line at the entrance to the departure hall. Meanwhile, a caravan of about 30 cars started approaching the airport. The deliberately sluggish caravan blocked the incoming traffic to the airport and started honking in tandem as it reached the departure hall. The controlled frenzy garnered the attention of the passengers and law enforcement alike. A few on-foot protesters took to the street, risking arrest, leading the car-caravan, and holding banners that read “No work. No school. No shopping” and “ICE out of our streets. Israel out of OAK fleets.” The carefully orchestrated picket-caravan double whammy brought the departure terminal of the Oakland airport to a standstill for about 20 minutes. The protesters vowed to return as the picket line dispersed after the caravan passed.

The crowd reconvened at 3 PM in Fruitvale, a predominantly immigrant neighborhood of the city of Oakland, to hold another rally and march. Oakland Sin Fronteras (Oakland Without Borders) coalition organized this rally, followed by a resource fair. Several organizations, including Bay Area Cuba Solidarity Network, Black Organizing Project, Mujeres Unidas y Activas, Oakland Tenants Union, OEA Rapid Response Team, East Bay Sanctuary Covenant, etc., offered services and material support to the community at the resource fair. At a gathering of about a thousand people, the speakers voiced their strong disapproval of deportations, travel bans, and racial profiling of immigrants and refugees.

The day ended with several cultural events taking place in the different parts of the East Bay. La Peña Cultural Center in Berkeley held a “Party for the Workers” concert featuring Bambu, Boots Riley, etc. In downtown Oakland at Fluid510, Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff gave a talk on their newest publication, Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed.

Berkeley/UC Berkeley

The UC Berkeley Labor Coalition held a May Day rally in front of UC Berkeley’s California Hall (where the office of the UC Berkeley Chancellor, Rich Lyons, is located) in support of AFSCME’s open-ended strike that was scheduled to begin on May 14th. That strike has since been called off as a tentative agreement has been reached. In addition, the rally also called for support for the contract fight of UC-AFT 1474 (which represents lecturers, librarians, and archivists across the UCs). There were speakers from several unions, including UAW 4811 (the grad workers’ union), UC-AFT 1474, and UPTE-CWA 9119 (University Professional and Technical Employees), as well as campus organizations such as Blackstone Divestment and the ICE off-campus campaign. A big theme of the rally was connecting the funding of Zionism and genocide to labor struggles and the fight against ICE in the US. Soon after the rally began, chanting could be heard coming from another side of the campus, which turned out to be a large group of students from Berkeley High School who led a walkout and came to campus to join the rally. Two of the high school students (who were also members of the Sunrise Movement) spoke in support of their teachers and immigrant workers. The participation of the high school students, including their two speakers, was especially impressive and moving.

San Jose, CA

May Day 2026 in San Jose started with a Rally at the corner of Story and King, followed by a march to San Jose City Hall. Union members seemed to have the largest groups, and were supported by the South Bay Labor Council and Working Partnerships USA. There was a very strong presence of SEIU folks from various locals, along with Alphabet Workers and Flight Attendant union members. Students from 10 San Jose high schools walked out to join the event. Socialist organizations included FRSO, DSA, and PSL. The billionaire candidate for governor of California, Tom Steyer, made an appearance at the Rally.

The Rally was the largest grouping of folks at Story and King in the last ten years, and folks were still marching the three miles to City Hall three hours after they got started on the three-mile route. Some organizations tabled at City Hall, and the crowd was a pretty good size for San Jose.

San Diego, CA

In a new departure influenced by growing interest in general strikes as a means to defend threatened democracy, County employees in San Diego’s SEIU Local 221 joined International Workers’ Day festivities.  Militant workers phone-banked and organized co-workers for weeks, encouraging them to take either unpaid leave or vacation time. This falls short of full strike action as it does not involve direct defiance of the boss. But importantly, it did demonstrate–to ourselves, our co-workers, and our class rallying together for May 1–a willingness to collectively make an economic sacrifice for a cause.  And this day of skipping work and missing pay was done primarily under political slogans–ICE Out of San Diego, No War in Iran, Tax the Rich, and Protect Our Votes.

There was also one key economic demand–End Tier D. Tier D is the outrageous pension plan in place for all County employees hired since 2017, requiring them to postpone retirements late into old age. Members knew that the May 1 action would not accomplish this goal by itself. But by raising our own particular issue, alongside those important to the cause of social justice and our class as a whole, we took an opportunity to publicize it in a way that begins to knit it into a larger campaigning alliance.

Workers spent the whole day together, meeting at 9 AM at the Union hall, where two buses drove them first to the mid-day rally at Chicano Park, then to the action in support of janitors at the San Diego International Airport, and finally to the late afternoon action organized by the San Diego-Imperial Counties Central Labor Council.

About 50 county workers took part in the daylong action. 160 declared that they would not work. It is unknown whether fewer or more actually took the day off. This is a small fraction of the 11,000 represented County workers, but an unprecedented step while working under an unexpired contract.

Tony Ledezma, a worker at Agriculture, Weights, and Measures and a former Federal employee, said, “When Trump went to power, he illegally fired us. Because of the Union, I got my (Federal) job back.” But “Tier D is not working for people; it should be altered.”

“2026 has just been chaos and nonsense…I think there’s a bunch of people in high office that have an agenda that is taking power away from the people and benefitting corporations and the ultra-wealthy,” said Dan of Behavioral Health Services.  “We’re spending billions on war, cutting health care, cutting education, and separating families.”

“Laborers can step into a more powerful political role today… “I think we’re here today as a result of decades of organization by people of wealth.  We will only be able to confront that together.”

“Laborers can step into a more powerful political role today,” said 221 member Krista.  “I think we’re here today as a result of decades of organization by people of wealth.  We will only be able to confront that together…it’s a little bit of a mind shift to be in solidarity with people who are different.”

“I’m saying no to war; no to ICE; no to voter suppression,” said Jesse Gonzalez, Mental Health Worker at County Psychiatric Hospital.  “The worst part for me is when they blame immigrants…I just read horrific statements about pregnant women in detention facilities.”

In the words of Adult Protective Services Specialist Natasha, “it’s important to create community and interconnectedness.”  County employee Brian Lafferty said, “Workers will bring down fascism.”

APS worker Rodney argued, “The May Day event is important to honor those who fought for the rights of others and continue to fight for basic human rights for future generations. I believe people would place more value on their freedom/democracy if they learn about their history”.  And Brenda Nunez of the Union’s Black Caucus, AFRAM-Sankofa, said, “May Day is important to bring solidarity”.

Finally, Elena Long, President of 221’s newly launched Latino Caucus, spoke to some 500-1000 people at the central stage at Chicano Park. Speaking in Spanish, she said, “It is very important to support and protect our community. Our community has struggled much, has worked much, and has sacrificed much to be in this country. That’s why we cannot remain quiet when we see injustices. We cannot remain quiet when many families are living in fear.”

Thanks to Cecile Estelle for assistance with this article.

Burlington, Vermont

Around 1,000 people took part in a  spirited May Day march. The action was comprised of the Left, but with a bigger concentration of union members. The highlight of the day was when protestors took over the Hannaford grocery store’s parking lot and demanded that the chain join the farmworkers program Milk with Dignity. Noticeable was the absence of broader liberal forces, who are already orienting toward the election instead of more direct political activity. In a sign of that, all the politicians were angling to get on the stage and speak, but organizers did not allow it.

Madison, Wisconsin

In Madison, Wisconsin, the teachers’ union successfully pressured the school district to close public schools on May Day. Schools were also closed in Milwaukee. In Madison, thousands of people rallied at the University of Wisconsin campus in support of immigrant rights. Protestors marched to the State Capitol, where they were met by large contingents that marched from two of the city’s high schools.

New York, NY

May Day in New York City drew about ten thousand people for a vibrant rally and march. Some unions brought out large and multiracial contingents, especially notable the Laborers International Union of North America (LUINA), which bused workers in from every borough. LUINA represents 40,000 workers employed in the construction trades. Tempest marched with the Professional Staff Congress at CUNY, representing public college and university faculty and staff. PSC-CUNY  had a visible and lively contingent of a few hundred. Some unions that could have had big contingents had a poor showing, most notably the United Federation of Teachers, part of the American Federation of Teachers. The march overall was very multiracial with large contingents of immigrant workers and immigrant rights groups. The union mobilizations meant it was a much more racially diverse and working-class in composition compared to the No Kings protests and other recent demonstrations. Anti-Trump, anti-billionaire, and anti-ICE slogans were everywhere.

Ottawa, Ontario, CAN

Ottawa’s May Day event consisted of about 400 people from various single-issue campaigns and left groups on a march that stopped five or six times to highlight specific issues in the city. The event, organized by a local anarchist collective, only had flags from one union, a federal public service union.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: skuchamenz skuchamenz, Susan Ruggles, Fibonacci Blue; modified by Tempest.

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Muzan Alneel, in many ways, represented Sudan’s 2018 revolution, and the strong tradition and legacy of Sudan’s women revolutionaries.

Muzan was a clear-eyed revolutionary strategist. She was part of the revolutionary movement, analyzing its trajectory, while also acting as a spokesperson, communicating its importance to revolutionaries and activists around the world. Muzan participated in the Khartoum sit-in in early 2019, warning against leaving the sit-in and relinquishing power to the military. Understanding this, that the revolution could not be handed over to the military, that overthrowing Bashir and then Ibn Auf was not enough, was key to moving Sudan’s revolution to its next stage. It was one of the lessons that the Sudanese revolution learned from the failures of Egypt’s 2011 revolution, that overthrowing the figurehead of the regime was not enough, and one of the reasons Sudan’s revolution went so much further—and why so many of us held on to hope and optimism that Sudan provided a lesson that revolutionaries around the world must pay attention to.

Muzan was also prescient and aware of the dangers of the agreement between the transitional government and the military, and saw the 2021 coup by the military as expected and inevitable after this. There can be no agreement between a revolutionary movement and a counterrevolutionary military that does not end in bloodshed and counterrevolution. Muzan understood both the successes and the limitations of the Sudanese Professionals Association (SPA), and of Hamdok and the transitional government. The SPA had accomplished what it could in the early phases of the revolution, galvanizing layers of workers and mass days of resistance, but now no longer represented a revolutionary alternative. Muzan highlighted the crucial importance of the neighborhood resistance committees, pointing out that they were ignored and overlooked by commentators and international media, but that they were key to the next stage of the struggle, and to moving the revolution forward. She analyzed both the potential of the resistance committees and their challenges and weaknesses, finding that in wealthy neighborhoods, the politics of the neighborhood committees were shaped by middle-class politics and thus less radical than in other areas.

Muzan had the analysis needed to navigate through the ups and downs of the revolutionary struggle. She, perhaps more than anyone, understood what elements are needed for a revolution to be successful. Our movements are in desperate need of revolutionary thinkers and strategists like Muzan, for them to have a chance at success.

Moreover, Muzan retained revolutionary optimism. She understood that revolutionary processes are long. Even when the war between the RSF and SAF began in 2023, she remained hopeful, while also realistic about what was needed at each moment on the ground. She knew that during the war, the resistance committees were providing needed aid, healthcare, and lifesaving services. She remained hopeful that once the war ended, the work of the revolution could continue, and the resistance committees could return to a political strategy that prioritizes the revolution.

And Muzan was not bitter, even though much of the world ignored Sudan’s revolution and counterrevolution. She was open to working with anyone who understood the gravity of the situation and who took Sudan’s revolution seriously.

The loss of Muzan is a horrific setback for not just the Sudanese revolutionary struggle but for the broader global struggle for liberation. Muzan understood that our liberation movements and revolutionary struggles are connected.

Muzan was one of many incredible Sudanese women I have been lucky enough to connect with in solidarity work with the revolution since 2018. Sudan’s revolutionary history, its history of left-wing activism and revolutions, has produced militant revolutionary women who are politically astute, who study revolutionary traditions and history, who note the crucial interconnections between liberation struggles like Sudan’s and Palestine’s. Muzan comes out of this tradition, a tradition that still deserves more attention, more solidarity, and more seriousness than it has been given. She represented its strongest edge. Our movements worldwide need to work hard to instill revolutionary seriousness, study of history, and political analysis that Muzan held and embodied.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”

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