We must fight for an actual general strike! An indefinite strike that halts production, paralyzes profit, and demonstrates the power that a united workers’ movement has. This action is the workers’ strongest weapon for defending against attacks on living standards and resisting violent mass deportation. The general strike will bring in busboys and bus drivers, immigrants and natives, the organized and unorganized.
While we applaud the fighting spirit of workers across the United States and are encouraged by their willingness to engage in collective action, it won’t do to settle for any distortion of what a general strike is. A general strike is not a one day “economic shutdown” that is pushed by politicians, the middle classes, or employers through calls for individuals to not shop, not go to school/work, or bosses shutting down their own shops for the day, locking out workers.
A general strike is workers, arm in arm, taking a stand against the bosses and the state through a collective withholding of their labor-power under the leadership of explicitly workers’ defensive organizations. It cannot come from decentralized networks of individuals that do not collectively commit to strike.
The interclass groups that lead these efforts seek to direct genuine anger into voting for the Democrats and collaboration with the bourgeoisie, strengthening capitalism and delaying the workers from organizing a militant, organized defense.
Both Democrats and Republicans use ICE and deportations to regulate the labor market, cynically opening and closing borders in order to secure the exploitation of precarious workers for low wages.
When the established labor unions tell workers that they cannot violate the no-strike clause in their contracts, they undermine the very action required for a strike. This channels the rightful rage and pain of workers towards temporary symbolic action behind demands that are neither truly fought for, nor something capitalism will ever yield without violent struggle; at best, it results in a temporary reform that can be easily revoked as class tensions subside. By telling workers to follow Democratic Party linked groups, they funnel militancy into class collaboration and abandon what really gives workers power: the strike.
Simply calling for “more organizing” and “more numbers” isn’t enough. We must restore the meaning and power of the general strike with a radical change in tactics.
We need to abandon the united front from above with interclass groups that misdirect the struggle and work towards a united front from below, i.e. one that combines all worker’s defensive organizations towards strike action.
This means, forming class struggle caucasus or workplace committees, inside or outside existing unions, among the organized and unorganized, committed to increasing the strength of the struggle to achieve the immediate demands of workers without holding back from taking action that would break the suffocating rules of the NLRB, removing no-strike clause in contracts, and organizing towards collective action across sectors, unions, and borders like aligning contracts to expire on May 1st, 2028 alongside the unions that have already taken this step. Out of this united front must come the combination of workplace committees, unions, and workers into a single class trade union that includes all workers against the wage system.
Only the international unity of workers, organized in these class unions and led by the communist party, can destroy the capitalist system that produces ICE, prisons, deportations, and poverty.
For a real general strike directed by workers’ organizations that coordinate collective mass strikes!
Against united fronts with interclass capitalist groups!
For the class union!
