This CSAN article accompanies CSAN’s participation in the event “For a Fighting Workers Movement: A Militant Critique of Labor Notes” – Event details here.
Soon, sections of the labor movement from across North America and internationally will be gathering in Chicago for the 2026 Labor Notes conference. This conference serves as another moment in which Labor Notes and the labor left seek to channel and control the most militant sections of the working class. While using the language and some ideas of militancy, in practice, Labor Notes and the labor left have revealed themselves to be another mechanism for dampening the working-class fightback, channeling combative energy into collaborationist electoralism, coalition politics, and a vague fight for democracy that does not serve workers. The working class needs real answers and a genuinely combative labor movement to mount a fight against the attacks it faces, from those targeting immigrant workers to stagnating wages as the cost of living skyrockets. That is what this event is about.
Understanding the Problems with Labor Notes and the Labor Left
Financially and organizationally, Labor Notes ties itself to the dominant regime leadership of the AFL-CIO, while also supporting the Democratic Party by selling workers on how certain Democratic politicians can supposedly improve the lives of the working class. We can see this on full display in Labor Notes’ excitement over “movement mayors” such as Mamdani in New York City. UAW President Shawn Fain, a figure celebrated by Labor Notes, took the stage at the 2024 Democratic National Convention to declare “Kamala Harris is one of us.” This is how supposedly combative union leadership and Labor Notes tie the working class and subordinate it to the bosses’ government, whose core function is to enforce the power of the capitalist class. Labor Notes occasionally publishes criticism of Democratic Party leadership or unconditional union endorsements, but this does not change its fundamental political function. Its organizational and financial structure, tied to an AFL-CIO deeply integrated with the Democratic Party, determines where it actually leads workers regardless of what any individual article says. The occasional critical piece serves to maintain Labor Notes’ credibility as an independent voice while the overall trajectory of its politics remains firmly within the Democratic orbit.
The Democratic Party, including its “progressive” elements, functions as a representative of the employing class alongside the Republicans, as evidenced by its continued support for, or flaccid, faux opposition to, imperialist war, the attacks on immigrants, and its collaboration with union leadership to suppress strike action whenever it threatens capital. Some will point to real differences between the parties on labor issues, from NLRB appointments to support for the PRO Act, as evidence that the Democratic Party is a lesser evil worth supporting. But these differences evaporate precisely when workers exercise real power. When railroad workers prepared to walk out in 2022, it was not the Republicans but a Democratic Congress and a Democratic president who intervened to crush the strike before it began. The party that labor leftists present as an ally of the working class revealed its true function the moment that working-class power threatened capital.
And the progressive, social-democrat Democrats that Labor Notes upholds, like Mamdani, dissipate and divert the discontent of the working class into reform and electoral solutions that will always fall flat given the fact that the state is decidedly in the hands of the bosses and is used to enforce their class’s power and to continue capitalism. And the ‘democracy’ workers are called to defend against authoritarianism and “Trumpism” means, at the end of the day, getting the Democrats back in office. As if that has ever done any good for the working class. The 3.1 million deportations that took place under the Obama administration, held up as a pinnacle of Democratic Party leadership, make this plain. The bottom line is that a labor movement chained to the Democratic Party cannot oppose these attacks and will continually be either manipulated or bludgeoned into fulfilling the agenda of the bosses and their government.
Connected with this subordination to the bosses’ political parties is the labor left’s over-reliance on and support for the legal structures of the bosses’ government. While Labor Notes gestures toward not overly relying on the NLRB and related processes, treating legal channels as just one pillar of struggle, in practice it holds up the NLRB and the legal framework of the NLRA as genuine protections for the working class. Labor Notes describes the NLRB as created to protect workers’ rights and the NLRA as designed to “level the playing field between workers and employers.” These statements obscure the real purpose of these institutions. This is not to say workers have never used the NLRB for some wins. Recent organizing successes at Amazon and Starbucks relied on the NLRB election process. But those very successes illustrate the limits of the legal framework: years of delays, endless employer appeals, and Amazon’s successful stonewalling of contracts demonstrate how the legal process is designed to constrain and demoralize workers. And the current dismantling of the NLRB under Trump shows precisely how durable these legal protections are: gains built on the foundation of the bourgeois state’s legal apparatus can be taken away by that same state the moment the ruling class decides it no longer needs them.
The legal regime Labor Notes channels workers into defending from being whittled down and made defunct was built precisely to stifle waves of working-class militancy and prevent the working class from using its organized power to threaten capital, working to constrict strikes or stop them altogether in favor of collaborative negotiating relations with the bosses designed to create labor peace and continue capital accumulation. The creation of these tools came on the heels of a strike wave, including the 1934 West Coast waterfront strike, that scared the ruling class into constructing state infrastructure such as the NLRB to contain and control working-class militancy. Today, workers are forced into highly regulated, boss-controlled contract negotiations, union election processes, and strike regulations that stifle the working-class fightback. Labor Notes may use the language and make nods to militancy outside these systems, but what it is selling to workers firmly stays within them, reinforcing the funneling of workers back into the boss-controlled legal framework.
The legal straitjacket the labor left defends also shapes how it conceives of the general strike itself, in practice firmly remaining safe and weak for the bosses and their government. Labor Notes describes its ideal general strike as a “civic shutdown” including workers, churches, liberal activist groups, “friendly” politicians, local governments, and small businesses. What is described is not a strike at all and confuses and misguides the struggle of the working class. The Minneapolis “general strike” of January 2026 shows this. Workers were explicitly told not to strike, as doing so would violate their collective bargaining agreements. Individual workers were advised to call in sick. Small business owners were asked to close voluntarily. The sole demand was for ICE to leave Minneapolis, with no class-based demands for higher wages or better conditions. Instead, workers marched alongside their friendly employers rather than against them.
Such class-based demands would have united the working class and actually thwarted the attacks of the ruling class on immigrants by moving toward closing the wage gap between immigrant and domestic workers. This wage gap is maintained through the terror and blackmail of state forces such as ICE, with the goal of providing super profits to the ruling class from cheap immigrant labor and the suppression of domestic workers’ wages. A struggle for higher wages closing this wage gap across the working class, immigrant and domestic workers organized and fighting together, would hit at the material basis for the attacks on immigrants by ICE and the ruling class’s attacks on the working class generally.
The struggle for higher wages and building independent worker defensive organizations are much more important than building interclass coalitions such as No Kings and May Day Strong, advocated for by Labor Notes and the labor left, aimed at accomplishing some institutional reform within a policing agency of the capitalist state or fighting in the dark, aimlessly to protect the supposed democracy we have when in reality we live in a dictatorship of the bosses and ruling class. These efforts to build interclass coalitions blur the lines of struggle between the classes of workers and bosses only perpetuates and worsens the situation, delaying the development of any real solution. This same pattern shapes the May Day 2028 initiative, which UAW leadership and the May Day Strong coalition have framed around defending democracy and institutional reforms rather than advancing class demands, sabotaging its potential as a genuine class weapon from the outset by anchoring it in class collaboration.
What we need is independence from the bosses, the capitalist parties, and the state’s legal apparatus. A strike should not be some symbolic, weak gesture. It is the greatest weapon the working class has because it hurts the bosses where it counts the most: their profit! A real general strike means workers collectively withholding their labor across unions and industries, not a civic shutdown involving churches, liberal activist groups, local governments, and friendly employers. These groups do not hold the same power as the working class, whose labor is the source of the bosses’ profit. And it must be fought for on class demands: higher wages and a shorter working week without reduced pay, demands that cut into the lifeblood of the ruling class, their profit, rather than calls to defend democratic institutions that serve the employing class and revocable institutional reforms that get the working class nowhere.
This also means fighting the divisions the ruling class uses to weaken workers. Immigrant workers subjected to ICE raids and higher rates of exploitation cannot be defended through symbolic solidarity or appeals to courts and politicians. The answer is unified class demands: equal wages across nationality lines, abolition of tier systems, and generalized strike action capable of materially confronting deportation terror. If immigrant labor can be terrorized into accepting lower wages and worse conditions, the conditions of the entire class are dragged downward with it.
The labor left answers the problems facing the working class, including the attacks on immigrant workers, with a collaborationist popular front in which working-class demands are dissolved into broad alliances with forces hostile to those interests, including liberal politicians, activist groups, and small businesses. The class union answer is the united front from below: bringing together workers’ defensive organizations independent of the constricting legal apparatus toward collective strike action, independent of capitalist political forces, and transcending the imposed divisions of race, nationality, industry, and sector. This means workplace committees, rank-and-file assemblies, strike committees, and inter-workplace coordination, all building toward generalized strike power on a class basis: a genuine foundation for a robust defense and fightback of the working class.
Building a Fighting Workers Movement
This event emerged from discussions among militants active across different unions, workplace committees, immigrant defense efforts, and class-struggle organizations who found themselves running into the same limits inside the existing labor movement: struggles isolated workplace by workplace, strikes contained within legal channels, and the constant effort by the union apparatus and the labor left to subordinate class struggle to electoral and coalitional politics.
Out of this came For a Fighting Workers Movement, a coordination of class struggle formations initiated by the Class Struggle Action Network, which came together with Teamsters Mobilize, the Northern California Committee to Organize the Unorganized (IBEW), Transit Workers for a Fighting Union, the Committee for One Fighting Transit Union, and the Machinist Reform Action Committee. It has since been endorsed by Class Struggle Baristas (a class struggle committee within the Starbucks Workers Union), United for Class Wide Action (a class struggle committee within the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union), the Blue Ridge local of the IWW, and the DC local of the IWW.
Clarifying and organizing around the above points is a central goal of the event, one aimed at connecting isolated class struggle militants across unions and workplaces who already understand these problems but remain separated from one another. This gathering is not a rival conference or a coalition of activists, and we are not building a new permanent labor federation by abstract proclamation. Genuine workers’ organs emerge from periods of intensified struggle, not administrative declarations. We are laying the groundwork, connecting class struggle militants and organizations across industries and regions, encouraging forms of organization capable of generalized struggle, and developing a pole clearly opposed to both the official labor lieutenants of capital and labor-left reformists.
Some will ask where the class union forces are today and whether the points here are abstract, pie-in-the-sky notions of militancy and combativity. Class union organization in the United States is at an early stage of development. The class union the working class needs has not been built yet. And it is clear the reformist path has a demonstrated ceiling: decades of union democracy campaigns, reform caucuses, and labor-left politics have not reversed the decline of the labor movement or its subordination to the bosses’ agenda; they have reinforced it. The organizations coming together for this event represent real, existing nuclei of class union organization, and the task now is to connect and build them, laying the groundwork for a fighting workers movement that will blossom when the crisis of capitalism demands it, as the intense deterioration of workers’ lives forces a hard break with reformist and collaborationist forces who have decisively shown themselves to be on the side of the bosses.
The Class Struggle Action Network participated in an interview speaking more on these points. Read the interview here.
