Workers across the world and in almost all industries are once again feeling the need to struggle against the attacks on our living standards. Unions, which form an important part of our working class history, are the first to offer us a way to channel this struggle collectively. But looking beyond these initial stages of working class struggle, the history of union struggles becomes less rose-tinted. The history of the class struggle has shown that the unions became gradually integrated into the state’s planning apparatus during the last two world wars.

More than ever workers must begin taking control over our own struggles against worsening conditions with our own class organization. Capitalism is the cause of our rapidly declining living standards. Inflation, gig work, and cut benefits are all ways that the capitalist bosses are wringing workers for more profits. These are not the results of actions from particularly malicious bosses. Rather, it's the structural needs of capital that force the capitalist class to try to make workers pay with our own blood and sweat for the crisis of profitability. For all these reasons and more, we must answer the enemy’s class repression with our own class organs, not ones beholden to their state.

As we once again march towards war, we must remember that in both previous world wars, the working class was convinced by “workers'” parties and their unions to give its blood on every front, such as by enforcing no-strike pledges to help reorganize the economy around war production and to help enroll workers for imperialist slaughter. These newly legally recognized unions allowed the ruling class to maintain the struggle of the working class within certain guardrails in exchange for a cut of the profits. Between WW2 and the early 1970s, before the crisis of profitability reemerged in full force, unions were still able to win wage increases and reforms for their dues­paying members, so long as they kept within those legal and de facto boundaries set by the capitalist class, continuously limiting workers' struggles and weakening the overall struggle of the working class. However, as soon as profits began to decline, this former status quo became an unsustainable one for the capitalist state. Despite unions' role in maintaining capitalist stability, their power began flaking away as the rate of profit further eroded. Bosses began to see unions as potential hurdles in increasing workers exploitation, even with their collaboration.

Unions exist to negotiate the sale of labor power: that is how they “eat”. Union bargaining committees and contracts enforce strike clauses, allowing workers to strike only after conditions have been met, not when workers' real demands to meet living conditions aren't realized. Unions negotiate different contracts in each industry, sector, and workplace, where within the workplace there's oftentimes different contracts managed by various unions alongside swathes of non­unionized workers. On January 31 2026, the unions (who had “endorsed” the so-­called general strike in Minneapolis) told the workers they claim to represent that they must go to work and could not join in any strike action. As expected, the unions prefer the bosses’ rules to the workers’ demands. The unions' betrayals to the working class doesn't begin with unions acting as flagrant class collaborationist state organs. Rather, they begin in the workplace by establishing recognition for capitalist management rights and promoting contractual mediation rather than the class struggle. Workers can't delegate their own struggle to capitalist organs such as the unions which keep workers' struggles narrow and set workers up for defeats.

Historically, workers have already found truly class­wide organs such as the strike council, factory committees, soviets, shuras or territorial worker councils. Unlike the unions, these organs aren't permanent arbitrators between labor and capital and don't fragment the working class. Today striking workers are taking it upon themselves to create chats to discuss their grievance and dissatisfaction against unions muzzling their struggles and turning strikes into negotiation theatricsinstead of generalizing the strike. Capitalism's insoluble crises are leading the entire system toward imperialist wars, capitalist states are finding wars that will kill millions of workers as a more suitable solution in order to revitalize the exploitative capitalist system. Workers' own self activity must move away from only defensive struggles against deteriorating working conditions, but to move onto an offensive struggle. This means beginning to relate all of our worsening conditions and increased repression and surveillance to crisis-ridden, decadent capitalism. The revolutionary proletariat also needs a communist party which embodies proletarian subjectivity through reflecting on past experiences of the class struggle and acts as a reference point for the class conscious proletariat. The political content of the communist party is the most indispensable tool for how class-wide organs form the basis of the dictatorship of the proletariat, where the working class is able to seize political power and self-emancipate from capitalism. This is the only way to achieve communism, a stateless, classless society, without commodity production, exploitation or wars. The alternative is the social murder by the capitalist class united in their state and imperialist world wars.