Labor Day 2026—another year marked by repression against workers, strike bans, union sabotage, and terrorization of migrant workers. These attacks waged by the capitalist class are not limited to the US and Canada, but are a response to an international crisis of insufficient profits. The issue is not one malicious boss or politician, but the global capitalist system, for which the working class pays with its blood, sweat, and tears—but around the world, it can only definitively fight back as a united class!

Repression against Workers

Globally, the capitalists are increasing their brutal repression against our class siblings. The DHS’ funding has been substantially augmented by billions of dollars, and its authority has been significantly expanded. Surveillance overhauls and access to private data, and greater latitude to proscribe domestic terrorism under the guise of protecting their respective nation against domestic threats have substantially empowered the institution. During Trump's second administration, ICE, Border Patrol, and the DHS have carried out brutal raids arresting workers to fulfill quotas across major cities, while the National Guards and US marines have been activated as added security for federal departments, all the while the much hated local police arrest those protesting deportations against workers. So far 4 have been murdered on the streets, thousands injured and no less than 52 have died at ICE and DHS concentration camps. In Canada, the Carney administration is showing that this is not limited to below the 48th or Donald Trump, by boosting RCMP funding as part of a hiring blitz, overhauling the judiciary system, and granting agencies far more expansive authority.

It is not a random sequence of tragedies that have spun the movement against migrants, with global regimes marching into the death cult of nationalism, the “blame-game” is one of the most useful tactics for agents of the bourgeois state to stay in power and provide an illusion of problem solving for the contradictions of capitalism. This is, in part, due to the lack of options for those in power to solve any of the economic and social ailments of capitalism, while still maintaining levels of profitability for national capital. In just Los Angeles alone, over 10,000 people have been abducted by immigration enforcement agents. With the entire staff of small businesses being taken into custody in some cases, it is apparent that the focus is not to maintain the economic standing of individual petty bourgeoisie, but to meet the agenda of those in power and to divide the working class further through rhetoric that drives division and builds nationalist sentiment. The great, apparent contradiction lies within the need for cheap labor to be exploited, while also keeping the proletariat divided, and seeking to turn the dial of incoming migrants at a whim. As democratic illusions crumble, the bourgeois class and their tactics grow increasingly brutal, and the threat to remove hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people is promised in places such as the US and Europe.

In this current period, much of the rhetoric of mass deportation, sometimes referred to as “remigration”, comes from the Right. History points, however, to social democratic and liberal governments alike adopting extreme policies of deportation once in power. We should not expect that deportations will decrease, even if Republican leadership ends in 2028. If anything, they’re likely to continue less overtly, taking on a mundane administrative style while still managing to maintain brutal levels of deportation that do not make headlines. Both the Biden and Obama administrations conducted a number of deportations that rivals the Trump administration, with the first year of Trump’s second term having over 900,000 deportations. Ultimately, both camps of the American bourgeois state have deported and uprooted the lives of hundreds of thousands of migrant workers, with no end in sight.

Outlawing Strikes

Of the 19 times Congress has intervened in railway labor negotiations since the establishment of the RLA, every time was to prevent a strike. The most recent example in 2022, forced workers to accept terms previously rejected by members. This was signed by the “most pro-worker president in American history”, along with the self-anointed “socialist” politicians in Congress. One of the reasons for the potential strike was the lack of safety due to an aggressive on-call policy. Two months after the terms were forced on rail workers, the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio occurred resulting in a major toxic spill.

Recent strikes in Canada highlight how the ruling class has unravelled legal weaponry against the working class. Canada Post and Air Canada demonstrated that if a strike becomes too inconvenient for the bourgeoisie to handle, then they will not hesitate in administering back to work orders. In spite of what union leadership may say in defying such orders, the unions in charge of these strikes have been all too keen to return to the courts and knock the wind out of the sails of the workers struggling on the picket line. This, paired with provincial level developments in Quebec aiming to ban strikes ‘against the public good’, demonstrates a unified tactic in beating the working class back into submission.

In the face of these conditions the working class must struggle outside of unions legal confines and against the unions control. This is easier said than done but the history of our class is filled with rich lessons which point in that direction. From the wave of wildcat strikes in America during World War 2 to the strike committees in Quebec in the 70’s, the working class has shown that it is at its most successful and its most combative when it directly confronts the state and its various appendages. Even small examples such as workers deciding their own strike tactics on the picket line against union authorization is a step in taking the reins of our own struggle. Without such actions our doom will be determined by lawyers behind closed doors.

Unions vs. Workers

Everywhere across the world, the capitalist class is facing a deep crisis of profitability- any gains are hard to come by, and the losses that have to be forced onto the working class multiply. Because unions can only exist so long as there is a capitalist to buy workers, in these times of crisis the role of the union is to enforce losses onto the workers. For the most part, negotiation is no longer about confronting the company with grievances and more about convincing union membership to accept a raw deal. We can only expect the unions to ask more and more of the working class in the incipient global inter-imperialist face-off.

The unions in the US and Canada are integrated into the state in a thousand different ways. They are coordinated via government organs like the NLRB, and ensure that disputes are always held in a vacuum, preventing cross-sectoral struggle and criminalizing sympathy strikes. It’s therefore no surprise that from the UAW’s leadership artificially synchronizing a 2028 "general strike" (Giving the bosses two years to prepare for pageantry! As if it is simply a matter of timing contract expirations and not real working class combativity reaching a boiling point), to the Teamsters’ and Longshoremen’s union presidents backing Trump’s nationalistic policies, unions are loyal to the bourgeoisie. Bringing the working class into the service of different factions of the capitalist class, they are wilfully undermining workers to their own benefit.

Even the most “radical” union movements fall into the same pitfalls of unionism. Despite their political rhetoric around capitalism and the need for a fighting working class, these ‘radical unions’ are still limited to the framework of negotiating the sale of labour. In their success they end up just like traditional unions. This is shown by even the IWW being forced to concede to ‘no strike’ clauses in recent years. Just like the leftists who want to challenge the establishment without any alternative, ‘radical unions’ hold the working class to a permanent state of opposition with no direction towards the conquest of power. What’s more, they are eventually forced to follow the model of the big unions, because of the thousand legal and political ties unions have to the capitalist state.

The war between Russia and Ukraine stands out as an example where workers are most brazenly turned into pawns of the imperialist state and all its policy aims therein. Vladimir Putin’s “tripartite” model of government, business, and organized labor is from the same old playbook of decades of class annihilation by imperialist war. Ukraine has also mobilized its labor organizations into a full scale defense of the fatherland, with the unions defending the war effort by keeping production going as Ukrainian workers are banned from striking and collective bargaining is outlawed.

Conclusion

Just as the union folds workers into state channels, and just as the union forces members to accept worse and worse negotiations, so too will it ultimately invite the working class into service for national capital at the imperialist arena. With such a situation of union sabotage of the class struggle, our only solution is to re-affirm the absolute necessity of independent class activity. This means the politics of proletarian power and the communist program firmly against any state-sponsored, legalistic, or apolitical, solely economic channels. Historically, workers have already found truly class­wide organs to act as the basis for proletarian political power on our own class terrain, such as the strike council, factory committees, soviets, shuras, worker councils and assemblies.

If we retain the lessons learned by militants over the last two centuries, we understand that the proletariat must act as its own class, and reject all solutions proposed by the ruling capitalist class. They offer us the choice of a myriad of parties that are ultimately engaged in an open assault on the working class, and call it “democracy.” They propose shuttering borders for us, while finance capital knows no geographic boundaries. Meanwhile, reform solutions only change out the guards. Social democratic organizations such as the DSA merely represent an alternative strategy to thwart real working class power by instilling false hopes of reforming an inherently rotten system. In Canada, the NDP’s governments in British Columbia and Manitoba have offered no solution to the massive attack on the working class but on the contrary have managed it, despite their rhetoric.

The solution for the global proletariat lies in revolution against the ruling bourgeois order, guided by program and party to effectively combat the forces of capital. The task of revolutionary communists is to engage with struggle alongside members of our class– all members, regardless of national origin, leading to the reformation of the world party on an international scale to guide the revolutionary movement against capitalism, for communism—that is, a stateless and classless society, where all people are freely associated producers, enjoying freedom of movement.