The Divide Between the Labor Left and the Class Union of the Future

Many of the workers gathered at the Labor Notes 2026 conference represent some of the most combative sections of the labor movement in the United States. They come frustrated with a regime union leadership that smothers strikes, negotiates concessions in back rooms, and delivers workers into the hands of the bosses. That frustration is legitimate and driven by a passionate desire to fight for their class, confronting the issues that face it within the monstrosity of capitalism. The question is where that frustration and passion goes from here.

Labor Notes and the broader current of the labor left pushing union reformism have an answer. They offer union democracy, supposedly labor-friendly politicians, and legal strategies. They offer the promise of a general strike framed as the defense of democracy against authoritarianism, organized by coalitions such as May Day Strong, an amalgam of union locals, Democratic Party-connected organizations, liberal activist groups, and opportunist political organizations. These answers feel like militancy and combativity. They borrow the language of struggle and invoke the history of past mighty battles of the working class. But their effect is to corral the most combative sections of the working class back into the collaborationist union line and agenda, dissipating the fighting energies that could otherwise land real blows on the bosses.

As imperialist war spreads and deepens alongside capitalism's social and economic crises, the stakes of this misdirection could not be higher. The same forces that sell workers on defending democracy today will mobilize them to die for the nation and fatherland tomorrow. It is therefore critical that workers distinguish between real class militancy and its counterfeit.

This article defines the labor left, their union reformism, exposes their false posturing as class militants, and contrasts them with class unionism and class union organization: what the working class actually needs to defend itself and break from the grip of a ruling class that will otherwise drag it into another imperialist war.

What is the Labor Left?

Generally, we can define the labor left as those who posture as militants in the fight against the bosses. As we can see today, this labor left ties itself to the political forces of petty-bourgeois reformism within broader coalition efforts in the defense of democracy, such as Indivisible, No Kings and the 50501 Movement. These petty-bourgeois reformers need workers on their side and, to accomplish this, support a limited program of union reform that the labor left in turn sells to workers as a version of militancy. However, this program remains firmly within the bounds of bourgeois law, which ultimately contains the workers' movement, preventing it from generalizing its struggle and fighting for its own interest.

Union reformism is a tactic that seeks to reform the regime unions by increasing democratic mechanisms and participation in them. Examples include one-member, one-vote schemes, open collective bargaining, or the use of state injunctions to force out entrenched old leadership and install more supposedly progressive, democratic leadership. The problems with union reformism are as follows. First, whether or not regime unions are made more democratic does not change their material mandate and function within capitalism, which they are obliged to perform: a mandate to impose labor peace on workers to the detriment of their conditions. To do anything else would risk the union being taken out by the state and capital's labor lieutenants losing their comfortable positions within ruling circles. The regime unions can and do perform their function within capitalism with democratic mechanisms. Second, union democracy is insufficient in principle as a solution to class collaborationism: even where democratic mechanisms are installed, collaborationist forces can and do reassert control through manipulation of those very processes.

Putting the unions and workers' defensive organs back into the hands of the working class will require a much more profound change than merely altering the method by which the current union apparatus is administered through giving more members access to decision making. It will require a revolutionary upsurge within the class, with leadership that leads on a class basis, helps the working class understand its fundamental difference of interest from the bosses, and shows that it is in its best interest as a class to engage in real struggle. This movement must emerge from the grassroots of the class itself as a result of real historical developments and the growing contradictions of capitalist economy and society. It is not something that can be willed into being through the heroic acts of individuals, small groups of activists using clever tactics and voting blocs to elect this or that leader, nor through merely opening the union to more voting participation at the base, which will have no meaning if those who lead the union continue to lead workers down blind alleys while the masses show no spontaneous impulse towards more militant action.

Such a bottom-up movement of the masses of workers cannot come from the top down through electing new leaders and administrators of the regime unions. There must be a generalized movement based on non-conformity to the established union organization that mandates an all-pervasive policy of class collaboration at every level. This movement must emerge not through the tactical maneuvering of established union leadership within the law, but through the self-organization of the working class at its base: advancing aggressive wage demands that increase workers' real wages, developing strike committees to organize strikes at the grassroots level outside the hands of boss-linked leaders, building territorial links between all workers' organizations, and setting sights toward building generalized strike power.

What is the Class Union?

Class unionism and class union organization can be defined by its lack of connection to and conciliation with the state and its apparatuses, bourgeois parties, government agencies, and laws the ruling class puts in place to extinguish the flames of class struggle. Class unionism and class union organization struggles on clear class lines for the working class to elevate its spontaneous impulses towards effectively organized collective action. It has no shared interest with the capitalist class. It spans across the imposed divisions within the working class, whether racial, national, or otherwise, relying above all on the greatest weapon in the working class's arsenal: the strike and, more broadly, the general strike.

One example from United States history is the old IWW (Industrial Workers of the World). Organizing across craft lines on an industrial basis, the IWW united immigrant and native-born workers alike, waging militant strike action regardless of the legal constraints imposed by the bourgeois state. It stood apart from the opportunist unionism of its time in its principled opposition to the First World War, refusing to subordinate the working class to the imperialist slaughter until it was brutally attacked and mostly dismantled during the Red Scare. It was precisely this class independence that made it a target for destruction by the bosses, the bourgeois state, which carried out raids, deportations, blacklists, and the outright murder of its militants, and the AFL, which collaborated with employers and the state to drive out class unionism and secure its own place within the ruling order.

Such class unionist struggle and organization does not arise from consciousness-raising around some set of grand ideas, but rather from doing the hard, concrete work of organizing along these lines across the working class, weaving a network during times of malaise that rapidly blossoms and expands in times of extreme capitalist crisis and deprivation. It is precisely such conditions that leave no other option but to draw clear class lines and organize on those lines on a mass basis, forcing a break with the regime union leadership who, in critical moments, unequivocally reveal themselves as class traitors.

It cannot emerge merely through the activist impulses of small groups but requires the great masses of workers to be drawn into active class struggle, as was seen in the earlier part of the last century due to the cataclysmic social crisis of that time. The inherent crisis-ridden nature of capitalist economy guarantees that such conditions will one day arise again. Thus it is the obligation of worker militants today to work where possible to establish nuclei of the future class union movement, to reject class collaborationist compromise, and to clarify the real grounds of class struggle wherever the working class shows itself willing to fight. The task is to bring together any such emergent groups into closer coordination, establishing links and working toward a class struggle united front from below that can advocate for unified strike action and bring larger sections of workers into direct conflict with the capitalist class.

The Labor Left and the Democratic Party

The opportunism of the labor left and their union reformism can be seen clearly across three illustrative fronts: its subordination to bourgeois political parties; its over-reliance on bourgeois legality and the state apparatus; and the tactics and demands it promotes under the guise of militancy. Examining each exposes how thoroughly opportunism has penetrated the labor movement and why a genuine break with it is a precondition for any real advance of the working class.

First, one clear marker of the labor left is its connection to bourgeois political parties, especially social democrats and, in the United States, the Democratic Party, whereas class unions historically struggled independent of bourgeois political parties and politicians. In Labor Notes, the organization's support for social democrats and ultimately the Democratic Party is not merely a matter of political tendency but of organizational and financial reality: its leadership and financial backing are closely tied to the AFL-CIO and the Democratic Party. We can see this reflected in their press, where the election of labor-friendly Democratic politicians is sold to workers as a pillar of struggle to improve conditions and advance the fight of the working class, and in allowing the Mayor of Chicago to speak at last year's Labor Notes conference. The same subordination of the labor left is on full display beyond the pages of Labor Notes.

At the 2024 Democratic National Convention, UAW President Shawn Fain, supported by Labor Notes and whose union has been among the most vocal proponents of the May Day 2028 general strike, addressed the crowd and declared: "This election comes down to one question. Which side are you on? On one side we have Kamala Harris and Tim Walz who have stood shoulder to shoulder with the working class...For us in the labor movement, it's really simple. Kamala Harris is one of us". One of us? Thus the supposedly combative leader of one of the most prominent unions in the United States attempts to tie the working class to the bourgeois order, exactly as the labor left always has.

The problem is that the state, as Marxism makes clear, is dominated and controlled by the capitalist class and is the prime instrument for imposing the will of the capitalist class on workers and for repressing the working class when it rises up, ensuring capital accumulation continues and crises are managed. Even the social welfare measures promoted by social democrats and so fervently supported by the labor left ultimately serve capital in a bid to calm deprivation and social and economic crisis, and to subsidize wages, improving the bosses’ bottom line, that are paid according to the cost of sustaining a worker. Such a state and its politicians are therefore incapable of providing any genuine solidarity in the struggle of the working class. Those who sell workers on supporting social democrats, the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, or any bourgeois party misdirect the workers' struggle into a dead end that ultimately reinforces capitalism and the role of the bourgeois state.

The Labor Left’s Historic Support for Imperialism

The stakes of this subordination extend way beyond the United States. The Democratic Party, same as the Republican Party, is the party of US imperialism, the same imperialism that today wages war in Venezuela and Iran in pursuit of energy dominance and the suppression of its rivals. History makes the connection between the labor left, social democracy, and imperialist war unmistakably clear. While Sean Fain praises the role of U.S. imperialism in building the “arsenal of democracy” to allegedly fight fascism, today he openly supports Donald Trumps tariffs which are designed to once again develop the U.S. war economy. While he hypocritically condemns Trumps fascism, he presents himself as a defender of fascist economic and union policy.

In the First World War, the social democrats of the Second International, who had pledged working-class solidarity across borders, voted for war credits and sent workers to slaughter each other in the trenches, in what Lenin correctly identified as a fundamental betrayal of the proletariat. In the United States, the AFL under Samuel Gompers struck a direct bargain with the Wilson administration: guaranteeing military production and a steady supply of proletarian cannon fodder for the trenches in exchange for legal recognition by the bourgeois state, collaborating with the government to suppress strikes and discipline the working class for the imperialist slaughter. In the Second World War, the CIO's (Congress of Industrial Organizations) accepted no-strike pledges that froze the gains of the 1930s strike wave and subordinated workers' economic struggles to the war effort, ensuring capital accumulated unimpeded through wartime production. Many of the CIO union leaders where members of the Stalinized, Communist Party of the United States of America, which had by this time accepted the disastrous popular front policies of Moscow, endorsing the New Deal program; thus when the bourgeois after the war again shifted into a massive red scare campaign following the post war strike wave, they found themselves politically isolated from the working class and easily purged.

The labor left's subordination to the Democratic Party today reproduces this historic pattern. Due to capitalism's inexorable cycles of crisis caused by overproduction, the bourgeois requires war to overcome these crises through destruction of workers and capital to restart the cycle of accumulation. Thus a generalized imperialist war will come. Protection of nation and democracy is evoked to mobilize the working class for such a war. And a labor movement chained to the parties of US imperialism is not capable of opposing such an imperialist war. When the moment demands, if the labor left and the regime unions prevail, the labor movement will be mobilized behind it.

The Regime Unions and the Legal Regulatory Apparatus

Second, running alongside the labor left's subordination to bourgeois parties is its over-reliance on legalistic forms of struggle. Where party subordination chains the working class to the political apparatus of the ruling class, legalism chains it to the state's regulatory apparatus, constraining the struggle to form the ruling class can tolerate and control. Labor Notes and other elements of the labor left are examples of this. They seek the use of state injunctions to impose new leadership in regime unions and democratize them. They hold up the NLRB (National Labor Relations Board) and related state regulations and laws as the greatest achievement in the history of the United States labor movement, spilling tears at its current dismantling, and treat the contract negotiations outlined by such laws and regulations as sacred protections for the working class and the regime unions. What they fail to reckon with is what this legal framework actually contains. The Taft-Hartley Act, once dubbed the "slave labor act" by the labor movement itself, criminalized solidarity and sympathy strikes, restricted the right to organize, and at one point explicitly outlawed Marxists and communists from holding union leadership positions. The legal regime the labor left defends, was built precisely to drive class militants out of the unions and ensure the working class could never use its organized power to threaten capital. And where such laws openly repress the working class, the labor left seeks only to change those laws, for example as in the states where it is illegal for public workers to strike. And then there's the grievance processes: endless paperwork that usually amounts to nothing but the wasted energy of well-intentioned stewards fighting for their coworkers. The problem is that all of this flows from the bourgeois state and thus only serves the preservation of capital and its accumulation, meaning the control of the working class.

Looking back, the NLRB arose out of the state's attempt to manage the capitalist crisis of the Great Depression, which gave rise to mass strikes and labor conflict. The Wagner Act sought to ensure labor peace for employers by constraining workers within the system of collective bargaining, ultimately preparing them for the next major imperialist war, WWII. The consequences of this legal straitjacket continue today. In 2022, railroad workers voted to reject a contract and prepared to strike. Before a single worker could walk off the job, Congressional intervention led by the Democratic Party, with the collaboration of union leaders, forced the contract onto workers against their will and ended the strike before it began. This is legalism in practice: the very framework the labor left defends was used by the party they support to strip workers of their most fundamental weapon at the moment they were prepared to use it. What is ultimately called for is a break with these legal frameworks. The NLRB straightjacket must, and likely will be broken. As facism dictated by economic crisis demands the total subordination of the working class and the regime unions, the NLRB and related apparatuses need to be wiped away as is currently happening in a capitalism that can't even afford faux working class struggle.

The Labor Left, It’s Fake Strikes and False Combativity

Third, we can see a major difference in the tactics and demands promoted by the labor left and union reformism versus those of class unions and class union organization. The strike and general strike action are tactics invoked by both sides. However, we must look closely to see the difference between them. For one, the labor left typically relies almost exclusively on legal striking, that is, striking that is acceptable to and controllable by the ruling class. Class union organization, by contrast, focuses on striking regardless of the bourgeois state's mandates and on extending the strike as far as possible, generalizing it across sections of the working class. It has become popular these days, as it was in the past, to invoke the term "general strike" and promote one, when in reality no actual strike is intended. Labor Notes makes this explicit in their own press, describing their ideal general strike as "a broad-based general strike, sometimes called a civic shutdown, that includes not only workers, but also supportive local governments, churches, media institutions, professional associations, and even some businesses". What is described is not a strike at all but a civic shutdown encompassing various elements across the classes: churches, local governments, small businesses, students, and shoppers, asking people as individuals to stop work, stay home from school, and delay shopping for a day or two.

The Minneapolis "general strike" of January 2026 illustrates this precisely. The action arose in response to Operation Metro Surge, an ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and CBP (Customs and Border Protection) occupation of Minneapolis that explicitly and racially targeted Somali and Latino workers. Trump had publicly labeled Somali workers as "garbage", and ICE agents had been authorized to enter private residences with administrative warrants, bypassing judicial approval in a break from previous legal practice. The murder of Renee Good in the course of this enforcement campaign sharpened the urgency of the response. Organized by a coalition of liberal politicians, activist groups, and business union leadership, the action was called an "economic blackout" rather than a strike, and for good reason. While several unions signed on to lend it the appearance of a general strike, the message delivered to the rank and file was explicit: workers were not going on strike, as doing so would violate their collective bargaining agreements and break the law. Instead, individual workers were advised to call in sick or take a mental health day. Shoppers were asked to delay purchases. Business owners were asked to close voluntarily, and the coalition even provided workers with advice on how to approach "friendly" employers about shutting down for the day. The result was that whatever shutdown occurred was driven more by employers choosing to close than by workers collectively withdrawing their labor. The sole demand was for ICE to leave Minneapolis, with no class-based demands for higher wages or better conditions anywhere in sight. Workers marched alongside their friendly employers rather than against them, and the action's real function was to channel genuine working-class frustration into the electoral dead end of the Democratic Party which it accomplished. Ending in ICE and CBP leaving Minneapolis to do its work of terror elsewhere.

Class unionism and organization recognize that a strike is the most powerful weapon workers have because it cuts off the lifeblood of the ruling class: profit. This is what gives the working class the power to coerce the bosses into meeting its demands. Other elements in society such as students do not hold that power, and small businesses even less so, who as employers have antagonistic relationships to the working class.

The Labor Left and its Popular Front

The labor left embraces coalitional politics and the popular front, selling them as ways for the working class to address its problems. The popular front is an interclass political coalition built under the banner of defending democracy, in which the working class is subordinated to the leadership of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois political forces, dissolving its independent interests and demands into a broad alliance with forces hostile to those interests. Historically, the popular front has subordinated the working class's economic demands, helping mobilize it for imperialist war under the banner of defending democracy. In the 1930s, the popular front tied the working class to the democratic imperialist powers, paving the way for the Second World War and the slaughter of tens of millions of workers on all sides. Today, as US imperialism wages war in Venezuela and Iran for energy dominance over its rivals, the defense of democracy against Trumpism and authoritarianism serves the same function. As the Party makes clear, the deepest purpose of imperialist war is a war against the proletariat and revolution, even before it is a war for the division of imperialist profits. Labor Notes and the labor left, chained to the Democratic Party through their popular front politics, are structurally incapable of opposing these wars. The working class mobilized today behind the banner of No Kings will be asked to die tomorrow behind the banner of democracy and the nation.

We can see this in the organizing around the enduring No Kings protests, organized by the Democratic Party-funded Indivisible and 50501 movement, calling all the good people and organizations of society together to fight evil, from churches to activist groups and beyond. With the help of Labor Notes and the regime union leadership, the working class has been mobilized for these popular front protests, calling for the defense of democracy and the rule of law, subordinating and extinguishing demands for higher wages and other class-based demands in the interest of the working class. For Labor Notes to have promoted such popular front efforts, as is common for the labor left, is to muddy the working class's struggle and mobilize its energies in the defense of bourgeois democracy rather than for demands and tactics that could truly land a blow on the ruling class: real generalized strike action, across sectors and regions, for demands that materially take from and weaken the ruling class, including higher wages and a shorter work week that unite the working class on a material basis.

The Need for a United Front from Below and the Class Union

The class union answer to the popular front is the united front from below: the combination of all workers' defensive organizations toward collective strike action, independent of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois political forces, transcending the imposed divisions of race, nationality, industry, and sector that the ruling class uses to weaken the working class. Where the popular front unites classes from above under the banner of democracy, the united front from below unites workers from below on the terrain of class struggle: workplace committees, class union committees within regime unions, workers' assemblies, strike committees, inter-factory councils, and territorial bodies linking workplaces, sectors, and regions without regard for juridical boundaries, all coordinating collective strike action against the ruling class, opposing interclass coalitions that seek to absorb and neutralize the working classes fighting energies. Unorganized and organized workers alike must come together, utilizing what they can within existing unions and forming new organs of struggle where the regime unions fail them, putting forward their own class demands for higher wages and a shorter working week. Out of this united front from below must come the forging of workplace committees, unions, and workers' organizations into a single class union encompassing all workers against the wage system.

And where do we go from here? History is instructive. The great surges of class struggle in the United States did not arise from gradual stagnation but from sharp, sudden collapses in living standards that stripped away the buffers containing struggle within reformist limits and left workers no choice but to fight. The Pullman Strike of 1894 followed wage cuts of 30 to 40 percent in the wake of the Panic of 1893. The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 erupted after successive reductions totaling up to 50 percent during the Long Depression. The mass strikes of the 1930s emerged from drastic pay cuts and mass unemployment during the Great Depression. In each case, capitalism's crisis was abrupt enough to force workers onto the terrain of open class conflict. In the present, contemporary capitalism has managed to hedge against such a rupture through economic stabilization, credit expansion, and residual social spending, keeping accumulation afloat while preventing a decisive break toward mass class union organization. Without conditions of that severity, class unionism and class union organization can develop only to a certain degree. But that degree matters enormously. Class union forces exist today within the labor movement, organizing in and outside the regime unions, building workplace committees, and networks of militant workers on a class union basis. The task in the present is for these forces to be built and unite, forming a class union front from below that rallies workers to the side of the class union, opposes opportunism in the labor movement from the labor left to the boss-linked leadership of the regime unions, and lays the groundwork for the future class union that will blossom when the objective crisis of capitalism demands it. Both the labor left and regime union leadership present a different look and content, but both function to channel, restrain, and subordinate the working class, preserving the ruling class's ability to accumulate capital and, when the time comes, mobilize workers to die in its imperialist wars. Against both, the united front from below must be built now.