On June 14, members of our trade-union fraction traveled to the city of Chicago, where the “Labor Notes” conference was being held, and where a parallel event entitled: “For a Fighting Labor Movement: A Militant Critique of Labor Notes.” was being organized.

Our comrades participated in organizing this event through the trade-union coordination Class Struggle Action Network (CSAN), of which they are members alongside workers and trade-union militants who are not members of our party. This is consistent with our approach to trade-union organizations, which must be open to all workers regardless of their political positions.

The event represented the inaugural action of a coordination between CSAN and other organizations supporting class-based trade unionism: Teamsters Mobilize, the 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, which had come into contact with CSAN through previous actions in defense of workers. Class Struggle Baristas United and the Blue Ridge IWW also joined the event after it had been publicly announced.

For our complete critique of the Labor Notes conference itself, see the article “Labor Notes Conference 2026: The Divide Between the Labor Left and the Class Union of the Future” in issue 69 of TICP.

Many workers belonging to the other sponsoring organizations and participating in the initiative were members of non-communist workers political parties, our doctrine does not regard this as an obstacle to complain about, but rather as the terrain on which the party’s intervention in the working class actually takes place: The trade-union movement is the crucial field of political battle in which the communist party confronts the other workers parties that put themselves forward to lead the labor movement.

This battle takes place primarily on the terrain of practical trade-union struggle. We therefore know that the communist trade-union orientation will also establish itself among the ranks of workers belonging to opposing parties, insofar as it proves to be the orientation consistent with the necessities of the development of the class struggle. As the clash between the classes and the crisis of capitalism intensify, and as the revolutionary crisis approaches, practical trade-union problems increasingly take on a political character. The theoretical problems of today will be the practical problems of tomorrow. Within the trade-union movement, communists do not conceal their opinions, but they do not wage a political battle of a theoretical and programmatic order—for example, over the necessity of overthrowing the bourgeois State through revolution—when this question remains remote from the current practical problems of the trade-union struggle. The task of the party’s trade-union fraction is to show workers and trade-union militants, including those belonging to other parties, the validity of the communist trade-union orientation for confronting today’s problems and its connection with the ultimate political questions of the workers’ movement.

On this basis, we succeeded in mobilizing a good number of militant and combative trade-union activists to adopt points of unity consistent with our trade-union program, not because they had abandoned the opportunism of their parties, but because the immediate economic terrain on which the coordination was built is one on which it is possible to arrive at correct positions even among workers who, for the time being, remain politically attached to other banners.

These points are as follows:
     - Workers within existing unions must organize on the basis of the class struggle in opposition to the misleading leadership of officials tied to the employers.
     - The working class and the employing class have no interests in common.
     - Unions must break with the political parties of the capitalist class.
     - The struggle of the working class is an international struggle against a global capitalist system based on the exploitation of wage labor, and it requires international solidarity among workers of all nations in order to achieve its objectives.
     - Building the strike power of the working class remains an indispensable and central pillar for advancing the independent interests of the working class, defending wages and living standards, and imposing greater political demands against the employing class and its State.
     - Unions must break with their timid subordination to the legal and regulatory apparatus of the capitalist State, namely the National Labor Relations Act and Taft-Hartley, which impose recognition of employers’ rights, suppress solidarity strikes, and have historically been used to purge unions of their most militant leaders.

Overall, we consider the event a success. Speakers from each of the organizations were given the opportunity to respond to a series of questions prepared in advance, as well as to questions posed by an audience of approximately 150 people attending both in person and online. Among those attending in person were many who had been drawn to the event precisely through Labor Notes, thanks to our comrades distributing leaflets at the conference.

It was an excellent opportunity for our militants to present our positions to workers and to “take the pulse of the American working class,” as one of our comrades put it.

We do not view this coordination as the “seed” from which the class unions of the future will necessarily emerge. To think this would mean falling back into precisely the voluntaristic illusion against which our current has struggled for a century: the notion that organizational forms can be assigned historical significance through their own will, before the material conditions arise that alone can give them their weight.

Rather than representing an organic outburst of the working class rising up against attacks on its living and working conditions—which alone can provide the necessary foundation for the rebirth of class action—the coordinating body is merely a small group of class-based union activists who still wield very little influence within the labor movement.

This is necessary work in the field of trade-union struggle and orientation, allowing us to arrive stronger and better prepared when the objective conditions produced by capitalism push ever larger sections of the working class into struggle.

It is work that constitutes an absolutely necessary training ground and field of instruction for the party.