When we workers try to understand the current establishment labor movement, try to understand why even with historically unpopular Democratic Party and a second Trump administration in the White House major labor unions are seemingly unable or unwillingly to put up a fight and break with the practice of depending on government support for their activity, we have to put it in the context of the US capitalist class’s almost century-long plan to create a docile state-controlled labor movement. The truth is that the state unions have been systemically adjusted and prepared by government intervention for decades for this precise moment: that when fascistization intensifies, the labor unions don’t fight against it but in fact lean into it.

Without this understanding the actions of the establishment unions become incomprehensible. For example, why haven’t the federal worker unions launched a major strike action to resist Trump’s unilateral invocation of “national security” to strip union representations from hundreds of thousands of government employees? Even for a conservative “business union” such an action would be common sense: if the whole bargaining unit is being taken away from you anyways, you have much less to lose by organizing a strike in violation of federal law, but you have a lot to potentially gain financially (retaining dues-paying members) and influence-wise (showing membership you will fight to defend the union). Instead all the federal unions have done is organize press conferences thinly disguised as rallies and double down on their appeals to the US imperialist state, as represented by the Democratic and Republican Parties, for protection and support. They are seemingly unable to break out of the cage of state dependence, even when the state itself comes down on them.

We can see then how contradictions within the labor movement continue to intensify, and continue to become more and more plain for all to see. Prices are rising, wages are worth less and less, the rights of workers are trampled on, and our conditions inside and outside the workplace get worse and worse. So then again, where is the labor movement? Where are the strikes, the walkouts, the withholding of labor and acts of resistance? The truth is that the establishment labor movement is complicit in these crimes, and that their complicity has been deliberately developed over a century so that when push came to shove the establishment unions would make way for or side with the policies of the reactionary imperialist government even if it went against their short-term interests (much less their long-term interests!).

In this way the encouragement and fostering of a state unionist trend in the labor movement has always been one of the main underlying pillars of a country’s development towards fascism. The workers movement, especially its revolutionary conscious element, has historically been the main opponent of fascism. Without a strong state unionist element at the helm of the labor movement, the prospects for fascistization become much more limited and difficult to achieve. However, on the opposing end, if a country’s capitalist class is able to foster the consolidation of a powerful state unionist trend, all possible opposition to reactionization and fascism becomes neutered. While the revolutionary groups and the class-conscious masses might be able to temporarily take the streets, their prospects for halting production and directly materially weakening the logistical and economic supports that underpin the state are now become dramatically limited.

Guilt for this situation also falls on the shoulders of generations of so-called “reformists” within the unions who failed the workers that entrusted their hopes and aspirations to them time and time again. The energy of literal tens of millions of workers have been channeled into reformist caucus after reformist caucus, influence campaign after influence campaign, only for the labor movement to become more and more lost and reactionary year-after-year. Whether they call themselves, liberal, conservative, socialist or apolitical, the factions that provide false paths to the workers and impede or oppose those who forge ahead on the path towards a New Labor Movement, are just as much a part of the problem as the union higher-ups they claim to oppose.

Amidst an escalating process of fascistization, the revolutionary workers movement is confronted with a set of tasks and challenges it must face in order to defeat these devastating plans of the capitalists and reactionaries. In a context such as ours, class-conscious workers and their organizations, like the New Labor Organizing Committee, must redouble their efforts to unify and expand the class-conscious, independent and combative labor movement in the United States. More work must be done to organize and create platforms and campaigns on key points of struggle, such as ICE defense work in workplaces, against workplace surveillance and speed-ups, and against lay-offs and other effects of the current economic crisis, with those rank-and-file workers and class-conscious workers organizations who can be united around such common demands. The lessons and summations of promising campaigns, victories, and successful mobilizations much be propagated so that these lessons may be taken in common and pessimism or apathy combated. The lessons of defeats, setbacks, and challenges must also be assessed and summed up so that they may be learned from and in the future overcome. If the ranks of the New Labor organizations are strengthened, and their allies consolidated, then the arsenal available to the proletarian anti-fascist movement is reciprocally strengthened and consolidated.

The political education work of New Labor also becomes critical in periods such as these. The agitation and propaganda of the class-conscious workers’ organizations must, in approachable every day language, not only expose the class enemies, but explain to the workers the path of resistance and struggle against the owners and reactionaries. Basics of our ideology must be broken down into simple to understand and helpful courses, presentations, media and pamphlets, and the ideological influence of the bourgeoisie exposed. Workers should see the connections between worsening conditions of work and the broader process of fascistization and imperialist decay. Parallel with this political education calls must be made and organizationally implemented, leading to the mobilizations and actions that in turn politicize the workers through actual acts of class struggle.

In such a period, class-conscious workers should not look at the challenges before them and despair, but rather work together to creatively and collectively solve problems, and should look to history for examples of how movements with similar problems were able to overcome the challenges posed by fascistization.

In 1970s Peru, for example, the anti-revisionist elements of the Communist Party of Peru – Red Flag (who included among them Chairman Gonzalo and the Ayacucho group who would go onto to lead the reconstitution of the Communist Party and the launching of the Peruvian People’s War), were faced with a similar crisis. Under General Velasco, a fascist corporatist government had been installed in Peru under the banner of a false “socialism”. The establishment labor movement there, which was also dominated by opportunism, revisionism, and state unionism like our own, was an active participant in this corporatism and in the various fascist-style governments in Peru throughout the 70s, 80s, and 90s.

Given these very conditions, the class-conscious labor movement in Peru was able to forge forward through the leadership of its conscious revolutionary element. The workers in their thousands were mobilized to carry out indefinite and armed strikes, politicized around the ideology of the proletariat and Communist Party of Peru’s class line in the workers movement, and organized into the PCP’s generated organisms in the mass movement. This was made possible through a few key points that we would be wise to learn from:

1. A correct revolutionary line, which in particular entails a correct application of the mass line to the workers movement
2. A correct relationship to the question of political power for the proletariat
3. A stable, persistent, disciplined and devoted set of revolutionary labor organizers and revolutionary labor organizations embedded among the toiling masses, in particular their lowest and deepest sections
4. A creative approach to solving problems and challenges that avoids both anti-masses commandism, while also avoiding reformist tailism
5. A solid united front based on shared principles, program, practice and collective discipline

There are other examples from our history that can be drawn from so that a negative situation, such as a period of rising fascism, may be turned into its opposite. We must situate every mobilization, every exposure, every demand letter, walk out, strike and slowdown as battles within the context of the broader class war.

There is no way around it: to defeat the machinations and plans of the state in an imperialist country like the United States we must organize more and more working-class trade unionists imbued with revolutionary desire, forged by collective struggle, and bound together through political discipline and unity. With these leaders, and the organizations they fill the structure of, the multinational US working class will have a powerful weapon in its fight against reactionization and fascistization, and the capitalist offensive which affects us every day, in every aspect of our lives.