For a Militant, Independent Labor Movement

The following is a statement by People’s Defense Grand Junction endorsed by Mesa County DSA. We will be holding a May Day Rally, more details to come.

May Day is one of the most important annual commemorations for not only the multinational working class of the United States, but the international working class as a whole. This year, we commemorate 140 years since Chicago police fired on workers demonstrating for the eight-hour work day in what is now known as the Haymarket Massacre, and this anniversary gives us in the Grand Valley an excellent opportunity for self-reflection.

This day holds a profound significance for the revolutionary labor movement worldwide, especially as subjective conditions rise to meet this moment. Locally, we have seen the increasing politicization of the people of the Grand Valley – no longer willing to accept the daily lacerations of life under a system we are not meant to survive. The ultra-reactionary second administration of Donald Trump has only intensified the process of fascistization that started before him, and more and more every day the people of the Valley begin to understand that from unaffordable housing propped up by poverty wages to state violence against our immigrant, racialized, homeless, and queer neighbors, to wars of imperialist domination in Iran and Venezuela and the colonial violence every day exerted over Hawai’i, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa, and Guam, the status quo of our society rests on the suffering of working people, both at home and abroad.

It is in this spirit that we must understand and learn from the stale, current state of May Day, with calls for one-day “general strikes” and legal marches with police permission, led by unions whose leadership have never touched the shop floor. We must recognize that International Workers Day has been taken out of the hands of revolutionary workers and placed in those of a labor aristocracy. Indeed, it is commonplace to hear talk of a united front of “progressives”, “reclaiming” American patriotism, or tailing the state unions in the name of “labor”. This is a grave mistake.

Much has been written about the failures of political and economic reformism – the capitalist state’s co-optation of working-class grievances on its terms, and it is in this light that we must reflect. Do our efforts genuinely represent workers and our interests? Or do they bear the stamp of an assumption that all will return to “normal” if only the right people are elected, whether in the halls of Congress or the AFL-CIO? These are very pressing questions for our movement!

The New Labor Organizing Committee (NLOC), in its Draft Program, answers as follows:

“The first principle of NLOC, from which all of our other principles stem, is that we recognize that true labor unions are and must always be organizations of struggle for the working class against the class that exploits them, the capitalist class, and its repressive government. This principle of class, the recognition that the working class and the owning class are locked in perpetual warfare and have irreconcilable interests, is a fundamental truth from which all of our other tasks and ideas flow. In particular we uphold the strike and other economic actions based around the withholding of our labor as the primary weapon of the unions, and resist all attempts to weaken, undermine, and restrain that weapon. We work to embody and uphold the old slogan of the class conscious workers “class against class”.”

“No rights or concessions have ever been granted by the bourgeoisie out of generosity, they were won on the basis of the workers’ unity and discipline. The workers need to achieve a much more expansive level of organization than the state unions—which have left the overwhelming majority of American workers completely unorganized and defenseless—are capable of.”

“We insist on the key principle and task of developing working-class unity through our work. In particular, a working-class unity not based on papering over currently existing divides and backwards ideas among our class, but one which is actually centered on overcoming artificial professional categories towards achieving industrial unity, and one which actively and acutely struggles against all forms of chauvinism (racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, nativism, etc.) that oppresses certain workers to privilege others. We also insist on targeting, in particular, the trend of class collaborationism in its many manifestations, not only because it feeds the workers illusions of peaceful co-existence with the capitalists but also because it actively confuses the workers and places them in opposition to one another. We reject all unity with the capitalist class and their reactionary agents, and embrace unity with all the exploited people who are willing to struggle alongside us.”

“Now, as we come upon May Day, 2026, People’s Defense Grand Junction joins NLOC in calling for a combative, independent, and class-conscious labor movement. We understand that we cannot win a better world by asking for it nicely, without abandoning the reformism and “rank-and-file-ism” that has become predominant in both labor and “left” organizing spaces. Without a clear and independent, working-class understanding of the labor struggle, we cannot hope to break our chains.”

We call for the class-conscious forces in the Grand Valley to join us in independent, red solidarity this International Workers Day.

WORKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!

LONG LIVE INTERNATIONAL WORKERS’ DAY!

FOR A MILITANT, INDEPENDENT LABOR MOVEMENT!

People’s Defense Grand Junction