May Day Strong!

Alex Schmaus: What’s been happening at the Chicago Teachers Union headquarters the last couple of days?

Jesse Sharkey: There’s been a meeting of the May Day Strong coalition. We had about 475 rank and file activists, community organizers, leaders of civil rights organizations, people who do labor education, and people who do trainings on non-compliance. It’s basically a big cross-section of the anti-Trump movement in the country. We’re here to build a working-class fight-back against the MAGA billionaires.

AS: Can you say more about who’s here and where they’re from?

JS: There’s a ton of rank-and-file teachers. We’ve got local leaders who are still in classrooms and doing amazing work from San Diego, L.A., San Francisco, all the way up the West Coast to Portland, Oregon. Then we have people from Colorado, Minnesota, the upper Midwest, Ohio, Michigan, and Missouri. There are a  bunch of people from Illinois, Wisconsin, the Northeast, the South, and across the Sunbelt. There are a bunch of big community organizations here like People’s Action, which has an important base in the upper Midwest and in the South as well. United Service Workers are here. A bunch of federal workers are here. A number of people in higher education, Higher Ed United folks, United Electrical Workers. I can keep going. It’s an impressive list of folks from across the community. I should mention that there are a bunch of community organizers who are affiliated with Journey for Justice, people from Louisiana, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. And the list goes on. People from the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization, they’re here. It’s a really impressive turnout. Most workers aren’t in unions, so if you want to get something together that feels like a working class movement, you’ve got to include those groups and spaces. That’s what it feels like here.

AS: What’s the vision? What is May Day Strong trying to accomplish today and into the future?

JS: Trump and the billionaires that he supports have launched a broad attack. For many parts of our society, it’s not a new attack, but it’s got a renewed ferocity and viciousness against social programs, against the LGBTQIA community, against immigrants in a particularly vicious form right now, against workers’ rights in our unions, against civil rights, and against the 14th Amendment. So that represents an authoritarian attack. The only way to get that kind of attack against so many people is that they dispense with a whole set of features of formal democracy. They’re going to seize people without a court order. They’re going to use masked law enforcement agents. They’re going to defy court orders, or they’re going to get a packed Supreme Court to ratify the worst of their excesses. We’re saying we need a united working-class defense against rising authoritarianism. They’ve had a breakthrough. We have got to stop them from consolidating power.

To be explicit, that means up to and including the general strike, the ability to withhold our labor across our society. That’s what stopped the coup in South Korea in December. Historically, the general strike has been a really important defense mechanism, whether it was in Tunisia or whether it was in South Africa during the apartheid regime. It’s a really important defense mechanism. So our vision is that we see an attack and we need to defend ourselves against it. We represent the vast majority of people in our society. We have a vision of a society that provides for a decent future for all people, where they can live with dignity and with high-quality public institutions and healthy communities; where they can have the resources that they need to thrive and where our children can look forward to a future on a planet that isn’t being destroyed. We have a broad vision of the future. So it’s not just about trying to stop the terrible things that their side is trying to do. It’s about having an inspiring vision of the future that we can believe in that gives us a life that’s full of joy and fulfillment.

AS: What is important for Tempest’s audience of people who are interested in socialism and left politics to understand about May Day Strong?

JS: I think that anyone who’s paying attention, whether they’re a socialist or not, has to be really concerned about the direction of U.S. politics, the way the right has broken through. I think that when you look at mainstream society, most of the response to that has either been completely anemic, like, let’s wait for the Republicans to screw up. James Carville said that in our times, the most radical thing we can do is nothing. We’re going to wait basically and then we’ll get ’em in the polls. That’s one kind of vision.

Another vision is based on very large mobilizations. I’m really happy that those exist. Indivisible and 50501 are playing an important role and doing important work. And in fact, those folks have been quite unsectarian; they have been willing to work with us. But periodic large mobilizations aren’t going to be sufficient for taking on this challenge. And to the extent that those mobilizations play into an electoral strategy, again, I think that what’s really challenging about Trump is that they’re trying to undermine the basis of fair elections. They have a program of voter suppression. They have a program of layoffs and attacks on federal workers and other unions. They are bullying institutions in higher education and law firms. They are putting troops on the streets. I mean, this is a playbook that is not based on electoral calculation. This is based on authoritarian use of force, intimidation, and control over a whole series of institutions in our society. We need a strategy that mobilizes a big majority of society well organized in our workplaces, in our communities, among immigrants, and wherever people congregate to counter that power. I think the readers of this interview should pay attention to it because I think this is at the heart of a vision that can win.

AS: How can people support this project? How can they get involved?

JS: A bunch of ways. We don’t represent the same kind of money and power that they do, but we represent a fuck of a lot more than nothing. And so there are many responses. If I lived in L.A. or a place like that where masked ICE agents were terrorizing folks, I’d be out on the side of those being targeted. I’d be cautious–I saw that there’s a report that there was an explosion at a police training facility today. It wouldn’t surprise me if that had nothing to do with our movement, but I promise you that our movement is going to get blamed for it. There’s going to be a lot more repression, and we’ve got to stand up to it. We can’t cede the streets to them. We’ve got to be smart, but we’ve got to exercise our right to assemble and to be seen.

So participate in your local actions, whether it’s defending immigrants, or defending any of the attacked groups. When they’re trying to erase LGBTQIA people from our libraries and curriculum, show up, speak, fight it as well as we can. If there’s a union that’s got a picket line up, support it. My point is that there’s a whole bunch of local ways that people should be participating. By all means, do it.

Then there is May Day itself. We put out a call in March for mobilization across the country, and we had hundreds of thousands of people participate in those actions on May Day. The next thing that we want to try to do as a coordinated movement is to turn out for Labor Day events. It’s a workers’ holiday. In a lot of places, it hasn’t been radical in maybe forever, certainly for a long time. We’re trying to reclaim left-wing space. We’re asking people, if there’s a Labor Day march, to bring a sign, show up to it. In a bunch of places, we’re trying to get regular organizing meetings that are open to people who plan to turn out. Here in Chicago we’ll show up to a Labor Day parade and we’ll make a stop and make a protest against some of the billionaires that are behind the DOGE efforts to cut public services.

So if that’s happening in your community, you plug in that way. Labor Day will be an event that we’ll coordinate online at maydaystrong.org. There’ll be a map up and people can click on a map and get a mobilizing link and plug into local actions that way. And then going forward, we want to have twenty or thirty regional conferences around the country. Get a union hall or get a school on a Saturday and ask activists to come to plan. We’re cognizant of the fact that we haven’t had a particularly united movement for quite a while. So the idea of those regional conferences is that they’ll be a place where we can discuss strategy and have workshops that build up our skills and be together in a conversation about what our next steps are and really try to strengthen our ties and build coalition. So those are coming up in the fall. And then beyond that, look for more national mobilizations. And I hope that May Day 2026, which falls on a weekday again next year, will actually be a day where we have some ability to stop production and slow down the authoritarian machine.

AS: Many people have grown skeptical of calls for general strikes and political strikes. Why is this one different?

JS: Yeah, I am skeptical too. I think we should be a little skeptical. A general strike is easy to call for, but actually pulling it off is a different matter. If wishing for it and pulling it off were the same thing, then there would’ve been general strikes long before now. I don’t think I’m predicting that you circle it on a calendar in ten months and say, this is when the general strike is going to be. But it’s an idea that has a tremendous amount of currency right now because it highlights the people who deliver the food; plant, grow, and harvest the crops; make our society run in every kind of way; allow water to run into houses; build our houses; make the roads drivable; and build the machines that we use to run our lives. In any area you want to look at, our society depends on workers. You might have some freaking billionaire weirdos who believe that we’re going to jet off to Mars and that robots are going to do all that work, but that’s not the way our society actually works.

When you have a government that is thoroughly captured by a billionaire agenda like the Trump government is, they’re  also in a complete bubble, they’re in a Twitter bubble, and there’s an echo chamber. They hear themselves talking and think they represent the majority of people. They have a talking point about illegal aliens. I don’t see illegal aliens. I know the city of Chicago and I see vibrant communities of people from around the world who not only make the city work by doing their jobs, but they make it a vibrant and amazing place to be. But those folks on the right have a monopoly on the means of violence right now and a kind of self-assurance and overconfidence that should give all of us pause. It doesn’t matter if their program is deeply unpopular, they intend to carry it out. It doesn’t matter if deporting 16 million people is going to leave our society broken. If they could get away with it, which they won’t, but they’re going to attempt to carry that out because they’re ideologues and they’re in a bubble and they’ve got their hands on the levers of power. That can be a really demoralizing place to be if you’re a worker. And if the only thing that you can do is cast a ballot once every four years, if that’s the only thing you think you can do is stop it, that’s not a recipe for having the confidence and the initiative that we need to organize.

The idea of a general strike really has important currency because it’s actually a vision of something that could change things. It could work. Now in history, it’s often been that general strikes actually happen because of a particular convergence of events. In the general strikes in the thirties, the cops would murder  a striker and the funeral would wind up becoming the general strike. There would be a defensive response. On the West coast, there was an attempt to crush the longshore strike. The repression gets worse and then the strike generalizes. It was a response to a particular kind of provocation from the bosses. I suspect that we’re in a similar kind of situation. So again, I don’t think you can put it on the calendar, but I think that we can train people about what it means and give the idea currency and get people organizing in the workplaces. It would be really unwise to say that a general strike is something that we are never going to do. It’s the kind of tool in our toolbox we really need right now.

AS: Thank you for doing this interview. I want to express appreciation to the CTU for organizing this space. As one of the union activists here from the San Francisco Bay Area, we are going back home with plans for a Labor Day demonstration, and we’re going to plan a big mass meeting in the fall. We’re going to try to get a thousand people into a high school or a union hall to plan for more actions and to give people courage to fight back here in the Bay Area. I’m very inspired.

JS: Thank you. Awesome.