Tempest, the United Front approach, and “the Resistance”
This article will focus broadly on “the Resistance” (the movements and constellation of forces that have grown up in opposition to the Trump administration and its authoritarian efforts), its political dynamics, and the role and posture of the revolutionary Left.
I start here because this new reality defines and delimits the nature of the class struggle in the United States.
Among other things, the second Trump administration (Trump II) represents the most significant one-sided class attack by the U.S. state and capital since the global economic crisis in 2008. Whatever its populist veneer, this is a government of and by the billionaires. To provide just one glaring example, as Thomas Hummel argued last summer in reflecting on the first six months of the administration, Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” carried “the largest transfer of wealth from the very poorest to the very richest in the country’s history, while at the same time it allocates $75 billion to ICE, in effect massively expanding what has effectively become a state gestapo.”
Now approaching eighteen months of Trump II, the attacks on Medicaid and food subsidies for the poorest of working class people in the United States have not yet been fully felt. The impact on the broader working class is being widely felt and continues apace, escalated by Trump’s trade and imperial policies. Last year’s decimation of the unionized federal work force is the single largest union busting operation for decades. Most significantly, the fascistic and racist violence directed at immigrant workers is the greatest qualitative escalation of an assault on this part of the working class since the mid-1990s, if not earlier.
All of this needs to be placed in the broader crisis of late neoliberalism. For capital, the challenges of re-establishing systemic profitability in a global system marked by sluggish growth, at best, and built on unsustainable and contradictory fiscal and monetary policy, has provided an opening to the far right. The results internationally have been a spectacular, dangerous, and reciprocally impactful reworking of the global imperialist system.
In the United States we are witnessing the demolition of the post–World War II state and political order. As a result, some of the most acute fights over the last few years, and therefore some of the biggest social movements, have been about basic democratic rights—the right to organize, assemble, and protest (for example, the Palestine movement and campus repression generally), the right to basic bodily autonomy and freedom (trans health care), the right to representation and equal protection under the law (attacks on voting rights and so-called DEI, fights against racial profiling and warrantless invasions by ICE). These are foundational class questions.
As Tempest argued in an editorial in February 2025,
We should understand struggles against identity-based oppression as struggles against capital’s socio-material relations…
Donald Trump’s recent barrage of executive orders—which have targeted workers, immigrants, queer and trans folks, women, and those who are racially oppressed—give lie to the fact that struggles against oppression can either be tabled in favor of class-wide demands or somehow fought indirectly.
In addition, an even cursory assessment of recent “workplace” struggles— for example the nurses’ strike in New York City, the educators’ strike in San Francisco, the meat packing strike in the Midwest, or ongoing oil workers bargaining nationally—shows these to be fundamentally conditioned by the dynamic of Trump II and the post-2008 fallout. This is also true of the political developments and struggles within key unions such as UAW and the Teamsters.
The cross-class “Resistance”
Taken as a whole, the breadth and depth of these attacks and the struggles that follow, also mean that the Resistance has been likewise broad and cross-class. Even more than is generally true in our undemocratic capitalist republic, the opposition to this authoritarian trajectory in all its myriad forms has a mass character. The majority of the population opposes what is unfolding. The recent turnout at the mass No Kings protests is one good indication.
This has inevitably meant that the perspectives and strategies of the different parts of this broad, cross-class movement is being contested. Different parts of the movement reflect different politics and different class interests. Rather than stand on the sidelines of these broad mobilizations because of their liberal character and ties to the Democratic Party, the Left, including revolutionaries, must be present and fight for our approach as a distinct current.
The recent experience in Minneapolis is instructive. All of these streams of social and class attacks converged in Minnesota, culminating in mass protests that forced Trump to retreat, fire his commander of the Border Patrol, Greg Bovino, sideline Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, and withdraw hundreds of ICE and Border Patrol agents. This uprising against ICE was based on a much more developed infrastructure of resistance forged over the last couple of decades. This was built through the George Floyd uprising against police brutality, union organizing and strikes, immigrant rights struggles, and indigenous-led climate justice campaigns.
And at the turn of the new year in the Twin Cities, the different perspectives and strategies played out, with efforts of the Left to consolidate workers’ assemblies and to continue to build more lasting infrastructure. At the same time, those sections of the resistance most closely aligned with the Democratic Party leadership (the mayor of Minneapolis, the Governor of Minnesota, the leadership of the police and sheriffs offices) sought to demobilize the movements, and prioritized stability and a return to an unsustainable status quo.
Yet whatever challenges exist in Minneapolis, the dynamic was in advance of most of the rest of the United States. In reality, there is a continuum across the country in the development of infrastructures of resistance. Most parts of the country lack the scope of organization that had been previously built in the Twin Cities. And like the rest of the United States, the militant minority and revolutionary Left remain small in the Twin Cities. This hampers the organization and politics of the resistance.
Local character and the fight to build a national resistance
Even granting the national character of Indivisible and the more nascent May Day Strong, the overarching dynamic of the Resistance is the extent to which it is defined by local and regional constellations of forces and organizations. Unfortunately, the Left lacks a counterpart to national organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Congress of Racial Equality, or Students for a Democratic Society. This is especially lamentable in the lack of any national immigrant rights formation that could have taken the lead in the response to the ICE invasions and abductions.
While it is possible to generalize about certain common approaches within the Resistance generally, the contest over how best to build the Resistance, and therefore what the class struggle will look like in its specificity, depends on the relative balance of power among those organizing on the ground in a given city or region.
It is clear that dynamics in any given place can be highly contingent. Some of this is a result of how acute an attack a given city has faced. The invasions by ICE and the National Guard in Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Portland, Washington, D.C., Charlotte, Memphis, New Orleans, and beyond, have forced a higher level of organization and political contestation over the response of the movements. The extent to which Burlington, Vermont, has been at the center of important and high-profile struggles around immigration detention has impacted the character of its coalitions. Similarly, the decades of experience of immigrant rights organizing, and the memory of the protests of 2006, in Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Diego, inevitably impacts the dynamics there.
We also should not underestimate the impact of the Palestine solidarity movement on the current organization and politics of the Resistance . Finally, the relative strength of the organized Left and its revolutionary and reformist wings plays a role that is often overlooked.
Unionization and the role of the unions
It is also important to note the role of the trade unions. This is especially true because it has been where the trade union forces are more advanced in organization and politics that they can have a more decisive role in giving political direction and shape to the local Resistance movements. Chicago, and the Chicago Teachers’ Union, offers the best example.
Despite the adverse political conditions nationally—including the composition of Trump’s National Labor Relations Board and the massive attacks on the size of the federal work force—the broader political radicalization has led to an increase in organizing and in overall unionization rates and density. In 2025, 16.5 million workers in the United States were represented by a union—an increase of 463,000 from 2024 and the highest number in 16 years. This represents 11.2% of all wage and salary workers, up from 11.1% in 2024.
This growth was roughly equal in the public (236,000) and private (227,000) sectors. Construction and Health and Social Services accounted for 70 percent of the private sector increases.
Nonetheless, the level of strike activity paints a more ambivalent picture with overall strike numbers either flat or down slightly. As Kim Moody argues, in recent years, “Strikes are, with rare exceptions, limited to when contracts expire and new ones are negotiated. That means labor’s most powerful weapon against capital is limited to a prearranged schedule like the union’s convention or the monthly local membership meeting.”
Thus, despite the uptick in union organizing, the role of the unions and their leaderships varies greatly but is consistently delimited by their structural role as essentially defensive organs of the working class. Especially in the context of the all out attacks of the far right and state, in the absence of significant pressure from broader movement and Left forces, the strategic and tactical conservatism of the union leaderships, and the depth of their historic ties to the Democratic Party coalition, will negatively impact their role in a local Resistance.
Thus, the role of organized labor, and the relative success or weakness historically of the Left in building rank-and-file organization and class struggle and social justice unionism, impacts what roles the unions play, and therefore what is possible in Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, or San Francisco as opposed to New York City, to give one example.
One of the impacts of this dynamic with the unions is that the calls for a general strike largely exist at the level of agitation, and have not yet manifested themselves in a realistic prospect for an actual general strike led by the trade union movement. This is not to minimize the importance—or breadth—of the actions in Minneapolis in January 2026 and its significance in raising expectations. Rather, it is to recognize the challenges we face if our aim is truly a South Korea–style mass strike (to give but one recent historical example).
Efforts to build national organization
Despite the inevitable local character of the broader resistance efforts, there is an ongoing struggle to forge new national organizations and coalitions and therefore a new Left. The two main organized currents of the national resistance are Indivisible and May Day Strong.
Indivisible was formed by two Democratic Party organizers who explicitly conceived the project to galvanize its base in struggle and then turn it to elections to defeat Trump and Republicans. It has staged the massive No Kings rallies. But, because of its ties to the Democratic Party, it has tended to exclude Palestine solidarity activists and has proved reluctant to even include opposition to the war on Iran. Its strategy is to turn those millions into campaigners for the Democrats in the midterms and 2028 presidential elections.
As we know from bitter experience, the Democrats offer no alternative for the vast majority. The people on those demonstrations are open to much more radical ideas and strategies, however, and should not be written off or left with no alternative but the liberal politics on offer from the front of the march.
May Day Strong was spearheaded by the Chicago Teachers’ Union. It has brought together unions, immigrant rights groups, other social movement organizations, and NGOs in a potential united front of working-class forces.
May Day Strong does include Indivisible and another liberal formation, 5051, and it is limited by the horizons of the left union bureaucracy. Nevertheless, it has taken an initial call by the UAW leadership, and helped put May Day back on the map, encouraged solidarity schools to prepare unions to stage political strikes against Trump, and pushed the slogan “no work, no school, no shopping” for this year’s May Day.1 And in Chicago, the CTU and its May Day coalition are campaigning for the mayor to shut down the schools, and therefore to shut down the city, in a backdoor mass strike.
May Day Strong is the key national vehicle to advance the argument for a general strike to challenge Trump’s increasingly authoritarian regime. Its explicit model is the South Korean strike that blocked a coup and toppled the government. That said, it is not immune from cooptation by the Democrats through the trade union officialdom’s alliance with the party. And it does not exist in all cities and towns.
Despite its limitations, the Left should take up the May Day Strong banner, as it facilitates our ability to highlight the qualitatively new nature of the attacks of the far right and therefore the need for much higher levels of class struggle and strike action. Our challenge is how to forge similar local formations aligned with the national coalition. For the moment, it is our best shot to agitate for mass working-class action to topple the Trump regime and what it represents.
At a much more modest level, and with an eye to both strengthening the revolutionary left pole of the resistance and helping build a more coherent national face to this resistance, for the last year Tempest has been part of building the United Left Platform. The ULP was launched by five revolutionary and independent socialist organizations (International Marxist Humanist Organization, Socialist Horizon, Solidarity, Workers Voice, and Tempest), with a sixth (Speak Out Socialists) subsequently joining.
The driving motivation behind the ULP was two-fold. First, to amplify revolutionary perspectives and strategy in the Resistance. Second, to help build common defense in the context of “the unprecedented authoritarian assaults facing the left, oppressed communities, and the working class as a whole in the U.S.” In addition to some joint propaganda and meetings, the ULP helped launch the Committee to Defend Tom Alter, which has proven to be a vibrant and successful effort to defend one of the many victims of the authoritarian assaults.
Competing perspectives and strategies within “the Resistance”
At the risk of over generalizing, there are four main political tendencies within (and in relationship with) the Resistance. It is worth reiterating that often people have a mix of consciousness and will share aspects of each. This is part of the reason why there is space for political contestation among these trends.
First is the right-wing of the movement, best represented by the national leadership of No Kings and Indivisible. It is inevitably and unwaveringly pro-Democratic Party, and therefore electoralist. These forces often conceive of the fight as one of “rescuing democracy,” with the assumption that the U.S. state pre-Trump is what we are fighting for, a restoration of the post-World War II status quo. This is often (though unfortunately not exclusively) the side of the movement which encourages the use of U.S. flags in the demonstrations, who will discourage the discussion of purportedly “divisive” issues—like imperialism, Palestine, or trans rights—and whose purpose is to get Democrats elected.
As a distinct current within this first tendency, the social democrats share with the liberals a commitment to the Democratic Party and electoralism, though often couched as a strategic or tactical choice.
Second, the popular front wing of the movement, as against the liberals and (usually) the social democrats, conceives of their approach as a Marxist one built on a legacy of the (official Stalinist) Communist Party. They share a perspective of a defense of democracy, not based on a principled defense of popular democratic rights but on the idea that any project of building socialism has to be taken in stages. And that a “democratic” capitalist stage has to be consolidated before a real fight for socialism can be engaged. To this end, these forces actively and explicitly seek to build a cross-class political coalition with a “progressive” section of the bourgeoisie.
In the United States, this has meant building a political coalition with that section of the “progressive” capital that supports the Democratic Party and historically subordinates all other goals to winning elections. In its recent iteration, many of the forces supporting this strategy, including some of the leadership of May Day Strong, acknowledge the importance of independent class activity and strike action, but have historically ended up subordinating this to a pro-Democratic Party electoralism.
The third trend that is identifiable and worth mentioning is one that can be described as “ultraleft.” It often rejects participation in the broader Resistance because of its liberal or social democratic leadership. As a result, it can often focus on more adventurist activism at the expense of building the mass movement. In choosing to focus on a more comfortable or familiar, pre-existing radical milieu, and too often in choosing to conflate radical tactics for socialist strategy, it mistakenly foregoes politically contesting leadership of the class movement as a whole.
While it is understandable for newly radicalizing people to want to take action, and unconditionally reject the politics of the pro-Democratic Party trends, this current often ends up writing off the possibility of both winning other people who are newly radicalizing from our right2 and the tactical importance of legal mass action.
Whatever our criticisms of its leadership, and the reactionary character of some of the liberal politics and tactics—insisting on not having speakers at rallies in some cases and in others platforming Democratic Party officials, refusing to countenance demands around Palestine, wrapping propaganda and demands in the U.S. flag, concessions around national and so-called border security, a refusal to acknowledge the crimes of U.S. imperialism— we should recognize the value of this mass action as a response to the class attacks and Trump II. The Left must use these mass protests as a place to meet, engage, and most importantly, organize people who are looking to take the struggle, in all its limitations, in a better direction.
Tempest is committed to a different, fourth, strategy, a United Front approach, one premised on a consistent and principled engagement with the class struggle on all fronts, including the defense of democratic rights, while rebuilding independent organizations of the working class and oppressed communities.
This is a strategy for forging coalitions for activism and action, and will inevitably mean working with forces to our right, while remaining opposed to electoralism and any subordination to the Democratic Party. It also means fighting for open, democratic organizing spaces where different political currents can freely argue for the best ideas, strategies, and tactics.
Given the relative size and weakness of the revolutionary Left, we see the importance of engaging the class struggle—with these goals in mind, and without hiding our principles—in as broad a political front as possible to best achieve our ends. This means working with other forces that do not necessarily share our politics and approach, in the interest of building our collective organizational capacity and winning discrete fights, all while helping to clarify and win an argument about what will best take the working-class movement forward. In this process we should be focused on helping to organize our class and social forces to build a new political party; one focused not primarily on elections but on giving voice and organizational weight to class and social struggle. This includes working to build both a principled revolutionary socialist organization and, using the United Front approach, to build broader socialist, worker, and popular organizations.
While it is true that the initial formulation of the theory of the United Front— in the early 1920s at a period of mass workers parties and with revolution on the agenda—is quite different from our own, the lessons from the period, and the approach overall, remain very relevant.
The post-2008 political radicalization has taken place in a period of overall weakness of the organized forces of the Left and after decades of largely one-sided neoliberal class war in most Western capitalist countries. The United Front approach is important in this moment precisely because it provides revolutionaries a road map for engaging in the broader class struggle. It gives us a chance to stand side-by-side with those newly participating in these struggles. And this allows us to engage and win activists who, given the weakness and lack of continuity of the organized Left, may have little theoretical, historical, and/or practical organizing experience.
Just as importantly, it also allows us to learn the lessons we collectively need to build stronger and more implanted organizations on the Left. In this, we should not shy from the value and importance of building self-consciously revolutionary organizations such as Tempest, so long as we are winning people based on this broader perspective and its importance in helping build a broad, effective Left and working-class movement and lasting infrastructures of dissent.
Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: Myotus; modified by Tempest.
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Aaron Amaral is a member of the Tempest Collective and serves on the editorial board of New Politics.