May Day or 1 May is International Workers’ Day. It started when the working class rose up as a collective force and claimed a day to mark its struggles. Workers did so not to remind themselves to send out warm greetings of solidarity once a year, but in their own class interests. To test their wings and flex their muscles and above all strengthen their cohesion and their solidarity. What is not possible to achieve if working class people around the world join forces?
“What do we want?” is the phrase often shouted by protesters. “We have a world to win,” the watchword of the Communist Manifesto, is the answer. When the world’s working class rises up and puts an end to capitalism’s constant exploitation of workers, it will at the same time, open the way for the liberation of all humanity and the protection of the environment.
War and Authoritarianism on the Rise
The red flag of May Day 2025 is raised against a sky darkened by the bombs of war and the shadows of “strongmen”, clouded by pollution and half obscured by tariff walls, in a world dominated by an intensifying conflict between US and Chinese imperialism. Gaza’s children and paramedics are being deliberately murdered by Israel’s regime of death, which, with Trump’s support, is planning outright mass displacement and ethnic cleansing.
The number of wars in the world is the highest since records began in 1946, and the number of refugees globally is breaking records. But it is worse than that. More and more countries are planning to produce more nuclear weapons. Europe’s leaders like to (rightfully) paint Trump as dangerous, but their response is to copy him. The EU’s new armaments package is astronomical—worth €800,000,000,000—and the world is in an arms race frenzy. Militarism is the road to war in a system whose economy and foundation rests on competition and domination.
Trump is building an authoritarian regime. This includes political control and repression, from universities to museums, and attacks on trade union rights. Trump wants to rewrite history. It is “negative” to talk about racism, says the leader of a state whose rise and wealth is based on colonialism and racism. All the world’s commentators are drawing comparisons with the 1930s, which was the worst decade in modern history. Extreme nationalism and racism led to extermination and world war.
The fundamental problem is not about the world’s most powerful nation having a bad leader. It’s the fact that the system creates the leaders that correspond to this era: Trump, Putin, Xi, Modi, Milei, and many others. That is why our response must be one of opposition to the entire system, building anti-capitalist and socialist working-class struggle. As capitalism becomes more authoritarian and places limits on the parliamentary arena, resistance needs to be built even more so on the extra-parliamentary plane, with strikes, mass mobilisations and blockades. If we look at the roots of the problem, we will find answers on how to address it.
The Legacy of May Day
Workers started organising globally in order to secure peace. From the outset, 1 May was a day of international mass struggle for the eight-hour work day and universal suffrage, as well as for world peace and socialism.
It was the first mass socialist international workers’ organisation — the “Second” Socialist International — that decided in 1889 to make 1 May an annual global day of workers’ struggle. To ensure that anti-militarism did not remain mere words, the Second International also made it mandatory for all socialist members of parliament to refuse to grant any funds whatsoever for military purposes and to respond to the agitation for war with mass demonstrations for peace and with international anti-militarism campaigns.
However, anti-militarism has also always been a litmus test for the labour movement and the left—dividing those who dare to reject imperialist militarism and those who, citing the complexities of the “situation,” give in to warmongering, nationalism and the loud demands of the capitalist elites for military proliferation.
The early labour movement used Marxism to understand the root of the problem. Exploitation of workers worldwide means that wealth accumulates at the top. The wealth of the billionaires rose three times faster in 2024 than in 2023. Since 2020, five billion people have become poorer, while the world’s five richest men have doubled their fortunes, Oxfam wrote last year. We need to reverse this pyramid.
Capitalism pits workers against each other, thereby laying the foundations for racism. Conversely, anti-racism is in the interests of workers. The oppression of women and transgender people grows out of the patriarchal structures of capitalism in the workplace, the home, and the state, and is both expressed and reinforced by sexual violence. Accepting or turning a blind eye to oppression weakens us.
Our common solidarity makes us stronger and more united—not just in words, but in deeds. Malcolm X and the Civil Rights Movement were among the first to recognise the need to fight against US imperialism’s war in Vietnam. Ten years later, a worldwide mass movement with revolutionary potential stopped the war.
A Crisis-Ridden and Parasitic System
With the new global militarist upsurge, new wars are threatened while all ambitions of stopping capitalism’s destruction of the planet’s ecological balance are thrown overboard. In 2024, the planet’s average temperature was 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels for the first time. In just one year, 151 extreme weather events forced 800,000 people to flee their homes, the highest figure since records began. Just how much the crisis-ridden capitalist system has become a parasite on society is symbolised by the climate crisis being answered by the leader of the world’s richest country with “Drill, baby, drill.”
When Trump’s brutal trade war was launched on “Liberation Day,” it was, as even some bourgeois commentators noted, a declaration of war on the whole world. As Leon Trotsky explained in the 1930s, tariff barriers are erected “because they are profitable and indispensable to one national bourgeoisie to the detriment of another, regardless of the fact that they act to retard the development of the economy as a whole.” And just as in the 1930s, military rearmament goes hand in hand with increased economic protectionism—it’s all about imperialism and the domination of the stronger imperialist power over the weak. With Trump’s hawkish sights set on Canada, the Panama Canal, Greenland and Gaza, naked, bullying imperialism is becoming exposed in the eyes of hundreds of millions of workers worldwide.
For the working class, the transition of capitalism from neoliberal globalisation to economic nationalism and a new imperialist arms race is like moving out of the frying pan into the fire. We must fight against the worst-case scenario—that workers and the poor are pitted against each other in new wars in the interests of the ruling class. Of course, closed borders will not save the economy or jobs on either side of the walls. Capitalism has been embedded for more than 100 years in a world economy where economic development is about an international division of labour. To hope that reversing this would revive the ailing economy is nothing short of a reactionary utopia. On the contrary, Trump’s trade war risks throwing the world economy into deep chaos and crisis, just as in the 1930s.
The trade war is another attempt to escape the inherent contradictions of the capitalist system that have led to today’s “polycrisis” with society on the brink of, or in collapse. The war and refugee disaster in Sudan, along with the genocidal war in Gaza and ongoing “meat grinder” in Ukraine, is a grim reminder of what lies ahead unless a socialist alternative can be built.
Build an Alternative Through Struggle
For the working class, the new era means stormy times but also a period in which struggle and consciousness can develop in rapid stages. Instability, rapid fluctuations and political crises make the character of the period—of revolution and counter-revolution—even stronger.
Politically, the working class still lacks a voice, but as the far-right and authoritarians come to power and the “centre” collapses, it inevitably opens the way for the conclusion that new fighting parties for the working class must be built.
In Europe, workers and youth in Serbia, Greece and Belgium have led the way with mass protests and general strikes. Argentina saw its third major strike against Milei in April, and in the US, opposition to Trump has escalated significantly with the biggest protests since BLM in 2020. In Hungary, Orban, who calls himself Trump’s predecessor, has been met with mass protests from students when the right to demonstrate was curtailed. Mass mobilisations stopped the coup attempt and ousted President Yoon, the Trump of South Korea.
An alternative to capitalism can only be built through struggle. Neither free trade nor tariffs will save the living standards of the working class—on the contrary, both options are about enriching a small elite.
For a Planned Economy and a Socialist World
Only a socialist alternative, where the capitalist pursuit of profit and imperialist lust for power is broken, provides the basis to redistribute resources from the billionaire class and the arms factories to the real needs of food, housing, health care, education, and other basic needs for the entire population of the world. In a socialist economy, the economy and trade are based on public ownership of the means of production and key levers of the economy, and the democratic planning of production. A planned economy is also the only way to end society’s dependence on fossil fuels and to make the transition to rapidly reduce emissions and the exploitation of natural resources that are destroying our planet and to take the necessary steps to restore degraded ecosystems.
Amidst the crisis and chaos of capitalism, the need for a socialist alternative becomes clearer. Humanity has never been better placed to live a life of prosperity without poverty, war and oppression. With a planned use of resources and production and distribution according to need, we could see a real “liberation day” for all humanity. This requires the united and international struggle of the working class to overthrow the whole parasitic capitalist system. This is what International Socialist Alternative is fighting for. Long live May Day and the international unity of the working class!
