All Out for Labor Day
Everyone’s asking: how do we reverse the tide of fascism? One of the most important ways is to get into the streets with as many other people as we can turn out. With a little luck and your help, that’s about to happen on Monday, September 1, Labor Day.
An anti-fascist movement has been getting its act together, albeit in a somewhat lumbering fashion. DSA members in coalition with other community groups in California and elsewhere are showing up to protect immigrants from kidnapping by Trump’s secret police. Discussions are taking place among local elected officials and community coalitions to convince local law enforcement to refuse cooperation with the cruel, inhumane and often violent actions of ICE. Many people are leading or attending trainings on non-violent direct action, safe participation in demonstrations, and preparing for the 2026 elections.
Delegates to California DSA state council at its meeting on Saturday August 23 voted to endorse the off-year special election put in place by California governor Gavin Newsom and the state legislature, with Proposition 50, a statewide ballot initiative coming up this November 4. Devised in response to the actions of the Texas legislature to gerrymander its districts and elect five more Republican representatives to Congress, California’s state elected representatives have decided to fight fire with fire. [See article elsewhere in this issue.]
Actions like these, along with many others, are necessary types of work in building the anti-fascist movement. But for the coming week one item should be at the very top of our to do list: planning to come out on the streets on Labor Day, and make it the biggest nationwide demonstration yet. The May Day Strong coalition effort has scheduled hundreds of events across the country behind the banner of “Workers Over Billionaires.”
Next offramp
DSA members have been helping to organize for the national days of anti-Trump action, adding their bodies to millions of others across the country at events such as “No Kings Day”, expressing the firm desire to take the next offramp from Trump’s Road to Fascist Hell.
Although Labor Day is better known for barbecues and consumer discounts than militant demonstrations of worker solidarity, that’s not the way the holiday started out. Signed into law by President Grover Cleveland in 1894, it was meant to intervene within a moment of peak industrial class struggle. By giving workers a paid day off, the capitalist class hoped to lead them to believe that U.S. society might have something to offer besides the points of National Guard bayonets during strikes, all too fresh in mind the year of the American Railway Union’s Pullman Strike.
Labor Day was offered as a less radical substitute for International Workers Day, held on May 1, the campaign for which had sparked the only national general strike in US history, but was bloodily repressed in Chicago and elsewhere in 1886. The past few years have seen a revival of interest within organized labor to mark May Day as a time for remembrance of class struggles of the past and preparing for those to come. May Day 2025 served as one of the big days of national demonstration against Trumpian fascism, and labor leaders are calling for Labor Day to function the same way.
Making the event especially significant this year is a growing understanding that it’s up to all of up to stop the steady erosion of democracy, and that we can use events like Labor Day as steppingstones to build toward a strong mass anti-fascist movement, and to aim high at May Day 2028, when we answer United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain’s call to leave work together and begin to take back some of the historic power that the working class lost during the long years of neoliberalism.
Click here or here to find Labor Day events near you. See you on the streets.
