May Day Strong, 2026

[Joseph]

The next major follow-up to No Kings Day is May Day Strong on Friday, May 1, 2026.

Just to start discussion:

May First is supposed to be "No Work, No School, No Shopping". Pay Day Report presents it as many local "general strikes". (https://paydayreport.com/map-65-cities- ... s-growing/). There is grandiose terminology for something else, and what is a more accurate picture of the mass discontent with Trumpism and what will appear in demonstrations? What assessment do comrades have of this? Have they seen, or been involved in, preparations for it?

Long list of endorsers: https://maydaystrong.org/coalition, just as in No Kings Day. Endorsement of course is one thing, actually organizing among one's own members, and among others, is another.

The national organization seems pretty much along the lines of No Kings Day.

What views should we promote among participants when appropriate?

Perhaps, besides basic anti-Trump points::

* This is going to be a long struggle, even if Trump himself falls.

* The class (capitalist) basis of Trumpism.

* Vote against Trumpism, but don't expect the Democrats to fulfill our needs or for voting to replace the need for mass resistance.

* In talking to leftists, the need to fight agaimst red-brown tendencies and denigration of the importance of anti-Trumpism, even though it is but the first step of a long struggle.

(Thanks, Phil, for the correction on the date.)

[pete]

One of the May Day protests in the Detroit area is specifically sponsored by the AFL-CIO (in Roosevelt Park, from 4:00 to 5:30 PM). I'd like to go there and talk to workers about how to build a strong working class movement against Trumpist reaction and war, and how to overcome the sabotage of the labor bureaucrats.

[pete]

Report on Detroit's May Day Strong rally: Joseph and I attended this demo at Roosevelt Park in front of the old train station. This rally was sponsored by the AFL-CIO, and there were a few literature tables set up by unions. Other literature tables were spread out across the park. These were mostly the same ones we've seen at No Kings days. We got to the rally early (3:30 PM), and there weren't many people there, but more kept coming as people got off work. By the time we left, about 5:00 PM, there may have been a thousand. There were lots of homemade signs, including a lot of "8647" signs. I didn't see any of the usual "No Kings" signs; it looked like people went to pains to come up with new slogans and signs. An interesting new twist: many people's signs had QR codes on them, so you could look up more information about their message if you clicked on their sign. There was a table for Bayan, the Filipino organization, which had news about a massacre by the gov't a couple weeks ago. Gov't planes bombed a village they suspected of something and killed 19 people, including some journalists from the U.S. I talked to WSWS, which insisted that the Democrats are the same as the Republicans. I also talked with someone from RCA, who said RCP stole their name, that they are an older organization, with 8,000 members in 30 countries. We stopped at the DSA table, but they didn't have much to say. APWU had a literature table, sort of; it was manned by one person, Regina Favors, but it didn't have any identifying banners or signs. And Regina didn't have any literature or anything from the union. She had a petition for getting utilities' money out of politics -- nothing especial about postal. I tried to talk to her about Trump's edict of March 31 for the postal service to begin acting as election overseers, but she was busy with her petition, so that went nowhere.

[pete]

One additional point I thought was interesting: there was no march at the Detroit demo, but a number of small groups held mini-marches through the crowd. For example, a group of SEIU workers marched through chanting slogans "Health care for all". A small group marched up and down chanting "Stop the war on Iran". Joseph says he saw a trade union group chanting in support of their strike. It was good to see some activity of that sort.

[Frank]

Around 4,000 people turned out for May Day in Seattle, and it was a quite youthful crowd. There were homemade signs, often against ICE, as well as manufactured sign with the slogans of the organizers. And there were more Palestinian flags than I expected (perhaps over a dozen), with at least some of them being carried by FRSO and ILPS people.

I noticed contingents from the UFCW, UAW, SEIU and Teamsters.

With regard to the speeches I heard:

With the exception of those who spoke against ICE, all most of the speakers had to say was that the workers had to unite. The president of the Washington State Labor Council pointed out that there were hundreds of thousands of workers under its umbrella and that Washington was one of the most densely unionized states in the country (to which we were supposed to applaud), but she was silent about the deep crisis the labor movement is in, and she gave no targets for what the workers should do, not even organize the majority of workers who are not in unions. A young Filipino from the Teamsters who'd been locked up in the Northwest Detention Center by ICE and organized on the inside there (lots of inmates are held for several years) praised his Teamsters local (117) for helping get him out. And the theme of his speech was that unions should unite with immigrant rights groups like the one he founded in order to get the prisoners freed. An exception among the speakers was a young Chicano from FRSO, who talked about why there needed to be a revolution, praised communists from the past and touted his group, the FRSO.

The individual speeches weren't long, but since they were all translated from English to Spanish or from Spanish to English they used up considerable time, I had to leave before the march started. But this is a short video of it: https://www.facebook.com/search/top?q=s ... rch%202026.

[pete]

Comment on WSWS's leaflet for May Day:

sep on may day.docx

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