“solidarity In Action Is Our Weapon”: International Workers’ Day 2025

Statement on May Day 2025 from the Black Rose/Rosa Negra Anarchist Federation.

Around the world, millions of people will be taking to the streets today in honor of May Day, International Workers’ Day. In the U.S., mass mobilizations from coast to coast, border to border are stringing together various strands of a multiplying movement against the accelerating authoritarianism of the Trump Regime.

This year’s May Day takes place in the shadow of Trump’s first hundred days in office. Since his inauguration, Trump has spearheaded a systematic assault on the working class at home and abroad — firing thousands of federal workers, militarizing the border with Mexico, terrorizing immigrants and their families, targeting international students for their solidarity with Palestine, bombing Yemen repeatedly, and attacking trans people, labor unions, and free speech.

Elon Musk and Trump have slashed federal administrative departments and agencies across the board, but key to their reactionary offensive is also the rapid expansion of the repressive arm of the state. The Trump administration plans to hire thousands more Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) stormtroopers, expand its network of concentration camps, and promises a trillion dollar military budget as it continues to back Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people.

As we fill the streets today with our co-workers, neighbors, classmates, and comrades, we should be clear-eyed about the fight ahead: no one is coming to save us. In response to the ongoing onslaught from the White House, the Democratic Party has barely mustered symbolic opposition, while the “Fight Oligarchy” tour, led by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, seeks to channel popular discontent against Trump back into the voting booth.

International Workers’ Day is an opportunity to demonstrate where our most potent weapon lies: in an independent, organized, and militant working class capable of disrupting politics and business as usual and stretching its solidarity across global borders. When the marches end, we must continue patiently and persistently building our power from below; in our workplaces, neighborhoods, sites of incarceration and schools, outside and against the state. This power—popular power—is forged and strengthened when we use it as a fulcrum to pry concessions from the hands of the bosses and the state.

Even as the authoritarian assault accelerates, we can seize victories. After the State Department detained and attempted to deport Mohsen Mahdawi, a green card holder and a prominent Palestinian organizer at Columbia University, tens of thousands demanded his release; to the cheers of hundreds of protestors, he walked free yesterday. Similarly, neighbors put their bodies on the line to deliver food, water, and gasoline to a Tennessee man targeted by ICE until agents backed off. Solidarity in action is our weapon.

On May Day, we remember the Haymarket Martyrs, anarchist labor leaders executed by the state for their fight for the eight hour workday. Recalling “The Crime of November Eleventh,” the infamous date on which the state hanged Albert Parsons, George Engel, Adolph Fischer, and August Spies, the famous anarchist Emma Goldman, proclaimed:

“Our great dead, from the scaffold and the block, the rifle shots and the electric chair, who sent their last greetings to Liberty, are not dead; they live with us always, unto all eternity. Thus the people learn to know the men and women who have perished for the emancipation and liberation of all…Their thoughts and deeds supply the leaven by means of which will rise a new and beautiful world.”

For popular power!
For libertarian socialism!
For  “a new and beautiful world!”

Illustration by Dinelli.