Why we should make May Day ‘Workers for Palestinian Resistance Day’

Over the past five months, millions of workers across the world have marched for Palestine. The problem is that with some exceptions, workers taking over the streets for Gaza are not openly and consciously mobilized as workers. While this is understandable for many reasons, it tends to conceal that the struggle in solidarity with the liberation of Palestine is part of the class struggle.

It also obscures the reality that most of the support for Palestine comes from the working class. Today, and in the long run, it serves the broader interest of working-class internationalism, as well as being consistent with the realities of the modern global working class, to break with old traditions and organize workers on a class basis around critical political struggles.

The fight to organize workers in solidarity with liberation and self-determination should be waged both inside and outside organized labor. Groups such as Labor for Palestine and Health Workers Alliance for Palestine and many others have been doing this with greater and greater success. It is critical that this trend be expanded and draw in more and more workers.

The most oppressed workers in the Global South as well as in the [neo]imperialist centers of the West can only come to the realization that workers of the world are their allies in the struggle for liberation and self-determination if action is taken to make this revelation self-evident. Let’s make International Workers Day this year help set that direction.