May Day Surrender: The Dems’ Affordability Politics Does Not Meet the Moment
Look at the progressive Democrats’ “May Day Strong Coalition’s” call for a day of economic protest this May 1st:
“This May Day, It’s Workers Over Billionaires. On May 1, 2026, workers, students, and families rally, march, and take action across the country to demand a nation that puts workers over billionaires, with many refusing business as usual through No School. No Work. No Shopping. That we tax the rich so our families, not their fortunes, come first… it’s up to us to organize and act together. Together we will flex our collective power in a tremendous day of action — rallying, marching, and taking action to demand a country that puts workers over billionaires, with many refusing business as usual through No Work. No School. No Shopping. No ICE. No war. No private army serving authoritarian power. Expand democracy. Hands off our vote.”
The May Day Strong Coalition (MDSC) has posted a “Policy Manual To Put a Good Life For Everyone Back Within Reach,” advancing a Real Affordability Agenda it calls “a policy blueprint and organizing roadmap to: lower costs, raise wages, and fund the basics working families rely on by making billionaires and corporations pay what they owe.”
Forget for a moment if you can that American and global late-stage capitalism has no more room for any significant improvement in the economic lives of any but a small number of ordinary people.
There’s something really glaring missing here: any call for the immediate removal of the Trump fascist regime. The genocidally racist, arch-patriarchal, and xenophobic nationalist Trump regime is tearing up everything decent people hold dear. Every day it sweeps up more than 1000 human beings into its expanding network of concentration camps. It is recklessly pushing the planet closer to environmental catastrophe and World War III. It is a fierce and dedicated enemy of truth, science, public health, civil rights, social justice, unrigged elections, constitutional checks and balances, the rule of law. It is working to cancel what’s left of previously normative electoral democracy, deliberation, and rule of law. As Refuse Fascism says:
“Fascism is not a looming threat. It is here. This is a time when we must focus on the real danger to the future of humanity and the planet—a fascist America. …the future of humanity and the planet is on the line with the advancing of a fascist regime set loose on the people here and around the world….This [Trump] regime is fascist through and through. They have shredded the rule of law domestically and internationally. Masked gestapo agents continue to round up masses of people — shipping tens of thousands of our immigrant sisters and brothers into warehouse concentration camps in the US and into countries where these detainees have no ties. The rule of law, the right to dissent, and basic rights for women, people of color, and LGBT people are being wiped away. This regime has put the destruction of the environment on steroids..”
Add in the madness of Trump’s monumentally criminal war on Iran, which could easily set off a global conflagration, and it is obvious what the primary people’s demand ought to be this May Day: “In the name of humanity, the Trump fascist regime must go now!”
“A whole civilization will die tonight,” the fascist gangster Trump threatened, “never to return.” As Refuse Fascism adds:
“The streets of this country should be filled with protest at every murderous assault on the people of Iran. A ruler who threatens to wipe out a whole country and civilization, on top of war crimes already committed – with 20 universities, 600 schools, medical facilities and crucial infrastructure bombed in an illegal, illegitimate, and immoral war – cannot be allowed to remain in power another day. The current shaky ceasefire in Iran is being conducted under the sword of Trump’s threat to ‘destroy a civilization.’ We cannot leave the fate of humanity to the whims of a lunatic fascist tyrant.”
What’s historically specific about the conflict between American working people (workers) and the powerful wealthy Few (“billionaires”) in the spring of 2026 – on “this May Day”? Nothing at all, to be honest. That conflict has existed across the long capitalist sweep of American history.
What’s historically distinct this year is that the American capitalist-imperialist “billionaires” system is headed by a specifically fascist regime that poses a grave existential menace to humanity at home and abroad.
Is the main demand decent people should be making right now in this historical moment improved economic “affordability”? Really? As if we‘d be okay with Trumpism-fascism if life under its rule was more affordable for everyday working- and middle-class Americans? Does the MDSC know what time it is? We should recall that the German masses’ standard of living rose considerably during Adolph Hitler’s opening seven years in power thanks to rising military and social spending under the Nazi Third Reich. Millions of German workers had already fallen under the spell of Hitler’s fascism by the time of the first Nazi May Day rallies purporting to celebrate workers in 1933.
On top of which the current American fascism is by no more coincidence taking place under a late capitalist system in which the door – the frontier, so to speak – has closed for improved working- and middle-class affordability. That’s all over now.
“A nation that puts workers over billionaires”? That would require organizing for a socialist proletarian revolution, long overdue, beyond a world torn by the core contradiction between social production and private appropriation. That’s something quite different than “taxing the rich” – a timeworn slogan that grants “the rich’s” right to exist as a parasitic, Earth-raping exploiter class in the first place.
What about livable ecology v. the growth-addicted “expand or die” system of capitalism,” whose fossil fuel addiction is embraced by fascism? There’s no “affordability” or economic justice on a dead planet.
What about the oppression of women and LGBT people by patriarchy, intimately related to and weaponized by capitalism while fueling and getting advanced by the Trump fascist movement and regime?
What about people of color v. white supremacism and immigrants v. xenophobia and nativism, also inseparably and dialectically bound up with the capitalist system while fueling and being weaponized by the Trump fascist regime?
“No ICE”? It’s good that the MDSC doesn’t like ICE, but ICE (plus Border Patrol) is the Trump regime’s publicly (not privately) funded fascist (beyond just “authoritarian”) police state arm (SS/Gestapo) and getting rid of it requires the removal of Trump and his chief fascist political adviser Stephen Miller, for starters.
What about the deadly imperialist conflict that is all bound up with the “expand or die” capitalist system? “No war?” It’s nice that the MDSC doesn’t like war but we will not get to “no war” short of the revolutionary abolition of a world profits system that pits nations against each other in an endless struggle for the world’s shrinking stock of exploitable natural resources, labor power, markets, and investment outlets.
“Expand democracy”? It has long been understood by serious scholars that the United States is a corporate and financial plutocracy where majority public opinion is trumped by the disproportionate power of the wealthy Few on one issue after another – this regardless of which of the two dominant capitalist-imperialist parties or what combination of those parties holds elected office. No actual democracy, a democracy for all, is possible under any system of class rule. We can perhaps marginally and occasionally expand popular majority input under capitalism, but never when capitalist state power is held by fascists.
“Hands off our vote”? “ That is very tepid language in relation to the Trump’s clear many-sided threat to subvert and possibly cancel or refuse to honor the outcomes of the 2026 mid-term elections. Trump heads the election-denying party of January 6 and has appointed a Christian Fascist “Secretary of War” who would love to deploy the US military against “the enemy within,” meaning the regime’s political opponents. The celebrated liberal historian Timothy Snyder thinks the criminal war on Iran may be intended in part to provide a context for real or concocted terror attacks the Trump regime will try to use as a pretext for suspending or cancelling the next elections.
There is no such thing as a significant policy-relevant voting process free of elite “hands” in a giant savagely class divided and powerful society like the contemporary U$A. Those with surplus resources and special stakes in policy outcomes will always exercise wildly disproportionate influence on elections – and everything else for that matter. (At the same time, America’s constitutional order is distinctively tilted towards anti-democratic Minority Rule through a number of interconnected mechanisms including the Electoral College, the absurdly powerful and malapportioned US Senate, the lifetime-appointed Supreme Court, and more).
And what does electing unaffordable capitalist-imperialist Democrats – the real purpose behind “the affordability agenda” — have to do with putting workers over billionaires, anyway? The vast upward distribution of wealth and power that has characterized the last half century bas been a richly bipartisan capitalist (“neoliberal”) production, with Democratic presidents Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama fully on board. The Democrats’ inherent subservience and allegiance to those who own and run the underlying political economy and to the perverse and anarchic logic of that system – socialized production under a regime of competitive private accumulation – is no small no small part of how fascism has risen to power in the US.
“Make billionaires and corporations pay what they owe?” Really? What does that mean?! Know any other good jokes? How exactly does the MDSC propose to calculate the unfathomably massive sum that might begin to match up with even a small fraction of the total amount of surplus value and natural wealth the nation’s capitalist ruling class and its corporations have extracted from the proletariat and Nature in the absurd name of “the free market” over the centuries ?! And, by the way: just what percentage of our capitalist masters’ parasitic fortunes is not in fact owed to humanity and the planet?! Does the MDSC coalition not understand that the billionaires and their corporations owe their existence to our mistaken and suicidal toleration of an exploitive system that has no higher purpose than private profit?
Does the trade unionist and Democratic Party-affiliated MDSC know or care about May Day’s revolutionary origins around the world and in the USA – its leadership by left anarchists, socialists, and communists proclaiming, “No Gods, No Masters,” and calling (as in mid-1880s Chicago) for a proletarian state moving beyond class rule and other forms of exploitation and oppression?[1] One day of “refusing business as usual?” Hello? We need to refuse fascism with prolonged, system-disrupting mass action, with many millions in the streets day after day, making it clear that there will be no resumption of business as usual as long as billionaires (and others) insist on menacing the planet with a fascist regime atop the world’s most lethal superpower! Beyond that we need to refuse and in fact remove an underlying system that has produced a US fascist regime that is backed by a considerable section of the capitalist parasite ruling class.
+1. See Paul Street,” The Many-Sided, Overlapping Meanings of May Day,” Truthdig, April 29, 2017.
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