What will May Day 2025 teach us?

May Day 2025 will measure the broad left’s strength vis-à-vis the Trump Administration and the MAGA Republican Party here in Maine and across the country. It won’t tell us everything, but it will tell us a lot.

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”—Sun Tzu

Know your enemy. Trump had a bad week. Even Fox News had to admit that “Americans are not overly thrilled” with Trump as his approval rating slumped into the low 40s. Hegseth keeps on Signaling, Putin doesn’t seem interested in a ceasefire, Netanyahu is ratcheting up his genocide machine, he fell asleep at Pope Francis’s funeral, and, worst of all, his trade war has rattled the markets. “He’s tanking,” as Rachel Maddow put it this week. I hope she’s right.

Yet it’s Maddow, not Trump, who is being pushed aside, reduced to one show per week starting May 5 by MSNBC’s new CEO who is encouraging producers to take a more “measured” tone towards Trump. Meanwhile, the Republican Party is moving in lockstep towards its single most important goal this year: slashing $1.5 trillion from the federal budget. They will hand hundreds of billions in tax breaks to corporations and the rich and they will gut social programs, most likely tearing the first pound of flesh from Medicaid. Republican Congressmen may face angry crowds at constituent meetings, but compared to the millions of dollars pouring into their campaign coffers, they just don’t care.

The one group that may have the power to back Trump down at this point are the big banks. JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Citibank are collectively worth $10 trillion. Trump’s tariffs may trigger a recession—which he clearly doesn’t mind—but if stagflation threatens the bond market and the status of the US dollar as the global benchmark currency, the Lords of Finance might try to get him to move on. But even if they do put their thumbs on the scales, it will only be to save themselves. Remember, Occupy taught us who gets bailed out and who gets sold out.

To my eye, Trump looks happy. He loves this. He may—or may not—believe his plan will bring manufacturing back, but his real goal is to Make his American Great Again. Meaning, make the rich richer. The elite and their hangers on are going to make out like bandits and they love him for it. The MAGA upper middle classes—the managers, big landlords, medium size businessmen, wealthy lawyers and professionals, tech bros—love him for telling them that they will get rich too. Deeper down in the MAGA-inflected sections of the working class, decades of betrayal and swindles from bipartisan union busters, insurance company pirates, and devious banksters have enraged millions of people. And in the absence of a powerful labor movement or a party willing to fight for workers interests, millions have thrown their lot in with Trump because almost anything is better than the status quo.

Trump doesn’t need 50% approval ratings. He needs a ruthless Republican Party willing to gerrymander and intimidate, a loyal base of 35 to 40% of the electorate, and a Democratic Party leadership that has no idea how to fight. As of today, he’s got the trifecta and he intends to run with it.

Know yourself. The working class in the United States has been bruised and battered by neoliberalism. Unions represented about 30% of workers in 1970, today less than 10%. The rich, the very rich, and the ultra rich have scraped an unprecedented share of the national wealth off the rest of us and are—literally—sending their fiancés into space. Meanwhile, holes in the social safety net grow by the day and grocery store inflation hits the lowest paid the hardest. LGTBQ+ workers suffer escalating harassment at work, Black workers endure double-the-average unemployment, women still earn less than men for equal work, and immigrant workers face a terrifying escalation of hatred and repression. Basic democratic rights are under attack to a degree not seen since McCarthyism. In sum, we’re in rough shape.

[Listen to the Maine Mural podcast: Camp Hope, Bangor, Maine]

Throughout the grim neoliberal period, unions and social movements have put up a fight: Black Lives Matter, Standing Rock, Bernie’s presidential campaigns, mutual aid during COVID, education and healthcare workers organizing and strikes in Blue and Red states alike, the UAW stand up strikes, Amazon union drives, and too many more to name. Each of these struggles proved that there are two sides to the class war. Chief among these was UAW president Sean Fain’s call for unions to align their contracts to expire on May Day 2028 and to lead a general strike to make working-class power visible. In fact, the UAW proposal—alongside the living legacy of the 2006 mass May Day marches and strikes by immigrant workers—is an important motivation for this year’s May Day mobilizations.

Despite all this, we remain far weaker than our enemies. There is no shame in recognizing this fact. Nor is there any point in dwelling on it. If we want to defeat Trump and to change the social and economic conditions that gave him a mass base to begin with—Democratic leaders only care about the former—we will have to find ways to accomplish things that only seem possible in history books. How did we get unions in the first place? Factory occupations, mass picket lines, and defiance of pro-corporate courts. How did Black people win the right to vote? Civil disobedience in defiance of racist police and politicians. What brought the Vietnam War to an end? Courageous resistance by the Vietnamese people, campus and urban revolts, postal wildcat strikes, mass marches in the U.S., and soldiers refusing to fight.

The scale and power of these events can seem impossible to reproduce. Too often, people attend a protest or two and despair that the monstrous policy they marched against remains in place. But this is to misunderstand history. The unions fought for seventy-five years before they beat General Motors. African Americans struggled for hundreds of years for freedom. Nothing important changes easily.

However, that truism can lead to a certain kind of fatalism. The trick to bringing history to life is to understand the following. Those decades-long struggles moved in fits and starts, leaps forward and costly setbacks. Success always, in every instance, emerged from 1/ sharp strategic and tactical debates, which 2/ were only possible because hundreds of thousands of people joined political and social organizations, who in turn 3/ created local and national leaders, active and informed rank-and-file members, and skilled organizers. Whether they were called political parties or community organizations or unions or caucuses or churches, no examples of progress towards social justice were won outside the reality of mass membership participation. Why does this matter?

Because we are weak and we must become strong. And the only way to do so is to practice democracy and politics by joining a political, community, student, or union group and dedicating time to building it into something powerful enough to defend yourself and those close to you. Root yourself locally and then link up with other groups and communities in mutual defense pacts, organizing campaigns, and united fronts. This will not be done online. It will require hundreds of thousands of people learning how to listen and how to persuade and participate..

What will May Day teach us? May 1st will show us how many people we can bring out to protest Trump. But May 2nd will show us how many people joined the fight to better our chances in the hundred battles to come.