We are workers. We are class-struggle unionists, community activists, and revolutionary socialists. We come together in the labor movement because it is the one terrain where working people are already organized, already confronting the power of capital every day, and already capable of fighting back.

We know that the workplace is where the system’s violence is most visible: the boss who squeezes more labor from fewer people; the politician who cuts public services to please investors; the billionaire who treats our exhaustion and our planet’s collapse as collateral damage. 

But it is also where workers — once conscious of their collective power — can transform the world. Unionizing is not only about wages and benefits; it is about awakening our class to its potential, building democratic structures that make solidarity a habit, and turning isolated resistance into organized strength.

Capitalism is the source of the crises we face — economic, ecological, social, and political. As those crises deepen, the institutions of capital increasingly rely not only on exploitation, but on repression to preserve their power. Our answer to both is organization. It organizes production for profit, not need.

Capitalism trains us to compete rather than cooperate, to see our co-workers as rivals rather than comrades. And it demands that we forget what we already know: that every workplace runs on our labor and our consent.

We organize to remember and use our power.

Through democratic unions, we institutionalize that power. When unions are run transparently, led from the bottom up, and accountable to their rank and file, they become schools of democracy — training grounds for leadership, solidarity, and self-governance. When captured by bureaucracy or electoral opportunism, they become hollow shells. Our task is to reclaim them, rebuild them, and unite them into a force capable of confronting capital itself.

We launch this Manifesto in the middle of a very clear political crisis. There’s a nationwide movement of resistance where the cries — against ICE, rising cost of living, bad jobs, war, genocide, and climate catastrophe — have taken the scene with massive street actions, confrontations with police and urban revolts in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago and Minneapolis.

Trump and the far right have torn the mask from the system. Millions can now see the “us and them” that has always defined capitalism. The ruling class is open about its greed; the state is open about its repression. The ruling class is open about its greed; the state is open about its repression. Workers who organize, strike, defend their neighbors, or stand in solidarity increasingly face retaliation designed not only to punish individuals but to intimidate entire movements. Our response cannot be fear or isolation. It must be deeper organization and stronger solidarity.Yet this crisis is also a gift. It clarifies that there is no savior coming — no candidate, no NGO, no enlightened billionaire. Only organized workers can save ourselves.

The Democratic Party has shown that it can’t (and won’t) stop the right. It isn’t time to save the Democratic Party but to find the solution within our own forces. The need for a new historical party of the workers is the most crucial problem on today’s political agenda. 

We refuse to surrender our movement to liberal politicians who use our votes but fear our power. 

We refuse to let ultraleft moralism substitute purity for strategy. 

We build power where workers live, labor, and struggle — not where academics debate or campaigns fundraise. 

Electoral politics can amplify our demands, but only class struggle can win them.

We recognize that the Democratic Socialists of America holds the largest infrastructure of any socialist formation in the United States — chapters in every major city, dues-based funding, and democratic procedures. But its politics are dominated by electoralism and left liberalism.

DSA-endorsed candidates and electeds too often compromise their socialist values. Instead we need mass movements to hold electeds accountable to the needs of the working class. Similarly, we need to collaborate with liberals in nonprofits and unions with caution, knowing that these groups ultimately bend to the will of donors and union bureaucrats — both of whom are directly tied to the “other party of the ruling class,” the Democrats .

DSA’s culture reflects both blind spots: it is populated mainly by white, downwardly mobile, college-educated, middle-class members who who develop plans for the working class without any real connections to it.

We seek to change all of that.

Workers Resist exists both inside and outside DSA — to connect class-struggle unionists across industries, to develop working-class socialists as leaders, and to make DSA a movement rooted in the labor movement. 

We welcome collaboration with all who share these goals (including members of other DSA caucuses), but we will not wait for permission to act. Our allegiance is to the working class, the drums of class warfare are beating. We know which side we are on.

We reject the idea that unions should only bargain for bread-and-butter issues.

Capital teaches us to see one another as competitors, strangers, or members of separate communities with separate interests.Capital teaches us to compete. Solidarity teaches us to act as a class.It is the conscious decision to recognize that an injury to one truly is an injury to all — not as a slogan, but as a strategy for building the collective power necessary to defeat capital. Every act of solidarity expands the boundaries of our class and strengthens our capacity to fight together.

Because working people do not live separate lives, our struggles cannot remain separate either. Every issue that affects working people — housing, climate, healthcare, racism, policing, gendered violence — is a workers’ issue. Capital will always try to divide us by turning the community against labor, the employed against the unemployed, tenants against teachers, farmers against truckers. Our survival depends on refusing those divisions. We reject divisions of race, gender, immigration status, industry, and nationality. We defend one another across those divisions and stand with workers and organizers facing retaliation for acting in solidarity. An injury to one is an injury to all.

Solidarity also demands that we defend one another when the powerful attempt to make an example of those who resist. Employers fire organizers. Governments surveil movements, criminalize protest, and prosecute workers and community members who stand together in struggle and in defense of their neighbors and coworkers. We reject the isolation these tactics are meant to create. An injury to one is not only an injury to all — it is a call for all to respond. Defending workers and organizers facing retaliation is not charity or legal support alone; it is an essential part of building the trust and courage without which no mass movement can survive.

The lesson of the Teamsters in the 1930s is clear: when they fought for the unemployed and defended farmers’ right to sell their goods, they built alliances that made victory possible. Every serious strike becomes a social struggle, because to defeat the boss, we must unite the class.

Unions must therefore fight not just for better contracts, but for a better world. We cannot win merely to afford the spoils of capitalism—a larger house, a bigger car, a smaller conscience. We fight for a sustainable, collective, and democratic future, where production serves life rather than profit.

We envision a network of workers across sectors — teachers, nurses, truck drivers, janitors, tech workers, warehouse pickers — learning from one another, developing strategy, and fighting for control of our workplaces and communities. 

We will build power locally and link it nationally and internationally. 

We will connect union reformers, community organizers, and socialist militants into one movement capable of confronting both the boss, the landlord, the union bureaucracy, the fascist state, and all people in institutions that value profit over people.

We will nurture leaders from the rank and file, not the professional class.  

We will turn our workplaces into sites of resistance and our unions into vehicles of liberation.  

We will work in united fronts with those with whom we might otherwise disagree.

We will bring new workers into the socialist movement, not by lecturing them but by struggling alongside them.

1. Democracy: Every organization we build must be run by and for its members, with transparent decision-making and accountability. 
2. Solidarity: We reject divisions of race, gender, immigration status, and industry. An injury to one is an injury to all. 
3. Militancy: Power concedes nothing without a fight. We will organize, strike, and disrupt. 
4. Education: Theory matters when it grows from practice. We will study to act, not to posture. 
5. Internationalism: Capital is global; so must be our resistance. 
6. Sustainability: We reject the capitalist model of infinite growth on a finite planet. 
7. Independence: We will work with parties, but not for them. The working class must have its own politics. We fight to build a new party of the working class. 

Capital teaches us to brand ourselves, to seek safety in status, to measure our worth by individual success. Revolution requires the opposite: to lose oneself in the collective struggle for liberation. The habits of capital — careerism, competition, cynicism — must be unlearned through the practice of solidarity.

We will build a movement capable of transforming not just our workplaces, but ourselves. 

We will build a movement where power flows upward, not downward. 

We will build a movement that resists—and wins.

*Workers Resist: because the future belongs to those who organize.*