MAY DAY is always an opportunity to review the tasks and prospects for the working class internationally and within each country.

There is no shortage of issues to confront in 2025. The Israeli genocide in Gaza. The need for peace in Ukraine. The intensifying war drive led by Washington and directed at China above all.

In Britain, there is the collapse in the Labour government’s public standing as it attacks pensioners, the disabled and the poor generally while indulging the City and big business, and the menacing rise of the hard-right Reform party, likely to be confirmed in tomorrow’s local elections and the Runcorn by-election.

War, austerity and authoritarianism are our prospects under the rule of capital.

Yet there is a still more fundamental issue this May Day. That is the nature and mission of the working class itself.

This must be addressed because within our movement, there are efforts to shrink and diminish that role, to reduce the labour movement to a purely limited, economic and nationalistic role.

It is argued that the workers in each country should stick to their knitting, focus exclusively on their own social and industrial agenda and pay no regard to what is happening elsewhere.

This position belittles the centrality of solidarity movements. It claims to be following the injunctions of Ho Chi Minh, who asked foreign supporters of the Vietnamese people to make revolution in their own countries.

Yet the great Vietnamese revolutionary also said: “Combining the national revolutionary movement with that of the international working class and oppressed peoples, the Communist Party of Vietnam overcame all difficulties.” 

And: “The strength and perseverance of the Vietnamese originate primarily from the solidarity and support of world peoples… International solidarity is tremendously meaningful to us.”  Clear, it seems.

Those who seek to confine the working class within strictly national boxes ignore this history. They also neglect that the working class is a global class because capitalism has made it so, and never more so than in the age of now-crumbling globalisation.

Donald Trump’s tariff policy, for example, poses a challenge to workers everywhere, both because of its universal economic impact but also because it presages intensified great power rivalry, the end point of which is dramatically familiar.

This false position shades into a related one, that trade unions should focus entirely on their members’ pay and conditions, to the exclusion of all other political and even ethical considerations.

This has led some to step back from the movement of solidarity with the heroic Palestinian people. It goes without saying that a union which is not strong in the workplace can do little about anything else, and that workplace power can only be founded on delivering basic economic demands.

Nevertheless, reducing union activity to solely these issues diminishes the role of the working class, which is not merely to secure the satisfaction of its own compelling material demands but to lead the whole of humanity into a brighter future.

That means challenging the power of the capitalist class wherever and however it manifests itself, including in imperialism and militarism. Without confronting such evils, such gains as are won must forever remain provisional.

May Day is therefore a moment to raise our collective horizons and assert that there is an alternative to austerity and war because there is a class which, by its whole social position, can only liberate itself by liberating all peoples everywhere.

It is a moment to echo the words of the great Communist Georgi Dimitrov: “The present rulers of the capitalist countries are but temporary, the real master of the world is the working class.”

Workers of the World, Unite!