Militancy, Defiance, and Struggle in Class Society
The Louisville Workers Brigade
5/1/2025
The class struggle is ever-present. Even while the majority of working and oppressed people are not class conscious and, therefore, are not directly engaging in class struggle, class conflict is still being waged. Limited access to quality and affordable healthcare, climbing rents and cost of housing, exorbitant student loan debt, racialized police brutality, union-busting—all of these and more are regular daily offensives that the owning class makes as part of a clear and unrelenting class war. And yet, despite all of this suffering, the working class is just supposed to take it. Any measure of defiance, any challenge to the status quo of exploitation and oppression we take is automatically labelled as excessive. This makes the “Overton window” of working class demands and the ways we can realize them narrow, if not nonexistent, under the rule of the owning class.
It is no wonder, then, that militancy is demonized and bastardized in mainstream political discourse. In the media, when working people take any kind of stand, no matter how pacifistic they are, no matter how much rephrasing they employ to avoid unintentional escalation, they’re treated as taking things too far. Take, for instance, the Rail Worker labor dispute back in 2022. Despite being the supposedly “left-wing” news channel, CNN’s reporting of the dispute maligned the workers, and heavily painted them as being too selfish, too stupid, or too stubborn, making them the bad guys in a story that should be highlighting the enormous profits the railroad companies made from exploiting the workers. But no, because the workers were making demands, they were the bad guys, and they should have, according to CNN (proud mouthpiece of the owning class), learned self-restraint. The Rail Worker Labor Dispute is just one of hundreds of examples of workers demanding what they deem fair, and being told that they’re going too far. The result is that working people are left in a catch-22, where they have demands but they can’t be “too pushy,” but it's only through being “too pushy” that workers can reasonably achieve anything for themselves.
This “gospel of self-restraint,” is a ploy to redirect any anger and frustration back into the system, confining people into using pre-packeged ready-made systems of control and diffusion—workers being told to file reports to Human Resources but never hearing back from them, people being told that if they just vote in the next election they’re sure to get someone better than what they have now, filing Unfair Labor Practice after Unfair Labor Practice and waiting for the NLRB to get through its immense backlog of filings. The owning class doesn’t really care if any of these systems of control actually resolve your particular issue; in fact, they would prefer that they didn’t. All the owning class wants is for you to be a good little worker bee. It doesn’t matter if you have total faith in the systems they offer or you're too disillusioned to care; as long as you don’t resist, the owning class wins.
It is for these reasons that displays of defiance are maligned. All acts of defiance, especially riots, are culminations of hollow and broken promises, violent repression, and the exploitation and oppression the working class experiences daily. It’s a representation of our shared anger and discontent with the status quo, and is the clearest sign of a demand for change. And yet, while hated and feared by the owning class and its allies, it's because of these acts of defiance that any real change has happened. All of the things that we have today (for now, at least), child labor protections, the eight-hour work week, the civil rights for a variety of marginalized communities, and so much more, were only achieved through a bitter struggle. In our class society, where one class has everything and one class gets less and less, we can’t accept the rules the owning class has laid out for us. To be militant, to engage in class struggle, is to brazenly stand and fight for the interests of working and oppressed people in any way we can.
From the Haitian Revolution that saw the overthrow of slavery in what is now Haiti, to the Paris Commune that saw Parisian workers attempt to establish a working class society, to the Coal Wars in Appalachia that saw the miners face off against the coal companies and their “gun-thugs,” to the Stonewall Riot that kickstarted the Queer Liberation movement—all of these movements, even if they didn’t all succeed in their initial demands, or were later co-opted, still served to galvanize hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people into fighting against exploitation and oppression both in the immediate and long after. These displays of defiance, of militancy, are what is needed now more than ever.
The rule of the owning class is extremely exploitative, oppressive, and brutalizing for the working class, but, like the Kings, Queens, and aristocracy of old, it’s a paradise for the owning class, where all their wildest dreams can be realized. This simple reality is why we cannot ask for a raise, ask for affordable healthcare/schooling/housing, ask for an end to exploitation and oppression—they will never grant us any of this. To rely on the good graces of the owning class is a part of the folly of reformism. Nothing in this world was handed down to us; it was gained through struggle. Even the concessions that the owning class gives following a failed working class struggle are not granted out of moral obligation but out of fear of what a militant working-class movement could and would achieve. The owning class will do and say anything to sustain their rule over us, whether that be through paltry concessions to bribe us or siccing their foot soldiers to crush us. It is for this reason that we must struggle, we must be defiant, we must be militant. The militancy of the brave working and oppressed people of history has won us many things and serves as a blueprint for achieving our collective liberation from exploitation and oppression.
Following the Haymarket Riot, famous Labor organizer August Spies was charged along with others for inciting the riot, despite ample evidence to the contrary. At his trial, Spies addressed the court in one of the most famous statements given in support of the Labor Movement:
“…If you think that by hanging us you can stamp out the labor movement—the movement from which the downtrodden millions, the millions who toil and live in want and misery, the wage slaves, expect salvation—if this is your opinion, then hang us! Here you will tread upon a spark, but here, and there, and behind you, and in front of you, and everywhere, flames will blaze up. It is a subterranean fire. You cannot put it out. The ground is on fire upon which you stand…”
This is the meaning of militancy, the meaning of engaging in class struggle. We have suffered long under the boot of the owning class, and it's time to throw them off us. It is only through a militant struggle that we will ever break the cycle of exploitation, oppression, and brutalization. We all must do our part to fan the flames of the subterranean fire, to carry the legacy of all those who came before until we have achieved a world for working and oppressed people!
Power, Liberation, and Peace to all working and oppressed people!