Fighting for Socialism in Education Unions
How should socialists organize in the labor movement in a period of authoritarian capitalism?
Though union density remains low in the United States, with only about 9 percent of workers represented, unions remain critical as a vehicle for building working-class power.
Socialists must work within unions to politicize the class struggle, broaden workers’ democracy and power, organize the fight against authoritarianism and imperialism, and call out capitalism as a killing system. We do this work while oriented on the rank and file, rather than the union bureaucracy. Put another way, we fight for socialism from below within the labor movement.
While unionization rates remains low overall, the education sector has a high density of workers in unions. Educators in public K-12 schools and university professors combined total nearly five million unionized workers. This includes 2.9 million teachers in the National Education Association (NEA); 1.7 million in the American Federation of Teachers (AFT); and 44,000 in the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). In 2022, the AFT and AAUP merged, now constituting the largest single fighting force of higher education workers. It is this section of the organized working class that has the power to fight against Trump’s multifaceted attack on public education, but this urgently-needed fightback needs to be organized and mobilized as class struggle not only against a reactionary tyrant, but also against the decaying capitalist system and imperialist order that produced him.
Trump’s Attacks on Education
The significance of a highly organized education workforce takes on special significance as as potential bulwark of class opposition to the Trump Administration’s efforts to remake the public schools and higher education systems in a politically far right and authoritarian way. For example, Trump has already begun to eliminate the federal Department of Education, accusing it of “indoctrinating young people with racial, sexual and political ideologies.” In reality, Trump and the far right want to destroy the department because it funds and implements supports for poor and working class students, students of color, and students with disabilities.
The Department of Education also enforces civil rights law to prevent race or sex-based discrimination in federally funded schools. These aspects of how the department functions reflect the histories of class struggle in education and the anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-ableist movements that compelled reforms, and with them the creation of a federal agency to enforce them. As Trump and the forces of the far right have taken control of the state, they seek to dismantle civil rights gains and restore the dominance of white nationalist, imperialist, and eugenic ideology that had predominated within the US education system since its inception.
The administration is also imposing autocratic control over the higher education system to remake and subordinate it to more direct control by the authoritarian capitalist state. The goal is to repress and root out oppositional and dissident politics, enforce more compliant and rightwing governing structures, control admissions and police student populations, and defund and dismantle programs, policies, and institutional practices that implement any form of social justice, equitability, or critical evaluation of the US state and empire.
Trump is taking a page directly from the authoritarian playbook of figures such as Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Vladimir Putin in Russia to destroy education and civil society while maximizing state ideological and political control. Alongside the effort to eradicate all vestiges of anti-oppression and justice-based education, Trump is repressing students and faculty who speak out against or oppose the genocide in Gaza and the role of US imperialism in backing, funding, and perpetuating it.
It is in this context of rising authoritarianism and state repression that the class struggle of education workers has become a critical front line in the fight for democracy and socialism. Unions have the power to defeat the Trumpian assault through their placement and power within the education system itself. Like workers in other industries, educational workers run the schools, colleges, and universities through their necessary labor. They are also exploited within the class structure and are limited or deprived in their capacities to participate in the administration of the productive process, in policy-making, and all other forms in which top-down control is exercised by administrations, school boards and trustees, donors, and state officials.
Trump is operating through this existing class structure in education to politically repress dissident workers and students who challenge ruling class ideas and policy, to increase the rate of labor exploitation of all educational workers (to work more for less pay), to defund and reallocate educational resources to further enrich the capitalist ruling class, and to increase managerial control over the workforce and student populations to render them more compliant and servile to the capitalist and imperialist system. Trump’s attacks on education are not an aberration from the US capitalist system, but rather a product of it and its current state of affairs. Therefore, the struggle to defend democratic rights in education necessitates that we understand the class dimensions and function of the US educational system, and connect the defense of educational rights to the anti-capitalist struggle for socialism.
Class Structure Within the Education System
A Marxist analysis of the educational system identifies that the school, college, or university administrations, elected or appointed boards of trustees, and other state officials overseeing the education system are not our allies in the struggle against Trumpism. In practice, they are operating more like our opponents. As we are seeing, campus administrations have not only failed to resist Trump and the state attack on students, faculty, freedom of speech and inquiry, academic freedom and autonomy, and the institutions as a whole; but are conceding without a fight, accommodating to the new authoritarian reality, and even complicit in Trump’s scheme to remake the education system from the top down.
Liberal college and public-school administrators and board members—like much of the Democratic Party’s political leadership—lack the capacity, desire, or political basis to resist Trump’s far-right assault on education. As bosses and managers who operate an educational system amid four decades of neoliberal capitalist restructuring, defunding, privatization, and increased corporate hierarchization political conservatism and reaction, they are also products of the capitalist system and subordinate to its trending imperatives. In the colleges and universities, administrators are subservient to billionaire donors and dependent on lucrative federal grants. They are complicit in suppressing Pro-Palestinian activism, anti-Zionism, and any criticism of Israel. They are unwilling or unable to take a stand that might put their own positions, careers, or self-interests in jeopardy.
This is why resistance will have to come from teachers, professors, teaching assistants, campus staff, and student workers. These are the workers that run educational institutions and have the interest and the power to defeat Trump’s attacks, and who can be won to fight as a class to defend their jobs, working conditions, and for academic and political rights.
It is also necessary to organize rank and file education workers to challenge the established leadership of their unions. The current leadership is bureaucratic, conservative, and entrenched after decades of subservience and subordination to the Democratic Party which has also advanced its own version of neoliberal restructuring and downsizing in education. This downward trend has led to the complete abandonment of class-conscious politics and militancy in the unions, and replaced by a top-down leadership that has no history, memory, or appetite for class struggle. Much of this leadership works to oppose rank and file initiative, and to suppress expectations for change and improvement. Instead, they work to conform their political action to Democratic Party electoral campaigning, and to tamp down and limit the scope of vision and acceptable discourse within the union to be in alignment with the that of the Democratic Party, its vetted candidates, and billionaire donors who ultimately champion the interests of the capitalist class.
Turning the Tracks Towards Class Struggle and Anti-Capitalism
The newly merged American Federation of Teachers and American Association of University Professors have both been traditionally bound to the Democratic Party. This means they have sacrificed worker power for electoral access, distributed union dues to party operatives rather than building power from below and have supported policies that hurt workers both domestically and internationally. A key example is the Democratic Party’s leading role in orchestrating and conducting the genocide in Gaza.
But rank-and-file organizing with education unions against the genocide—and against Democratic Party fealty—is slowly working. The AAUP has grown more than 20 percent in the past two years by openly appealing to workers who oppose the genocide and who are willing to break with the Democratic Party outright.
The AAUP has grown more than 20 percent in the past two years by openly appealing to workers who oppose the genocide and who are willing to break with the Democratic Party outright.
This has happened in several ways. In the Spring of 2025, the AAUP supported and participated in a “Day of Action for Higher Education” this last April 17th. The Day of Action was organized by rank-and-file members specifically to fight authoritarian attacks on higher education workers. Campus workers, faculty, and students at more than 200 campuses organized protests against Trump’s attacks on students, academic freedom and free speech. The protests openly defended Palestine, called for the end of Israeli occupation, advocated for trans rights, and put forward open calls for anti-fascist organizing.
The positive results have been tangible. The AAUP leadership, for instance, was previously fearful to talk about Palestine for fear of “dividing the union”. It is now openly calling for defending Palestine supporters, and has organized a national webinar on “scholasticide”, referring to the destruction of K-16 education institutions in Palestine. It has also promoted and featured new union leaders who are leading Palestine work within the union.
Beyond standing up for Palestine, socialists in the labor movement also need to be clear about the toxic relationship between neoliberal capitalism and unions. Trump’s efforts to mass fire and destroy the union power of federal workers, for example, is the culmination of decades of assault on American workers. Think back to Ronald Reagan’s firing of unionized Air Traffic Controllers in 1981. Public sector workers are by far the largest section of the unionized workforce in the U.S. Having nearly destroyed unions in the private sector, capital now seeks to smash unionism in the public sector. Defending federal worker unions is not about protecting the capitalist state, but the power of workers to organize everywhere in their own collective interests and to advance the class struggle as a whole—including from within and against the capitalist state.
Socialists in labor unions also need to lead the fight against other forms of oppression and state violence. This means opposing and fighting back against ICE, mass deportations, and attacks on immigrant workers. The U.S.’s long history of settler colonial displacement and dispossession of indigenous people and the “illegalization” of non-European peoples continues in new forms as migrant and immigrant workers laboring in farms, factories, schools, and hospitals are snatched by ICE, arrested, incarcerated, and deported.
Socialists in unions must make every effort to initiate and lead the organizing efforts against this campaign of terror. An injury to one is an injury to all remains the most timely and important slogan for why every worker must stand to protect their union siblings—and the working class as a whole. Because of rank-and-file organizing, these politics are now being practiced by some K-12 unions (such as the Chicago Teachers Union) and the AFT/AAUP. While not calling for the abolition of capitalism—which should be the socialist approach to the attacks on immigrants—these positions reflect rank-and-file struggles within the unions to force them into anti-racist stances and to act like internationalists.
Finally, socialists in unions must relentlessly name capitalism as the culprit for all of the ills of today. The goal of socialist organizing within unions should not be to simply advocate and organize for reforms that support workers, but to also advocate and organize for society in which the working class leads and rules democratically and collectively through the abolition of capitalism. That is what socialism means.
As revolutionary socialists we understand that the fight against imperialism, oppression, and capitalism are all integral to the class struggle. The stakes are high and the threats we face are immense. If we do not actively build and grow the movement for socialism inside unions and as part of the class struggles we will face in this period, we will surely lose. The time is now for socialists in unions to organize, fight, and win on this basis.
