Fifteen thousand New York City nurses at four hospitals launched the largest healthcare strike in the city in decades on Monday morning. The battle in New York is the first of what will be many major struggles by the working class in 2026, which will be the defining feature of the new year in the US and internationally.

In just the first two weeks of the year, the Trump administration has launched the criminal invasion of Venezuela, threatened war against Iran and overseen and defended the ICE murder of Renee Nicole Good.

Through Trump, the capitalist oligarchy has declared war on the working class. The year ahead will be defined not only by imperialist aggression and dictatorship, but also by mass layoffs, a surge in industrial accidents, and rising prices driven by Trump’s tariffs and trade war. The ruling class is determined to squeeze every drop from workers in order to pay for the deepening crisis of the global capitalist system.

These attacks are already provoking opposition, expressed in a growing wave of protests. But the decisive issue is the development of a mass working class movement that is independent of the corporate-controlled political system and the pro-capitalist trade union apparatus, which is working consciously to block and derail opposition.

Nurses are fighting against conditions that are universal in hospitals across America: dangerous understaffing, extreme overwork and inadequate pay. Taking place in the center of the world financial system, the strike pits nurses against the ruling class and the entire political setup.

The strike has won enormous support among workers in New York. The popularity of the TV medical drama The Pitt, for its realistic depiction of impossible conditions, is an indication of the wide sympathy felt towards healthcare workers, many of whom have given their lives during the pandemic. At Mount Sinai West, one of the hospitals on strike, nurses were forced to resort to wearing trash bags in 2020 due to the lack of personal protective equipment.

The dismantling of COVID safety measures and the false declaration of the end of the pandemic have expanded into a broader attack on public health. Hundreds of thousands of nurses have left the profession since the start of COVID, with burnout as the principal reason. Bed occupancy rates have surged to dangerous levels, due entirely to a 16 percent decrease in the number of hospital beds. Mount Sinai Beth Israel, which had more than 700 beds, was closed last year, with management citing financial losses.

This process has accelerated under Trump, who is attacking vaccinations and basic health science. A cut of $8 billion in federal Medicaid funding in New York City will lead to the loss of 34,000 hospital jobs and the elimination of medical coverage for 1.5 million people, according to one estimate, as the city battles an escalating flu epidemic.

The same process is mirrored in every other industry and aspect of life, including education, housing and social programs.

The working class will be thrust into struggle because it cannot accept industrial slavery and dictatorship. These struggles will increasingly reveal the class character and function of those who falsely claim to speak on behalf of workers.

New York City’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, was elected by city residents outraged by inequality. At a photo op on the picket line Monday morning, Mamdani railed against multimillionaire hospital executives. However, it is impossible to defend healthcare without an assault by the working class on the prerogatives of Wall Street.

Instead, Mamdani has pledged to be mayor for “all New Yorkers,” meaning both workers and the corporate oligarchy. This can lead only to new traps and new attacks on workers. Mamdani has spent months courting financial executives, including a craven pilgrimage to the White House to pledge a “partnership” with the fascist President Trump.

In plain language, “working with” Trump means participation in savage attacks on the working class. Mamdani’s appointment to his administration of former Biden Labor Secretary Julie Su, who played a key role in blocking major national strikes by railroaders and dockworkers, is a warning.

A central aim of Mamdani’s campaign has been to subordinate mass opposition to the Democratic Party—a party of Wall Street, the intelligence agencies and the military. As Trump launches a frontal assault on democratic rights and the working class, the Democrats have functioned not as a party of resistance, but of complicity. In New York, Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul has declared a “state of emergency” in response to the nurses’ strike, laying the groundwork for direct state intervention. 

Mamdani appeared on the picket lines alongside officials from the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA) bureaucracy, which did everything in its power to prevent the strike and is now working to shut it down. Just as in 2023, NYSNA has already called off strike action at most hospitals without finalized contracts, seeking to isolate the struggle and wear nurses down through backroom negotiations.

The union bureaucracy functions as a key prop of a ruling class mired in deep crisis. Last week, the teachers union in Minneapolis called off a strike in a major school district the day after the shooting of Renee Nicole Good, seeking to prevent the struggle from developing into a political fight against police dictatorship. Figures such as Shawn Fain of the UAW and Sean O’Brien of the Teamsters are backing Trump’s “America First” nationalism as a supposed defense of jobs, even as they themselves help management lay off tens of thousands of workers.

The laws of history are more powerful than any bureaucratic apparatus. Attempts to sabotage and suppress the class struggle will only further discredit these organizations. But the decisive question is the extent to which this social logic is translated into independent organization.

The key to this development is the building of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC), new forms of organization and a new strategy to unite workers in a broad movement against inequality and dictatorship. This is the only realistic strategy, because under present conditions, every major question runs up against the need for a frontal assault on the so-called “right” to profit.

The World Socialist Web Site urges nurses to form rank-and-file strike committees to take democratic control of their struggle. These committees must fight for the expansion of the strike to all 15 affected facilities, organize independent oversight of picketing and negotiations, and mobilize nurses to actively oppose any attempt to shut down the strike prematurely or send them back to work on the basis of vague promises that are never fulfilled.

At the same time, these committees should reach out to broader sections of the working class—educators, transit workers, city employees, and others facing inflation, job cuts, and collapsing public services. The fight to defend healthcare must be linked to the struggle of the entire working class against the subordination of social rights to the profit interests of the capitalist oligarchy.

Every healthcare worker knows that the conditions they face are rooted in the subordination of life, health and the interests of the working class to profit. Hospitals are run as business enterprises governed by the ruthless dictates of insurance companies and corporate executives. The result is a system in which even the most basic medical care is denied to vast sections of the population, while healthcare workers are driven to exhaustion and burnout.

The specific question that is driving New York nurses—safe staffing levels—raises fundamental political questions. Neither legislation on staffing nor contracts that union officials claimed to have resolved staffing problems have, in fact, changed anything. This is because to do so requires a direct attack on the subordination of health care to profit and a massive investment in the training and hiring of new nurses through the reallocation of enormous sums monopolized by the rich and squandered on war.

The strike by New York nurses is only the beginning. The year 2026 is opening under the shadow of dictatorship and imperialist war, but also immense social opposition. What is required is a conscious movement of the working class in which workers act not on wishful thinking or the deceitful slogans of official “leaders,” but on a scientific understanding of society and the decisive role of their own struggles in resolving the historic crisis of capitalism.

The profit interests of the capitalist class are fundamentally incompatible with further human progress. To win the fight for healthcare, jobs, education and democratic rights, the working class must consciously emerge as the decisive political force in society and take aim at the capitalist system itself. That means fighting for socialism, including the expropriation of the banks and corporations, the transformation of the healthcare giants into public utilities and the reorganization of society under the democratic control of the working class for the benefit of all.