The Trump administration has announced an operation called "Project Freedom" focused on the Strait of Hormuz.

The workers who load the coal, steer the engines, and repair the hulls of the merchant marine have a singular interest: they wish to return home with their lives intact and their wages in hand. The decision being made does not include their voice. It should.

We are told of an operation called “Project Freedom.” The name is a heavy cloak draped over a very old, very familiar machinery. When the masters of capital speak of freedom, they are rarely speaking of the liberty of the common man to eat, to sleep, or to live without the shadow of the bayonet. They are speaking of the freedom of the market to flow unimpeded, the freedom of the investor to reap the harvest of risk without bearing the cost of the bullet. The Strait of Hormuz is not a place on a map to the working class; it is a chokepoint in the global circulation of profit, and now, it is being positioned as a chokepoint for human life.

Let us apply the audit of solidarity to this moment. Who benefits from the tension in the Strait? The oil companies, the shipping magnates, the arms manufacturers, and the political class that profits from the spectacle of crisis. Who bears the cost? The sailor who must navigate waters where a single miscalculation or a single act of aggression can end his life. The worker in the shipyard who builds the vessels that will be targeted. The family who waits by the telephone, knowing that the state has decided their loved one is a necessary expense in the ledger of national interest.

The Trump administration, like every administration before it, presents this not as a choice but as a necessity. They speak of security, of stability, of the free flow of commerce. But commerce is not free when it is guarded by the threat of war. Commerce is not free when the price of a gallon of gasoline is inflated by the fear of conflict. The state does not stand neutral here. The state is the enforcer of property rights, and when those rights are threatened by the instability of the global market, the state moves to protect them. It has always been this way. When the railroad owners needed their tracks cleared of striking workers, the troops came. When the mines needed to remain open despite unsafe conditions, the courts intervened. Now, when the oil needs to flow, the navy is positioned. The mechanism is identical; only the scale has changed.

There is a division at work here, a division that serves the interests of those who hold the power. We are asked to see ourselves as Americans, as patriots, as defenders of a way of life. We are asked to forget that the sailor in the Gulf and the truck driver in Ohio are brothers in the same struggle. The sailor risks his life so that the truck driver can fill his tank, and the truck driver pays the price in higher costs of living. Yet, we are kept apart. We are told that the sailor is a hero and the truck driver is a consumer, that one is noble and the other is merely economic. This is a lie designed to prevent us from seeing that we are both exploited by the same system.

The solidarity audit asks us to look at the specific arithmetic of this situation. If hostilities resume, who dies? It is never the general. It is never the oil executive. It is the young man from a working-class family who has been told that his duty is to die for the profits of others. And what is the alternative? It is not chaos. It is the recognition that the working class has the power to stop the war. If the workers who build the ships refused to launch them, if the workers who refine the oil refused to process it, if the workers who transport the goods refused to move them, the “Project Freedom” would come to a halt. Not because of diplomacy, but because of the withdrawal of labor.

We must not be seduced by the rhetoric of freedom. True freedom is not the freedom to sell oil at a premium; it is the freedom from the fear of war. It is the freedom to determine the conditions of our own lives. The state claims to protect us, but it protects only the property of the few. The working class must understand that our power lies not in the ballot box, which is often a theater of illusions, but in our collective capacity to withhold our labor. We are the engine of this society. When we stop, the machine stops.

The decision being made in the halls of power is a decision to risk lives for profit. We must decide, in our own hearts and in our own unions, whether we will allow this. We must recognize that the sailor and the factory worker are on the same side. The enemy is not the foreign power across the water; the enemy is the system that sends our sons and daughters to die so that others may grow rich. Solidarity is not a sentiment; it is a strategy. It is the only strategy that works. Let us not be divided by the flags we are asked to wave, but united by the bread we are denied. The time for passive acceptance is over. The time for active, collective resistance is now.