The first General Strike in 80 years
We're at war, and now people are fighting back like never before
War has been declared upon us by our own government. The shock troopers of the regime are concentrating their attack on Minneapolis, and now Maine, but people across the country are facing kidnappings, assaults, and terror. ICE and border patrol agents are openly flaunting the 4th amendment, with their officers asserting the power to enter our homes without a warrant. More and more people are dying in ICE custody, protesters are suffering life-altering injuries, and as leaders in Minneapolis say, their city is under “siege.”
If we were governed by a regime not at war with its own population, the murder of Renee Good would have been a turning point. An agent point-blank murdering a woman for no reason would have caused a policy change, at the very least. But the deportation and border enforcement troops, already fundamentally flawed, have been re-appropriated as Trump’s Gestapo, so shooting first and asking questions later is the policy, not an aberration. And in the wake of an ICE agent murdering Renee Good, the regime forces closed ranks and doubled down on their reign of terror.
Some people internalized the horrific truth about our own government being at war with us long ago, while others are just coming to it now. But every day, as we see footage of ICE agents kidnapping kids, assaulting countless people, and tear gassing neighborhoods, more and more people come to realize that these regime forces are at war with the people of this country. For the first time, a plurality of this country wants to abolish ICE, and that number is only going up as the horrors of the agency are broadcast across America.
We could pause here and expound upon the nightmare. We could fill pages, as many journalists have, with the atrocities being committed in towns across America by Trump’s Gestapo. And we need those testimonies, we need as many people as possible to know about the war this regime is waging on us. But if you’re here, if you’re reading this, I assume you know the horrors. I assume you’ve seen the mother shot, the children detained, the fathers kidnapped and sent to countries they’ve never lived in before. I assume you’ve seen the city under siege, and the countless people afraid to go to work and school, the people scared to live their lives.
We’re all so familiar with the atrocities of ICE because they’re documented and shared again and again. On social media, and even on corporate media, videos of assaults, abuses, and even a murder have been broadcast across the country. What tends to lag behind, what tends to not get the same attention, is the heroic stories and scenes of resistance. Sometimes a clash between brave protesters and ICE will go viral, but it’s harder to capture the sustained organizing that makes effective resistance possible.
Today is different. Today many of the biggest unions in Minnesota, along with faith groups and community organizations and more, called for a general strike, an economic blackout in opposition to the terror inflicted by federal agents in Minnesota. Hundreds of businesses, museums, and institutions are shut down today. Thousands and thousands of people aren’t going to work. The streets of Minneapolis and St. Paul will be filled with protests and marches, and people in other cities and across the country will also be rallying in solidarity. And these scenes will be broadcast nationally, even globally, capturing the attention of millions and helping foster the next phase of our resistance.
A true general strike in the U.S. is unprecedented in most of our lifetimes. People above the age of 80 may have faint memories of the last round of city-wide general strikes, which took place in 1946. Before that point it was already a rare, historic feat for unions and communities to pull off, and after that point they’ve been non-existent in this country. So today is monumental, not because a one-day general strike will achieve all of its demands and successfully drive ICE out of Minnesota, but because it sets a new tone, a new standard for the degree of organization and impact that the left is aiming for. In a moment that calls for drastic action, the people of Minnesota are living up to the call, and orienting the rest of us toward more ambitious and necessary action.
One sign of the historic and urgent nature of this moment is that the traditionally more cautious and conservative unions, like the Minneapolis AFL-CIO, have joined today’s general strike call. They join numerous other unions in flexing their muscles to push back against the fascist attack on working people across Minnesota, and across the country. Overall, Minnesota union density is about 16%, while the national number is just below 10%. That distinction might not seem huge, and we certainly want those numbers to increase everywhere, but the six percent difference means tens of thousands more unionized workers, tens of thousands more people who are organized and ready to respond to their union’s call at a pivotal moment like the one we’re in right now.
So today’s general strike is both historic in its own right, and a signal of what we must aspire to. We must urgently get more organized, enabling us to reach higher levels of coordination and pursue more effective methods of fighting back. The greater our capacity to shut things down, the more unionized we are, the more organized we are, the greater our capacity to hit the ruling class and the fascist regime where it hurts — in the wallets. We know that Trump and his cronies only speak one language, money. We know that profit is what they care about, and so we know that our ability to create economic disruption is a vital, irreplaceable tool in our arsenal of resistance.
There are, of course, countless other tools. We’ve seen community organizing, ICE patrols, displays of armed resistance, whistle brigades, tracking and hounding federal agents, taking the fight to the hotels they stay in, and more. And it’s going to take each and every one of these tactics, and then some.
As people everywhere wake up to the reality that we are at war, they become willing to adapt a more radical approach to fighting the Gestapo forces, more willing to pick up radical tools. And I know the language of war sounds intense, but when you see what’s happening on the ground, when you see how the fascist regime is attacking thousands and thousands of people, and attacking all those who dare to protest, it becomes hard to argue. This war, like so many others, didn’t ask for our permission, it began when the fascists declared it. For a time much of this country was asleep to the fact that the fascist movement had launched this attack on us, on countless groups of people all across this country. But the twisted, violent, continuous attacks perpetrated by ICE have broken through. Our own government is at war with us, and now it’s time to respond accordingly.
Minneapolis is leading the way right now. Their dogged, sustained, bold resistance is a beacon in the dark. The Minnesota general strike today may go down as one of the pivotal moments of resistance to the Trump regime and his Gestapo. Today people are taking their future into their own hands, and tomorrow millions more Americans will feel emboldened to do the same. As labor leader Big Bill Haywood said over a century ago, “If the workers are organized, all they have to do is to put their hands in their pockets and they have got the capitalist class whipped.”
Today it’s Minnesota, tomorrow it’s your town, your city, your state. The acceleration of fascism demands that we accelerate our organizing and resistance. It also demands, as we’re seeing in Minneapolis and St. Paul, the expansion of our horizons. We have no choice but to think bigger and think bolder. ICE certainly has no compunction about thinking of new ways to violate the law and hurt more of our people. Therefore we have no choice but to expand our organizing, expand our coalition, bring more people in and fight like hell for our future. So see you on the picket lines, in the streets, and at the next general strike. - JP
NATIONAL GENERAL STRIKE!
I hate the violence happening in Minneapolis but I'm not surprised at how amazingly the people there are fighting back. It truly is such a special history with a lot of labor organizing that has happened in recent decades . . . Much love to everyone there!