In Minnesota, on January 23, there was a mass strike. The demand came from the streets of the Twin Cities, where nothing has been normal since the beginning of “Operation Metro Surge,” the Trump Administration’s invasion of the state with some 3,000 troops from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
Nothing has been normal: Thousands of students had to resume remote learning that began during the COVID-19 lockdown. Thousands of people have not left home since the invasion began and are living on groceries provided by organized neighbors reviving mutual aid networks seeded during the pandemic and the George Floyd uprising in 2020. Businesses have closed, and communities have erected checkpoints to slow the flow of federal agents through their neighborhoods. The sound of whistles calls the community to the streets as helicopters thunder overhead. Cars are left abandoned on the street, windows shattered, seatbelts sliced to yank drivers out.
Business as usual had already been shattered by the time thirty-seven-year-old Renée Good was killed on January 7 and the demand went up to shut everything down. “This has been such a nightmare,” Greg Nammacher, president of SEIU Local 26 in the Twin Cities, tells me. “We’ve now had twenty-five members abducted, people who had helped lead strikes and had been a part of revealing wage theft and winning huge amounts of back pay for workers.” Those people have been disappeared without due process, and sometimes without being able to contact anyone. “When the community called for a day of no work, no shopping, and no school, we had a member meeting where 95 percent of the folks at the meeting said that they were planning on not going to work,” Nammacher says.
The unions, in turn, took the risk of endorsing the action. Existing networks of community groups, labor and tenant unions, and faith communities worked together to ensure that the action was felt across the state. Clergy organized a mass disruption at the airport, and hundreds of small businesses shut their doors in solidarity, each of which amplified the workers’ actions, Nammacher notes. A poll after the event found that 80 percent of Minnesotans across the state had heard about the day of action, and nearly a quarter participated in it.
The excitement of the day was a reminder of the power of the general strike as labor’s strongest weapon: the mass refusal to work across a geographic area, demonstrating that the wheels of capital accumulation still stop when the working class does. General strikes have been much discussed in recent years but rarely seen in the United States; other countries, from Greece to Palestine, have a much livelier tradition of stopping work en masse. The week after Minnesota’s strike, calls for another one ricocheted around the Internet, but settled on a series of much-reduced demands, paling in comparison to what the Twin Cities had pulled off on January 23.
The United States is particularly disconnected from a radical labor tradition—we should be grateful that the term “general strike” still has the resonance that it does. But strikes are a particular thing; they are not just a protest. Strikes feature workers in their roles as workers, in the context of capitalist production and distribution, using their leverage to disrupt the flow of profits and thus force bosses (or politicians) to concede to their demands. Rent strikes similarly disrupt the flow of capital by collectively withholding the one thing a landlord needs: your cash.
The true general strike, in the words of political theorist Joshua Clover, “is the precondition for emancipatory class war.” It cannot simply be called into existence, as Rosa Luxemburg wrote back in 1906, “a kind of pocket-knife which can be kept in the pocket clasped ‘ready for any emergency,’ and according to the decision, can be unclasped and used.” Luxemburg argued that the mass strike arises from social conditions; it grows from existing organizations and from heightened conflict that draws new participants into the struggle, as if by “electric shock.” The strike, Clover added, has its roots in the riot; it is more than simply staying home from work, but entering the streets to face down one’s opponents. It requires, in other words, risk.
To look for recent antecedents to Minneapolis and to illustrate what is at stake, A Day Without Immigrants in 2006 is a good example. In response to the move to criminalize undocumented immigration, millions of immigrants across the United States stopped working and joined together in mass marches in major cities—400,000 in Chicago, 300,000 in Los Angeles—to insist on their humanity in the face of a harshening border regime. Those immigrant workers were, and still are, some of the country’s most vulnerable people, but collectively, they remain a force to be reckoned with.
In comparison, consider one of the viral calls to action for January 30, titled “Five ways to join the national strike on Friday if you’ve gotta work.” It offers up the following actions: canceling subscriptions to tech companies; not spending money at big box stores; being “chatty” by telling people about the strike; working slowly; and calling your representatives. None of these actions are bad—several would be on any organizers’ list of escalations toward a walkout, if done in coordination—but none of them are a strike. The whole point of a strike is refusing to work exactly when “you’ve gotta.” This is more than a semantic debate; the power of a strike is in throwing a wrench into the gears of business.
“A call over social media for folks to do mass actions is great,” Nammacher says, but it is different from what happened in the Twin Cities. “It is helpful for different tools to have different names so that we can use them consciously to build the kind of pressure we need.” The Twin Cities had built momentum through mass marches and actions—two of which involved more than 50,000 people—before Good’s death. Both union and non-union workers, Nammacher says, took a “significant level of risk” by not working that day. “In our legal structure in our society, most of the laws are set up to try and prevent or dissuade people from doing that,” he adds. “That’s very serious, and so just having a community or workers call for that willy-nilly is not helpful.”
Internet-called “general strikes” make the mistake of assuming one can have power without risk, while in the streets of Minnesota, every day we are seeing the incredible power that comes when ordinary people stare deadly violence in the eye and show up anyway. They are showing, tenant organizer Tara Raghuveer tells me, “a remarkable collective commitment to material solidarity.” Compared with what Good and thirty-seven-year-old Alex Pretti (killed by CBP officers on January 24) risked and lost, what is “take a day off work if you can?”
As political philosopher Rodrigo Nunes writes, “Emancipatory politics demands sacrifices not for their own sake, but for the sake of a future in which less (and less harsh) sacrifices are demanded of all.”
In the wake of Good’s death, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey made headlines by saying that ICE should “Get the fuck out” of Minnesota. Yet in the weeks since, he has been criticized by the movement for conceding too much to Donald Trump. In contrast to the material solidarity in the streets displayed by ordinary Minnesotans, Frey’s militancy is a pose. It’s a vibe.
“Vibe shift” is a common term these days, a way of explaining a change in the atmosphere, the zeitgeist. It gets at something, critic Scott Wark writes, “an affective resonance that’s pre-cognitive, that resists easy explication, something that attends scenarios that aren’t yet fully resolved. In our moment, one defined by a lack of resolution into a coherent whole, vibes reign.”
In the age of the Internet, the influencer, and the Instagram reel, affect dominates. The almighty algorithm prioritizes emotional reactions; those could come from a cute puppy video or the latest video of a murder at the hands of agents of the state. “Post after post after post after post after post might hit like news then joke then hot take then personal update then thirst trap,” Wark writes, “horror and aversion and disgust blended together with cuteness and captivation and (whatever now passes for) beauty, while also conveying some kind of information about what’s going on.” Everything becomes content; the bar for participation feels lower than ever as we are bombarded with the hyperreal alongside the AI slop.
In lieu of actually doing anything, Democrats these days seem to settle for an occasional chest thump before meekly rolling over. Evoke a feeling, rather than initiate a material change.
The right has figured out this tactic all too well. Back in 2016, before Trump’s first term, I met Tom Lewandowski in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The longtime labor organizer noted that Trump represented something emotional happening with working people. He offered them little during his first term, and almost nothing this term except the vicarious pleasure of watching his agents attack and deport. “We need to have politics that knows the narrative, knows the emotional, and knows the numbers,” Lewandowski told me back then.
In lieu of improving conditions, we’re offered vibes. In lieu of organization, we get what Paolo Gerbaudo calls “hyperleaders.” “[W]here digital media has come to mediate political leadership, politicians begin to adopt the colloquial and demotic style of YouTubers and Instagram influencers,” Gerbaudo writes. “Hyperleaders compensate for the crisis of membership organizations, providing their followers with a supplementary form of collective identification.” Politicians offer thoughts and prayers and “get the fuck outs” and do nothing with actual power; the influencer posts a call for a general strike that isn’t.
Social media has lowered the bar of entry in a way that can be beneficial even as it can be demobilizing. It brings a message to thousands who might otherwise not know what is happening. I have labored too long in independent media not to be grateful for the spread of alternative sources of news when corporate media are capitulating to Trumpism or simply slashing jobs.
Yet, as Nunes notes, “A meme may travel very widely, and transform the way those who see it think, but otherwise lead to little difference in their lives.” Successful action usually depends on the work of a committed group of organizers. Influencers indicate a direction of travel, but to stop our neighbors from being thrown into unmarked vans, we must do more than post.
“In my organizing practice I am committed to realness—in our case, that means building majorities in properties and across landlords’ portfolios, applying research to build strategy, running legitimate authorizations, launching strikes, and holding the line until we win,” Raghuveer says. “But context also matters, and we can’t afford to be precious about process at the expense of power. In the face of a federal occupation, we may not have the luxury of building by building, block by block, but we must figure out how to exercise much more power, and there are suddenly many more people to do it with. We have to live where strategy and structure meet momentum, or we miss the moment.”
In these moments of momentum, in other words, it’s not that the rules go out the window or those organizations lose their importance—in the midst of an occupation in Minnesota, Raghuveer was there to help launch a Twin Cities-wide tenant union, and then a drive for a Twin Cities-wide rent strike, endorsed not only by tenant organizations, but also by five major unions including Local 26, and community groups.
Well before January 23, Twin Cities unions had aligned contract expiration dates to coordinate strikes across multiple unions, and built relationships with community organizations. It had taken years’ worth of experiments, “many of them failed, some of them successful,” Nammacher says, to build the infrastructure of resistance now at work in Minnesota. And to replicate that work, it’s important to build those relationships before the invasion comes. Organizations that hold people together, for a short or long period of time, serve as a container for institutional memory, a training ground for tactics, and a place to debate and refine strategy.
At the same time, “a whole bunch of new forms of organization and the community as a whole really stepped up in new ways that we had not seen,” Nammacher says, pointing to “the heroism of a whole bunch of folks that were not previously in an organization, that were so infuriated that they dropped their day jobs and went to these marches.” People with no previous organizing experience, he adds, “are now coordinating 80,000-person marches.” Some 12 percent of adults in the Twin Cities are in rapid-response or mutual aid Signal chat groups now, “far beyond the organizational touch of any of our traditional base-building organizations.”
Nammacher believes that “sometimes in our movement there’s this dichotomy between fast social movement—often mobilization or social-media-driven structures that surge and die down in reaction to a set of events—versus long-term base-building organization. All I can say is what has happened in the Twin Cities in the last two months would have been absolutely impossible if we had not had both of those types of structures and motion at the same time.”
In Minnesota, the movement has grown, to paraphrase Luxemburg, by being tested in the struggle and going forth with increased strength. Around the country and the world, onlookers long to be tested as well, and this can only be a good thing. But the force that is testing them now is one of the best-armed in the world and backed by organized capital and billionaires who have accumulated their wealth by building the very technologies of surveillance and shopping on which we are watching the violence unfold.
The general strike remains a goal to aspire to. But simply saying the words over and over again will not call the strike into being; rhetorical maximalism is not enough. The lesson from Minnesota is that material solidarity matters—sometimes it matters even more so for being unseen and therefore undetected. January 30 was not a general strike, but businesses and individuals donated thousands of dollars to the work being done on the ground, and that increased the capacity for Minnesota organizations to keep up the struggle. Honesty, not wishful thinking, is what we need now.
Trumpism will not be defeated by good intentions or the best of vibes. It will not concede because enough of us are watching or “speaking truth to power.” Love may be stronger than hate, Raghuveer says, but love still needs to have a strategy and the leverage to pull it off.