United States. Minnesota: On the “General” Strike That Wasn’t

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One of the most powerful weapons the bourgeoisie uses against the proletariat is its ability to distort the terms of the real class struggle and impose a completely sugarcoated version of it. In this way, the major milestones in the development of bourgeois rule are presented as victories of the proletariat. Democracy is portrayed not as the system the bourgeoisie needs to guarantee its commercial, industrial, and other interests, but as a “right won” by the proletariat. World War II is presented as an epic struggle for “anti-fascist” freedom, rather than the massacre of proletarians for purely imperialist ends, as it actually was. And so, at every level — from inter-imperialist conflicts to the everyday manifestations of exploitation and oppression — the reality of the proletarian class’s very existence is presented, time and again, as corrupted by the destructive force of the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois classes.

Very often, it is the very currents that claim to be “class-based,” “proletarian,” and even “communist” that propagate this alienated view of reality. This has happened, for example, with the mobilizations against ICE and the U.S. government’s racist deportation policies, in which so many supposedly “Marxist” groups saw the beginning of a large-scale class struggle where what actually existed was the petty bourgeoisie’s tight control over the proletariat through the imposition of its own means and methods of struggle.

We take the example of the Revolutionary Communist International (formerly the International Marxist Tendency), specifically its U.S. section, the Revolutionary Communists of America (RCA), because it serves to illustrate this type of distortion we are discussing: they attempt to pass off an example of mobilization—important and large, yes, but of a popular and interclassist nature, as a milestone in the proletarian struggle. In doing so, they hinder the true development of the class struggle, which requires, above all, clarity and rigor.

In its article “The 2026 Minnesota General Strike: A Historic Turning Point” (1) (January 26, 2026), the RCA writes that “Minneapolis has yet again become the epicenter of the class struggle in the United States” and that “the subsequent daily protests and widespread civilian resistance against ICE culminated in the de facto general strike”, during which “hundreds of thousands of ordinary Minnesotans” fel[t] that their city [was] under occupation by federal agents, and as the Democrats offer[ed] no real solution, ordinary people have been taking matters into their own hands”, and that “January 23, 2026 will be remembered as a turning point in the history of the American class struggle. (…) This was the first time anything remotely close to this has happened in the US in 80 years, since the 1946 strike wave, which saw general strikes in Oakland, Rochester, and other cities. Furthermore, this was essentially a political general strike. It was not an economic action over wages and benefits, but an overtly political act, aimed directly at the repressive apparatus of the national government. It was sparked in defense of workers unfairly targeted because they don’t possess a particular piece of paper, and to protest against the brazen killing of American citizens for the crime of exercising their constitutional rights. In it, the embryo of an emerging class consciousness can be clearly discerned. The strike mushroomed organically despite the lack of a militant class-struggle leadership, thanks in no small part to the self-organization of the working class taking place in neighborhood meetings and Signal chats across the Twin Cities.” The RCA concludes that “communists must study these events closely, and draw the conclusions.” Very well-let us do so.

While the RCA and other outlets of the bourgeois left (Jacobin, Monthly Review, In These Times, etc.) speak of a general strike and base their conclusions on the number of demonstrators, media headlines, and emotional atmosphere, genuine Marxism must draw its conclusions from material relations, from the production process, from class position. There is no denying that the January 23 protests were massive. But the issue is not semantic. It concerns the real content and weight of the working class’s weapons: an actual strike process, real class polarization.

So-called “civil society” — a broad coalition of community organizers, religious leaders, and NGO activists in Minnesota — “called for a statewide general strike, often described by participants as an ‘economic blackout’ or Day of Truth & Freedom” (Wikipedia). Yet trade unions committed to class collaboration refused to declare a strike. The national AFL-CIO did not support it; local unions offered verbal endorsement but warned of illegality, possible job loss, and invoked the contractual framework limiting strikes to collective bargaining (the “no-strike clause”). They did not call for a work stoppage, and certainly not in key economic sectors. The speeches of union officials were purely symbolic; in some cases, no strike vote was even held—what a form of workers’ struggle! Hospitals invoked moral duties of care, and the UAW, with its 1.1 million members, did nothing to mobilize them, merely floating the idea of a general strike in... 2028.

There was no coordinated collective work stoppage by workers in strategic industries; no paralysis of logistics; no halt to energy supplies to centers of production, finance, or state repression. Major employers—Target, 3M, UnitedHealth, Xcel Energy — continued operating as usual. Participation largely took the form of vacation days, calling in sick, or individual absence… Under these conditions, one cannot speak of a general strike. Workers did not impose any “embryo of class force”. Rather, the event confirmed the dominance of class-collaborationist politics, imposed both from union leadership and internalized within the workers’ movement itself. A section of the petty bourgeoisie could afford to close its shops symbolically at minimal cost. That is not proletarian class action. It was no general strike, but a mass demonstration combined with “individual absences”.

Instead of analyzing the objective weakness of the workers’ movement, the RCA proclaims a “new epoch.” Subjective impressions of mass enthusiasm replace objective class criteria.

Thus, the RCA can write: “Nearly 800 small businesses closed their doors for the day, either due to genuine political solidarity with the anti-ICE movement, pressure from employees who wanted to participate, or a mixture of both. At first, only a handful of small businesses had announced closures, but as the pressure to participate grew, dozens and then hundreds of small businesses followed like dominoes. The result was a cascade of small business closures. (…) Institutions such as the Science Museum of MN, the MN Institute of Art, and the Guthrie Theater also closed.” Genuine political solidarity — from bourgeois shopkeepers or public institutions? How can bourgeois proprietors express political, that is, class solidarity with immigrant proletarians?

The closure of approximately 800 small businesses, the shutting of museums, schools, etc. by the institutions themselves “as a sign of solidarity,” is not a strike. If an owner shuts a business, it is not a collective strike action of labor power against capital. Likewise, if public institutions close “because of the weather” (hypocritically), that is not a strike. Here the RCA confuses an interclass protest action with a struggle of a class character by workers that structurally intervenes in the reproduction of capital.

Yet even despite the exaggerations and flights of fancy, a more accurate picture can be gleaned from the RCA’s own text: “if it did not result in a total shutdown of the key levers of the local economy, it certainly constituted a generalized work stoppage, making a significant dent in the economic activity of the metro area that day. (…) the demonstration outside the Minneapolis airport earlier that morning… did not succeed in shutting down the airport entirely.” Demonstration — not workplace action. Key industries and the airport functioned normally, to the satisfaction of the big bourgeoisie. Yet the RCA insists it was a general strike!

The RCA speaks of Signal chats, neighborhood networks, community meetings, moral outrage—and presents this as class-oriented organization. This is interclass “political” mobilization, activism. Struggle of a class character unfolds through polarization between proletarians, wage workers, those “without reserves,” and the capitalists and their state; in factories, warehouses, hospitals, in the streets—wherever the clash takes place between the capitalist mode of production and its conservation, and the assertion of the working class’s material and social needs. Not in hashtag campaigns.

The RCA writes that “the capacity for self-organization, the rapid changes in consciousness, the class instinct coming to the fore, and the massive potential to escalate the movement even further are absolutely apparent. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary Minnesotans are searching for a way forward…”. The reality, however, is that workers have not been able to break through the suffocating constraints of the so-called “no-strike clause,” nor to advance other methods and means of class-oriented struggle; they have not even reached the level of what Lenin once called “trade-union consciousness.” For the RCA, this structural weakness of the workers’ movement does not exist: the absence of an organized stoppage of production, subordination to union-imposed limits, the interclass character of the action, the dominant defense of the “constitution,” the lack of class organization (class organization can exist only as organization against capitalism). These are not secondary shortcomings — they are structural limits of the workers’ movement. For the RCA, however, the only weakness is that there is a “lack of a clearly defined political leadership for the movement” — that is, the absence of a revolutionary party. Yet even such a revolutionary party cannot create a strike where no material basis exists.

To call the protests against ICE in Minneapolis “the greatest turning point since 1946” is to devalue real historical general strikes, to dilute the meaning of concepts, to diminish the significance of class struggle. The inflation of terms such as strike — indeed, general strike — and class struggle leads to the disorientation of the proletariat and undermines the seriousness of the need to deploy these weapons and to step onto the terrain of genuine struggle of a class character.

When the RCA declares mass demonstrations and permitted “absence from work” to be a strike — and in this case a general strike — it creates an illusion of strength, conceals real weaknesses and difficulties, and lowers the bar of class struggle. The proletariat needs truth and proper orientation — not mobilizing myths and marketing tricks.

A real strike separates workers from capitalist employers, sharpens the antagonism between the classes, exposes the role of the state as the defender of capital, and compels capital to respond with repression (as in the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters Strike, when up to 35,000 construction workers joined in solidarity, police shot two strikers, 100,000 people attended their funeral, and the result was the breaking of the bosses’ resistance).

A strike teaches workers through experience: confrontation, collective discipline, organization, the creation of strike committees, the building of a militant network coordinating workplaces… The real outcome of their struggles — since they win only occasionally, and only temporarily — is not immediate success, but the ever-widening unification of workers, their organization into a class, the sharpening of their own weapons, preparation for political, revolutionary struggle, for every class struggle is ultimately a political struggle.

Conclusion? Minnesota witnessed significant protests, moments of political radicalization, expressions of anger. Yet it was not a general strike, nor a step toward one; not a paralysis of capital from class positions, nor a transition to a higher form of class organization (from “economic” to “political”).

The task of genuine communists is neither to exaggerate nor to demoralize, but, in the spirit of materialist analysis, to name the weaknesses plainly, to remain in contact with the working class and its daily struggle in opposition to capitalism and bourgeois oppression, to support any proletarian struggle that breaks with social peace and rejects submission to interclass collaborationism, and to support every effort toward the reorganization of the proletariat on the basis of economic association, with the perspective of a broad revival of class struggle, proletarian internationalism, and revolutionary anti-capitalist struggle.

In other words, to indicate the path toward real class organization through the rejection of illusory interclass solidarity, and to help restore the strike — not the “day of action,” the “economic blackout,” or pacifist mass parades — as the genuine weapon of the proletariat.

(1) https://communistusa.org/the-2026-minnesota-general-strike-a-historic-turning-point/

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