Minnesota workers have shown the world that the class struggle is alive and well in the US.

In addition to the war-zone scenes of barricades and street battles with militarized forces, the white clouds of tear gas blending into the wintery city landscape, there is a whiff of revolution in the air.

Without any proper leadership, without a political party, without a genuinely combative labor organization, tens of thousands of ordinary workers have self-organized to take action.

The creativity of the masses

The dizzying array of Signal group chats and other digital messaging groups that have sprung up is without precedent in US history. Some of these networks trace their roots back to the 2020 neighborhood organizations that emerged after the murder of George Floyd. Many more are proliferating day by day, as spontaneous community gatherings and street corner vigils now frequently end in breakout sessions for everyone to find their neighbors—and get connected on the spot.

The Signal groups function as a sort of digital nerve center for the movement, convening in-person meetings, dispatching patrol convoys, sharing reports and updates. There are even audio chats—similar to a police dispatcher radio channel—for sharing ICE sightings and reporting their movements in real-time.

In the hours after the murder of Alex Pretti, on the morning after the January 23 general strike, dozens of neighborhood networks immediately began organizing vigils in every corner of the city. One RCA comrade in Minneapolis described the seamless, almost automatic, manner in which this activity was orchestrated.

From one moment to the next, a group chat is formed and swells as dozens of neighbors join it. Suddenly, a team is putting up posters and leafleting door to door, a coordinating body meets at a local restaurant, welcomed and even thanked by the workers there.

That evening, hundreds of neighbors assemble at the meeting place from all directions. As the comrade put it: “Everything needed for the event found its way there without any sort of bureaucratic planning. A park table was used to stage the candles and hot chocolate, random people brought a fire pit, people passed around lyric sheets.”

The lyric sheets contain the words of protest songs like Bella Ciao—an Italian attendee steps forward to explain its origins and lead the crowd in song. Another “random person” brings a stash of whistles so that nobody left without being equipped. The RCA comrade gives a speech on the 1934 Teamsters Strike. At the end of the night, six people approach him about joining the party.

Scenes like this capture the creativity, innovation, and spontaneous self-organization that emerges in every revolution. Tactical ingenuity is the hallmark of a truly mass movement that draws in the participation—and the talents and thoughtfulness—of countless participants. Working people with no experience in protests, people of all ages who have never held a megaphone before, suddenly ask themselves what they can do for the movement. The result is awe-inspiring.

In an essay titled “The Minneapolis Uprising,” a reporter for The Atlantic described it as “a meticulous urban choreography of civic protest … At times, Minneapolis reminded me of what I saw during the Arab Spring in 2011, a series of street clashes between protesters and police that quickly swelled into a much larger struggle against autocracy.”

Escalate the struggle with workplace action committees

January 23 revealed the deep groundswell of support for mass strike action to kick out ICE among the working population of the Twin Cities. So, where do we go from here?

Organized networks have emerged spontaneously in working-class neighborhoods across the Twin Cities. The next step is to extend this type of formation directly into the workplace.

The turnout on January 23 leaves no doubt that the struggle against ICE has adherents in every jobsite. If coworkers gathered into action committees, they could give structure and continuity to the political discussions that are already buzzing through the breakroom and the shop floor.

Ideally, this effort would be coordinated in a systematic way by the labor movement, which has the resources to give it structure and guidance. Given the meekness of the union bureaucracy—who reluctantly signed onto the January 23 day of action, but couldn’t even bring themselves to write the word “strike” in their press releases—it may fall to the creative energy of the workers themselves to get organized.

In addition to creating a setting for continual discussion among coworkers, as well as a line of communication between different workplaces, action committees would serve above all as decision-making bodies for tackling the practical tasks of the movement. If workers are alerted to nearby ICE activity, the committee can designate teams to secure the entrances, inform the customers, communicate with neighboring workplaces, etc.

Elect delegates to form a citywide action committee!

If these formations each elected a delegate to represent every workplace at a citywide level, it would provide the backbone of a mass strike committee capable of taking decisions and coordinating mass actions in the name of the workers of the Twin Cities. Faced with that level of self-organization, the labor leaders would be under immense pressure to get on board—not just in words, but in deeds—during the next general strike.

The practical need for this kind of organization was on display when protesters attempted to block the Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport (MSP) during the January 23 strike. The closest thing to a mass arrest that day took place when hundreds of demonstrators formed a picket line, blocking the entrance to the terminal used by Delta, the largest carrier operating at MSP.

The protesters understood that shutting down air transportation would increase the general strike’s chances of success. But it wasn’t airport workers on the picket line. It was mainly activists, including a large number of clergymen.

Police from multiple jurisdictions coordinated with federal authorities to clear the picket, arresting over 100. But if action committees of airport workers had been organized inside MSP in advance of the strike, it would have been a different story. The airport wouldn’t function without baggage handlers, flight attendants, and air-traffic controllers.

Strike at the Fortune 500 companies and the largest employers!

Among the nearly 800 workplaces that closed on January 23, nearly all were small businesses. This is a positive sign of the sympathy of a layer of business owners, as well as the insistence for action on the part of their staff.

But the power of a real general strike is its ability to impact the profits of the top layers of capitalists. Minnesota is home to around 20 of the largest employers (Fortune 500 or Forbes Largest Private Companies List), which bring in billions of dollars in annual profits and employ hundreds of thousands of workers.

This includes the notorious UnitedHealth Group, retail giants like Target and Best Buy, and manufacturing and food processing corporations like 3M, General Mills, and Cargill, in addition to major finance, energy, and utility companies.

Beyond these national behemoths headquartered in the Twin Cities region, there are other major corporations with enormous workforces in the area like Walmart, Home Depot, Delta, and Enterprise. The three largest employers in downtown Minneapolis alone—Hennepin Healthcare, Target, and Wells Fargo—employ a total of over 20,000 workers. Then there’s the MSP airport, which employs over 21,000 workers.

These are the “heavy battalions” of the working class of the Twin Cities. If they decided to collectively flex their muscles, the American ruling class would feel the pain nationwide.

No service for ICE! Strike action at every point of contact with federal agents!

The masked thugs terrorizing the Twin Cities rely on services provided by other workers every day: from the meals they eat, to the hotel rooms they sleep in, to the vehicles they rent, and the fuel they buy at the pump. In other words: at every turn, they rely on the kind permission of the working class to go about their brutal business.

This also means workers collectively have the power to deny service to these criminals at each step. Service workers at restaurants and cafes can deny them a table in their restaurants—many have already put signs in the window to this effect. Likewise, retail and grocery workers can refuse to check them out at the cash register, or better yet, deny them entry through the door of the grocery store.

Nighttime “noise protests” are another tactic which the anti-ICE movement has spontaneously seized on, not only in Minneapolis–St. Paul, but also in other cities. Activists gather outside hotels where ICE agents are known to be staying, and attempt to deny them a decent night’s sleep using pots and pans, whistles, drums, airhorns, car horns, sirens, etc.

These protests may make ICE agents miserable, but hotel workers could effectively deny ICE not only peace and quiet, but even a roof over their heads. Organized hotel workers could refuse rooms to ICE agents and change the keycard locks in rooms they’ve already rented.

Some activists are advocating a nationwide boycott of Enterprise Rent-A-Car, which has been renting many of the unmarked vans that ICE uses to kidnap people off the street. If there were an action committee in every Enterprise location, workers could easily keep ICE agents from getting behind the wheel of any rental vehicle.

Neighborhood committees are tracking the license plates of autos that ICE already has. If they linked up with action committees of gas station attendants, workers could turn off the pumps at filling stations whenever a known ICE vehicle tried to refuel.

None of these actions can, on its own, stop ICE from terrorizing immigrant workers. But action committees from workplaces, schools, and neighborhoods could elect delegates to a citywide coordinating body. It could serve as the organizational backbone of a more profound and effective general strike, one powerful enough to drive ICE out of Minnesota.