John N, Minneapolis, MN
This evening three RCA comrades attended a community meeting at Whittier International Elementary School in South Minneapolis. People were flooding towards the school from all directions. By the beginning of the meeting, over 1,000 people had filled the entire school was completely. It was standing room only in every large room.
The Whittier Alliance Neighborhood Association organized the meeting and was visibly overwhelmed. They had a small speakers list including a city council member, a state rep, and a park board commissioner. With these speakers came the standard liberal moral appeals. A representative of the South MPLS Tenants Union voiced the need for in-person neighborhood committees organized in every block in the city, providing basically the only source of direction in the entire meeting.
Afterwards, time was provided for residents to break out and “find their neighbors.” Comrades used the opportunity to spread out into the meetings and talk with as many people as possible.
The movement seems to be picking up where the George Floyd uprising left off five years ago. The momentum towards neighborhood action committees is far stronger than ever before.
There is also growing enthusiasm for a turning the January 23 day of action into statewide general strike. Some people are recognizing that the union bureaucrats are acting as a barrier but don’t know what to do about it.
The whirlwind of information, organizations, and lines of communication have been overwhelming for a lot of people. To most everyone we talked to we consistently raised the following ideas:
- Make these mass meetings regular
- Discuss the lessons of the neighborhood committees and generalize them across the movement.
- Elect a centralized leadership made up of delegates from each neighborhood committee. Draw in the unions. Have union members form their own strike committees if necessary to maneuver around their leadership.
- Ultimately, we need to organize city and statewide general strikes to paralyze the city until ICE is forced out entirely.
Our ideas were met with the enthusiasm. One person even admired how our ideas were more clear and well thought out than any other in the meeting. The mood on the ground suggests that this movement will continue to escalate.