How to Build a Real General Strike Against ICE

What will it take to stop ICE and Donald Trump? More and more Americans are coming around to the following answer: a general strike.

They’re right to move in that direction. General strikes are a powerful tactic that have defeated corrupt and authoritarian rulers across the world, most recently in Egypt and Tunisia in 2011, Puerto Rico in 2019, and Sri Lanka in 2022. As the union anthem “Solidarity Forever” puts it, “without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn.”

Unfortunately, last Friday’s national call for “no work, no school, no shopping,” billed widely as an anti-ICE general strike over social media, came nowhere close to the projections of its most vocal advocates. Economic disruption was minimal, though workers from Grey’s Anatomy did force production to shut down for the day.

In contrast, Minnesota’s Day of Truth and Freedom one week earlier on January 23 did give a glimpse of the power of everyday people to make the system tremble. Many (though not most) businesses were shuttered. And over 75,000 people poured into downtown Minneapolis in the middle of the workday, braving -20°F chills. As SEIU Local 26 president Greg Nammacher put it on the Dig’s excellent new episode on Minneapolis,

We achieved things [on January 23] that were not imaginable two weeks before. … It really did feel like history to our members. I know many Uber and Lyft drivers just started crying when we were checking in with them that day about seeing [roughly one hundred] pastors getting arrested at the airport, seeing all those people pouring downtown to defend them.

How did Minneapolis achieve such a widespread work stoppage on January 23? What do the limitations of that day and the January 30 actions suggest about the path ahead? And what can the history of general strikes tell us about how to make the system’s wheels finally stop turning in the US?

Real General Strikes

Before we can answer those questions, let me briefly clarify what I mean by “general strike,” a term whose meaning has gotten twisted by overuse in recent years.

Academics and activists can endlessly quibble over definitions, but a general strike is basically a work stoppage that paralyzes multiple major industries. Such actions can be primarily political — demanding changes from the government — or economic, demanding changes from employers.

In that light,