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Minneapolis General Strike: Working Class Takes Step Into Revolutionary Future
(orinocotribune.com)
By Larry Holmes – Feb 13, 2026
The general strike in Minneapolis on Jan. 23 that shut the city down and catapulted forward the general strike movement that has been stirring below for some time may turn out to be the biggest step forward that the working class has taken in our lifetime. It is a sign that the virtual frozen iceberg that has slowed the development of the working class for too long is thawing.
After the Minneapolis strike, thousands of people across the country, especially students, joined a call for a national general strike, but that was only a preview of what’s coming.
Groups including labor unions, migrant solidarity forces and antiwar activists are calling for a general strike on May Day 2026. In the recent past, there have been calls for general strikes on May Day, but until now, they’ve been symbolic or not taken seriously. Some activists have been talking about and planning for a general strike for many months. They see Minneapolis as proof that they are on the right track.
Boston, Jan. 30, 2026. Photo: Stevan Kirschbaum/WW.
Some major unions have targeted May Day 2028 for a major labor general strike, when a number of big labor contracts expire. It seems that workers are not willing to wait two years.
The Minneapolis general strike, which was also called an economic blackout, was in response to the violent and murderous occupation of the city by thousands of storm troopers under the direct control of the White House. It is significant that the last general strike in this country — 20 years ago May Day 2006 involving millions of migrant workers across the country called “A day without immigrants” — was also in response to repression against migrant workers.
Police state repression provoked the working-class strike in Minneapolis. But the underlying causes of the strike go beyond state repression and have been long in the making. The deeper context for what happened in Minneapolis is the unprecedented crisis of U.S. imperialism and the capitalist system. It is this crisis that is behind the emergence of Donald Trump and everything that he and the billionaires who back him have been doing or trying to do here and around the world in order to save U.S. imperialism.
The working class is now in the process of rediscovering the weapon of the general strike out of a realization that marches, protests and bourgeois elections are not enough and relying on a bourgeois opposition to Trump to stop the attacks are ineffective. Workers are starting to understand that fighting and smashing the danger of fascism is a class struggle and ultimately a struggle to end the capitalist system.
Accordingly, the working class needs far more powerful weapons in their arsenal, like the general strike. Big Bill Haywood, the leader of the Industrial Workers of the World at the peak of its strength and influence in the working class, predicted that “the general strike is the measure by which the capitalistic system will be overthrown.” The bourgeois opposition to Trump will try to stop the general strike movement, or co-opt it, tame it and extinguish its militancy, its class character and its radical and revolutionary potential. They will try to bring it back under the control of the capitalist ruling class.
However, the growing anger below will not make this easy for them to do, and revolutionary forces should understand this, unite and by doing so, make it that much harder for the ruling class to subordinate the working class to its class interest.
All over the country, there’s been militant mass opposition to the war against migrant workers, people of color and all of those who have risen to their defense. Minneapolis has opened up a new phase of the resistance, but it is just a beginning. Minneapolis has pushed the Trump regime back and widened the cracks in Trump’s ruling-class support. But this new phase has not stopped repression and war. Indeed, the war at home and abroad is going to intensify.
A decaying, dying systemBecause of a dying capitalist system and an imploding and desperate U.S. imperialist empire that is still powerful and dangerous, the world is descending deeper and deeper into a catastrophic crisis under the threat of the U.S. launching more economic and military wars. The next eruption is not coming later; it is in progress right now.
Will an imperialist war be launched against Iran? How far will the imperialists go to try to overthrow the Cuban revolution? Will Trump invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 and try to cancel the midterm bourgeois elections? At a minimum, he’s already trying to disrupt them. Will the capitalist economic crisis collapse the economy? Will the imperialist war drive spiral into a civilization-threatening global war?
Already, the majority of the working class cannot afford the basic necessities of survival. The magnitude of the economic crisis that is looming will be far bigger than 2008 and push the conditions of the working class beyond the breaking point. The reason for pointing this out is not to spread fear and demoralization. To the contrary, it is to illustrate the necessity of the working-class and revolutionary forces to prepare for a wider and bigger class struggle, including a struggle for power.
The general strike is not new; it has been part of the development of the working class for almost 200 years. In the past, throughout the world, especially where the working class movements were strong, revolutionaries have analyzed and debated every aspect of the general strike and every experience with it. Every question raised by the general strike — from what it is, the conditions for it, what its aims are, how it should be organized and how the working class prepares for it — has been studied.
The rich history of the general strike is important. At this moment, the fundamental goals of a new general strike movement in the U.S. must be viewed in the context of the present situation of the working class, its level of political and class consciousness, organization and experience. This can’t be done by proceeding as if there are no important differences in the situation of the working class in other places and other periods compared to today.
Today in the U.S., from the perspective of a united class struggle against the capitalist class, the working class is only finally awakening. After a long period of being weak organizationally and also tied to the political apparatus of the bourgeoisie, the working class’s priority is acquiring — based on conditions and experience – its identity as a class unto itself and the capacity to act as such transcending all geographical or circumstantial boundaries.
This basic goal is not separate from all other goals, but it is nonetheless a critical goal at this moment, because the ruling class has historically waged an effective war against class consciousness.
Especially now, because of the unprecedented and generalized nature of the crisis, the capitalist class is absolutely dependent on dividing the working class, turning workers against each other, primarily on the basis of white supremacy. The ruling class cannot rule without this weapon. Nothing is more important for the development of the working class right now than overcoming this divide-and-conquer weapon of the enemy class.
The Trump regime and the ruling class want to derail and crush the development of the class struggle by diverting it into a civil war against workers of color based on maintenance of white supremacy.
A class warWe are in a sense back to the basics of class consciousness, class solidarity and united class action 101. This is the only way that the true character of the struggle can be understood and acted upon. This is a struggle between classes. The realization of this in the living struggle is precisely what the ruling class fears more than anything else. A general strike movement has to be more than about a particular strike but rather a deep political and social process of education, learning from experience and moving to the next battle. Minneapolis has opened the door to this realization.
Minneapolis has given us the template for a workers’ general strike that fits present conditions. The strike was not called by or organized by labor unions, although many unions supported it, and union and unorganized workers found creative ways to leave work and participate in the strike. The success of the strike was due to workers and students regardless of union affiliation or circumstances. Most businesses of all sizes were either convinced or pressured to close.
In a way, the Minneapolis general strike succeeded, without knowing it, on the basis of the advice that the great revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg offered to the working-class movement 120 years ago in her pamphlet “The Mass Strike.”
Luxemburg wrote, “The plan of undertaking mass strikes as a serious political class action with organised workers only is absolutely hopeless.” She continued, “If the mass strike, or rather, mass strikes, and the mass struggle are to be successful they must become a real people’s movement, that is, the widest sections of the proletariat must be drawn into the fight.”
It is essential that a political and mass strategy that involves organized and unorganized workers be strengthened to push the leadership of the labor movement into supporting general strikes. Much, much more must be considered, organized and implemented towards this end.
Preparation for general strikeThere is a critical role for young militants, many of whom were drawn into the struggle for almost three years in solidarity with Palestine, to play in the general strike movement. Many of these activists have already been establishing a widening network of community organization with no dependence or control by the capitalist government or its apparatuses.
This grassroots, working-class, community organizing includes defense of migrant workers, anti-police violence, tenant organizing, mutual aid, anti-imperialism and solidarity with revolutionary resistance to the U.S. throughout the Global South. This could be part of a critical mass infrastructure of preparing for a general strike. That preparation would of necessity include mass, popular education upholding the reasons for classwide solidarity and mass action.
Italian dockworkers stop armed shipments to Zionist Israel, Aug. 4, 2025. Photo: Unione Sindacale di Base.
On numerous occasions since Oct. 7, 2023, the Palestinian liberation movement has called for worldwide solidarity general strikes. On Feb. 6 and 7 of this year, dockworkers in a number of countries shut down docks to stop the shipping of weapons to Israel. But this is only the beginning of realizing the potential for more massive, global workers’ strikes against occupation and imperialist war.
Here. at the center of world imperialism, the most politically advanced forces — and our numbers are growing — must view making a general strike movement, or any other expression of the class struggle at home, intrinsically connected to the struggle of workers of the world, and in particular the liberation movements in the Global South. And this needs to be more than symbolic, but rather politically strategic, because it’s more than solidarity; it is the only way our class can prevail worldwide.
There can be no denying, and no tolerance for the denial, that more than ever the class struggle is global. This fact is more than a theoretical principle or a future aspiration. This is a practical and immediate reality. The class struggle everywhere is interconnected, interactive and interdependent. To proceed in our work as though it is otherwise weakens our class and helps the class enemy.
All of these things and more can be accomplished, but only if going forward there is forged a level of unity among like-minded revolutionaries that corresponds to the world crisis and the urgent needs that this has crystallized for the world class struggle.
Larry Holmes is Workers World Party’s First Secretary.
From Orinoco Tribune – News and opinion pieces about Venezuela and beyond via This RSS Feed.
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By Jesús Arteaga – Feb 13, 2026
This article, originally published on the portal Cimarrón, was titled “Fulfilling Duty in the Storm.” Its author, journalist Jesús Arteaga, narrates his actions from the moment his sleep was interrupted by the sound of the explosions from the US imperialist bombing of Caracas on January 3, 2026.
I was awakened by the sound of explosions and the buzzing of planes. Immediately, at 1:57 a.m., I received a call from Miranda, my daughter: “Dad, they are bombing us.” She and Gabriela, her mother, knew what to do, which made me calm.
I looked out the window of my house that faces the center of Caracas: the night was clear, and the explosions of the missiles lit up the sky with red flashes. The roar was terrifying.
Miranda and Gabriela live in La Pastora, in a place with a view over much of the Caracas valley. With their binoculars, they were able to see the places the US was attacking. They gave me an excellent report, both acting with composure in difficult moments.
Miranda was in her mother’s womb in April 2002 [during the failed coup against Hugo Chávez]. Gabriela has some experience with such situations; she breathed in quite a bit of gas during our student days.
My brother Juan and I immediately went to Radio Rebelde. My sisters, distressed, stayed at home. Almost in unison, they told us, “Take care of yourselves.”
Jesús Arteaga, journalist and political activist.
We arrived at the radio station very quickly, immediately waking up Camacaro, a member of the Rebelde team who lives on the radio premises, and we started broadcasting at 2:15 a.m.
Juan, the operator, interrupted the music that was playing—I think it was Edgar Alexander—activated the speaker that can be heard in the nearby area, and started playing Alí Primera.
Once “América Latina obrera” started playing, I began: “People of the glorious west of Caracas, at this moment we are being attacked by US imperialism. It is time to honor the legacy of our liberators. Let us show them that we are the sons and daughters of Bolívar. Let us follow the example of Chávez and Guaicaipuro. No one surrenders here!”
I passed the charge to Camacaro, who, along with Juan, executed the plan that we had reviewed thoroughly: first, convey calm and rally the population; second, maintain the radio’s operability for as long as we could. The speeches gave way to the voice of Alí Primera and Commander Chávez. The listeners participated with their reports and questions.
There are threats that, even though they are obvious, many insist on not seeing, as a spell to prevent them from materializing.
At Radio Rebelde, we held several meetings to discuss the threat from the United States and what to do when the aggression would occur. Some producers did not participate because they were of the opinion that nothing would happen here, as if their wish could prevent the attack. Others were punctual and made their contributions, and a few were present when the time came.
I went out on my motorcycle to report on the situation in areas of Catia and to establish some contacts. The streets were deserted, of course, it was 2:00 in the morning.
The Bolivarian National Police (PNB) officers who were in Sucre Square stood firm, without hesitation.
We could hear the voices of some drunks who continued the New Year’s Eve party and seemed unaware of what was happening, sometimes muffled by the flying planes.
Carmelitas corner a little while after the bombing. Photo: Jesús Arteaga.
From the square, I made the first report that spread like wildfire. I sent a message to my comrade Gabriela—not Miranda’s mother, another Gabriela—she replied immediately, informing me that the enemy planes were still in full flight. She, too, was “fulfilling her duty in the storm.”
I continued to apply the protocol, I communicated with Toro, the person in charge of the Sucre parish, and went to the designated place. I immediately verified that the civic-military-police unity is no joke: women and men arrived and obediently followed the instructions.
The place of the gathering was illuminated by a beautiful, bright moon, which provided enough light to recognize some comrades. Among the people present at that place were several officers of the Bolivarian National Armed Force. They were in civilian clothes, but their stature and confident demeanor revealed that they were our soldiers.
“Coffee is ready!” A female voice could be heard saying. Women had prepared that elixir and were distributing it.
From Gramovén, I went out with Toro to tour several key points of Sucre parish. We arrived at Coopercentro, where the people were active, including my buddy Yovani. We also toured other areas of Catia, and the attitude of the organized groups was the same: an absolute willingness to defend the homeland.
We returned to the point of gathering, and people kept arriving.
Alcides, who was in Maracay and whom I woke up at 2:00 a.m. with the news of the bombing, called me to tell me that he had made a connection with a journalist from the New York Times. She had seen my first report made from the Catia square, and he asked if I wanted to speak to her. I said yes, that it was necessary to tell everyone what was happening, to inform the world about the US aggression and the determined attitude of our people. The journalist called me, and I told her the story. I do not know if they published anything.
While I was in Gramovén, my colleague Francisco Trías, a photographer, called me and sent some pictures of the city center. We agreed to meet at the corner of Santa Capilla, where José Valero and Luis Hugas were already. We were the only journalists at the scene. It was still dark, and people were already starting to arrive to support President Nicolás Maduro.
Francisco and I went out to explore Caracas. The rumor of the bombing of the Cuartel de la Montaña made us go up there, where we verified that the 4F monument was still standing and intact. Francisco took some photos, and I wrote another report.
At the roundabout of block 7, the people were ready for defense, and Ramón Padrón was there commanding a large group. We went down to the Coordination Committee, and its members, as always, were ready for battle.
From the 23 de Enero neighbourhood, we headed east, touring the strongholds of the opposition. Altamira Square was deserted. A couple of guys from the Chacao Police were watching us from the south sidewalk of Francisco de Miranda Avenue. We went down to the highway and passed in front of La Carlota, and we did not notice anything unusual. We were not able to see the attacked area.
We decided to go to El Valle. Everything was silent, and there were few people on the street. We noticed that there was no electricity service because the traffic lights were off. In front of the Pedro Emilio Coll high school, Nicolás Maduro’s supporters were beginning to gather.
We arrived at checkpoint number 3 of the Tiuna Fort. There were some people who wanted to return to their apartments; they had left their houses while the bombs were falling.
Checkpoint 3 of Tiuna Fort. Photo: Jesús Arteaga.
An Army officer told them that they could not go back, that they were in danger. However, he let a few in to retrieve documents and something to change into because they had escaped in their nightclothes.
Among those people, there was a very beautiful woman in her 40s, wearing a short, very pretty pajama set. I asked Frank: “Did you take a picture of the girl?” “Nooo Chu, how could you even think of that?” he responded. “Ahh, but you saw her.” “Of course I saw her!”
In contrast was a man of about 70 years, short and fat, he too had sensual clothing: worn-out boxers, a stretched undershirt that had been white in the past, and barefoot.
We returned to Santa Capilla. More people had arrived: there were representatives from the National Assembly, Mayor Carmen Meléndez, and PSUV leaders. That is where I found out, as Desiree Santos Amaral informed me, about the president’s kidnapping by the US.
Venezuela to Iran: The Fate of Our People is Not Determined by Bombs
In Santa Capilla, I did a live report for Radio Rebelde. I interviewed Councilor José Reyes and a National Assembly deputy whose name I forgot.
There was brother Matías, an Argentinian journalist who had made Venezuela his home, and Venezuela had made him its own. We gave each other a tight hug. Mati said to me, “I knew I would find you here, Chu.”
Matías and I decided to keep looking for news. We went to the [opposition] Copei party headquarters to get the opinion of its leaders. That was a bust.
I returned to 23 de Enero, and this time I was able to talk to Juan Contreras, the historical leader of the Simón Bolívar Coordination Committee. I asked him about his son, Freddy Sebastián, a brave kid who fights for his life every day. Then we exchanged information and said goodbye with a strong hug, knowing, without saying it, that we were risking our lives.
From 23 de Enero, Mati and I set off to meet with Toro. Now there were more people in our group. Wilfredo and Yaguaramay arrived there by car. From Gramovén, we left with clear instructions and everything else to exert absolute control over our territory.
Back at the radio station, Vicente and his partner Nena, both with military training in the Militia, were waiting for us, as well as Rondón, Nelson, Reyes, Maikel, and Marcos. Then Franki, Vicente’s brother, two “tenants” of the Citadel, Jhon and Evelio, and Matías joined us. With everyone, we organized the defense of the Citadel, then José Félix joined, who, along with Juan, Camacaro, and Rondón, kept the audience of Rebelde informed.
Several people arrived, including women who asked to be taught how to use weapons to defend their land, their neighborhood, and their children. Nena, who was the instructor, had to conduct several sessions of a rifle handling “workshop.” The will and conviction of our people were manifested with the same firmness as always.
Camacaro had been in charge of the “ranch” for months. We had stored some food, water, and, of course, more coffee—so necessary during the sleepless nights.
We managed to form a larger team than planned, and there was no shortage of timely midnight coffee, messages of support, commitment, and love for this homeland.
On Sunday, January 4, I received another call from Miranda: “Dad, where are you? We are at the march.” “I am on my way, daughter, wait for me, I am heading there now,” I told her. I arrived with my sister, Denis. It was my daughter calling me, and I could not let her down.
People march in Santa Capilla on January 4. Photo: Radio Rebelde.
Thus passed the first days after January 3 for this people who resist, who demand the liberation of their president and first lady, who support comrade Delcy Rodríguez as acting president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.
Many young people joined, in various ways, in the defense of the homeland. My daughter did it her way. I feel a deep pride in her. Gabriela and I had not worked in vain. Neither had Simón and Hugo.
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
OT/SC/SF
From Orinoco Tribune – News and opinion pieces about Venezuela and beyond via This RSS Feed.
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