If Anyone Can Pull Off a General Strike, It’s Minnesotans

The Minnesota movement thinks, as
political philosopher Rodrigo Nunes puts it in Neither Vertical Nor
Horizontal, ecologically: It brings together different forms of
action (strike, boycott, mutual aid, self-defense) and disparate organizational
forms (unions, community groups, tenant organizations, text threads) with
unaffiliated individuals who turn up to protests or just stop, like Renee Good
did, while passing through, to protect members of their community and to
document what was happening. This entails, in Nunes’s words, “privileging cooperation over competition, nurturing common
resources and mutually beneficial relations, and strategizing with a broad
field of other agents in mind.”

At the moment, all of those
organizations and quite a few new allies are united behind a simple demand: ICE
out of Minnesota. Beyond that, many of them have endorsed the call—now
nationally popular—to abolish
ICE entirely, and some have called for an eviction moratorium
(again, mirroring Covid-related policies, this time to protect people from a
threat entirely caused by the state). Organizers have targeted major
corporations—CTUL is focusing on builder D.R. Horton; Unidos and
others have held sit-ins and sing-ins in Target stores, as the
corporation is headquartered in the Twin Cities—demanding that they protect
employees from ICE. Some are using the language of general strike,
while the unions, which have contracts that often prevent them from striking
within the bounds of those agreements, are avoiding those words.

Crabtree’s organization, Minneapolis
Families for Public Schools, has focused on the return of school sanctuary
status, so that her experience with Bovino’s forces is not replicated. It has backed the eviction moratorium, and—in yet another Covid echo—remote
learning access for students who risk being profiled by the federal troops. To
her mind, remote learning also means ensuring that students have computers and
internet access, as well as getting groceries so they are well fed before they
try to learn in crisis conditions. “It’s not lost on me that our kids
who are most likely to need to stay home are also coming from some of our
families that are living in potentially some of the most precarious
situations,” she said.