Brentwood High School students walk out against ICE, Brentwood, Tennessee, Feb. 4, 2026. Photo: Mark Zaleski/The Tennessean.
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.
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 system
Because 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 war
We 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 strike
There 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.
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.
