The freezing streets of Minneapolis on February 13, 2026, witnessed a scene that would have made the old Bolsheviks weep with joy. Tens of thousands of workers, students, faith leaders, and community activists marched in sub‑10°F weather, refusing to work, attend school, or shop in a coordinated act of civil disobedience that echoed the historic general strikes of the early twentieth century. This was not merely a labor dispute—it was a political general strike against the very foundations of capitalist rule, a conscious attempt to keep ICE out of hospitals, schools, and workplaces.
The strike emerged from the fusion of labor and community struggle that has been developing across the United States. As the capitalist class, desperate to maintain its profits, increasingly turns to immigration enforcement as a tool of divide and rule, workers have begun to see through the charade. The strike organizers understood what the Marxist analysis of the state has always taught: the police and immigration agencies are not neutral instruments of law and order, but the armed wing of capital, deployed to protect private property and suppress the working class.
What makes this development particularly significant is its anti‑imperialist character. The strike against ICE represents the growing recognition among the American proletariat that their struggle cannot be separated from the fight against racism, colonialism, and state violence. The workers of Minneapolis understood that the same system that exploits them also uses immigration enforcement to terrorize immigrant communities, to drive down wages, and to maintain a climate of fear. By uniting in defense of immigrant rights, they demonstrated the revolutionary potential of the working class when it sees its interests as inseparable from those of the oppressed.
Trotsky would have recognized in this strike the embryonic form of the “workers’ government” that the Fourth International has always fought for. The fact that workers were willing to shut down entire cities, to confront the state with mass civil disobedience, shows that the American proletariat has begun to develop the political consciousness necessary to take power. The strike was not merely a defensive action—it was an offensive demonstration of working‑class power, a declaration that the working class can and will govern.
The capitalist press, predictably, has tried to portray the strike as a disruption caused by a few “radical agitators.” But the reality is that the strike grew from the grassroots, from the daily experiences of workers who see their families torn apart by deportation, who see their communities terrorized by immigration raids, who understand that the system that exploits them also seeks to destroy them. This is the essence of class consciousness: the recognition that one’s own liberation is bound up with the liberation of all oppressed people.
The strike also demonstrates the importance of revolutionary leadership. While the strike was spontaneous in its origins, its success depended on the ability of Marxist organizations to provide political direction, to connect the immediate demands of the workers to the broader struggle for socialism. The fact that the strike was able to maintain unity across different sectors of the working class—from healthcare workers to retail employees to students—shows the power of a clear, revolutionary program.
The Minneapolis strike is a warning to the capitalist class and a beacon to the working class. It shows that the era of passive, individualistic resistance is over—that the working class is ready to take direct action, to confront the state, and to build a new society. It shows that the struggle against ICE is not a side issue but a central component of the class struggle, that the fight for immigrant rights is inseparable from the fight for workers’ rights.
The capitalist class will respond with repression, with arrests, with attempts to divide the working class. But the strike has already demonstrated that the working class can and will resist. The question is no longer whether the working class will rise up, but whether it will be able to maintain its unity, to develop its political consciousness, and to build the revolutionary organizations necessary to seize power.
The Minneapolis strike of February 13, 2026, is a turning point in the class struggle. It shows that the American proletariat has begun to understand its historical mission: to overthrow capitalism, to establish workers’ democracy, and to build a socialist society in which the working class and its allies can finally determine their own destiny. The revolution is not yet complete, but the first steps have been taken. The working class has shown that it can and will fight—and that it will not rest until it has won.