general strike minnesota january 23
Those looking for a positive example of how to resist government violence need look no further right now than Minnesota. According to friends in Minneapolis, labor and political action and mutual aid groups are pulling together in a massive way to organize a real, material opposition to ICE and their cruelty. Everything is shutting down this Friday. No work, no school, no shopping. General strike.
However nervous you may feel right now, rest assured that ICE, and the billionaire-owned corporations that support them, and the political duopoly that created them and provides them with weapons, are many times moreso. No one is more acutely aware than they are that they’ve been methodically crafting the perfect conditions for a revolution.
The 1% and ruling class duopoly will do just about anything to prevent a revolution. I say “just about” because history has repeatedly shown that they typically stop short of actually improving the material conditions of the population. Why bother with that when they can simply give more money and weapons to ICE and the police? They can simply threaten you with extreme violence, and if you make the mistake of thinking that no threat that hideous could actually be in earnest, they start making good on it.
The ruling class are gamblers by trade, and their favorite, most exciting wager is that everyone on Earth will be too scared, too distracted, too overworked or too disorganized to do anything with their outrage other than roll their eyes and suffer. And maybe vote for their favorite serial killer once every four years. And certainly they take steps every day to try and make sure. But just in case something changes, they do have a backup plan: Spy on everyone with the enormous surveillance infrastructure that Big Tech has convinced everyone to buy, and develop and test systems of Big Tech-assisted mass murder.
If revolutionary activity were to break out, as in fact it does frequently but fitfully, the 1% and ruling class duopoly fervently hope it will include what they deem “violence” or “crime.” These vague but useful terms do not apply to anything they do of course, no matter that they use actual bullets and bombs to commit war crimes that actually kill large numbers of actual human beings. It however does apply, and severely, to someone who slows down car traffic, or breaks an insured window at Starbucks. That’s just the excuse they’ve been waiting for to begin their all-out militarized assaults.
Justice for Renee Good will hardly be achieved by focusing only on the individual man who pulled the trigger, who under the current system would simply be replaced by another man with another trigger. What this situation calls for is justice focused on the corporations that give material assistance to ICE terrorism, and on the lawmakers who gave him that gun and told him, “You may pull the trigger without consequences.”
There's not as much substantive or conceptual difference as it might seem between making the taxpayer fund ICE, making them fund the police, making them fund the military, making them fund foreign militaries committing genocide, and making them subsidize weapons billionaires. They all demonstrate “lethality,” they’re all terrific ways to test out new weapons systems on one population that can then be deployed upon others, and they all decrease the taxpayer’s chances of survival or happiness while increasing corporate profits.
What kind of person do you have to be to provide support or increase funding to ICE, knowing full well that ICE can and does and will kill with impunity? To provide support or increase funding to Israel, knowing full well that Israel is committing genocide? To provide weapons or increase funding to the US military, knowing full well their bodycount and their plans for more illegal invasions? I would describe such a person as a murderer. A mass murderer. A serial killer. Bringing a policy into being that you know will lead to mass death is just as much the premeditated kind as pulling the trigger yourself.
What kind of person do you have to be to continue to simultaneously prevent billionaires from paying taxes, while opting not to raise minimum wage, and thereby suppress everyone’s wages? To choose to allow energy companies and healthcare to be operated for the benefit of profiteers instead of public wellbeing, knowing that all of these policies are mathematically assured to cause the deaths of massive numbers of persons? To allow record homelessness and hunger in your own country? You would have to be a murderer.
What kind of person do you have to be to implement sanctions on poorer countries, in an attempt to make their populations so miserable and desperate from mass starvation or physical danger, that they will submit to any terms from the US ruling class, no matter how exploitative? A murderer. And this is exactly what that same ruling class is doing now in their own country. Sanctioning the USA, threatening them, crushing them with debt, trying to get them to bow down.
What we are seeing from our rulers, billionaires, and their media cheerleaders right now is of course not a genuine effort at the total deportation of immigrants, or anything close to it. That’s the sales pitch to gullible, racist recruits. This is an effort at suppressing independent thought and suppressing wages. Threaten low-paid workers, especially Black and Brown immigrants, with possible detainment, deportation or murder if they dare criticize the government, start a union, or organize a political group calling for justice, peace, or systemic change.
To hear our elected leaders and their media cheerleaders tell it, going unarmed into the vicinity of their militarized agents, whose salary one pays with one’s taxes, is a cowardly act, and any fool who does so deserves whatever grisly fate befalls them. According to such exalted arbiters, it’s the officers carrying rifles and killing with impunity that are brave, and who actually deserve our thanks, praises, and more of our money to get more training and bodycams. And of course bravest of all are the lawmakers themselves, making all those tough emotional choices, like allowing their constituents to be murdered in cold blood, while sitting in safety, comfort and affluence.
We’ve all watched enough TV to know that not everyone who "seems nice” is the genuine article. Think of the classic abuser or cult-leader archetype, and how often they come across as a friendly or charismatic savior at first. I recommend keeping this in mind when evaluating corporations, politicians, and other media personalities. I recommend adopting evidence-based criteria, such as whether they support genocide or ICE, rather than waiting to be won over by entertainment value or personal charm.
The argument that “yes, he or she may be pro-ICE and pro-genocide, but they have some other good policies” is no longer convincing to anyone but the most affluent and comfortable. If a politician or CEO has already demonstrated that they are comfortable committing murder, it doesn’t much matter how charismatic they are while they’re doing it. Someone capable of operating on the principle that Black, Brown or dissident lives have less value can no longer be trusted with life and death decisions.
Once you hear your voice telling your friends that they have no choice but to vote for or buy from this serial killer because they're not as bad as that serial killer, you know you’ve already lost the debate. And this losing strategy only mirrors and enables the nauseating internal dialogue of the killers themselves: “Maybe I can get away with committing mass murder, because my mass murder won't be as bad as theirs.”
I personally believe it’s possible to for a murderer, rapist, or torturer to reform themselves and re-earn the personal trust and forgiveness of their friends and family. But they should never again be allowed to hold public office, run a large company, or carry any other weapon. This is doubly true if the killing, raping or torturing they are doing is still underway.
Nothing about the ruling class’s current atrocious behavior is actually a surprise. Trump spelled this all out in some detail in his campaign platform. It follows in a hallowed tradition of American racism, violence, and capitalism. Laws, norms, and institutions governing state violence have been methodically and publicly pulverized by both parties, and by the billionaire class that profits from the resulting crimes.
Democrats claiming to be shocked right now are not fooling anybody. They understood the electoral stakes just as much as anyone else with access to a newspaper or website, and chose to run pro-ICE, pro-genocide, pro-billionaire, pro-lethality candidates anyway, in full knowledge that most Americans do not enjoy voting for monsters. Perhaps it’s unfair to say that Democrats don’t care about the electoral results. Individual Democrats probably do feel down in the dumps when they lose. They probably go for melancholy walks in the woods. But they well understand: not offending billionaire donors is the higher priority.
The price of running a political campaign in the U.S. has been deliberately inflated by corporate price-gouging, just like the price of concert tickets or groceries. It’s been forced so high by insane donations from the super-wealthy, trying to raise the bar of entry, wishing to permit only those politicians willing to do their bidding, or who are super-wealthy themselves.
While it’s true that our current political system has been carefully designed to prevent us from being able to simply vote ourselves out of this disaster, we don’t need to make our situation worse by legitimizing politicians like Harris, Newsom, Booker, Jeffries or Schumer, who are explicitly pro-ICE, pro-billionaire, or genocide deniers. We can support their progressive or independent or third party challengers instead. And we can stop doing business with ICE-supporting companies like Amazon, Palantir, Dell, UPS, FedEx, Motorola, Comcast, AT&T, Home Depot, and Target. We can support or take part in strikes, lawsuits, political action groups, and community aid groups.