Mother Jones illustration; Jen Golbeck/SOPA Images/Sipa/AP

Every few months, you likely notice something: people on Instagram calling for a general strike.

The posts will appear suddenly, evincing urgency but sparse in details. Their provenance is usually obscure. But the message is always clear. To resist Trump’s authoritarian agenda, Americans need to unite in a national economic blackout.

The cyclical nature of the posts can be frustrating, but the impulse is born from a hopeful place. General strikes have a rich history in the United States. A wave of citywide strikes in the 1940s proved so threatening to the prevailing order that Congress passed the Taft–Hartley Act, banning unions from striking in solidarity with workers at other companies. For the past few decades, the general strike has seemed more like the fanciful hope of the anarchist bookstore poster than a real possibility. Online, much the same has happened. Modern-day social media calls for mass strikes have rarely translated to collective action in the material world.

Then came Minneapolis.

On January 23, roughly 75,000 people flooded the streets on a workday, in sub-zero temperatures, demanding that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) leave Minnesota. Hundreds of businesses and cultural institutions in the Twin Cities closed their doors; one in four Minnesota voters either participated in the shutdown or knows a loved one who did, according to Blue Rose Research. A motley coalition led the charge: labor unions, racial justice groups, faith-based organizations.

“There is no one figurehead that’s going to save us from authoritarianism. What I’m seeing every day here is thousands of people finding the way to plug in and do what they can.”

The remarkable success of Minnesota’s “Day of Truth and Freedom,” as it was billed by organizers, inspired student groups at the University of Minnesota to call for another day of action. One week later, on January 30, tens of thousands of protesters across all 50 states took to the streets. Students held walkouts on high school and college campuses. Many businesses in major cities either closed for the day or committed to donating their proceeds to immigrant advocacy groups. More than 1,000 organizations signed on in support of the “national shutdown.” 

“We want to bring it to the national stage and see it happen all over the country,” Austin Muia, vice president of the University of Minnesota’s Black Student Union told my colleague, Nate Halverson. “We want everyone to feel that solidarity that we felt last week.”

While the day of action on the 30th was an impressive start, it ultimately manifested more like a mass protest. A general strike requires a substantial portion of workers, organized across multiple industries, to halt economic activity in pursuit of a shared goal.

The US economy largely functioned as usual. That means there’s still a lot of work to be done. 

But as Trump’s federal agents continue to occupy US cities—raiding workplaces, wrenching apart families, and shooting protesters dead in the street—the momentum for a national general strike is undeniably growing.

Last week, I spoke with five organizers involved in the Day of Truth and Freedom. We discussed the tactics they used to organize a labor stoppage in the Twin Cities and what strategies the rest of the country can employ to replicate Minnesota’s success. 

Here are six key takeaways from those conversations.

Labor unions were vital for executing the Day of Truth and Freedom. They mobilized thousands of people to stop work across sectors—both those in their unions and those who aren’t in them.

Devin Hogan, president of OPEIU Local........

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