THE BURNING HOUR
A Journal of Crisis & Possibility
conversations with claude
VOLUME 1 • ISSUE 1 • JANUARY 2026
A JOURNAL OF CRISIS & POSSIBILITY
THE FIRST STRIKE IN EIGHTY YEARS
How Minneapolis Remembered What We Forgot
On January 23rd, 2026, in temperatures that reached negative thirty degrees with windchill, over one hundred thousand people took to the streets of Minneapolis. Seven hundred businesses closed their doors. The Walker Art Center went dark. The Guthrie Theater. Seven First Avenue music venues. Starbucks workers walked out on unfair labor practice strikes. Graduate students maneuvered around university warnings. An English teacher named John Reuss spoke into a microphone: “If we do not shut it down right now, your city is next.”
It was the first general strike in the United States in eighty years.
Let that settle. Eighty years. The last one was the Teamsters action in 1934—also in Minneapolis, as it happens, a city that keeps teaching the rest of us what we’ve forgotten we knew.
The immediate trigger was the killing of Renée Good on January 7th. A thirty-seven-year-old poet, mother of three, queer, beloved. She was sitting in her car when ICE agent Jonathan Ross walked around the vehicle, and then walked back, and then other agents approached, and then one reached through her window, and then she moved her car, and then Ross fired three shots into her.
The video exists. You can watch a person become a symbol in real time.
But the strike didn’t emerge from nothing. The networks that organized it in sixteen days were built over years—some dating back to the uprising after George Floyd’s murder in 2020, some older, rooted in labor halls and church basements and immigrant mutual aid societies that never stopped meeting.
This is the lesson Minneapolis is teaching: the capacity for general strike doesn’t materialize from outrage alone. It requires relationships dense enough to coordinate action across sectors—faith leaders and nurses, teachers and brewers, graduate students and airport workers. It requires practice. It requires the institutional memory of how it’s done, even if that memory has been suppressed for eight decades.
The CEOs noticed. Sixty of them—from Target, 3M, Mayo Clinic, U.S. Bancorp, General Mills—issued a letter calling for “de-escalation of tensions.” They didn’t demand ICE leave. They didn’t side with the strikers. But they noticed. Capital always notices when labor remembers its power.
On January 24th, the day after the strike, federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti. He was an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA hospital. Thirty-seven years old, like Good. He was trying to shield a woman who had been pepper-sprayed. Video shows him holding a phone when they tackled him. Video shows his gun had already been removed by officers when two agents fired.
The next strike is tomorrow.
WHAT WE DIDN’T DO
FOR GAZA
A Counterfactual for the Haunted
I keep returning to a question I cannot answer comfortably. If this kind of mobilization—general strikes, economic shutdowns, businesses closing in solidarity, museums going dark, labor federations endorsing work stoppages, the whole apparatus of collective refusal—had been deployed for Gaza with this intensity and coordination, could we have stopped what we are now facing?
This is not a question about whether people tried. They did. The encampments. The marches. The labor resolutions. The symbolic actions that cost jobs and relationships and sometimes freedom.
But it did not reach general strike threshold. It did not shut down cities. It did not make CEOs issue nervous letters about de-escalation. It did not spread from one state to three hundred cities in a week.
Some deaths catalyze. Others accumulate. Forty thousand dead in Gaza accumulated. Two dead in Minneapolis catalyzed.
Why not?
The comfortable answer is structural: proximity, direct threat, the galvanizing power of a killing on video in your own neighborhood versus killing at a distance, mediated and deniable. People respond more readily when the violence is coming for them and theirs.
The uncomfortable answer is that we are implicated in hierarchies of grievability we don’t always acknowledge. Some deaths catalyze. Others accumulate. Forty thousand dead in Gaza accumulated. Two dead in Minneapolis catalyzed.
I am not interested in assigning blame. I am interested in asking whether the infrastructure being built now—the relationships, the coordination, the rediscovery of the general strike as a tool—can become something that doesn’t require the violence to come home before it activates.
The connections are not metaphorical. They are contractual. They have names and addresses and shareholder reports.
The Palestinian Youth Movement has endorsed the National Shutdown. This is meaningful. But endorsement is not the same as the practice of mutual defense, where each movement shows up for the other’s fights as a matter of course, where the analysis connects the struggles not just morally but materially.
- Who profits from border militarization?
- Who profits from arms shipments to Israel?
- Who builds the surveillance systems used by ICE and exported to occupation forces?
- Who runs the private detention facilities and the private prisons?
If this moment is going to mean something beyond this moment, the solidarity cannot remain symbolic. The movements that are discovering their power in Minneapolis must become the movements that deploy that power for struggles beyond their immediate survival.
Otherwise, we will win this fight, or lose it, and the next Gaza will accumulate its dead while we wait for the violence to come home again.
A Dispatch from the Spreading Fire
As I write this, it is the night before the National Shutdown. Tomorrow, January 30th, 2026, solidarity actions are planned in at least three hundred cities across the United States. The call is simple: no work, no school, no shopping.
The endorsement list runs to hundreds of organizations. CodePink. The Council on American-Islamic Relations. The North Carolina Poor People’s Campaign. The North Texas Area Labor Federation. The LA Tenants Union. The Palestinian Youth Movement. Student groups at Minnesota, Harvard, MIT. Churches. Labor councils. Art collectives.
The celebrities are not the point. The celebrities are never the point. The point is the coffee shop owner who wrote that “closing up shop for a day hurts, but this is our mere offering to show support.”
The point is the deli giving paid time off. The point is the climbing gym that lost a cleaner to deportation and responded not with grief alone but with action.
What I’m tracking is the emergence of a practice.
A general strike once every eighty years is a miracle. A general strike as a known tool—something people have done, something people can imagine doing again—is a capacity.
Minneapolis is teaching. Tomorrow we find out how many of us are learning.
The fire is spreading
Will you carry it?
ON DURABLE MUTUAL DEFENSE
Notes Toward a Practice
What makes movements dissipate is well understood. Single-issue framing that cannot name the connections between struggles. Dependence on crisis energy without underlying structure. Leadership captured by NGOs and electoral campaigns. No material stakes beyond attendance. Relationships that exist only at protests and dissolve between them. Victories that cannot be felt. Exhaustion without rest.
What makes mutual defense durable is less often discussed, because durability is not dramatic. It is not the general strike. It is what happens between general strikes that determines whether the next one is possible.
Material Interdependence
The businesses closing tomorrow are experiencing something. Lost revenue, yes. But also the discovery that they can survive it, that their neighbors did it too, that the isolation of the market is not total.
That experience must become structure. Can those networks become buying cooperatives? Mutual aid funds? Strike funds? Bail funds?
Symbolic solidarity evaporates. Material interdependence endures.
Relationship Density Before Crisis
The Zapatistas do not build compañero relationships during emergencies. They build them continuously, so that when emergency comes, the relationships are already load-bearing.
The fact that Minneapolis could coordinate a general strike in sixteen days means the trust networks already existed.
This is the slow work. It is unglamorous. It does not trend. It is the only thing that matters.
Practice at Smaller Scales
Capacity is built through practice. What are the smaller actions that build the muscle?
A solidarity strike for a single workplace. An economic boycott with a clear target. A shutdown that is not national but local and winnable.
Each action teaches logistics. Each action builds trust. Each action reveals who shows up.
Dual Power
The Zapatistas are not primarily an anti-NAFTA movement. They built autonomous governance, education, health systems. They became what they needed rather than waiting for the state to provide it.
During Operation Metro Surge, the church Dios Habla Hoy delivered twelve thousand boxes of food to families in hiding. That is dual power.
Can strike infrastructure become mutual aid infrastructure that operates continuously?
Cross-Issue Solidarity as Practice
Endorsement is not solidarity. Solidarity is showing up for each other’s fights as a matter of course, not as a favor to be negotiated.
This requires shared analysis: how are the struggles connected?
This requires shared enemies: who profits from all of it?
This requires shared practice: did you show up for my fight? Did I show up for yours?
Demands at Multiple Timescales
“ICE out of Minnesota” is immediate. It can be won or lost. It builds morale or breaks it.
“Abolish ICE” is medium-term. It gives direction.
“End the border regime” names the horizon.
Movements need all three. Without immediate wins, people burn out. Without the longer horizon, wins get absorbed and the movement demobilizes.
Energy flows toward professionalization. Toward 501(c)(3) status. Toward foundation funding. Toward staff and budgets and strategic plans. Toward respectability.
This is how movements die while appearing to succeed.
The decentralized nature of the National Shutdown—emerging from Indivisible chapters, student unions, informal networks without central command—is protective. The question is whether it stays that way.
None of this is a guarantee. Durable mutual defense is not an outcome but a practice. It must be renewed continuously. It will fail often. The only certainty is that without it, the isolation returns, the energy dissipates, and we wait for the next crisis to remember what we keep forgetting.
The fire in Minneapolis is teaching. Whether we learn is not yet determined.
WHAT SAN DIEGO MUST BECOME
Notes from the Border
I write this from a city that sits on a line someone drew to make some people legal and others not. A city where the wall is always being built. Where the desert takes the bodies of those the policy intended to kill. Where the asylum system processes trauma into data and then closes the door.
The fire in Minneapolis feels both close and far. Close because the same agencies operate here—ICE, CBP, the whole apparatus. Far because San Diego has not yet remembered how to strike.
But Minneapolis was not always Minneapolis. Before January 7th, it was another city waiting for its own capacity. The capacity was there, latent, built over years in labor halls and church basements. It required a catalyst to become visible.
San Diego has its own latent networks. Border justice organizations. Solidarity collectives. Labor unions. Tenant organizations. Artists and musicians who have not yet been asked to close their venues in solidarity but might, if asked. Churches that shelter. Lawyers who file. Witnesses who document.
The question is whether these networks are in relationship or merely adjacent.
What would it mean to build, here, the kind of density that Minneapolis has?
I think about the spaces we have. Warehouses and studios. Radio infrastructure. Documentary archives. Academic programs where students study disaster and humanitarian response. All of it potentially connective tissue. None of it automatically so.
The work is not to wait for our own killing—though it may come, has come, will come again; the desert is full of the evidence. The work is to build now, in the pause, the relationships that can bear weight when the weight comes.
- Regular convenings across movements, not just coalitional statements
- Shared analysis sessions: who profits from what we each oppose?
- Practice actions at local scale
- Mutual aid that doesn’t wait for crisis
- Documentation as historical memory, so we remember what we did and can do it again
Tomorrow is the National Shutdown. What San Diego does tomorrow I do not yet know. But I know what San Diego must become:
A city where the general strike is not a miracle but a tool. Where the networks exist before the emergency names them. Where the movements show up for each other without negotiation. Where the border is not a line that divides us from struggle elsewhere but a site where struggles converge.
The fire is spreading. What we do with it here is not yet written.
— End of Issue One —
COLOPHON
THE BURNING HOUR is published irregularly, when conditions require it. This issue was assembled on the night of January 29th, 2026, in anticipation of what comes next.
No copyright is asserted. Reproduce freely. The point is circulation.
“IF WE DO NOT SHUT IT DOWN RIGHT NOW, YOUR CITY IS NEXT.”