The current cycle of protests in Minneapolis has been accompanied by a type of resistance that I call care activism. This is not just about assisting protestors on the frontline but also helping those who've been harmed or kidnapped by ICE. In this form, care activism is practiced by providing “rent, food, diapers, and animal support” for people whose lives have been disrupted by an ICE raid or who are scared to leave their homes. And many of these people are actually documented, as with the case of the 5-year-old boy, Liam Ramos, who, with his father, was taken into custody by ICE, despite the fact that both entered the country legally, and the parent had no criminal record.
Thanks to the Kavanaugh stop, you only need to be brown or have a funny accent to be detained by ICE. Protests are surely important during this time of trouble, but for those who are exposed to legalized racism, what matters most is care activism. And it seems the people of Minneapolis, and other cities, have, through self-organization, met this challenge as best as they can.
“Let Minnesota Fuel You”
Important message from Imani B.
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— Key (@keykeymonet.bsky.social) January 23, 2026 at 2:45 PM
But what made the spontaneous networks of care activism even possible? One explanation can be found if we understand the kind of modern city in which we live. This is no easy task. But we can begin with a line from a poetic novel, Bones, by the late and great Zimbabwean writer Chenjerai Hove: “If the city is so frightening as you say… why are so many people living there?” Let’s keep these words in mind as we turn to this passage from T.S. Eliot’s conservative play The Rock:
“When the Stranger says: ‘What is the meaning of this city?
Do you huddle close together because you love each other?'
What will you answer? ‘We all dwell together to make money from each other?' or ‘This is a community?'”
What Hove and Eliot capture is the paradox at the heart of the modern city. And by modern, I mean the kind of city that emerged in 17th-century Europe and, over the past four centuries, has become global. The cities of today are closely connected with the Amsterdam or London of that founding century, but are almost completely disconnected from those of antiquity: Rome, Alexandria, Timbuktu, and so on.
What connects all modern urban centers is their very nature. The pomerium, the sacred boundary of the ancient city, has been replaced by the market. Modernity is primarily about making money (industrial production, finance, consumer consumption). True, the market found a home in premodern cities, but rarely was it central to the life of the polis. Aristotle, for example, only devotes one chapter in the 500 pages of his book Politics to oikonomia (household management) and barely a page to what he contemptuously calls chrematistics, the unnatural massing of wealth. A modern examination of the polis would look mad if it excluded or made little mention of chrematistics, because that is what a modern city mainly does. To answer T.S. Eliot, that’s precisely why we come together. To make money. Don’t doubt it for even a minute. But there turns out to be another and maybe even deeper side to the modern metropolis. Markets are only possible because we are highly, even spectacularly, social animals. Remove this innate capacity to cooperate at very large scales and often with strangers, and we are no better than Hobbesian wolves. This is the great paradox of the modern city: an economic system that prioritizes individuals (the bellum omnium contra omnes of capitalism) and yet depends on human sociality, or species-being, for its realization and reproduction.
Now for a little theory. In socialist economics, there are two key concepts: contradictions and paradoxes. The former is associated with traditional Marxism, the latter with post-Keynesianism. To better understand a city that’s at once about community and generating profits, we need to abandon the concept of contradictions. It is too strict, teleological, and Hegelian. Meaning, contradictions are dialectic: thesis (what dominates), antithesis (what opposes what dominates), and synthesis (the resolution of the antagonism). Paradoxes, on the other hand, are not as tight or predictable as contradictions. For example, in post-Keynesian economics, there’s what’s called the paradox of thrift. This concept explains the fact that saving or hoarding money actually hurts capitalist accumulation on a macro level. The system’s performance is improved by circulating money, and hampered when large amounts of it are parked in bank accounts. And yet, capitalist ideology praises misers and even frugality to the high heavens.
The modern city is a paradox in this sense. The top ten metropolitan areas, including Seattle’s, generate an astonishing 90 percent of the US GDP, and 88 percent of its employment. The modern economy would collapse without them. Without this kind of economic power, you don’t have an Idaho, or a Wyoming, or a Montana. You don’t have a billionaire class. Yet cities are now under violent attack from the GOP, the party that represents the ruling class, because they’re too blue, because they have policies that are supposed to protect the rights of immigrants, and so on. Yet ICE has only one mission: make the lives of city people miserable. This is the paradox of all American paradoxes and it has seemingly backfired.
ICE is now facing resistance from the deeper city, from the community, from networks of care, from nurses, one of whom it killed. Adam Serwer of the the Atlantic writes:
“The federal surge into Minneapolis reflects a series of mistaken MAGA assumptions. The first is the belief that diverse communities aren’t possible. … ‘Social bonds form among people who have something in common,’ Vance said in a speech last July. ‘If you stop importing millions of foreigners into the country, you allow social cohesion to form naturally.’ Vance’s remarks are the antithesis to the neighborism of the Twin Cities. … A second MAGA assumption is that the left is insincere in its values, and that principles of inclusion and unity are superficial forms of virtue signaling.”
What ICE has done is actually strengthen, rather weaken, the bonds between urban dwellers. Indeed, the social meaning of the city, which, as Serwer points out, is still massively underrepresented in state and national politics, has become more pronounced. This is not to say modern cities are perfect. We have a heap of racial, housing, and gender issues to work through. But many of these problems come from the market of the modern city. What we are seeing now (in Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland, Minneapolis), and what must continue, even with the firing of Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino after the broad-daylight execution of Alex Pretti, is the movement toward the stabilization of urban fellow feeling and, eventually, its expansion into state and national politics. The Dems, in a word, are failing our cities. Now is the time to change that.