propositions press

recalling legitimacy

While the rest of the American left was out on May Day celebrating, trying to make something happen, or block business as usual, Occupy Madison marked the day by quietly closing down the encampment they’d held for months. The fact that this development meant practically nothing to the Wisconsin movement says volumes about the different political space traveled by the Wisconsin Uprising at this moment, compared to the national Occupy movement. It is not Occupy that is on the mind of Wisconsinites, but rather the upcoming Wisconsin recall election targeting governor Scott Walker and several others.

The election, set for June 5, 2012, only about six weeks from now, was forced by overwhelming petition. Before then, the Democratic and Republican candidates will be winnowed down to one nominee from each party by a primary election set for May 8, barely one week from now. May Day it is not. But unlike the May Day protests, actions, symbolism, and demonstrations—whose sound and fury, let’s face it, are pretty easily tuned out by the mainstream (and not just media, but actual people)—the consequences of this election will be felt concretely by everyone in Wisconsin, activist or not, and for way longer than the news cycle of a single day. Hundreds of thousands in Wisconsin—probably even millions—will feel the effects of this election directly in the measurable forms of a reduced paycheck, a lost job, a health problem that leads to financial ruin, an unmanageable classroom, and twenty other big things. Furthermore, the consequences will ripple out nationally, either to draw a line on austerity attacks or to green light the regressive austerity agenda.

It has been said by Emma Goldman, Lucy Parsons, and countless radicals that if elections mattered, they would be made illegal. Well, through their various voter suppression efforts, the Wisconsin GOP has been trying to do exactly that—make voting difficult and legally restricted. This election matters and they know it. But the movement grassroots has not grasped yet the meaning of the election. We must discuss this, if the movement is to have any hope of effectively continuing beyond the advertised finality of the recall election. This is my attempt to think through how the movement needs to interpret the election if the Uprising is to remain relevant, powerful, and strategically ready on the morning of June 6, no matter who wins or loses.

*

Wisconsin has an open primary, meaning anybody of any party affiliation or non-affiliation can vote for any of the candidates. Conservatives can vote for a Democratic candidate and progressives can vote for a Republican. An open primary removes the exclusivity of an official party-identified electorate, which is good. At the same time, the open primary assures an element of cynicism through tactical voting and bad-faith candidacies. 

For example, right now the Republicans are running several candidates in Democratic primaries without a shred of pretense that they are anything other than electoral hurdles and tactical disruptions. In the case of some or maybe even all of the “fake” Democrats, there is hardly anything dishonest about them. For example, the Senate Majority Leader of the Wisconsin state senate is Scott Fitzgerald, and he is facing a recall election of his own (also June 5). In order to force the Democratic challenger, Lori Compas, into spending resources on a primary election, regressive Republican activist Gary Ellerman is running as a Democrat. If it weren’t for him, Compas would not have to compete in a primary at all. This helps Fitzgerald by taking the fight to the Democratic primary election, which, if enough Republicans vote in it, theoretically could be won by Ellerman. Then he simply runs a concessionary campaign for the recall election and hands a victory to his buddy Fitzgerald. So Compas must win the primary.

This tactic was used back in the summer of 2011 against some of the Democratic state senators facing recall. It has not been actually successful, not to the point of undermining a good-faith candidate. Not yet. But this time the Republicans are trying harder, and I heard some rumor about Tea Partiers pledging to vote in the Democratic primaries.

The tricky part comes with the rule that however one chooses to vote in the primary, a voter only gets one vote. So if conservatives spend their vote on a bad-faith Democrat, then they leave the Republican side open for progressive voters to do the same thing to them. Democrats, unsurprisingly, are not aggressively taking the opportunity to generate havoc for the Republicans by running bad-faith candidates, somehow being content to leave the Republican candidate unchallenged while they sort out their own. As usual we can chalk up the Democrats’ timidity to a cowardice masquerading as integrity—a lack of fighting spirit that essentially has become the national Democratic brand, from Obama on down.

But here again, an opportunity opens up. Arthur Kohl-Riggs, a young activist with no Democratic Party connection, recognized the gap and filled it by running in the Republican gubernatorial primary as—and get this—not a “fake” Republican, but as a good-faith Lincoln Republican, a LaFollette Republican, which is a posture that carries inescapably more than a whiff of irony, if not exactly bad-faith. Kohl-Riggs is recognized by many in the uprising circles as a regular at Capitol demonstrations and for his social media activism, so it is clear to all that he is certainly not of the contemporary Republicans. But he is playing it straight, pounding the argument that he is, in fact, the true conservative, that Scott Walker is a traitor to the grand Lincoln tradition of integrity, justice, and leadership, and that true conservatives will consider voting for him.

That Kohl-Riggs got himself on the primary ballot means that however secure Walker and the Republicans feel, a signal has been sent. The mantle of the LaFollette tradition—such a Wisconsin thing—could be picked up yet in the future by some enterprising and substantive candidate who speaks the language of Colbert irony, and who potentially could bring a measure of chaos into the Republican side, and do it without any Democratic Party involvement whatsoever.  Could there really be an insurgent force of ironic conservatism brewing somewhere that could invade the Wisconsin GOP? Not if the GOP can help it, of course. See how they’ve shut down the principled libertarian candidate, Ron Paul, for years. If Kohl-Riggs dedicates himself to his idea, I for one would not discount the possibility of some youth-driven movement to reclaim conservatism eventually gaining visibility. It might be marginal to the party mainstream, but again like Ron Paul, it would bring into play many new people. Kohl-Riggs is only 23. If he decides to become a politician (as opposed to the citizen-running-for-office that he is now), to perform that act, follow that career, and dedicate himself to the craft of becoming an image, then who is to say where will he be in fifteen years.

Let’s parse out the present situation.

Scott Walker, the incumbent Republican governor, faces a primary challenge from Arthur Kohl-Riggs.

Democrats Kathleen Falk, Kathleen Vinehout, Tom Barrett, and Doug LaFollette are running against each other in the primary. Gladys Huber, a known Republican, is running as a bad-faith Democratic candidate.

Voters get one vote, and it goes to only one of the above seven candidates—the vote will be spent on either a Democrat or a Republican, not both. Say a sizable bloc of progressives decide to vote for Kohl-Riggs. Maybe a previously non-voting bloc comes out of the woodwork, attracted by the Kohl-Riggs novelty. Whatever the case, the vote total for Kohl-Riggs is sure to be small. But in a tight Democratic primary, those votes (or rather, the consequent non-votes for the Democrats) will make a difference. Where might those non-votes leave Falk, given that, presumably, many of those people would have voted for her over Barrett? Then again, a prediction based on ideological correspondence perhaps would have many of Kohl-Riggs’ crossover voters going for the outsider-ish progressives,Vinehout or LaFollette.

Similarly, conservatives who might otherwise have voted for Huber just to mess with the Democrats might feel some pressure to spend their vote on the Republican side for Walker because of Kohl-Riggs. If he were to attract even a five-digit vote total, Kohl-Riggs, the future/throwback candidate, might garner more media attention embarassing to Walker, and therefore (though we know that Walker himself plays the unflappable zombie to inhuman perfection) further damage the Republican brand. I can imagine conservative activists thinking it more important to put on a display of overwhelming support for Walker than throw vote wrenches into the Democrats’ race by marking the arrow for Huber.

* 

As in an epic sporting contest in which the bad breaks, bad calls, and bad bounces on both sides cancel each other out, perhaps the tactical manuveurs will ricochet through all corners of the contest, leaving no perceptible effect. Or, maybe it is all even until the very end, leaving a final surprise to stand as the defining controversy that shifts a race this way or that. Of course, unlike in sports, political candidates feel no special obligation to respect the rules. They bend or challenge them all along the way. And that, of course, only guarantees the expansion of cynical tendencies in two directions—ie, that platoons of lawyers searching for technicalities end up deciding the contest for the parties while ordinary voters throw up their hands and wonder, why did we even bother doing this?

My armchair dissection may not clarify the elections themselves, and likely further confuses one’s predictions. But the very futility of sorting through the permutations and possible outcomes of tactical versus naïve voting makes apparent the larger but hardly abstract problem of legitimacy as it relates to elections in general, and to this election in particular. Because of the unavoidable cynicism and calculation inherent in voting, there can be no moral legitimacy gained or lost in an election victory, period. The Wisconsin movement must be very clear about this. No matter who wins or loses, we will not accept the victory as the final stamp of legitimacy—any outcome is in essence illegitimate on the level of values. An election is a non-violent contest for control over the state’s levers of coercion—and that is all it is. This is a crucial statement to broadcast because should he win, whether it be fairly or by theft, Scott Walker will wear the victory on his sleeve, using its aura of legitimacy as a bludgeon. Make no mistake, Walker and his GOP cabal have a second, more horrible act of legislative aggression at the ready, to be unveiled just as soon as he beats back the recall. To the good people of Wisconsin: be prepared to fight a governor unafraid to rule by emergency executive decree—and everyday forward, he will remind everyone that this is what the voters decided. Such will be the emboldened Scott Walker we will face after his victory. 

Thus, it goes without saying that we must defeat Walker in June. This is no small task given that Walker will have amassed a war chest that guarantees dominance of television and radio advertising, and has the support of any number of third party groups, flush with cash and a willingness to lie. 

But should this much-desired defeat come to pass, whoever the Democrat is will have earned no legitimacy on a values level. The movement grassroots must view and treat the new governor as distrustfully as any other ambitious, ego-driven careerist politician all too capable of selling out the public interest once in office (which is, of course, a specialty of the Democrats). The values of the movement will only be expressed by the elected leadership if the movement remains large, vital, visible, and beyond the reach of both union and Democratic Party control—or, in other words, dangerous, hydra-headed, and untamed. How to be that movement and yet engage in the most difficult and momentous electoral contest most of us will have ever seen is the paradox within which the Uprising now exists. Let us embrace it. 

*

My last thought concerns the mentality and commitment of a winning movement. The last and perhaps most meaningful victory gained in the Wisconsin movement was the successful blockage of new mining up north—a key item on GOP’s corporate agenda. (For those interested in the story, Rebecca Kemble’s reporting for the Progressive is a great place to start.) The victory was gained at the Capitol through a state senate vote, but was won over a translocal theater of activism and coalition-building, binding together numerous groups and constituencies across different parts of the state. Of complementary significance was the willingness and even resignation among coalition members regarding the likelihood of having to fight an eventual ground war up north, pitting our bodies against their machines. Without this coalition, led by the native peoples of the Bad River Band Chippewa, the victory could not have been won. Without the latent militancy, spiritual dedication, and specter of nihilism belonging to a people who recognize a battle for survival when they see it, the victory could not have been won. Without the ability to simultaneously: lobby legislators politely and agitate on the streets angrily; collect independent, scientifically-sound research and launch barbs of wit and ridicule at GOP targets; pack the assembly hearings in person and disseminate information through social media, the victory could not have been won.

The lesson is clear. Prepare for the worst. Work for the best. Make our appeals to the hearts and minds of the unconvinced while standing firm at a threshold of ultimate defense. And deal with whatever comes.

 

 

wi uprising @ year one

It was one year ago that the outward ripples of the Tunisian uprising were felt across borders and through unlikely differences in context. One of those places that saw a righteous outrage directed at a local tyrant in early 2011 was Madison, Wisconsin. Beginning on the day Mubarak fell, Wisconsinites opened their Friday after work routine with the surprise announcement that Scott Walker's so-called budget repair bill, set for a vote early the next week, would end the collective bargaining rights of the state's public sector union. As citizens read the fine print, they found that the bill contained other controversial measures, as well, such as a provision to sell off some publicly owned energy facilities on a no-bid basis. A variety of constituencies found reason to mobilize.

Thanks to the grassroots info-activism of individual citizens from all quarters of the state, the rapid circulation of information through social media, and the prevailing global mood of ya basta (and in this sense, Madison has long been a very global town), within a matter of hours our governor crossed the all-important line of perception, going from harmless amateur to despotic, venal, and dangerous egomaniac. Then, as Walker dug in his heels, the movement to criticize, resist, and now to oust him, gained traction through months and months of renewed outrages committed by him and his Republican lieutenants. Right up to, literally, this very moment. As I type this post, the Republican-controlled Assembly are preparing to ram through yet another of their controversial, poorly-written bills. This one would effectively gut Wisconsin's regulatory apparatus that has successfully conserved wetlands across the state, giving in wholesale to the well-financed interests of irresponsible short term wealth-generating development. It would also have the effect of heaping additional unworkable duties on the DNR, setting that agency up for failure. This is a prime example of T.C. Frank's wrecking crew in action. 

So at the one-year mark, what does it look like going forward? The many subplots and numerous controversies of the last six months have recently been reduced to three main storylines, each with its own actors, antagonisms, and possible outcomes. Now fully developed as political narratives, how they play out from this point will shape the contours of the Wisconsin movement for at least the first half of 2012 and possibly the second. The three stories are 1) the massive grassroots recall effort and election, 2) the battle over new mining up north, and 3) the ongoing FBI John Doe investigation into illegal activities in Scott Walker’s office when he was Milwaukee County Executive and running for governor in 2010. 

The overwhelming enthusiasm of the petition-phase of the recall campaign shocked even the optimists. Gathering over a million signatures means that two of every five would have to be invalidated, an insanely unrealistic prospect, thereby crushing the Republicans' first defense. As well, in absolute numbers, the total comes very close to the 1.2 million votes that Walker received in 2010, indicating how widespread the disapproval really is. Most importantly, given the grassroots nature of the recall effort, this contest is being written as a David vs Goliath story, and therefore a possible turning point in electoral strategy beyond this one election. The David (the WI movement, leading the Democrats and not the other way around) and Goliath (Walker, Koch, ALEC, WMC, money, money, money) story, helped along by citizen reporting on the forces organizing behind Walker, has opened this struggle to a possible outcome in keeping with the idealism that has fueled the movement thus far. If the movement capitulates to the conservative tendencies that are already emanating from within the Democratic Party and union leadership, it will have been another opportunity lost.   

Up north, anticipating what would be in effect a ground invasion, the tribes and their allies are ready to defend their lands, through the courts, and physically if necessary, in the hills. There are successful treaty rights and environmental defense campaigns within the recent memory of a great many Wisconsin activists; organizers are confident in their abilities to form strong native/settler, urban/rural coalitions and use all tactics, from lobbying and media work to civil disobedience and direct action. The state’s strong environmental constituencies (remember, Wisconsin is the state of Aldo Leopold and Gaylord Nelson) are already on the same page in opposing the proposed new mining, and the strict regulatory regime that ranks Wisconsin one of the states least friendly to mining is a legacy of the victorious grassroots-led anti-mining/land preservation struggles that happened fifteen years ago around the proposed Crandon mine. Are the Republicans really anxious to go to the ground in the face of people who are willing to sacrifice their own lives before seeing the ruin of their land and culture? Are they that foolish? Yes, they are. When the invasion begins and the struggle takes a turn toward the dramatic, if the movement articulates its moral, scientific, and economic positions wisely, the chances are good that in one way or another Scott Walker's image and reputation will take another lasting hit. With any luck it would be politically fatal, career-wise.

And, finally, the drip-drip-drip criminal investigation that has placed a chokehold around Walker's inner circle raises the possibility that the other dogs are willing to cut him loose to save their own future ambitions (remember, Paul Ryan and Reince Priebus have their own delusional plans). Walker has retained a legal team, now that the John Doe investigation has the feds breathing down his neck, and I'm sure even his corporate backers are beginning to formulate their own Plan B. As far as I can tell no arm of the WI movement has a contingency plan should Walker be indicted before a recall election is scheduled, even though at this point it seems like a real possibility. I am not even sure what happens. Is he removed from office? Does an indictment trigger any sort of impeachment process? Or will the state's Republican cabal of the Fitzgeralds, JB Van Hollen, and the David Prosser state supreme court work to protect him? Our theocratic lieutenant governor Rebecca Kleefisch is also the target of the recall campaign, and will likely stand for early election along with Walker. But could there be a situation in which she assumes the office of governor and thereby invalidates her recall? Given the tangled plots and unprecedented nature of this whole thing, the legal minutiae yet to be wrangled over cannot be underestimated. How we, as the grassroots engine of the movement, write this narrative is the question. Above all, we must continue to find ways to keep the stories open enough–through both well-timed political offensives and the attendant shaping of the mediated narrative–for a possible outcome that definitively reduces the present and future power of the regressive forces. 

Though a wooden performer in public, we know that through it all Walker's been shaken. He has attempted to spin himself a softer image in recent weeks, miserably, baldly dishonestly, and unsuccessfully. (Playing the compassionate card is not his forte; neither is being honest). But the tone deaf narcissists our careerist political system produces–and Walker is precisely such a product–never really comprehend the message, even if they sense an external threat. Scott Walker is an embodied example of what Debord wrote more than a generation ago: the spectacle is incapable of thinking strategically. And we knew this as early on, when he made a calculated move to play the role of Dairyland Dictator on the very day that Egypt's Mubarak ended his career with a literal escape for his life. Can you say political blind spot?

Blundering his way through, with all the resources that large amounts of cash can buy him, but with none of the kind that don't come with a price tag, Scott Walker now faces a crisis every which way he turns, each one of his own making. Whether Walker realizes it or not, he can never go back. Apart from the hardcore ideologues, his support has evaporated, even as his people lamely manage his deteriorating image and reputation, as exemplified by this sorry effort at staging, and then spinning, a pro-Walker event. It is safe to say Walker's done. Only the ending has yet to be written.

The relevant sign you'll see in this video, shot earlier today at the tail end of the noontime rally (after most of the people left, and before the larger afternoon rally that happened later), is the one held up by the firefighter, first at 3:36 and then at 7:18 with interaction.

    

And one year ago? Let's remind ourselves of what the mood was. Anxiety, disbelief, and a vague hopefulness in a movement yet to fully blossom, tempered by the depressive expectations of a collective lifetime of cynicism. The video below is from noon on Tuesday, February 15, 2011: the occupation of the Capitol began about fourteen hours after it was recorded. Massive demonstrations went on for weeks afterward, generating a whole culture of activism, resistance, and grassroots leadership. John Nichols' review of notable actors and events is only the very tip of the iceberg.

The movement continues, with arrests of activists being tweeted from the Capitol as I compose this, and the disgraceful dead-of-night passage of the wetlands destruction bill as I edit. 

 

 

 

 

psychedelic recall

“What’s going on in this country, it’s fascism, simple as that.”

The stranger who spoke those words to me had not attended and did not even know about the Saturday noontime rally on Capitol Square, at which there was an estimated crowd of 40,000 celebrating the recently launched campaign to recall Wisconsin governor Scott Walker. On the square the spirits were high, and the consciousness evident. This was the massive and genuinely popular Wisconsin movement, again visibly churning to life. But the critical pronouncment above came neither from the rally stage nor from any of the scores of petition-gathering volunteers, nor from a protest sign. It came later that evening, from the mouth of the guy in his early 50s sitting next to me at the Furthur show.

“The people are distracted by this bullshit corporate media, which is all lies and pure bullshit. What’s that show, Three Men and a Half, or some shit. Fuckin’ bullshit. And in the meantime the rich are putting up a police state, and nobody fuckin’ notices. They’re defunding schools, keeping people stupid. It’s fascism!”

This man was pissed, possibly in despair, but clear-sighted. When I asked him what he did for a living, he admitted embarrassment and then proceeded to tell me all about the new gold rush of the Bakken oil fields of North Dakota, where he has been working as a contractor for six months at a time. He was embarrassed because, as he put it, “It’s a goddam free for all out there, 4 billion barrels of recoverable oil, maybe more, with no consideration for any kind of environmental responsibility. And it’s insulated. You don’t see any big oil company that you’d recognize. Only Halliburton, and a lot of companies like Halliburton that nobody’s every heard of. It’s fucked up. I hate it.”

And right then the band went into Throwing Stones.

Picture a bright blue ball, just spinning, spinnin free,
Dizzy with eternity.
Paint it with a skin of sky,
Brush in some clouds and sea,
Call it home for you and me.

This encounter did not happen at a political rally. Or did it? I spent $110 on two Furthur shows this weekend, outside Chicago and in Madison. Very un-critical art of me. Not radical.

It was great.

Not because the boys opened the party with a raging Sugar Magnolia and Chimenti wailed the keys on a tightly shuffling Stagger Lee in Friday’s first set, or because they hit the euphoric passages of The Eleven and St. Stephen with full, thunderous volume in the second set. And not because they offered up favorite cover Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues in Saturday night’s first set, or because the band pummeled Viola Lee Blues and Bobby crushed the vocals on Death Don’t Have No Mercy in the second set.

Those are some of the reasons the shows were excellent for Deadheads, something I most certainly am. But these nights were not merely about Dead fandom. They were about an old counterculture meeting a new moment of economic and cultural upheavel.

The thoughts that came to me during the shows had to do with if and how those nights connected with the times of the heterogenous psychedelic counterculture before “Deadhead” gained meaning as a defined subcultural identity, and which had emerged visibly already by the early and mid-70s. Having come into the scene in the age of the mega-Dead (from 1987 on—basically the years after Garcia’s diabetic coma), aesthetically speaking the ur-mythical early days had always felt rather remote, even with Captain Trips on stage. By then the concert experiences had become packaged and predictable, all the more so for having attained the status of a major concert draw. By the 90s, the band was falling apart in terms of internal communication and the concert experience ran on the fumes of cliches. I had tickets to two shows at The Palace in Auburn Hills, Michigan, in 1992. The first show was so flat that my friend and I gave our tickets to the second show to some “miracle”-seeking fans, who looked extra-pathetic given the sorry performance they were dying to see.

By contrast, the Furthur shows of this past weekend were meaningful on an intellectual and aesthetic level I have never felt before. The shows were great because they gave me time, space, and stimulation to think—and feel—through the political sensations of our day. To really stop and wonder about this cultural moment in America, in so many ways seeming to be on the edge of a cliff—or, more promisingly, on the take-off edge of a growth spurt of a kind. That Furthur remains a direct link to some of the most important American cultural experiments of the Sixties—open-ended, bravely good humored, at once literati and working class, astonishingly amateur, and selectively provincial—figured importantly in the experience.

My musing began with the questions, what does it mean for a few thousand people to gather for an evening party, many of them wigged out on mushrooms, Ecstasy, or acid, plus copious amounts of grass, shaking to music supplied by a fresh-sounding and expertly performing outfit directly descended from the original house band for the Acid Tests of forty-six years ago? What does it mean for this event to be happening in a time of unrest, persistent economic crisis, and a general deep questioning of values? Can a form of hedonistic revelry borne out of a turbulent and revolutionary time from a generation and a half ago maintain purchase on a measure of meaning that goes beyond a consumer experience—and maybe even opens doors to new pleasures and, therefore, desires? What are the changed structural circumstances, from then to now, that might limit the reach of the experience, or re-inscribe fresh meanings?

The discontents and desires out there, products of a generalized injustice, so personally felt and expressed in the America of 2011, had me reaching for the poignancy of forty year-old lyrics, my ears pulling them out of the mix. See the romantic indignation of Hunter’s losers and wharf rats.

Half of my life
I spent doin’ time for
some other fucker’s crime…

Measured in pure pleasure, the Rosemont show was the better of the two. It was a happy crowd, ready for a high energy party. The first set put us on notice. The band was tight. The unusually coherent second set, full of high points and seamless transitions, took me to the recordings of the early Seventies, the mindfully groovey playing I never got to hear in the late Grateful Dead. I could only think, so this is what this music is supposed to feel like. Music sung to the hassled longhairs of 1969, newly resonant in the contested space that is brutalized Occupy America, 2011. A basic message we can all relate to, from Ron Paul supporters to the drummers of Zucotti, and everbody who has been hassled post 9/11—which is to say, everybody. Get off our backs. Let us be. Stop telling us what to do.

Ooo, Freedom!

 Ooo, Liberty!

Oh-wo, leave me alone

I want to find my own way home

I expected the Madison show to have some discernible political vibe, simply because of the setting—there were sure to be recall campaign volunteers out, fans with buttons and Wisconsin solidarity t-shirts on. Appropriately, the music was darker than the previous night’s jolly ride, more bluesy, sadder songs, and hard driving rock. Less ecstatic.

Saturday night’s message seemed to be that nowadays, we are losers, all of us. But we can wallow together if we are fortunate enough to escape the various wars (dodging the draft then, evading the creditors now), score a ticket and a ride. And for an evening at least, a diversion of mind and body that might be more than only a diversion, with the right dosage and preparation, can still be had.

It used to be said that the Grateful Dead weren’t the best at what they do, they were they only ones who do what they do. That is no longer true, and hasn’t been for quite some time. The second generation jam bands, not to mention the modern psychedelia of techno tribes and orchestral pop, reached maturity long ago. Now the kids have a lot of choices. Consequently, the Madison show wasn’t a sellout. Not even close. The upper sections were were sparsely attended, mostly with people who wanted lots of space to “white person wiggle,” as Jim DeRogatis would say. But the floor was another story. It was full, with many from the upper reaches having come down. And here again, as I scanned the floor party, I wondered, is this what those 70s Winterland shows felt like—intimate and non-glamorous, and decidedly not the hottest ticket in town?

Like my discontented new friend—whom I never would have met at an activist event, or at Mess Hall, or through a critical art project—people are back to speaking and working against the system, and most importantly, hating it while having to make do in it. 

We used to play for silver, now we play for life;
And one's for sport and one's for blood at the point of a knife.
And now the die is shaken, now the die must fall.
There ain't a winner in the game, he don't go home with all.
Not with all.

For me, the guy made the occasion more than a party. Maybe not a political rally, but even better, a politicized reenactment of Deadhead social memory once in danger of being permanently overtaken by stylized consumerism and now returned to the truth of an aesthetic experience, a pre-enactment of times to come. We are going “furthur” indeed, both forward and back.

*lyrics from Throwing Stones, Wharf Rat, Liberty, and Jack Straw.

 

from wisconsin, on OWS and post-democracy

During the Great National Debt Ceiling (non-)Debate of 2011, when President Obama stood his ground after giving it away first, like many of my fellow Americans I called and emailed the offices of my US senator and my congressional representative. I urged my senator, the ultra-regressive Ron Johnson, to vote for the debt ceiling-increase plan, and I advised my congressperson, liberal Tammy Baldwin to vote against the House version of the bill. In the end, Ron Johnson blew off my opinion and voted against it. Tammy Baldwin honored it and voted against it. I sent an email to Senator Johnson expressing my disappointment, and an email to Ms. Baldwin applauding her for listening to her constituents. 

Did you get that? On my score card Johnson voted against it and did the wrong thing. Baldwin voted against it and did the right thing. Huh? 

The thinking was this: voting against the bill would be handing the regressives a victory in their effort to sabotage the US economy; this invented crisis was their method of blackmailing the American public into accepting draconian cuts to social spending. From this position, the conclusion was that Senator Johnson needed to hear from constituents opposed to his extreme regressive tendencies. So, call his office and lodge a tally in the Vote Yes column. 

For her part, Tammy Baldwin always needs encouragement to uphold the progressive standard she proudly advertises but frequently fails to deliver. As noted, President Obama gave away the ranch even before getting the Republicans to the table. No self-respecting defender of social priorities could possibly vote for such an insult. So, call her office and tell her to stand up to the assault by voting No.

In the end the bill passed, with the No votes cast by a bunch of Tea Party greenhorns who had gleefully put Speaker Boehner’s panties in a twist, and a cadre of progressives who couldn’t stomach the bill’s passage without lodging a principled refusal to take part in the charade. Nevermind that the Great (non-)Debate has already been forgotten, more or less, in just the several months between then and now. The absurdity of the actual vote—what those votes represented, and how complex positions mixed with ideological posturing cannot be reduced to a yes or no vote—not only remains, but is replayed every single time an ideologically written bill comes to the floor of the legislative chambers. Which is to say, now, all the time. 

Governing by lowest common denominator may work in periods of equilibrium, but dysfunction and the exacerbation of crises are all but guaranteed when a society deals with urgent challenges using the blunt tool of majority rule in an oligarchical representative democracy. Tactical voting and manipulative campaigning (was I secretly trying to get Senator Johnson to vote No?) against ever more preordained outcomes only makes the base level limitations more obvious. Though I tell the story above as a personal experience, it is a mass phenomenon, experienced by millions every day. The absurdity of the participatory experience can no longer mask the essential disenfranchisement that supports the cheap veneer of a functioning democracy. Though perhaps most acute in the US, with the unrestricted amounts of money now warping the electoral process beyond repair, the limits of democracy are felt in all variations of the parliamentary system, and in all presidential systems, the world over. Judged by the standards of effectively tackling the problems faced by societies, representative democracies as functioning systems are the exception, not the rule. 

*

As the existing system proves itself incapable of addressing the needs of ordinary people, an out of whack economy, and ecologies on the brink—and, most fundamentally, the crisis of political participation itself—other systems, embryonic and half-blind, emerge, wherever they can. The most evident emergence of a non-parliamentary system from recent times is the process at the heart of the Occupy Wall Street movement, that is, the direct democracy of the General Assembly. Owing much to the long history of group process identified with movements of social justice and egalitarianism, going back directly to the councils of Seattle, the cultures of consensus in the social experiments of the 60s and 70s, the workers assemblies of revolutionary Catalonia, the voteless decision making of the Quakers and nineteenth-century utopian societies, the GA presents the seed of the long term project, the one that builds different social relations through an extraparliamentary, non-representative system.     

It is the resolute refusal to avail itself of the existing democratic system—not just the political parties, but the system of representation as a whole—that marks Occupy Wall Street as a movement for a different world, as much or more than any of its critiques of finance capital, corruption, and corporate power. The General Assembly takes the direct vote and/or consensus process to a new level of proliferation by virtue of its visibility and performed display. For the six weeks of the Occupy movement at pretty much every Occupy site the GA has been held in the open, anyone can listen, and anyone can participate. The process has thus far resisted corruption and the concentration of power, and yet still allowed groups of people numbering in the hundreds and even single thousands to make concrete decisions. What is being created through the practice of daily assemblies (at some sites twice daily) are new political cultures and working models of direct democracy.

Philosopher Alain Badiou specifies the resonant radicalism of the Paris Commune precisely in its Committee’s rejection of, as he says, a parliamentary destiny. Based on his interpretation of March 18, 1871, it seems reasonable to wonder whether the Occupy movement might qualify as, in his word, an “event.” It is difficult to say, for two possible reasons. First, the historical reverberations that conclusively mark a political moment (a “site,” as he says—and OWS is already that, certainly) as an event only come later; it is too early for such reverberations even if the original moment over. The other, better reason may be that OWS is not over, and an event is never known as an event for its duration. Within that duration, time is different; seasons change, but the present holds still for as long as the insurgency authors life freshly, thereby disrupting the reproduction of daily life.

Unlike the territorial particularity of the Paris Commune, the Occupy movement has proliferated across geographic space and distance. With the arrests in Chicago, the bulldozing in Richmond, and above all (thus far) the brutality of Oakland, the mediated affective center of the movement pinballs around the nation, with each turn extending the movement. The longer the Occupy movement stays viable as an unpredictable process, the longer and broader the site gets stretched, facilitating its evolution toward an event. On the level of long term possiblity being considered here, the most dangerous of the counterforces is neither police repression nor eroding public sympathy, nor even the shrinking of public spaces suitable for occupation. Rather, it is the reassertion of normal processes of governance, ie a turn away from the GA and toward a formalized representative system, especially as some elements of the Occupy movement eventually move toward an institutionalized, sustainable form. 

*

When activist researcher Brian Holmes speaks of post-Fordism, he is careful to describe that condition as the new media, hyper commodified, globalized environment of complex subjectivities living in societies that at many key institutional and structural levels remain Fordist in origins, design, and essential operation. When theorist Xudong Zhang writes about the cultural politics of postsocialist China, he is describes the contradictions of an unshackled market economy and exploding middle class, learning to consume the material and the symbolic, overlaying a society whose socialist foundations are far from disappeared across an uneven geography. In other words, the “post-” phase of a society is about emergence, layering, and coexistence. The later system, paradigms, lifeways, and economies never wholly or cleanly supersede the earlier frame—especially when that earlier frame was itself a wholesale displacement of the pre-modern, as it was the case with both American Fordist industry and Chinese revolutionary socialism.

Similarly, OWS hints at the coming of the post-democratic. This is the long term potential of the movement. One can see it in Madison, where the GAs take place practically within shouting distance of the capitol building. The GA is a study in the amateur, what with its balky sound system, ramshackle info tables and grungy participants. Every additional day is a kind of existential victory. Meanwhile, the edifice of officaldom that is the Capitol silently screams permanence. For the rest of our lives and probably far beyond, these two systems of governance, decision making, and power distribution will coexist, with the post-democratic system growing, developing, and gaining traction wherever it can, and the democratic system continuing to monopolize official power but rotting from within.

For activists, the challenge is how to fight and function in both arenas at once. The nascent world must be nurtured, we must acculturate ourselves to the post-democratic social relations by participating, giving of ourselves to the emerging embryonic systems. At the same time at the very least we must defend against the brute attacks coming out of the existing democracy, wielded by the regressives with the stamp of state legitimacy. That means fighting battles on the terms of that system: using the legislative process and the elections. 

In Wisconsin, this contradictory position will be coming to a head in the next few months. The recall campaign targeting Governor Walker will be starting on November 15. The recall campaign will almost certainly achieve its goal of staging a new election, but the outcome of that election is far from a guaranteed victory. Republicans will do everything they can to win it, precisely because they understand that when they win, they will then have the final mark of legitimacy that they will need. The extremist agenda we have seen up until now will be nothing—nothing—compared to what will come should Walker win (or, more accurately, buy and steal) the recall election. Therefore, we must defend against this possibility by working for a Walker defeat in the election, but at the same time articulate our basic rejection of the election as anything but a sham exercise that confers zero legitimacy on whomever should win. There is no simple way to deliver this dual message, other than through our actions—to work in the electoral sphere (door knocking, fundraising, get out the youth and minority vote) and also to build up our local post-democratic initiatives (co-ops, GAs, experimental forms).

In Wisconsin, in Oakland, at OWS, and all the as yet unknown future sites, it is up to us to make this latest “post-” phase a reality. As with other post- phases, it is really not a choice, but simply where the decaying but extant structures leave us. We have the rest of our lives to do it, but the reasons for diving in are all right now.

 

musings on the eve of the recall elections

So it seems that a group of mostly freshmen Representatives, with the quickest draw in the Tea Party midwest, Michele Bachmann, often playing their face, are hell-bent on acting the idiot’s role into reality. If one precondition for brute fascism is that the actors forget when to stop performing, based on these people we are about there. Even Speaker Boehner is fed up with them. Forcing President Obama to dance was all fun, but they made Boehner shimmy, too. The Speaker didn’t kiss all that ass for that many years only to be saddled with a non-compliant majority. The progressive Left, which came back into the electoral field after at least two decades of irrelevance with Obama’s winning coalition of 2008, has nowhere to go, other than cheering on the few sane voices in Congress ever allowed to reach the national media, ie Bernie Sanders, Dennis Kucinich, and a few others. Anthony "the Torso" Weiner did not help the progressives with their visibility problems.

Besides bemoaning the smallness on display and dreading the real hurt that the working classes and all things public will suffer should this systemic dysfunction continue to play out as mindlessly as projected, for some there is the schadenfreude to be gathered while witnessing the establishment go into crisis-management mode. How many times does your average lefty intellectual use the word ‘crisis’? Me, I practically live on the word. For reasons of easing the alarmism, I always like to say that the crisis is not something that arrives, but rather is a time that we are living through. We have already gone over the environmental/economic edge in terms of guaranteed massive change, but it unfolds over decades, not weeks. It is not a news story. And yet here is exactly that, an alarm situation, a newsmedia play-by-play that has gotten the credit ratings agencies seriously involved and the markets spooked. All delivered by a bunch of pukes who rode into office only because the black people and the young people conveniently fell back into their traditional indifference, not showing up to vote in last year’s mid-term elections. Elections have consequences. That’s the new favorite line from conservatives around here, and they are right. For today’s conservatives, election victories are a readymade line absolving them of any and all responsibility, spoken in defense of both Republican intransgiance at the national level and their extremism here in Wisconsin.

So I’ve mentioned Wisconsin. What happened to the Wisconsin movement? No more demonstrations—did those people just disappear? What do hundreds of thousands of mobilized citizens do when the protests are over? Was it a purely foul-weather movement? No, it was not. The mobilization has dispersed throughout the state, leaving Madison a quietly angry summer town. Even though we know now that the Wisconsin Republicans were busy drawing up their ridiculous and transparently vindictative redistricting maps even then, by the time the weather had warmed I sensed that conservatives, too, were worn down by the fights that went through the frigid winter and into the muddy spring. But here we are, in the dog days of a lush and humid midwestern summer, re-energized for the August 9 elections, aka the ballot machine/creative counting event, again with chaotic events reverberating globally in the background, as in the winter and spring.

The last time I reported on the Uprising in any detail here, the movement was in re-group mode. The stolen election of April 5, for a key seat on the state Supreme Court, was still very fresh and a reminder of to what lengths the party of thievery will go to retain power. The impending early summer signing of Governor Walker’s bills was nothing to look forward to, and the recall elections seemed far off, with plenty of time still for the Republicans to pull more abusive moves from the Capitol. The mood was negative, but true demoralization was kept at bay by the constant reinjection of outrage, thanks to the regular pace of variously targeted attacks emanating from the offices of either the governor or state Senate Majority Leader Fitzgerald. From assaults on Wisconsin Panned Parenthood that will end up limiting affordable women’s health screening services, to a horribly conceived and written Voter ID law, to the attempts to open up a four-county stretch of northern Wisconsin less than thirty miles from Lake Superior to new mining, and more—the Wisconsin GOP guaranteed that people stayed motivated and involved. They supplied the opposition with fuel for anger, outstripping their own best weapon: despair and paralysis. Top Republicans had been confident that once the bill and budget were signed and implemented, the people of Wisconsin would forget all about the fight and accept the new reality. As many of us probably would have, had the attacks stopped then. But they didn’t. In northern Wisconsin, the fast-tracked move toward mining raised such concern that citizens organized quickly, broadly, and angrily--enough to apply the brakes. Such extraordinary motivation can be found across the state.

Not to be underestimated, the Governor continues his missteps, mostly due to blind spots. Walker mostly certainly has them, that much we have known ever since the “David Koch” prank call back in Week 2. What we have seen over the last several months is a politician who frequently cannot adjust, neither ideologically nor strategically. His failure to read the whole media landscape is encapsulated in one repeating scenario that has become an established pattern over at least five or six occasions since April. Either it is leaked or announced that Walker will make an appearance at a given site, visiting a company, a school, or a ribbon cutting ceremony. Word circulates through social media, with emphasis on the outrage inherent in this governor’s daring. A recurring theme is his daring to pretend all is fine, making pro forma celebratory and laudatory remarks on the site of a public institution or public works, while in reality cutting the legs out from under the public sphere.

For example, Walker tried to speak at the centennial celebration of Gateway Technical College—a public college facing massive difficulties after Walker passed his budget, cutting $30 million from the already barebones and affordable technical colleges. For this kind of insult, people turn out to boo at the top of their lungs. Each such appearance gives activists an occasion to make the negative connections between the Walker agenda and wherever the place his appearance happens to be. Protestors show up, footage of the demonstration gets returned to social media, and the best of the videos—the ones that capture anger, hurt, sincerity, cleverness, and commitment—get thousands of views. Seeing images of people birddogging Walker in a new location every two or three weeks has provided the mobilized with a constant new infusion of morale, motivation, and yes, entertainment.

 

  

And the best one, from a few days ago:

 

These repeated victories in the war of images filter through to the mass media and therefore have something to do with Walker’s declining approval ratings, helping to associate the carefully groomed and disciplined Walker brand with controversy, unhappiness, and general negativity. And yet the man continues to stake his career on the conventional playbook, believing that by making public appearances he is projecting normalcy, showing people that he is not afraid, not rattled, and will not deviate from his agenda. To the many tens of thousands now dedicated to opposing him, such images are read quite differently, as the picture of entrenched defiance against popular opinion, an ideologue so committed to his program that the term “weapon of mass destruction” reasonably applies. Walker’s minions, from Prosser to Hopper, also continue to screw up, undone by their own essential asshole-ness, apparently. On the day these scoundrels are turned out, we will have the Governor and his troops to thank in no small part.

The truth is, the Walker agenda may come to a halt, more or less, after tomorrow, August 9. That is the hope. Voters in six state senate districts will go to the polls to vote on their recalled Republican state senators, all of whom supported the Walker agenda. The opposition needs to capture at least three of those six seats and then hold their two Democrat seats in another two district elections a week later. This round of recalls, including the inevitable efforts concerning Walker himself, may ultimately require as many as 22 elections. Factor in the weaponization of redistricting, in which the current Repubican-controlled legislature deliberately mapping some of the Democrat challengers out of the districts that they would be representing should they win. That, and the massive inflow of national money, the possible disruptions (for example, a suspicious fire last week that destroyed a building that included the La Crosse office of We Are Wisconsin, a group coordinating the recall effort targeting Republican Dan Kapanke), and what we have is a state-level display of American democracy in a vital and almost electric, but heavily degraded condition, in what had been for decades one of the cleanest and most straightforward political systems out of the fifty states. 

With the movement’s attention and activity channeled into this avalanche of recall elections, we have another occasion to feel all the excitement, trepidation, and despair about electoral politics as a direction for a social movement. Instead of the usual voting vs. non-participation debate within leftist circles, I propose that we judge electoral politics on the basis of a different kind of efficacy. Today the exercise of political power is equally legitimate, compromised, and problematic at every level and in every mode. The reformism vs. radicalism debate is not relevant when, for the change Wisconsin and the world needs, voting is necessary but not sufficient but the same can be said of any other kind or instance of political engagement.

The alternative criterion is this: any particular exercise of democratic power gains in surplus political potential when it also unleashes a process of rewriting social relations. By this measure, most instances of electoral engagement stay very much within their pre-determined bounds of possibility, ie everybody from candidate to campaign manager to volunteer canvasser to voter has their strictly limited role to play. The same is true of most large and established activist organizations—ie the professionalized left and the non-profit industrial complex. In the context of an evolving social movement, however, in which a campaign for office is not entirely under the control of an official campaign, often some social creativity overflows the expected bounds. This has been true in the season of Wisconsin recall elections. Partly because each of the recalls was started as a citizen-initiated grassroots effort, these efforts have been far less conventional in their social aspects, with truly promising communities of social action appearing in some of the contested districts, out from the previously undifferentiated citizenry blob. Based on this criterion, for example, the Playground Legends—a grassroots squad doing creative voter education in the African American sections and documented confrontations in the ultra-conservative parts of Alberta Darling’s state senate district —is as valuable a contribution as the Capitol occupation was, as is the ongoing Solidarity Singalong. New social forms, all. If the Singalong and the related Heart Balloons Rotunda action still fall into the category of “cute activism,” when put under the duress of Wisconsin’s “cute” tyranny (see the story of the locally infamous Heart Balloon Assault of several weeks ago) they nonetheless have the effect of knitting people together in a new and meaningful sociality.

Yes, we need progressive legislation. The regressives put their money and organization into the electoral process because they know that nothing legitimizes like an electoral and consequently legislative veneer. And yes, we need to apply pressure through creative disruption, to carve out the political space for meaningful change. But, above all, our worlds need different social relations, cultures of new value systems built up in a political context. No matter what the results on Tuesday, no matter how they resonate nationally or don't, those of us who identify with the movement must continue our activism such that the organic and immanently energetic social formations that have come out of the Wisconsin Uprising continue to grow and proliferate.

 

 

summertime in walkerville

It is high summer in Madison, warm lakes, fireflies, and thunderstorms. 

And camping. Not in the woods, but on the sidewalks and patches of grass outside the Capitol.  

The Wisconsin Uprising lives. Which is saying a lot considering that after the real, meaningful, and historic victories of the first two to three weeks, we have suffered a string of defeats, each more serious than the last. But the movement is in a stage of metamorphasis, in a fragile state but trying to grow wings.

So let us review the political achievements of the Scott Walker regime, pretty much all of them concluded in the month of June. After recounts, at the very end of May the April 5 election for Supreme Court was finally certified in favor of the reactionary incumbent, David Prosser. The state’s Government Accountability Board declined to review the widely reported irregularities in the Waukesha County vote-counting process that made the difference in the election, despite problems during the recount that were documented by observers. The challenger declined to call for an investigation, instead opting to note the irregularities in a statement that called for improvements in the election system. Only about two weeks later the Supreme Court overturned the ruling by a Dane County judge that blocked the GOP-backed law stripping state workers of their collective bargaining rights, in a legally unconventional opinion blasted by the minority. The end of collective bargaining and payroll-deducted dues collection is now the law and will probably be upheld against further legal challenges. And then, as of last week, the budget, packed with deep cuts to nearly all state services (for example, BadgerCare, the state’s award-winning Medicaid program that serves about a million people), savaging anything progressive in particular (past provisions friendly to wind energy), and doling out special favors to private interests (the highway and road construction lobby), was passed with zero input from the Democrats and now waits to be signed by the governor.  

The curtain on this first drama has been drawn. Austerity is come to Wisconsin, dressed in the brown shirts of anti-abortion fanaticism and the Voter ID xenophobes, planned by the hard-scheming policy minds of ALEC, and sponsored by Koch Industries and the Cline Group.

On the left the consensus is emerging, just maybe, if the many movement analysis panels are to be believed, that the leadership of the unions was too timid. Of course the rank and file and grassroots knew this as it happened—on the night of March 9, to be exact, when Scott Walker essentially dared the workers to strike by ramming through his union-busting bill. As gratifying as it is to have one’s assessment affirmed even if long after the time of consequence, moving forward I am not convinced that the movement, at least as constituted in Madison, has the power for what it is going to take to halt the Walker regime, never mind undoing the damage. That is because the movement’s last remaining hope in the legislative arena is in the recall elections and our efforts on that front have been spotty to say the least.

Six sitting Republican and three Democratic state senators will defend their seats in an August 9 recall election. The money on the conservative side is already pouring in, as are the dirty tricks, the most widely publicized of which is their tactic of running fake Democrats to screw up the primary elections. Knowing this already, and having seen the Waukesha County electoral theft in plain sight, the Republicans will no doubt resort to any tactic that they can get away with. They know full well that a result short of a three-seat net gain for the Democrats will preserve not only their lock on Wisconsin government, but also crush the chances of a later recall campaign targeting Scott Walker (which cannot be filed until he’s been in office for a year).

In the meantime, the looming recall elections have the Republicans nervous enough to be piling on new policy and legislative initiatives at breakneck speed. There are too many proposed laws and regulations to go into here, but you can trust that they are nearly all uniformly hostile to any sort of public interest, and some are so extreme in their costly privatization schemes and ideological slants that even Republican voices are questioning them. The recall elections are all the more important as a result, but only as a negative achievement. In other words, if the Democrats do not gain the majority, the Republicans will trumpet their victory, call it an approval of the Walker agenda, and press forward even harder. If the Democrats win, they can only slow or stop the process, at best. Nonetheless, we must win. Youth and minorities will make the difference, which, again, given their rates of participation is anything but a safe proposition. 

So what to do? Helping with the dispersed recall campaigns in other parts of the state (election in seven weeks) is only the first of at least three shifts attention away from Madison. The second is finding meaningful ways to reach out in support of our comrades elsewhere, to return the favor to the people of the world who touched us back in February and March, whether in Spain, Greece, and Egypt. These gestures are more important than ever in the YouTube age.

 

But the most important pivot turns toward the looming battle over proposed new mining in northern Wisconsin. This is primary extraction, a proposed four-mile long dirty gash (inevitable leaching of sulfides, acids, and mercury) at the headwaters of the Bad River, which flows directly into Lake Superior, the largest and cleanest of the Great Lakes, the planet’s largest freshwater system. The formerly unprofitable levels of iron ore are now viewed as a pile of cash, an illusion driven by the appetite for steel in China and India—the main markets to which the taconite pellets will be shipped. Some of it would probably end up being unloaded in Tianjin.

The battle will bundle together a host of constituencies, pitting Gogebic Taconite and their hired representatives (GTAC, as they are known, was a big out-of-state donor to Scott Walker and expect to benefit from industry-friendly streamlining of regulations that are currently some of the toughest in the nation) against the citizens of the progressive strongholds of Ashland, Bayfield, and Iron counties, along with the Bad Water Band of the Lake Superior Ojibwe, whose traditional wild rice harvesting beds lie downstream from the lands eyed by GTAC—all in the context of lost American industry, globalization, and new BRIC economic power. This federally recognized band, though small in numbers, includes veterans from the Walleye Wars of the 80s and the Crandon Mine campaign of the 90s, both of which were successfully fought by grassroots anti-racist and anti-corporate coalitions. In the two campaigns, activists led by indigenous defenders of the land performed direct actions that confronted racist groups on the ground, stopped industrial equipment on the roads and tracks, and engaged legislative and media fronts simultaneously. In meetings, in letters to the editor, on message boards, references are already being made to both struggles. If the efforts to begin mining continue to advance, then the north woods is where colorful midwestern radicalism will make itself felt again. With the mining interests attempting to divide public opinion by promising jobs (first 700, then inflating that number to 2800–who believes them?), the position of labor will be interesting to watch. I’m not very hopeful, but what a time and place for labor to break its conservativism in relation to environmental politics. If there ever were an occasion to gang up on the common enemy, this would be it.

*

After the budget was passed last week, activists struck the camp. The square is mostly quiet, the Capitol will be reopened without metal detectors in about a week.

Walkerville is no more. Everywhere is Walkerville.

 

notes to a movement: wisconsin's lost strike moment

Wisconsin’s Lost Strike Moment

Dan S. Wang/Nicolas Lampert

Two months into the Wisconsin Uprising a movement still exists, but where it goes from here is unclear. The so-called Budget Repair Bill that will end collective bargaining rights for most public employees in Wisconsin is currently tied up in the courts. Legal challenges will likely go on for several months, maybe longer. In the meantime, risks, challenges, and contradictions loom within a movement that can be described as painfully moderate. Wisconsin citizens have arisen and protested in massive numbers. The sleeping giant that is the labor movement + working class solidarity has awoken. But the outlook is not entirely optimistic.

The Wisconsin Uprising has reflected the strengths and weaknesses of the organized labor movement. It has organized huge numbers of people and demonstrated the collective power of public and private unions to combat Walker, the GOP, and corporate greed. But it has also become sadly reflective of the labor movement’s leaders—cautious, allergic to direct action and civil disobedience, and most of all, adverse to calling a strike. Labor leadership has instead curtailed a movement that had real potential to defeat Walker and real potential to demand and create a more just and equal society, and transformed it into a movement that has become all about protest marches, recall efforts, and votes for Democrats. But before one screams, “These tactics were necessary! Labor could ill afford turning public opinion against them with a strike!” ask yourself, when has labor won a significant victory without calling a strike? And when has a social justice movement won significant demands without the one-two punch of electoral politics combined with civil disobedience and actions that led to mass arrests? And lastly, for those still not convinced, if voting for Democrats is the panacea to all our problems, why were so many of us living in economic stress in Wisconsin already long before the uprising with little to no hope that our situation would improve?

To critique a movement that started with such promise and then rapidly devolved, we offer this brief appraisal of what we’ve seen thus far and what we hope to see develop. For the purposes of this analysis, we can talk about four key moments/storylines, in the overlapping order that they happened.

 The first week.

The flight of the 14 senate Democrats.

The events and non-events of March 9/10.

The April 5 election and aftermath.

1. In terms of outrage and energy turning into the mass mobilization that persists two months later, the narrative of the first week remains of primary importance. Recall the rapidly developing chain of linked events. The active opposition to Governor Scott Walker and the GOP agenda went from a small, mostly student-led protest on Monday, February 14, to sustained demonstrations of 12k and 30k only days later, capped in its first phase by a day long rally of 70k people on the first Saturday.

In that short time there were sizable public school student walk-outs, firefighters and police marching in solidarity with workers, a three-day teacher sick-out (essentially a non-picket strike) in Madison, and a successful effort to clog the public hearings that in turn triggered a spontaneous occupation of the Capitol lasting nearly two weeks. In the first week, each act of unexpected militancy on the part of one constituency pushed all other constituencies toward taking their own risks. This was the moment of a collective, leaderless, and organic constitution of a social movement, its evolution measured in hours, not days. For those who were in Madison at any point in those first seven days or so, it was exhilarating.

The collectively hailed movement changed participants, especially through the occupation, which over those days became one of the most intensely moving political social spaces seen or experienced outside of Tahrir Square. The newly uninhibited desire to communicate—expressed in countless clever and entertaining protest signs and performances—combined with the shared sense that Walker’s assault targeted whole groups, helped to create novel socialities in which political expression and shared feeling with strangers became a new norm. The new socialities, the rising class consciousness, the unleashed creativity in expression, the immanent power of self-organized action, and the snowballing impacts of tactical escalation—all products of the earliest stage—remain the most vital achievements of the movement, and bode well for the months and years of struggle ahead.

2. On the morning of the first Thursday (February 17) the rumor and then the confirmed news of the 14 senate Democrats fleeing to Illinois sent waves of excitement through the occupied Capital and the throngs on the square. It was exactly the action we needed and fit the string of escalations over those early days perfectly. The flight of the 14 and consequent denial of a quorum took control away from the Republicans. It was an act of aggression, a true counterattack that served as an escalation. Every escalation risks a loss of support, a desertion of the nervous, the unsure, and the moderate. But in each of the earlier escalations—the walk-outs, sick-outs, the occupation, etc—resolve stiffened and excitement grew massively. Thus, in escalating the standoff in that moment, the 14 joined the movement and pushed it along. In exercising a comparatively direct power over the Republicans, we don’t mind saying that the 14 took the momentary lead in the movement. They saw the opportunity, made their move, reaped positive attention, and put Walker and Fitzgerald on the defensive, making them worry about desertions from those wavering on the Republican side.

But precisely because the 14 are elected officials, the move opened up a whole front of legalisitic minutiae, opaque and inaccessible to the vast majority of the citizenry. At the same time, as a media storyline, the 14 drowned out the other risk-taking constituencies. As movement voices, the senate Dems presented solutions in terms of legislative compromise and electoral strategy. While we credit them for there timely move, for all the above reasons the flight of the 14—ie, the insertion of themselves into the movement—in hindsight represents a structural moderation from within the movement.

This was confirmed when some of the returning 14 spoke to 150,000-plus who gathered around the Capital for a huge rally on Saturday, March 12. They spoke almost exclusively of the movement as an electoral effort, and neglected to credit the chain of escalations that made their own move possible. This was true, too, for Rev. Jesse Jackson on that day, and at rallies in Madison and Milwaukee. Leaders of the largest unions, WEAC President Mary Bell and AFSCME Council 24's Marty Beil, also called for the ballot box, never once mentioning that organized labor has the ultimate weapon: work stoppage. The majority of the crowd, effectively administered a dose of moderation, headed down State Street after the celebrities of the movement, the Wisconsin 14, spoke. For us, the lesson of the day was, the movement grassroots would do well by refraining from over-valorizing the 14. And we would do better by reflecting on the actions of fellow workers and global citizens in Egypt who inspired us during the first week—the ones who peacefully toppled a thirty-year autocrat partly thanks to a general strike. The questions of the day, for all but especially for the union rank-and-file were, does labor leadership actually represent the best interest of the working class? And why are we only organizing against Walker and the Republicans? Why not pressure the Democrats and labor leaders just as hard?

3. March 9 and 10 stand as the dates that a strike would have made most sense but did not happen; the fact is, the strategy of escalation was abandoned when it most mattered. Walker’s strategy of waiting out the movement had failed; after two and a half weeks of senate stalemate and daily demonstrations, it was clear that the movement wasn’t going anywhere. Rather than compromise, and being worried about cracks in Republican lawmaker unity, he and senate majority leader Fitzgerald rammed through his union-busting bill on the evening of March 9. This was accomplished by splitting “fiscal” from “non-fiscal” issues from the bill, circumventing the 14 Democrats who had blocked quorum, and by advancing a hastily called vote in a deceitful move of still unsettled legality.  

In other words, on March 9, rather than back down Walker raised the ante yet again, and to a level for which there could only have been one kind of escalation in response: a strike across sectors and occupations. Talk of a general strike, both fanciful and serious, existed during the first three weeks of the struggle. It was visible in flyers and signs, the conversations happening around the square, and most particularly from the IWW and the South Central Federation of Labor (a Wisconsin federation of nearly one hundred labor organizations representing 45,000 workers.) By February 21, the beginning of the second week, the SCFL had endorsed a one-day general strike but did not have the authority to call one. From the point of view of the raging non-unionized grassroots, and much of the rank and file, a one-day strike should have been called on the day that Walker signed the anti-union bill at the very least. The hot potato then would have been thrown back in Walker’s hands, confronting him with the queasiness of having to carry out his stated threats to fire public workers. But it did not happen. The union leadership responded with words, not actions, thereby severing the chain of escalations, and accepted a defeat. By this time the movement had for all practical purposes become identified, including from within, as union-led, leaving the non-union grassroots with nowhere to channel their outrage, energy, and willingness to share risk. A precious historic opportunity was lost.

Here the lessons for the grassroots are at least two. First, that union leadership is, like the Democrats, wedded to a narrow and ultimately conservative set of interests. Their primary considerations include the short-term job security of their members, the viability of their organizations apart from the greater public good, and, above all, the easiest ways to ensure the flow of member dues, above all. Secondly, and at a deeper level, that both trade and labor unions are in essence defensive formations, there to protect a standard of living often originally won under comparatively favorable labor market conditions. Moving into uncharted political territory, much less contributing to the movement a visionary element, is not the natural tendency of the modern union. Even more so for a labor movement that has been steadily declining since Reagan fired the air-traffic controllers in 1981, and before that, the Taft-Hartley Act (1947) curtailed the legality of strikes, making massive concessions under the smokescreen of collective bargaining the standard course of action for organized labor. Yet, 2011 has witnessed Republican governors attack even this last recourse—collective bargaining—across the Midwest. Win now and defeat the GOP’s onslaught against the last stronghold of middle class economic security, and all things public. Or lose and send the demoralizing message to the nation and the world that hundreds of thousands of protestors, a two-week occupation of the Capital, and public opinion on the side of labor still could not produce a victory in Wisconsin. In times like this, when public unions are fighting for their very existence, and a panoply of constituencies face serious threat, all tactics are needed to win, including strikes and direct action. No action can be ruled out.

4. Even before the March 9/10 episode, the April 5 election for Wisconsin Supreme Court was recognized widely as a statewide referendum on Scott Walker, given incumbent justice David Prosser’s avowed support for the Walker agenda. After the non-response of March 9/10, the election was left as the next opportunity for the movement to land a substantive blow against Walker in the foreseeable future. Furthermore, the dispersion of the weeks-long movement into a myriad of fronts (recalls, boycotts, etc) made the April 5 election that much more important as a way to refocus the movement on a single, shared, unifying goal, a way to recapture the power of mass mobilization.

On April 5 more than 1.5 million Wisconsin voters went to the polls and elected Kloppenburg by a mere 204 votes, or so it seemed. A day later 14,300 previously uncounted votes suddenly appeared in Waukesha County under suspicious circumstances involving Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus, a former employee of Prosser. She reported enough missing votes to place the results just barely past the percentage needed to trigger a state-financed recount. Amid the calls for investigation from liberal groups, the lesson in electoral strategy from Gore v Bush 2000 and the ’08 Obama campaigns was totally lost, ie close results will always be vulnerable to right wing electoral theft, and that therefore, an electoral victory must be beyond doubt. That means mobilizing a massive coalition on the left, including the traditionally under-polled groups of African American and youth voters. At the time of this writing it does appear that Kloppenburg may have lost fairly, yet what is arguably worse than her defeat is a movement that hedges its bets solely on the polls as the way to defeat one of the most extreme and well-coordinated right wing attacks on working people in modern history, and even then, fails to implement a known winning electoral strategy.

On a larger level, let’s imagine, what would have transpired had citizens occupied the senate assembly chambers instead of just the rotunda, especially on the day of the assembly vote? What would have happened had Walker ordered the National Guard (as he threatened to do from the beginning) to quell protests and strikes and the Guard refused? The fact is nobody knows, and that is precisely the point. Once the movement energy and hopes are re-channeled into electoral efforts nearly exclusively, the outcome—no matter who wins, really—is already predetermined and circumscribed by the structure of conventional politics, a structure that favors wealth and has allowed ever increasing inequality to become the norm.

 *

 We have now reached the fourth or fifth act of the Wisconsin Uprising. The fundamental contradictions that have shaped the sequence of events—including the key failures of the left that have helped Walker achieve his present position of strength—cannot be resolved without a strategic reorientation. Above all, we need to be courageously visionary.

As with any historical advance toward an egalitarian society, our achievements will take time, energy, and commitment for the long haul. But we already knew that. What we’ve been reminded of in Wisconsin over the last two months, is that once started, following through on the chain of escalations gives us a better chance of winning specific battles and puts our opposition on the defensive, as long as we have the courage, vision, and creativity to increase the pressure when the opportunities present. Strategically speaking, the events in the chain of escalation itself are what generate the spaces of new socialities, the beginnings of the democracy we want, and the ground on which new leaders and new ideas emerge from the grassroots.

Now that the chain has been broken and the conservatives have prevailed for the moment, the question is how to restart a series of meaningfully oppositional actions. Furthermore, let us always remember how these such actions can communicate solidarities across sectors and constituencies beyond the union-dominated constitution of the movement, as did the near-spontaneous actions of the first week. In other words, if this movement is to be sustained, it can no longer be exclusively or even primarily about unions, collective bargaining, or the GOP’s greed and lies, as egregious as they are. In order to win, we need to imagine and articulate the society that we want to live in, not simply fight defensively against the latest round of GOP/corporate attacks. The Wisconsin Uprising must evolve into a movement that speaks to the priorities of immigrants and the inner-city poor, the unorganized private sector workers, the unemployed, and the incarcerated, as loudly as it speaks to the concerns of the unionized. We need to ask what it would take to make this movement truly popular. We have the power of numbers but we remain separated by walls of division. The white progressive voices in a relatively privileged place like Madison have a responsibility to use their privilege and power creatively and generously. The Wisconsin Uprising will gain strength by moving towards a long-term coalition of urban and rural constituencies, one that activates and embraces leadership from the peoples who have been hardest hit by the economic crisis—rural farm communities, Native communities, African-American communities, Hispanic communities, the unemployed, and youth from all classes. A first step towards a movement that attracts and keeps all constituencies will demand systemic change on the state, national, and world levels:

1. A visionary safety net founded on a universal basic income for all, rich and poor alike, young and old, employed and unemployed.

2. True immigrant justice, i.e. full amnesty for undocumented adults and citizenship for undocumented youth.

3. Full democratic rights for the incarcerated, and an end to the Drug War. Voting eligibility cannot be stripped.

4. The end of corporate tax giveaways and the privatization programs that have destroyed the public sector.

5. Increased public funding for public education, public health care, public transportation, and the arts.

6. Environmental sustainability and water conservation as the foundation for urban and rural planning. Shift towards renewable energy and food justice.  

7. A real end to the unnecessary, wasteful, and brutal multi-trillion-dollar wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, drastically reduced military spending, and funding full care for our veterans.

8. The ousting of Gov. Walker and his administration, either through resignation or recall.

*

We all know that the budget repair bill is only the beginning of a calculated attack on the middle and lower class. In preparation, we would do well to revisit the movements and campaigns from both the recent and distant past that mixed lobbying, protest, and media work with strikes, occupations, and civil disobedience. These include struggles like the 2008 Republic Windows and Doors factory and the 2010 Whittier Elementary School field house occupations in Chicago, and the Ojibwe fishing rights movement and the campaign that killed the proposed Crandon Mine, both from Wisconsin in the 1990s. Any number of past struggles, such as the Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike of 1968, or the San Francisco General Strike in 1934, or the Flint Sit-Down Strike in 1936-37, still inspire and instruct. As we move forward we need to examine why overly cautious labor leaders and unimaginative Democrats took the reins of a movement that held such promise, and how we let them. In closing, we urge our fellow citizens and activists in the grassroots to reserve our power separately from the “leadership” and prepare for the next uprising, the one that will erupt in a day, a week, a month, or years down the road—the one in which we do not let the opportunity slip away.

 

 

 

report from madison: why wisconsin?

We are into phase two.

The massive crowds of 15-30k on the weekdays and 75-150k on four consecutive Saturdays have dispersed. Now the people are spread out, working the ground of the entire state in a multi-pronged strategy of electoral canvassing, working recall campaigns, bird-dogging Republican state senators and the governor himself wherever they go, organizing targeted protests, coherently and incoherently boycotting businesses that are said to have a Walker association, or simply lashing out in hundreds and maybe thousands of acts of primitive resistance, ranging from wheatpasting General Strike posters on utility boxes to gluing locks. Wisconsin is alive, electric with political activism and political expression, both organized and not. Window and yard signs blanket the neighborhoods of the hippie east and the bobo west sides of Madison.  In Milwaukee, joint union/teacher/immigrant rights actions are being planned. Nine hundred people marched in the little town of Mt. Horeb a couple weeks ago, which is more amazing than 100k in Madison. Our new adoption worker, a woman just starting out in her social services career, showed up on our doorstep smiling and professional, but sporting bright blue and yellow anti-Walker buttons. The bus driver wears a button that says Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Republican. Many at the Stoughton Opera House for Friday night’s Tim O’Brien show (high quality white music, for the unfamiliar) wore Kloppenburg buttons.

The political inhibitions of the average Wisconsinite, only two months ago seemingly internalized to the degree that politics had become a subculture rather than everyone’s business, have evaporated, steamed off by the extreme attacks of Scott Walker. The political has returned to Wisconsin, to everyday life, to people’s expressions in both private and public spheres. And just in time, because it is not too early to call a victory for Scott Walker. More on that below.

But first I continue my inquiry into the conditions of the uprising. What has been happening, at the various distances of the local, the regional, and the global, that the Walker agenda began to generate a kind of oppositional coherence, a broad sense of belonging to a current far beyond oneself, or one’s town, or one’s country? On this blog I have already discussed both the local and the global, how the Madison infrastructure and the international echoes of Cairo played into the uprising. From where I type this, both of these elements continue to be present. Last Wednesday evening I attended the Chris Hedges event on the UW campus. After being out of town for nearly two weeks, I was curious about what I’d see. The lecture was held in Humanities 2650, a room that seats 268. There were hardly any empty seats and quite a few standing in the upper reaches of the hall. People came out on a crummy, cold and icy night—a good sign that interest and motivation remains high at the grassroots level. The energy in the room was lively and Hedges ended up taking questions for an hour after a thirty-five minute lecture.  Whether we are talking about movement analysis events organized by the Havens Center, immigrant rights groups working to fight Walker’s cuts to bilingual education, the neighborhood bars hosting benefits for interfaith labor justice projects, or the Dane County administration and judicial establishment standing up to the GOP’s legally questionable manuveurs, the Madison activist and progressive infrastructure is humming. 

As well, the global echoes—drowned out and overshadowed for weeks by everything from the disaster in Japan to attention on the Wisconsin 14 and the villanous Koch brothers—reappeared on the fifth Saturday, in all-too tragically convenient a way: the massive demonstrations that were sparked by Scott Walker’s attack on the day Hosni Mubarak resigned came to a close on March 19, both the eighth anniversary of the bombing that started the Iraq War in 2003, and the first day of American and European bombing of Libya. If the War at Home/Wars Abroad meme had been shoved aside for a little while, history will always neatly bookend the first phase of the Wisconsin uprising in the wrapping of a single global class and energy war, and the beginning of generalized global chaos. Lots of us, including Iraq Veterans Against the War, who called for the March 19 Madison demonstration and came out in a force of more than fifty GWOT veterans, would not have it any other way. 

So, we have the local and the global. What about the movement dynamic at the state and regional level? Or put another way, why Wisconsin, and why now? Sure, it is a comparatively homogenous state, with a strong and distinctive tavern culture, a single, statewide university system, and self-embraced customs of beer + brats, dairy + deer hunting. But what of the conditions in early 2011? What was different then?

Having made something of the echoes of Cairo, I must say, the story of the 2010-2011 Green Bay Packers also helped to set a kind of pre-uprising climate in Wisconsin, because of how they reached and won the Super Bowl, the kinds of storylines that spun out of the team’s postseason run, and the fact that the Super Bowl was played on the Sunday of the same week in which Scott Walker later unveiled his budget repair bill. Given the event proximity, two of those storylines resonated with the Wisconsin uprising of a week later. The first concerned the Packers as an institution. When the Packers take the national stage, the national media enjoy re-telling the story of why and how the comparatively small city of Green Bay, Wisconsin (pop. 102k), happened to land and hold onto the most storied of all NFL franchises. This happened in the old media world of January of 1997 when the Packers last reached and won the big game, and it happened again in 2011. The surprise ending part of the story goes, little Green Bay keeps its team because it is… (drumroll) publicly owned! The merits of public ownership and non-majority ownership clauses are then held up for consideration as an historical quirk that actually works—unlike the failure of private ownership, for example, to currently supply Los Angeles with an NFL team. The merits of public ownership are then brought into the national conversation, in however superficial a way. For Packer fans, who like most midwesterners are more self-conscious than their coastal countrymen about how they are perceived by the bi-coastal media/cultural establishment, it is another reason to take pride in who they are, and another media-reflected self-image around which the trace of a collective identity coalesces.

The second important storyline emerged in full as soon as the championship game was over. Starting the day after the big game, sports talk radio chatter turned the topic from post-game analysis to the negotiations between the NFL owners and the NFL players association, a looming millionaire-versus-billionaire labor showdown that cast a shadow over the whole season and now finally took center stage. The contentiousness between the two parties got football fans everywhere considering the possibility of a canceled season or watching scab teams. If nothing else, this situation (which weeks later hangs in a stalemate due to the owners locking out the players) imposed a discourse of labor politics on a wide swath of the football-watching population. A great many apolitical fans are being forced to think about the fact that labor conflict exists. And once engaged, a lot of fans see the players as reasonable given their concerns about things like cumulative head injuries and the owners refusal to disclose their profits. Here in Wisconsin, it didn’t hurt the image of the players association that the Super Bowl MVP, Aaron Rodgers, the latest player to reach Packer greatness, is also the team’s union rep. Finally, there were the two Super Bowl XLV competitors, the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Green Bay Packers, each club named after the twentieth-century workers associated with those towns, and each club bucking the labor-bosses faultline—the Packers with their aforementioned anomalous shared ownership and the Steelers with their outspoken owner, Dan Rooney, who has openly complained about the greed of his fellow owners. The fact that both teams had this vestigial identification with the working man, and whose current ownership didn’t fit the venal role played so well by that of other NFL clubs, and yet had risen to the top of the competitive hierarchy by beating everybody else on the field, dispelled the claim that labor-friendly relations lead to a decline in quality and performance. If anything, these two teams proved that the opposite is true. 

So this whole NFL thing, with the Packers as newly crowned champs after an improbable, attention-getting run of four straight do-or-die victories (not including the final game), has been running parallel to the Wisconsin uprising. At times it crossed over, with some Packer players, including star cornerback and team co-captain Charles Woodson, tweeting statements in support of the Wisconsin state workers. The Sunday, March 19 NYTimes sports section featured an article on the NFL lockout and its effects on the town of Green Bay. It was the first post-uprising piece on the Packers I’d seen, and it necessarily mentioned the political turmoil of the state—not the usual thing for sports journalism.

On the question of spatial scale, the Packers reinforce state identity as a constituency, because in Wisconsin the Packers are regarded as belonging to the entire state and not just the city of Green Bay, literally owned by thousands of shareholders around the state, and Packer fandom is practically a secular religion binding together far-flung Wisconsinites, including those of the Wisconsin diaspora. Also interestingly, of all the population centers in Wisconsin, Madison is the least Packer-crazy town. Too many transients, hoity intellectuals, and Chicago transplants, plus a fan focus on the University of Wisconsin teams. So the NFL and Packer storylines spoke more directly to the people of Wisconsin outside of liberal Madison than inside, helping to generalize the politicized climate of labor strife to the far corners of the state. Even more than that, the Super Bowl underlined a fundamental turn in consciousness that informs any political uprising, anywhere. And that turn happens when an angry people wanting to do something become aware, and then are self-confident enough to tell themselves, “Why not us, and why not here—after all, we are somebody, we are somewhere.”

 And that's how we get pure Wisconsin action, like artist Rick Kurki showing a new painting at a recent protest up north in Hayward, Wisconsin. Pic by Pete Rasmussen.  

Not to overplay any of these factors—the Packers, Cairo, the built-in activism of Madison—but taken together, they all mattered, they all reinforced the tide. Then, as a movement imprinted with the stamp of multiple places, signaling a simultaneous belonging, echoes of it could be heard in other places. Demonstrators in Albany on March 23 chanted “Wisconsin, New York—the struggle is the same!” Last week a solidarity event in LA drew more than ten thousand people and featured Wisconsin firefighter’s union president Mahlon Mitchell, one of the scores of new leaders to have emerged in the course of the last six weeks. Activists in Michigan have measured the smaller demonstrations there against what happened in Wisconsin, trying to ascertain the different limits under which a nascent Michigan movement toils. Movements sited in and identified by place, whether that place is first thought of as a city, a state, a country, or a region, are doing the work of validating the movements of other places. We have learned from the world social forum strategy from the past decade. No more summit hopping. We work where we happen to find ourselves, but build into the process a sending and receiving of signals from other places.

My attempt, speaking to Oaxaca and Wisconsin, from Chicago, pic by Alice Kim:  

*

More to say about Wisconsin, good and bad, besides the Packer thing, but moving on…. 

Let me end this post by addressing the state of the movement, in bullet points.

1. Now it is clear that the story of the fourteen senate Democrats who fled the state in order to stall the passage of Walker’s bill stands in danger of overwriting the earlier heroism of the grassroots. Had not the Madison teachers, public school students, firefighters union, the Teaching Assistants Association, a goodly number of undergraduate students and lots of independent citizens stuck their necks out in the days leading up to the Flight of the Fourteen. And yet through all their hero’s welcome, not one of them has given full credit to the strategy of peaceful, legal escalation that gave them the opportunity to take dramatic action with full confidence of widespread support. Even worse are their exhortations to support the Democrats, exclusive of the many elements making up the backbone of this movement. As the struggle continues through a protracted phase without further massively unifying attacks by the GOP, the splits between Democrats and the grassroots will widen.
2. Walker won. His bill is still not clearly law, but he’s not waiting around for any court decision to implement it, even though every move he makes toward implementing it further muddies the legalities. And the question of political payback remains highly motivating, and there are plenty of deserving targets, not only Walker himself. Through electoral politics we will end the careers of at least a few, and make life at times miserable for the rest through all manner of activist confrontation. But the fact is, we will live with a seriously degraded state bureaucracy and a dysfunctional state government, and a horribly unbalanced state budget for years to come. Undoing the damage will be monumental task beyond the capacities of the Democrats. Thus, one of the high points of the liberal state structure—twentieth-century American Upper Midwestern state government, effective, professional, and mostly non-partisan—in Wisconsin is definitively no more. Time to roll up our sleeves, grab a tool, and start planting or building whatever it is that we want to grow.
3. The movement response to the March 9 surprise assault by Walker and his state senate minions remains unexamined. Surprising, when one considers the fact that we know the day and even the moment the movement lost the battle over Walker’s bill. But perhaps not so surprising when we consider the unpalatable truths such a examination would reveal. To begin with, the failure to meaningfully respond begs the question, where, exactly, the union interests lie? If the rank and file’s willingness to strike was overridden by the leadership, that is one thing, complete with an ugliness all its own. But what if the basic conservatism of the unions crouched in a defensive posture stands at cross purposes with those of us looking ahead to a different world? In other words, what if, as Jimmy and Grace Lee Boggs would say, a job ain’t the answer? Even though the various unions took all different kinds of heroic and historic action over the last six weeks, I can’t help but point out that the visionary element is completely missing from the union side, and the lost opportunity of March 9 showed us the price of accumulating power, even oppositional power, without vision. Nicolas, Erin, and I are working up a fuller treatment of March 9. Will post when it’s ready.

 

the wisconsin uprising: why madison?

 While conservative assaults on anything with the word ‘public’ in front of it proliferate around the states of the American midwest and beyond, the struggle in Wisconsin continues. In its non-response to Scott Walker’s declaration of war on the evening of March 10, the unions absorbed a defeat even as the movement energy turned to legal and electoral fronts. How much of this defeat can be rolled back on the electoral terrain is an unanswered question, but the very least we can say is, the damage inflicted by Walker’s bill will likely never be undone in full, even if Democrats manage to retake control of the state senate, the state assembly, and the governor’s mansion. The primary reason being, they are Democrats. In anycase, the struggle has entered a protracted and highly localized phase. Even though things continue to develop—just yesterday a Dane County judge put a temporary restraining order on the authoring of Walker’s bill, thereby halting it from taking effect as law just yet—it is an apt moment to ask questions that had been put aside by the month-long maelstrom of events. 

Nicolas Lampert, Erin Stalnaker, and I are currently composing a text reviewing the first phase of the struggle and that will among other things dissect what we see as the March 10 failure, so I will hold off on discussing that episode for now. Instead, let’s consider the question of place. Why Madison? In Tunisia, Sidi Bouzid was the town of the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, who became a movement martyr. In Madison there was no individual act of heroic, dramatic resistance as a precipitating event. Instead, it was collective offense and collective outrage. First a thousand people, then 15k, then 30k, then at least three consecutive Saturdays of near or over 100k, four straight weeks of demonstrations, plus an extended occupation of the Capitol. All in a second-tier city that would probably strike any distant observer as equally obscure compared to the other sites of global uprising from the past several months.

If it is true that under the auspices of globalization, if you look hard enough at what is right around you, you will see the whole world, then Madison is one of those places where you don’t have to look very hard; the city suffers from a conceit of cosmopolitanism, a scene where sporting Guatemalan pants or quaffing Belgian lambic can be passed off for consciousness. Needless to say, in normal times this tendency is irritating to the critical eye. But in extraordinary times the substance behind the superficiality does make a difference. For example, Madison is a favorite stop for national leftwing figures, always supplying them a reliable audience. So when Chomsky wrote this short analysis for Truthout in which he links the Cairo and Madison movements, he’s thinking about a town he’s been to regularly over the years—in both 2009 and 2010 he lectured to a packed house at the Orpheum Theatre. Even better, this profile of a local boy who’d gone on to report from Tahrir Square for Al-Jazeera was published on February 8, mere days before the Wisconsin uprising broke. The internationalist awareness of the local populace worked to the movement’s advantage over the first week in the many echoes of Cairo, and then all the way through to the Ian’s phenomenon, before fading as the political narrative split into different storylines. Whether and how that internationalism will be re-injected into the language of the movement is unknown, but internationalist terms remain as a potential advantage and cannot be erased for as long as the movement’s demonstration element is sited primarily in Madison.

Perhaps more importantly, just about every constituency that Scott Walker antagonized in his short tenure on the statewide stage is present in Madison. The teachers and public sector workers, of course, but also the environmentalists, who were dealt the dual slap of a hostile appointee to head the state Department of Natural Resources and the axing of a new biofuels power plant conversion project. Poor people's services, already slim from past attacks, were put on notice for draconian cuts, angering the whole social service establishment, not to mention the people who use services. Mass transit and anti-sprawl advocates got theirs when the governor-elect declared that he wouldn't accept federal stimulus money for rail development between Madison and Milwaukee. Therefore, as soon as the unions were kicked into action, plenty of the local citizenry instantly knew the common enemy.

*

Picture this~

Pedaling downtown from my home on Madison’s West Side for a show on a warm summer night, it is six miles of easy slopes along Lake Mendota. Getting there early, I take a stroll up State Street and around the square. Students in town for the summer are out entertaining themselves with burgers, candy, and ice cream while their professors dine out for Nepali food. A man with a guitar who resembles the other man with a guitar a little further down the street, tunes his beat-up instrument while arguing with somebody about nothing in particular. On my way up towards the square, coming the other way are a few small packs of drinkers who have strayed out of the sticky beerhalls zone at the campus end of State Street. Near the steps of the Capitol a homeless gentleman makes his bed, as do others in spacious intervals along the square. It is very still, just slightly more peaceful than sterile. A few patrons of upscale locavore restaurants stroll to and from their car parks. The occasional cop zips by on a bicycle against the lit-up Capitol dome, under which a couple of teens puff on the lawn. Hardly noticed but playing roles we can only imagine, a lone suit working late—a capitol aide, lawyer, or lobbyist—crosses the square from office to condo. After the show at the Orpheum or the Majestic or the Frequency, I munch a fresh donut at the Greenbush Bakery to fuel my return passage through the quiet dark streets and leafy bikepaths, far from the turmoil of the world. ~

The idyllic life that is or was a kind of norm in Madison could be described for that same summer evening in probably three dozen ways, depending on your hobbies (knitting…or kayaking?), tastes (artisanal brews), and budget (state worker classification). Because Madison is that placid kind of midwestern town, well-educated, competently governed, economically stable, full of intelligent diversions—which is to say, it is not a normal place at all. It is a Rust Belt city enjoying the trappings of a modest twentieth-century affluence while hundreds of cities, towns, and villages throughout the region deal with economies that have gone down the greased chute of globalization, leaving behind wrecked communities. It is the comparatively intact economy and communities of Madison, and the peculiar abnormalities of Madison thus made possible, that are worth considering after the events of the past five weeks.

In relation to how the movement materialized over the first two weeks of the uprising, the most important fact about Madison is its management as a people’s city, as opposed to a police state. Madisonites take it for granted, but nearly all the out of state visitors I met mentioned the unbelievably low and casual police presence, especially over the first two weeks. For example, when I ran into Brooklyn-based activist artist Jim Costanzo on the steps of the Capitol on the second Tuesday, nearly a week into the occupation, he declared the action around us impossible to imagine happening in New York because of the security priorities. On another night in the occupied capitol I met a UWUA staffer named Mark Brooks from Nashville who came to see for himself what was going on. One of the first things he said was, this slumber party/occupation could never happen in Tennessee. The police simply wouldn’t allow it. Speaking about policing from a Chicago perspective, where the cops routinely line avenues wearing $700 worth of hardshell riot gear to contain depressingly small antiwar marches, I can say that by comparison Madison has indeed fended off the pressure to militarize America’s police forces.

There are reasons for this. One, the Madison Police Department is as committed to a trust-based and non-confrontational philosophy as any department in the country. Two, it is a comparatively well-educated force. And three, by a long stretch the main public security threat in Madison revolves around massive numbers of out-of-control drunk college football fans on six Saturdays a year, plus the regular party atmosphere in the drinking district. The Madison police are professionals who deal with drunken fights, falls, sexual assaults, vandalism, and alcohol poisoning all the time. Demonstrations at the Capitol are nothing compared to the puke-fests going down on the other end of State Street three nights a week. Even in terms of outside agitators, it is the bars that attract the out of town rabble, not the demonstrations. The city police know this, and so does county law enforcement.

The consciousness of the police and county sheriff bled over into sympathy for the forces opposed to Walker at a pretty early point, thus depriving the governor of a ready onsite tool of enforcement. In time both Chief Noble Wray and Sheriff Jim Mahoney publicly questioned and/or criticized the governor, speaking from their perspective as public security professionals. Their statements damaged the governor, further (and correctly) painting him as a hyper-partisan extremist, and reinforced the broad unity of public opposition. So when right wing outsiders were baffled by Walker’s tolerance of the occupation, they did not understand that in Madison the police have different and more intelligent priorities, unlike in most other places and unlike the authoritarian law enforcement most Americans now accept. 

The lesson is, building the conditions for large social movements that can assemble in spectacular masses includes working on civilizing your local police. 

*

Another thing about Madison is its progressive and countercultural infrastructure, and latent political potential. The latter was put on display last fall by a thirty-six year-old Green Party candidate, Ben Manski, in making a serious first run for the open state assembly seat representing the West Side, and who has since performed as one of the voices of the movement in media appearances. But it's been long term labor that laid the foundations. Over a couple of generations at least, people in Madison have built up a functioning network of co-ops and enlightened businesses, a healthy local alternative media in print, radio, and online, several locally-based but internationally networked progressive organizations, and thriving local cultures of both food and biking. This infrastructure is maintained and used by a population of grad students, educators, sort-of-creative types, and lots of people who work secure, moderately-compensated state jobs, folding a degree of everyday activism into a large proportion of Madison's population. On the whole, this is a city population that has, compared to the big city rat racers, a good deal of free time. To put it negatively, Madison is one of those enclaves where “artist” is not a meaningful professional category, the local currency project trades heavily in bodywork, and an awful lot of residents seem to have the time and narcissism to “work” on themselves. 

But as my friend Chris B once said, as pathetic as the prospect may be, the hippie freeks just might be humanity’s last and best hope. By essentially hosting the Wisconsin uprising, the hippie element of Madison did in fact prove its worth. Without the laid back vibe and good humor, the anger might have gotten out of control. Without the easy generosity expressed in a thousand little ways (I did my part early on with a midnight delivery of five dozen donuts to the occupied rotunda—the pleasure is truly in the giving), the welcome would have stayed theoretical. And most importantly, it was the people of Madison, dedicated and available, who kept the attendance of the weekday rallies at respectable and sometimes very impressive numbers for four weeks, in between the massive weekend rallies. Different unions bused in people from Milwaukee and other parts of the state for a day at a time, but without the thousands of local people going down to the square multiple days a week and often a couple of times a day, with many temps in the 20˚/-6˚ range, the movement would not have gained the respect that durability commands. Even Scott Walker had hoped at first to wait out the demonstrations, but in the end could not.

Now that the demonstrations are winding down and the epicentric role of Madison takes a backseat to the statewide April 5 election for Wisconsin Supreme Court, the dispersed recall campaigns, and the wider battles around the region, for people who live in Madison one question is, what will be the lasting effects on our city of this historic uprising? Will the nascent police state patched together by Scott Walker to maintain control of the Capitol building become a permanent feature of our town? Is it a foothold for the militarization trend that has been thus far successfully avoided? What special sorts of punitive measures will the conservatives aim at the city of Madison? Will the events of the past few weeks open opportunities to bring the segregated communities of Madison—all of which will suffer under the Walker agenda—into substantive contact? How will the Gen Y students—grad, undergrad, and high school—who played powerful roles and gained real political experience, move forward as young, radicalized adults facing much greater personal uncertainties than those before them? Are we seeing the beginning of their generational moment?

Although nothing in this struggle has been settled with finality, I can say that the old “normal” of Madison, if it never comes back, won’t be much missed. It is like what Rich Feldman said about the so-called economic recovery—the recovery the pundits keep talking about, and so much of officialdom presents as desirable, is basically imperialism. Scott Walker’s attacks have revealed what used to be normal as a temporary mirage. It lasted for decades, but it was temporary nonetheless. If Madison was a pocket of comfort, health, and freedom, in the continuing unfolding of the global crisis of capitalism that pocket has been turned out. Over the last four weeks, and really just in time, the people of Madison, in a big way, rejoined the people of Detroit, Fort Wayne, Rockford, Saginaw, and the rest of the settlements of the midwest in our regional front in the global class war.

*

My last note on Madison in the Wisconsin uprising is a parable of sorts. While we were out battling the Walker agenda on the square and in the Capitol, the power of volunteerism, enlightened consumerism, best retail practices, and the cancerous business models of corporate America came home in the news that Borders would be shutting down its Madison store. So for a short while I allowed myself to relish the difference between this,

the window of Avol's Books, one of Madison's independent bookstores, and this.

There are those who believe that the death of any bookstore is reason to mourn. I disagree. But the thrill of our independents outlasting the deep pocketed growth/choke out strategy of the big box chains is only tempered by the knowledge that the independents remain precarious. The latest and most serious threat to an independent bookstore happens to involve our very own Rainbow Bookstore Cooperative. Please support them.

the sunday after wednesday's attack and saturday's masses

This past Saturday’s demonstrations brought 150,000 people out in Madison. But unlike the celebratory mood on previous Saturdays, this was a comparatively somber day. It had to be. After Scott Walker rammed his “budget repair” bill through three days earlier, down the throats of the public, even if possibly in violation of more than one law, by Saturday the fact had settled in. Scott Walker had called labor’s bluff and labor did nothing, at least not immediately. He and the top state senate Republican, Scott Fitzgerald, then went into good cop/bad cop mode, with Walker speaking his reassuring words while Fitzgerald continued to deride all elements of the opposition, especially his Democrat senate colleagues. Either voice by itself would be irritating enough; as a coordinated follow-through to their manuveur, it galls like a hard poke from a momentarily triumphant inferior.

Late into Wednesday night and all day Thursday, angry strike chatter filled the tweet and comment threads. Student walk-outs were floated for Friday, but no union called a strike, and no wildcat strikes erupted. Scott Walker’s move was a dare to the workers. Go ahead, strike, and see what happens, he seemed to be saying. The union leadership studied the situation in emergency meetings and decided against it. Given the lack of strike funds, the likelihood of being fired, and the possibility of public support evaporating behind a work stoppage, there were in fact good reasons for refraining from striking. The unfortunate thing is, the emotional momentum that would carry a strike forward as a real weapon of disruption, similar to how the occupation of the Capitol had brought forth a previously unknown community of support, is now lost. A strike still may be called eventually, but now it can only be a symbolic strike, a one-day affair with no real power. A disruptive strike, as a premeditated action, will surely lose public support, and therefore is off the table, unlike the spontaneous or immediate strikes that could have happened, and would have been, by contrast, driven by the emotion of the events rather than the political calculations of the leadership.

So where does this leave the Wisconsin uprising? Back home in Madison late on Friday, Sam Gould, Jerome Grand, and I worked up a flyer to pass out on Saturday, discussing this situation. We got about 400 out by hand, a drop in the bucket of 150k bodies, but nonetheless a real attempt to have people reflect on our options and opportunities at this time. It was heartening to see many, many signs supporting the Kloppenburg candidacy. To me, this showed that the April 5 election is widely recognized as the next urgent battle, and our next best chance to land a blow on the Walker regime.

The text of our flyer:

 

We will

always remember

who fired

the first shot 

in the      

class war  ❧

  

AS ONE OF OUR COMRADES, SAMUEL Á LOVE, DECLARED on the evening of Wednesday, March 9, 2011, we will always remember who fired the first shot in the class war. On that night the Republican Party of Wisconsin, led by Governor Scott Walker, played the hardliner card. No more pretending. 

After a night of loud protest in Madison, on Thursday the most aggressive part of the so-called budget repair bill—that which strips public sector workers of their right to collectively bargain—was passed by the state assembly. Walker signed the bill, rescinded his layoff notices, and now puts on a happy face, telling everybody to go along with it, that he knows better than anyone how hard the medicine is, but never fear, it is for the good of all. Arrogance is apparently a requirement for the new generation of conservative ideologues.

So even as we prepare for and attend the largest demonstration we can possibly muster for Saturday, we must at the same time consider the reality. This first phase of the struggle—heroic, inspiring, and creative in many respects—is drawing to a close. They won.

But the war is far from settled.

Their opening victory and our setback took place even as the next three fronts open up in full. They are:

1. The April 5 elections for Wisconsin Supreme Court. That is right around the corner.
2. Challenges to the legality of the new law. The day Walker signed the bill, Dane County filed a suit to block the enactment of the bill. Other lawsuits may follow.
3. Recall campaigns, already underway for state senators, and less than a year from now for Scott Walker.

Of the three fronts, the most pressing is the April 5 election. JoAnne Kloppenburg must be elected. David Prosser, who has already declared his intention to support the Walker agenda from the bench, must be defeated. The current court is split 4-3, with a conservative majority. We have the opportunity to overturn the balance. The term for a Wisconsin Supreme Court justice is ten years. Both candidates have accepted public funding for their campaigns and therefore cannot accept donations of funds from individuals. But you can help the Kloppenburg campaign through volunteering, spreading the word, and most of all, voting and making sure your friends and family in Wisconsin vote, too.

The legal challenges are mostly out of the hands of the grassroots. But here again, the April 5 election matters, because many of these laws will be decided by the courts. A vote for Kloppenburg is a vote against Walker!

The recall campaigns need all the help they can get, both in terms of funds and volunteer labor. The sixty day countdown is already down to less than fifty. Being specific to senate districts, all of them depend on the committed activism—and voting!—of local citizens. But there is no precedent for a tide of recall campaigns on this scale. By seeing these recall campaigns through to their ends, with focus and dedication, our movement can make history again.

To sum up this short analysis of where we are at, the utility of the demonstrations is fading. We in the movement must pivot; the electoral campaigns on the horizon can stop and/or undo the Walker attacks, but will depend on grassroots engagement of a level similar to that which went into the demonstrations. And it needs to happen now—both the April 5 election and the recall campaigns are sprints already underway. Many of you have attended demonstrations repeatedly and regularly over the first phase. Let’s apply the lesson from that experience to the next phase of the struggle: how do we build into our regular lives the political work that is now needed?

Scott Walker is counting on us forgetting this ever happened. He and his people will do everything they can to both rewrite history and distract. In addition to their manipulation, we’ll have to combat the natural distraction of the corporate media. This is the challenge as we move into the protracted phase of the struggle.

Electoral politics are not fun, not glamorous, and there is no guarantee that retaking control of the senate or the governor’s office will result in the undoing of the Walker agenda. This is not a philosophical argument for electoral engagement, only a view to what is immediately ahead for us. After April 5 and the recall campaigns, there will be yet more and different things to do. A culture of resistance, with variable tactics and a diversity of engagements, is what we are building. Let’s keep on building it together, in Wisconsin and around America—BECAUSE WE WILL ALWAYS REMEMBER.

—Your fellow citizens of the Midwest Radical Culture Corridor, 3/12/2011