propositions press... 2.0

second report on the wisconsin movement

I tell the story from where I left off. That was last Friday afternoon, February 19.

The situation at that moment: Madison public schools shut down for three days due to student walk-outs and teacher sick-outs. From Tuesday on, there had been big turnouts of union workers, high school students, university students, graduate students, nurses, firefighters, teachers, a great many public school parents, police, and all manner of supporters. Senate Democrats were still out of state, denying Walker a quorum. Jesse Jackson spoke to a crowd of thousands at the evening rally, marking the beginning of a procession of national figures to descend on Madison.

The word all that day and into the night was that the first organized Scott Walker support rally was scheduled for the next day, Saturday, from noon to three on the square. The rally for conservatives was being put together by tiny but well-heeled right-wing groups Americans for Prosperity, the Wisconsin GrandSons of Liberty, some small Tea Party groups, and who knows who else. The conservatives were already using the event as infowar—bloggers and event announcers described the Saturday counter-demo as showing the world Wisconsin’s real majority. This was a direct challenge to the six day-old movement on the level of visible numbers, bodies in the street and in the Capitol. With no new development from the governor’s office or the legislators, Saturday’s rallies would be the next chapter in the unfolding story.

The Friday evening messages flying around the part of the anti-Walker universe that is visible to me made a single point: Saturday’s turnout had to be massive. The Wisconsin movement had to write the narrative by outnumbering the conservatives 10-1 or 20-1, precluding any possibility for the story to be told without mentioning the crushing imbalance, especially given that the national media were by this day fully engaged.

The pro-labor/pro-education forces met the test. By the time we got there at noon the entire paved area of the square was filled with anti-Walker people, the inner sidewalks and the outer (more sparsely), and some of the lawn areas, plus, we cannot forget, the several thousand (still!) inside the Capitol. The rally for conservatives, organized under the banner I Stand With Walker, by contrast, gathered in the interior part of the square, well inside the corner of Main and Pinckney, and didn’t even fill it.  Even inside the mass of bodies assembled in front of the Tea Party stage, there were anti-Walker and pro-education/pro-worker signs visible. The right wing turnout would be generously granted at a thousand. The progressive side had to have been at least 70,000, and that was the estimate of the police. The space filled by bodies was more than twice that of Thursday and Friday, when estimates were at 30,000.

To give you a sense of the difference, see this video that Ben Manski shared on social media. As he says, the stationary crowd standing in front of the stage is the Tea Party rally, but there were conspicuous anti-Walker sign holders in there, too. The rest of the square, all the way around, and packing the other three corners are all us. On this day the Wisconsin movement transcended protest and became a phenomenon, something that draws attention just because one wants to see for themselves what this thing is. In this case the point of curiosity centers around whether this assemblage is as mainstream as the images depict it. Saturday proved that you don’t get 70,000 people together in the street in Wisconsin without it being a picture of America.

Later on Saturday the rumor circulated that some doctors from UW Health had made it known that they were willing to sign illness excuse forms for teachers who continued to demonstrate. Slate reports that over the weekend one or more doctors actually set up a station near the square to write doctor’s notes for any demonstrator who asked for one. Because of the dishonesty involved and the standards of integrity doctors are held to, the episode attracted a fair bit of shaming by right wing observers and prompted calls for an investigation. I prefer to interpret the action as a continuation of the domino-effect of different groups and constituencies taking the initiative to share risk, in support of one another, in real solidarity. And it is not a stretch. The doctors know that Badger Care and Medicaid are in line on the chopping block, which greatly hurting their poorest patients, not to mention the public school cuts that will hurt their own children.

Sunday turned out to be a day of rest, relatively. The weather was crummy, all day and night, cold sleet and freezing rain. Though rallies were announced, there were many fewer demonstrators. But for those who showed up, there was the Capitol, so for another day and night, the rotunda was kept occupied with people and energy. Medea Benjamin, having just returned from visiting Tahrir Square in Cairo during the crucial last days of the movement that toppled Mubarak, spent the night with demonstrators in the Capitol and reports on it here, especially the echoes of Egypt she sees and hears in Madison. What they portend, and how those echoes reverberate, and who else hears them, are all questions worth considering. My favorite Egypt reference so far: a super minimalist sign that read very simply, 18 DAYS.

On Monday the public school students and teachers returned to class in Madison. In Milwaukee, it was a President’s Day holiday for Milwaukee Public Schools. That and the fact that Monday was a state worker furlough day, made bodies available for yet another day. Jesse Jackson walked with Madison East high school students in the morning, leading his preach/chant call-and-response with them (“Say this, I AM!” I am! “Somebody!” Somebody!). Tom Morello played a show for the unions on Monday evening. Reverend Billy Talen was scheduled to appear on Tuesday. While the right wing blogosphere fulminates against the Obama administration for having been the architects of this uprising (needless to day, their imaginations are working overtime), it seems now that the left wing establishment and celebrity pool is trying to catch up with and support this locomotive of dissent, lest they miss it.

Tuesday's rallies went on as routine, almost. Again, morning and evening, and plenty of milling around in between. Unlike the festive atmosphere of last week, this was quieter but conversational. The square had become a space for political discussion, strangers talking to strangers, looking toward the uncertain future together. I spoke to metal workers from Milwaukee who told me about Walker's disasterous tenure as county executive there. I spoke with a UW custodian and a retired guy who came down from Menomonie. And then there were these two women, doing their part to change the conversation from the GOP-manufactured budget crisis to what this is really about:

The proliferating solidarities hit at least three more high points from Saturday to today. The first was the viral image of Muhammed Saladin Nasair holding his now famous sign. Wisconsinites lapped up the gift of symbolism and association, but up until this pic circulated there had not been any indication that people in Egypt could hear or see us, or that our fight mattered to them. This image sent a good many demonstrators into elation—it showed us that translocal communication, bringing movements closer together, could happen. This was quickly followed by news of Ian’s Pizza becoming a receiving station for out of town donations—hundreds of orders—to the demonstrators, including a few pies paid for by somebody in Egypt. By Tuesday, the Capitol rotunda is decorated with pizza boxes repurposed into signs.

The second high point followed weekend rumors of the Capitol police possibly readying to execute an order to vacate the building. The word was that Walker is taking right wing heat for not having already cleaned house, for letting the disorder get out of hand. Madison area firefighters, themselves exempt from the provisions in the bill that would strip collective bargaining, responded dramatically to the rumors by coming to camp out with the students on Monday night, nearly sixty of them. Supposedly, they intend to be an overnight protest presence for the duration, thereby setting up the potentially uncomfortable image of police evicting the firefighters should the governor order them out. Whether all the police would even obey the orders might even be a real question. The firefighters are putting their reputations and prestige on the line for the others even though nobody asked them to. It is impressive.

And then there was Tuesday morning. On my way down to the square I checked into WORT’s noontime discussion on, of course, the movement. Lena Taylor, one of the fourteen absent Democratic senators, was on the phone from somewhere in Illinois. While on the air, she said that she had just received a text confirming that the House Democrats of the Indiana legislature had, like the Wisconsin 14, fled to Illinois in order to deny the Republican majority a quorum. The radio host and studio guests let out a cheer. There’s only one thing better than solidarity. Contagion. 

Observations:

1)   On the “echoes of Egypt” question—yes, it is real. Scott Walker’s bill was a carefully coordinated effort, as evidenced by the fact that supportive television ads aimed at demonizing the unions were aired the day the bill was unveiled. Clearly, the frontal assault was planned in advance. Nonetheless, he and his masters, for all their money and tactical thinking, have showed their almost unbelievable blind spots, chief among them, having made their opening attack on the SAME day that Hosni Mubarak resigns. You don’t openly threaten a Wisconsin workforce with the National Guard in the very moment that a three-decade-old dictatorship in a big country (that the world media has been following for more than two weeks) goes down unless you’re practically daring people to make the association—or you are completely oblivious. However substantive are the parallels between the Madison and Cairo movements, from that moment on, the narrative opened up in a way that continues to be advantageous to the demonstrators, in terms of how we see ourselves, and how we think of ourselves as having a world audience. Walker’s blind spot hearkens back to Debord, where he says the spectacle, for all its tendencies to accumulate possibilities and thereby curtail them, loses it ability to think strategically.

2)   The battle of bodies is over. For the moment, the opposition has conceded the point. All the websites that promoted the counter demo have erased their reporting on it, in other words, have chalked it up as a loss and moved on. From there they moved to the arena of pranking, dirty tricks, and unapologetic meddling. The call for trouble makers and the out of state-driven effort to recall Democratic state senators fall into these categories. But even here the progressives have scored the first point. Today, Wednesday, by mid-morning the news broke that Scott Walker has been caught on tape in a conversation with an activist posing as billionaire conservative donor David Koch. We don’t know where this will lead in the news cycle of the next few days, but already it is big. There are calls from public interest groups for a full investigation into the relationship between Walker and the Koch empire, and journalists smell blood.

3)   While the beating heart of the movement continues to be the capitol rotunda, which during waking hours ranges from very loud to super loud (see any youtube video of the rotunda demonstrations), the movement is at a turning point. Walker is dug in, he’s made that clear. The unions are, as well. Their opening gambit of conceding all demands for employee contributions in exchange for the basic right of collective bargaining paid off handsomely in the form of a mass movement and popular support. But now they cannot concede anything else. The language of strike is in the air. When and how is the question. Before the bill gets rammed through, or only after? The workers and students must think through, must imagine what an effective strike will look like—how to maintain the beauty and love that has been communicated so well by the demonstrations, but in the form of a strike, ie a measured, targeted, well-articulated, and loving withdrawal of labor. The demonstrations have been disruptive, true, but that has not been the main story precisely because the evidence of self-organization, creativity, sincerity, and novel forms of sociality has taken over the storyline, to the point of drawing in participants who want to help author it. When Walker carries out his threat to start firing workers, which may begin as early as the end of this week, the question of a strike will move front and center. Then, for supporters from afar, the situation will also change.

4)   How to place this movement? Not only in relation to current worldwide unrest, but also in comparison to the UC campus strikes of last year, and the Republic Doors and Windows occupation that happened in Chicago in late 2008, the last two instances of real disobedience to come out of an American student or worker left? Compared to those recent American campaigns, here the worker-student divide has been successfully bridged from the inception, and the space of demonstration has been utilized very well, framing the rallies under the gravitas of the Capitol building. No complete thoughts, as everything continues to move here, but the questions of historical significance creep in. Especially when you see signs like this:

There is much more to say, particularly about under-surface tensions within the movement, and how demands beyond that of preserving collective bargaining rights might get articulated in a complementary way. The unity is strong for the moment, but attempts to break it apart unceasing, including a growing security presence at the Capitol, shrinking the public's hold on space, especially overnight. My guess is that rotunda will remain loud during the day but that the sleepovers will end this week. That will not be counted as a defeat, only a natural progression to the next sphere of contestation. On the local level, somehow I keep going back to high school students who catalyzed the movement in the first few days. Multi-hued, multi-lingual, multi-racial—they are the picture of the future, a different one than the (adorable and loving!) older mostly white workers, teachers, and parents. The young of Madison, nearly 50% of color in a traditionally white town, are usually a source of anxiety here—crime, achievement gaps, curfews, etc, etc. But now they’ve show a bit of their minds and hearts, and it gave strength to the rest of us right when we needed it, early. This will be their world, what will they do to shape it, given the chance?

To finish (for now), a short tour of the sign gallery that is the Capitol rotunda, from Tuesday afternoon, Week Two.

http://www.defendwisconsin.org/

Check the Wisconsin AFSCME website for updates on planned actions, especially now that action is being organized outside Madison, in other parts of Wisconsin: http://www.wiafscme.org/

For in town, check the Madison Activist Calendar: http://lists.madimc.org/~infoshop/activistcalendar.html

 

 

report from day five, first chance to reflect

It was only a week ago that I was sitting in the dark, during the Dark Matter session at CAA, receving a stream of texts about Hosni Mubarak’s infuriating kiss-off to the people of Egypt and the world. The uncertainty of that day and then the jubilation of the next leaked over to where I was, in New York, thousands of miles away from Tahrir Square. While visiting friends, the topic rightly kept circling back to Egypt. How could I know then that a movement would be born right here in my own town square only a few days later?

 

I only heard about the planned demonstrations on Monday, while I was in Chicago to teach, via Facebook friends Josh and Catherine and progressive cause pages. Monday was mostly a student event, on the order of a thousand or more bodies. Tuesday’s rally was supposed to have more union organizing behind it. By this time word had spread that the governor had already threatened to call out the National Guard if the public workers resisted the measures that, on that day, looked sure to pass into law.

I made it down on that day expecting maybe a thousand people. Instead, the whole corner of the square on the State Street side was full, plus many hundreds inside the Capitol. Citizens flooded the hearings, booking the public debate list for hours and hours at two minutes per person. Madison firefighters showed up in big block with signs reading Firefighters in Support of Labor. Already there were signs making direct reference to ousting dictators, in Egypt and in Wisconsin. Other groups announced themselves to cheers from the crowd, in moving passages. Later estimates put the event numbers between ten and fifteen thousand. Looking back from the end of the week, this was the key day, the day that clearly showed the demonstrators themselves that a nerve had been touched, that we had strength, that a widespread resistance was in the cards, and that the disgust with the governor’s aggression was shared.

Significantly, Tuesday was the first day of action by high school students. Some 800 students walked out of East, joined by a couple hundred each from West and Memorial. Many had permission from their parents, and the affectionate blessings of their teachers, but were basiclly self-organized. How could a jaded adult not be impressed? Come Tuesday evening, as the citizen commentary at the Capitol went deep into the night, the news hit of a likely sick-out by Madison teachers. That went from rumor to an announced district-wide closing of the schools for Wednesday. The sick-out action was matched instantly by the decision of hundreds still in the Capitol—many of them UW students—to stay the night, essentially beginning a round the clock occupation of the rotunda that continues to the moment of this writing. The chain of events, in which various constituencies signaled their commitment to other constituencies through independent action, was underway.

Other unions, student groups, and ordinary people matched this commitment by turning out to the tune of 30k bodies on Wednesday. As the upswing in momentum could not be denied, the situation began attracting national attention that day forward. Legislators were knocked off balance by the raised stakes. From the governor? Silence. 

On Thursday there was no let up in the action and energy. The biggest news of the morning was the flight of the Wisconsin Senate Democrats, denying the Senate a quorum. Demonstrators correctly read this turn of events as a result of their continued presence and numbers, coupled with online activism, phone calls, and emails. Rumors went in two directions—that the governor would be dispatching the state police to find and force them back, and that two Republicans went awol, as well. There were many guesses flying around the rest of the day, as the Republican maybe-defectors were not named. Cracks in the Republican front? Hmm…. 

 

I noticed two new elements on Thursday. One was the first counter-demonstrator I’d seen. Only one, but I’m sure a herald of things to come. And two, the left-wing protest vultures arrived—sectarian leftists hawking papers and doing their tired schtick. Will this scene, beautiful and open for the first three days, devolve into the usual predictable performed farce of contemporary American protest? This is a new anxiety, not felt until Thursday. 

By Thursday evening the game had changed again. Ed Schultz arrived for live broadcasts. Rachel Maddow gave long segments to coverage of the demonstrations. Right wing media began their own spin cycle, putting out non-stop union-bashing language and blaming the selfishness of the teachers for everything from the deficit to the swine flu. President Obama, for whom Madison is a personal base of support, weighed in on the side of the workers, though as is his wont, in blasé tones of general support and room temperature criticisms of Scott Walker. Now it had become a national story, with the symbolic stakes raised to the level of a referendum on the Tea Party agenda and the first post-2010 test of progressive muscle.

Inside the Capitol at midnight on Thursday the energy remained high, with drumming, chanting, students spread out slumber-party style, complete with pajamas and those fuzzy animal hats that somehow look cute when worn by nineteen year-old psychology majors. The interior walls were by this time plastered with posters and signs. Banners of solidarity from other cities, states (Baltimore, Detroit, North Carolina), and countries (Pakistan?!) draped the railings. Former and possibly future Madison mayor Paul Soglin joined the campers, along with more than a few grown-ups and graybeards. At the same time there was an element of uncertainty and that weird mixture of euphoria and fear that comes with breaking established limits. The security presence was minimal, but everybody knew that the order to vacate could come at any time. Throughout the day flyers were distributed outlining the procedures of an order to vacate and the various consequences for disobeying. The inevitable nighttime exhaustion also begged the question—how long can this go on? At what point does Walker bring in the enforcers? And if things continue, what will Week Two look and feel like? It is at this point I gain yet another level of respect for those who occupied Tahrir Square. 

A few things are clear:

1)   At this point the battle is being fought both in the square and in the media, and the two theaters go together. Control of the narrative must be kept from the right wing noise machine and that means telling the story from the square, with the authority of being here, of seeing and hearing how things are unfolding, of having the confidence that comes with lived experience to tell the dittoheads, very simply, that they are ignorant, clueless, and don’t know what the hell they are talking about.

2)   The presence in the square has attained the scale of a movement. Very literally, there are too many pockets of action within the space and time of the square happening for any one person to know. Walking around today, within minutes I witnessed the noisy rally inside the rotunda, the incoming UW student march of 1000s along the State Street side, and the union rally in front of television cameras on the East Washington side. People in the thick of each cluster were oblivious to what was happening in other parts of the square. Not to mention, this was at around 12:30 pm. There had already been a large rally organized by the AFL-CIO at 10 am. Jesse Jackson will speak at 5 pm, and there will be evening rallies, as well.

3)   It is the unity of the senate Republicans versus that of the Democrats. Who will divide and conquer first is the question. I’m sure Walker is scheming to buy off one of the Dems, promise that one senator everything in order to get him to sell out the rest, because one vote is all he needs to reach a quorum. On the other hand, there are Republicans spooked by the size and tenor of the demonstrations, and they know that Walker may have overreached to the detriment of their own careers. Targeted pressure will determine the fate of this bill.

4)   The reaction is underway, though with how much strength is unknown. A Tea Party organized counter event is scheduled for Saturday noon. Word is spreading for progressive forces to show in overwhelming numbers. If the counter bodies are many—say 5000—there will be tension. If they are pathetically small—say 500 or less—then we must take full advantage and tell the story as proof of the inarguable majority strength of the progressives and the absolute corporate whoredom of the GOP. Provocateurs cannot be ruled out, and given the dirty tricks of the right ever since the ’08 election, probably ought to be expected. People attending need to know who they are with. A little paranoia in times of crisis is not such a bad thing.

5)   The movement has a longer term concrete goal, that of recalling Scott Walker. Wisconsin’s recall process is not an easy one. The big challenge is the time limit. From the day the recall effort gets officially filed, we’ll have only 60 days to gather signatures in a number set as a proportion of the total votes in the last gubernatorial election. The current battle lays the groundwork for that effort better than anything else could have done. Many signs among demonstrators make reference to the option, and there are people coordinating already, in preparation for Walker’s first year anniversary, at which time the campaign can begin.

6) The creativity and humor has been impressive. Demonstrators are entertaining each other, showing each other their inventiveness, and making the square the place to be. That alone makes this a resistance of a different, more promising kind.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

a new york journal

I just reached home after two weekends in Chicago and the days in between in New York. I went for the CAA conference, or at least that was the excuse. The last time I was in New York was the fall of 2008. It was September, around when Barack Obama’s candidacy first started to take on a sense of inevitability. The stakes of the presidential election had been raised that very week with the $600 billion bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers. Creative Time’s Democracy in America Convergence Center opened over the days I was there and so did Signs of Change show at Exit Art. There was a sense of possibility in the air and in the season.

This time it was different. Signs of Change is now a wonderful book as well as an exhibition. A little more than two years into the Barack Obama administration, the United States is in the full grips of a conservative reaction. How appropriate is it that the only show I managed to see in a week in New York was AbEx in NY at Moma. Not that the AbEx artists were conservative (Motherwell’s Spanish Revolution elegies positively radiated with the vitality of revolutions, then and now), but the retreat into formalism, individual spiritual journeys, and abstract systems is a path that always stands in high relief in times when retreat from the political seems perversely reasonable from a survival standpoint. I was fortunate to walk through the show with one who knows about painting, my neighbor from Madison Derrick Buisch. True to myself, I found the drawings and work on paper as or more satisfying than the canvases. But as far as seeing other shows goes, fortunately this was New York, which meant I could see some cool and canonical things without having to go out of my way, such as…

 

The conservative climate of the nation was not in evidence at the conference. It being CAA, there were quite a few sessions that included a radical or leftist scholarship. My contribution to the conference was managing the production of the Radical Art Caucus newsletter and helping to distribute it on site. This year’s was the first issue overseen by me. The heavy lifting was done by Sam Gould of Red76, whom I drafted in by suggesting to him that we make it an issue of the Journal of Radical Shimming. Being a touch manic and always open-minded about audiences and opportunities, he jumped aboard. Sam, in turn, brought into the project (it had by this point become “a project”) our friend Mike Wolf. The two of them engaged in an extended Google chat done over two sessions about something they’re calling “critical imaginative communities.” You can read that chat here. 

Sam did the layout and the interior graphic art. I assembled the newsletter text and fed him the files. I composed and proofed the front page display text in hand-set wood and metal type, scanned it, and sent that to Sam for use in the layout. Sam had a line on a very reasonable printer in Queens, arranged for 1500 to be printed, and had the invoice sent to me.

 

Joanna Gardner-Huggett, our RAC secretary, took on the task of receiving the delivery at the hotel, right near the conference site. Over the days of the conference I called her probably ten or twelve times, trying to figure out how to pick up another bundle. The three co-presidents, Linnea Wren, Travis Nygard, and Kaylee Spencer, kept getting them from her, too. Joanna managed the central distribution point well and with good humor. Together we distributed nearly all at the conference. I blanketed the first Dark Matter session, and Alan W. Moore had the second Dark Matter session well-supplied. I started a couple of stacks going around in the jam-packed Centennial Session on Feminism. I passed them out at the Diasporic Asian Art Network meeting and at the University of Southern California reception. I got them into the hands of Margo Machida, Nicholas Mirzoeff, and Martha Rosler. Through run-ins, I got them to some of the friendly faces I first met at other conferences: Richard Meyer, Peter Mortonböck, and Helge Mooshammer. I got them to some people who are name-checked in the interior cascade of critical art players. They seemed to enjoy finding others they recognized in the jumble, and wondered about the names they didn’t know. 

JRS #12 definitely reached hundreds and hundreds of people in the field whom I do not know, and who possibly do not know any of us who were involved in the project. Also, the conference was a great place to make guerrilla placements, like at the book fair. In that sense, making use of CAA as a ready-made audience was a big success. At the same time, there could be some big improvements. For one thing, the listings info was incomplete in one vital area, announcing RAC’s Friday evening meeting and reception. Which, by the way, turned out to be organized as a terrific discussion with two visiting union organizers. I just didn’t have the information when we needed it for inclusion. And for another, the readability of the text in Sam’s radical art tribe graphic was compromised in some key places, which blunted the intended messaging. But no matter—we got it done and distributed, much to the expressed delight of many a conference goer, with only about three weeks lead time, a small budget, and only partial available attention. Not bad for a first effort, and in spirit very true to the best Red76 work.

Other highlights from those days included visiting the activist and videographer Dara Greenwald (who is taking it easy and slow while undergoing medical treatment), getting to see for the first time my collaborators Ryan Griffis and Sarah Ross present in a public event setting (along with Lize Mogel and Sarah Kanouse), and catching up with my crash-pad host Naeem (who was in full-press deadline mode). Oh yeah, and the Mubarak regime fell. That was crazy—sitting in sessions or hitting sessions with stacks of the newsletter while receiving Egypt update texts from Naeem, including a blow by blow account of the president’s final, intrasigient address to the nation.

Finally, I crossed the Whitestone Bridge for an overnight visit to Connecticut to see an elderly uncle who no longer travels. I had never driven that part of the country and was blown away by the many miles of decades and decades worth of suburban overflow from the city. Rolling past all the wealth, the northern end of what the Don Draper character once called “the Cash Belt,” all I could think of were prep school feeder populations and quiet desperation amid the boatloads of taste. The stone walls visible along the Merritt Parkway screamed affluence; the age and history represented by the hundreds-year-old wall work only come into play as a corollary to the modern day wealth of the area. Once in Cheshire, the village where my uncle has lived for 45 years, the blue collar returned to the landscape in the form of Aldi stores and Chinese buffets.