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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

 

 

the conservatives go on offense

I type this post tonight from Chicago, where I'm staying with my ill mother. Though I've been in and out of Madison ever since this whole thing started, it is the events of tonight have shown me what it feels like to watch what's going on in Madison from a distance and wish you were there. At the same time, in the age of mediated political conflict, getting the distance view is also important to understand in order to better shape the local, on the ground struggle. In Madison, it's a battle for space, control of the Capitol, and a gathering of massed bodies, but at the same time it's the production of a representation for distance media.

Tonight Scott Walker, through the actions of his senate allies, played his hardliner card, with textbook lead-up. Yesterday’s weirdness, in which Walker leaked emails between he and some of the awol senate Dems, had people wondering what was up. Now we know. The emails were completely insubstantial and didn’t go anywhere, supposedly of a “hey, let’s talk”, “what about?”-variety, and not much further. But the fact that he could prove that he sent an email and Dems responded meant that he could sell a line to whatever media would listen to him, ie that he was “in negotiations,” that he was “softening,” that he is “willing to talk.” Lies, media manipulation, and more lies.

It was a perfect set-up for tonight. We were taken by surprise. Touche, Mr. Walker.

But he didn’t count on a few things. One, it seems that again he underestimated the motivation, the level of engagement, and the speed in communication in the movement. People were being called to the Capitol right around 6 pm in emergency emails and social media, as soon as word of their procedural plan broke. This created the dual movement surge: of bodies on the square and grassroots media rippling through the communication ethers, instantly countering the right wing narrative. This thing was not going to be snuck through without hailing the people into impromptu physical demonstrations and crazy message sharing, not with such thick and rapid communication networks and such practiced demonstrators. Sounds like the crowds on the square grew all night long from then on. 

And two, Walker wasn’t able to fully secure the Capitol (much less the square) before pulling this provocation. Partly because of having alienated the Madison and UW police departments, not to mention having antagonized the Dane County Sheriff, Walker couldn’t realize the police state I'm sure he wanted and was advised to impose. The result is that tonight demonstrators have re-taken the Capitol, with anger, joy, and massive numbers. The people’s noise chamber and social forum, which drove Republicans crazy for two weeks, is back for the moment. Nobody's sure how long this occupation will last, but the point is made–the GOP doesn't hold title to this building. Check out the live stream. In between chants and songs protestors are discussing through an open mic under the rotunda the question of where this movement is going, what needs to be done, etc.

Finally, the recall efforts targeting the GOP state senators have just gained another shot of energy. John Nichols believes that the recall efforts already had senators scared on the GOP side, and that this manuveur was triggered in part because of GOP leadership nervousness. Read this impassioned response to the Republican move by Kristopher M. Rowe, coordinator of the grassroots, self-organized Alberta Darling recall effort, and one of the amazing voices to have emerged from this movement. If you can, do like I did, give them a few bucks. The north shore villages she represents are some of the wealthiest parts of Wisconsin.

I and many coming from Chicago will be there for Saturday, which now promises to be the biggest demonstration thus far, probably by a wide margin. A lot of things can and will happen between now and then, particularly in the area of legal challenges and whether strikes commence. School walk-outs are planned for Friday, as are sick-outs.

What has become clear after tonight is that this man will stop at nothing. He doesn't know any limits. But we also now understand that he will continue to make mistakes.

 

from madison, third report

This third report from Madison is difficult to write. Since at least the middle of last week there are too many lines of development for one person to follow, much less explain. In that sense, the Wisconsin uprising has truly become a broad movement, complete with sub-fronts, fissures, and rumors swirling daily. Ten days ago I still had the security of knowing that I had a privileged view of the struggle by virtue of living here. Now, I get the feeling that I’m only seeing the close-up action, while larger forces with national reach, perhaps imperceptible to us inside the city limits, are somehow shaping the contest.

This feeling of disconnect, of the local movement having lost its monopoly on the narrative, was confirmed when I started receiving email blasts last week from MoveOn, Democracy for America, TrueMajority, and other national progressive groups. After about the third one (and there have been countless since) I cringed to see the creativity, humor, and outrage of a citizen and worker-driven, organically developing movement that has no central leadership, and variable demands, be reduced to a branded online petition and donation button. I’ll take the sectarian newspaper hawkers over the dumbness of a professionally marketed email cause (of the week, or until donations crest) any day. At least the sectarian leftists entertain with their inadvertant goofiness. 

Let’s talk about three fronts to this battle: the space of the Capitol, the April 5 election, and the possibility of a strike. Each one is a complicated tale in its own right.

Up until about last Sunday night, Feb 27, the Capitol building could be accurately described as occupied. Up until late this past Thursday there were still protestors inside. For their last four days they dwindled in number and were basically cut off from the outside. The attrition—once a person exited, they were not allowed back in—guaranteed that the authorities would retake the Capitol sooner or later.

The Capitol police had been boxing demonstrators out of various corridors and corners of the building all week long. The occupied space shrunk continuously through the simple tactic of clearing people out of a section “for cleaning” and then marking that section off with police tape and posting police to guard it. The order to vacate the building in whole was finally delivered on Sunday, but with several hundred demonstrators inside, the police chose to let people stay but locked newcomers out. And so the attrition began. Looking back, it was a very smart non-confrontational move on the part of the Capitol police.

This Wisconsin constitution specifies that the Capitol is to remain open to the public during all daytime hours. Scott Walker flouted this constitutional guarantee, thereby inviting a lawsuit. A Dane County judge quickly granted the demonstrators a temporary restraining order on Monday, preventing the governor from locking out the public. But he flouted that, too, and kept only one door unlocked and guarded, and set rules for who could come in—some vague requirement that it be “on official business.” The situation became so ridiculous that the Dane County sheriff, Jim Mahoney, took the extraordinary step of relieving his deputies of having to guard the entrances. Walker doesn’t control the sheriff, and Mahoney let him know it by quipping that the sheriff’s deputies “are not palace guards.” Thus continued the sub-plot of Scott Walker antagonizing even law enforcement. (Word from unnamed sources is, the Madison police—one of the best educated forces in the country—are resentful. He’s transferred into Madison a bunch of outstate cops to help, but their loyalty is questionable, too. Only the Capitol police are under his strict control.)

The Teaching Assistants Association ran the occupation—coordinated cleaning, managed the food, kept in contact with the police, etc—and they had the option on Sunday to end the occupation on their terms, in consultation with the police. They chose not to, and the lockout is what happened; after a few days of legal wrangling, the building was opened to the public again, but with shifting and possibly illegal conditions placed by the governor. No matter. Even with this setback and miscalculation, the occupation was a success. In America there have been only a handful of occupations of state capitol buildings historically, and all the rest were only for a day or part of day. The occupation in Madison went on day and night for thirteen days. Already it is widely acknowledged as an historic event. The longer term ramifications are unsettled, but clearly there will be some. As far as the governor bringing in the heavies goes, here again, as with this whole sorry tale to begin with, he overreached. The video of a Democrat lawmaker getting thrown to the ground while trying to enter the building has further hurt the standing of the governor. 

Equally important has been the nature of the occupation, what it proved to the demonstrators, and what the space became. During the day the rotunda was a cauldron of shared anger, the drumming and unison shouting so loud it made your ears ring, and kept the lawmakers hidden deep in their chambers and offices on edge all day long. By the second week, the occupied areas would turn into a social forum in the late evenings and nighttime, with people coming to read the hundreds of signs, to talk politics with strangers, to eat free food, and to perform music or speechify from the open mike center. It was quite a sight, and for anybody who entered during those days, one’s sense of possibility could not help but be enlarged—this was a co-op, a commune, a punk house (where everybody cleaned up after themselves, imagine that), a labor temple, a free speech zone…in the freakin’ state Capitol building! When does that ever happen?! (Apparently, it has happened before, in 1985. See comments.) This will not be erased from memory anytime soon. Also worth reiterating here is the way the occupation started. That first Tuesday night/early Wed morning, Feb 15-16, when debate was cut off by the Republicans, those waiting to testify against Walker’s bill were so many and so livid with anger that the police couldn’t do anything. The cops were too scared. Those who weren’t scared were sympathetic.

Here is very good take on the occupation, how it evolved, what it served, what it meant. Sorry, you have to read it on Facebook.

Next: The April 5th election. The reality is, should Scott Walker ram through his bill—and all indications are that he still believes that he can—many of the provisions will be decided in the courts. The Wisconsin Supreme Court now has a 4-3 conservative majority, but a sitting conservative judge is up for election on April 5, facing a liberal challenger, an environmental law attorney from lefty Madison. (In Wisconsin judges are an elected position. As in all other parts of American political life, what used to be a rather sedate, non-partisan affair has in recent years become yet another polarized fight zone.) This election will be treated as a referendum on the Walker agenda. One question is, then, how will the movement make the transition from street demonstrations to taking a side in an electoral campaign? Are there enough people with enough energy to keep Scott Walker embattled with large demonstrations at the Capitol for the next four weeks while also ramping up work on what is normally a low-key, low turnout, spring election? As well, there are now recall campaigns underway, targeting the eight eligible Republican state senators, ie who have been in office for at least a year already. The recall process is by design extremely demanding, and no matter how energized an electorate, requires a great deal of effort for even a chance of success. The movement only needs to recall and replace three senators to gain control of the Wisconsin Senate, but even this will require the dedicated attention of many activists, not to mention money, legal counsel, media work, etc.

In sum, since my last report, battles on the terrain of conventional electoral politics have emerged as another true front of the struggle. Here, too, as with the contest over control of the Capitol, there is a politics of space in play, but at the comparatively neglected scale of the state senate districts, typically encompassing an average population of 160k, some more and some less, and a ground area of about two or more counties. One by-product of all this mess is, thousands more state residents will learn for the first time what the size and shape of their senate district is, and, moreover, what it means to act politically at that scale of space. For nearly a generation now, the US left has permitted the right to act at this and other mid-level scales of governance with hardly any challenge. This newly sparked engagement cannot be a bad thing, especially in the long term—unless it drains movement attention and substantial bodies from the still-important demonstration spectacles on the Capitol square. To spell out the dilemma: the fourteen awol Democrat senators are the only thing standing between Scott Walker and his agenda being legally realized, but they can only stay away for as long as there are large daily and occasionally massive demonstrations of support, and realistically, can only stay away until the April 5 election. So the demonstrations must not dilute the campaign messaging, and ideally, need to echo it, but at the same time not be reduced to it. To lose the April 5th election and to fail on the most achieveable recall efforts would, unquestionably, be major defeats.

Finally, there is the spectre of a strike. The truism of labor’s ulimate power being that of withholding its work activity, which in the US context sounded practically meaningless only a month ago, rings with revitalized freshness, given the threats of force and firings being leveled by this governor. But how and when? Who and where? Teachers? Students? Those who are legally granted the right strike, or those who instantly run the risk of being fired? What is the strike supposed to communicate? How does it get organized, and what kinds of practicalities would be involved? Would it be a symbolic one-day strike or a true shut-down of business as usual? The South Central Federation Labor has already endorsed a general strike, so the language is getting out there and these questions coming into play.

Already there are two points of reference, generated by the movement itself. One, during the first week we saw the Madison Public School teachers essentially call a strike without using strike language, shutting down the schools for three days through a massive sick-out. It was a bet that paid off, but only because the message was not primarily about leaving work to protest the budget cuts and attacks on unions; rather, the message was one of love, as in, the teachers love their jobs, schools, and students so much, that they are walking out, and the students love their teachers so much, that they are joining them, and the parents love their children’s teachers so much, that they are supporting them. The message of love is what a proper and possibly general strike must convey—the conservatives have found it impossible to argue against it, and even have professed the same love, to the jeers of the public. And then two, to return to the occupied Capitol, there now exists an actual model of a self-organized society, an example of something that worked. Over the two weeks of occupation, food stations, childcare, clean-up crews, first aid and internal communication structures inside the Capitol were set up as needed. In contemporary America the term mutual aid is tossed around by radicals as a vague, dreamy concept, or else made real through slowly growing limited projects around a given focus of cooperative energy. Here mutual aid became real in a way that was entirely outside of our American experience, as a process of change, spontaneous giving, and practical adjustment, focused on meeting immediate and concrete needs that arose in new situations daily. What happened at the Capitol shows us that the many kinds of support that a strike beyond three days would require *will* materialize, even if in the end it’s neither perfect nor sustainable. Strikers will not be left high and dry by their fellow workers, their neighbors, their friends.

The who and when of a strike is the biggest question. If Scott Walker follows through on his threatened firings of state workers, 1500 or a thousand at a time, for no other reason than to pressure the absent Dem senators into returning from out of state for a vote, then the mood for striking will go up. I suspect the teachers’ union would be the first to declare; if and how other unions respond will be most important. If AFSCME turns scared in that moment and publicly dissociates itself from strike tactics, the battle may be lost. If they merely hold their cards, refusing to say one way or other, then I think the momentum towards a strike will build, especially if there are massive student strikes, too. If any other union joins the teachers with a sympathy strike that goes beyond a short symbolic gesture, then the general strike may indeed be on, especially if the governor reacts with aggression.

Other points:

1)   As expected, national media coverage has been atrocious. While utterly oblivious in some significant and surprising respects, Scott Walker has proven himself a skillful handler of journalists, and nearly impossible to shake from the script. While he’s managed to skew the national media discussion toward the smokescreen of budgetary matters by repeating the same script with each and every appearance, the non-corporate media (just one example: rotundaville) has been disseminated so widely, and the numerous media lies of Walker are so quickly debunked, that Walker’s single and well-practiced strategy is not enough to drive the narrative.

2)   After Walker unveiled his bi-annual state budget last Tuesday, new outrage arose from heretofore quiescent parts of the state—particularly in the rural areas and in the urban core. The massive cuts to schools and healthcare he had planned for the budget were based on the first bill passing, which would have freed up county and town governments to do away with their public sector union employee contracts as a way to make up the shortfall in state funding. The governor put off announcing his budget for two weeks, hoping the demonstrations over the “budget repair bill” would die down. They haven’t, and now he’s had to show the whole state exactly what he has in mind for them, thereby digging himself a deeper hole, politically. After three weeks, we can say definitively: Scott Walker has been the greatest gift to the American left since Richard Nixon, and maybe even since Bull Connor.

Here is a little video from Tuesday, March 1, outside the Capitol. At the very moment this was shot, Scott Walker is announcing details of his budget at a press conference inside the building. He packed the media room with a gallery of his corporate supporters, smuggled in through the steam tunnels. He illegally locked out the demonstrators, but couldn't lock out the noise; they could hear us inside.

 

3)   The rural and urban expressions of discontent arrive in Madison this coming weekend. A farmer-organized convoy of tractors is scheduled to demonstrate on the square on the same day that a march of high school students from Milwaukee arrives. These actions come just in time. Even though the past three Saturday demonstrations have turned out massive numbers of protestors, the energy that comes out of a new and unexpected movement is dissipating. The protracted struggle has begun and the anti-Walker constituencies must adjust to the reality of political work without the advantage of novelty. As with the convoy and march, coming up with new storylines is a necessity if we are to maintain visibility as proof of commitment.

4)   As the struggle has take a turn for the local, with thousands of activists diving into the minutiae of recall campaigns, dealing with the legalities concerning the fourteen absent Dem senators, and countless other details of hard-slog politicking, the international dimensions are fading from front-line consciousness. As it happens, the main battle from the other side of the globe is no longer a peaceful occupation of Tahrir Square, but a shooting civil war in Libya, complete with hundreds of gruesome deaths, displaced peoples, and a paralysis in international response. Thus, the comparisons no longer suit. But even without convenient parallels that insist on connection, I hope it is not lost to people both inside and outside of Wisconsin, inside and outside of the US—what’s happening in Wisconsin matters to the world, for the following reason. The election last November of Scott Walker along with Ron Johnson’s defeat of Russ Feingold for a Wisconsin US Senate seat were taken by the national GOP as a model and pathway to their future power, so much so that Wisconsin GOP head Reince Priebus was elected to lead the Republican National Committee shortly after, and then Janesville, Wisc., congressman Paul Ryan was granted the slot to respond to Obama’s State of the Union address. Walker is seen as the operations guy, Priebus the strategist, and Ryan the policy brains—the rising star triumvirate of the GOP. Because of their national prominence, if they manage to win the day in Wisconsin, the rest of the world will feel no doubt feel the effects. If we win, we will have struck a blow against all three. How to reinstall the internationalism of the movement's first week under these changed conditions is the challenge.