propositions press... 2.0

notes to a movement: wisconsin's lost strike moment

Wisconsin’s Lost Strike Moment

Dan S. Wang/Nicolas Lampert

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

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

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

 The first week.

The flight of the 14 senate Democrats.

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

The April 5 election and aftermath.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

 

 

 

report from madison: why wisconsin?

We are into phase two.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

 

the wisconsin uprising: why madison?

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

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

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

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

*

Picture this~

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The text of our flyer:

 

We will

always remember

who fired

the first shot 

in the      

class war  ❧

  

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

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

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

But the war is far from settled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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.

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

suicide and labor, far and middle east

Another Foxconn suicide was reported last week. That would make fifteen since the rash of worker suicides started last spring.

But I’m not sure this one counts. Or at least if it does, it is important to note some differences in this latest case. For one thing, this report describes the woman as an engineer. I’m pretty sure most or all of the earlier suicides were line workers. And, to be precise, she was no longer a Foxconn employee, having been put on leave for reasons of mental illness. 

Do these differences matter? What does it mean to be “counting” the suicides, anyway? If there is a political interpretation to be had, then does the breaking of a pattern—i.e. that this person might have been a white collar level worker—strengthen the analysis or weaken it? At the very least, whatever this particular woman’s work situation or mental condition, it makes me wonder about the educated work force in China and around the world. Chinese universities are graduating some 300k new engineers every spring. Many of them cannot find employment in the fields of their training. Widespread disappointments are bound to become a social problem at some point, and maybe soon. 

Compare these suicides with the twelve or thirteen self-immolations that have been reported from Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, and elsewhere in the Middle East in the past couple of weeks. These acts were clearly politically motivated, in the sense that the life situation of each actor was so reduced by social circumstances shaped by political forces that they acted out their personal despair through a gesture with symbolic and communicative power. The first of the acts, that by the young man Mohamed Bouazizi, was precipitated by a direct and personal conflict with a police woman, the street-level representative of the repressive and unfair regime. One of the Egyptian attempted self-immolations took place in front of the parliament in downtown Cairo. Doesn't get much more symbolic than that.

In the North African countries the government, and even a particular ruler, is the target. In the Foxconn case, the government is not the target. Rather, a company with an opaque power structure and nebulously defined responsibilities to its workers (but which for thousands extend to providing room, board, and a community) is the target, if you could call it a target. The Foxconn situation presents the discontented with a more abstract power structure (along with still concrete deprivations). It follows that the actions are also more abstract.

To me the contrast between the Foxconn suicides and the North African self-immolations speaks to the possibilities of symbolism in two different contexts, but the same subjective experience of despair and hopelessness on the part of working people. That there is a global labor issue at hand is evidenced by the contradictory reports about Bouazizi’s background. Some say he was an unemployed university graduate, just like the Chinese grads and the thousands of educated unemployed young men throughout the Arab world. Others say he never finished high school and was condemned to life as a street vendor, forever harassed and humiliated by the police. The dual story perfectly captures the present trend, because whichever is true the conclusion is the same: persons without membership in the elite five or ten percent, without the social and family connections, without property and the status that comes with it, whatever part of the world they are from and whatever their merits, face a bleak future. Or, when some stop to think about it, no future at all.

The question is, will the assembly lines and dormitories of the Foxconns of the world be the promised solution to the unemployed of North Africa, as they were delivered to the peasants-turned-workers of rural and small town China? Because if they are, then in the contest between labor and capital the workers of Tunisia may soon have an adversary more difficult to locate than the parliament building, but all the same despair.

 

 

 

 

pittsburgh debrief

I eagerly anticipate an opportunity to return to Pittsburgh. Having very little official activity on the program on this past trip, I got to poke around for a bit. I was intrigued by all that I saw. And, I should say, by what I was shown.

My guide for several hours was the estimable scholar of Russian cinema and cultural studies Nancy Condee. We met for a brunch at the Waffle Shop, which is a slightly wacky media art project + restaurant. The waffles are fine and the live video stream talk show brings a funny kind of performance energy into the room. From there Nancy took me to an old-school grassroots shrine, hidden below the South Oakland neighborhood (of Andy Warhol’s youth) on a natural ledge along one of Pittsburgh’s many cliff formations. This place is a gem of folk Catholicism—something one might expect to see in an Italian village, or maybe in a hidden patch along some remote highway in Louisiana.

          
This mouse apparently died on its pilgrimage to the shrine. Now that is dedication to a faith.

The path to the shrine was at the end of an extremely steep cobblestone dead end. Nancy drove right down it and then later showed her Pitt-trained clutch engagement chops by backing out at high speed, right pass a couple of burly workmen.

Then she took me to campus for a run through of the Nationality Rooms in the Cathedral of Learning. This collection of rooms is a fascinating document of 20th century internationalism. The rooms (still used as classrooms) are decorated and furnished in materials and styles supposedly representative of a given nation. They were assembled in cooperation with people from various Pittsburgh ethnic communities in the late Thirties and early Forties. In other words, right when the world was about to fall into massive war. Not surprisingly, some of the nations represented no longer exist.

The rooms were partly intended as learning tools for the children of steelworkers and other first generation university students.  There were quite a few people touring the rooms the day I was there.

But the most poignant and memorable feature I witnessed on this trip, I found on my own. Only a few blocks from my hotel, I happened upon the United Steelworkers building. It is an impressive design, but that is not what caught my attention first. There was a crowd of people across the street, under this pedway.

 

It was a Friday evening. I got closer and realized that this activity was a dinner service for homeless people in need of a meal. Directly across the street from the USW headquarters. The logic of capitalism is difficult to ignore in Steel City to begin with, what with the names Carnegie and Frick plastered all over the place. But here the proximity of labor’s political power to the reality of unemployment was almost too perfect. Labor flexes it muscles; capital responds by automating and shedding human labor. Labor gets weaker through attrition and shrinkage; capital gains strength through increased efficiency; people who in former days were steel workers in that very city end up with no work…and possibly no home. 

Though I applaud the strident tone of the union, as represented by this mural in the headquarters lobby, once again, I turned to the words of Jimmy Boggs: a job ain’t the answer.

The place I skipped on this trip was Braddock. Though I could have taken a bus pretty easily, the many billboards around Pittsburgh touting the Levi’s/Braddock connection were a bit off-putting. I’m settling for this Red76 video, featuring the hobo/punk filmmaker Bill Daniel talking about Braddock from a rooftop (with a cameo by Jim Voorhies).