Category Archives: Wisconsin

After Wisconsin, Occupy.

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It was somewhat expected but still not great news from Wisconsin last night. It does suggest that, despite many prominent voices to the contrary, Occupy has had the better read on tactics after all. As we should have learned, there’s no short-cut here. Would a Democratic governor even have been able to abolish Walker’s law, let alone improve things? The hope remains with the social movements, even if that seems attenuated now,

As no one will need reminding, the 2010 elections returned Scott Walker as Governor of Wisconsin. In the manner of George W. Bush, he swung hard right after the election and introduced one of the most sweeping anti-collective bargaining laws anywhere. Led by students, organized labor quickly moved to resist, occupying the Capitol building.

The Madison occupation of February 2011 was a great moment. It claimed the right to be taken into account and the right of the people to actually be present in what is known as “the people’s house,” the Capitol building. In what became a precedent for later public space occupations, the occupation was ended by quasi-legal force of law after only a few weeks.

March 9, 2011 Madison WI

Late in 2011, unions and the Democratic Party decided to attempt to recall Gov. Walker. In a very short space of time from November to January 2012, a million signatures were gathered, a remarkable accomplishment by any standards. There were those who thought that the Occupy movement as a whole should pursue such electoral goals.

However, when I was in Madison in April, you could already feel a sense that the situation had slipped out of the movement’s control. The Democrats failed to coalesce around a candidate and held a divisive primary as late as May 8, choosing the same man, Tom Barrett, who had lost to Walker in 2010. Whatever Barrett’s merits, the election looked like a replay, rather than a referendum on collective bargaining rights or democracy.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the nascent global social movements, skilled in the “local” work of holding public space, demonstrations and organizing their own have proved less accomplished in mass electoral theater. Almost by definition, movements that take their energy from direct democracy don’t transfer to mass manipulation, sound bites and fund raising, the very cynical maneuvers they are against.

The Egyptian Presidential election is a case in point, where pro-revolutionary candidates gained the majority of the votes but failed to make the run-off. The Wisconsin election showed almost no change from the 2010 precedent. I don’t think it was the money or anti-union bias, so much as a sense that what Walker had done fell within the purview of electoral democracy. His Thatcherite neo-liberalism recalls precedents like Reagan firing the air-traffic controllers in 1981 or Thatcher abolishing the Greater London Council in 1986. Both were clearly extensions of what had hitherto been considered standard practice but they did not breach the letter of the law.

So what we are seeing is an extension of electorally-validated authority beyond what is taken to be the norm. Precisely because such norms are largely unspoken, there is very little preventing someone who wants to do so from extending their authority, as long as they can corral the necessary votes. In the UK, this elected force of law has long been standard via the “whip” system, in which parties require their members to vote as they want them to do, or face expulsion. What gives the current US system its peculiar feel is that its mechanics are so based on consensus within a narrow ruling elite that it is surprisingly easy for a determined party, whether formally in government or opposition, to drive the agenda.

The simple lesson for social movements is that you can’t win battles against those who have defined the very way that battles should be fought. You have to change the way, not that battles are fought, but the way that people think about their relationship to the social. If it’s about battles, those without the monopoly of violence tend to lose. If it can become about changing how we understand ourselves, what the purpose of life might be and how to enlarge the possibilities for all, then sometimes very surprising things can happen.

What happens next depends very much on whether finance capital manages what it has so far been unwilling or unable to do: to restrain and reform the banks and their markets. The Eurozone crisis suggests that the mechanisms of debt on which the endless circulation of capital is based are so flawed as to be beyond repair within the present neo-liberal framework. The US economy is slowing to halt, even China and India supposedly exempt from market cycles because of their endless supplies of free labor have slowed. Don’t be depressed: imagine something completely different. And go and make it happen.

Diversity of Occupy

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I’m in Madison, Wisconsin, for a few days and finding out the different history of occupation and Occupy in what many people think of as the home of the movement. Here, I’m hearing about the ways in which the legacy of the occupation at the Capital have in fact mitigated the impact of the Occupy movement.

In some ways, what’s happened in Wisconsin is an interesting test case for those looking for demands, structure and leadership from Occupy. When Gov. Scott Walker launched his assault on public sector unions, the Teaching Assistants Association and other unions organized a response that galvanized thousands in February 2011. No one is quite sure how the occupation began–one version was that it originated with a queue to speak. But the energy of that protest has driven an extraordinary campaign that culminated with the ratification of a recall election for the governor and some state senators.

Nonetheless, matters are now poised. Polls show an even divide between Walker and his yet-to-be-decided Democratic opponent. Conversations here are centred around the elections, from Tammy Baldwin’s run for US Senate to the Madison House of Representatives seat currently held by Baldwin, and of course the recall. The difference with the decidedly unconcerned perspective of OWS in regard to the 2012 elections is noticeable and thoroughly understandable. Were I still a Wisconsin resident, as I once was, I would be electorally committed.

Occupy Madison turns against the town mayor Soglin

As a result of this unusual pattern, Occupy Madison is a very different phenomenon than elsewhere. For one thing, it still has an encampment.  The tents stand on a disused parking-lot on the less favored East side of town. The encampment houses about 60 to 100 homeless people. The occupiers-by-choice are no longer part of the movement. While the occupiers have a GA and use the vocabulary of the movement, they are being considered by local authorities as a social services issue, rather than a political one.

Nonetheless, it was a surprise to many in Madison that the local mayor Paul Soglin, a long-tine Madison liberal who has held the office off and on since 1973, evicted Occupy Madison last Friday. His grounds were contractual: he had given a permit to the occupiers until April 30 and their efforts to extend the encampment were in breach of this agreement. From the account in  the Isthmus, the local alternative paper, written by Joe Tarr (4/20/12: 5), the issue came down to how the movement was perceived. For Soglin, the campers were homeless people and Madison feels itself at risk from transient homeless people, who, it is believed, journey to the city from Chicago in search of benefits and other amenities. For others, even in the Common Council, this was a social movement even if the participants happened to be homeless.

So here’s the irony. In Madison, the city that many rightly think of as the origin of the Occupy movement in the US, with its inspiring occupation of the state Capitol, May Day will see the eviction of Occupy Madison, even as 115 other cities are marking a Day Without the 99%. Downtown, you can see shops like “Amsterdam,” better known for its fetish gear, with a window full of Occupy materials, general strike posters and T-shirts recalling the Wisconsin movement.

The stakes here are interesting, considerable and very different to New York. People are hoping to replace a very right-wing governor by means of an electoral coalition that includes all the public sector unions from the students to the police and the corrections officers. Perhaps that’s a viable working model of the 99%. Should that election fail, it may be the end of that model. Or it might be the beginning of a new version of it. Keep an eye on Wisconsin: for once the rhetoric of bell-weather state might be right.