Wisconsin: Why a general strike hasn't happened yet...

thanks for writing this up

Thanks for writing this up, very interesting.

I will post some more general thoughts later when I have some more time, but in terms of your statement around the two approaches of building for a general strike:
- the standard Trotskyist/left bureaucratic way, of attempting to get motions passed or left officials elected via official union channels for
- the anarchist/libcom way of attempting to build organisation and militancy at the base.

You state that you are not sure which will have been more effective. Well I am a union member in a public sector job. In my union, Unison, a bunch of left branches send resolutions to national conference calling for a one-day general strike (some were only calling for a one-day strike of the whole union). These were all blocked from the agenda on the basis that they would put the union "in legal jeopardy".

Effective action is against the law. To win we have to go beyond it, and if we base our activity around doing things through official channels, we basically give people faith in these official channels which all lead to a dead-end.

Yeah, Juan, this is great (and not only because the more N. American Wobs we have embracing the SolFed model, the better ;) ). Thanks for writing it up.

Perhaps a submission for the IW?

Hi comrades,

Thank you for writing your perspective on Wisconsin. I was also able to go there and although I am not a Wob I spent the majority of my time with the IWW. I was there when the Dems came back and there was a tractorcade around the Capitol-maybe we saw each other?

There are a few different issues that you bring up: leadership and working class self-activity. These are the two missing pieces of Wisconsin. On the one hand the "leadership" is running people back to work when strikes, direct actions, walk-outs, occupations etc are whats necessary to defeat this bill and start to go on the offensive in this aptly termed Class War.

The Dems want a Recall and Walker is the "bad cop" that helps make their relection possible and seals the deal for the concessions the Dems and labor bureaucracy is eager to give. But why would we be against a Recall on principle? Recalling is a great gain workers made to be able to kick out "leaders" and in any case I think we need more than economic power but political power. If we had a slate that for example took over the seats the Democrats had while they were gone and then had a Recall campaign to get rid of the Republicans this would be an extremely radical step. They could run on a No Cuts, No Concessions, Tax the Rich, Workers Power platform. This is a way of promoting workers leadership politically. At the same time we could be participating in our unions adn workers organizations to have a double effect. Strikes in teh streets and political take overs. I think we will need to have this kind of approach when fighting for workers power.

The rank and file have not has as much experience in breaking with the leadership and for decades faced defeats. The leftists there could take on smaller winnable victories that unite the workign class. For example, the Immigrant Workers Union (UTI) which has socialists in it could unite with the IWW and call for an end to on the spot ID checks which cause many people to get deported. In Los Angeles (my city) we have Special order 40 which has kept the police from being able to report people to La Migra. You could call for an adoption of that. You could also attack Walker for his anti-immigrant stance and forcing undocumented students to pay out of state tuition costs from the bill.

I would argue that its not true that there were no Black people at the protests. There were definately a few and I met some. Mikwalee is a large Black city in Wisconsin which a high incarceration and poverty rate not to mention other things. The unions must orient towards the private sector and stop supporting concessions! These concesssions alienate people who receive social services and see that the union doesnt have their back. If the union does not call for (for example) job training programs and call out the "Cops for Labor" for a racist history of brutality then we are lost. Black youth were present and walked out. I have a 1:30 video here that I took.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AbHfez__54

Also, the workers who have played the most militant role are workers from majority women's unions and professions yet I do not see this reflected in the membership of the IWW for example. That orientation has to be made. I spoke with members about this and they seemed open to criticism and making efforts.

Participating in elections that this was the group that pushed throughthe South Central Fed resolution in education on a General Strike if the Bill passed. Goodwork on that! Lets get May 1st organized!! Another huge General Strike like the immigrants did in 06!

The locals here in Madison with the university employees are mostly (maybe 60%) women. AFSCME locals 171 and 2412 formed a combined rank-and-file committee called the "education committee". They held joint membership meetings during the height of the protests. Since then these efforts have been dissolved.

I've lived and worked in Madison here for a many years and was even a member of Local 171 for a short period of time in the blue collar trades section back in the nineties. My whole family is in these unions.

Caving to the concessions from the start and then inundating people with electioneering and rhetoric about the "middle class" is a surefire way to alienate any minority, or working poor white person. I know it has always alienated me.

I got the impression from talking to people at the protests that a strike was largely an unknown quantity for people who would be more comfortable with sticking to the usual familiar politics of elections and union activism. Something familiar that doesn't work seems preferable to many, as opposed to something that may or may not work that is wholly unfamiliar and outside of their experience. These people I spoke with learned back in the seventies and eighties that all strikes will always fail. There were bitter defeats in those days for workers, the Hortonville teachers strike, the Racine teachers strike, the Schneider Trucking Company strike the Madison Newspaper strike, and the Stoughton Trailer strike all were defeated. I hope that this lesson in defeat is one lesson the working class kids today never learn.

Just in response to the point about running for election to change something, as Juan points out: this is completely counter-productive.

In Wisconsin you happen to have a right wing governor, however elsewhere across the world anti-worker austerity packages are being put in place by governments left and right, Conservative and socialist (and communist in Cuba's case) - especially here in Europe

blackhawk:

Something familiar that doesn't work seems preferable to many, as opposed to something that may or may not work that is wholly unfamiliar and outside of their experience.

This is the basis of all revolutionary perspectives, all attempts to break with the past, and should be writ large over all the threads on libcom, and on all the walls of all the cities, towns and villages. Very succinct. Familiarity breeds contempt. Unfamiliarity breeds progress.

Just to add though, "Will alone is not enough to confront the enemy and to remove fear . One must consider the examples, the reasons, that can convince one to go forward, that one will gain pride as a winner, whereas in retreat one can only expect shame and regret..." (Descartes) (from memory, probably not exact).

When you ask why a general strike hasn't happened yet does that imply that you think one is still likely to happen? Was it ever likely to happen?

Devrim

Marx

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,1852)

The situation in Wisconsin has come full circle, with the tragedy begun by Republican "Fighting Bob" La Follette being realized with the farce of Republican Scott Walker.

La Follette was part of the Progressive Movement whose political career as Wisconsin's liberal U.S. Senator paralleled the history of the Industrial Workers of the World. The IWW was founded in Chicago in 1905; Bob La Follette was elected Senator the next year, serving until his death in 1925. Not that Bob hadn't been part of many of the good fights, having been a District Attorney, serving three terms in the House of Representatives, and a term as the Governor of Wisconsin; in those positions he distinguished himself by standing up for Native and African American rights, opposition to World War I, and fighting the monopolies and trusts that were gaining increasing control over government.

But it was the Progressive Movement that tried to channel class-against-class battles, that had marked class relations in the U.S. since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, into assimilationist ideas of "Americanism" through democratizing the political processes. These mostly Republican Progressives introduced reforms like the Initiative, Referendum and Recall; they pushed for direct primaries and women's suffrage (while often denying blacks access to the voting booth for "corruption"; women's suffrage was finally realized with the 19th Amendment in 1920). They launched clean city campaigns to break the machine politics of ethnic patronage practiced by the Democratic Party, demanding "efficiency" in politics (presaging Reagan and Thatcher's open attacks on corrupt governments -- that they themselves led). In demanding universal education, they were the first to push for standardized testing and compulsory education for all children.

Progressive ideas were embodied in the assimilationist attempts to Americanize immigrants through social work and English-language classes. Jane Addams' Hull House in Chicago was the archetypal example of this elitist, middle class ideology to clean up slums and raise standards of living.

Progressives also pushed for prohibition, successfully passing the 18th Amendment in 1919 which banned alcohol until it was repealed in 1933. Anti-Trust laws reigned in the monopolies, but Progressives saw the revolutionary threat of groups like the IWW and encouraged acceptance of Sam Gompers racist craft unions of the AFL instead.

So in summary, the Progressive Movement that began in Wisconsin was an attempt to pacify class struggle and recuperate it into reformist deadends which only strengthen the power of the ruling class. The whole Progressive agenda was making capitalism appear fair and reasonable by integrating the working class into bourgeois institutions and it was the beginning of the contemporary myth of the U.S. being a classless society. Governor Scott Walker is just the latest installment of this farce, pushing fascistic attacks on a working class that, in failing to conceive itself as such, lacks the class consciousness to fight back -- having been weened on the Progressive mythology.

Hence the union piecards all bleating on and on about Walker destroying "middle class jobs." What they're really talking about is their 6-figure middle class jobs, the description of which is to obey labor law (by preventing strikes and dampening militancy), wave American flags, and channel dues payers' money to the Democratic Party. In the 2008 election cycle, unions donated $400,000,000 to the election industry -- the SEIU gave $85,000,000 to the Obama campaign alone -- with most going to Democratic class enemies, with some going to Republican class enemies. Remember that novelist Gore Vidal said: "In the U.S. we have one party, with two right wings." I'd add to that: one is pro-business, the other is anti-labor. As Juan Conatz point out above, think of how all that money could be used in strike funds and for bail (so as not to have to buy bail bonds; the total bail amount could be put up).

But working class participation in the election industry in the U.S. -- and in most places, for that matter -- is simply jockeying for influence with our class enemies. It's just made worst in the U.S. because it's simply a racket like any other, with it's winner-take-all rules and with the undemocratic Electoral College in presidential races. Questions challenging American exceptionalism (or promoting it, like Mike Davis' Prisoners of the American Dream) always beg the question: "why is there no socialism in America?" To me, the best answer I've ever read is from Alan Dawley, who in his book Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn, puts it this way:

Dawley

My own preference [to answer the question] was for the idea that the free gift of the ballot to white men had dampened their ardor for radical political change...

"The ballot box was the coffin of class consciousness"

Further histories from below bear this out, how enfranchisement in the political system can't be disentangled with the legacy of white supremacy and class collaboration amongst the white working class.

Anyway, why would we want to compete with our class enemies to run a bourgeois state? Didn't Marx and Engels themselves write:

Communist Manifesto

The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.

Even Milton Friedman, riffing on Adam Smith, comes on board for this:

Friedman

As Friedman puts it, the state is "essential both as a forum for determining the 'rules of the game' and as an umpire to interpret and enforce the rules decided upon" and enforcement is necessary "on the part of those few who would otherwise not play the game." That is to say, "the organization of economic activity through voluntary exchange presumes that we have provided, through government, for the maintenance of law and order to prevent coercion of one individual by another, the enforcement of contracts voluntarily entered into, the definition of the meaning of property rights, the interpretation and enforcement of such rights, and the provision of a monetary framework." The state has to "promote competition" and do for the market what the market "cannot do for itself" (excerpted from Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom, 1962)

But the Leninist left has more in common with Friedman -- and with Engels at the end of his life, when he wrote (in the Preface to the 1886 English edition of Volume I of Capital): "social revolution might be effected entirely by... legal means," meaning that, breaking with the ideas of Marx, he came to believe that socialism can be achieved through "parliamentary struggle." This faith in the neutrality of the state can be summed up in one word: reformism.

He wasn't the first to come out of the 19th century European workers' movement to believe in the reformability of capital. Ferdinand Lassalle had come to the same conclusions much earlier. Lassalle's erroneous "iron law of wages" held that the amount paid to a worker was equal to what was necessary for her/his "subsistence" and would never be any higher. Lassalle rejected that strikes were of any importance, instead positing that the ballot box was the only instrument for lifting the "yoke of capital" from labor, since it alone would enable workers to establish producers' cooperatives with state aid, enabling them to raise out of wage slavery into socialism. Reformist schemes like this pushed an enraged Marx to denounce their liberalism in his brilliant "Critique of the Gotha Program," detailing how Lassalle's descendants were betraying the revolutionary aspirations of the working class.

Even the Constitution of the Workingmen's Party of the United States, one of the key participants of which was Marx's close comrade Friedrich Sorge, made clear the class struggle position in this document:

WPUS

THE BALLOT BOX

Considering, That in this country the ballot box has long ago ceased to record the popular will, and only serves to falsify the same in the hands of professional politicians

[...]

Considering, That the corruption and mis-application of the ballot box was well as the silly reform movement flourish most in the years of presidential elections, at such time greatly endangering the organization of workingmen;

For these reasons the Union Congress meeting at Philadelphia this 22nd day of July 1876, Resolved,

The sections of this party as well as all workingmen in general are earnestly invite to abstain from all political movement from the present and to turn their back on the ballot box.

The Workingmen will therewith save themselves bitter disappointments, and their time and efforts will be directed far better towards the organization of the workingmen, which organization is frequently destroyed and always injured by a hasty political movement.

Let us bide our time! It will come!

*****
[the use of sexist language, while dated, is unacceptable]

Lassalle's influence was very formative to the ideology of the Bolsheviks, which the left around the world accepts uncritically.

Here's what Loren Goldner said in an interview South Korean left communist comrades from Korean Socialist Workers Newspaper Group (SaNoShin):

Goldner

... I think it's very important that Lassalle was viewed as a precursor. At the 1924 congress of the Comintern, according to Max Eastman, there were three big pictures behind the speaker's stand -- Marx, Engels and Lassalle. I think it shows how Lassalle was viewed that late as a revolutionary who had contributed to the development of the working class movement. In fact it was Lassalle, not Lenin, who was the first person to argue that the revolutionary party should be a special military party of professional revolutionaries. And because Lassalle was eliminated from the revolutionary pantheon, starting in the mid 1920s, his great influence on the Russian movement is not widely appreciated. After the 1924 congress, it was at that time when they discovered the documents that showed that Lassalle had been meeting secretly with Bismarck. Again I'm not sure about the dates there but it was after 1924 that Lassalle was forgotten. He went into the unmentionable file. But the important thing is that Lassalle played a very important role in the development of the Russian revolutionary tradition before the introduction of Marxism, and certainly before the appearance of Bolshevism. I don't think there is time to talk about every aspect of it now, but I think the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia had a very unusual evolution relative to the western European capitalist countries. Are you familiar with Nechaev?

SaNoShin: Yes.

LG: Nechaev in the 1870s wrote his "Revolutionary Catechism", and it said the revolutionary has no friends, the revolutionary has no romantic attachments, the revolutionary lives for only one thing which is the destruction of the existing world, and I'm sure I'm forgetting other things. And as you may know the Russian writer Dostoevskii wrote a very powerful novel called "The Devils" (or "The Possessed") which portrays this mentality of the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia before Marxism, and before Bolshevism in which clandestine groups of revolutionary intellectuals are sitting around and saying, "Well of course we will have to kill millions of people to build the perfect world." So the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia repudiated Nechaev and Nechaev's specific activities. On the other hand, the mentality I think, pervaded the revolutionary milieu there.

SaNoShin: In Korea we had similar influence.

LG: Really? Like the NL faction?

So Victor Serge again, reports that in 1920, 1921, in the first congresses of the Comintern, when communist delegates came from other parts of the world, there was no one who compared to the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia in terms of experience and attitude. And I think we can all agree that Nechaev's "Revolutionary Catechism" has nothing to do with a Marxist view of the revolutionary individual. I think that in the creation of Bolshevism, was this influence of a very unique evolution of Russian revolutionary intelligentsia, the influence of Lassalle, not Marx and that even when the Russian revolutionary tradition was talking an exclusively Marxist language, this other element was always present. When Lenin wrote "What is to be done?", he argued that real class consciousness..., that the working class struggle, the spontaneous struggle of the working class could never go beyond trade union consciousness and that revolutionary consciousness was embodied in this special stratum of revolutionaries. It's like what I was saying earlier, that the Bolshevik party embodies the revolution, they were the revolution and people who criticized them were counter-revolutionaries. There was this dualism in Lenin's view between the reformist, trade unionist practice of the working class and the revolutionary perspective of the party and that without that special body of professionals, the working class would never go beyond trade union reformist practice. Then came 1905 and the creation of soviets and workers' councils and it was clear that, because the soviets and workers' councils were not created by Bolsheviks, that the whole view was wrong! I think it's really important and I presume you agree that the soviets and the workers' councils were not a discovery of any theoretician. They were the discovery of the practical activity of the working class. So when Lenin published "What is to be done?", Rosa Luxemburg was not the only critic of what he said.

And if we want to critique the limitations of a general strike in Wisconsin, would couldn't do better than a careful reading of Rosa Luxemburg's The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions, that was published in 1906 as a detailed account of the wave of economic and political strikes that, beginning in 1896 in Russia and Poland, culminated in the St. Petersburg Soviet in 1905.

I'm a former factory worker (33 years), and currently a labor historian. In my view, absent some calamity significantly worse than Wisconsin, a general strike isn't at all likely until workers' consciousness and awareness are changed. I'm not downplaying Wisconsin, it is bad. However, working people outside these areas aren't adequately shocked by what is happening to pay close attention, and even if they were, there isn't yet any sort of narrative tying together what is happening in Wisconsin, Ohio, Maine (with the mural), and other rollbacks of organized labor's gains.

If orthodox organized labor (which has control over considerable resources) is failing to successfully convey such a narrative, how might we expect radical labor -- which has significant energy, but very limited resources -- to do so?

Then there's also the issue that most workers don't see organized labor's gains as (potentially) their own gains. That's a serious problem, but at least a partial solution would come from solving the more basic problems that confront us.

We need to:

1) organize and grow.

2) crystallize for workers the essential difference between radical labor and orthodox labor.

What is that essential difference? In my view it is this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Workers_of_the_World_philosophy_and_tactics#Two_guiding_principles

We offer a framework (like orthodox unions) within which workers may fight for better wages, hours, and conditions. But we also offer the promise of a permanent solution to the problem of periodic or relentless attacks on working people and their right to organize.

Workers who are disenchanted with politicians, orthodox labor, or just the status quo in general, don't really see any alternative, and that's partly because they don't know the history of working people. That's true for a lot of reasons, including actions like what is happening in Maine, where a right wing politician has single-handedly removed a labor mural from public view. This should be a teaching moment -- not only could we use the action to teach about labor history, we could use it to demonstrate to working people one of the many ways their history is kept from them. In that sense, Maine should be considered as significant as Wisconsin.

A lot of theory is nice, but most working people don't really want theory, in my opinion. They want choices that they don't currently have, or don't currently know about.

We need to organize to give low wage/disenfranchised/itinerant workers, and those without the vote, some hope. There are tens of millions of these folks out there.

Then if we get people's attention on the simple choice of:

a) fighting forever, or

b) possibly succeeding and putting an end to constant struggles over working people's rights,

then we can teach them the other stuff along the way.

So, what could make our first job (organizing and growing) easier? Having some successes. The early successes that the IWW had (from approximately 1908 to 1912) were very important to working peoples' awareness of who/what we are, and we need something like that again.

How should that work? We should all do our best to support the organizing that we are doing, even as we watch for new opportunities.

That said, what difference do i see between the early history of the IWW, and the current possibilities? The early IWW was pervasively and falsely vilified by the mainstream media of the era, so when repression came, there was no help for it. Now (with the Internet) we have at least a possibility of crafting our own message, and having it get to the workers who want to know.

I don't think that "the impression of the protests as a ‘white people’ thing or ‘public sector worker’ thing" is just an impression. You're right, austerity has been attacking working class people, not just the unions. It's been going on for years.

But tell me this, do you really think that the working class population of Wisconsin is going to risk their livelihoods so what they see as the most privileged group in their class: skilled, public sector, union workers can continue maintaining that privilege? The unions specifically made this a union struggle, they were willing to bend over backwards on everything else except their own right to exist as "collective bargaining" mediators. I'm from Michigan, and there was just a protest against the republican governor here in my home town because of a similar anti-union bill. 400 people came, and almost all of them were union workers or students/faculty. People don't come out to these things in mass, putting their livelihoods on the line, unless they perceive that they are being directly hurt. The fact that the unions have initiated and maintained control of almost the entire Wisconsin uprising is why people aren't being active. Not that their awareness or consciousness needs to be raised.

If this is going to change, we need to focus our energies on developing tactics that we find liberating to ourselves and that will inspire and enable other folks to act on their own behalf. A "general strike" that only union people would participate in is not that kind of tactic.

Richard Myers

I'm a former factory worker (33 years), and currently a labor historian. In my view, absent some calamity significantly worse than Wisconsin, a general strike isn't at all likely until workers' consciousness and awareness are changed. I'm not downplaying Wisconsin, it is bad. However, working people outside these areas aren't adequately shocked by what is happening to pay close attention, and even if they were, there isn't yet any sort of narrative tying together what is happening in Wisconsin, Ohio, Maine (with the mural), and other rollbacks of organized labor's gains.

IMO If an effective general strike is to be imposed by workers it has to be proceeded by a wildcat strike movement. The role of the wildcat strike movement is to raise collective working class consciousness and awareness in workers of the powers at their disposal and the weaknesses of the enemy (hiding behind its' physical and spiritual instrument: the police and the law). The wildcat strike movement also has the advantage of being able to circumvent attempts by union bureaucratic attempts to bring it within its' control and thus back to the negotiating table with the capitalist class and its' state. Recent general strikes in Greece and Spain IMO largely failed because they were organised by union bureaucracy with in a bourgeois legal framework thus forcing workers to negotiate in a position of extreme weakness.

I agree with many of the sentiments in this piece, and particularly with the last line. But before the last line there was a lot unfounded negativity and defeatism. I mean what... there isn't going to be a general strike now? Aw shucks. How do you know?

Just as the protests raising the spectre of a general strike appeared suddenly and dramatically... so they could reappear in short order if the government keeps trying to push people too far. And do you doubt that it might?! Just wait til the news comes out that the Democrats or the union leadership has been working with the Governor all along. What do you think the prospects would be for a general strike then? But it wouldn't necessarily have to be that or anything directly related.

People have gotten a taste of the power they can exercise in mass protests -- and they very well may take it to the level in the not-so-distant future (for any number of conceivable and legitimate reasons). People in Wisconsin are still charged up -- they may not still be protesting in the streets, but the full fury of their passion could be unleashed when you or I least expect it. And I'm sure we both look forward to and encourage the possibility of that happening.

Don't lose faith and don't promote the idea for the bosses and the government that the General Strike has been defeated before it began. That has yet to be proven -- it's still likely to occur at some point in the future for one reason or another. And it's still quite likely to occur for the very same reasons that inspired the previous protests. Nothing has truly been resolved yet.

Nihilo Zero