I don't know if it's just me--I don't think it's just me, because I know a lot of people now living at the bottom of this heap we call the class system here in Wisconsin. But it seems as if a lot of the "solidarity" in the Anti-Walker Movement is a kind of one-way street. That is, a lot of unorganized labor put in a lot of protest face-time in the Capitol and on the streets to defend against "The Bomb" Gov. Walker dropped on organized labor back on Feb. 11, 2011. And a lot of precarious proletarians' time was spent getting those recall petitions signed.
I think of many of the younger folk I know here in Point, barely tethered at all to any employment of any sort, who went out and tabled and petitioned against Walker not so much out of a sense of defending their own self-interest (since these folks don't have any benefits in the first place for Walker to strip away) but more with a sense that this was somehow taking care of the future.
I always ridicule the position of conservatives who say "the unions are running the Recall Walker effort because they want to be back in charge in Wisconsin again." This is supposed to be a credible remark at a time when labor unions represent just 10% of workers in America? (Or, 14.2% in Wisc. [http://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.t05.htm]). No, the best the unions could hope for was a return to the former feeble bargaining strength . There is not much appetite for organizing the rag-tag labor force that remains outside traditional labor's bounds.
No, you don't see, really, a lot of solidarity coming back the other way. For example, where are the organizers out signing-up the BigBoxCo and ChinaMart workers in YOUR hometown, or picketing to help end their abuse? How about those folks picking sweatshop gear out of a matrix of storage bins to fill orders in the Lands' End Distribution Center, or at EastBay (SweatBay?) or "Figi's"? Is someone out there rounding up their union cards? How about agricultural workers in the giant CAFO barns? Tough battles to round up the rag-tag precarious labor force?
You don't see that. You just don't see that these days. Yes, liberals will pack a hearing about cutting BadgerCare, true, but you won't see many of these folks out protesting with the occupiers over the fact that the ruling class has literally nothing to offer the underclass these days: No Job, No House, No Pension, No Future (No Fear, either) as the Juventud Sin Futuro say out in Barcelona.
Now, the process of picking the new governor gets down and dirty. When I heard the other day that Wisc. State Employees Union and the Wisc. Education Association Council were getting down to "vetting" who might be the best candidate, I realized how this is going to work.
No one is going to come to your hometown and get the ragged underclass together and ask, "who would you like to see as your Governor? What should they be doing for you, oh desperate ones?" You just don't see that, these days. You can go to Democrat Party HQ in your area and perhaps catch Tammy Baldwin talking about her Senate race, or someone else with star power. You're not going to stumble into a class on "how to do real grass-roots organizing among the indignant ones" however.
You also aren't going to hear much discussion about the complete breakdown in capitalism as an economic system that could meet people's needs. That topic is strictly going to be taboo, in the Governor's race, in the 2012 presidential, or in any other race you can imagine in our imagination-free political system.
Yet that IS the issue, the whole of it, in this campaign or any other. The Issue Whose Name Must Not Be Spoken.
You can dish out immense amounts of statistics already about the complete failure of the Walkerites to "create jobs" as they had promised. Jack Norman has a report out, on Institute for Wisco's Future. The monthly business reports are starting to take note of the fact that Wisconsin is at the bottom tier when it comes to "creating" jobs.
However, when pressed, the Democrats are not going to give you a detailed plan for how their party, once restored to power in Wisconsin, will do this "job creation" thing that's vaguely promised in the Anti-Walker movement.
To actually reverse the rampant job-destruction process unleashed by global capitalism, you would somehow have to impose a planned economy that would reverse decades of these three processes, objective material processes baked-in to capitalism itself:
Outsourcing to rock-bottom low-wage and near-slavery regimes; China, Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, and now, Africa is coming next.
Degradation of labor inside the USA: Newt Gingrich's child-labor restoration programme is the tip of the iceberg, Republicans chomping at the bit to get that process underway. However, use of prisoner indentured servitude is on the rise--much of it to be privatized, I might add. The degrading of "perm" jobs to "temp" status, with stripping of all benefits, also is part of this.
Finally, and most important, hyper-rationalization as I call it. All recessions lead to "rationalization of productive process." However, the Great Recession, far from over, is just getting started. Hyper-rationalization eclipses old-school electromechanical automation, with programmable logic controllers (PLCs) and such, with the leap to robotics and the further leap -- just in its dawning hours -- of machine-learning and artificial intelligence. These latter will plunge many former "professionals" into the ranks of the precariat, the underclass, the indignados, as well.
If you are able to scare up a study group to attend, dealing with these meta-issues, I'm going to take a wild guess that it's going to be taking on the topic of how can we rescue capitalism from itself and preserve the two-party system for another generation or two? You'll have your "green capitalism," your "small capitalism," "venture capitalism," "cool capitalism," "slow capitalism," "socially-conscious capitalism" "fair trade capitalism," "local food systems" and what have you. You are not going to be permitted to suggest things such as socialism, communism, syndicalism, the co-operative commonwealth.
You just don't see that much, these days.
This is why, when it comes to politics these days, I'm mostly sitting it out. Sure, I did some hours of petitioning against Walker. But I never lost track of the fact that in the bigger movement statewide, I'm one of the invisible ones. The ones who, you know, aren't invited to the table when they're vetting the next gubernatorial candidates. The ones who should never expect to be invited. It's time for us to shut up and go home, and wait til it's time to phone-bank for whoever gets vetted down there in Madison.
Meanwhile, in the underground, we'll be having our study groups with the anarchist-communist youth and studying our Marx, Lenin, Derrick Jensen and Bill McKibben. Maybe even weirder stuff like CrimeThinc.
Come the spring, come May Day, you'll see the return of Occupy Everywhere. This time, the Riot Cops will be ready. In Chicago, Rahm Emanuel is gearing up for the showdown of the century. He's going to make the original Mayor Daley look tame and wimpy, so we hear. And he's a Democrat. Best of the best among Obamites.
Cue up that song from the Decembrists:
"this is why...
this is why we fight..."
Anon00
Red 'n Black 'n Green in Point
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