On 2011-08-15, at 6:50 PM, Joshua Morey wrote:
> Wojtek - thank you for the thoughtful response. There is certainly much to
> criticize re: the strategies and tactics we used in WI...
>
> ...with Cairo in the immediate past and
> 100k people from an array of unions, immigrant organizations, community
> organizations, radical organizations, etc marching around the capitol,
> raising their fists, talking seriously about what solidarity and their
> unions/organizations mean, and showing hints of thinking about things in
> terms of (anti)capitalism - in that specific situation, I do not think
> organizing for electoral reform would have been a meaningful approach and I
> certainly do not think descending upon madison in masses was a
> strategic/tactical mistake; however, it alone was clearly not enough. The
> tragedy (and this is the kernel of truth in your argument) was that there
> was no organized (proactive?) "next step"…
A mass strike can't sustain itself indefinitely. It exhausts itself, and needs to aim a political objective - typically, a call for the resignation of the government which provoked the strike, and its replacement by a party representing the strikers' interests. This at any rate has historically been the gist of Marxist criticisms of anarchist and syndicalist prescriptions which gave central importance to the mass strike as the instrument for taking power.
Parliamentary democracies allow for the resignation of the government before its term has expired. There is no similar provision in the US except in those few states which provide for the recall of individual politicians, as in Wisconsin. The strikers took advantage of this political opening to try to alter the legislative balance and to hamstring the Walker government, and came close to doing so.
This seems to me to have been the correct tactic under the circumstances. I don't know of any other political option which would have extended the process intitiated by the strike. I'm not persuaded that the Democratic representatives saw recall as a means of subverting the action in the streets, as has been suggested here, but I can accept that they were characteristically half-hearted in the way they executed the tactic. The DP is, after all, a bourgeois party, even though based on the unions and social movements, and a far cry from the militant workers' party which the early Marxists envisaged could lead such strikes to fruition. In the final analysis, the political makeup of Wisconsin was such that the degree of mass support for the strikers, while impressive, was not sufficient to carry the day.