Wisconsin: We’ve Already Won!

[This article is based on a piece I wrote for a forthcoming issue of the Norwegian magazine Rødt, published by the Red Party there.]

Today marks the recall election of Governor Scott Walker, another milestone in the protracted Battle of Wisconsin. which erupted well over a year ago. Irrespective of what happens in today’s voting, it has been, arguably, the most important battle waged by the US working class in several decades.

That importance is too easy to overlook, because the current stage of the battle is largely electoral and because the Wisconsin Upsurge was eclipsed last autumn by a broader development in the class struggle in the US, a development it helped to lay the foundation for, the Occupy! Movement. The point of this article is to help us remind ourselves of how Wisconsin has already changed things in this country.

The basic story can be told in a few paragraphs. Scott Walker, newly elected Governor in the traditionally unionized (in US terms, if not Norwegian), industrial state of Wisconsin, announced on Friday, February 11, 2011 that he was putting legislation before the Republican-dominated Wisconsin Assembly and Senate to mend the state’s budget deficit. The main item in the bill was to make collective bargaining between public workers’ unions and any level of state and local government illegal. Combined with a ban on “dues checkoff” (the means by which unions collect membership dues from the weekly paychecks of members), this amounted to an all-out effort to smash public sector unions in the state.

After picket lines on the weekend, protests started in earnest on Monday. By Tuesday, over 10,000 people gathered at the State Capitol building in Madison to protest. That night, 3000 protesters occupied the building (triggering, when I read about it, personal memories of sleeping on the cold marble floor when students

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