On Facebook, the most heat was generated over appraisals of the union movement. Chad wrote his piece with a post Doug Henwood published in his Left Business Observer in mind, quite critical of his attack on labor.

Henwood replied:

“I have never come across such a bunch of thin-skinned, paranoid, defensive people as those in & around the labor movement, except maybe the hedge funders who were offended when Obama slipped and called them fat cats. If you criticize, you’re embracing the right. Not all are like this – I’ve gotten a lot of support for what I’ve written from rank & file teachers, laborers, Teamsters, and even one SEIU VP. They at least know that telling comforting tales would be suicidal at this point.

Also, how is the fact that 38% of union HHs voted for Walker not an indicator of union failure to educate and mobilize the membership?”

Goldberg in turn replied:

“I do not object to all criticism of labor but criticism that (1) adopts and starts from the assumptions of the right and (2) is too sweeping. To conclude that unions are an ineffective means to mobilize popular support for social justice because Walker survived a recall election is to set the bar absurdly high. He was only the third governor in U.S. history to even face a recall election. Yes, thirty-eight percent of voters in union households (not 38% of union households) voted for Walker. I’m open to constructive suggestions for more effective ways to educate and mobilize our fellow citizens in Wisconsin and elsewhere–that would indeed be a useful contribution–but it’s an insult to the tens of thousands of volunteers who made a million phone calls and knocked on two million doors in the largest GOTV effort in Wisconsin’s history–and this after the severe blow that Act 10 dealt to union resources–to suggest that unions made no attempt to educate and mobilize.”

This point was amplified by Anya Paretskaya:

“To begin with, I also find Doug Henwood’s post that Chad Goldberg takes issue with problematic and on some points plain misinformed. It would do Mr. Henwood good to get some of his information not from twitter but at least from Wisconsin local media, if he couldn’t come observe things first hand. First, the recall effort was carried out by United Wisconsin, a grassroots organization not affiliated with “the unions” (yes, WI AFL-CIO and individual state unions provided support of various sorts both during the signature collection and the campaign); none of its leadership are union members, even though the one public employee on the board could have joined his university’s faculty and academic staff union. And as Chad just pointed out, Tom Barrett – I agree he was a terrible choice to run against Walker – wasn’t “the unions’” choice candidate: some of them supported another candidate in the primary and tried to dissuade Barrett from entering the race.

Second, a dispatch in another WI publication illustrates the point that both Chad and Jeff make about the educational and organizing potential of electoral campaigns. This story (to my knowledge barely reported outside of WI) is about a completely grassroots recall campaign against the state senate majority leader. The progressive challenger, Lori Compas, lost in this very conservative district. But I think this should be the takeaway from this electoral strategy: “…before the recall effort started, most of [her supporters] had felt alone, as progressives in a firmly Republican district. ‘There were several people who didn’t know a neighbor a block away was just as involved and just as engaged as them until they were canvassing on a street corner together,’ one Compas support[er] said. ‘And strangers became friends quickly.’ ‘I think a lot of us felt very isolated seven months ago, felt like “I’m the only one in my town who has concerns, or I’m the only one in my town who’s paying attention,’” Compas said. ‘And now we see no, they’re everywhere.’” Compas herself, a total newcomer to politics and largely apolitical before last year, plans to remain engaged particularly with the issues of money and transparency in government.

What I and many other members of the labor and progressive movements can agree with Mr. Henwood on is that the Democratic Party isn’t always the best ally for unionists and progressives – although I am far from suggesting that DP and GOP are one and the same (just remember the 14 WI Democratic senators who left the state to delay, as they couldn’t really prevent, the passage of the anti-union bill and their firm opposition since to most of Walker’s legislative initiatives from the environment to healthcare to pensions). Labor, the progressive left, and the country as a whole would certainly benefit from the end of the two-party system. But given the institutional constraints it is not clear just how to achieve it in the near future.”

Henwood replied:

“Anya Paretskaya: I love the emerging consensus of the defense. You can’t talk critically about labor unless you’re an organizer yourself, and you can’t comment on Wisconsin unless you’re there. Well that really opens things up.

John Nichols, who is not unfamiliar with Wisconsin, told me that the unions were the ones who decided on the recall strategy and led it at every step.

Yeah, I’ve heard all about the educational potential of election campaigns. In this case, this defeat has greatly strengthened Walker and the war on labor nationally.

If labor/progressive forces want to stop losing they’ll have to start asking some serious questions of themselves. This sort of defensive fog is damaging.”

Henwood clearly is making a couple of crucial points: not only insiders have the authority to judge the Wisconsin events, especially since they have significance that goes way beyond Wisconsin borders, and it is crucial to ask serious and critical questions about the state of the labor movement, its role in Wisconsin and more generally.

Yet, I fundamentally agree with Paretskaya and Goldberg. Although far from perfect, the labor movement has contributed significantly to a more just society on many issues. As they have weakened, the struggle between capital and labor has shifted in favor of capital, against not only union members but the less advantaged as a whole. The leadership of the labor movement may need reinvigoration, its direction may need correction, but it has played a crucial role in the struggle for social justice. The Republicans want to re-write history by taking labor out, as we have observed here. Progressives should not aid in this enterprise.

After the fall of Communism, the strength of the left is its diversity, its turn away from dogmatism. Understanding what different actions, movements and institutions contribute is crucial. Dismissing potential allies a bit too enthusiastically, as I believe Henwood does concerning labor, and others do concerning the Democrats and especially Barack Obama, consolidates conservative power. More about that in my next post, in which Paretskaya’s point about the educational and organizing potential of electoral politics will be addressed, as will her concerns about the two-party system. A key to my concerns: the need to act politically in way that takes into account real political constraints and limitations, looking for openings for creative action, not imagining openings that don’t exist.

I want to take this opportunity to respond to two recent blog posts which reflect upon the usefulness of electoral politics in the wake of the Wisconsin recall election: one by Jeffrey Goldfarb (“On Wisconsin,” June 6, 2012) and the other by Doug Henwood (“Walker’s Victory, Un-Sugar-Coated”). I am in basic agreement with Jeff Goldfarb’s main points, though I have a few of my own to add. With Doug Henwood, I am in strong disagreement.

Elections matter, as Jeff Goldfarb argues, and not just presidential elections. Elections are what enabled Republicans to gain power in state legislatures and the U.S. House of Representatives in 2010. Their electoral success in Wisconsin is what empowered them to legislate a radical assault on labor and public services there. Unless they are dislodged from power through elections, they will continue to use their power in familiar ways. But ironically, even as the right demonstrates the effectiveness of electoral politics, some radicals are now arguing that the left should abandon elections.

Following Walker’s victory on Tuesday, a longtime friend of mine wrote that Wisconsin’s unions should have organized a general strike instead of fighting Walkerism by means of elections. This is almost surely an erroneous conclusion. Exit polls showed that 38 percent of voters from union households voted for Walker in the recall election, suggesting that solidarity was neither broad nor deep enough to pull off a general strike. Moreover, rather than forcing a repeal of Walker’s anti-union legislation, a strike in Wisconsin would more likely have ended like the 1981 PATCO strike, another iconic instance of government union-busting that reportedly inspired Walker. I do not oppose strikes and other forms of disruptive protest under all circumstances; I only insist that anyone who cares about the consequences of their actions must use these methods intelligently. Their effectiveness depends on the ability of protesters to surmount a host of practical obstacles, well documented in sociological studies of social movements, including the likelihood of severe reprisals. Without some serious thinking about how protesters might withstand reprisals and overcome other obstacles, calls for a general strike—both those made in Wisconsin in 2011 and those made retrospectively now—are nothing but foolish bravado. Lastly, to insist on either disruptive protests or electoral politics is a false choice. As Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward showed in their classic study Poor People’s Movements, protest movements have historically been most successful when disruptive protests worked in tandem with—not as an alternative to—electoral volatility.

Doug Henwood, a contributing editor to The Nation and the publisher of Left Business Observer, echoed my friend’s rejection of elections in his blog: “channeling a popular uprising into electoral politics,” he commented, was a “horrible mistake.” In his view, unions would have been better off supporting a “popular campaign—media, door knocking, phone calling—to agitate, educate, and organize on the importance of the labor movement.” This suggestion dovetails with Jeff Goldfarb’s argument that progressives must work to shape “how the broad public understands the problems of our times” or, put differently, “to win hearts and minds.” But as Jeff understands, this kind of education is entirely compatible with and indeed a necessary part of electoral politics, and it is in fact precisely what Wisconsin union members were doing when they made a million phone calls and knocked on two million doors in the weeks before the recall election.

Just as “giving up on electoral politics, or blaming Obama, … is extraordinarily foolish,” in Jeff Goldfarb’s words, it is equally foolish to give up on or blame organized labor for the outcome of Wisconsin’s recall election. This is precisely what Henwood does in his blog post. Labor unions aren’t popular, he argues, because the anti-labor right is correct about them: rather than fight for the public interest or the needs of the working class as a whole, he insists, they are a special interest who care only about the wages and benefits of their “privileged” members. The right has always depicted labor unions this way, but it is astonishing to see an avowedly progressive intellectual embrace the most anti-labor elements of the right-wing vision about America. It suggests that progressives need to start within our own ranks if we want to shape how the public understands the problems of our times.

Contrary to Henwood’s sweeping condemnation, organized labor has used its political clout since the New Deal to promote full employment and decent wages and to improve health care, education, and housing—for all Americans, not just union members. Furthermore, Henwood ignores the efforts within the labor movement since the 1990s, documented by sociologists Kim Voss, Dan Clawson, and others, to reach out to groups that were previously alienated from unions (students, immigrants, and so forth), organize the unorganized with innovative grassroots strategies (e.g., the Justice for Janitors campaign), and build a new “social movement unionism.” Lastly, Henwood’s characterization of unions is contravened by their role in Wisconsin, where they spearheaded a broad-based recall movement that was motivated by far more than the loss of collective bargaining rights.

Rather than dismiss the entire labor movement, progressives should support this kind of unionism—indeed, they should join unions whenever and wherever possible. While recent events in Wisconsin and elsewhere have undeniably weakened organized labor, they have also shown the extraordinary commitment, energy, and public-spiritedness of union members. Progressives still need unions to help realize their political agenda.

While it is a mistake to give up on electoral politics or unions, we need to do more than participate in elections. We need to fight to ensure that the electoral process is fair and inclusive. One of the chief reasons that Wisconsin is so politically polarized at present is that what we have seen there is not ordinary partisan politics within stable and consensual rules. Rather, the radical right is using its monopoly on political power in Wisconsin to alter the electoral process itself. After the 2010 election Wisconsin was effectively a one-party state with virtually no checks or balances: Republicans controlled the governor’s office and both houses of the state legislature, and they held a majority on the state’s supreme court. Moreover, the agenda of Scott Walker and Republican legislative leaders was closer to the radicalism of the Tea Party than the moderate conservatism of previous Republican administrations. They sought not merely to enact their agenda but to ensure that it could not be undone. By crippling public-sector unions and thereby eliminating an important source of funding for the political opposition, gerrymandering legislative districts, and passing a highly restrictive voter ID law that will skew the electorate in its favor, Walker’s party has worked ruthlessly to give itself a permanent advantage and to cement its grip on power for the foreseeable future. (Although the June 2012 recall election appears to have given Democrats a razor-thin majority in the state senate, they are likely to lose it in November when the new legislative districts will be in effect.) This strategy has implications at the national as well as the state level.

Wisconsin State Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, speaking on Fox News in March 2011, boasted that if their efforts succeeded, Obama would have a “much more difficult time getting elected and winning the state of Wisconsin [in 2012].” Add to this state-level corruption of the electoral process the untrammeled flow of corporate money into American politics as a result of the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision and the electoral dice begin to look frighteningly loaded. Effective resistance to this power grab will require both symbolic work and material resources. Progressives must work to win over hearts and minds but also to safeguard democratic institutions.

Although a progressive-labor coalition failed to unseat Scott Walker in the Wisconsin recall election, and this failure will undoubtedly embolden those who wish to imitate him outside of Wisconsin, the struggle will continue in Wisconsin and elsewhere, at the state level and the national level. We must fight a war of position and not a war of maneuver. I can attest that for many of us Wisconsinites, the failure was heartbreaking and bitter, but we can perhaps take courage in the words that Max Weber famously uttered in 1918:

Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards. It takes both passion and perspective. Certainly all historical experience confirms the truth—that man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible. But to do that a man must be a leader, and not only a leader but a hero as well, in a very sober sense of the word. And even those who are neither leaders nor heroes must arm themselves with that steadfastness of heart which can brave even the crumbling of all hopes. This is necessary right now, or else men will not be able to attain even that which is possible today. Only he has the calling for politics who is sure that he shall not crumble when the world from his point of view is too stupid or too base for what he wants to offer. Only he who in the face of all this can say ‘In spite of all!’ has the calling for politics.

I am on the road from Gdansk. It’s been an intense few days. Last Tuesday, I joined the Occupy Wall Street demonstration for a bit. By Wednesday, I was in the Gdansk shipyards, where Solidarity confronted the Party State in 1980, ultimately leading to the collapse of the Soviet Empire. I was interviewed for the Solidarity Video Archive, giving my account of the work I did with Solidarity and my understanding of the great labor movement. Immediately after which, I was taken to Gdansk University, where I gave my talk, this year’s Solidarity Lecture, “Reinventing Democratic Culture.” It opened the All About Freedom Festival. Over the weekend, I visited my family in Paris, and now I am flying over the Atlantic on my delayed flight to Newark, hoping I will get back to New York in time to teach my 4:00 class, The Politics of Everyday Life. It has been a packed week.

Unpacking my thoughts is a challenge. A new social movement is developing in the U.S., with potentially great impact. In Poland, a new generation is confronting the Solidarity legacy, trying to appreciate the accomplishments, while also needing to address new problems. Yesterday’s elections in France and especially in Poland were important. Yet, just as important for what was not on the ballot as for what was. Everywhere, there seems to be a political – society agitation and disconnect, with the politics of small things potentially contributing to a necessary reinvention of democratic culture.

I have many thoughts and will need more time to put them into a clear perspective. Here, just a start. I have a sense that things are connected: not falling apart, rather, coming together.

In the U.S., the central ideal of equality has been compromised in the last thirty years. From being a country with more equal distribution of income, property, education and respect, than in other places, which Tocqueville took to be definitive of the American democratic condition long ago, it has become a country of gross and increasing inequalities. With dramatic flair, the Occupy Wall Street movement is making the issue visible, resetting the terms of public debate, from the conservative issue of taxes and debt to the more progressive problems of unemployment and gross inequality. There have been, of course, many individuals and groups who have been trying to bring these issues forward, from the respected Nobel Prize winning economists Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, to labor unions – transit workers, public employees, the AFL-CIO. It is intriguing that a relatively small but dramatically inventive social movement has focused the issue. Its political potential points to the importance of imaginative gestures in getting media attention and changing public debate, very similar in this regard to the Tea Party.

In Poland, Solidarity is gone and forgotten, but also constantly present. The two major parties emerged from Solidarity. The leaders have in common experience in the opposition to the Communist regime. The major parties are to the right of center, one based on patriotism, identification with Catholicism and nation and skepticism about Europe, PiS, Law and Justice. The other party is the pro-Europe, pro-business and pro-market PO, Civic Platform. The election presented a clear 19^th century choice, between Conservatives and Liberals. Only minor parties presented 20^th century social democratic alternatives.

My hosts, and the professors, students and the members of the general public in my audience repeatedly expressed dismay about their choices. It’s not that they felt that there were no differences between the parties. It’s that the differences didn’t seem to address the problems of our times.

Following my talk, during the question and answer period, a young woman expressed the problematic situation. She saw that there was a serious debate between the parties, but she couldn’t understand how the debate included her. She may have been put off by the ultra nationalism of one party and the market fundamentalism of the other, but neither party addressed her and her peers concerns. She didn’t know what to do.

I, of course, told her that I wouldn’t advise her on voting (which she actually seemed to be asking for), other than to make the general statement that I am a strong believer of choosing the bad over the worse, with the proviso that I wouldn’t choose between two competing faces of totalitarianism (two Nazi Parties, I think I said). But then I returned to the theme of my talk, linking the politics of small things to the challenge of reinventing political culture. The Solidarity movement revealed the power of the politics of small things.

I highlighted my basic theoretical position as it emerged from my observations of Solidarity.

When people meet and speak in each other’s presence, and develop a capacity to act together on the basis of shared commitments, principles or ideals, they develop political power. This power is constituted in social interaction. It is realized in the concerted action. It has its basis in the definition of the situation, the power of people to define their social reality. In the power of definition, in the politics of small things, there is the power of constituting alternatives to the existing order of things. When this power involves the meeting of equals, respectful of factual truth and open to alternative interpretations of the problems they face, it is democratic. As Arendt has theorized, such meeting, talk and action constitute political power as the opposite of coercion. As Goffman investigated, this power is constituted in the expressive life of the involved people. Power by acting together, expressively created, is a power that has been highly consequential.

My talk was about how I saw this in the 1980s, specifically when I was last in Gdansk to observe the trial of three Solidarity leaders, Bogdan Lis, Wladyslaw Frasyniuk and Adam Michnik. I used my reflections on that experience to show how such power is playing a key role in the politics in the U.S. and the Middle East today, drawing upon analysis that is systematically developed in Reinventing Political Culture.

The irony was that this applies to Poland now as well, as the population and the political leadership seem to have lost sight of what was accomplished in the Solidarity Movement. I tried to answer the Polish student’s question, and quite a few others developing this point. Actually existing democracies, such as Poland and the United States, need recurrent social movements to keep them alive. As the conflicts in Polish politics is being played out by people who were involved in the struggles of those times, the principles of those struggles provide untapped resources for those who are critical, or feel disaffected from the present political scene.

During my weekend in Paris, I thought of this as well, as I talked about the primary elections in the Socialist Party and the upcoming general elections. Politics seems inadequate, as the problems the democracies of Europe face seem quite profound. The popular movements and disruptions in Spain, Greece and England were not particularly creative, as Solidarity was, but they are a clear expression of a fundamental problem, not only economic but also political.

And in this light, from a distance, I read with appreciation Ermira Danaj’s contribution to Deliberately Considered. Here, in a most dramatic way, we see concerted action making democracy possible in a pretty extreme circumstance.

In Gdansk, I also took part in a public discussion of a brilliant documentary film, Cyril Tuschi’s Khodorkovsky. It is an excellent work. The film portrays the kind of neo-Soviet state with a democratic opposition that Russian has become. It also presents a great study of an amazing character, the richest man in Russia, turned into a prisoner, turned into a dissident, locked in battle with an equally impressive character, Vladimir Putin. The power of small gestures was remarkably revealed in the film. This power of gestures in the new media age is quite important.

Final note: the power of mediated gesture is what I saw on the first day of this intense week, in the Occupy Wall Street movement. It is in the creative gesture that the alternative to the order of things and mindless disorder is to be found. More about this in my next post. I will try to work on it after I teach in a few hours and after a good night’s sleep.

For the first time since we have been operating, I felt like the discussions on the blog were getting away from my editorial control.  I take this to be a good sign.  While there were interesting posts on the economy and economic theory, and on media and media theory, as well as on revolutionary hopes in Egypt, the focus of our discussion this week was on the issues surrounding the events in Madison, Wisconsin, moving in interesting and somewhat unexpected directions.

Anna Paretskaya opened our deliberations, with her “Cairo on the Isthmus.” She presented a bird’s eye view, including some telling photos.  I actually found some of the details of her post more interesting than the elements that stimulated heated discussion.  Particularly fascinating was how she understood the beginning of the movement as she reported in the opening of her piece:

“What started as a stunt by a group of University of Wisconsin-Madison students to deliver a few hundred “Valentine’s Day” cards from students, staff, and faculty to Governor Scott Walker asking him not to slash the university budget has now become national news: close to 100,000 Wisconsinites have come to the State Capitol in Madison over the past four days to protest the so-called “budget repair” bill…”

This made clear to me Madison, Wisconsin’s connection to Cairo, and Cairo’s connection to the movement I observed around the old bloc, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and to the Obama campaign and the Tea Party movement.  People meet with each other, speak to each other, develop a capacity to act together, create a power that hitherto did not exist.  They may or may not reach their political goal, but they change the political landscape as they act.  This is what I see as being the most significant consequence of “the politics of small things.”  Not only has there been regime change in Egypt and Tunisia, but the Arab world will never be the same after the wave of protests we have observed.  And the Republicans may or may not succeed in their battle against public employee unions and the union movement in general, but the resistance to these changes that have appeared in Wisconsin and beyond, suggests to me that the Tea Party may have met its match.

The debate has changed, and the changed debate has appeared at DC. Michael Corey was quite critical of Paretskaya’s post.  What she takes for granted, he questions.  He wonders whether she is too close to the protestors to present an accurate description of the events and issues involved.  She is on the side of the protestors.  He sees the merits in both sides, clearly suggesting that she overlooks the necessity for State fiscal constraint, the democratic legitimacy of Governor Walker’s actions, and the illegitimacy of the Wisconsin Democrats withdrawing from legislative deliberations.  He also questions the very idea of unions in the public sector.  In a balanced fashion, Michael Corey engaged the fundamental issues of the debate, subtly, but clearly, taking a position.  This then opened the DC deliberations.

Iris and Chad Alan Goldberg objected strongly.  Iris expressed the strong conviction that Governor Walker was following Rahm Emanuel’s advice and wasn’t letting a crisis go to waste, using the need for fiscal discipline to promote a right wing agenda.  Chad Goldberg, a sociologist and union official in Madison, agreed and added a great deal of specific Wisconsin details.   I decided to publish his reply to Michael Corey’s comment as an independent post because of its length and detail.  Its tendentious quality made me uncertain, but we have had a serious debate about what is at stake in the standoff in Wisconsin, so I think I made the right decision.

Only Michael Corey expressed sympathy for Walker’s position.  But more than partisan debate occurred.   Scott in the exchanges about Goldberg’s post maintained: “Obviously, the proposed cuts don’t balance the budget. Furthermore, the state worker’s have actually agreed to the cuts. Therefore, by examining what facts I could gather, I can’t conclude that the main issue is really balancing the budget. As far as that’s concerned, the numbers just don’t add up. It appears that the issue really being contested is collective bargaining rights for workers.”

In my analysis of a post by Jonah Goldberg at the National Review, I came to the same conclusion.  And this was highlighted by Iris as she brought into our discussion the hoax telephone conversation between “David Koch” and Governor Walker, in which the Governor makes clear his broader anti-union ideological commitments, closing remarkably by comparing himself to Ronald Reagan, invoking a highly creative notion that the fall of Communism began with Reagan’s firing of the air traffic controllers in 1981.  He concedes that his stand may not have as broad international significance, but its importance on the ideological battle lines is comparable to his mind.

I believe with the DC consensus that the conflict in Madison is about fundamental positions and not just about how to divide the spoils and the pain in our present economic circumstance.  I agree with Chad Goldberg’s conclusion “maybe we all need to ask ourselves a fundamental question: Which side are you on?”  But I need to add, that I think that this is a political question and not one where truth is on one side or the other, which Chad sometimes seems to suggest.

And exactly what the fundamental question is, as Michael indicated in his reply to me, is open to question.

For Michael, the key issue is about public versus private unions, citing FDR’s warning against the establishment of public unions to substantiate his claim. This point has been made by numerous pundits on the right, but I feel it is highly unlikely that this would have been Roosevelt’s position given the present state of labor relations.

I think, rather, the issue is one that was dear to Roosevelt’s heart, the right of workers to collectively bargain.  Unions in the private and public sectors are in the same boat struggling against a long term trend of government policies and corporate strategies that undermine labor organization.  I think the conflict is about workers’ rights to collectively bargain versus those who are committed to more libertarian principles.

I also know that each of these sides have very concrete economic consequences, as Scott and Eric Friedman highlight in response to my post.  Michael knows that deficits and high taxes negatively affect economic growth.    We have a political disagreement, which can be worked on through democratic debate – a debate that is being facilitated by the events in Wisconsin.

A note on next week: in upcoming posts Daniel Dayan will reflect on the odd fact that until very recently the Libya of Colonel Gaddafi played a prominent role within the two highest United Nations human rights organizations, and Benoit Challand, a scholar intensively studying the Middle East, will offer a comparative reading of the upheavals in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain and Libya, and also about the little covered protests in the Palestinian territories, as we continue our consideration of the great changes of 2011 in the Arab world, following up on Hazem Kandli’s post this week.