One morning last week I awoke and read the news: Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and the Republican legislature were ready to pass a budget repair bill aimed at bridging the state’s $3.6 billion deficit, protecting 5,500 public employees from lay-offs and furloughs, granting freedom of choice to public employees with regard to joining a union, granting freedom of choice to local school boards with regard to health care, and ending a perennial cycle of Corleonesque backroom dealing between legislators and union lobbyists using taxpayer funds as collateral.
In response, all 14 Democrat state senators decided to stand by the people of Wisconsin by scrambling to hide out in Illinois. Within hours, busloads of out-of-state union members, many from Illinois, swarmed the Capitol with “Democracy at Work” signs to thank the senators on behalf of the people of Wisconsin. (You know, the people of Wisconsin whose majority elected Scott Walker into office by 52 – 46 percent.)
While I tried to figure out how “Democracy at Work” meant Democrats not showing up at work, the demonstrators made it abundantly clear in their favorite chant: “This is what democracy looks like!” So a few hours later, I caught a flight from Los Angeles to Wisconsin to find out what I was missing, and for that matter, what precisely democracy looks like.
Notwithstanding some of the rather audacious tactics employed by their supporters I was to encounter upon my televised doctor’s appointment, I was for the most part impressed by the rank and file, the actual Wisconsinite demonstrators, who bear little if any resemblance to the friends I made at another union protest in Palm Springs just weeks prior, nor the winners documented in my video Teachers Unions Gone Wild.
To the contrary, they are warm, kind-eyed, genuine. Among them are some of the politest protestors I have met at a left-wing rally. They are mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, grandmothers and grandfathers, who have simply been misguided into believing this they have been marginalized and ignored — despite the 17-hour public testimony hearings the legislature had just held.
Wide-eyed and idealistic, they are dreamers, but they’re not the only ones. As Chicago’s new mayor famously said, “Never let a crisis go to waste.” Mindful of this axiom, scores of operatives from groups such as Organizing for America (the campaign arm of that mayor’s former boss) flocked to Madison. Pizzas orders came in from at least 14 foreign countries to feed the demonstrators camping in the Capitol who had instituted their own socialist people’s government with their sleeping bags, first aid tables, and “food share” stations. This was not just a legislative battle in Wisconsin. The SEIU, AFSCME, SDS, AFL-CIO, WIAC, NEA and other national and international “progressive” groups had all shown up to invest their capital into this crisis–inspiring me to investigate what their anticipated dividends might be.
One such shareholder (I hope they’ll forgive these analogies), is a group called the International Socialist Organization (ISO), a Trotskyite international organization that has been committed to organizing unions, and particularly students, since 1976.
As a friendly and curious participant (it didn’t hurt to mention I’d grown up in the San Francisco Bay Area).I attended a strategy meeting of theirs in the social studies building of the University of Wisconsin, a meeting titled “From Cairo to Madison: The Global Reemergence of Class Struggle.” The keynote speakers were Phil Gasper, Ph.D, professor emeritus at Notre Dame, Madison Area Technical College dean and editor of the annotated Communist Manifesto, and Mike Imbrogno, executive committee member of AFSCME Local 171 and delegate to the South Central Federation of Labor.
They discussed the need to co-opt the Madison protests into a global struggle against the monolithic culprit — capitalism. They saw the simultaneous revolutions in Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia as no coincidence; the current weeks as their moment — an event they live for, the opportunity for dismantling the capitalist system as a whole via quiet incrementalism — assessing the market economy as a structure that ought not to be brought down by direct demolition, but by discreet, brick-by-brick elimination.
The ideas expressed seemed to all be traceable to a common emotional impetus – a general disdain for “the ruling class” and the free market instead of any sober assessment of economic science. This corroborated a long-held suspicion that “progressive” ideology is predicated on feelings, rather then logic.
I did not show up to this meeting uninvited. The night prior, I had encountered within the Capitol a young man named Rob Lewis, early 20s, an activist with ISO. Kind, bright and friendly, he explained, very eloquently, just what was going on upstairs in that building, and how it ought to be interpreted and addressed from the standpoint of “the workers.” He told me he was one, at a local chain restaurant called Noodles. So I asked him how things would be different at Noodles if he had his way, and could successfully implement the ISO vision.
Lewis proceeded to illustrate how the world is made up of “workers,” and “capitalists,” and how he and his fellow Noodles employees, whom he describes as “the workers,” would act as a virtual board of directors, while the owner, the “capitalist” would be kindly offered a seat at the table (socialists are, after all, humanitarians), but would be forced to accept their terms and sit down as a “co-equal,” or be simply kicked to the curb.
Aaron Kennedy, the founder of Noodles, grew up on a farm with few to no connections to money. Like my friend Rob, Kennedy also studied at the University of Wisconsin. At 29, while eating at a Chinese restaurant, Kennedy had an idea, and scribbled his business plan on a napkin.
Scraping some money together from his friends and family and maxing out eight credit cards, Kennedy opened the first Noodles in his basement, and then put together a team with whom he’d build and operate 100 Noodles branches all on their own. It is now a $75 million franchise with 240 locations in 18 different states, providing jobs to over 3,000 employees just like Rob. This is what the American Dream looks like.
Under Lewis’ vision, however everything Kennedy has worked for would be taken away from him. The status he has earned for himself through his achievements would be reduced to that of one filling out an application for the very business he built from the ground up. Perhaps my imagination is limited, but I at the moment I cannot imagine a greater humiliation. This is what socialism looks like.
But under the ISO’s charter, Kennedy is not a “worker.” I would learn by listening carefully to them that the term “worker” itself is a semantically manipulative and deliberately divisive term. According to its etymology, when a “worker” works as hard as Kennedy, for instance, he ironically forfeits his right to the title “worker” and the perks that come with it, for instance retaining ownership of everything he has, well, worked for.
The term is carefully designed to wedge and factionalize a population — which is prerequesite to any successful revolution and absolutely necessary for the survival and expediency of the “progressive” left.
Such is the MO of “progressives”: Convince individuals they are part and parcel of a “group,” instill disillusionment with notions of lacking and marginalization (as with the classic marketing technique: convince the consumer his life is missing something), rally that “group” against a common anathema, coordinate the respective “groups” together and then centralize them in the “progressive” image. This is what community organizing looks like.
Towards the end of our interview, Lewis showed me ISO’s publication International Socialist Review, for which Phil Gasper is a key contributor. I asked him how I might obtain a copy, and he told me it was $5. I asked him if he had change for a $20, and fortunately for me, he did. He accepted my $20 and handed me a $10 and a $5 and my brand new anti-capitalist reader’s digest.
It was then that I suddenly became worried for my friend Rob. I wondered, had the revolution happened at that very moment and the capitalists had been dragged out into the streets, whether he would be the first to go.
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