Anarchy in Wisconsin!

No amount of political freedom will satisfy the hungry masses. 

-Vladimir Lenin

All forms of the state have democracy for their truth, and for that reason are false to the extent that they are not democracy.

– Karl Marx

1.)THE MORTIFICATION OF THE LAST YEAR AND A HALF

Well wasn’t that fun! A real hoot in all of its pathetic signals of irrelevance and concession. As though anything would have been fixed if Tom Barrett would have become governor instead of the incumbent Tea Party humping Scott Walker. It is all seemingly quite ridiculous and peculiar, how fast and easily a popular uprising was corralled and broken. Rewind to a year and a half ago and a force of popular change is taking Madison by storm; mass strikes, people camping inside the state’s capitol and firefighters driving around the city blasting their sirens in response to Walker’s plan for making state wide cut backs. His design to fix the budget – Wisconsin’s austerity measures – was a series of cuts that stripped collective bargaining and massive amounts of state funding from state employees (ie. teachers, janitors, cops …etc. However, the police were later removed from these cutbacks. Though Walker is a jack – ass, he was not completely unaware of who does his dirty work when the people start constructing a guillotine). Fast forward a year and a half and this force has just been silenced and basically defeated. Not by any real sort of policing apparatus or governmental repression, but by the results that came out of the liberal’s demand for recalling the conservative governor; the June 5th verdict on Wisconsin’s re-election. This re-election materialized inside the liberal camp around their desires for more job creation and more workers rights, proving to all us from the start that this discourse was limited entirely to simply making work better. At the risk of sounding obvious, we must clarify a crucial point here, as much as one cannot expect a police officer to preform their job in any sort of decent way, we can not expect anything similar from the most insidious form of our collective exploitation; that in which is our servitude to the citadels of production. Though Barrett centered his campaign around the creation and loss of jobs here in Wisconsin, it didn’t really matter.  Because as the recent outcome showed us, in the end Walker remained in the capitol.

Well what have we learned from this sham? So, Scott Walker is back in office and the entirety of the Wisconsin popular uprising was vented, crammed, and neutralized into an overly simplified and extremely irrelevant re-election. Thus, creating a situation where many people now are worse off than when it all started. Cast your vote the liberals proclaimed to no end, calling my phone, putting shiny things in my mail box, and in some cases approaching me while at work to proselytize for their newly found savior. And what did the liberals win, besides a bad taste in their mouth after the unintended embarrassment from their own brainchild back firing; nothing. Despite this outcome, the majority of the left in Wisconsin still remains loyal to democracy and capitalism. It is all very insidious and quite pathetic, not as much from the blind admiration of the two pronged yet one body perspective of bipartisan politics. As much as, regrettably, that a huge portion of those who were pissed off and wanted to tear some shit up, now feel drained, burnt out, and essentially defeated by this year and a half long wasteful pursuit of another ruler. That is only to have their desired ruler defeated at the polls by what they call a worse option. The day after the liberals dooms day, I walked to work and saw a docile cow – eyed mass of people staring quietly at the ground and following their daily routine, as though nothing in regards to their own true desires actually occurred. As I said before, it is all very insidious and pathetic, but that is to limit our frustrations to mere words. So, what does this mean overall for creating stronger allies and building larger and more autonomous forces towards social insurrection? Once again we ask, what have we learned?

2.)TOWARDS BECOMING MORE NEGATIVE AND CONSISTENT

On the evening of June 6th a group of occupiers and anarchists a like meandered through the streets of Milwaukee.[i] A force denying the options posed, a force proclaiming in materialization that the results of this re- election never really mattered: the problem does not lie in the head, but at the core. The numbers involved in this isolated expression of rage and nihilistic tendencies were a fraction of what was the totality of folks involved a year and a half ago. Still in spite of these quantitative realities, this organ conveyed a thousand times more than what the liberals did in that wasted time, proving to us our focus shall be on the quality and consistency of our acts not the quantity of those involved. Despite the millions spent, the television commercial slots, and all the fancy paper printed with shiny catchy slogans of patriotic liberal fervor, the left’s movement was resoundingly ineffectual. It is true that the more people involved in a force of change,  the more inertia it will have behind it. And with regards to the laws of physics, the larger and faster that motion is, the more an external force will have to act upon it to slow/stop it. Still in the light of these scientific elucidations we were reminded, as history has taught us time and time again, to be very weary of mass movements in all their popular appeal.

Frankly, we don’t give two shits which ass- hole sits on their throne in Madison, whether they rock upon their sleeve the donkey or the elephant, they are both in need of a swift kick towards the door. Our beef does not start or die with one politician; we are speaking in totalities here. If the flooring in your house is rotten you don’t patch it, you rip the whole rotten thing out.

So, to answer our own question; we have learned the Spectacle still exists, in all its distracting capabilities. The re-election proved this to us. It re-directed a real force of change away from its true power of negation and corralled it into an arena quarantined by its participants’ own self imposed limitations, by validating that systems method over their own (Here we see the true environment of Empire, Biopolitics working hand in hand with the Spectacle). A re-direction brought on by those who believe social justice is still somehow obtainable, that is despite how demented this system is, thinking that it could potentially mend a lifetime of wrongs with a single right. It is similar to someone trying to put a band- aid over a severed limb; the outcome is obvious from the start. Therefore the believers in this divine (yet unobtainable) social justice engage whether intentionally or not with the state in a reformist discourse strictly confined to the language of democracy’s political functions. Simply by choosing the methodology of a re-election as the means of solving this ‘problem’- which truly is unsolvable as long as Capital still flows into our lives – Wisconsin’s left sealed their fate as a potential real force of change. In addition, the uprising by steering away from the consistent deployment of direct confrontation and the human strike negated any real chance it had at reoccurring and intensifying. We believe some here in Wisconsin see this, while others choose to focus on the football style rivalries of bipartisan politics. Reform and concession were the uprisings down fall that put Wisconsin’s popular revolt back into the hands of its rulers. By believing that democracy can work out the complexities of our lives and desires through voting, they put stock in reform over revolution. Reform is not an external method of accountability, it is an integral part of Empire’s ability to survive and re-adapt to the changing of times and collective desires. So, what we are saying is the Wisconsin popular uprising sold out and we go back to the drawing board.

3.)REALIZING SPACE IS NOT WHAT TRULY SEPARATE US, BUT ONLY FAILURES TO ACT

The totality of our generalizations coat Wisconsin’s motion towards insurrection in a series of blanketing statements, that at times invalidate other folks efforts; we get that. There is obvious room for other events to occur and we are sure they will to certain degrees. With frustration running so high and no legal legitimate avenue to turn to, people may start doing their thing all over Wisconsin. Milwaukee’s action encourages us to remind ourselves and the ones we care about that their politics are dead. We could care less which politician is where. Their politics strive for our validation and much as we do not care, we understand that Empire is the environment we were born into. An  environment riddled with hostilities positioned against us becoming something different and powerful. We must remind ourselves we are at war and as such, we must recognize what warriors do. This is just another reason to not buy into their bipartisan politics, for in form it is an endless circle of isolation and neutralization. We have learned a lot from the last year and a half, a lot of which we already knew. But, the biggest reminder was recalling how programmed Capital’s subjects are to its deadly system. Work is not the terrain we shall liberate ourselves within or upon, it is another method of domination that needs to be destroyed. As early as kindergarten they have conditioned us to believe work can be good, “one day you may grow up to become president.” How early they start on conditioning us to believe that death is not really death. For these are the spectacular politics of reform,  an exception that has become a norm in their world of constant crisis. A world in which we wish to subtract ourselves from. We shall see what these searing summer months bring us, as comrades the world over continue to remind us what it means to actualize our will to power.

Yours from the upper Midwest.

Claurice Nightengale

Juliette Group | June 2012