Theorizing Wisconsin's 2011 Protests: Communitybased Unionism

JANE COLLINS University of Wisconsin–Madison Theorizing Wisconsin’s 2011 protests: Community-based unionism confronts accumulation by dispossession ABSTRACT ometime on Monday, February 14, I stepped into a parallel uni- Recent waves of social-movement protest in verse. I entered a world where firefighters and students slept side Wisconsin challenge conventional understandings of by side in SpongeBob SquarePants sleeping bags on the cold mar- labor activism, as they have responded not only to ble floor of the Wisconsin State Capitol, where donations from rollbacks of labor rights but also to privatization of Cairo paid for pizza to feed students running phone banks, and state programs and resources and budget cuts that S where people wearing Green Bay Packers caps greeted each other on target poor and working families. Drawing from the street with the Steelworkers’ slogan “One day longer.” It was a uni- participant-observation, I explore the question of verse where more than 100,000 people—busloads of nurses and teachers whether the movements that arose in Wisconsin in from Milwaukee, sanitation workers, brigades of corrections officers, fire- early 2011 represented an expansion of union-based fighters decked out in their gear, and police officers carrying “Cops for activism struggling within the “expanded Labor” signs—stood ankle deep in snow in 15-degree weather singing reproduction” of capital or a broader struggle union ditties and Bob Marley songs. In that universe, people repeated over against what New Enclosures Movement scholars and over again that we were finally drawing a line in the sand against have conceptualized as capital’s ongoing primitive the politics of austerity and the war on unions—until U.S. Representa- accumulation strategies. I examine the implications tive Tammy Baldwin took a look at her cold, bundled-up constituents and of the answer to this question for community-based pointed out that we might more appropriately say that we were drawing a labor movements in Wisconsin and beyond. line in the snow. [community-based unionism, labor, accumulation by The tens of thousands of protesters who marched, chanted, and sang dispossession, social movements, social protest] outside the State Capitol in the early spring of 2011 evoked memo- ries of other protests—antiwar movements, labor rallies, global justice campaigns—but I could not escape the feeling that I was in the presence of something unusual. In part, I was struck by the sheer number of people who were expressing support for unions. “I didn’t know this many people knew what a union was,” a colleague from the University of Wis- consin (UW) School for Workers quipped. As a newly elected Republican governor and legislature unveiled draconian bills targeting public-sector employees’ collective bargaining rights coupled with harsh spending cuts, public outrage spilled into the streets and then channeled into dozens of grassroots efforts organizing recall petitions, boycotts, and an alternative budget.1 Although the strong union presence seemed to mark this as a labor movement, other aspects of the scene were less consonant with that interpretation. Many union members carried signs that did not address AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 39, No. 1, pp. 6–20, ISSN 0094-0496, online ISSN 1548-1425. C 2012 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2011.01340.x Theorizing Wisconsin’s 2011 protests American Ethnologist their rights as workers but the broader issues of spending to global movements toward deregulation and market cuts—for example, members of a national nurses’ union fundamentalism. held placards proclaiming “Some Cuts Don’t Heal.” At the Beginning in the 1990s, a group of scholars some- same time, despite the governor’sexplicit attempt to portray times labeled the “New Enclosures School” began to re- public-sector workers as privileged, lazy, and responsible visit Marx’s concept of “primitive accumulation” to theo- for the state’s purported budget deficit, massive numbers rize these forms of dispossession (see Caffentzis 1995; De of nonunion community members showed up to support Angelis 2001; Federici 2001; Perelman 2000). Most Marxist them. Signs reflected this too—from one young man’s ban- scholars have understood primitive accumulation as part of ner reading “Gays for Unions: The Other Kind This Time” the prehistory of capitalism and as having two intertwined to the ubiquitous “I ♥ My Teacher.” If the 1999 protests dimensions: Early capitalists forcibly confiscated land and against the World Trade Organization in Seattle had pro- other resources to bankroll their nascent enterprises, and, duced the unlikely collaboration of workers and environ- in so doing, they separated agriculturalists and craft work- mentalists that came to be known as “Teamsters and Tur- ers from the resources they needed for self-provisioning, tles,” what kind of alliance or amalgamated movement was leaving them no recourse but to sell their labor on the mar- emerging in this snowy square in the upper Midwest? ket to survive. In contrast, Italian economist Massimo De This question about what was happening in Wisconsin Angelis has argued that Marx did not mean for this process speaks to a larger one—what kinds of social movements to be understood as simply historical but as an ongoing fea- do the political rationality and policy regime of neoliberal- ture of even mature capitalist systems. According to De An- ism give rise to? As Angelique Haugerud observes, “Neolib- gelis, capitalists resort to primitive accumulation whenever eralism has sparked a stunning array of popular counter- workers find ways to overcome their separation from the movements” (2010:112) that often target corporate power. means of production or to set limits on their exploitation— Scholars generally agree that popular responses to eco- whenever they create what Karl Polanyi (2001) called the nomic liberalization “render obsolete the overarching op- “protective covering” of social institutions.3 These protec- positions of working-class/poor and global North/global tions can include labor laws, unions, the social programs of South that have long framed our narratives of class and so- the welfare state, and forms of collective property as well as cial inequality” (Kasmir and Carbonella 2008:5). They sug- subsistence resources that make workers less dependent on gest that these movements have shifted the terrain of po- their wages. In this view, primitive accumulation is not just litical organization away from traditional political parties about the amassing of capital for productive investment—it and unions and into a “less focused political dynamic of is the attempt of capitalists to reinstate the radical separa- social action across the whole spectrum of civil society” tion of workers from the means of production, to remove (Harvey 2003:168). Sociologists call these more diffuse man- their protective covering. Although, in theory, capital accu- ifestations of discontent “new social movements” and see mulation does not “need” primitive accumulation, in prac- them as reflecting the problems and possibilities of global- tice, it is required whenever the working classes create “ob- ization.2 Both in its fluid organization and the array of con- stacles” to the accumulation process. cerns it addresses, this “movement of movements” is seen This understanding of primitive accumulation as a as a significant departure from social mobilizations of the continuous, and thus contemporary, phenomenon was past. given a wider stage with David Harvey’s now-famous chap- Since the late 1990s, there has been a growing ten- ter on “Accumulation by Dispossession” in his 2003 book dency to understand these kinds of oppositional politics as The New Imperialism.4 In this chapter, Harvey echoes responding to various forms of “dispossession” unleashed the New Enclosure School in arguing that primitive ac- as part of the latest wave of neoliberal globalization. Ac- cumulation was not simply capital’s “original sin” but re- tivists themselves were the first to argue that the global cir- mains “powerfully present within capital’s historical ge- culation of capital under neoliberalism has entailed rob- ography”; he says, in fact, that it has been “the pri- bing poor communities of many kinds of material and cul- mary contradiction to be confronted” (2003:145, 177) in tural resources. Members of movements as diverse as the the period since 1973. In contrast to De Angelis, Harvey Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, the opposition of the Ogoni suggests that capitalists pursue strategies of primitive people of the Niger Delta to Shell Oil, battles against World accumulation, which he calls “accumulation by dispos- Bank–funded dams, and the “water wars” in which activists session,” when they face an overaccumulation crisis— resisted the privatization of water in Bolivia have under- that is, when the supply of capital exceeds oppor- stood themselves as responding to dispossession. Speak- tunities for productive investment. Building on Rosa ing from these movements, Subcomandante Marcos (2001), Luxemburg’s work on imperialism, he argues that, under Vandana Shiva (1992), Arundhati Roy (1999), and others these circumstances, capitalists return to dispossession as have produced impassioned statements tying “privatiza- a way to gain new assets for profitable use. Like De Angelis, tion of the commons” and loss of collective resources he understands primitive accumulation to differ from 7 American Ethnologist Volume 39 Number 1 February 2012 normal accumulation in being imposed through extra- All of this has taken me far from the scene outside the economic force, often wielded by the state. Both De An- Wisconsin State Capitol and the noisy protesters with cow- gelis and Harvey agree that the relatively high wages and bells and signs. But it allows me to more clearly pose the generous benefits won by workers in industrialized na- question of what they–we were doing there, and more to the tions in the post–World War II period contributed to the point, what we were doing there together.

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