General Discussion

and that's because the Dems ARE a bourgeois party. In spite of the way they portray themselves when it suits their agenda, the Democratic party is NOT a worker's party. When it comes to the choice between workers and the bosses, as representatives of the SYSTEM itself, they choose the system every time. Even the Democratic hero FDR didn't institute the changes he did FOR the workers, he instituted them to SAVE CAPITALISM ITSELF. The benefit to the working class was only a side effect of saving the system.

So in Wisconsin what they did is what they always do, they distracted the workers into the electoral system rather than something as disrupting as a general strike. A general strike, I might add, that had the possibility of spreading into the greater part of the Midwest. And your friend was correct in that either way, they would win BECAUSE a long recall campaign would distract the people from the underlying causes of their struggle which is capitalism. But it wasn't just the Dems that did this. The union bureaucracy didn't want a general strike either for the same reasons that the Democratic party didn't want a general strike. The union bureaucracy has a vested interest in the system itself, so they will resist any rank-and-file calls for wider actions and funnel the bottom up dissatisfaction into "safe" alternatives like negotiations and elections. Even any strikes called for by the bureaucrats are ONLY for economic issues, NOT overall and class wide political ones.

My group (Worker's Power-US) wrote extensively on this and, through analysis of the situation at the time, we predicted EVERYTHING THAT CAME TO PASS. Including Walker's winning the recall and nothing changing in Wisconsin. You can go to the website and read our articles and see. A widespread labor action, that included a statewide and even a regionwide general strike, was the only thing that could have saved worker's rights in Wisconsin. It wouldn't have NECESSARILY worked, but we knew that NOTHING else even had a chance.