Dear Wisconsin Morons: This Land WASN'T "Made For You and Me"!

What follows is my reply to this commentary on recent developments in Wisconsin and where they're headed:

"...what is most important is that we support the union in their struggle..."

I thoroughly disagree!

Here, sharply posed, is the reality of the matter:

The "workers" in question make EXPONENTIALLY more than you do, and probably even two or three times what I do, as things are. They are NOT, as you portray them, desperately poor and just trying to eek out a living on the verge of starvation. They are so wealthy that a very large percentage of them probably even own businesses of their own on the side, as well as stock portfolios, real estate, etc.! 5.8% of $35,000-$70,000+ a year isn't going to kill anyone, or even close.

The hard and painful truth for the American "left" to accept is that these "workers" would actually lose more under AUTHENTIC socialism than is being demanded of them right now by "the Mubarak of the Midwest"! That they compare themselves to the Egyptian masses is an insult to the latter. Their conditions are not remotely similar and their demands are for the retention of their existing privileges OVER the Egyptian and other Third world masses. And moreover there isn't going to be any imperialist bourgeoisie or imperialist government with which to bargain/collaborate under socialism if it can at all be helped.

Even the Tea Party racists can spout out anti-corporate dribble when it is opportunistically convenient. They complain of the bank bailouts, of executive bonuses, of powerful bureaucrats, even sometimes of the Iraq War. Does this make them progressive? That'll be a cold day in hell!

The problem with the union movement in Wisconsin isn't that it's doomed to fail, it's that their objectives are reactionary! There is no "good" or "progressive" side to the debacle in Wisconsin. The situation instead reminds me of a lecture my law professor gave us in college one time. She described to us a case wherein a member of a pair of bank robbers decided he had been cheated by his partner and thus decided to sue for "his share" of the loot. Naturally, the court frowned on the case itself and found that neither of them had the right to stake a claim in the first place, given the means by which they had acquired the money in question.

In that connection, one of the various particularly disgusting features of the Wisconsin action has been the celebration of American patriotism, which is inevitably the celebration of American colonialism and imperialism. Check out Tom Morello's little number. News flash to spoiled Wisconsin morons: this land AIN'T your land! And it ain't my land either. This land WASN'T "made for you and me"! This is stolen land and the debacle in question is over stolen loot! What we are witnessing in that video thus amounts to a celebration of genocide and plundering. And no, throwing in a verse about relief lines does not change that overarching essence.

We shouldn't just "be the best protesters we can be". We need to ask these hard questions about the political contents of protests. We should not support ANY section of American exploiters in fighting for the retention, let alone extension, of their privileges. No one has a right to plunder, no matter how employed or waged they are. The proletariat is more essentially defined by the property-less condition than by the employed status anyway. The property-less condition is what gives the proletariat its class interest in bringing all property under common ownership. That's the only way the proletariat AS A CLASS can acquire property. The former First World proletariat, on the other hand, has acquired it by way of the de facto exploitation of the Third World masses, thereby rendering the latter the place where the international proletariat is overwhelmingly concentrated today. There is no First World proletariat to speak of. And even the 30% of these Wisconsin protesters you describe who allegedly have sympathies with socialism are, in fact, coming from a social-imperialist understanding of that, given the nature of their demands, as explained above.

Does all this mean that real communists, Maoist Third Worldists, have no role to play in this situation? Are we to just sit at home and lament from afar? Of course not! We have a role. Real communists, leading light communists, need to be in really any given "mass" action that arises in America, be it one of these unionist actions or even a Tea Party rally, precisely in order to undermine them and actively attract as many people as will be interested to the genuine communist pole. We are looking for the few First Worlders, for the few Americans, who are willing to betray their own class interests and their country and fight on the side of the world's oppressed and exploited majority in the Third World. We are working behind enemy lines. Genuinely progressive mobilization in this country is bound up with opposing American imperialism and supporting revolution in the Third World.