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Bill,

First, maybe I didn't place enough emphasis, but I did say that for people the recall and the movement were blurred. The various left groups in Madison and Wisconsin generally have been pointing out for the last year that this was going to be a major problem, that the movement was being reigned in by the Democrats and labor officials, that it was ultimately not going to work because they would play to the center and no one gives a shit about that.

The problem isn't about what is true or not, because you are right that the Dems and Republicans both were putting out an austerity agenda, but where power lies. Most people also saw themselves as voting "Against Walker" and not "For Barrett"--selecting Barrett was a 'pragmatic view' of who had the best chance of unseating Walker.

In terms of power, was not a strong enough pole that was independent of the recall that had a strategy that was sensible. It is also true that the rules of elections are made so that it's incredibly difficult to "win", but most working people regard them as legitimate in some sense, and they have considerable sway ("hegemony"); materially, that policy directly affects the public sector unions, cuts to services and civil rights, so of course they'll see the value in them. If you pretend that what happens at the level of big-P Politics doesn't matter, well then I think your movement strategy is going to fall short. I'll probably write something on this soon, but the "not just recall" Left (or whatever you want to call it) did not have a way to challenge on the electoral or labor fronts, and when you look at the incredible deployment of resources labor put into these elections I think you'll agree that it wasn't something that you could just make a good argument about and people would hit the streets again.

Also, it has been really amazing the way that people nationally took to the idea of a general strike in Wisconsin. It was very effective propaganda--TOO effective, because it was never going to happen. If you look at the organization of public sector unions in Wisconsin, their history and the number of militants, you'd see that this was really a point of agitation that worked very well to push people on tactical possibilities. But the idea was not going to spontaneously organize. This was a motion made at a Fed that has no power to actually enact strikes, it was to push the idea. The reality was that a general strike was not going to happen. People in Wisconsin knew that, its the rest of the country that didn't understand. Now it is possible that other kinds of labor actions could have happened, and that I agree with, but again it's a problem of how would you enact it--we know that bureaucrats have no interest in such things, even "when the knife is at the throat" as someone said to me. That's something the left needs to take up.

So, yes, the recall that was necessarily tied to the Democrats and the move away from labor action were bad and they shouldn't have happened. The question is and was, what are you going to do in these conditions? I do not think it is wise to dismiss the election and say "the Dems lost, not us", because to thousands of people the movement and the election became linked, and people's assessments are measuring the strength of the movement by the results of the election. I'd say a task of the radical left is to point out that this is not the case, that the movement is and must be independent even if you see how there's overlap objectively, and point out exactly what went wrong with the Democrats--how that is a reason for political independence that you're talking about.