Political progress for the working class and oppressed in US history has always come through struggle, often including sit-ins and occupations. From the WWI veteran’s “Bonus Army” march on Washington in 1932, to the student sit-ins of the 60s to desegregate lunch counters in the south, to the Wisconsin State Capitol occupation in 2011 followed by the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2013, occupations and civil disobedience are political tactics that have been used throughout history to achieve economic, social and political gains for the poor, oppressed, and dispossessed.
But not all occupations are equal. The January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, for example, doesn’t belong to this tradition. To understand why it is necessary not only to compare the outward forms that struggles take, but also their aims. The aim of the January 6 assault was to nullify the popular vote through a violent intervention during the Electoral college ratification; its aim was not to fight for more democracy (for example by demanding the abolition of the undemocratic Electoral College), but to impose the will of a minority whose primary goal was to reestablish white supremacy in the U.S. All the other movements described above had as their aim the expansion of democratic, social and economic rights.
And yet there were voices in the mainstream press that believed otherwise. In a Washington Post op ed., right-wing political commentator Mark Thiessen equated the violence of the US Capitol assault with what happened during the occupation of the Wisconsin State Capitolin 2011, claiming that the Democrats applied a double-standard when they denounced the January 6 storming of the U.S. capitol but “embraced the left-wing mob that occupied the state Capitol in Madison.”
Thiessen is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank awash with corporate donations including from the billionaire Koch’s family. He and then-Wisconsin State Gov. Walker co-authored abook that offers their account of the 2011 Wisconsin capitol occupation.
But was the Wisconsin State Capitol occupation comparable to what we witnessed on January 6?
Let’s recall what the aims of the Wisconsin occupiers were.The 2011 occupation of the Wisconsin capitol started with a sit-in to prevent republican legislators from passing laws undermining public workers collective bargaining rights. The law was scheduled to be debated in a midnight session to avoid public contestation. Wisconsin gov. Scott Walker, a Republican backed by the right-wing billionaire Koch brothers, had just enacted tax breaks and business-friendly deals worth $117M for the rich while trying to force cuts on public workers (who Walker thought would be an easy target) to fix the budget deficit. The sheer scale of Walker’s attack was matched by a wave of solidarity that followed the occupation of the state capitol by public sector and private union workers, students and activists.
Contrary to Walker and Thiessen’s account of the Wisconsin occupation, there was no violence remotely comparable to the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, even though the former lasted several weeks while the later lasted only few hours. The Wisconsin occupation gathered more than a thousand people on weekdays and tens of thousands on weekends, and a 100,000 strong demonstration was organized on Feb 26, 2011 at the peak of the movement. But from the beginning to the end of the Wisconsin occupation, no one was seriously hurt, while five people died and many were seriously injured in the less than three hours that the January 6 attack lasted.
The composition of the crowd is also a major difference between the two occupations. In Wisconsin, the occupation was led by public and private sector union workers, but also non-unionized workers. What’s more, because of its overwhelming working-class nature, the Wisconsin occupation rallied a racially diverse crowd even though Wisconsin population has a relatively low proportion of minorities. The January 6 assault, on the other hand, was led by a significant portion of business owners, was overwhelmingly white, and the participants didn’t hide their support for white supremacy.
So even though the tactics may have broadly been the same in Wisconsin and at the U.S. Capitol (both sets of protesters occupied a capitol building), the purposes were diametrically opposed: one was a mass, democratic movement to defend the rights of working people; the other was a right-wing mobilization, directed by a sitting president, to nullify the democratic vote of the majority. Comparing the two events by reducing them to their violent content, as Thiessen and others do, amounts to comparing the wanton violence of the police against African Americans with the violence of protesters who resist it.In essence, Thiessen’s position mirrors Trump’s infamous statement after the horror of Charlottesville: “there are good people on both sides.”
The difference isn’t just in the degrees of violence, but what motivates the protesters. The far right revels in violence, seeking to build a social order that rules by violence, whereas ordinary people fighting for their rights tend to see violence only as a last resort and something done in self-defense of the movement.
We should not judge a movement based on its tactics, but first and foremost on its aims. Leon Trotsky brilliantly expounded this idea in his book “Their Morals and Ours” written at the height of the Spanish civil war:
History has different yardsticks for the cruelty of the Northerners and the cruelty of the Southerners in the [US] Civil War. A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains – let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!
Although it is true that Nancy Pelosi praised the Wisconsin occupiers’ “impressive show of democracy in action” at the time while she denounced the January 6 assailants, it would be a mistake to look at this as a sign of loyalty towards working people. For one, the praises from leading democrats like Pelosi towards the 2011 Wisconsin Capitol occupants were part of a strategy (elaborated with local and national union leaders) to reroute the anger into a recall election that would have replaced Walker with a democratic governor. While Democrats on the spot presented themselves as sympathetic to the demands of the occupiers, they worked assiduously to wind the protest down and bring it to a close.
This strategy miserably failed to recall Walker, but it succeeded in demobilizing one of the first revival of working-class struggle in decades. Moreover, if it wasn’t clear where the Democrats stand when it comes to independent working-class actions, a couple of years later when the anger against the 2008 crisis and the unjust bailout of the wealthiest turned into a national movement under the name of Occupy Wall Street, it was the Democratic mayors, with the support of President Obama, who executed a coordinated police effort to quelch it.
Finally, working people and oppressed cannot count on the state to protect them against the far-right in the long run. Capitalism is inherently prone to recurring failures that even capitalists cannot control. As society polarizes and instability increases, the ruling class will fend off threats to its dominance from the far right as well as from the left. However, despite being a temporary break from the political rule of the Capitalists, fascist dictatorships ultimately rely on the bourgeoisie’s economic power. It follows that sooner or later the bourgeoisie regains total economic and political control of society. The ruling class is well aware of this dynamics.
Only a conscious, organized working class has the potential to defeat the ruling class through its own mass, revolutionary action. If confronted with an existential threat, the bourgeoisie will choose a fascist dictatorship rather than see the working-class in power because only mass repression at the hands of the fascists can end the threat.
In “Their Morals and Ours” Trotsky warned precisely of this, arguing against those on the left who asked the Spanish working class to defer its revolutionary aspirations in order not to frighten the Spanish bourgeoisie from the republican coalition—in spite of the fact that the Spanish capitalists had already abandoned the republic and preferred Franco. The result was complete demoralization among the workers and, ultimately, the victory of Franco, establishing a fascist dictatorship in Spain three years later.
In the US today, it would be dangerous to think that the Democrats, the “second most enthusiastic capitalist party,” would be successful in preventing the rise of the far-right by enacting new laws to forestall another repeat of January 6. These laws, as experience shows, will be used to suppress Left, progressive, and working-class movements sooner than they will be used against the right.
François Laforge is a research scientist at Princeton University. He has been a member of the formerly International Socialist Organization for over two decades. He is active in local struggles.
