from the editorial team

From Tahrir Square to Madison, Wisconsin, the political climate has changed. After years and decades of quiescence and acquiescence to the domination of powerful elites, resistance suddenly erupts. Who can say why exactly? Why now, why not before, why ever? Historians will ponder this. For the moment, it is enough to know that it can happen, that all across the Middle East and across the American Middle West it is happening. What will be the outcome? At this writing, and for some time to come, no one can say for sure. But as the thousands upon thousands of demonstrators at state capitols and in the streets of American cities have made clear over the last several months, people are prepared to do more than just wait and see.

An accounting and assessment of the Egyptian revolution will appear in the fall issue of New Labor Forum. (It is at least already clear that the Egyptian labor movement played a critical role not only recently, but in the years leading up to the events of this past winter.)

Our lead article in the current issue examines the events in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, and elsewhere. There, a right wing, emboldened by Obama’s “shellacking” in last fall’s midterm elections, launched a no-holds-barred assault on the rights and material well-being of public sector workers and their unions. At least four features of that attack—and the massive blow-back it inspired—stand out. First, it happened in precisely that region—the country’s industrial heartland—gutted by a generation’s worth of deindustrialization at the hands of Wall Street financiers. Where once there were well-paid, skilled, and unionized workers—and a more equal distribution of the tax burden, able to support a decent level of public services—now there are corporate tax delinquents, ghost towns, legions of the permanently unemployed, and a workforce that’s lower paid, less skilled, downwardly mobile, just hanging on. Second, the insurgency simultaneously highlighted how perilously weak and defensive the labor movement had become. After all, the public workers’ unions in Wisconsin made every tangible concession demanded of them by the newly elected “Tea Party” governor, Scott Walker. They only balked when he and his Republican cohorts threatened to drive these unions out of existence. Third, once Wisconsin’s state employees did get their backs up, the spirit of resistance spread like a prairie fire, not only enlisting the sympathy and solidarity of private sector unions that could see the handwriting on the wall, but all sorts of “non-labor” folk—students, church groups, community organizations, even small businessmen. This is a portentous sign of the viral spread of a social emotion: empathy. On its intangible basis, the labor movement once was and could be again the magnetic center of a movement for social justice. Last but not by any means least, Madisonians and others skirted or broke the law. They occupied buildings, didn’t show up for work, high-tailed it out of the state to avoid the local constabulary. For an institution that has been tied up in knots by all the rules and regulations of state law—and by the byzantine machinery of conventional collective bargaining—this signaled desperation. But it was also a symptom of returning good health. A movement that has seemed moribund for some time now needs to display just this kind of energy and imagination to make its presence felt once again. Stanley Aronowitz explores these and other critical issues that the events in Madison busted open for urgent debate.

Other articles in this issue orbit around the same questions, as they have arisen here at home and abroad. J. Phillip Thompson examines how the progressive wing of the Democratic Party might recover from the notorious beatdown the Party received in the recent off-year elections. Instead of caving in to right-wing, anti-socialist mongering, Thompson proposes that labor and its allies push for ambitious public-private investments in a green economy. Anne Marie Lofaso takes a detailed measure of the first two years of the Obama administration’s record when it comes to delivering the goods to...