On Wisconsin!

BY ED FELIEN

The actions by workers in Wisconsin over the past three weeks have inspired workers throughout the country. Their courage and indomitable strength have given workers everywhere a model for resistance to tyranny. The class warfare waged by Scott Walker, the Republicans and their billionaire buddies is doomed once we recognize how few they are and how many we are.

We have a right to organize society any way we want. If we decide that millionaires and billionaires should pay more in taxes, that is our right. And if we decide that everyone should have the right to medical care, a college education and peace and safety in their neighborhoods, then that’s our right, too.

Frederick Douglass, 150 years ago, commenting on the Dred Scott Decision of the Supreme Court and the inevitable Civil War that was about to happen, said,
“Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.

“This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. In the light of these ideas, Negroes will be hunted at the North and held and flogged at the South so long as they submit to those devilish outrages and make no resistance, either moral or physical. Men may not get all they pay for in this world, but they must certainly pay for all they get. If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others.”