I grew up in Minnesota, but moved away in 1998; today my connection to the state is not much more profound than following the local news and avidly watching Minnesota Twins baseball games. And yet as I watched the Wisconsin protests against Governor Scott Walker’s union-busting in early 2011, I felt a mixture of pride, shame and jealousy: the same emotions that many Egyptian activists described feeling as their Tunisian neighbors took the lead in making political change in the Middle East.

Perhaps, in that intersection between an emotional connection to the Midwest and an intellectual commitment to leftist politics, the events in Wisconsin hold a clue to solving the great riddle of the twenty-first century left: the missing collective agent of anti-capitalist transformation.

The absence of the revolutionary agent is arguably the central problem of the Left since the 1960s. Since that time, the diagnosis and critique of capitalism has been updated and rendered in ever-increasing sophistication, as the cycles and crises and ideologies of capital accumulation have been theorized by the likes of David Harvey and Fredric Jameson. Nor is there a shortage of models of how a better society might be constructed from elements that already exist in the present; these range from the detailed blueprints of Albert and Hahnel’s Parecon to the open-ended framework of Erik Olin Wright’s Real Utopias. What is lacking is the organized mass constituency capable of effecting the transition out of capitalism and into something better.