Good analysis of May 1 in the Times:
Originally billed as a nationwide economic boycott under the banner “Day Without an Immigrant,” the day evolved into a sweeping round of protests intended to influence the debate in Congress over granting legal status to all or most of the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the country…
The economic impact of the day’s events was hard to gauge, though economists expected a one-day stoppage to have little long-term effect. In large swaths of the country, life went on with no noticeable difference.
To wax Maureen Dowd-like, the strike/protest aimed for Day without a Mexican and got Network instead. As a strike I think the day has to be chalked as a failure… nothing worse than wanting to show how the economy would grind to a halt if you didn’t work only to demonstrate that it gets along just fine. Except for sectoral niches like meatpacking and fruitpicking, it was by and large less a strike resisting capital than one requiring petit bourgeois shopowners to close down in sympathy and solidarity.
If anything, the event points out the limits of the “New New Left” (which not enough has been written on… there’s this book from a conservative take, plus lots of self-congratulatory stuff from the New New Left itself, little written with critical distance). Diffuse networks of coalition-based political movements can mobilize symbolic protests fairly well but aren’t a substitute for a mass labor movement.
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