SALON

Monday, Apr 30, 2012 3:36 PM UTC

What to expect on May Day

No one knows quite what Occupy's general strike will look like, but police are reportedly preparing for action

By

Topics: Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Oakland, Occupy, General Strike,

What to expect on May Day (Credit: AP/Paul Sakuma)

With just one day to go until May Day, the Occupy-planned general strike remains a largely unknown quantity. How many people will skip work to take to the streets? The Occupy call, which has gained support from numerous labor and immigrant justice groups, reads “No Work, No School, No Housework, No Shopping. Take the Streets!” It’s just a matter of hours before we see whether and how it will be answered.

I have written here at some length against judging this May Day by standards of traditional general strikes — not seen in the U.S. since the 1940s — or contemporary mass strikes in Europe, where unions have not been politically pummeled into weakness, as they have in this country. And although pundits are looking at May Day as a referendum on Occupy’s relevance, it’s unclear what success in this case means or would look like. Marches (both permitted and un-permitted), free meals, teach-ins, college student and high-school walkouts and roving dance parties have been scheduled in 115 cities around the country. Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello and other well-known musicians will be joining a “guitarmy” — 1,000 guitarists marching (and strumming) from New York City’s midtown to Union Square. Clearly, the general strike organizers in New York are less interested in affirming the strength or relevance of a movement than they are in experimenting with new tactics. Still, there’s a feeling that somehow, and in some bold way, it’s got to be big.

Eyes will be on New York and the Bay Area when it comes to setting the tone. On the West Coast, a major May Day plan has already changed at the last minute. The plan had been to shut down the Golden Gate Bridge in support of bridge unions, which have been without a contract for a year. The Golden Gate Bridge Labor Coalition renounced its original bridge blockade plans on Saturday, however, asking supporters instead to join its hard picket lines shutting down ferries and buses (the coalition of bridge worker unions will be striking that day). The Port of Oakland Longshoremen have called for a daytime work stoppage and over 4,000 Bay Area nurses also without a contract will be striking, although the majority of May Day activity has been outside of union organizing.

In New York, back-to-back (and overlapping) actions will be taking place across Manhattan and in some outer-borough areas. Numbers in the tens of thousands are expected at a permitted “solidarity march” in the afternoon from Union Square to Wall Street, jointly organized by OWS, the Alliance for Labor Rights, Immigrant Rights, Jobs for All and the May 1st Coalition. Organizers have been keen to stress that different marches and actions carry different levels of risk. Schedules demarcate rallies as permitted or unpermitted, or “green” or “red” (from a color-code for assigning risk dating back to the late ’90s anti-globalization movement) — enabling individuals with, say, precarious immigration statuses, to avoid activities that might put them at risk of deportation.

There will be unpermitted, unpredictable actions a-plenty — including an autonomously organized Wild Cat march, with the “wild cats” consisting of various anarchists, anti-capitalists, anti-authoritarians and their allies, beginning in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Its call states, “if we wanted to protest we could carry a sign and walk within police barricades, safely cordoned off in a free speech zone. On May 1st, we aren’t working and we aren’t protesting. We are striking.”

Much of the activity will depend less on the strikers themselves than on the police response and crackdown. The Village Voice’s Nick Pinto noted on Twitter Sunday that according to a “well-sourced” colleague, the NYPD assigned to cover May Day demonstrations “have been ordered to bring ‘hats and bats’.” Conveniently, New York will see increased security and police vigilance on May 1, following warnings from the FBI and Department of Homeland Security about potential terror risks on the anniversary of Osama Bin Laden’s death (even though the Al Qaida leader was actually killed on May 2. and Police Commissioner Ray Kelley notes there is no known terror threat to the city). At a Sunday press conference, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said, with regards to policing on May Day, “We will do what we normally do and find the right balance.” So if we are to go by the normal police response to Occupy mobilizations in New York, we can expect vast police presence, mass arrests, aggressive crowd handling, swinging batons and pepper spray at the very least.

In my view, there is little point in predicting in advance what the May Day General Strike will do. As I argued, writing in the most recent n+1 Occupy! Gazette, Occupy’s zeitgeist-shifting events have never gone according to plan. Even setting up camp at Zuccotti Park — the unmiraculous corporate plaza, which became the epicenter of a radical political opening — was a backup plan after the first choice spot in Downtown Manhattan was blocked by police on September 17.  And so I’ll repeat here what I wrote in Occupy!, I don’t know what a success might look like on Tuesday, rather “I hope for a May Day, which— like other Occupy actions have—re-orients how we feel about failure and success altogether.”

Natasha Lennard is an assistant news editor at Salon, covering non-electoral politics, general news and rabble-rousing. Follow her on Twitter @natashalennard, email nlennard@salon.com. More Natasha Lennard.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 79 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: Chekhov's story mirrors Russia's own

Recommendations