From: jeffreydanielrubard@gmail.com   
      
   In mid-February, as thousands of people were pondering what to do about a   
   midweek “Day Without Immigrants,” one of them called up a union office in   
   Chicago to ask if he should call in sick when going on strike for the day.   
   “You can’t say you are    
   calling in sick. You’re on strike!” replied an agitated union official.   
   “If you are calling in sick, you’re just sick.”   
      
   This little bit of confusion illuminates larger and more important questions   
   facing all those seeking the best way to protest President Trump, the GOP-led   
   Congress, and the immigration, health care, and environmental polices the new   
   administration seeks    
   to impose upon a reluctant populace: what is the meaning of a strike,   
   demonstration, or protest march?   
      
   Is it designed to register a vast outpouring of sentiment, as was so   
   magnificently demonstrated in the women’s marches and assemblies held all   
   across the country the day after Trump’s inaugural? Or are these protests   
   really more like a political    
   strike, designed to show that many workplaces (indeed, the entire functioning   
   of a complex society), will be crippled, at least for a day, when both   
   immigrants and those who support them don’t show up at work? That was the   
   message put forward on    
   Thursday, February 16 when thousands of workers shut down hundreds of   
   restaurants, warehouses, retail shops, and garages in a work stoppage and   
   boycott labeled “A Day Without Immigrants.”   
      
   Most recent marches and demonstrations don’t have much impact at work. They   
   are often held on a Saturday at a location far away from residences and   
   workplaces. But this weekend protest tradition is actually of relatively   
   recent origin, with an    
   unexamined politics and strategic outlook that has weakened the very impact of   
   the cause those participating seek to advance. While more people might be   
   expected to show up on a Saturday, the potency of their protest is diluted by   
   creating a divide    
   between what people do in the arena of politics and how they conduct   
   themselves in the world of work.   
      
      
   In the nineteenth century and for decades after, one could hardly make such a   
   distinction. A demonstration, a strike, and a march were all part of the same   
   protest. Workers in tightly packed industrial districts “turned out” of   
   their factories and    
   mills, marching by neighboring worksites and calling on their mates to down   
   tools and join the parade.   
      
   In their demand for a shorter workday, union recognition, or higher wages,   
   they sought not just to stop production, but to occupy the public square —   
   civic space — in order demonstrate their power both as workers and   
   rights-bearing citizens. Thus did    
   the women of the antebellum Lowell Mills declare themselves “daughters of   
   freemen” in protest against the “Lords of the Loom and the Lords of the   
   Lash.” Clashes with the police or militia were frequent because the local   
   bourgeoisie were just as    
   determined to deny such public legitimacy to a proletariat organizing itself   
   for political and economic combat. In the 1930s and 1940s when the industrial   
   unions were on the rise, the biggest demonstrations also shut down factory   
   districts in Detroit,    
   Chicago, Akron, Oakland, the garment district of Manhattan, and other   
   industrial hubs.   
      
   In Detroit, tens of thousands of autoworkers filled Cadillac Square in a   
   series of region-wide general strikes that were as much political as economic   
   in their demands. In April 1937, the United Auto Workers (UAW) emptied scores   
   of factories to protest    
   police assaults on female sit-down strikers then occupying department stores   
   and smaller industrial establishments.   
      
   After the war, in July 1946, the UAW again filled downtown Detroit, with fifty   
   thousand striking workers, to demand the continuation of war-era price   
   controls on meat, milk, and consumer goods essential to working-class   
   families. And just fifteen months    
   later, on April 24, 1947, the autoworkers shut down Chrysler, Ford, and many   
   other factories in the city to fill Cadillac Square with more than a quarter   
   million people protesting the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act then pending in   
   Congress.   
      
   This demonstration, on a Thursday, was by far the largest in US history up to   
   that point. But it was much more than a large assemblage — as one union   
   leader forecast, it seemed to open up an era of class-wide general strikes,   
   deploying “the kind of    
   political power which is most effective in Europe.”   
      
   McCarthyism, broad prosperity, and the routinization of collective bargaining   
   ended that prospect, but the understanding that demonstrations should have a   
   working-class dimension was not lost on those, like the African-American   
   unionist A. Philip    
   Randolph, who organized the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.   
   That demonstration was held on Wednesday, August 28, 1963. The organizers, who   
   included many from the ranks of labor, as well as the civil rights leadership,   
   did not intend to    
   shut down work in Washington, DC. But that is exactly what the march   
   accomplished.   
      
   “At 8 AM,” reported journalist Russell Baker, “when rush-hour traffic is   
   normally creeping bumper-to-bumper across the Virginia bridges and down the   
   main boulevards from Maryland, the streets had the abandoned look of Sunday   
   morning.” Many    
   African-Americans in government employment and elsewhere undoubtedly skipped   
   work to join the march. But of the 160,000 federal and city employees, most   
   were white and a majority of them stayed home, while nearly half of local   
   businesses were closed.   
      
   White tourists also avoided the city, leaving many hotel rooms vacant. As in   
   the nineteenth century, the occupation of the public sphere and space by a   
   supposedly alien army had proven profoundly disquieting to those accustomed to   
   the deference and    
   invisibility of that social force.   
      
   “For the natives,” Baker wrote, “this was obviously a day of siege and   
   the streets were being left to the marchers.”   
      
   Ironically, it was the generation of self-consciously radical young people,   
   organized into the Students for a Democratic Society, who ended the   
   century-long tradition that linked demonstrations, marches, and the world of   
   work.   
      
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)