Boycott The Boycott

NYTimes editorial:

On Monday, if many immigrant advocacy groups get their wish, America will awaken to a disturbing silence. Shops and offices will not open, factories will be idle, and classrooms and restaurants will empty out. The nation will rattle with the emptiness of millions of immigrants not working, not shopping and not going to school.

The noise is supposed to come later, when many of those same immigrants hit the streets, protesting and chanting in a continental chorus of complaint. Their din will be joined by a moan rising from the rest of America, newly exposed as a fat, immobile queen lost without her worker bees. The shaken nation then will buckle and pass forgiving laws that loosen its borders and grant the 11 million to 12 million illegal workers their rightful place in the American landscape.
...
The groups that chose May 1 for a day of boycotts and rallies for immigrants' rights were emboldened by a miracle of grass-roots mobilization that turned a shadow population into a national movement in less than a month. But many outspoken defenders of the immigrants' cause are drawing a distinction between peaceful rallies and punitive boycotts and work stoppages. They say, rightly, that immigrants should not try to inflict pain on this country just to prove how much they love it.

My gut reaction was to reject this notion, especially since I saw that Kevin "Mushy Middle" Drum is also reluctant to get behind the boycott.  However, after thinking about it more carefully I am less enamoured with the idea of a strike at this time.  It is a powerful tool in the non-violent toolbox, and I think one to hold in reserve in case the issue needs to be escalated.

A while back I'd expressed hope that there would be follow-through after the successful mass protests in March.  So why not get behind a boycott/general strike/whatever?  Because it already came to fruition in the sense that the immoral immigration bill was scuttled by the Senate. Now seems to be inappropriate for this kind of action--instead, we all should focus on diffusing this issue because it's really nothing more than a wedge and distraction cynically wielded by the GOP.

Gandhi used a tactic similar to a general strike quite effectively during India's struggle for independence.  His approach is called hartal:

"Hartal" is a Gujurati word. "Har" means "everything" or "always"; "Tal" or "tala" means "to close". The word "hartal" means a day of mourning or protest, on which all the shops are shut and no-one goes to work or does any shopping.

The first time we saw hartal employed was in 1919 to protest of the Rowlatt Act, which severely limited civil liberties in the Raj:

The idea came to me...in a dream that we should call upon the country to observe a general hartal. Satyagraha is a process of self-purification, and ours is a sacred fight, and it seems to me to be in the fitness of things that it should be commenced with an act of self-purification. Let all the people of India therefore, suspend their business on that day and observe the day as one of fasting and prayer. The Musalmans may not fast for more than one day; so the duration of the fast should be twenty-four hours. It is very difficult to say whether all the provinces would respond to this appeal of ours or not, but I feel fairly sure of Bombay, Madras, Bihar and Sindh. I think we should have every reason to feel satisfied even if all these places observe the hartal fittingly.

...I drafted a brief appeal. The date of the hartal was first fixed on the 30th March, 1919, but was subsequently changed to 6th April. The people thus had only a short notice of the hartal. As the work had to be started at once, it was hardly possible to give longer notice.

But who knows how it all came about? The whole of India from one end to the other, towns as well as villages, observed a complete hartal on that day. It was a most wonderful spectacle.

However, Gandhi soon came to believe this action was an error:

[W]hen I reached Nadiad and saw the actual state of things there and heard reports about a large number of people from Kheda district having been arrested, it suddenly dawned upon me that I had committed a grave error in calling upon the people in the Kheda district and elsewhere to launch upon civil disobedience prematurely, as it now seemed to me. I was addressing a public meeting. My confession brought down upon me no small amount of ridicule. But I have never regretted having made that confession. For I have always held that it is only when one sees one's own mistakes with a convex lens, and does just the reverse in the case of others, that one is able to arrive at a just relative estimate of the two. I further believe that a scrupulous and conscientious observance of this rule is necessary for one who wants to be a Satyagrahi.

Let us now see what the Himalayan miscalculation was. Before one can be fit for the practice of civil disobedience one must have rendered a willing and respectful obedience to the state laws. For the most part we obey such laws out of fear of the penalty for their breach, and this holds good particularly in respect of such laws as do not involve a moral principal. For instance, an honest, respectable man will not suddenly take to stealing, whether there is a law against stealing or not, but this very man will not feel any remorse for failure to observe the rule about carrying head-lights on bicycles after dark. Indeed it is doubtful whether he would even accept advice kindly about being more careful in this respect. But he would observe any obligatory rule of this kind, if only to escape the inconvenience of facing a prosecution for a breach of the rule. Such compliance is not, however, the willing and spontaneous obedience that is required of a Satyagrahi.

A Satyagrahi obeys the laws of society intelligently and of his own free will, because he considers it to be his sacred duty to do so. It is only when a person has thus obeyed the laws of society scrupulously that he is in a position to judge as to which particular rules are good and just and which are unjust and iniquitous. Only then does the right accrue to him of the civil disobedience of certain laws in well-defined circumstances.

My error lay in my failure to observe this necessary limitation. I had called on the people to launch upon civil disobedience before they had thus qualified themselves for it, and this mistake seemed to me Himalayan magnitude.

Given that we are talking about boycotts to protest laws pertaining to illegal immigrants, I think that this kind of action would also be premature here.  And concerns about backlash are legitimate when you consider majority attitudes about immigration.

One does not back down from a fight because the majority holds a particular view on a moral issue. One does however, use appropriate tactics at appropriate times to achieve strategic aims. 

We should eschew something punitive now for more constructive actions that will continue to raise awareness in a non-threatening way while fostering more dialogue.  Anything else will only feed into the fears that the GOP hopes to tap and legitimize their wedge as we head toward November.  That won't help us in regard to immigration or the other major problems we face today.

ntodd