Most of Wednesday's May Day activities around the world focused on traditional labour issues: domestic battles over pay, working hours and union recognition.
Only in France, where demonstrations against the rightwing extremist Jean-Marie Le Pen, and in Britain and Germany, where protests were more diverse, was this traditional May Day theme clearly broken.
Yet such bread-and-butter debates seem far removed from the high ideals of the anti-globalisation coalition, which sought to ally labour movements around the world to the cause of instituting worldwide social justice in place of untrammelled capitalism. But while this coalition has yet to be resurrected, campaigners say it is too early and simplistic to write off its chances of re-emerging.
In previous years, traditionally insular trade unions saw sufficient cause to throw in their lot with international environmentalists and development campaigners to oppose what they saw as a system which freed capital but trapped and impoverished workers.
At the 1999 World Trade Organisation meetings in Seattle, the 2000 International Monetary Fund/World Bank meetings in Washington and Prague, and the Group of Eight summit last year in Genoa, that alliance had been powerfully on display.
The violence which increasingly accompanied such gatherings, together with the events of September 11, caused a rethink among all elements of the Movement, as the loose coalition was often called.
The adoption by many anti-globalisers of minority positions, such as opposing the Afghan military operation and, in the US, supporting the Palestinian cause, has also not helped reconstruct that broad alliance.
Recent anti-globalisation demonstrations at the IMF's spring meetings in Washington drew only a few hundred, with the AFLCIO, the US trade union umbrella organisation, declining to take part.
But while the coalition has yet to reform on any significant scale, members of the movement insist that the pause in large-scale activity is merely temporary.
"Certainly there was greater apprehension post-Genoa and post-September 11 about any mobilisation which might end in violence," says Steve Kretzmann, policy analyst at the Institute for Policy Studies think-tank in Washington DC.
But Mr Kretzmann, who saw first-hand the intricate process of stitching the labour movement into the broader coalition in the run-up to last year's IMF meetings, thinks that the reluctance to engage in public protest is dissipating. "Labour and NGOs are still maintaining contacts and co-operating as necessary," he says.
The big test for the ability to rebuild the broad-based coalition will come at the IMF and World Bank's annual meetings this October, for which activists are gearing up.
Fred Azcarate, executive director of Jobs with Justice, which aims to link the labour movement to wider social justice issues, admits that many of the peace and Middle East concerns are alien to union members, particularly in the US.
But he says: "We are trying to prevent these issues becoming a litmus test for whether to continue working together on economic globalisation. I don't yet know what will happen in October, and we are aiming to move beyond simple rallies to more imaginative forms of protest, but we anticipate something on a substantial scale."
Inferring sweeping worldwide conclusions about the state of global discontent from yesterday's activities is in itself misleading.
Activists in the anti- globalisation movement have always been irritated by the idea that the protests in Seattle, Washington, Prague and Genoa - not to mention the frequent outbreaks of direct protest in developing countries - were somehow all orchestrated by the same people.
"I never had the time or money to summit-hop, and I don't know many people who did," says Matt Smucker, an activist with the Mobilisation for Global Justice (MGJ) anti-globalisation grouping.
Europeans, particularly in Italy and France, have a much stronger tradition of organised far-left political activism, often linked to radical sections of the labour movement which still retain the syndicalist philosophy of political power arising directly from control of the factory floor.
Trade unionists and labour movement activists provided much of the street presence at Genoa, for example, where "anarchism" is a political philosophy, not an insult, and physical direct protest formed an integral part of the mobilisation.
In the US, where the trade unions are smaller and more aligned to the mainstream political process, there is far more reluctance to engage in any protest which looks like a threat to law and order.
US protests surrounding large international summits have in general been far more peaceful than those in Europe.
The significance of May Day in itself also differs substantially across countries. In the US, where Labor Day is in September, Mr Kretzmann notes that the May celebrations have often been associated with the May Day parades in Moscow under the Soviet Union - and hence most self-respecting moderate trade unionists and political activists have steered well clear.
Brant Olson, currently active with the MGJ, says: "Any time there is enough consensus on an issue, we are going to take the opportunity to build the widest coalition that we can, and that includes the labour movement." But so far the ability of the anti-globalisation movement to do just that in the aftermath of September 11 and the violence of previous large demonstrations remains unproven.