Vincent Kolo is a contributor to chinaworker.info.
Incredible movement in Hong Kong. Sunday, June 16’s demo was two million, outnumbering last Sunday’s one million, which opened the floodgates.
This means more than 1 in 4 of Hong Kong’s population (7.5m) joined the march. A statement on behalf of the Chief Executive Carrie Lam, who may not last the week, is more humble and apologetic than yesterday’s u-turn announcement which was accompanied by defense of the police, insistance that the youth who were gassed and shot at were “rioters” etc. This new appeal to “give me a second chance” won’t wash. She is hated.
An occupation of the main road around the Legco (‘parliament’) has begun with possible development of a new Umbrella Revolution. Masses aren’t being fooled by “suspension” but want the extradition law scrapped. Trust in the government and mis-named Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is zero. The mass movement’s focus has shifted to demanding Carrie Lam’s resignation and three other hated ministers most associated with the law.
There are elements of a pre-revolutionary or even revolutionary situation in these events. But there are many contradictions. Not least the general weakness of the workers’ movement, which workers in Western countries would find difficult to believe, and other factors which will be explained in more depth in upcoming material.
The government’s concessions came too little too late. Masses sense they have momentum and lessons have been learned from 2014. For Xi Jinping and the CCP this is a major crisis and possibly worse – a sign of what’s coming in mainland China.
CWI comrades have been systematically agitating for a political strike as the main weapon to pursue this struggle, linked to demands for building democratic committees of grass roots workers and youth to give the largely spontaneous and leaderless movement democratic structures and make the idea of strike action more concrete. This has met with some success, as already reported, but consciousness in this field is still lagging far behind the other features of what is a powerful mass democratic movement against authoritarian rule. Marxists, since the Bolsheviks and before, have always strived to play a key part in democratic movements, linking the struggle for democracy to the need to build an independent working class force and a socialist program.
