Friday, October 3, 2014

Umbrella Revolution Folding Up After Only a Week

I should be clear. I am not opposed to the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong.

What I am opposed to is the official narrative of the protests as told in the Western mainstream media. That narrative goes something like this: a peaceful, industrious, capitalist people struggles to free itself from the tentacles of a totalitarian Communist China by embracing the kind of democratic reform we enjoy in the egalitarian, modern West.

It is a crock of shit, a lie, part of the larger narrative of official enemies. There are bad actors on the global stage, according to the Gray Lady, and these number Iran, China, Russia, Venezuela, Cuba, as well as others. The official enemies found in the mainstream media almost always align with those that the U.S. State Department considers antagonists.

Take today's paper for instance. the number of major stories devoted to Occupy Hong Kong equal that of the West African Ebola outbreak. All this week there have been saturation levels of coverage of the pro-democracy protests; Occupy Wall Street never garnered anywhere near the attention.

So what are we to make of this? The obvious, I would think: We are dealing with an official enemy here, the People's Republic of China; so no expense will be spared. In the case of Occupy Wall Street (OWS), the enemy in question was the be-all and end-all of the U.S., "capitalism in one country" state itself, a nominally democratic massively plutocratic neoliberalism.

As the Hong Kong Occupy protests begin to splinter today, it is interested to note the differences and similarities with Occupy Wall Street. Of significant differences, I think there are two. First, Occupy Wall Street was very careful never to articulate specific political demands, as have the two main student groups and Occupy Central With Love and Peace have in Hong Kong. In Hong Kong the two demands are that chief executive Leung Chun-ying resign and that going forward his successor can be elected by popular vote without first being approved by a nominating committee selected by Beijing. OWS was a Utopian movement, a grand gesture rejecting pretty much the entire cultural project of the West -- its consumerism, its pay-to-play representative democracy, its pauper's wage slavery careerism. There have been indications that this sensibility is also at work in Hong Kong. Good.

Second, the street occupations in Hong Kong are more akin to what went on in Bangkok in the run up to the military coup there than Occupy Wall Street and its various epigones across the United States. OWS was very careful to choose parks, usually located downtown and relatively small, for its occupations. Marches would proceed from those spaces. But mass sit-ins at several locations of the type that protesters in Hong Kong are undertaking were never a feature of Occupy Wall Street -- for the simple reason that, without a doubt, the police would crack down quickly and harshly and be applauded in the prestige press for doing so.

The main similarity between OWS and Hong Kong is the commitment to leaderlessness and consensus in decision making and a lateral rather than hierarchical social structure. This is creating the obligatory splintering and chaos, as Austin Ramzy and Keith Bradsher describe in "Hong Kong Leader Refuses to Resign, but Deputy to Meet With Protesters":
“We don’t have a leader,” said Irene Ng, an English major at Hong Kong Baptist University. “This is trying to be a democracy, but then you try to reach a decision and you can’t. Nobody can decide. The ultimate problem is it might split us apart.” 
The protesters interviewed gave no indication that a retreat was imminent. But many wondered how long they could sustain the turnout necessary to block crucial roads in the city and just what would constitute an acceptable victory. 
Tim Lam, an engineer who said he had joined the sit-ins every day since Sunday, said he expected the occupation to last another week at most. “That’s about how long the protesters’ passion can last,” he said. “After one, two weeks of occupation, protesters would start to think about how it affects the economy, the everyday lives of people.” 
Further escalation by the protesters could alienate members of the public resentful of a demonstration that affects their daily lives. But without more aggressive steps, the protests could fade. “If we take rash actions, we may lose people’s sympathy,” said Niko Cheng, a recent college graduate and protester in Mong Kok, a densely populated area of Hong Kong on the Kowloon Peninsula. “But if this drags on — it’s already turning into a carnival, with people dancing, singing and all that — people may forget what they’re here for.” 
Prominent voices in the pro-democracy campaign have indicated that there is no consensus on what, short of an unlikely reversal of the central government’s position, would lead to an end of the protests.

No comments:

Post a Comment