Rebuilding Hong Kong’s democratic movements in retreat: A response to Zi‑yuet

First published at Anti*Capitalist Resistance.

Zi-yuet’s “ Charting a New Course for Hong Kong’s Struggle” is a timely document that identifies new pathways to rebuild the democratic movement in Hong Kong, investigating political possibilities in a period of downturn and retreat for social and democratic movements. This type of reflection is as essential as it is rare in these times: the conditions of totalitarianism prohibit easy avenues for action, but they force us to slow down and critically evaluate the successes and mistakes of the recent past for movements to rebuild with more strength and clarity in the future. Very few pieces of writing today interrogate the horizons of Hong Kong politics as expansively as “Charting a New Course” does. My critical comments should not be taken to detract from the importance of Zi-yuet’s intervention; rather, I hope to build on it by opening a conversation.

My critique is framed around what I see as two general ambiguities in “Charting a New Course,” concentrated around the document’s fourth part: 1) the ambiguous ideological status of Zi-yuet’s vision of democratic revolution (and scarce attention to the intermediate organizing tasks needed to achieve it) and 2) the untimeliness of foregrounding the task of vanguard party-building. Zi-yuet’s theory of democratic revolution is clearly more advanced and nuanced than the ones generally espoused by the mainstays of the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong. Zi-yuet emphasizes mobilizing workers’ collective action to seize the means of production as a fundamental means for democratic change, rather than a simple shift in sovereignty in which electoral processes mainly define democratic governance. Zi-yuet thus implicitly encourages their readers to consider that one cannot simply find a common denominator for democratic politics, as its forms always already appear with ideological inflections. The fate of Hong Kong self-determination, as they suggest, is inseparable from addressing the city’s structural foundation on “state-capital collusion” and “crony capitalism.” Thus, the structural conditions make it such that the self-activity of a particular class — of those alienated from those who control the levers of economy, be it the professional office workers in Central or the non-local, low-paid workers laboring in construction and transport across the city — is the most adequate social force to lead democratic transformation. A genuinely democratic revolution, in other words, is fulfilled not just when Chinese rule becomes Hongkonger rule, but when the working class seizes control of the city’s political and economic levers, monopolized by the Chinese state in collusion with Chinese and Hong Kong capitalists, such that they can collectively determine their material conditions from the ballot box to the workplace.

Many movements across the world would readily understand this vision as some form of socialist democracy, though, as Zi-yuet very well understands, the histories and traditions of the left have been too utterly misconstrued in the minds of everyday Hongkongers for them to register it as such. As French Marxist Daniel Bensaïd writes, “For most people, the massive use of the communist label to characterize the free-market authoritarian state in China will weigh much more heavily and for a far longer time than the fragile theoretical and experimental sprouts of the communist hypothesis.” This is partly thanks to the Chinese government’s complete betrayal of socialist principles over the decades, leading them to preside over one of the most hyper-capitalist regimes today — confusingly in the name of socialism. In fact, Zi-yuet’s deep awareness of this unfortunate reality leads to the manifesto’s conspicuous lack of a clear left-wing ideological framework, even as it hints toward such a horizon. Capitalism is barely mentioned throughout the piece, despite the author’s familiarity with its operations. While this impulse to conceal this politics for a better chance to appeal to their readers is understandable, it overly obscures a clear vision of revolutionary activity, and thus, also the tactics and strategies needed to occasion it.

Democratic movements in defeat and retreat

Without adequately laying out that a democratic revolution must tend toward an anti-capitalist one, there is little basis for justifying the centrality of workers or proletarian organization that Zi-yuet articulates. Why build workers’ collective power? Why ought Hong Kong workers gear toward “paralyzing the economy?” Why would this be effective, and persuasive to Hongkongers? Why is labor particularly conducive to democratic revolution, compared to mobilizing along other social forces or according to other frameworks? How do we explain the value of labor organization to the average pro-democracy Hongkonger, who prioritizes an abstract conception of ‘democratic organizing’ (encapsulated in the ‘non-ideological’ ‘Five Demands’), to which all other kinds of organizing frameworks are secondary? The former HKCTU organizer Leo Tang once reflected, in a document he wrote in prison, that historically, workers’ organizing in Hong Kong has been “confined to the arena of ‘labor rights’ in the strictest sense and do not engage adequately in political discourse.” The goal, he writes, is for Hongkongers to understand that “worker subjectivity borne out of this struggle does not intend to merely show that there are workers in the movement too, but to weaponize the workday and workplace as a frontier of political struggle.” The limited political horizon of the new union movement during 2019-20 testifies to this historic weakness: the sudden burst of unionization across dozens of industries (many for the first time) should not be mistaken for a rise in class consciousness, as most workers mainly saw the unionism as merely one vehicle alongside many others to fight for pro-democracy demands, with the traditional focus of unionism — building economic power as a collective class — rendered incidental. The importance of working-class organization that Zi-yuet emphasizes, in a sense, resonates with Tang’s idea as well. But the manifesto’s attempt to balance between gesturing toward the centrality of labor while avoiding language that may alienate Hong Kong readers produces its own kind of limitation: in abstaining from providing a comprehensive account of the crisis of democracy as interlinked with capitalist rule, it is unable to provide a clear sense of “democratic revolution” coherently distinguished from its liberal renditions, just as it is difficult to see why workers’ organizing should be central in its paradigm of change. In other words, “Charting a New Course” rightly criticizes the pro-democracy movement for lacking a clear vision and strategy for change — but still does not go far enough to articulate a robust enough strategic alternative.

Rather than emptying “democratic revolution” of its ideological content or positing a dogmatically ideological vision of “socialist revolution,” we need a conception of demands and organizing that could immediately speak to the most pressing issues of working people’s material conditions, building toward an ideological rigorous vision of social change from there. Early Marxists have called these “partial” or “transitional” demands, meant to link between immediate and maximum conceptions of social change, as the Bolshevik revolutionary Karl Radek once characterized them, “anchored in the needs of the broad masses, do not merely lead them into struggle but are also inherently demands that organize the masses.” As Zi-yuet correctly points out, avoiding “abstraction devoid of meaningful political content” and “abstract slogans or aphorisms” is necessary to re-activate mass political consciousness. Zi-yuet invokes the Czech dissident Václav Havel’s idea of “resist[ing] social atomization and build[ing] community by “living in truth,” while correctly arguing that this conception is insufficient. Perhaps the experiences of a similar and adjacent region would be even more instructive. Like Czechoslovakia, Poland faces a similar difficulty in rebuilding the left after decades of totalitarian rule that identifies with the left. And the problem continues, as post-Communist ruling parties now push neoliberal policies that decimate the economy. One of the founders of a recent left-wing party, Razem, Adrian Zandberg, said, “If someone asked you [in Poland] — what are your political views? — and you answered “left-wing”, you were associated with those post-communist, neoliberal, right-wing politicians and policies.” How was Razem ultimately able to build one of the most promising left parties with a base in masses of young, precarious workers since Poland’s transition from communism in recent years? It mobilized around some core symptoms of Poland’s neoliberal economy — the effects of deregulation and privatization on increasingly precarious jobs with little security—arguing for policies guaranteeing secure employment and against “zero-hour contracts.” In 2016, Razem elected leaders spearheaded mass demonstrations against a near-total abortion ban, leading to thousands of Polish women going on strike in October for reproductive justice. There is nothing inherently revolutionary about any of these social issues, but together — and with a clear political program and perspective that ties these social ills to systemic root causes—we can rebuild a democratic movement that can be as ideologically rigorous as it can rally the masses.

What would such democratic demands look like for Hong Kong, that could “build the revolutionary consciousness, capability, and confidence of the Hong Kong people?” We need ways to connect to immediate and relevant issues relating to democracy that also relate to class. The key is not unstrategically foregrounding left-wing rhetoric (which, as Zi-yuet points out, may very well alienate Hongkongers), but identifying openings that can allow Hongkongers to start interrogating how issues of democracy must necessarily involve thinking through the reality of social exploitation. In other words, Zi-yuet has the right instinct to note that we need some kind of intermediate conception of revolution that can appeal to Hongkongers who may not be readily open to left-wing ideas — but this does not mean centering on a conception of “democratic revolution” absent of any concrete links to a socialist program, but developing democratic demands and campaigns palatable enough to Hongkongers while also providing an opening for us to talk about the relationship between class and democracy. Framing such demands must begin with gathering like-minded activists to carefully attend to existing workers’ mass grievances as they evolve with the contradictions of the political system. While Hongkongers may be allergic to left-wing ideas, the persistence of capitalism’s contradictions means that there will always be issues that afflict someone, albeit in inconsistent and unformed ways. For example, are there Hongkonger migrants in the UK concerned about the recent racist attacks by far-right mobs, or interested in or sympathetic to the labor actions of the early 2020s? Are there exiles from Hong Kong who are now part of trade unions, and face unemployment, under-employment, and other everyday issues? Are there Hongkonger international students who are newly politicized by Israel’s genocidal campaign on Palestinians? Could you identify and gather such individuals to work on smaller projects together to build trust and sharpen each other’s perspectives — as a crucial first step to building any revolutionary core?

Zi-yuet effectively provides a crucial example of one worthwhile topic that may stimulate Hongkongers back home when they pinpoint Hong Kong’s “structural budget deficit,” and how “it will be ordinary Hongkongers who will bear the brunt of the government’s efforts to cut its operating costs by slashing public spending on education, healthcare, and social welfare,” and “the regime will continue to plough taxpayer money into environmentally ruinous white elephant projects to create an illusion of growth and progress.” Indeed, Hong Kong’s economic contradictions express “a polycrisis, arising from the accumulation of political, geopolitical, social, economic, demographic, environmental and ecological contradictions.” However, the proper work of revolutionary theory also unpacks and specifies how such a global polycrisis manifests in Hong Kong society to develop an effective political strategy. What are some examples of such white elephant projects, what are the demands and campaigns that can mobilize Hongkongers around them, and how do we raise such issues that can stimulate Hongkongers’ political consciousness during this period of movement downturn? Which public industries are particularly affected by these spending cuts? What are the subjective conditions of workers’ organizing in those industries? What can be safely done publicly, and what organizing measures would be too risky to discuss publicly? If there is little organizing potential among workers in the relevant sites, would it be effective to agitate about the issue abroad as small cells of overseas activists? For one, Liber Research Community is not a revolutionary formation, but a hub that has played a role in Hong Kong’s movement ecosystem even before 2019, and continues to publish critical reports on the negative impacts of the proposed Lantau artificial islands—an issue that has energized small groupings of Hong Kong activists for years. Would this be something worth agitating around? What types of activities and organizations would best enable such agitation toward the greater political ends of re-congealing the Hong Kong democratic movement? Some models of this type of concrete organizing exist in the Hong Kong left in recent decades, like in Left 21. I would study their approach to organization in the early 2010s — how they analyzed and intervened in the Kwai Tsing dockworkers’ strike, the rise of the Hong Kong Labour Party, etc. — to see what are the successes and failures from which we can learn.

Of course, totalitarian conditions in Hong Kong mean that openly building toward mass organizations like Left 21, or a mass party like Razem in Poland, today would be impossible. But again, Polish history shows that thinking critically and creatively about small-scale organizing to continue quickening radical ideas and action even under authoritarian conditions paved the way for the revolutionary process throughout the 1980s. The historian David Oks observes in Solidarity and the Politics of Anti-Politics (1990) that “​​leftist social initiatives did not come naturally in Poland. People had to create them. Oppositionists had to lay the groundwork, to build a movement that seriously tried to organize independent social initiatives and the kernels of new trade unions.” The most influential one of these oppositionists was the Workers’ Defense Committee (KOR), elements of which kept the idea of independent trade unions alive through the downturn of the 1970s. This demand proved even more successful than they imagined when its manifestation in the strikes of 1980 suddenly became the key trigger that began the political revolution. But this upsurge was only possible because of KOR’s tireless and diverse organizing in the late 1970s, when its members raised awareness for persecuted workers, and organized independent underground outlets for political education and debate through “flying universities” and print journals like Robotnik. KOR’s strength was not its programmatic clarity and discipline of organization.

Of course, there is much to criticize them for their oversights and ideological errors. The Polish Marxist Zbigniew Marcin Kowalewski argues that KOR’s weaknesses ultimately made it disastrously ill-prepared when the revolutionary opportunity came (in fact, I would also add that the ideological imprecision of KOR and their predecessors’ vision of “open democracy,” or podmiotowość, share similar weaknesses as the idea of “democratic revolution” espoused in Zi-yuet’s document). But what was successful about KOR is precisely their open orientation and approach to organizing, their capacity to carve out critical spaces for everyday workers (or at least the more politically advanced ones) to continue practicing independent thinking and politics — grounding the role of labor in broader practices of democracy through their education and organizing — while avoiding being fully repressed by the state. On the other hand, one could also argue that the ideological ambiguity of KOR led to structural weaknesses in Solidarność that allowed for more right-wing elements to take the helm of the movement for democracy as well, paving the way for full capitalist restoration in Poland. How might Zi-yuet avoid such a scenario for Hong Kong — if their vision of revolution gains momentum?

Clearly, Zi-yuet understands this principle to some degree as they write, “To forge a revolutionary democratic movement, we must not only spread ideas through agitation, propaganda and political education, but also organize and build networks. We must support and participate in social and economic struggles — clandestinely when necessary, but, where possible without attracting state repression, on the front lines.” But this formulation would benefit from more specificity in its content. What social and economic struggles are most decisive for local and diaspora politics right now? Elsewhere, in their analysis of the late 2021 Foodpanda delivery workers’ strike, Zi-yuet theorizes at a more precise level of detail when observing that there is more space for ‘non-political’ labor action at this moment, though labor can be an important site for workers to “incubate political consciousness.” In that case, can we further expand on that observation to inform how exactly labor can be a productive site for organizing, especially given the current state of stagnation and decline among the unions that emerged from or played robust roles during the 2019-2020 upsurge that the Hong Kong-based New Union Movement Research Group identifies? What are workers and other militants — those who still show the most will to struggle — concerned about or acting on now? For one, the labor crunch in 2023 has led to an expansion of the quota of non-local workers in some industries. This has led to deeper tensions between local and non-local workers, and the further exploitation of non-local workers by local agents. What should be our analysis as the left toward the growing labor shortage, and are there Hong Kong workers and trade unionists at home and in exile alongside other progressive activists interested in thinking through this issue who we can coalesce to think together? Can we bridge such issues to the experiences of the many skilled professionals who have moved to Britain in the wake of the movement’s defeat and are now struggling with unemployment or under-employment? There are also small groupings of overseas Hongkongers and local Hongkongers newly politicized by Israel’s genocidal invasion of Palestine—a crucial start to begin understanding how the US is no savior to Hongkongers, and, as Chinese diaspora activists in Palestine Solidarity Action Network are discovering, organizing around Palestine could become a vital platform for new campaigns that bring to light China’s role in facilitating global capitalism and imperialism to educate circles around us, and encourage them to think at a deeper level politically. How can we provide a critical and democratic outlet for everyday members of such communities to have political discussions around interconnected issues that reveal how Hongkongers most tangibly experience the global polycrisis — beyond the rights-based advocacy and service frameworks that dominate Hong Kong diaspora civil society?

These questions can only be answered in practice by taking the lead to create spaces of political dialogue with others (especially as few exist). Being able to pose these questions in meaningful ways would allow Hongkongers to rediscover an anti-capitalist vision of democratic politics for themselves. It is what would solve the central dilemma of Zi-yuet’s theory of democratic revolution: not to hide anti-capitalist principles or express them only in suggestive forms, but to stage occasions by strategically identifying and mobilizing around concrete issues and campaigns — in a scale that adequately corresponds to our current conditions of retreat — for Hongkongers to interrogate and expand our vision of democratic politics collectively, and on our own terms. The proper audience for Zi-yuet’s document must be created from existing communities and networks of politically engaged activists. We must not presume that there are masses simply ready to be activated, only if they come into contact with our ideas. A significant part of revolutionary work recognizes that we must organize to create mass leaders to be receptive to revolutionary paradigms, who can stay consistently and critically together through the highs and lows of movements, cultivate them together, and meaningfully digest theoretical texts engaging with a more rigorous conception of politics like the one Zi-yuet begins to sketch. And thus, only such a sense of organizing could generate an audience that can think on the scale that Zi-yuet’s document operates — for “Charting a New Course” to become meaningful, or to use Marx’s words, such that it can become theory “capable of gripping the masses.” This is another key principle Zi-yuet recognizes to some degree, as they write that “it is true that most uprisings do not have revolutionary demands or aspirations from the beginning,” thus requiring a “catalyst that brings the uprising to a revolutionary ferment. But now, the terms of the question have shifted: how must we restore the basic blocks of democratic consciousness toward action, not in the conditions of an uprising, but in conditions of downturn, retreat, and defeat?

On revolutionary parties

The Belgian Marxist Ernest Mandel remarks that to comprehend Lenin’s organizational praxis is not just to understand that social contradictions exist in the world that can be superseded through revolutionary organization, but also that politics require one to “discover the mediations – the intermediate links – which articulate the contradictions, instead of juxtaposing them and “transcending” them by virtue of this juxtaposition [as] these intermediate links alone make possible a coherent interpretation of what otherwise is liable to look like a fortuitous mosaic of ‘contradictory factors’.” In other words, what intermediate steps allow revolutionary organization to take on meaningful existence out of a formless mass of social contradictions? The core weakness of Zi-yuet’s text is that such intermediate links are not clearly explained: how do we bridge democratic and socialist revolution? How do we effectually articulate the relationship between workers’ movements and political democracy through organizing? This issue is most prominent in Zi-yuet’s ultimate solution: the building of a revolutionary party, as they write, that “must intervene at every level of the uprising and the mass movement to make the case for a revolutionary seizure of power from below, where the people form their own organs of grassroots political power.” But how would such a party emerge, sustain, grow, and recruit under totalitarian conditions? How would such a party organization avoid the bureaucratic mistakes of party organizations in the past and the present? How would you convince everyday Hongkongers who have been historically distrustful of membership-based organizations, let alone a disciplined revolutionary party, of the importance of a revolutionary party? What is the programmatic basis of such a party? As Mandel writes, to simply identify the Leninist theory of organization with the necessity of a revolutionary party is to miss the myriad and decisive “intermediate links” that allow such a mode of organization to become meaningful to the masses in the first place: the chances of success of a party “requires a previous implantation of the cadres of the vanguard party among the workers: this, alone, can make that party a potential leadership for the class. It requires a correct strategy and tactics, such as convincing most workers politically. It requires a tradition of political initiatives and actions preparing the masses for the revolutionary assault, and rendering the vanguard organization credible as the proletariat’s potential leadership.”

There is also the larger issue that most theories of party organization in the Marxist tradition build on an existing reality that there is already some kind of party or party nucleus with some level of meaningful support among the masses. Lenin wrote What Is To Be Done when the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) already had a significant core of cadres, well-versed in political theory and strategic thinking, with experience organizing with workers in Russia and building links with comrades in exile. The RSDLP itself was formed only after a decade of constant and growing militancy of the Russian working class in the 1890s — far from what we have in Hong Kong right now. In the early 1890s, building a party was not at the forefront of the minds of Russian socialists, even as workers’ struggles were first expanding. Marxist intellectuals and workers gathered in underground study groups and lectures to practice basic modes of democratic political thinking and practice (here I wish to again draw connections to KOR and the underground Polish left of the late 1970s before the Gdańsk strike in 1980), critically thinking through the objective conditions around them. Such groupings later felt the need to centralize and begin agitation work, as the workers’ struggles reached new heights, later forming the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class, which eventually created a social-democratic party, the RSDLP. The central lesson in recounting this history is Mandel’s point: we must always attend to what intermediate organizational tasks and demands allow one to work toward a revolutionary party most effectively. Positing the need for a revolutionary party has little meaning when conditions are not right for it, and when there is not a clear sense of what steps are necessary to take at which stage of the objective conditions.

Zi-yuet considers in detail the role a revolutionary party can take in a revolutionary upsurge in Hong Kong, analyzing its power in directing and quickening “neighborhood and assembly committees” led by everyday Hongkongers. But there is a key problem: we are no longer in those conditions (even the 2019-20 upsurge barely constituted pre-revolutionary conditions), and 2019-20 showed us that even if similar conditions did exist, it was tremendously difficult to gather left-wing militants in the movement around a common political platform and strategy, let alone a party. Zi-yuet might recall our participation in a meeting of progressives, socialists, anarchists, trade unionists, diaspora activists, and other leftists at the height of the movement in Hong Kong. One person called on our different organizations to unite as the left to formulate a common set of demands with a clear ideological vision. What was most telling was not the validity of the proposal, but that little discussion followed from that proposal. There seemed to be a lack of agreement of what even constitutes the left. The meeting ended with little consensus on any next steps or consensus on a political and strategic level.

Today, there is an even further scattering of movements, let alone the left, because of the national security laws. Zi-yuet’s careful articulation of how movements can consolidate into council-style assemblies to challenge political power from below may have been a pivotal contribution as a readily disseminated flyer, pamphlet, or online post on LIHKG during the movement in 2019-2020. But the conditions have drastically changed since then: thus, how might the tasks of any revolutionary nuclei change? British Trotskyist Tony Cliff once mentioned that Lenin’s approach to “attitude to organizational forms [is] always historically determined. He never adopted abstract, dogmatic schemes of organization and was ready to change the organizational structure of the party at every new development of the class struggle.” The current state of Hong Kong is one of extreme proletarian disorganization. No one organization has any substantial links to the working class, and room for any kind of public mobilization is strictly limited now. Chilean Marxist Marta Harnecker once said that the position of a vanguard organization is “not something a party bestows upon itself but something that is earned through struggle and that there can’t be a vanguard without a rearguard.” And so, the defining organizational lacunae of our moment is not a revolutionary party, but a robust ‘rearguard’, in which workers are collectively and regularly exercising self-organization, even in rudimentary forms, with a steady current of revolutionaries not only embedded in such struggles, but also having the theoretical and organizational apparatuses to facilitate regular and deep analysis of these movements. Only then could the question of a revolutionary party meaningfully arise.

In the meantime, what we face today is an extreme backsliding of basic democratic rights. The (renewed) need for democratic revolution, as Lenin said, actually makes socialist participation in building “non-party organizations” more necessary. In 1905 — even as Russian movements were culminating into a revolutionary upsurge — Lenin admitted that the rise of non-party organizations concerned mainly with “immediate, elementary aims” was a symptom of the character of bourgeois revolutions. Nonetheless, he writes that we must “be able to adapt this general truth to particular questions and particular cases; but to forget this truth at a time when the whole of bourgeois society is rising in revolt against feudalism and autocracy means in practice completely to renounce socialist criticism of bourgeois society.” (I believe we can update Lenin’s thesis to say that superseding feudalism does not guarantee the resolution of bourgeois-democratic tasks in the political realm, and so his argument remains pertinent today.) This leads him to acknowledge that some “circumstances may compel us to participate in non-party organizations, especially in the period of a democratic revolution, specifically a democratic revolution in which the proletariat plays an outstanding part. Such participation may prove essential, for example, for the purpose of preaching socialism to vaguely democratic audiences.” Indeed, socialists must continue to find ways to gather together to advance independent perspectives and interventions in broader movements, and vigorously participate in and build broad non-party organizations. To leap instead to party-building when conditions are premature in effect puts the horse before the cart. At most, a more apt and modest task is to build what Mandel calls “ revolutionary nuclei” — groupings of dedicated militants defined not by the exactness of its program or its capacity to take power, but by a conviction and commitment to develop theory and practice to best make crucial political interventions in broader movements and recruit other advanced activists and thinkers in these movements to think together collectively. Ultimately, as Mandel considers it, “the building of the revolutionary class party is the merging of the consciousness of the revolutionary nuclei with that of the advanced workers.”

Indeed, these revolutionary nuclei would “build the revolutionary consciousness, capability, and confidence of the Hong Kong people in preparation for the moment of revolution,” a task Zi-yuet prescribes for the revolutionary party. But again, while there is nothing incorrect about this characterization, it has little concrete meaning if not specified to illuminate the tasks of the present moment, according to present conditions. I believe the immediate tasks that the moment demands are far, far more modest than the work described in the document. The scale of the tasks is closer, if not even smaller, than what KOR faced in 1970s Poland. There is an urgent need, first and foremost, to gather scattered groups of dedicated militants (and discover new ones) and form durable, albeit flexible, communities that accommodate a range of skills, interests, and levels of commitment—through regular meetings or other small-scale activities that involve elements of collective political reflection: private discussion meetings about relevant political topics, art-making in small groups, group chats, attending an action together, etc. Some people may be interested in or skilled in one thing but not another. There is no predetermined way to tell who can meaningfully organize with you before working with them. As Rosa Luxemburg said, “The type of organization that calculates in advance and to the nearest penny the costs necessary for action is worthless; it cannot weather the storm. All this must be made clear, and the dividing line must not be drawn so nicely between the organized and the unorganized.” Even more importantly, the criteria for identifying such militants, in my opinion, is not whether they are ready for underground revolutionary or party work now. Such a task would be a secondary question at this moment, only becoming relevant when there are robust enough circles of politically engaged activists already sharing a broad but clearly defined ideological vision. We must be careful not to see a question of the division of labor (who would do underground work, as opposed to organizing openly in broader formations, etc.) as the decisive factor when conditions are not right yet. Instead, we ought to gather those who are open to thinking seriously about and discussing political issues in a well-rounded way, and can demonstrate some basic ability or commitment to participate in ongoing discussions or projects.

To emphasize, we should not be looking for people who already agree with you on every point; as Lenin also once said, political unity and centralization of any sort “can not be decreed, it cannot be brought about by a decision, say, of a meeting of representatives; it must be worked for.” Political ideas and tactical divergences must be clarified and debated through democratic discussion. Any revolutionary core must begin from those open to conducting politics in such a serious manner. Only then can the basis for organizational and political centralization meaningfully emerge. In the meantime, we must break down the process into even smaller stages: what types of topics, what kinds of discussions or programming, and what platforms, can best gather promising individuals to build productively with one another? How do we best frame such discussions, who do we invite, and how do we encourage like-minded allies in our orbit to take more ownership of such spaces with us?

We must strengthen the different nuclei of Hongkongers, especially those with organizing capabilities and an interest in progressive and other social issues, to restore the basic blocks of civil society decimated by repression. A genuinely anti-capitalist conception of democratic revolution that can resonate with Hongkongers will not emerge from any program, no matter how well-formulated, at this moment. Instead, it starts with gathering the right combination of people already embedded in movements or engaging in political issues around them, looking for more democratic alternatives beyond localism, and being open to critically reflecting on the legacy of the 2019-20 movement. Such informal networks to share knowledge and analysis, as well as programming, can gather people in discussion and open possibilities for class critique, and later, class organization, through reading groups, informal and private discussions, writing, and small campaigns. Again, there is nothing particularly revolutionary about any of these initiatives in themselves, but we must remember that the precision of ideas in the abstract is not what makes revolutionary action: it is concrete actions that can mobilize people toward practices of political self-activity needed to conceive of what transforming society would entail.

No political program can emerge without energizing masses of everyday people, however scattered, to think politically on their own terms, through organizations — this principle does not necessarily go beyond liberal politics, but it is one that Hong Kong’s particular brand of liberals has never understood. Hong Kong parties and organizations (even on the left) have seen countless unprincipled splits, with minimal capacity for organized debate and unity of action along political lines. This is an excellent opportunity now to show that socialists are those who, in our pursuit of a nuanced and cohesive political horizon, fight for political democracy better than the liberals do. This is done not by designing the most pristine programs and organizations before building a robust base of militants, just as Lenin criticizes ultra-left elements during the German Revolution who wanted to abstain from broad trade union activities to build a “brand-new and immaculate “Workers’ Union.” We must find new ways of staying connected to the masses, and energize them from where they are. It means participating in broadly organized spaces, perhaps like the recent Hongkongers’ summits in London and Washington D.C., to strengthen them, not to have the illusion that such bodies could be transformed into revolutionary vehicles, but by demonstrating our capabilities on such occasions to other participants, identifying and trying to win over progressive-minded activists to come up with tactical campaigns that open further possibilities of independent organization by pushing for open discussion and democratic debate at every turn.

I will conclude with Lenin’s analysis of how the Bolsheviks succeeded in 1917, more than a decade after a grand defeat of the workers’ movements in 1905. Simply put, it is about knowing how to retreat, and how to regroup one’s forces in this retreat: “Of all the defeated opposition and revolutionary parties, the Bolsheviks effected the most orderly retreat, with the least loss to their “army”, with its core best preserved, with the least significant splits (in point of depth and incurability), with the least demoralization, and in the best condition to resume work on the broadest scale and in the most correct and energetic manner.” Zi-yuet’s call for revolutionary assemblies will surely be needed when the next stage of mass uprising occurs again. But it may be years — if not decades — before revolutionary conditions emerge after the historic defeat of 2020. Of course, we must also not be dogmatic and refuse to acknowledge historical junctures that may accelerate political consciousness (just like the 2019 uprising) and social crises, and be ready to adjust our organizational tasks accordingly then. But in the meantime, the dismal objective conditions are clear. And so, how can we, as revolutionaries, best rebuild Hong Kong movements in disarray and retreat? Answering this question demands a level of specificity and precision in our concrete tasks suitable for navigating the contingent terrain of scattered militants struggling to regroup upon defeat, with the enemy still continually threatening any space for maneuver.

Hau-wai is an overseas Hong Kong activist.