It was good to see HK people turn up at the Exchange Square protests and the HSBC headquarters on the weekend. This is part of the global movement now beginning to spread across the world like wild fire. People everywhere are saying we, the 99%, have had enough and we want change.
As is the case with the beginning of any populist movement, there is no unified agenda. I heard speakers protest against everything from capitalism to the wealth gap in HK, government bias toward the rich and the powerful, ideological monopoly, financial/property hegemony, nuclear energy and the treatment of domestic helpers. Like protesters in New York, Madrid, London and other cities, there is a multitude of voices, all addressing a variety of issues. But if there is a common theme, it is that we don’t want to be ruled by the corrupt 1%, the corporate/financial elite.
In comparison with other cities, the number of HK people who showed up is small. This in itself doesn’t mean people here don’t care. The number and intensity of protesters is in direct proportion to the pain and damage inflicted by the financial crash and government policies on ordinary people. In the US and Europe, the crash is hurting many. In HK the damage has been relatively mild, and the government didn’t need to bail-out the banks with huge sums of taxpayers’ money. That may explain the small turnout here.
Will the movement turn into real change? Much depends on how the current economic crisis unfolds across the world. Put simply, a deepening recession—turning possibly into a depression—will cause a lot more pain and unleash more people onto the streets. They will rise up and pose a real challenge to the monopoly of power now strangling us. The way things are moving in the financial epicentre, we are not far off from a second economic collapse.
I will analyse the economic crisis in my blog. Meanwhile, those of you interested in a critique of mainstream economics and how it fails to address the financial crisis could check out this blog:
http://bobbehull.wordpress.com/2010/10/01/economics-in-crisis-2/