I was going to write a piece today about the Stonewall Uprising. However there are the explosive events in Hong Kong. But a short comment on Stonewall. The capitalist media tries to refer to the Stonewall events as “riots”. The idea being to try and diminish their importance. Unfortunately many on the left also mistakenly use the term “riots”. Stonewall was an uprising of people who were discriminated against because of their sexual orientation. They reached their breaking point and they rose up. The main lesson to be drawn from Stonewall is that changes for the better in US society comes from uprisings from below.
It was mass strikes and workplace occupations and street fighting that built the CIO and the trade unions in the 1930’s. It was mass movements on the streets and the urban uprisings of the Black revolt of the 1950’s and 1960’s that forced racist US society to make some concessions. It was the women’s movements on the streets of the 1960’s that made the gains for women, it was the anti war movements on the streets, in the schools and colleges and in the rank and file of the US military in Vietnam that undermined US imperialism’s slaughter in South East Asia.
Today there is a majority in US society for higher wages, better benefits, better and affordable housing, free education, health care for all, gender equality, women to have control over their own bodies, action on climate change and against racism sexism and war. But neither of the two capitalist parties can deliver on these issues. Instead, capitalism and the capitalist parties the Republicans and the Democrats and their undemocratic political system with its gerrymandering and its undemocratic electoral college, and its legal system with its undemocratic so-called Supreme Court, the road to the wishes of the majority being implemented is blocked. In fact, the capitalist class and its parties are waging an offensive against the working class and the gains that were made in the 1930’s and the 1960’s.
This will not continue indefinitely. The wishes of the mass of the population will be expressed. Whatever triggers it, an economic slump, an environmental or climate change disaster, vicious police repression, gun violence, the taking away of women’s rights, whatever, the wishes of the majority will explode onto the streets and workplaces and schools and colleges of US society. The anger that exists will express itself. US capitalism thinks it can stop the rage that is building below the surface by laws and gerrymandering and its undemocratic electoral college and its undemocratic and packed supreme court. They are wrong the rage that is building in US society will explode to the surface. As the organizers of this Blog continually say “This country is going to blow”.
This is the lesson of Stonewall. This is also the lesson of today’s events, in Hong Kong.
Backed by the dictatorial regime in Beijing, of which it is a pawn, the Hong Kong administration tried to pass a law that would allow it to send people to mainland China to be tried in that regime’s courts. Up to two million people out of a population of seven million have demonstrated in the past weeks. They were met with the fist of the state apparatus, the cops. But today a smaller number of demonstrators took over the legislative buildings, trashed them, spray painted the walls and the symbols of the Hong Kong regime and left. This was an explosive movement. The state apparatus was unable to stop it. It demonstrated that whatever laws are passed, in whatever country, that when regimes go against the will of the masses they will face opposition, and if a regime insists on trying to impose its will, this opposition will not confine itself to debates in parliament or elections.
This Blog has been observing the developments in mainland China. We have pointed to the movement of 400 million people from the countryside into the cities and into the workplaces and into the working class. We have emphasized that this, part of which is the entry of hundreds of millions of women into the paid workforce, has resulted in a dramatic strengthening of the Chinese and the world’s working class. We have explained that the Chinese working class will put its imprint on events in that country and oppose the undemocratic regime and that when that happens it will have an effect worldwide. The events in Hong Kong will be noticed in main land China. They will show that the Beijing regime cannot impose its wishes at will. They will encourage and bring closer the movement of the working class in that country. Irrespective of the demands of the protesters in Hong Kong being confined to the call for the withdrawal of the extradition law what will have most effect on the consciousness of the Chinese working class will be the fact that the Beijing regime can be challenged.
World wide we have seen struggles. Sudan. Algeria. Turkey. The Czech Republic. Kazakhstan. Montenegro. Albania. Romania. Stirrings in Russia against the Putin regime. In many of the former countries of the Soviet Union people are seeing the limits of the capitalist regimes that followed the former Stalinist regimes and new movements are developing. In Latin America there are new signs of struggle. Likewise this can be seen in the US and in Western Europe. Yes there are confusions. Yes there is the rise of right wing forces. This is inevitable because the leaders of the workers organizations the trade unions and where there exist, the left parties, are not prepared to confront the source of the problems which is capitalism or in China the combination of a dictatorial regime and its moves towards capitalism.
The international working class is larger and stronger than ever before. It is the collective power and the collective brain of the international working class that has the power to change the lives of the world’s population, to stop and reverse the threatening catastrophe of climate change, to end mass poverty and inequality and undemocratic regimes. The building of a mass international movement based on this understanding is what is necessary. Such a movement can be built out of explosive movements from below which have changed things for the better in the past and which we can see around us today.
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