Organizing, Protest and Working Class Self-Activity: Reflections on East Asia

The resurgence of working-class militancy in East Asia in the last decade has inspired the radical imagination and offered us renewed hope in the struggle against capitalism. This was most clearly expressed in the mass protests and strikes by workers at the height of the Asian economic crisis in 1997-98 which appeared to challenge the logic of the capitalist 'globalization' project, while demonstrating the power of (re)emerging independent workers' organizations in the face of ongoing state repression. Precisely because of this ongoing repression and the social destruction wrought by the economic crisis, these strikes and protests were all the more significant for their courage, commitment and sacrifice. In this sense every strike and every protest may be viewed as a victory, with the historical accumulation of these fragments bound up in some way in the project of working-class emancipation. For example, in an essay published in Monthly Review in September 1998, David McNally concluded: 'East Asia has become the focal-point of the international class struggle. Out of these struggles a new 'Asian model' may emerge-a model of working-class resistance to capitalist globalization. We have much to learn from these struggles. And we owe them our solidarity and support'.