They Can Have My Support . . .

But I’m Keeping My Mind

Time plays terrible tricks on rhetoric. A statement that might once have seemed self-evident or deeply insightful can, with passing years and changing circumstances, become stale, then dated and eventually ludicrous. The slogans of the seventies and the formulas of the fifties don’t always work in the here and now. They retreat from understanding, with social cues and passing references no longer able to carry the intended meaning. But they persist in a kind of Twilight Zone, uttered by those who want change yet don’t really know how to achieve it, or are relatively powerless to do so in one way or another.

If you think the rhetoric of revolution is dead in the developed world, you’ll need to think again. It’s alive, though barely, in some migrant worker organisations, and it surfaced here in Hong Kong recently.

Attending the opening session of an international migrant worker conference on the weekend I was in turn bewildered, amused, annoyed and finally, almost inevitably in hindsight, stunned by a barrage of rhetoric that I thought no longer had a place in political discourse. Raised voices, thumping on the lectern, fingers stabbing at the air, all these things shouted indignity at the capitalist world system, the ‘imperialist’ agenda of multinational business, the sins of the ‘bourgeoisie’ and the relentless ‘toil’ of comrades in struggle.

Now, regular readers of this blog will know that I’m very much supportive of migrant worker groups, and write often about the virtual commodification of domestic helpers here in Hong Kong. An image that will never leave me is my wife, crouched on the floor at 4 o’clock the Monday morning after we married, crying because she had to be back at work in an hour. That, and worse, is the constant outlook for the domestic helper in Hong Kong – few escape it and most are items to be used, and discarded when no longer needed.

Such is the exploitation inherent in the wage differentials between developed areas and those like my wife’s native Philippines, which is in the chronic grip of underdevelopment, mismanagement and the sheer avarice of massive corruption. When you move from the glare of poverty to the shadow of wealth your situation obviously improves, but we should never under-estimate the capacity of employers to sense vulnerability and exploit it.