How can our movement effectively balance honoring the legacy of grassroots international solidarity with adapting strategies that resonate with local communities' evolving needs and fears, without diluting the revolutionary spirit that underpins our collective efforts?
Treat history as living compost, not embalmed relic. Begin with an “ancestral audit”: gather veterans of The 70’s Biweekly and today’s frontline organisers in closed-door circles where stories trade hands like contraband. Identify the principles that survived repression—mass participation, cross-border camaraderie, militant care—then pledge to express each one through a tactic unknown in the 1970s.
Next, anchor every international gesture in a concrete local wound. If housing precarity burns, stage a rent-strike clinic that pairs legal defence with nightly teach-ins on global land grabs; the immediate service earns trust, the anti-imperialist frame keeps the horizon radical. People follow usefulness before ideology.
Build a multilingual “solidarity relay” that translates your communiqués within 24 hours into Tagalog, Urdu, Cantonese and Spanish, so migrant workers circulate the narrative back to their homelands, reviving the border-hopping energy of Biweekly but at digital speed. The relay’s very existence dramatizes interconnected struggle, inoculating against parochial retreat.
Finally, ritualise renewal: retire any tactic after one lunar cycle, publish a brief autopsy, and birth the next experiment. Revolutions stagnate when they cling to yesterday’s winning move; loyalty must belong to spirit, not form.
Which forgotten fragment of Hong Kong’s radical past are you ready to resurrect in a shape the state cannot predict?
I realize that anchoring revolutionary practice in adaptable, localized actions rooted in shared principles can revitalize our movement. How might we design structures within our collective that consistently question, renew, and reforge our tactics to ensure our revolutionary spirit remains resilient and unco-opted as circumstances evolve?
Think of the collective as a forge with two alternating chambers: heat and quench. During each twenty eight day “heat” phase affinity cells run one live experiment that applies a core principle—mass participation, anti-imperialist linkage, militant care—to a pressing local fault line. Success or fiasco, the tactic is automatically sunset at the new moon. No exceptions. Sunsetting triggers the “quench” phase: a three-day retreat offline where cells convene a Radical Inquiry Council. Phones in sealed bags, everyone narrates what surprised, what bored, and where co-option tried to sneak in. A designated “pattern decay scribe” records only emergent lessons, then burns the raw notes so data never becomes dogma.
Out of the ashes, a small R&D pod drafts the next month’s menu of prototype actions, stealing shamelessly from other struggles and science-fiction alike. The wider collective votes with feet, not talk: whichever prototype commands volunteers proceeds. Because every experiment carries an automatic kill switch, nostalgia cannot fossilize your imagination and opportunists cannot trademark the brand; the calendar itself enforces perpetual mutation.
When did your movement last schedule an intentional burial for a beloved tactic, and what phoenix might rise from its ashes?
How can we embed this cycle of deliberate renewal—testing, sunset, inquiry, rebirth—into our everyday organizing routines so that questioning and adapting become instinctive, rather than sporadic, practices that keep our collective spirit unpredictable and resistant to co-optation?
Routinise revolution like breathing: inhale experiment, exhale reflection. Begin every week with a ten-minute “edge forecast” where each cell names one local crack they sense widening—rents, arrests, climate angst. Mid-week, a micro-action pounces on the most volatile crack, even if only five people are free. Forty-eight hours later a standing “sunset café” convenes: phones off, coffee on, two guiding questions pinned to the wall, What startled power? What bored us? Notes go into a public logbook that anyone may remix but no one may canonise.
Build a shared calendar that visually counts down to the automatic expiry date of every tactic. Seeing the red timer beside an ongoing campaign trains muscle memory: we are married to purpose, not form. Rotate the role of “combustor” who must propose at least one outrageous successor action before the timer hits zero; failure to suggest is failure of duty, not imagination.
Finally, celebrate endings. When a tactic retires, hold a small wake with laughter, critique, and a symbolic gesture—maybe screenshots of media hits fed into a shredder—to signal liberation from past success. Scheduled funerals keep strategies wild and uncollectible.
Which ritual of farewell will you adopt first, and how might it teach newcomers that impermanence is your greatest shield?