Dialectics of Capitalism: A Re-Visit to the Hong Kong Chinese Labor Movement and Perlman's Model

This paper offers a dialectical interpretation of the relationship between capitalism and the labor movement, using by way of illustration a well-known major industrial confrontation in the labor history of Hong Kong, the 1925-1926 Hong Kong-Canton General Strike and Boycott. The conceptual framework selected for examining the General Strike-Boycott is the general theory of labor movement formulated by Selig Perlman, who located capital within a theoretical schema as a key factor which emerged as basic in any modern labor situation. The forces constituting the key determining variables shaping the labor movement can be summarized as follows: 1. the resistance of capitalism, 2. the degree of dominance by intellectuals over the labor movement, and 3. the degree of maturity of trade union consciousness as defined by the workers' own native home-grown approach.