Tiananmen Remastered, Part 1

Mia revisits her episodes situating the Tiananmen Square Massacre in the context of the century long battle over democracy in the workplace.

Sources:
https://lausancollective.com/2021/communists-crushed-international-workers-movement/

https://chuangcn.org/journal/two/red-dust/sinosphere/

http://www.tsquare.tv/links/Walder.html

https://chuangcn.org/2019/06/tiananmen-square-the-march-into-the-institutions/

https://www.marxists.org/archive/brinton/1970/workers-control/

https://endnotes.org.uk/issues/4

https://libcom.org/article/utopia-rules-technology-stupidity-and-secret-joys-bureaucracy-david-graeber

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Call Zone Media. Welcome to it had happened here. I'm
your host, Nia Wong. Today is the day before the
thirty sixth anniversary of the Tianneman Square massacre. We're doing
something a little bit different. Three years ago I wrote

(00:21):
a pair of episodes about Tieneman democracy in the International
Workers Movement, expanding off a piece I'd written for laos
On a year before that. That was a long time ago.
The world is a fundamentally different place than it was
in twenty twenty one. Europe has been consumed by war.

(00:42):
Whole revolutions rose and fell. The fast threat we defeated
in the streets returned to power in a new and
more terrifying form. In this new, uglier and more brutal world,
I wanted to return to Tianeman, to return to one
of the great horrors of another age, to see if

(01:03):
we can take anything new from the wreckage of the
death of Hope. I'm no longer the same person I
was when I originally wrote these episodes, and so today
and tomorrow are Tianamen remastered. There were really three Tianemens.
The first and most famous Tieneman was a student protest

(01:26):
inside Tianaman Square itself. If you've heard the word Tienemen
before this story, you know the second Tienemen was the
Tienemen of the blocks of Beijing around the Square, blocks
sees and transformed by Beijing's working class. If you've heard
about this Tienemen at all, it's probably in the context

(01:48):
of the tanks rolling through them on their way to
the Square. And then there was the third Tienemen, the
protests in other cities, of which we still years after
the original piece. No distressingly little about Our focus today
is on the first two. The students of the student

(02:10):
protests were a weird ideological grab back that cannot simply
be reduced down to the simplistic pro democracy label they've
been settled with in the three and a half decades
since Tienemen. The short version is this, the students were
pissed off about what's called reform and opening not going
fast enough, and we should talk about what reform and

(02:33):
opening actually was. On the one hand, you had some
steps to ease restrictions on free speech, rehabilitate intellectuals and
other people were so called bad class backgrounds, and allow
for a broader public discourse. This was paired with market
reforms I started to bring capitalism back to China. This

(02:54):
was a shit show in a lot of ways. If
you want to hear about the CCP reinventing what's essentially
dipped P and che about five years into this process,
go listen to my Behind the Bastard's episode about the
poisoned milk scandal. But Reform and Opening is remembered as
a kind of golden age of free expression, a golden
age of hope and possibility where things really seemed like

(03:16):
they could be different. This is not entirely accurate. Reform
and Opening also saw a bunch of absolutely draconian crackdowns
on the social sphere. There was the One Child policy,
a hideous expansion of the states into the sphere of
social reproduction, replete with forced sterilizations and the reimposition of

(03:38):
patriarchal power. It saw the tightening of one man rule
in the factory, the destruction of any form of worker's
decision making and control over the process of their own labor.
In these horrors, you can see the beginning of the
fragmentation of Tiannemen and Chinese politics more broadly, already forming,

(03:58):
the students wanted market form to go faster, They wanted
more freedom of speech, they sort of wanted democracy, but
mostly they wanted to be in charge of the party
so they could crush the bureaucracy that was holding market
reforms back. It's worth noting, of course, that many of
these students were involved in what became known as neo authoritarianism,

(04:21):
which holds that the strong central party should take full
control of society and destroy factions in the bureaucracy. It
was an ideology that survived the death of the protests
and went on to become a major faction of the
CCP itself in the nineties and two thousands, and this
is where some of the truly weird shit at Tianeman
comes from. The students were, in many ways an incredibly

(04:44):
hierarchical movement which escalated to the point where student leaders
were kidnapping each other for control over stages and microphones,
and these protests, in terms of their nominally stated goal
of influencing the factional fights inside the party, were studyingly
in a f actual The guy they were trying to
defend inside the party wound up getting ousted and put

(05:04):
under house arrest for the rest of his life, and
the changes they demanded failed to occur. But Tianeman, as
I mentioned earlier, was also the workers, and for most
of the protests the students absolutely hated them. Students barred
workers from entering the square itself until the final hours
of the protests, tried to stop workers from carrying out

(05:25):
a general strike, and relations were in general extremely bad.
This raises the question what were the workers doing there
in the first place. There's a few answers. The simplest
and most immediate one is that the workers were pissed
off at how badly the Party was treating students in
the square. But there were other things going on too.
The late in eighteen eighties in China saw rampant and

(05:47):
skyrocketing inflation. The rapid price increases threatened the supply of
cheap grain that composed a huge supply of welfare services
provided to urban workers. Meanwhile, marketization was accelerating, and suddenly
you had CCP princelings racing down the streets in imported
sports cars, driving past workers on their bikes, and spending

(06:09):
a year's salary gambling at the racetrack. And this pissed
people off, so they started organizing. I'm going to read
a section for a piece by Uron, saying about what
the workers were doing during the struggle to obstruct the military.
Workers started to realize the power of their spontaneous organization
and action. This was self liberation on an unprecedented level.

(06:34):
A huge wave of self organization ensued. The worker's autonomous
federation membership grew exponentially, and other workers' organizations both within
and across the workplace mushroomed. The development of organization led
to a radicalization of action. Workers started organizing self armed
quasi militias such as Quote Picket Corps and Quote Dared

(06:56):
to Die brigades to monitor and broadcast the military's whereabouts.
These quasi militias were also responsible for maintaining public order
so as not to provide any pretext for military intervention.
In a sense, Paijing became a city self managed by workers.
It was reminiscent of Petrograd's self armed workers organized in
the months between Russia's February and October revolutions. At the

(07:18):
same time, Pijing workers built many more barricades and fortifications
on the street in many factories that organized strikes and
slow downs. A possible general strike was put on the
table as well. Many workers started to build connections between
factories to prepare for a general strike. This was unaccepsible
to the party, and so for the third time in

(07:39):
seventy years, the CCP fed its own working class to
the machine guns. On the night of June third, the
army began to slaughter its way to the workers defending
the square. It was the workers who bore the front
of the massacre. Most of the casualty and later political
oppression were against members of the workers faction. The army

(08:00):
soon reached the square itself for the Western press corps
bore witness to what became known as the Tianaman Square massacre.
This is where you get tank Man and the most
famous accounts of the massacre. But by that point it
was almost all over. The protests were crushed and the
Chinese working class died with it. But before the last
bullet had even been fired, every faction under the sun

(08:24):
began to construct their own narratives about what had just happened.
The most common narrative is that Tianeman was a clash
between democracy and authoritarianism, and to some extent it's not
exactly wrong. There were a lot of other pro democracy
movements in this period. You see them in Taiwan and Korea.
They swept across huge swaths of Latin America and eventually

(08:46):
spread to places like the Philippines. But the real question
of the pro democracy movements was what kind of democracy.
The students at Tieneman, to the extent that their democratic
principles were sincere and not simply cover for a deeply
authoritarian version of liberalism that demanded rule of law by
a new class of intellectuals to oversee market reforms, believed

(09:08):
in a narrow conception of political democracy. This political democracy
operates at the level of the state. It's based on
free citizens equal before the law, participating in elections to
choose representatives who pass laws and generally oversee and manage
the state bureaucracy. This model of political democracy relegates the

(09:30):
workplace to a separate economic sphere into which democracy does
not extend. The capitalist firm or its state owned equivalent,
remained the absolute dictatorship of the capitalists and their managerial flunkies.
Even the progressive wings of the pro democracy movements in
Taiwan and South Korea maintained this private dictatorship. Workers would

(09:54):
be given rights under the progressive regimes, permission to form unions,
access to the welfare state, limited protections from the worst
physical and psychological abuses their bosses could inflict. But no
matter how progressive the pro democracy movement, the legitimacy of
the dictatorship of the bosses was not up for dispute.
To them, democracy meant a democratic state, not a democratic workplace.

(10:20):
The workers of Tienemen alone disagreed. They stood against not
only the rest of the world's pro democracy movements, but
the tide of history itself. By applying the principles of
the pro democracy movement to their own concerns skyrocketing inflation,
mounting debt, rampant corruption by government officials, spiraling inequality, and

(10:40):
petty bureaucratic oppression, Beijing's working class reinvented an old and
now largely forgotten traditional democracy in the factory, democratic workers
self management. This is, to a large extent, what Tianmen
was actually about. It was the culmination of a century
and a half long war between the democratic wing of
the classical workers' movement and essentially every other ideological movement

(11:04):
on Earth. The worker's movement would fight capitalists and communists,
liberals and fascists, monarchies and republics, social democracies and theocracies,
and at Tienemen they would lose one final time. That
defeat is the origin of the modern world. One man
rule in the factory, in its thousand thousand forms is

(11:29):
the author of the hell of the twenty first century.
And when we come back, we're going to look at
the international part of the struggle that ended at Tianeman.

(11:50):
To fully understand the magnitude of Tianemen, we need to
go back to the revolutions of eighteen forty eight. If
you want a detailed accounting of eighteen forty go listen
to the Revolutions podcast. It's great. It's also many, many, many, many,
many many episodes. The short version is that there were

(12:10):
a bunch of revolutions across Europe in eighteen forty eight,
collectively known as the Springtime of the Peoples. It was
the first wave of revolutions where socialists were a real
political faction. Frederick Engels death that angles of Marx and
Engels fame was on the barricades with a rifle fighting
in Prussia. There was a huge revolution in France where
they deposed the king and the question of how far

(12:33):
democracy was going to go came for the first time
to the forefront. Inside of a democratic movement itself, you
had a split between the sort of French radicals who
done the original French Revolution, who wanted electoral democracy but
dictatorship in the workplace, and the new socialists who wanted
to question property relations and the question of class itself,

(12:56):
and most importantly for our purposes, whether democracy would extend
past the political sphere and directly into economics. These prefigures
a split inside the socialist movement itself. For the most
radical factions, control over the means of production meant that
workers would control the production process directly through free associations

(13:17):
of workers direct democratic unions, a position later known as
syndicalism or workers councils. But more conservative factions of the
socialists became enamored with the bureaucratic technologies of the state.
They watched with envy as the industrializing powers of the
eighteen sixties and eighteen seventies engage in increasingly elaborate planning schemes,

(13:39):
first of roads canals in railroads, then of entire cities
with complex electrical grids, gas lines and plumbing systems, and
began to believe that centralized state planning, not the democratic
association of workers, could bring about the long sought after
cooperative commonwealth of socialism, and that planning obsessed facts began

(14:00):
to encompass more and more of the left. In Germany,
home to the powerful German Social Democratic Party, socialists became
divided between two camps, the Revisionists led by Edward Bernstein,
who renounced Marxism and Revolution entirely in favor of reforming
capitalism in the state from within, and Karlkovski's orthodox Marxists. Basically,

(14:22):
the only two things these factions, who otherwise despise each other,
agreed on was the primacy of state bureaucratic planning over
workplace democracy. This led to the Social Democratic Party disastrously
working to break the workplace autonomy of many of its
own workers, but were still The person who became most

(14:43):
obsessed with the potential of bureaucratic state planning was one
Vladimir Bilitch Lenin. As the anthropologist David Graeber pointed out,
Lenin's obsession with the German postal service was such that
he included this passage about the future social state in
his famous State and Revolution a text written between the

(15:04):
February October revolutions of nineteen seventeen. Quote a witty German
social democrat of the seventies of the last century called
the postal service an example of the socialist economic system.
This is very true. At present. The postal service is
a business organized on the lines of a state capitalist monopoly.

(15:25):
Imperialism is gradually transforming all trust into organizations of a
similar type to organize the whole national economy on the
lines of the postal service, so that the technicians, foreman, bookkeepers,
as well as all officials receive salaries no higher than
a workman's wage, all under the leadership and control of
the armed proletariat. This is our immediate aim. Lenin's idealized

(15:50):
form of socialism would thus take the form of a
total state bureaucracy tasked with planning the entire economy. This
would set off a massive series of confrontations with the
part of the workers movement who wanted workers control over
the means of production to mean workers making decisions overworked
themselves and not just working for a different set of bureaucrats.

(16:11):
The struggle between bureaucracy and democracy in the workers movement
mirrorred the struggle between the workers movements and the capitalist state.
By the eighteen eighties, the workers movement had created variable
states within a state in countries like Germany and Italy.
These quote unquote states were vast networks of workers' institutions,

(16:32):
ranging from as grape were described free schools, workers associations,
friendly societies, libraries and theaters end quote to unions, co ops,
neighborhood associations, tennis unions, mutual aid societies, and political parties
ran democratically by workers themselves, which provided vital services to
workers and their families, and served, so the workers hoped,

(16:54):
as the basis for a new socialist society. Fearing the
popularity of these democratic works workers' institutions, Otto von Bismarck
created bureaucratic, state run versions of the library's, theaters and
welfare services to replace them. Telling an American observer quote,
my idea was to bribe the working class, or shall
I say, to win them over, to regard the state

(17:16):
as a social institution existing for their sake and interested
in their welfare. And this works. It was enormously successful.
Socialists themselves came to confuse Bismarck's welfare state bribe with
socialism itself, and when they took power, they replicated the
bureaucratic nature of many of Bismarck's programs, eliminating the democratic

(17:37):
aspects of the older workers' institutions entirely. But where their
leaders I'd forgotten the democratic core of the Rowan ideology,
workers themselves never did. As the nineteenth century drew to
a close and the twentieth century began, workers who engaged
in spontaneous uprisings instinctively began to form democratic institutions, particular

(18:00):
clarly workers councils. The most famous of these councils, of course,
were formed between the spontaneous Russian revolutions of nineteen oh
five in nineteen seventeen. These councils, called soviets, were originally
formed in nineteen oh five out of ad hoc strike
committees that became formalized elected bodies of representatives in the
various factions who worked to coordinate the general strike. The

(18:24):
revolution of nineteen oh five was crushed by the Czar,
but in nineteen seventeen the Russian working class would once
again form workers' councils as another revolution commenced. This time,
the councils would take control of production, directly coordinating between
various factories and industries, as well as serving as a
worker's counterpower to the new revolutionary government. The Russian Revolution

(18:46):
kicked off a period of open warfare that stretched from
Italy to Argentina between the forces of democracy and the
factory and the newly formed anti democratic alliance of social Democrats,
Bolsheviks capitalists. Between nineteen in seventeen and nineteen twenty, workers
councils formed in Germany, Poland, Austria, Ukraine, and Ireland, and
were matched by revolts of syndicalist unions in Brazil and Argentina.

(19:11):
These uprisings were all crushed in Italy, which saw some
of the most intense conflict between syncalists and the Italian state.
The famous occupation of the Factories was ended not by
the Italian government but by the Italian Socialist Party in
their union, the General Confederation of Labor. This, in large part,

(19:31):
was how fascism won in Italy and in Germany. Faced
with workers movements on the verge of seizing power, social
democrats turned on the working class slaughtered their own comrades,
propelling the fascists into power in their wake. Ironically, the
worst defeat of the democratic workers movements will come not
at the hands of the capitalists or social democrats, but

(19:52):
from Lenin and the Bolsheviks, the very party at the
workers councils had put in power. Lenin began to undermine
the the power of the Soviets almost immediately. Published mere
days after the October Revolution, his draft Decrees on Workers
Control stated in no uncertain terms that real power and
authority lay with the new state and the Bolshevik dominated

(20:15):
trade unions. In the face of massive and unexpected resistance
from the workers councils, the decree is needed to be
modified before they could be implemented. But while publicly declaring
his support for the workers councils, the Bolshevik slogan was
after all, all power to the Soviets, Lenin continued to
trip away at their power until he finally admitted his
real position of democracy in the Factory in nineteen eighteen

(20:37):
in the Horrifying the immediate tasks of the Soviet government
quote unquestioning submission to a single will is absolutely necessary
for the success of labor processes that are based on
large scale machine industry today, the revolution demands, in the
interests of socialism, that the masses on we obey the

(21:01):
single will of the leaders of the labor process. This
is obviously one of the most disturbing things I've ever read.
But to be clear, while Lenin is more candid about
what one man rule in the factory actually entails, the
system he's describing isn't actually different from one man rule
and any other political system. Bolshevik rule in the factory

(21:24):
would be no different than capitalist, social democratic, or even
fascist rule. The movement for democracy in the factory now
faced four implacable enemies willing to put aside their ideological
differences to ensure that workers would not run their workplaces directly,
and as the nineteen twenties bled into the nineteen thirties,
the movement seemed to have all but disappeared in a

(21:47):
haale of bullets and blood. But they didn't. And next episode,
our heroes, the collective hero the world's working class will
be back. They will do any many more revolutions, and
we're going to talk about why those revolutions happened, what
the ruling class did to stop them, And then returned

(22:08):
to the lead up to Tianaman Square to see the
final stand of the Chinese working class.

Speaker 2 (22:17):
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