June 4, 2025 • 24 mins
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
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Call Zone Media. Welcome toek it happened here. I'm your host,
Miya Wong. When we last left the story of Tieneman one,
Vladimir Ilios Lenin had, in theory, crushed the last remnants
of the faction of the worker's movement that actually wanted
democracy to extend into the factories. Unfortunately for the Leninists,
(00:26):
no matter how many workers they killed, the demand for
democracy in the factory simply refused to die for over
one hundred years. The development of the mass factory system
and the logistical infrastructure necessary to support it, perhaps most importantly,
coal mines and the railroads used to transport that coal,
(00:47):
generated an especially militant working class that saw democratic control
over the workplace as a fundamental aspect of its liberation. Ideologically,
as the Journal and Notes pointed out, this man infested
in a series of interlocking beliefs about the nature of
the working class and class society, all of which were
necessary for the instinctive formation of workers councils to manifest
(01:10):
themselves in moments of revolutionary crisis. In the midst of
the rapid technological expansions of the Second and Third Industrial revolutions,
workers came to see themselves as the creators of the
new world. This produced the second belief that drove the
classical workers movement. The producers of this new world should
(01:30):
also be its inheritors. Thus, the goal of the worker's
movement was to take control of production in itself and
manage it for the common benefit of workers themselves. These
two beliefs in and of themselves were not unique to
the democratic wing of the workers movement. They broadly comprised
the ideology of the movement as a whole, and by
(01:52):
this point the workers movement was extremely broad, stretching from
social democratic trade unionists the intellectual heads of the laf
Leninist vanguard parties. What made the democratic wing unique was
its concern with the fundamental alienation of factory life, with
the condition of being reduced to an object by bosses
who simply used workers as human tools. For the Leninists
(02:16):
and social Democrats, alienation was simply a product of ownership
or distribution. The liberation of the working class would be
found in its productive capacity, not in its innate humanity
and creativity. Before the democratic wing of the Workers movement,
this solved nothing as long as the fundamental reduction from
(02:37):
human to object that characterized one man rule in the
factory persisted. Changes in owners of structure and health benefits
missed the entire point that degradation could only be solved
by returning agency and autonomy to the working class, by
giving it the class itself control over the production process
(02:58):
that for so long had controlled them. In nineteen thirty six,
Spanish workers decided to take matters into their own hands
and seized control over their workplace's end mass. The Spanish Revolution,
as it later became known, would become the largest and
most extensive experiment in democratic worker self management before or since.
(03:19):
Everything from public utilities to bakeries, to hospitals to shoe
factories fell under the control of the direct democratic unions,
and once their former bosses had been chased from the premises,
the workers set about transforming the entirety of Spanish society
along democratic lines, pulling their resources collectively and allocating them
(03:40):
democratically for the benefits of everyone. For a brief moment,
the triumphant experiments in democratic self management delivered on its promises.
Output increased dramatically, social services were expanded, and the workers
of Spain, by their own self organization developed a universal
health care system that radically expanded service into rural areas
(04:02):
where KERR was previously inaccessible. But the revolution had begun
amidst the Violet Civil War in Spain and under the
guise of an anti fascist alliance, Liberal socialist and stoutist
forces brutally stamped out any attempt at democratic self management
and returned the factories to their owners before losing the
war to the fascist armies of Francisco Franco. Undeterred by
(04:26):
the mounting casualty tolls of pro managerial massacres, revolutionary workers
formed workers' councils and mass factory assemblies once again in
Hungary in nineteen fifty six, and then again in Italy,
France and Czechoslovakia in nineteen sixty eight. Hungary in particular
is an interesting revolution because over the years it has
(04:47):
been subjected to so much of the same liberal mythologization
you get with gienemen, but this time even worse. The
Hungarian Revolution is remembered as a liberal democratic revolution. We
talked to the actual people who did the revolution. They
were saying things like, and this is a direct quote
from a member of a Hungarian workers council quote, the
(05:09):
time when the boss decided our fate is over. In reality,
far from simply instituting liberal democratic democracy, Hungarian workers seized
control of their factories and workplaces, forward workers' councils, and
overthrew the governments before Russian tanks slaughtered them. This was
not a liberal democratic revolution at all. Almost identical revolts
(05:32):
broke out across the capitalist world as well, in Italy,
in France and Chile, communes broke out and colonized Vietnam.
They spread everywhere, and to the dismay of capitalists and
communists alike. The development and implementation of the democratic solution
to alienation these revolts provided was largely instinctual, and it
(05:54):
often emerged in places without established workers' movements and their
political education effects. Typical of such movements was the course
of the revolution in Algeria. The political education Algerian workers
had received was from the nationalist vanguardist National Liberation Front
f l EN, which had prosecuted the war against the
French colonizers. The afalen's ideology emphasized the decisive role of
(06:18):
the state in national development. Upon taking power, however, Ahmed
ben Bella, Algeria's first president, discovered the question of the
economic structure of Algeria had already been answered for him.
Production would be managed by democratic workers councils built on
the properties seized by Algerian workers after the mass exodus
of French settlers who fled the country following independents left
(06:41):
much of their property uninhabited. Then Bella's administration took a
page out of Lenin's book and publicly supported the councils
while privately undermining them, But the whole dispute was made
irrelevance by a military coup two years later that dismantled
the councils completely and reimposed one man role in the factory.
Even by the late seventies, it was by no means
(07:02):
clear that one man rule in the factory would triumph
as a political system. Workers and students almost took Italy
in nineteen seventy seven, and the CNT, the anarchist union
that had led so much of the Spanish Revolution, reappeared
after the death of Franco. For a brief fleeting moment
in the late nineteen seventies, it really looked like they
(07:23):
were going to do it. The persistence of these revolts
in the face of pure military repression caused capitalist managery
elites to look for ways to dismantle the systemic structures
that produced the democratic revolts without giving up their power.
As author and friend of the show, Viciostre Wilde points out,
the instinctive embrace of democracy in the factory was only
(07:46):
possible so long as the factory remained a point of encounter,
a kind of dark agra that at once both exploited
workers and facilitated the interactions that allowed them to identify
with each other as a class and find and produce
collective meaning. Thus, the fundamental thrust of the attack against
democratic self management would take the form of an attack
(08:10):
on the shop floor as a site of collective identity
formation and as a space that could be seen in
any way as liberatory. This assault took a number of forms,
most famously deindustrialization itself, as well as a spatial relocation
of factories from urban centers into the suburbs, where workers
could be isolated from each other and turned to homeowners
(08:33):
bought off with the combination of cheap credit and the
promise that the new homes would also function as assets.
The quote unquote democratization of finance replaced the democratization of
the factory as the capitalist class funneled union pensiants into
the stock market, thus tying remained of organized labour to
the fates of capitalism itself. Corporations began to turn the
(08:55):
workplace into an immense propaganda apparatus, replete with mass ideological
programming designed to promote identification with the corporation itself and
not the working class as a whole. Worst of all,
the mobility of capital and the immobility of workers combined
with the new logistics networks and technological advances in containerized
shipping to create a world where if workers ever began
(09:17):
to get the upper hand, capitalists could simply move elsewhere.
As the total size of the industrial working class contracted,
capitalists increasingly took that option and left spitting vast populations
out of the traditional workforce entirely. These developments would eventually
destroy the classical workers movement, but in order for the
anti democratic counter revolution to succeed, it needed somewhere to
(09:40):
move their production to, somewhere with a large, exploitable labor supply.
The capitalist class found that answer in China in the
wake of the CCP's victory in the Chinese Civil War
(10:03):
in nineteen forty nine. The Chinese factory system was extremely
different from the system that existed anywhere else in the world.
Chinese state owned firms virtually lacked the ability to fire workers.
People's entire social sphere was built around their work units,
which provided everything from their healthcare to their retirement, to
their food to often their entertainment. The CCP also eliminated
(10:27):
the piece rate system, a system in which people were
paid per unit they produced, which is, for example, how
the USSR worked. This meant that in order to get
people to work, bosses had very little leverage. They were
thus forced to allow a degree of participation in the
labor process and the ability to criticize bosses, because otherwise
it was virtually impossible to get anyone to do anything.
(10:50):
Chinese bosses solved this problem through a combination of mass
ideological work and a parentalistic, semi democratic system for determining
the heads of work. Teams that were out raked by
the party ensured that managers would at least be somewhat
popular till the process was strictly managed. Workers had the
ability to criticize the cadra to govern them and combine
(11:10):
the work unit's system of folding home and social life
into the factory system. The product of this system was
that because there was already a greater degree of workers
participation in Chinese factories than workers elsewhere, and because of
some of the structural elements of Maoism, demands for democracy
became delinked from the workplace, and it meant that the system,
at least in the cities worked sort of okay until
(11:33):
the Cultural Revolution. This means that it is time for
me to do the culture revolution. Rant everyone gets the
Cultural Revolution completely wrong. The initial targets of the Cultural
Revolution were kids with quote unquote black blood, the children
of people who had quote bad class backgrounds. These people
(11:54):
were heavily persecuted, and you can make arguments about what
you do with you know, a Shanghai oligarch collaborates with
the Japanese imperialists, But this extends to the children of
people from quote unquote bad class backgrounds, and that term
is extremely loose. I know people whose families were declared
(12:15):
of black class background, who had quote unquote black blood
and weren't allowed to hold government positions because her family
had made bird feeders before the revolution. It was as
a system absolutely nonsense. So what the early phases of
the Cultural Revolution amounted to was a bunch of privileged
kids from red class backgrounds in a new system attacking
(12:36):
a bunch of kids who were being persecuted for stuff
that was literally not their fault at all. They had
no way to control who their parents were now. The
initial stages of the Cultural Revolution were largely driven by
Mao attempting to play power games inside the party, But
as things became more and more chaotic and the attacks
on CCP, bear Gratz and Caudra escalated, it spiraled nearly
(12:57):
out of Mao's control entirely and produced what's called January Storm,
where rebel workers seized control of Shanghai and drove out
the CCP. And this caused what I would describe as
a oh fuck moment for Mao, because now, despite all
his rhetoric about bombarding the headquarters, he had to actually
deal with a worker controlled city. And I found this
(13:21):
incredible line from Joe and Lai in a meeting with
Mao where they were attempting to figure out what to
do with, you know, this New Revolutionary Shanghai quote when
asked whether the New leadership should be elected from the
bottom up. Joe and Lai bluntly replied that quote, anarchism
is bound to develop if we immediately implement direct election
of the Paris commune style. And this was obviously a
(13:44):
problem for Mao because there was no way for the
party to maintain its long term control if you know,
you actually implemented the direct elections in the style of
the Paris commun and so instead we saw a full
on revolution. By about nineteen sixty eight, rebel workers and
students were getting slaughtered everywhere. The initial uprisings, the stuff
(14:08):
that everyone remembers with the dunce caps and the placards,
was staggeringly by far the least violent part of the
Culture Revolution. Here's from Walder, an academic who spent a
significant amount of time studying the actual death records city
by city and province by province in the Chinese archives. Quote,
more than three fourths of all documented deaths in local
(14:30):
annals are due to the actions of authorities in this
third phase, in more than ninety percent of those persecuted
for alleged political crimes. This third phase nineteen sixty eight onward,
is where most of the people in the cultural revolution
gets killed, and this is the opposite of the way
that the culture revolution is understood. Most of the killing
(14:51):
wasn't the product of student radicalism gone out of control.
It was the state slaughtering its way to the various
rebel factions that did most of the killing and the
political persecution. And this has enormous effects on subsequent Chinese history.
It creates a ruling class that's incredibly paranoid about anything
that even smells like organizing happening outside the party, and
(15:12):
the most radical students and workers were simply butchered by
the state, and by the late nineteen seventies, radical politics
in China that could have produced anything even remotely like
democratic control of the workplace had collapsed almost entirely in
the face of state repression. In their wake, politics moved
towards more intellectual driven liberal democratic politics that broadly ignored
(15:33):
the working class entirely, as dangzhelping unleashed the horrific one
Child policy, an in draconian and ultimately successful attempts to
re establish the state's patriarchal control over the household and
strip hundreds of millions of women of even the limited
autonomy they had clawed out of the Cultural Revolution, but
the beginning of marketization, the gradual dismantling of the socialist
(15:54):
welfare state, and a wave of inflation produced a series
of economic changes that turned Chinese stas society into a
powder keg. By nineteen eighty nine, the classical workers movement
(16:15):
globally was on its last legs. Unable to spark its
own uprisings, it latched onto a series of other social
and political movements, most notably pro democracy movement in China.
But democratic self management and its critique of one man
rule in the factory was utterly alien to the pro
democracy movement, which meant that its developments by the workers
(16:36):
of Chiannemen was a spontaneous product of the application of
the principles of democracy to their own situation. This led
to formulations that would have been unfamiliar to previous incarnations
of the workers' movement. One worker interviewed by Walder said
this about democracy in the factory. Why do a lot
of workers agree with democracy and freedom in the workshop?
(16:56):
Does what the workers say count or what the leader says?
We later talked about it. In the factory the director
is a dictator. What one man says goes. If you
view the state through the factory, it's about the same
one man rule. Our objective was not very high. We
just wanted workers to have their own independent organization in
(17:17):
work units. It's personal rule. For example, if I want
to change jobs, the bus company foreman won't let me go.
I ought to go home at five, but he tells
me to work overtime for two hours, and if I don't,
he'll cut my bonuses. This is a personal rule. A
factory should have a system. If a worker wants to
change jobs, they ought to have a system of rules
and decided how to do it. Also, these rules should
(17:39):
be decided upon by everyone and then afterwards anyone who
violenced and we punished according to the rules. This is
rule by law. Now we don't have this kind of
legal system now. This is obviously an extremely conservative framing
of the classical critique of one man rule in the factory,
couched in the dominant political rhetoric of the rule of law.
(17:59):
Attempt to actually implement this system, that which workers controlled
the factories they work in, how long they work, and
what the bonus rate was democratically to an independent organization
could only end in democratic, self managed workplaces. As Walder
and jang If pointed out, the workers at the Beijing
Workers Autonomous Federation were uniformly uneducated. It had little or
(18:20):
no connection to any of the various liberal intellectual circles.
This was as pure workers movement as any in Chinese history,
and for one final time, the instinct of that working
class was to demand democracy in the factory. This demand,
above all others, was politically unacceptable. When the army marched
on Beijing, it was the Chinese working class they wiped out.
(18:43):
Even the memory of the demand for democracy in the
factory would be scrubbed for the records that the CCP
and the pro democracy movements alike, thus ensuring the meaning
of the events would be lost. What then was Tianeman.
In some sense, it was a transition point between two
different Chinese working classes. The protests were the high water
(19:05):
mark of the political mobilization of the old industrial working class, who,
in the streets surrounding Tienemen, mounted the final attack of
the classical workers movement. Their defeat ended the old working
class as a political force, and they were annihilated altogether
in the economic restructure of the nineteen nineties, which crushed
the last vestides of workers' autonomy in the factory and
(19:26):
destroyed what remained of the Chinese welfare state. They were
replaced by a new working class drawn from the rural
and semi urban under classes of the old socialist system,
who were dragged into the cities to fill the ranks
of the two hundred and seventy seven million migrant workers
that today comprised the background of China's working class. This
(19:47):
new working class, with rural household registration in no way
into the remaining state owned factories, would have none of
the benefits of the previous one. It would instead face
a full wrapt capitalist ideology she baked into every aspect
of workplace culture, and a massive attempt to encourage home ownership.
While the previous working class could at least posit a
(20:08):
democratic form of the factory to which life could be improved,
this new working class's greatest desire was to leave the
factory entirely and become a business owner. In this sense,
it considers itself to be a temporarily embarrassed batip bourgeoisie.
Such ideological selfconceptions are inimical to the formation of the
classical workers movement, and indeed the new Chinese working class
(20:31):
has largely failed to find the collective identity in the workplace.
The situation is not unique. The death of the classical
workers movement has seen the collapse of their demands of
democratic self management everywhere in the face of a working
class it refuses to cohere itself in the factory. China
(20:51):
was just late to the game. The fact remains, however,
that the global economics system has lurned from crisis to
crisis the better part of my lifetime, setting off in
its wake an increasing number of revolutions, even as the
darker gore of the factory ceased to function as a
place to form identities for this new working class. If
(21:14):
a collective identity couldnot be forged in the factory, it
would be foraged in the street instead. Lacking a positive
identity to cohere itself around, workers were only able to
mobilize on a mass basis in direct opposition to a
force that threatens it. On a cross sectoral basis, The state,
with its ability to increase the price of basic commodities
(21:35):
and slash welfare benefits, became the only available enemy, and
the constant fights against the police became the sole basis
for new collective identity formation. Contemporary revolts have thus taken
the form of mass street movements and almost continuous confrontations
with the states. Factory occupations were replaced with square occupations,
and as the squares were revealed to be indefensible, they
(21:57):
too were replaced by running fights with the police. But
this placed the new revolutionaries in a dangerous bind without
the leverage against the state the classical workers movement's control
over the workplace, provided they lacked the ability to bring
down a government firmly committed to fighting it out. Even
the attempts over the last five or six years to
(22:18):
carry out general strikes in Peru, in France, Hong Kong,
and Sudan were, as Melo Testa predicted in the early twenties,
easily defeated without the accompanying factory occupations. But with current
labor conditions exceedingly unlikely to produce another wave of factory occupations,
the way forward for any political movement that seeks to
reintroduce democracy into the economic sphere is unclear. Perhaps that
(22:43):
is the greatest legacy of Tianemen. The workers who assembled
outside Tianeman Square had already abandoned their factories. For all
that they spoke the language of the old workers movement,
they stood and fought and died like we do in
the streets. They were the bridge between the world, the
world of the workers movements, and the world we live
in today, and thus face the same revolutionary crisis we
(23:06):
face today, the crisis of Papua and Palestine, of Columbia
and Iran, of me and Maar in Hong Kong, of
victory just beyond the horizon that nevertheless cannot yet be grasped.
The workers of Tieneman I, suspect have no answers to
give us now, but expecting answers from the dead is
(23:26):
demanding too much of those past and present who died
fighting for liberation. All we can do now is find
our own way, and, with the names of the dead
on our lips, build the world they died fighting for.
It could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
(23:48):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts can now
find sources for It to Happen here listed directly in
episode descriptions, Thanks for listening,
Call Zone Media. Welcome toek it happened here. I'm your host,
Miya Wong. When we last left the story of Tieneman one,
Vladimir Ilios Lenin had, in theory, crushed the last remnants
of the faction of the worker's movement that actually wanted
democracy to extend into the factories. Unfortunately for the Leninists,
(00:26):
no matter how many workers they killed, the demand for
democracy in the factory simply refused to die for over
one hundred years. The development of the mass factory system
and the logistical infrastructure necessary to support it, perhaps most importantly,
coal mines and the railroads used to transport that coal,
(00:47):
generated an especially militant working class that saw democratic control
over the workplace as a fundamental aspect of its liberation. Ideologically,
as the Journal and Notes pointed out, this man infested
in a series of interlocking beliefs about the nature of
the working class and class society, all of which were
necessary for the instinctive formation of workers councils to manifest
(01:10):
themselves in moments of revolutionary crisis. In the midst of
the rapid technological expansions of the Second and Third Industrial revolutions,
workers came to see themselves as the creators of the
new world. This produced the second belief that drove the
classical workers movement. The producers of this new world should
(01:30):
also be its inheritors. Thus, the goal of the worker's
movement was to take control of production in itself and
manage it for the common benefit of workers themselves. These
two beliefs in and of themselves were not unique to
the democratic wing of the workers movement. They broadly comprised
the ideology of the movement as a whole, and by
(01:52):
this point the workers movement was extremely broad, stretching from
social democratic trade unionists the intellectual heads of the laf
Leninist vanguard parties. What made the democratic wing unique was
its concern with the fundamental alienation of factory life, with
the condition of being reduced to an object by bosses
who simply used workers as human tools. For the Leninists
(02:16):
and social Democrats, alienation was simply a product of ownership
or distribution. The liberation of the working class would be
found in its productive capacity, not in its innate humanity
and creativity. Before the democratic wing of the Workers movement,
this solved nothing as long as the fundamental reduction from
(02:37):
human to object that characterized one man rule in the
factory persisted. Changes in owners of structure and health benefits
missed the entire point that degradation could only be solved
by returning agency and autonomy to the working class, by
giving it the class itself control over the production process
(02:58):
that for so long had controlled them. In nineteen thirty six,
Spanish workers decided to take matters into their own hands
and seized control over their workplace's end mass. The Spanish Revolution,
as it later became known, would become the largest and
most extensive experiment in democratic worker self management before or since.
(03:19):
Everything from public utilities to bakeries, to hospitals to shoe
factories fell under the control of the direct democratic unions,
and once their former bosses had been chased from the premises,
the workers set about transforming the entirety of Spanish society
along democratic lines, pulling their resources collectively and allocating them
(03:40):
democratically for the benefits of everyone. For a brief moment,
the triumphant experiments in democratic self management delivered on its promises.
Output increased dramatically, social services were expanded, and the workers
of Spain, by their own self organization developed a universal
health care system that radically expanded service into rural areas
(04:02):
where KERR was previously inaccessible. But the revolution had begun
amidst the Violet Civil War in Spain and under the
guise of an anti fascist alliance, Liberal socialist and stoutist
forces brutally stamped out any attempt at democratic self management
and returned the factories to their owners before losing the
war to the fascist armies of Francisco Franco. Undeterred by
(04:26):
the mounting casualty tolls of pro managerial massacres, revolutionary workers
formed workers' councils and mass factory assemblies once again in
Hungary in nineteen fifty six, and then again in Italy,
France and Czechoslovakia in nineteen sixty eight. Hungary in particular
is an interesting revolution because over the years it has
(04:47):
been subjected to so much of the same liberal mythologization
you get with gienemen, but this time even worse. The
Hungarian Revolution is remembered as a liberal democratic revolution. We
talked to the actual people who did the revolution. They
were saying things like, and this is a direct quote
from a member of a Hungarian workers council quote, the
(05:09):
time when the boss decided our fate is over. In reality,
far from simply instituting liberal democratic democracy, Hungarian workers seized
control of their factories and workplaces, forward workers' councils, and
overthrew the governments before Russian tanks slaughtered them. This was
not a liberal democratic revolution at all. Almost identical revolts
(05:32):
broke out across the capitalist world as well, in Italy,
in France and Chile, communes broke out and colonized Vietnam.
They spread everywhere, and to the dismay of capitalists and
communists alike. The development and implementation of the democratic solution
to alienation these revolts provided was largely instinctual, and it
(05:54):
often emerged in places without established workers' movements and their
political education effects. Typical of such movements was the course
of the revolution in Algeria. The political education Algerian workers
had received was from the nationalist vanguardist National Liberation Front
f l EN, which had prosecuted the war against the
French colonizers. The afalen's ideology emphasized the decisive role of
(06:18):
the state in national development. Upon taking power, however, Ahmed
ben Bella, Algeria's first president, discovered the question of the
economic structure of Algeria had already been answered for him.
Production would be managed by democratic workers councils built on
the properties seized by Algerian workers after the mass exodus
of French settlers who fled the country following independents left
(06:41):
much of their property uninhabited. Then Bella's administration took a
page out of Lenin's book and publicly supported the councils
while privately undermining them, But the whole dispute was made
irrelevance by a military coup two years later that dismantled
the councils completely and reimposed one man role in the factory.
Even by the late seventies, it was by no means
(07:02):
clear that one man rule in the factory would triumph
as a political system. Workers and students almost took Italy
in nineteen seventy seven, and the CNT, the anarchist union
that had led so much of the Spanish Revolution, reappeared
after the death of Franco. For a brief fleeting moment
in the late nineteen seventies, it really looked like they
(07:23):
were going to do it. The persistence of these revolts
in the face of pure military repression caused capitalist managery
elites to look for ways to dismantle the systemic structures
that produced the democratic revolts without giving up their power.
As author and friend of the show, Viciostre Wilde points out,
the instinctive embrace of democracy in the factory was only
(07:46):
possible so long as the factory remained a point of encounter,
a kind of dark agra that at once both exploited
workers and facilitated the interactions that allowed them to identify
with each other as a class and find and produce
collective meaning. Thus, the fundamental thrust of the attack against
democratic self management would take the form of an attack
(08:10):
on the shop floor as a site of collective identity
formation and as a space that could be seen in
any way as liberatory. This assault took a number of forms,
most famously deindustrialization itself, as well as a spatial relocation
of factories from urban centers into the suburbs, where workers
could be isolated from each other and turned to homeowners
(08:33):
bought off with the combination of cheap credit and the
promise that the new homes would also function as assets.
The quote unquote democratization of finance replaced the democratization of
the factory as the capitalist class funneled union pensiants into
the stock market, thus tying remained of organized labour to
the fates of capitalism itself. Corporations began to turn the
(08:55):
workplace into an immense propaganda apparatus, replete with mass ideological
programming designed to promote identification with the corporation itself and
not the working class as a whole. Worst of all,
the mobility of capital and the immobility of workers combined
with the new logistics networks and technological advances in containerized
shipping to create a world where if workers ever began
(09:17):
to get the upper hand, capitalists could simply move elsewhere.
As the total size of the industrial working class contracted,
capitalists increasingly took that option and left spitting vast populations
out of the traditional workforce entirely. These developments would eventually
destroy the classical workers movement, but in order for the
anti democratic counter revolution to succeed, it needed somewhere to
(09:40):
move their production to, somewhere with a large, exploitable labor supply.
The capitalist class found that answer in China in the
wake of the CCP's victory in the Chinese Civil War
(10:03):
in nineteen forty nine. The Chinese factory system was extremely
different from the system that existed anywhere else in the world.
Chinese state owned firms virtually lacked the ability to fire workers.
People's entire social sphere was built around their work units,
which provided everything from their healthcare to their retirement, to
their food to often their entertainment. The CCP also eliminated
(10:27):
the piece rate system, a system in which people were
paid per unit they produced, which is, for example, how
the USSR worked. This meant that in order to get
people to work, bosses had very little leverage. They were
thus forced to allow a degree of participation in the
labor process and the ability to criticize bosses, because otherwise
it was virtually impossible to get anyone to do anything.
(10:50):
Chinese bosses solved this problem through a combination of mass
ideological work and a parentalistic, semi democratic system for determining
the heads of work. Teams that were out raked by
the party ensured that managers would at least be somewhat
popular till the process was strictly managed. Workers had the
ability to criticize the cadra to govern them and combine
(11:10):
the work unit's system of folding home and social life
into the factory system. The product of this system was
that because there was already a greater degree of workers
participation in Chinese factories than workers elsewhere, and because of
some of the structural elements of Maoism, demands for democracy
became delinked from the workplace, and it meant that the system,
at least in the cities worked sort of okay until
(11:33):
the Cultural Revolution. This means that it is time for
me to do the culture revolution. Rant everyone gets the
Cultural Revolution completely wrong. The initial targets of the Cultural
Revolution were kids with quote unquote black blood, the children
of people who had quote bad class backgrounds. These people
(11:54):
were heavily persecuted, and you can make arguments about what
you do with you know, a Shanghai oligarch collaborates with
the Japanese imperialists, But this extends to the children of
people from quote unquote bad class backgrounds, and that term
is extremely loose. I know people whose families were declared
(12:15):
of black class background, who had quote unquote black blood
and weren't allowed to hold government positions because her family
had made bird feeders before the revolution. It was as
a system absolutely nonsense. So what the early phases of
the Cultural Revolution amounted to was a bunch of privileged
kids from red class backgrounds in a new system attacking
(12:36):
a bunch of kids who were being persecuted for stuff
that was literally not their fault at all. They had
no way to control who their parents were now. The
initial stages of the Cultural Revolution were largely driven by
Mao attempting to play power games inside the party, But
as things became more and more chaotic and the attacks
on CCP, bear Gratz and Caudra escalated, it spiraled nearly
(12:57):
out of Mao's control entirely and produced what's called January Storm,
where rebel workers seized control of Shanghai and drove out
the CCP. And this caused what I would describe as
a oh fuck moment for Mao, because now, despite all
his rhetoric about bombarding the headquarters, he had to actually
deal with a worker controlled city. And I found this
(13:21):
incredible line from Joe and Lai in a meeting with
Mao where they were attempting to figure out what to
do with, you know, this New Revolutionary Shanghai quote when
asked whether the New leadership should be elected from the
bottom up. Joe and Lai bluntly replied that quote, anarchism
is bound to develop if we immediately implement direct election
of the Paris commune style. And this was obviously a
(13:44):
problem for Mao because there was no way for the
party to maintain its long term control if you know,
you actually implemented the direct elections in the style of
the Paris commun and so instead we saw a full
on revolution. By about nineteen sixty eight, rebel workers and
students were getting slaughtered everywhere. The initial uprisings, the stuff
(14:08):
that everyone remembers with the dunce caps and the placards,
was staggeringly by far the least violent part of the
Culture Revolution. Here's from Walder, an academic who spent a
significant amount of time studying the actual death records city
by city and province by province in the Chinese archives. Quote,
more than three fourths of all documented deaths in local
(14:30):
annals are due to the actions of authorities in this
third phase, in more than ninety percent of those persecuted
for alleged political crimes. This third phase nineteen sixty eight onward,
is where most of the people in the cultural revolution
gets killed, and this is the opposite of the way
that the culture revolution is understood. Most of the killing
(14:51):
wasn't the product of student radicalism gone out of control.
It was the state slaughtering its way to the various
rebel factions that did most of the killing and the
political persecution. And this has enormous effects on subsequent Chinese history.
It creates a ruling class that's incredibly paranoid about anything
that even smells like organizing happening outside the party, and
(15:12):
the most radical students and workers were simply butchered by
the state, and by the late nineteen seventies, radical politics
in China that could have produced anything even remotely like
democratic control of the workplace had collapsed almost entirely in
the face of state repression. In their wake, politics moved
towards more intellectual driven liberal democratic politics that broadly ignored
(15:33):
the working class entirely, as dangzhelping unleashed the horrific one
Child policy, an in draconian and ultimately successful attempts to
re establish the state's patriarchal control over the household and
strip hundreds of millions of women of even the limited
autonomy they had clawed out of the Cultural Revolution, but
the beginning of marketization, the gradual dismantling of the socialist
(15:54):
welfare state, and a wave of inflation produced a series
of economic changes that turned Chinese stas society into a
powder keg. By nineteen eighty nine, the classical workers movement
(16:15):
globally was on its last legs. Unable to spark its
own uprisings, it latched onto a series of other social
and political movements, most notably pro democracy movement in China.
But democratic self management and its critique of one man
rule in the factory was utterly alien to the pro
democracy movement, which meant that its developments by the workers
(16:36):
of Chiannemen was a spontaneous product of the application of
the principles of democracy to their own situation. This led
to formulations that would have been unfamiliar to previous incarnations
of the workers' movement. One worker interviewed by Walder said
this about democracy in the factory. Why do a lot
of workers agree with democracy and freedom in the workshop?
(16:56):
Does what the workers say count or what the leader says?
We later talked about it. In the factory the director
is a dictator. What one man says goes. If you
view the state through the factory, it's about the same
one man rule. Our objective was not very high. We
just wanted workers to have their own independent organization in
(17:17):
work units. It's personal rule. For example, if I want
to change jobs, the bus company foreman won't let me go.
I ought to go home at five, but he tells
me to work overtime for two hours, and if I don't,
he'll cut my bonuses. This is a personal rule. A
factory should have a system. If a worker wants to
change jobs, they ought to have a system of rules
and decided how to do it. Also, these rules should
(17:39):
be decided upon by everyone and then afterwards anyone who
violenced and we punished according to the rules. This is
rule by law. Now we don't have this kind of
legal system now. This is obviously an extremely conservative framing
of the classical critique of one man rule in the factory,
couched in the dominant political rhetoric of the rule of law.
(17:59):
Attempt to actually implement this system, that which workers controlled
the factories they work in, how long they work, and
what the bonus rate was democratically to an independent organization
could only end in democratic, self managed workplaces. As Walder
and jang If pointed out, the workers at the Beijing
Workers Autonomous Federation were uniformly uneducated. It had little or
(18:20):
no connection to any of the various liberal intellectual circles.
This was as pure workers movement as any in Chinese history,
and for one final time, the instinct of that working
class was to demand democracy in the factory. This demand,
above all others, was politically unacceptable. When the army marched
on Beijing, it was the Chinese working class they wiped out.
(18:43):
Even the memory of the demand for democracy in the
factory would be scrubbed for the records that the CCP
and the pro democracy movements alike, thus ensuring the meaning
of the events would be lost. What then was Tianeman.
In some sense, it was a transition point between two
different Chinese working classes. The protests were the high water
(19:05):
mark of the political mobilization of the old industrial working class, who,
in the streets surrounding Tienemen, mounted the final attack of
the classical workers movement. Their defeat ended the old working
class as a political force, and they were annihilated altogether
in the economic restructure of the nineteen nineties, which crushed
the last vestides of workers' autonomy in the factory and
(19:26):
destroyed what remained of the Chinese welfare state. They were
replaced by a new working class drawn from the rural
and semi urban under classes of the old socialist system,
who were dragged into the cities to fill the ranks
of the two hundred and seventy seven million migrant workers
that today comprised the background of China's working class. This
(19:47):
new working class, with rural household registration in no way
into the remaining state owned factories, would have none of
the benefits of the previous one. It would instead face
a full wrapt capitalist ideology she baked into every aspect
of workplace culture, and a massive attempt to encourage home ownership.
While the previous working class could at least posit a
(20:08):
democratic form of the factory to which life could be improved,
this new working class's greatest desire was to leave the
factory entirely and become a business owner. In this sense,
it considers itself to be a temporarily embarrassed batip bourgeoisie.
Such ideological selfconceptions are inimical to the formation of the
classical workers movement, and indeed the new Chinese working class
(20:31):
has largely failed to find the collective identity in the workplace.
The situation is not unique. The death of the classical
workers movement has seen the collapse of their demands of
democratic self management everywhere in the face of a working
class it refuses to cohere itself in the factory. China
(20:51):
was just late to the game. The fact remains, however,
that the global economics system has lurned from crisis to
crisis the better part of my lifetime, setting off in
its wake an increasing number of revolutions, even as the
darker gore of the factory ceased to function as a
place to form identities for this new working class. If
(21:14):
a collective identity couldnot be forged in the factory, it
would be foraged in the street instead. Lacking a positive
identity to cohere itself around, workers were only able to
mobilize on a mass basis in direct opposition to a
force that threatens it. On a cross sectoral basis, The state,
with its ability to increase the price of basic commodities
(21:35):
and slash welfare benefits, became the only available enemy, and
the constant fights against the police became the sole basis
for new collective identity formation. Contemporary revolts have thus taken
the form of mass street movements and almost continuous confrontations
with the states. Factory occupations were replaced with square occupations,
and as the squares were revealed to be indefensible, they
(21:57):
too were replaced by running fights with the police. But
this placed the new revolutionaries in a dangerous bind without
the leverage against the state the classical workers movement's control
over the workplace, provided they lacked the ability to bring
down a government firmly committed to fighting it out. Even
the attempts over the last five or six years to
(22:18):
carry out general strikes in Peru, in France, Hong Kong,
and Sudan were, as Melo Testa predicted in the early twenties,
easily defeated without the accompanying factory occupations. But with current
labor conditions exceedingly unlikely to produce another wave of factory occupations,
the way forward for any political movement that seeks to
reintroduce democracy into the economic sphere is unclear. Perhaps that
(22:43):
is the greatest legacy of Tianemen. The workers who assembled
outside Tianeman Square had already abandoned their factories. For all
that they spoke the language of the old workers movement,
they stood and fought and died like we do in
the streets. They were the bridge between the world, the
world of the workers movements, and the world we live
in today, and thus face the same revolutionary crisis we
(23:06):
face today, the crisis of Papua and Palestine, of Columbia
and Iran, of me and Maar in Hong Kong, of
victory just beyond the horizon that nevertheless cannot yet be grasped.
The workers of Tieneman I, suspect have no answers to
give us now, but expecting answers from the dead is
(23:26):
demanding too much of those past and present who died
fighting for liberation. All we can do now is find
our own way, and, with the names of the dead
on our lips, build the world they died fighting for.
It could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
(23:48):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts can now
find sources for It to Happen here listed directly in
episode descriptions, Thanks for listening,
It Could Happen Here News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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