July 2, 2025 • 28 mins
This is a teaser preview of one of our Radical Reads episodes, made exclusively for our supporters on patreon. You can listen to the full 122-minute episode without ads and support our work at https://www.patreon.com/posts/e106-radical-in-129688227
In this episode, we speak to Eli Friedman and Kevin Lin about their new book, China in Global Capitalism: Building International Solidarity Against Imperial Rivalry. The book (co-written with Rosa Liu and Ashley Smith) does an excellent job of looking at the actions of the Chinese state from the perspective of workers and marginalised groups to produce a picture of a capitalist nation that is not simply 'the same' as other nations, but not all that different either.
The full episode is out longest Radical Read yet, and covers a range of topics from the conditions and struggles of China's working class both inside the workplace and out, to women's and LGBT+ rights. We also talk about China's relationship to its "internal peripheries" of Tibet and Xinjiang, as well as its international relationships in Africa, Israel and, of course, with the US. We also discuss what building international solidarity from below might look like in the current context.
Listen to the full episode here:
More information
In this episode, we speak to Eli Friedman and Kevin Lin about their new book, China in Global Capitalism: Building International Solidarity Against Imperial Rivalry. The book (co-written with Rosa Liu and Ashley Smith) does an excellent job of looking at the actions of the Chinese state from the perspective of workers and marginalised groups to produce a picture of a capitalist nation that is not simply 'the same' as other nations, but not all that different either.
The full episode is out longest Radical Read yet, and covers a range of topics from the conditions and struggles of China's working class both inside the workplace and out, to women's and LGBT+ rights. We also talk about China's relationship to its "internal peripheries" of Tibet and Xinjiang, as well as its international relationships in Africa, Israel and, of course, with the US. We also discuss what building international solidarity from below might look like in the current context.
Listen to the full episode here:
More information
- Buy China in Global Capitalism from an independent bookshop
- You can also buy Eli’s previous book, China on Strike: Narratives of Workers’ Refusal
- Check out our excellent collection of books about Chinese history and politics in our online store
- Listen to a three-part series about Chinese migrant worker poetry by our sister-podcast, Working Class Literature
- Full show notes for this episode, including further reading and listening, as well as sources, are available on the webpage for this episode: https://workingclasshistory.com/podcast/e106-radical-reads-china-in-global-capitalism/
- Thanks to our patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. Special thanks to Jazz Hands, Fernando Lopez Ojeda, Nick Williams and Old Norm.
- The episode image is of the G.Tech Technology Factory in Zhuhai, China. Credit: Chris (with additional design by WCH). CC BY-SA 2.0.
- Edited by Tyler Hill
- Our theme tune is Montaigne’s version of the classic labour movement anthem, ‘Bread and Roses’, performed by Montaigne and Nick Harriott, and mixed by Wave Racer. Download the song here, with all proceeds going to Medical Aid for Palestinians. More from Montaigne: website, Instagram, YouTube
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
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(00:23):
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History link in the show notes.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
As we come margin Martin and the Beauty of the Day,
A million dark in kegeens one thousand mil last grade
are branden by the beauty. His Sun Sun discloses the
papal hereusden Roses Roses.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
In two thousand and six, there was a big campaign
that got a lot of international attention because the ACF two,
in a very short period of time, set up union
branches in every Walmart store in China. And this is
something American unions had been trying to do for a
while and had failed. So people are very excited about this,
and I actually did some research into one of the
consequences of this, and just one example in a store
(01:28):
in nan Chung, which is the capital of Chiongxi Province,
they had these elections, they set up a union, and
they actually had a reasonably democratic election. They elected a
guy who was very interesting and who really wanted to
push management on just some basic workplace stuff. He wasn't
organizing to overthrow the Communist Party or anything. He had
a few successes, and then very quickly the higher levels
(01:51):
of the union got anxious because they saw that he
was kind of stirring up trouble and was making them
a little bit nervous. He got fired and pushed out
with the consent of the higher levels of the union.
So I think that that's just one example that demonstrates
some of the limitations. Even in those cases where you
can have some sort of an election and someone who's
going to fight a little bit, there's real institutional.
Speaker 4 (02:12):
Constraints given that the ACF T you on the whole,
isn't organizing struggle. What forms do work as struggles in
China usually take then, and kind of how does the
state relate to those struggles.
Speaker 5 (02:27):
I think there is we're often a tendency to think
China is exceptional. It's political institutions, it's political culture, et cetera,
et cetera, and we're often you know, what's happening in
China is counterposed to sort of idealized version of the West,
if you will. So there's an idealized version of what
a union should be doing to fighting union very cross
(02:48):
so it's very radical, non bureaucratic. But actually that's now
the the reality of most larger unions in Asia, in Europe,
in North America, rights mostly bureaucratic, very top down. Union
organizers are overworks, not given much resources, They are highly
repressed or highly retarded against in workplace organizing. So I
(03:11):
think this is actually very important point that we should
be aware of in terms of not making that look
like that's the exception to some kind of idealized image
of whatever democracy. So society, unions, workers, etc. To your question, So,
for most of the last thirty years, striking China have
been almost entirely organized by workers themselves or by workers
(03:35):
working in those workplaces. Of course, independent unions are not
allowed or criminalized. So if you'll try to organize an
independent union, the chances are you'll be arrested. I think
maybe waitin a few days. There are small labor and
jills you can think of themselves, worker centers of a
few staff, interesting in labor rights, skilled trainings, auvacracy. I
(04:00):
think a small number of them do try to assist
workers in organizing, but they are you know, very small
and very fragmented, and I don't think they are you know,
for most of the workers they're organizing, their strikes are
organized entirely by themselves. And this is you know, what
we normally call wildcat strikes, that these strikes are that
are not organized by officially by tue unions. But again
(04:23):
here I think I want to make this point that
we talk about wildcat strike as the exception to the
more conventional sort of union organized strike. But I think
if you look globally, WorldCat strikes may be the norm
rather than the exception, because they're very actually very few
union organized strikes almost anywhere, and I think in China
(04:43):
in many other places in Asia, so called wildcare strikes
actually are the normal kind of strikes where workers entirely
organize their own own actions. And as cause this for
simple reasons that either the unions are stay controlled in
the case of China or Vietnam, so they do not
organize workers, they do not support workers strikes, or because
(05:05):
the union are very pro management, or they are in
this kind of union management cooperation framework, or just there's
no union. Again, it's the case for I think, for
the majority of the workforce globally, where they never see
any union in their workplace. So it's interesting to see
this kind of very direct formal confrontation between labor and
(05:26):
capital without the mediating role of the union. And I
think if we again thinking critically about the role of
the union in capitalists libert democracies, often their role is
not to push the struggle forward structurally or institutionally. Their
goal is now to transcend or go beyond capitalism. Their
the roal is to mediate the interests of labor and
(05:46):
capital in some way. They of course they would push
for the interest workers, but they will necessarily have to
make compromises, Whereas when workers and capital are in this
direct confrontation, there's no mediation, and this kind of confrontation
actually see in law cases in China over the last
twenty thirty years, workers end up winning their demands. There
also some problem with it in terms of the after
(06:09):
twenty thirty years, you don't you still don't see you
mass tree union, movement of mass workers organizations. So that's
another aspect of this. But in terms of winning actually
this kind of direct form of worker theybor capital confrontation,
actually end up being favorite workers in a lot of cases.
And two questions about the state approach to labor and
(06:30):
workers struggle, and I think again here is sort of
undergone several phases, if well, since the nineteen nineties. I
think for most of the nineteen nineties, the trans state
didn't really treat these megro workers very seriously because you know,
for the first ten years or so, ten to fifteen
years or so of this rural migration to the cities,
(06:51):
I think the trans government and I think a lot
of people in public think they are just transient, right,
So that's why they're called rural mecro workers. They will
come to the state for work for maybe ten months,
nine months, and ten months, they go back for a
chance in a year for a couple of months, and
maybe after several years they are enough money in the
city and they will just go back to the countryside
(07:11):
and settle so the traditional image of workers is that
of stay owned state sector industrial workers, and those so
called pithon workers, that's kind of their names in Chinese
are just hybrid pithon workers. But maybe the pison part
was even more important than the worker part. So they
really just tries. They didn't take workers right very seriously
(07:35):
until workers start to protest more and more and you
start to see the rise of workers protests and strikes
late two thousands and early tens, where again, as I mentioned,
there are thousands and probably tens of thousands strikes a year,
and that's when the trans governments start to realize they
have to find some way to deal with class conflict.
(07:57):
And there are of course two sides to it. One
is depression. If you are a very high profile worker leader,
you may be highrassed, you may be attacked, assaulted, or
you may be jailed. But there is also other part
of that which is more consolidatory, and there's parts to that,
minds legislation. So trying to in the eight to the
(08:17):
nine start to implement pro labor legislations, labor contract laws,
laws on mediation and arbitration, and actually those are if
they are implemented, are actually quite in favor workers. And
then there's other part, which is the XFT you and
state state institution that actually start to play a mediating
growth because they see labor and capital confy had to
(08:39):
mediate in some way, so they start to implement with
institution reform in order to mediate. And then the final
part of this is it changed again in the second
half of the twenty tents, where I think the trands
state revert back to a more repressive kind of approach.
So they start to shut down labor and jails their
(08:59):
rights and put very harsh surveillance on worker organizers and
regularly harass, you know, anyone would try to do anything
to do its labor, and so you began to see
kind of much more exclusionary of the world and much
more repressive approach by the state to the working class.
Speaker 4 (09:17):
Yeah, you've both actually kind of touched already onto the
next section that I wanted to talk about, But I
wonder if you might particularly of this sort of two
thousand twenty tens periods, could you maybe talk about any
particular struggles which seem kind of emblematic of that period.
Speaker 3 (09:37):
I think the most famous strike from this period is
the twenty ten Honda strike. And this took place after
the economic crisis two thousand and eight, which had a
big impact in China, and you had about twenty million
migrant workers that lost their job. But in contrast to
what was happening in western countries, China really resumed growth
quite quickly, and so you see a period of high
(10:00):
speed growth, but also growth in wages and a really
severe tightening of the labor market that's happening in this
period of time, which gives workers some kind of structural
advantages that they may might have been enjoying quite as
much before. So in twenty ten, you have this factory.
It's in a city close to Guangzhou in southern China,
wholly owned by Honda, just producing transmissions, and it's in
(10:22):
the city of nan High and a strike happened. It
was just organized a small group of workers from Hunan
Province who had trust with each other, and they stopped
working in the transmission assembly workshop of the transmission plant,
and very quickly thereafter the other workshops had to stop
because of this kind of just in time production, and
(10:44):
so they couldn't proceed, and within a matter of days,
Honda's entire supply chain within China was shut down and
the company was losing I think tens of millions of
dollars every day, So it had a huge national and
international impact. And the thing that was really interesting, there's
a number of things that were really interesting about this.
The first was that workers were very militant and they
(11:05):
were very insistent, not just on having the laws implemented,
but they were demanding to have a wage increase above
and beyond what they were legally entitled to, which was
something of a departure from the dynamics of labor unrest
that we had seen previously. Right, workers are on the offensive,
but they weren't just demanding economic gains. They were also
demanding unionization. They didn't like the union officers that existed there,
(11:27):
and they wanted to be able to directly elect their
own union representatives. That showed a kind of higher level
of political consciousness that was beginning to develop at the time.
They also had At this point, it was kind of
the most developed that Chinese civil society was, and so
there was support from NGOs in the area as well
as kind of pro labor a student and academics who
(11:50):
were in the area. And it's worth noting that at
following previous patterns, the union organized directly against them, and
in fact, the union organized a bunch of thugs to
go and try and break the strike. So it was
a very, very kind of nasty, but the workers want
They got a huge wage increase, they were promised that
they'd be able to elect their own union representatives. Ultimately
that that ended with a lot of frustration, but a
(12:12):
process was initiated, and they did so with support from
the much from the provincial level of the union federation,
who saw this as maybe an example that they could
use to begin to develop some sort of system of
more regularized labor relations. The other thing that happened is
it got a lot of coverage. Chinese media was also
more open at the time, and there was a strike
(12:33):
wave in the auto industry, and you had many other
plants in the region and around the country that were
going on strike at that period of time, and all
of them basically were winning big wage increases. That was
the moment that Kevin and I were very involved in
a lot of the activism that was happening there, and
I think was the most optimistic period. Very shortly thereafter,
you begin to see growing repression and less willingness to compromise,
(12:54):
both on the part of state and capital.
Speaker 4 (12:56):
I also remember that periods as a real period of
not even just in China really, but you know that
kind of early twenty tens international an the austerity movements
and things like that, and seeing workers in China go
on huge strikes as they were at the time, it
sort of felt like it was all part of a
growing internationalism that was coming back around again. Your book
(13:20):
actually also goes into a lot about the crisis in
social reproduction and specifically you know how that crisis affects women.
Could you maybe just give a brief explanation of what
you mean by social reproduction and what its crisis in
China actually looks like.
Speaker 3 (13:37):
Sure, So, social reproduction we think about as the maintenance
and the regeneration of social life on both a daily
and an intergenerational basis. Right, So, these are the provision
of all the things that people need to survive biologically
but also to survive socially. Right, So, you need house,
you need clothing, you need food, you need healthcare, et cetera.
(13:58):
But you also need some time work to be able
to spend time with your family. Whoever you might care
for and love and to be able to live a
kind of a dignified and meaningful life. And again, this
is a process that happens on kind of a daily basis,
but also intergenerationally between parents and children. And China's experiencing
(14:20):
a severe crisis of social reproduction. It's one again to
come back to a theme that we've touched on several
times already. It's one that very closely mirrors things that
are happening in lots of other countries, and I think
it's another opportunity to kind of de exceptionalize China. The
headline number that you can use to kind of understand
this crisis of social reproduction is the falling fertility rates.
(14:43):
And if you look at fertility rates in China over
the last forty years, they have dropped, and they've dropped
really precipitously just in the last few years. Now. People
might know about the so called one child policy that
was enacted for the eighties nineties into the twenty tens,
and of course that somewhat you know, artificially depressed the
(15:04):
fertility rate, and there was a lot of human rights
violations that came along with that, forced abortions for civilizations
and things of that nature. But one of the things
that I think is really surprised demographers but also really
surprised the state, is that once they've lifted in essence,
they've ended that there's now nominally a three child policy,
but you can have as many kids as you want. Actually,
(15:26):
the fertility rate has continued to crater right, and so
now it's right around one, which means that it is
lower than It's much lower than the United States. It's
lower than most of Western Europe, although I believe Southern
European countries Italy, Spain might be a little bit lower.
And it's in league with the place that have the
lowest fertility rates in the world, places like Taiwan, South Korea.
(15:49):
It's lower than Japan now, I believe. And this is
just kind of an indicator, right about how people are
feeling about bringing children into the world. And there's a
lot of reasons that people are anxious about it. And
some of it may be the political instability, some of
it may be climate change, but there's other explanations which
are basically it is very hard to bring children into
(16:11):
the world because all the things that you need to survive,
including critically housing, education, health care. Those are the big ones,
but also we should include elder care in there have
become much much more difficult for Chinese people to organize
as they have been marketized, as the cost has increased
a really dramatically, and you know, with respect to the
(16:33):
question of elder care, China is now a rapidly aging society.
So if you are a single person of childbearing Asian,
your your twenties, thirties, whatever, and you're thinking about having
a child, well, first of all, you have to think
about taking care of your aging parents. And there is
definitely not adequate facilities for elder care in China, which
again doesn't make it at all exceptional in the world.
(16:55):
And as the costs for all these other things have
gone up, that's going to really give you pop. Now
it's really important to note, of course, the gender dynamics
of this, because the expectation in China, as an all
patriarchal societies, is that women are going to take on
all of the labor or almost all of the labor
that's associated with social reproduction, with caring for children, with
caring for older people, etc. And one of the things
(17:18):
that that makes trein actually pretty exceptional is that, in
contrast to global trends, the gender pay gap between men
and women has actually been getting bigger in China over
the last forty years.
Speaker 4 (17:30):
Now.
Speaker 3 (17:31):
That's actually, I think more of a comment of the
progress that was made in the male era, where the
pay gap was very very small, almost non existent, not
non existent, but very small, and it is wide and
significantly and so now it's much more similar to other
capitalist countries. One of the ways that they've tried to
resolve this, and here you can see that it's not
just a kind of a gender form of gender oppression,
but there's other forms of social hierarchy involved, is by
(17:53):
trying to push those costs of social reproduction specifically onto
rural women. How does that work well, is you can
see the fiscal reorganization of the state, which has really
undermined the basis of social reproduction and rural areas and
created this big urban bias, right so that people so
that women in rural areas and especially grandparents in rural
(18:13):
areas have to take on a disproportionate share of child
rearing while the young, younger people are out working in
the cities. And so you have a kind of reorganization
of the family structure in rural areas where it's almost
the norm in many places to have grandparents looking after
children while the parents are way that's hard work, especially
you're going to do your sixties, seventies and even eighties.
(18:34):
It's hard work to look after children. And then the
other way that it works is by bringing domestic workers
into relatively well off urban households. And the domestic workers,
in contrast to most places in the world, are not
sourced from elsewhere in the Global South. Y're sourced from
rural China, right, So almost all of the domestic workers nannies, etc.
(18:55):
Come from rural China to urban China, and they are
paid substandard wages to essentially make the lives of urban
women somewhat easier. It's not to say that urban women
themselves don't face all kinds of struggles, but that's the
way they've tried to balance it, and it hasn't worked
right because, you know, some people think about it as
like a reproductive strike. Women are not willing to have children,
and this has created great anxiety on the part of
(19:18):
the country's patriarchs in the Communist Party this past year
over the lunar New Year holiday, the government announced that
they were putting a ban on sort of online discussion
that was opposed to marriage or opposed to childbirth, basically
telling people no, no, no, like it's you know, it's
your patriotic duty to get married and to have children,
but it is not working so far. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (19:37):
I think there's a part of your book where you've
got this really interesting quote from Hijin where he talks about,
you know, it is the women's task to strike a
balance between family and work and to take up social
responsibilities while contributing to their families. It's so in keeping
(19:57):
with actually quite a lot of the the sort of
patriarchal discourse that we're getting from, you know, the resurgent
kind of right across the West. It's quite striking, and
I wonder if as part of that de exceptionalizing China
that we've talked about, maybe there are other kind of parallels,
(20:19):
things like I think you talk about restrictions on abortion,
restrictions on LGBTQ rights, and actually this experience of migrant
women workers as kind of domestic help, you know, which
is kind of famous in you know, the sort of
the big wealthy cities London or New York, Paris and
(20:40):
things like that, where often it would be women from
like you said, from the global South who come to
do this work. In China, it's women from rural China. Again,
it really feels like there are these really strong parallels
of the gender regime of China with a lot of
Western countries. Does that feel fair or is that like
(21:01):
a fair comparison?
Speaker 3 (21:04):
I think it's extremely fair. So, just to pick up
on a couple of points that you made, if you
think about how I'll just talk about the United States,
the country that I know best. If you look at
how our country has tried to solve the crisis of
social reproduction. For let's say, middle class and elite urban people,
what is the hinterland that they can draw on. Well,
(21:26):
if you're in Los Angeles, your hinterland is Mexico or
the Philippines, right, And you bring in domestic workers, you
bring in nannies, you bring in elder care workers, you
bring in nurses from those places at depressed wages. Sociologists
talk about these care chains, right, which is to try
to understand that the global dynamics of this, if those
people are coming from the Philippines or from Mexico or
(21:48):
from elsewhere in Latin America to Los Angeles. That means
that they're leaving behind their own care responsibilities in their
own country, right, which means it's similar to chrya. Oftentimes
you know elder people, you know grandparents that have to
look after kids, and of course there's the emotional cost
of being away from your children for you know, key
years of their development which cannot be quantified. So in
(22:11):
that sense, I think we just have to think about
these these kind of global cities and what their hinter
lends are, and in China, I think for people outside
of the country can sometimes be hard to understand the
way that the Chinese countryside functions as that hinterland, and
that there are similar kinds of restrictions even in terms
of citizenship as institutionalized through the household registration system that
(22:33):
they call Huko. It's very similar to the way that
I think global cities in western countries will draw on
different kinds of hinterlands in the global South. With respect
to the question of LGBTQ and kind of queer rights
within China today, you know, to me, there's just so
much overlap with what the right wing extremists in Western
(22:54):
countries are trying to accomplish and what China already has
accomplished in a sense, right like Donald Trump just wants
to get up to the speed that China's already at. Right,
And I think that there's a way in which the
right feels like in Western countries feels like they've missed
the boat. You know, we already have gay marriage, and
now they have to attack trans people to make sure
that they don't kind of lose out on that and
that they don't lose the next generation. I think, you know,
(23:17):
in China, there's no gay marriage. There's not going to
be gay marriage anytime soon. I can guarantee you that
there's been a concerted attack on queer groups, even very
mild ones, you know, these kind of like student groups
that are there to provide emotional support for people. You know,
coming out is very difficult in China, as in all contacts,
those kinds of groups have been under attack. And you know,
(23:40):
to say nothing of trans rights, like that's not even
remotely part of a discussion in China, because I think
people understand that it's not possible, and with this increased hysteria,
really about the following following fertility rate. Of course, it
is disproportionately following falling on women and CIS women, because
that's just numerically a larger people. But there's no question
(24:02):
that it is also enhancing discrimination against queer people, against
trans people, because they're not going to be reproducing in
the way that the state demands of them. And if
that is your kind of overriding political aim, then it's
going to have those very clear and kind of heteronormative consequences.
You know. The last point on abortion, because this in
China is a huge, huge issue. Of course, I already
(24:22):
mentioned the one child policy and the forced abortions and
things like that. There was I think some fear for
a while that they were going to flip in the
other direction because there is this kind of like extreme
polarization and how the Chinese state has approached a childbirth.
You know, from the late nineteen seventies on, they're basically saying,
we have you know, we have too many people. We
really really have to restrain it. And they're saying that
(24:43):
up until whatever it was in the mid twenty tens,
and then they're saying, wow, we don't have enough people.
We got to force everyone to have more children, and
so people thinking that rather than making abortion widely available
and sometimes coercive, that they were going to go in
the other direction and say, no, you're not going to
be allowed to have an abortion. And you know, there
were some statements from the state based saying well, you know,
we shouldn't be doing abortion if it's not medically necessary,
(25:05):
and you know, doctors maybe trying to kind of counsel
women out of having abortions if they don't deem it
to be medically necessary. So far, we haven't seen evidence
that there are intensive restrictions on abortions, and that's a
good thing, but I do think that it's something to
watch out for for sure.
Speaker 4 (25:21):
So given all of that, could you speak a little
bit about how feminist organizing in China who has developed,
and maybe its responses to these kinds of pressures of
this gender regime.
Speaker 3 (25:34):
You know, there's been a lot of really impressive and
inspiring organizing done by feminists. Most people mark the beginning
of the modern phase of feminist organizing, distinguishing it from
some of the important advances but also some of the
problems that existed in the MA era. Most people mark
the beginning of the kind of modern contemporary phase to
nineteen ninety five when the UN held their Women's Conference
(25:57):
in Beijing. This was a big event. Famously, Clinton went there,
and you know, there's things to be I think dismissive of,
certainly with Hillary Clinton and with the UN. But one
of the things that a lot of feminists say in
China is that this really brought attention and gave legitimacy
to women's rights as a kind of a distinct issue
(26:18):
and an issue that couldn't just be left alone to
the al China Women's Federation, which is the kind of
the official body for representing women's interests, and its problematic
in all sorts of ways. So after nineteen ninety five,
you actually do see the growth of a kind of
civil society organizations working on different kinds of women's rights issues,
and that is a really important foundation for the things
(26:38):
that came afterwards. We begin to see some more to
me and to many of my comrades, more interesting organizing
that happened in the twenty tens at the same time
that this kind of more interesting labor organizing was happening
in In fact, a lot of times there's a lot
of overlap between the people and the labor and the
feminist world, not coincidentally, and there was a famous event
(26:59):
in twenty fifteen where you had a bunch of feminists
who were organizing against domestic abuse, and they were doing
some campaigning that I think is liberal democracy would seem
pretty tame. They were going out into public and distributing
information about domestic violence, really doing the important cultural work
to let people know, here's what domestic violence is and
(27:20):
here's why it's a problem. Right, And the state decided
to crack down on that very hardly. And I think
that the reason that they did that was not even
so much that they couldn't bear to have any kind
of discussion about domestic violence, but because it demonstrated that
they had organized kind of at the national level, because
(27:40):
there was women in multiple places around the country who
were taking similar kinds of action at precisely at the
same time. So it was the kind of the existence
of an organizing network that the state could not tolerate.
Speaker 2 (27:55):
As we come muchin martin In The Beauty of the Day.
Speaker 1 (28:00):
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Speaker 2 (00:44):
As we come margin Martin and the Beauty of the Day,
A million dark in kegeens one thousand mil last grade
are branden by the beauty. His Sun Sun discloses the
papal hereusden Roses Roses.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
In two thousand and six, there was a big campaign
that got a lot of international attention because the ACF two,
in a very short period of time, set up union
branches in every Walmart store in China. And this is
something American unions had been trying to do for a
while and had failed. So people are very excited about this,
and I actually did some research into one of the
consequences of this, and just one example in a store
(01:28):
in nan Chung, which is the capital of Chiongxi Province,
they had these elections, they set up a union, and
they actually had a reasonably democratic election. They elected a
guy who was very interesting and who really wanted to
push management on just some basic workplace stuff. He wasn't
organizing to overthrow the Communist Party or anything. He had
a few successes, and then very quickly the higher levels
(01:51):
of the union got anxious because they saw that he
was kind of stirring up trouble and was making them
a little bit nervous. He got fired and pushed out
with the consent of the higher levels of the union.
So I think that that's just one example that demonstrates
some of the limitations. Even in those cases where you
can have some sort of an election and someone who's
going to fight a little bit, there's real institutional.
Speaker 4 (02:12):
Constraints given that the ACF T you on the whole,
isn't organizing struggle. What forms do work as struggles in
China usually take then, and kind of how does the
state relate to those struggles.
Speaker 5 (02:27):
I think there is we're often a tendency to think
China is exceptional. It's political institutions, it's political culture, et cetera,
et cetera, and we're often you know, what's happening in
China is counterposed to sort of idealized version of the West,
if you will. So there's an idealized version of what
a union should be doing to fighting union very cross
(02:48):
so it's very radical, non bureaucratic. But actually that's now
the the reality of most larger unions in Asia, in Europe,
in North America, rights mostly bureaucratic, very top down. Union
organizers are overworks, not given much resources, They are highly
repressed or highly retarded against in workplace organizing. So I
(03:11):
think this is actually very important point that we should
be aware of in terms of not making that look
like that's the exception to some kind of idealized image
of whatever democracy. So society, unions, workers, etc. To your question, So,
for most of the last thirty years, striking China have
been almost entirely organized by workers themselves or by workers
(03:35):
working in those workplaces. Of course, independent unions are not
allowed or criminalized. So if you'll try to organize an
independent union, the chances are you'll be arrested. I think
maybe waitin a few days. There are small labor and
jills you can think of themselves, worker centers of a
few staff, interesting in labor rights, skilled trainings, auvacracy. I
(04:00):
think a small number of them do try to assist
workers in organizing, but they are you know, very small
and very fragmented, and I don't think they are you know,
for most of the workers they're organizing, their strikes are
organized entirely by themselves. And this is you know, what
we normally call wildcat strikes, that these strikes are that
are not organized by officially by tue unions. But again
(04:23):
here I think I want to make this point that
we talk about wildcat strike as the exception to the
more conventional sort of union organized strike. But I think
if you look globally, WorldCat strikes may be the norm
rather than the exception, because they're very actually very few
union organized strikes almost anywhere, and I think in China
(04:43):
in many other places in Asia, so called wildcare strikes
actually are the normal kind of strikes where workers entirely
organize their own own actions. And as cause this for
simple reasons that either the unions are stay controlled in
the case of China or Vietnam, so they do not
organize workers, they do not support workers strikes, or because
(05:05):
the union are very pro management, or they are in
this kind of union management cooperation framework, or just there's
no union. Again, it's the case for I think, for
the majority of the workforce globally, where they never see
any union in their workplace. So it's interesting to see
this kind of very direct formal confrontation between labor and
(05:26):
capital without the mediating role of the union. And I
think if we again thinking critically about the role of
the union in capitalists libert democracies, often their role is
not to push the struggle forward structurally or institutionally. Their
goal is now to transcend or go beyond capitalism. Their
the roal is to mediate the interests of labor and
(05:46):
capital in some way. They of course they would push
for the interest workers, but they will necessarily have to
make compromises, Whereas when workers and capital are in this
direct confrontation, there's no mediation, and this kind of confrontation
actually see in law cases in China over the last
twenty thirty years, workers end up winning their demands. There
also some problem with it in terms of the after
(06:09):
twenty thirty years, you don't you still don't see you
mass tree union, movement of mass workers organizations. So that's
another aspect of this. But in terms of winning actually
this kind of direct form of worker theybor capital confrontation,
actually end up being favorite workers in a lot of cases.
And two questions about the state approach to labor and
(06:30):
workers struggle, and I think again here is sort of
undergone several phases, if well, since the nineteen nineties. I
think for most of the nineteen nineties, the trans state
didn't really treat these megro workers very seriously because you know,
for the first ten years or so, ten to fifteen
years or so of this rural migration to the cities,
(06:51):
I think the trans government and I think a lot
of people in public think they are just transient, right,
So that's why they're called rural mecro workers. They will
come to the state for work for maybe ten months,
nine months, and ten months, they go back for a
chance in a year for a couple of months, and
maybe after several years they are enough money in the
city and they will just go back to the countryside
(07:11):
and settle so the traditional image of workers is that
of stay owned state sector industrial workers, and those so
called pithon workers, that's kind of their names in Chinese
are just hybrid pithon workers. But maybe the pison part
was even more important than the worker part. So they
really just tries. They didn't take workers right very seriously
(07:35):
until workers start to protest more and more and you
start to see the rise of workers protests and strikes
late two thousands and early tens, where again, as I mentioned,
there are thousands and probably tens of thousands strikes a year,
and that's when the trans governments start to realize they
have to find some way to deal with class conflict.
(07:57):
And there are of course two sides to it. One
is depression. If you are a very high profile worker leader,
you may be highrassed, you may be attacked, assaulted, or
you may be jailed. But there is also other part
of that which is more consolidatory, and there's parts to that,
minds legislation. So trying to in the eight to the
(08:17):
nine start to implement pro labor legislations, labor contract laws,
laws on mediation and arbitration, and actually those are if
they are implemented, are actually quite in favor workers. And
then there's other part, which is the XFT you and
state state institution that actually start to play a mediating
growth because they see labor and capital confy had to
(08:39):
mediate in some way, so they start to implement with
institution reform in order to mediate. And then the final
part of this is it changed again in the second
half of the twenty tents, where I think the trands
state revert back to a more repressive kind of approach.
So they start to shut down labor and jails their
(08:59):
rights and put very harsh surveillance on worker organizers and
regularly harass, you know, anyone would try to do anything
to do its labor, and so you began to see
kind of much more exclusionary of the world and much
more repressive approach by the state to the working class.
Speaker 4 (09:17):
Yeah, you've both actually kind of touched already onto the
next section that I wanted to talk about, But I
wonder if you might particularly of this sort of two
thousand twenty tens periods, could you maybe talk about any
particular struggles which seem kind of emblematic of that period.
Speaker 3 (09:37):
I think the most famous strike from this period is
the twenty ten Honda strike. And this took place after
the economic crisis two thousand and eight, which had a
big impact in China, and you had about twenty million
migrant workers that lost their job. But in contrast to
what was happening in western countries, China really resumed growth
quite quickly, and so you see a period of high
(10:00):
speed growth, but also growth in wages and a really
severe tightening of the labor market that's happening in this
period of time, which gives workers some kind of structural
advantages that they may might have been enjoying quite as
much before. So in twenty ten, you have this factory.
It's in a city close to Guangzhou in southern China,
wholly owned by Honda, just producing transmissions, and it's in
(10:22):
the city of nan High and a strike happened. It
was just organized a small group of workers from Hunan
Province who had trust with each other, and they stopped
working in the transmission assembly workshop of the transmission plant,
and very quickly thereafter the other workshops had to stop
because of this kind of just in time production, and
(10:44):
so they couldn't proceed, and within a matter of days,
Honda's entire supply chain within China was shut down and
the company was losing I think tens of millions of
dollars every day, So it had a huge national and
international impact. And the thing that was really interesting, there's
a number of things that were really interesting about this.
The first was that workers were very militant and they
(11:05):
were very insistent, not just on having the laws implemented,
but they were demanding to have a wage increase above
and beyond what they were legally entitled to, which was
something of a departure from the dynamics of labor unrest
that we had seen previously. Right, workers are on the offensive,
but they weren't just demanding economic gains. They were also
demanding unionization. They didn't like the union officers that existed there,
(11:27):
and they wanted to be able to directly elect their
own union representatives. That showed a kind of higher level
of political consciousness that was beginning to develop at the time.
They also had At this point, it was kind of
the most developed that Chinese civil society was, and so
there was support from NGOs in the area as well
as kind of pro labor a student and academics who
(11:50):
were in the area. And it's worth noting that at
following previous patterns, the union organized directly against them, and
in fact, the union organized a bunch of thugs to
go and try and break the strike. So it was
a very, very kind of nasty, but the workers want
They got a huge wage increase, they were promised that
they'd be able to elect their own union representatives. Ultimately
that that ended with a lot of frustration, but a
(12:12):
process was initiated, and they did so with support from
the much from the provincial level of the union federation,
who saw this as maybe an example that they could
use to begin to develop some sort of system of
more regularized labor relations. The other thing that happened is
it got a lot of coverage. Chinese media was also
more open at the time, and there was a strike
(12:33):
wave in the auto industry, and you had many other
plants in the region and around the country that were
going on strike at that period of time, and all
of them basically were winning big wage increases. That was
the moment that Kevin and I were very involved in
a lot of the activism that was happening there, and
I think was the most optimistic period. Very shortly thereafter,
you begin to see growing repression and less willingness to compromise,
(12:54):
both on the part of state and capital.
Speaker 4 (12:56):
I also remember that periods as a real period of
not even just in China really, but you know that
kind of early twenty tens international an the austerity movements
and things like that, and seeing workers in China go
on huge strikes as they were at the time, it
sort of felt like it was all part of a
growing internationalism that was coming back around again. Your book
(13:20):
actually also goes into a lot about the crisis in
social reproduction and specifically you know how that crisis affects women.
Could you maybe just give a brief explanation of what
you mean by social reproduction and what its crisis in
China actually looks like.
Speaker 3 (13:37):
Sure, So, social reproduction we think about as the maintenance
and the regeneration of social life on both a daily
and an intergenerational basis. Right, So, these are the provision
of all the things that people need to survive biologically
but also to survive socially. Right, So, you need house,
you need clothing, you need food, you need healthcare, et cetera.
(13:58):
But you also need some time work to be able
to spend time with your family. Whoever you might care
for and love and to be able to live a
kind of a dignified and meaningful life. And again, this
is a process that happens on kind of a daily basis,
but also intergenerationally between parents and children. And China's experiencing
(14:20):
a severe crisis of social reproduction. It's one again to
come back to a theme that we've touched on several
times already. It's one that very closely mirrors things that
are happening in lots of other countries, and I think
it's another opportunity to kind of de exceptionalize China. The
headline number that you can use to kind of understand
this crisis of social reproduction is the falling fertility rates.
(14:43):
And if you look at fertility rates in China over
the last forty years, they have dropped, and they've dropped
really precipitously just in the last few years. Now. People
might know about the so called one child policy that
was enacted for the eighties nineties into the twenty tens,
and of course that somewhat you know, artificially depressed the
(15:04):
fertility rate, and there was a lot of human rights
violations that came along with that, forced abortions for civilizations
and things of that nature. But one of the things
that I think is really surprised demographers but also really
surprised the state, is that once they've lifted in essence,
they've ended that there's now nominally a three child policy,
but you can have as many kids as you want. Actually,
(15:26):
the fertility rate has continued to crater right, and so
now it's right around one, which means that it is
lower than It's much lower than the United States. It's
lower than most of Western Europe, although I believe Southern
European countries Italy, Spain might be a little bit lower.
And it's in league with the place that have the
lowest fertility rates in the world, places like Taiwan, South Korea.
(15:49):
It's lower than Japan now, I believe. And this is
just kind of an indicator, right about how people are
feeling about bringing children into the world. And there's a
lot of reasons that people are anxious about it. And
some of it may be the political instability, some of
it may be climate change, but there's other explanations which
are basically it is very hard to bring children into
(16:11):
the world because all the things that you need to survive,
including critically housing, education, health care. Those are the big ones,
but also we should include elder care in there have
become much much more difficult for Chinese people to organize
as they have been marketized, as the cost has increased
a really dramatically, and you know, with respect to the
(16:33):
question of elder care, China is now a rapidly aging society.
So if you are a single person of childbearing Asian,
your your twenties, thirties, whatever, and you're thinking about having
a child, well, first of all, you have to think
about taking care of your aging parents. And there is
definitely not adequate facilities for elder care in China, which
again doesn't make it at all exceptional in the world.
(16:55):
And as the costs for all these other things have
gone up, that's going to really give you pop. Now
it's really important to note, of course, the gender dynamics
of this, because the expectation in China, as an all
patriarchal societies, is that women are going to take on
all of the labor or almost all of the labor
that's associated with social reproduction, with caring for children, with
caring for older people, etc. And one of the things
(17:18):
that that makes trein actually pretty exceptional is that, in
contrast to global trends, the gender pay gap between men
and women has actually been getting bigger in China over
the last forty years.
Speaker 4 (17:30):
Now.
Speaker 3 (17:31):
That's actually, I think more of a comment of the
progress that was made in the male era, where the
pay gap was very very small, almost non existent, not
non existent, but very small, and it is wide and
significantly and so now it's much more similar to other
capitalist countries. One of the ways that they've tried to
resolve this, and here you can see that it's not
just a kind of a gender form of gender oppression,
but there's other forms of social hierarchy involved, is by
(17:53):
trying to push those costs of social reproduction specifically onto
rural women. How does that work well, is you can
see the fiscal reorganization of the state, which has really
undermined the basis of social reproduction and rural areas and
created this big urban bias, right so that people so
that women in rural areas and especially grandparents in rural
(18:13):
areas have to take on a disproportionate share of child
rearing while the young, younger people are out working in
the cities. And so you have a kind of reorganization
of the family structure in rural areas where it's almost
the norm in many places to have grandparents looking after
children while the parents are way that's hard work, especially
you're going to do your sixties, seventies and even eighties.
(18:34):
It's hard work to look after children. And then the
other way that it works is by bringing domestic workers
into relatively well off urban households. And the domestic workers,
in contrast to most places in the world, are not
sourced from elsewhere in the Global South. Y're sourced from
rural China, right, So almost all of the domestic workers nannies, etc.
(18:55):
Come from rural China to urban China, and they are
paid substandard wages to essentially make the lives of urban
women somewhat easier. It's not to say that urban women
themselves don't face all kinds of struggles, but that's the
way they've tried to balance it, and it hasn't worked
right because, you know, some people think about it as
like a reproductive strike. Women are not willing to have children,
and this has created great anxiety on the part of
(19:18):
the country's patriarchs in the Communist Party this past year
over the lunar New Year holiday, the government announced that
they were putting a ban on sort of online discussion
that was opposed to marriage or opposed to childbirth, basically
telling people no, no, no, like it's you know, it's
your patriotic duty to get married and to have children,
but it is not working so far. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (19:37):
I think there's a part of your book where you've
got this really interesting quote from Hijin where he talks about,
you know, it is the women's task to strike a
balance between family and work and to take up social
responsibilities while contributing to their families. It's so in keeping
(19:57):
with actually quite a lot of the the sort of
patriarchal discourse that we're getting from, you know, the resurgent
kind of right across the West. It's quite striking, and
I wonder if as part of that de exceptionalizing China
that we've talked about, maybe there are other kind of parallels,
(20:19):
things like I think you talk about restrictions on abortion,
restrictions on LGBTQ rights, and actually this experience of migrant
women workers as kind of domestic help, you know, which
is kind of famous in you know, the sort of
the big wealthy cities London or New York, Paris and
(20:40):
things like that, where often it would be women from
like you said, from the global South who come to
do this work. In China, it's women from rural China. Again,
it really feels like there are these really strong parallels
of the gender regime of China with a lot of
Western countries. Does that feel fair or is that like
(21:01):
a fair comparison?
Speaker 3 (21:04):
I think it's extremely fair. So, just to pick up
on a couple of points that you made, if you
think about how I'll just talk about the United States,
the country that I know best. If you look at
how our country has tried to solve the crisis of
social reproduction. For let's say, middle class and elite urban people,
what is the hinterland that they can draw on. Well,
(21:26):
if you're in Los Angeles, your hinterland is Mexico or
the Philippines, right, And you bring in domestic workers, you
bring in nannies, you bring in elder care workers, you
bring in nurses from those places at depressed wages. Sociologists
talk about these care chains, right, which is to try
to understand that the global dynamics of this, if those
people are coming from the Philippines or from Mexico or
(21:48):
from elsewhere in Latin America to Los Angeles. That means
that they're leaving behind their own care responsibilities in their
own country, right, which means it's similar to chrya. Oftentimes
you know elder people, you know grandparents that have to
look after kids, and of course there's the emotional cost
of being away from your children for you know, key
years of their development which cannot be quantified. So in
(22:11):
that sense, I think we just have to think about
these these kind of global cities and what their hinter
lends are, and in China, I think for people outside
of the country can sometimes be hard to understand the
way that the Chinese countryside functions as that hinterland, and
that there are similar kinds of restrictions even in terms
of citizenship as institutionalized through the household registration system that
(22:33):
they call Huko. It's very similar to the way that
I think global cities in western countries will draw on
different kinds of hinterlands in the global South. With respect
to the question of LGBTQ and kind of queer rights
within China today, you know, to me, there's just so
much overlap with what the right wing extremists in Western
(22:54):
countries are trying to accomplish and what China already has
accomplished in a sense, right like Donald Trump just wants
to get up to the speed that China's already at. Right,
And I think that there's a way in which the
right feels like in Western countries feels like they've missed
the boat. You know, we already have gay marriage, and
now they have to attack trans people to make sure
that they don't kind of lose out on that and
that they don't lose the next generation. I think, you know,
(23:17):
in China, there's no gay marriage. There's not going to
be gay marriage anytime soon. I can guarantee you that
there's been a concerted attack on queer groups, even very
mild ones, you know, these kind of like student groups
that are there to provide emotional support for people. You know,
coming out is very difficult in China, as in all contacts,
those kinds of groups have been under attack. And you know,
(23:40):
to say nothing of trans rights, like that's not even
remotely part of a discussion in China, because I think
people understand that it's not possible, and with this increased hysteria,
really about the following following fertility rate. Of course, it
is disproportionately following falling on women and CIS women, because
that's just numerically a larger people. But there's no question
(24:02):
that it is also enhancing discrimination against queer people, against
trans people, because they're not going to be reproducing in
the way that the state demands of them. And if
that is your kind of overriding political aim, then it's
going to have those very clear and kind of heteronormative consequences.
You know. The last point on abortion, because this in
China is a huge, huge issue. Of course, I already
(24:22):
mentioned the one child policy and the forced abortions and
things like that. There was I think some fear for
a while that they were going to flip in the
other direction because there is this kind of like extreme
polarization and how the Chinese state has approached a childbirth.
You know, from the late nineteen seventies on, they're basically saying,
we have you know, we have too many people. We
really really have to restrain it. And they're saying that
(24:43):
up until whatever it was in the mid twenty tens,
and then they're saying, wow, we don't have enough people.
We got to force everyone to have more children, and
so people thinking that rather than making abortion widely available
and sometimes coercive, that they were going to go in
the other direction and say, no, you're not going to
be allowed to have an abortion. And you know, there
were some statements from the state based saying well, you know,
we shouldn't be doing abortion if it's not medically necessary,
(25:05):
and you know, doctors maybe trying to kind of counsel
women out of having abortions if they don't deem it
to be medically necessary. So far, we haven't seen evidence
that there are intensive restrictions on abortions, and that's a
good thing, but I do think that it's something to
watch out for for sure.
Speaker 4 (25:21):
So given all of that, could you speak a little
bit about how feminist organizing in China who has developed,
and maybe its responses to these kinds of pressures of
this gender regime.
Speaker 3 (25:34):
You know, there's been a lot of really impressive and
inspiring organizing done by feminists. Most people mark the beginning
of the modern phase of feminist organizing, distinguishing it from
some of the important advances but also some of the
problems that existed in the MA era. Most people mark
the beginning of the kind of modern contemporary phase to
nineteen ninety five when the UN held their Women's Conference
(25:57):
in Beijing. This was a big event. Famously, Clinton went there,
and you know, there's things to be I think dismissive of,
certainly with Hillary Clinton and with the UN. But one
of the things that a lot of feminists say in
China is that this really brought attention and gave legitimacy
to women's rights as a kind of a distinct issue
(26:18):
and an issue that couldn't just be left alone to
the al China Women's Federation, which is the kind of
the official body for representing women's interests, and its problematic
in all sorts of ways. So after nineteen ninety five,
you actually do see the growth of a kind of
civil society organizations working on different kinds of women's rights issues,
and that is a really important foundation for the things
(26:38):
that came afterwards. We begin to see some more to
me and to many of my comrades, more interesting organizing
that happened in the twenty tens at the same time
that this kind of more interesting labor organizing was happening
in In fact, a lot of times there's a lot
of overlap between the people and the labor and the
feminist world, not coincidentally, and there was a famous event
(26:59):
in twenty fifteen where you had a bunch of feminists
who were organizing against domestic abuse, and they were doing
some campaigning that I think is liberal democracy would seem
pretty tame. They were going out into public and distributing
information about domestic violence, really doing the important cultural work
to let people know, here's what domestic violence is and
(27:20):
here's why it's a problem. Right, And the state decided
to crack down on that very hardly. And I think
that the reason that they did that was not even
so much that they couldn't bear to have any kind
of discussion about domestic violence, but because it demonstrated that
they had organized kind of at the national level, because
(27:40):
there was women in multiple places around the country who
were taking similar kinds of action at precisely at the
same time. So it was the kind of the existence
of an organizing network that the state could not tolerate.
Speaker 2 (27:55):
As we come muchin martin In The Beauty of the Day.
Speaker 1 (28:00):
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The Burden
The Burden is a documentary series that takes listeners into the hidden places where justice is done (and undone). It dives deep into the lives of heroes and villains. And it focuses a spotlight on those who triumph even when the odds are against them. Season 5 - The Burden: Death & Deceit in Alliance On April Fools Day 1999, 26-year-old Yvonne Layne was found murdered in her Alliance, Ohio home. David Thorne, her ex-boyfriend and father of one of her children, was instantly a suspect. Another young man admitted to the murder, and David breathed a sigh of relief, until the confessed murderer fingered David; “He paid me to do it.” David was sentenced to life without parole. Two decades later, Pulitzer winner and podcast host, Maggie Freleng (Bone Valley Season 3: Graves County, Wrongful Conviction, Suave) launched a “live” investigation into David's conviction alongside Jason Baldwin (himself wrongfully convicted as a member of the West Memphis Three). Maggie had come to believe that the entire investigation of David was botched by the tiny local police department, or worse, covered up the real killer. Was Maggie correct? Was David’s claim of innocence credible? In Death and Deceit in Alliance, Maggie recounts the case that launched her career, and ultimately, “broke” her.” The results will shock the listener and reduce Maggie to tears and self-doubt. This is not your typical wrongful conviction story. In fact, it turns the genre on its head. It asks the question: What if our champions are foolish? Season 4 - The Burden: Get the Money and Run “Trying to murder my father, this was the thing that put me on the path.” That’s Joe Loya and that path was bank robbery. Bank, bank, bank, bank, bank. In season 4 of The Burden: Get the Money and Run, we hear from Joe who was once the most prolific bank robber in Southern California, and beyond. He used disguises, body doubles, proxies. He leaped over counters, grabbed the money and ran. Even as the FBI was closing in. It was a showdown between a daring bank robber, and a patient FBI agent. Joe was no ordinary bank robber. He was bright, articulate, charismatic, and driven by a dark rage that he summoned up at will. In seven episodes, Joe tells all: the what, the how… and the why. Including why he tried to murder his father. Season 3 - The Burden: Avenger Miriam Lewin is one of Argentina’s leading journalists today. At 19 years old, she was kidnapped off the streets of Buenos Aires for her political activism and thrown into a concentration camp. Thousands of her fellow inmates were executed, tossed alive from a cargo plane into the ocean. Miriam, along with a handful of others, will survive the camp. Then as a journalist, she will wage a decades long campaign to bring her tormentors to justice. Avenger is about one woman’s triumphant battle against unbelievable odds to survive torture, claim justice for the crimes done against her and others like her, and change the future of her country. Season 2 - The Burden: Empire on Blood Empire on Blood is set in the Bronx, NY, in the early 90s, when two young drug dealers ruled an intersection known as “The Corner on Blood.” The boss, Calvin Buari, lived large. He and a protege swore they would build an empire on blood. Then the relationship frayed and the protege accused Calvin of a double homicide which he claimed he didn’t do. But did he? Award-winning journalist Steve Fishman spent seven years to answer that question. This is the story of one man’s last chance to overturn his life sentence. He may prevail, but someone’s gotta pay. The Burden: Empire on Blood is the director’s cut of the true crime classic which reached #1 on the charts when it was first released half a dozen years ago. Season 1 - The Burden In the 1990s, Detective Louis N. Scarcella was legendary. In a city overrun by violent crime, he cracked the toughest cases and put away the worst criminals. “The Hulk” was his nickname. Then the story changed. Scarcella ran into a group of convicted murderers who all say they are innocent. They turned themselves into jailhouse-lawyers and in prison founded a lway firm. When they realized Scarcella helped put many of them away, they set their sights on taking him down. And with the help of a NY Times reporter they have a chance. For years, Scarcella insisted he did nothing wrong. But that’s all he’d say. Until we tracked Scarcella to a sauna in a Russian bathhouse, where he started to talk..and talk and talk. “The guilty have gone free,” he whispered. And then agreed to take us into the belly of the beast. Welcome to The Burden.