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