WEBVTT - Tiananmen Remastered, Part 1 0:00:01.720 --> 0:00:07.880 Call Zone Media. Welcome to it had happened here. I'm 0:00:07.920 --> 0:00:12.480 your host, Nia Wong. Today is the day before the 0:00:12.520 --> 0:00:17.120 thirty sixth anniversary of the Tianneman Square massacre. We're doing 0:00:17.200 --> 0:00:21.840 something a little bit different. Three years ago I wrote 0:00:21.840 --> 0:00:26.000 a pair of episodes about Tieneman democracy in the International 0:00:26.040 --> 0:00:29.680 Workers Movement, expanding off a piece I'd written for laos 0:00:29.760 --> 0:00:34.360 On a year before that. That was a long time ago. 0:00:35.159 --> 0:00:38.000 The world is a fundamentally different place than it was 0:00:38.040 --> 0:00:41.880 in twenty twenty one. Europe has been consumed by war. 0:00:42.720 --> 0:00:47.040 Whole revolutions rose and fell. The fast threat we defeated 0:00:47.040 --> 0:00:50.519 in the streets returned to power in a new and 0:00:50.600 --> 0:00:56.440 more terrifying form. In this new, uglier and more brutal world, 0:00:57.080 --> 0:01:00.360 I wanted to return to Tianeman, to return to one 0:01:00.360 --> 0:01:03.880 of the great horrors of another age, to see if 0:01:03.880 --> 0:01:06.840 we can take anything new from the wreckage of the 0:01:06.880 --> 0:01:10.720 death of Hope. I'm no longer the same person I 0:01:10.880 --> 0:01:14.760 was when I originally wrote these episodes, and so today 0:01:15.319 --> 0:01:22.240 and tomorrow are Tianamen remastered. There were really three Tianemens. 0:01:22.800 --> 0:01:26.080 The first and most famous Tieneman was a student protest 0:01:26.080 --> 0:01:29.800 inside Tianaman Square itself. If you've heard the word Tienemen 0:01:29.880 --> 0:01:35.480 before this story, you know the second Tienemen was the 0:01:35.560 --> 0:01:40.039 Tienemen of the blocks of Beijing around the Square, blocks 0:01:40.040 --> 0:01:44.039 sees and transformed by Beijing's working class. If you've heard 0:01:44.080 --> 0:01:48.480 about this Tienemen at all, it's probably in the context 0:01:48.520 --> 0:01:50.880 of the tanks rolling through them on their way to 0:01:50.960 --> 0:01:54.680 the Square. And then there was the third Tienemen, the 0:01:54.760 --> 0:01:59.720 protests in other cities, of which we still years after 0:02:00.160 --> 0:02:05.320 the original piece. No distressingly little about Our focus today 0:02:05.800 --> 0:02:09.959 is on the first two. The students of the student 0:02:10.000 --> 0:02:14.200 protests were a weird ideological grab back that cannot simply 0:02:14.240 --> 0:02:18.160 be reduced down to the simplistic pro democracy label they've 0:02:18.200 --> 0:02:21.160 been settled with in the three and a half decades 0:02:21.240 --> 0:02:26.000 since Tienemen. The short version is this, the students were 0:02:26.040 --> 0:02:29.960 pissed off about what's called reform and opening not going 0:02:30.000 --> 0:02:32.960 fast enough, and we should talk about what reform and 0:02:33.000 --> 0:02:37.200 opening actually was. On the one hand, you had some 0:02:37.240 --> 0:02:42.480 steps to ease restrictions on free speech, rehabilitate intellectuals and 0:02:42.680 --> 0:02:46.320 other people were so called bad class backgrounds, and allow 0:02:46.440 --> 0:02:50.000 for a broader public discourse. This was paired with market 0:02:50.040 --> 0:02:53.680 reforms I started to bring capitalism back to China. This 0:02:54.480 --> 0:02:57.040 was a shit show in a lot of ways. If 0:02:57.080 --> 0:02:59.720 you want to hear about the CCP reinventing what's essentially 0:02:59.720 --> 0:03:02.840 dipped P and che about five years into this process, 0:03:03.440 --> 0:03:05.840 go listen to my Behind the Bastard's episode about the 0:03:05.840 --> 0:03:09.640 poisoned milk scandal. But Reform and Opening is remembered as 0:03:09.639 --> 0:03:12.640 a kind of golden age of free expression, a golden 0:03:12.680 --> 0:03:16.440 age of hope and possibility where things really seemed like 0:03:16.680 --> 0:03:23.360 they could be different. This is not entirely accurate. Reform 0:03:23.360 --> 0:03:27.120 and Opening also saw a bunch of absolutely draconian crackdowns 0:03:27.160 --> 0:03:30.480 on the social sphere. There was the One Child policy, 0:03:30.840 --> 0:03:33.440 a hideous expansion of the states into the sphere of 0:03:33.480 --> 0:03:38.080 social reproduction, replete with forced sterilizations and the reimposition of 0:03:38.120 --> 0:03:42.119 patriarchal power. It saw the tightening of one man rule 0:03:42.120 --> 0:03:45.320 in the factory, the destruction of any form of worker's 0:03:45.360 --> 0:03:49.240 decision making and control over the process of their own labor. 0:03:50.360 --> 0:03:52.680 In these horrors, you can see the beginning of the 0:03:52.720 --> 0:03:57.760 fragmentation of Tiannemen and Chinese politics more broadly, already forming, 0:03:58.560 --> 0:04:02.000 the students wanted market form to go faster, They wanted 0:04:02.000 --> 0:04:05.360 more freedom of speech, they sort of wanted democracy, but 0:04:05.520 --> 0:04:08.160 mostly they wanted to be in charge of the party 0:04:08.560 --> 0:04:11.320 so they could crush the bureaucracy that was holding market 0:04:11.360 --> 0:04:16.080 reforms back. It's worth noting, of course, that many of 0:04:16.120 --> 0:04:20.760 these students were involved in what became known as neo authoritarianism, 0:04:21.080 --> 0:04:23.560 which holds that the strong central party should take full 0:04:23.600 --> 0:04:27.960 control of society and destroy factions in the bureaucracy. It 0:04:28.000 --> 0:04:30.560 was an ideology that survived the death of the protests 0:04:30.720 --> 0:04:33.159 and went on to become a major faction of the 0:04:33.160 --> 0:04:37.040 CCP itself in the nineties and two thousands, and this 0:04:37.240 --> 0:04:39.600 is where some of the truly weird shit at Tianeman 0:04:39.640 --> 0:04:44.280 comes from. The students were, in many ways an incredibly 0:04:44.360 --> 0:04:47.719 hierarchical movement which escalated to the point where student leaders 0:04:47.760 --> 0:04:50.640 were kidnapping each other for control over stages and microphones, 0:04:51.800 --> 0:04:55.400 and these protests, in terms of their nominally stated goal 0:04:55.440 --> 0:04:59.680 of influencing the factional fights inside the party, were studyingly 0:04:59.680 --> 0:05:01.960 in a f actual The guy they were trying to 0:05:02.000 --> 0:05:04.360 defend inside the party wound up getting ousted and put 0:05:04.440 --> 0:05:06.680 under house arrest for the rest of his life, and 0:05:06.760 --> 0:05:11.640 the changes they demanded failed to occur. But Tianeman, as 0:05:11.640 --> 0:05:15.159 I mentioned earlier, was also the workers, and for most 0:05:15.200 --> 0:05:19.799 of the protests the students absolutely hated them. Students barred 0:05:19.800 --> 0:05:22.760 workers from entering the square itself until the final hours 0:05:22.800 --> 0:05:25.440 of the protests, tried to stop workers from carrying out 0:05:25.480 --> 0:05:29.480 a general strike, and relations were in general extremely bad. 0:05:30.400 --> 0:05:33.320 This raises the question what were the workers doing there 0:05:33.320 --> 0:05:37.520 in the first place. There's a few answers. The simplest 0:05:37.560 --> 0:05:40.080 and most immediate one is that the workers were pissed 0:05:40.080 --> 0:05:42.280 off at how badly the Party was treating students in 0:05:42.320 --> 0:05:44.719 the square. But there were other things going on too. 0:05:45.320 --> 0:05:47.800 The late in eighteen eighties in China saw rampant and 0:05:47.920 --> 0:05:52.599 skyrocketing inflation. The rapid price increases threatened the supply of 0:05:52.680 --> 0:05:56.160 cheap grain that composed a huge supply of welfare services 0:05:56.200 --> 0:06:01.720 provided to urban workers. Meanwhile, marketization was accelerating, and suddenly 0:06:01.800 --> 0:06:05.279 you had CCP princelings racing down the streets in imported 0:06:05.320 --> 0:06:09.279 sports cars, driving past workers on their bikes, and spending 0:06:09.320 --> 0:06:13.520 a year's salary gambling at the racetrack. And this pissed 0:06:13.560 --> 0:06:17.760 people off, so they started organizing. I'm going to read 0:06:17.800 --> 0:06:21.080 a section for a piece by Uron, saying about what 0:06:21.279 --> 0:06:25.359 the workers were doing during the struggle to obstruct the military. 0:06:25.720 --> 0:06:28.880 Workers started to realize the power of their spontaneous organization 0:06:28.960 --> 0:06:33.279 and action. This was self liberation on an unprecedented level. 0:06:34.040 --> 0:06:38.000 A huge wave of self organization ensued. The worker's autonomous 0:06:38.040 --> 0:06:42.839 federation membership grew exponentially, and other workers' organizations both within 0:06:43.360 --> 0:06:48.039 and across the workplace mushroomed. The development of organization led 0:06:48.040 --> 0:06:52.000 to a radicalization of action. Workers started organizing self armed 0:06:52.040 --> 0:06:56.080 quasi militias such as Quote Picket Corps and Quote Dared 0:06:56.080 --> 0:06:59.880 to Die brigades to monitor and broadcast the military's whereabouts. 0:07:00.600 --> 0:07:04.000 These quasi militias were also responsible for maintaining public order 0:07:04.360 --> 0:07:06.960 so as not to provide any pretext for military intervention. 0:07:07.600 --> 0:07:10.800 In a sense, Paijing became a city self managed by workers. 0:07:11.360 --> 0:07:14.520 It was reminiscent of Petrograd's self armed workers organized in 0:07:14.520 --> 0:07:18.800 the months between Russia's February and October revolutions. At the 0:07:18.800 --> 0:07:22.560 same time, Pijing workers built many more barricades and fortifications 0:07:22.560 --> 0:07:25.680 on the street in many factories that organized strikes and 0:07:25.720 --> 0:07:28.720 slow downs. A possible general strike was put on the 0:07:28.720 --> 0:07:32.000 table as well. Many workers started to build connections between 0:07:32.000 --> 0:07:36.840 factories to prepare for a general strike. This was unaccepsible 0:07:36.880 --> 0:07:39.880 to the party, and so for the third time in 0:07:39.960 --> 0:07:44.040 seventy years, the CCP fed its own working class to 0:07:44.040 --> 0:07:47.320 the machine guns. On the night of June third, the 0:07:47.440 --> 0:07:49.800 army began to slaughter its way to the workers defending 0:07:49.840 --> 0:07:53.160 the square. It was the workers who bore the front 0:07:53.240 --> 0:07:56.720 of the massacre. Most of the casualty and later political 0:07:56.720 --> 0:08:00.720 oppression were against members of the workers faction. The army 0:08:00.800 --> 0:08:03.360 soon reached the square itself for the Western press corps 0:08:03.360 --> 0:08:06.160 bore witness to what became known as the Tianaman Square massacre. 0:08:07.120 --> 0:08:09.960 This is where you get tank Man and the most 0:08:09.960 --> 0:08:13.240 famous accounts of the massacre. But by that point it 0:08:13.360 --> 0:08:16.760 was almost all over. The protests were crushed and the 0:08:16.840 --> 0:08:20.800 Chinese working class died with it. But before the last 0:08:20.800 --> 0:08:24.280 bullet had even been fired, every faction under the sun 0:08:24.440 --> 0:08:27.720 began to construct their own narratives about what had just happened. 0:08:29.120 --> 0:08:31.280 The most common narrative is that Tianeman was a clash 0:08:31.320 --> 0:08:34.960 between democracy and authoritarianism, and to some extent it's not 0:08:35.040 --> 0:08:39.040 exactly wrong. There were a lot of other pro democracy 0:08:39.040 --> 0:08:43.120 movements in this period. You see them in Taiwan and Korea. 0:08:43.400 --> 0:08:46.480 They swept across huge swaths of Latin America and eventually 0:08:46.480 --> 0:08:49.960 spread to places like the Philippines. But the real question 0:08:50.240 --> 0:08:54.280 of the pro democracy movements was what kind of democracy. 0:08:55.360 --> 0:08:57.960 The students at Tieneman, to the extent that their democratic 0:08:58.000 --> 0:09:01.200 principles were sincere and not simply cover for a deeply 0:09:01.240 --> 0:09:04.679 authoritarian version of liberalism that demanded rule of law by 0:09:04.679 --> 0:09:08.560 a new class of intellectuals to oversee market reforms, believed 0:09:08.600 --> 0:09:13.679 in a narrow conception of political democracy. This political democracy 0:09:13.760 --> 0:09:17.200 operates at the level of the state. It's based on 0:09:17.320 --> 0:09:21.760 free citizens equal before the law, participating in elections to 0:09:21.800 --> 0:09:25.960 choose representatives who pass laws and generally oversee and manage 0:09:25.960 --> 0:09:30.600 the state bureaucracy. This model of political democracy relegates the 0:09:30.600 --> 0:09:35.760 workplace to a separate economic sphere into which democracy does 0:09:35.920 --> 0:09:40.360 not extend. The capitalist firm or its state owned equivalent, 0:09:40.960 --> 0:09:45.280 remained the absolute dictatorship of the capitalists and their managerial flunkies. 0:09:46.280 --> 0:09:49.240 Even the progressive wings of the pro democracy movements in 0:09:49.280 --> 0:09:54.720 Taiwan and South Korea maintained this private dictatorship. Workers would 0:09:54.720 --> 0:09:58.560 be given rights under the progressive regimes, permission to form unions, 0:09:58.679 --> 0:10:02.040 access to the welfare state, limited protections from the worst 0:10:02.040 --> 0:10:05.880 physical and psychological abuses their bosses could inflict. But no 0:10:05.920 --> 0:10:09.840 matter how progressive the pro democracy movement, the legitimacy of 0:10:09.920 --> 0:10:13.360 the dictatorship of the bosses was not up for dispute. 0:10:14.360 --> 0:10:19.439 To them, democracy meant a democratic state, not a democratic workplace. 0:10:20.160 --> 0:10:24.040 The workers of Tienemen alone disagreed. They stood against not 0:10:24.080 --> 0:10:27.160 only the rest of the world's pro democracy movements, but 0:10:27.240 --> 0:10:31.120 the tide of history itself. By applying the principles of 0:10:31.160 --> 0:10:35.160 the pro democracy movement to their own concerns skyrocketing inflation, 0:10:35.600 --> 0:10:40.840 mounting debt, rampant corruption by government officials, spiraling inequality, and 0:10:40.920 --> 0:10:45.240 petty bureaucratic oppression, Beijing's working class reinvented an old and 0:10:45.280 --> 0:10:49.880 now largely forgotten traditional democracy in the factory, democratic workers 0:10:49.960 --> 0:10:54.960 self management. This is, to a large extent, what Tianmen 0:10:55.080 --> 0:10:58.160 was actually about. It was the culmination of a century 0:10:58.200 --> 0:11:00.760 and a half long war between the democratic wing of 0:11:00.800 --> 0:11:04.800 the classical workers' movement and essentially every other ideological movement 0:11:04.840 --> 0:11:09.319 on Earth. The worker's movement would fight capitalists and communists, 0:11:09.440 --> 0:11:14.440 liberals and fascists, monarchies and republics, social democracies and theocracies, 0:11:15.440 --> 0:11:20.760 and at Tienemen they would lose one final time. That 0:11:20.880 --> 0:11:24.680 defeat is the origin of the modern world. One man 0:11:24.760 --> 0:11:29.040 rule in the factory, in its thousand thousand forms is 0:11:29.080 --> 0:11:32.120 the author of the hell of the twenty first century. 0:11:32.920 --> 0:11:35.560 And when we come back, we're going to look at 0:11:35.559 --> 0:11:39.240 the international part of the struggle that ended at Tianeman. 0:11:50.240 --> 0:11:53.760 To fully understand the magnitude of Tianemen, we need to 0:11:53.800 --> 0:11:57.640 go back to the revolutions of eighteen forty eight. If 0:11:57.640 --> 0:12:00.880 you want a detailed accounting of eighteen forty go listen 0:12:00.880 --> 0:12:06.679 to the Revolutions podcast. It's great. It's also many, many, many, many, 0:12:07.040 --> 0:12:10.320 many many episodes. The short version is that there were 0:12:10.360 --> 0:12:13.079 a bunch of revolutions across Europe in eighteen forty eight, 0:12:13.120 --> 0:12:16.560 collectively known as the Springtime of the Peoples. It was 0:12:16.600 --> 0:12:19.640 the first wave of revolutions where socialists were a real 0:12:19.679 --> 0:12:24.160 political faction. Frederick Engels death that angles of Marx and 0:12:24.200 --> 0:12:27.440 Engels fame was on the barricades with a rifle fighting 0:12:27.440 --> 0:12:30.360 in Prussia. There was a huge revolution in France where 0:12:30.360 --> 0:12:33.120 they deposed the king and the question of how far 0:12:33.240 --> 0:12:37.160 democracy was going to go came for the first time 0:12:37.440 --> 0:12:41.280 to the forefront. Inside of a democratic movement itself, you 0:12:41.320 --> 0:12:44.640 had a split between the sort of French radicals who 0:12:44.679 --> 0:12:48.679 done the original French Revolution, who wanted electoral democracy but 0:12:48.800 --> 0:12:53.120 dictatorship in the workplace, and the new socialists who wanted 0:12:53.160 --> 0:12:56.360 to question property relations and the question of class itself, 0:12:56.720 --> 0:13:00.600 and most importantly for our purposes, whether democracy would extend 0:13:01.120 --> 0:13:06.920 past the political sphere and directly into economics. These prefigures 0:13:06.920 --> 0:13:10.200 a split inside the socialist movement itself. For the most 0:13:10.280 --> 0:13:13.920 radical factions, control over the means of production meant that 0:13:13.960 --> 0:13:17.520 workers would control the production process directly through free associations 0:13:17.520 --> 0:13:21.200 of workers direct democratic unions, a position later known as 0:13:21.200 --> 0:13:25.480 syndicalism or workers councils. But more conservative factions of the 0:13:25.480 --> 0:13:29.720 socialists became enamored with the bureaucratic technologies of the state. 0:13:30.480 --> 0:13:33.640 They watched with envy as the industrializing powers of the 0:13:33.640 --> 0:13:38.640 eighteen sixties and eighteen seventies engage in increasingly elaborate planning schemes, 0:13:39.080 --> 0:13:43.520 first of roads canals in railroads, then of entire cities 0:13:43.520 --> 0:13:48.360 with complex electrical grids, gas lines and plumbing systems, and 0:13:48.400 --> 0:13:52.199 began to believe that centralized state planning, not the democratic 0:13:52.200 --> 0:13:55.839 association of workers, could bring about the long sought after 0:13:55.960 --> 0:14:00.559 cooperative commonwealth of socialism, and that planning obsessed facts began 0:14:00.679 --> 0:14:04.560 to encompass more and more of the left. In Germany, 0:14:04.760 --> 0:14:08.679 home to the powerful German Social Democratic Party, socialists became 0:14:08.720 --> 0:14:12.920 divided between two camps, the Revisionists led by Edward Bernstein, 0:14:13.280 --> 0:14:16.800 who renounced Marxism and Revolution entirely in favor of reforming 0:14:16.800 --> 0:14:22.400 capitalism in the state from within, and Karlkovski's orthodox Marxists. Basically, 0:14:22.440 --> 0:14:26.160 the only two things these factions, who otherwise despise each other, 0:14:26.600 --> 0:14:30.160 agreed on was the primacy of state bureaucratic planning over 0:14:30.200 --> 0:14:35.280 workplace democracy. This led to the Social Democratic Party disastrously 0:14:35.360 --> 0:14:38.280 working to break the workplace autonomy of many of its 0:14:38.320 --> 0:14:43.040 own workers, but were still The person who became most 0:14:43.080 --> 0:14:47.520 obsessed with the potential of bureaucratic state planning was one 0:14:47.760 --> 0:14:53.040 Vladimir Bilitch Lenin. As the anthropologist David Graeber pointed out, 0:14:53.720 --> 0:14:57.200 Lenin's obsession with the German postal service was such that 0:14:57.320 --> 0:15:01.280 he included this passage about the future social state in 0:15:01.360 --> 0:15:04.960 his famous State and Revolution a text written between the 0:15:04.960 --> 0:15:09.840 February October revolutions of nineteen seventeen. Quote a witty German 0:15:09.880 --> 0:15:13.280 social democrat of the seventies of the last century called 0:15:13.280 --> 0:15:16.560 the postal service an example of the socialist economic system. 0:15:17.200 --> 0:15:20.880 This is very true. At present. The postal service is 0:15:20.880 --> 0:15:24.440 a business organized on the lines of a state capitalist monopoly. 0:15:25.320 --> 0:15:29.160 Imperialism is gradually transforming all trust into organizations of a 0:15:29.200 --> 0:15:32.920 similar type to organize the whole national economy on the 0:15:32.920 --> 0:15:37.120 lines of the postal service, so that the technicians, foreman, bookkeepers, 0:15:37.160 --> 0:15:40.080 as well as all officials receive salaries no higher than 0:15:40.120 --> 0:15:44.240 a workman's wage, all under the leadership and control of 0:15:44.280 --> 0:15:50.040 the armed proletariat. This is our immediate aim. Lenin's idealized 0:15:50.080 --> 0:15:52.200 form of socialism would thus take the form of a 0:15:52.240 --> 0:15:57.560 total state bureaucracy tasked with planning the entire economy. This 0:15:57.640 --> 0:16:00.880 would set off a massive series of confrontations with the 0:16:00.880 --> 0:16:03.720 part of the workers movement who wanted workers control over 0:16:03.760 --> 0:16:07.520 the means of production to mean workers making decisions overworked 0:16:07.600 --> 0:16:11.560 themselves and not just working for a different set of bureaucrats. 0:16:11.680 --> 0:16:15.080 The struggle between bureaucracy and democracy in the workers movement 0:16:15.720 --> 0:16:18.880 mirrorred the struggle between the workers movements and the capitalist state. 0:16:19.800 --> 0:16:23.040 By the eighteen eighties, the workers movement had created variable 0:16:23.160 --> 0:16:26.640 states within a state in countries like Germany and Italy. 0:16:27.440 --> 0:16:31.680 These quote unquote states were vast networks of workers' institutions, 0:16:32.400 --> 0:16:36.920 ranging from as grape were described free schools, workers associations, 0:16:36.960 --> 0:16:42.240 friendly societies, libraries and theaters end quote to unions, co ops, 0:16:42.280 --> 0:16:46.640 neighborhood associations, tennis unions, mutual aid societies, and political parties 0:16:46.720 --> 0:16:50.880 ran democratically by workers themselves, which provided vital services to 0:16:50.880 --> 0:16:53.960 workers and their families, and served, so the workers hoped, 0:16:54.240 --> 0:16:58.320 as the basis for a new socialist society. Fearing the 0:16:58.320 --> 0:17:02.440 popularity of these democratic works workers' institutions, Otto von Bismarck 0:17:02.480 --> 0:17:06.399 created bureaucratic, state run versions of the library's, theaters and 0:17:06.440 --> 0:17:10.480 welfare services to replace them. Telling an American observer quote, 0:17:10.840 --> 0:17:13.600 my idea was to bribe the working class, or shall 0:17:13.640 --> 0:17:16.320 I say, to win them over, to regard the state 0:17:16.400 --> 0:17:19.560 as a social institution existing for their sake and interested 0:17:19.680 --> 0:17:25.000 in their welfare. And this works. It was enormously successful. 0:17:25.560 --> 0:17:29.680 Socialists themselves came to confuse Bismarck's welfare state bribe with 0:17:29.880 --> 0:17:33.680 socialism itself, and when they took power, they replicated the 0:17:33.680 --> 0:17:37.760 bureaucratic nature of many of Bismarck's programs, eliminating the democratic 0:17:37.800 --> 0:17:41.720 aspects of the older workers' institutions entirely. But where their 0:17:41.800 --> 0:17:45.480 leaders I'd forgotten the democratic core of the Rowan ideology, 0:17:46.119 --> 0:17:50.720 workers themselves never did. As the nineteenth century drew to 0:17:50.760 --> 0:17:54.560 a close and the twentieth century began, workers who engaged 0:17:54.560 --> 0:18:00.000 in spontaneous uprisings instinctively began to form democratic institutions, particular 0:18:00.000 --> 0:18:04.119 clarly workers councils. The most famous of these councils, of course, 0:18:04.680 --> 0:18:07.960 were formed between the spontaneous Russian revolutions of nineteen oh 0:18:08.040 --> 0:18:13.320 five in nineteen seventeen. These councils, called soviets, were originally 0:18:13.320 --> 0:18:15.720 formed in nineteen oh five out of ad hoc strike 0:18:15.800 --> 0:18:19.800 committees that became formalized elected bodies of representatives in the 0:18:19.840 --> 0:18:24.480 various factions who worked to coordinate the general strike. The 0:18:24.560 --> 0:18:26.960 revolution of nineteen oh five was crushed by the Czar, 0:18:27.320 --> 0:18:30.040 but in nineteen seventeen the Russian working class would once 0:18:30.080 --> 0:18:35.040 again form workers' councils as another revolution commenced. This time, 0:18:35.240 --> 0:18:39.200 the councils would take control of production, directly coordinating between 0:18:39.240 --> 0:18:41.879 various factories and industries, as well as serving as a 0:18:41.880 --> 0:18:46.400 worker's counterpower to the new revolutionary government. The Russian Revolution 0:18:46.560 --> 0:18:49.680 kicked off a period of open warfare that stretched from 0:18:49.720 --> 0:18:52.760 Italy to Argentina between the forces of democracy and the 0:18:52.840 --> 0:18:57.119 factory and the newly formed anti democratic alliance of social Democrats, 0:18:57.160 --> 0:19:02.480 Bolsheviks capitalists. Between nineteen in seventeen and nineteen twenty, workers 0:19:02.560 --> 0:19:06.320 councils formed in Germany, Poland, Austria, Ukraine, and Ireland, and 0:19:06.359 --> 0:19:10.320 were matched by revolts of syndicalist unions in Brazil and Argentina. 0:19:11.080 --> 0:19:15.800 These uprisings were all crushed in Italy, which saw some 0:19:15.880 --> 0:19:19.160 of the most intense conflict between syncalists and the Italian state. 0:19:19.760 --> 0:19:22.520 The famous occupation of the Factories was ended not by 0:19:22.520 --> 0:19:26.000 the Italian government but by the Italian Socialist Party in 0:19:26.040 --> 0:19:30.840 their union, the General Confederation of Labor. This, in large part, 0:19:31.280 --> 0:19:34.760 was how fascism won in Italy and in Germany. Faced 0:19:34.760 --> 0:19:38.040 with workers movements on the verge of seizing power, social 0:19:38.040 --> 0:19:41.440 democrats turned on the working class slaughtered their own comrades, 0:19:42.040 --> 0:19:46.720 propelling the fascists into power in their wake. Ironically, the 0:19:46.760 --> 0:19:49.800 worst defeat of the democratic workers movements will come not 0:19:49.920 --> 0:19:52.720 at the hands of the capitalists or social democrats, but 0:19:52.760 --> 0:19:55.840 from Lenin and the Bolsheviks, the very party at the 0:19:55.840 --> 0:19:59.879 workers councils had put in power. Lenin began to undermine 0:19:59.920 --> 0:20:03.320 the the power of the Soviets almost immediately. Published mere 0:20:03.440 --> 0:20:07.280 days after the October Revolution, his draft Decrees on Workers 0:20:07.400 --> 0:20:11.800 Control stated in no uncertain terms that real power and 0:20:11.840 --> 0:20:15.040 authority lay with the new state and the Bolshevik dominated 0:20:15.080 --> 0:20:19.320 trade unions. In the face of massive and unexpected resistance 0:20:19.320 --> 0:20:22.000 from the workers councils, the decree is needed to be 0:20:22.080 --> 0:20:25.400 modified before they could be implemented. But while publicly declaring 0:20:25.400 --> 0:20:28.560 his support for the workers councils, the Bolshevik slogan was 0:20:28.720 --> 0:20:32.159 after all, all power to the Soviets, Lenin continued to 0:20:32.160 --> 0:20:34.439 trip away at their power until he finally admitted his 0:20:34.480 --> 0:20:37.320 real position of democracy in the Factory in nineteen eighteen 0:20:37.920 --> 0:20:41.480 in the Horrifying the immediate tasks of the Soviet government 0:20:42.080 --> 0:20:48.400 quote unquestioning submission to a single will is absolutely necessary 0:20:48.440 --> 0:20:50.960 for the success of labor processes that are based on 0:20:51.119 --> 0:20:56.480 large scale machine industry today, the revolution demands, in the 0:20:56.520 --> 0:21:01.560 interests of socialism, that the masses on we obey the 0:21:01.600 --> 0:21:06.720 single will of the leaders of the labor process. This 0:21:07.600 --> 0:21:10.000 is obviously one of the most disturbing things I've ever read. 0:21:10.600 --> 0:21:14.000 But to be clear, while Lenin is more candid about 0:21:14.000 --> 0:21:17.480 what one man rule in the factory actually entails, the 0:21:17.520 --> 0:21:21.040 system he's describing isn't actually different from one man rule 0:21:21.040 --> 0:21:24.240 and any other political system. Bolshevik rule in the factory 0:21:24.240 --> 0:21:27.720 would be no different than capitalist, social democratic, or even 0:21:27.760 --> 0:21:31.760 fascist rule. The movement for democracy in the factory now 0:21:31.800 --> 0:21:35.560 faced four implacable enemies willing to put aside their ideological 0:21:35.560 --> 0:21:40.520 differences to ensure that workers would not run their workplaces directly, 0:21:41.160 --> 0:21:43.760 and as the nineteen twenties bled into the nineteen thirties, 0:21:44.240 --> 0:21:47.000 the movement seemed to have all but disappeared in a 0:21:47.040 --> 0:21:52.800 haale of bullets and blood. But they didn't. And next episode, 0:21:53.080 --> 0:21:57.760 our heroes, the collective hero the world's working class will 0:21:57.760 --> 0:22:02.480 be back. They will do any many more revolutions, and 0:22:02.560 --> 0:22:05.760 we're going to talk about why those revolutions happened, what 0:22:05.840 --> 0:22:08.680 the ruling class did to stop them, And then returned 0:22:08.720 --> 0:22:11.359 to the lead up to Tianaman Square to see the 0:22:11.359 --> 0:22:13.959 final stand of the Chinese working class. 0:22:17.880 --> 0:22:20.359 It could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media. 0:22:20.560 --> 0:22:23.640 For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website 0:22:23.680 --> 0:22:27.280 coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, 0:22:27.359 --> 0:22:30.920 Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can 0:22:30.960 --> 0:22:33.280 now find sources for it could Happen Here listed directly 0:22:33.320 --> 0:22:35.600 in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.