Speaker 1: Call Zone Media. Welcome to it had happened here. I'm
Speaker 1: your host, Nia Wong. Today is the day before the
Speaker 1: thirty sixth anniversary of the Tianneman Square massacre. We're doing
Speaker 1: something a little bit different. Three years ago I wrote
Speaker 1: a pair of episodes about Tieneman democracy in the International
Speaker 1: Workers Movement, expanding off a piece I'd written for laos
Speaker 1: On a year before that. That was a long time ago.
Speaker 1: The world is a fundamentally different place than it was
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty one. Europe has been consumed by war.
Speaker 1: Whole revolutions rose and fell. The fast threat we defeated
Speaker 1: in the streets returned to power in a new and
Speaker 1: more terrifying form. In this new, uglier and more brutal world,
Speaker 1: I wanted to return to Tianeman, to return to one
Speaker 1: of the great horrors of another age, to see if
Speaker 1: we can take anything new from the wreckage of the
Speaker 1: death of Hope. I'm no longer the same person I
Speaker 1: was when I originally wrote these episodes, and so today
Speaker 1: and tomorrow are Tianamen remastered. There were really three Tianemens.
Speaker 1: The first and most famous Tieneman was a student protest
Speaker 1: inside Tianaman Square itself. If you've heard the word Tienemen
Speaker 1: before this story, you know the second Tienemen was the
Speaker 1: Tienemen of the blocks of Beijing around the Square, blocks
Speaker 1: sees and transformed by Beijing's working class. If you've heard
Speaker 1: about this Tienemen at all, it's probably in the context
Speaker 1: of the tanks rolling through them on their way to
Speaker 1: the Square. And then there was the third Tienemen, the
Speaker 1: protests in other cities, of which we still years after
Speaker 1: the original piece. No distressingly little about Our focus today
Speaker 1: is on the first two. The students of the student
Speaker 1: protests were a weird ideological grab back that cannot simply
Speaker 1: be reduced down to the simplistic pro democracy label they've
Speaker 1: been settled with in the three and a half decades
Speaker 1: since Tienemen. The short version is this, the students were
Speaker 1: pissed off about what's called reform and opening not going
Speaker 1: fast enough, and we should talk about what reform and
Speaker 1: opening actually was. On the one hand, you had some
Speaker 1: steps to ease restrictions on free speech, rehabilitate intellectuals and
Speaker 1: other people were so called bad class backgrounds, and allow
Speaker 1: for a broader public discourse. This was paired with market
Speaker 1: reforms I started to bring capitalism back to China. This
Speaker 1: was a shit show in a lot of ways. If
Speaker 1: you want to hear about the CCP reinventing what's essentially
Speaker 1: dipped P and che about five years into this process,
Speaker 1: go listen to my Behind the Bastard's episode about the
Speaker 1: poisoned milk scandal. But Reform and Opening is remembered as
Speaker 1: a kind of golden age of free expression, a golden
Speaker 1: age of hope and possibility where things really seemed like
Speaker 1: they could be different. This is not entirely accurate. Reform
Speaker 1: and Opening also saw a bunch of absolutely draconian crackdowns
Speaker 1: on the social sphere. There was the One Child policy,
Speaker 1: a hideous expansion of the states into the sphere of
Speaker 1: social reproduction, replete with forced sterilizations and the reimposition of
Speaker 1: patriarchal power. It saw the tightening of one man rule
Speaker 1: in the factory, the destruction of any form of worker's
Speaker 1: decision making and control over the process of their own labor.
Speaker 1: In these horrors, you can see the beginning of the
Speaker 1: fragmentation of Tiannemen and Chinese politics more broadly, already forming,
Speaker 1: the students wanted market form to go faster, They wanted
Speaker 1: more freedom of speech, they sort of wanted democracy, but
Speaker 1: mostly they wanted to be in charge of the party
Speaker 1: so they could crush the bureaucracy that was holding market
Speaker 1: reforms back. It's worth noting, of course, that many of
Speaker 1: these students were involved in what became known as neo authoritarianism,
Speaker 1: which holds that the strong central party should take full
Speaker 1: control of society and destroy factions in the bureaucracy. It
Speaker 1: was an ideology that survived the death of the protests
Speaker 1: and went on to become a major faction of the
Speaker 1: CCP itself in the nineties and two thousands, and this
Speaker 1: is where some of the truly weird shit at Tianeman
Speaker 1: comes from. The students were, in many ways an incredibly
Speaker 1: hierarchical movement which escalated to the point where student leaders
Speaker 1: were kidnapping each other for control over stages and microphones,
Speaker 1: and these protests, in terms of their nominally stated goal
Speaker 1: of influencing the factional fights inside the party, were studyingly
Speaker 1: in a f actual The guy they were trying to
Speaker 1: defend inside the party wound up getting ousted and put
Speaker 1: under house arrest for the rest of his life, and
Speaker 1: the changes they demanded failed to occur. But Tianeman, as
Speaker 1: I mentioned earlier, was also the workers, and for most
Speaker 1: of the protests the students absolutely hated them. Students barred
Speaker 1: workers from entering the square itself until the final hours
Speaker 1: of the protests, tried to stop workers from carrying out
Speaker 1: a general strike, and relations were in general extremely bad.
Speaker 1: This raises the question what were the workers doing there
Speaker 1: in the first place. There's a few answers. The simplest
Speaker 1: and most immediate one is that the workers were pissed
Speaker 1: off at how badly the Party was treating students in
Speaker 1: the square. But there were other things going on too.
Speaker 1: The late in eighteen eighties in China saw rampant and
Speaker 1: skyrocketing inflation. The rapid price increases threatened the supply of
Speaker 1: cheap grain that composed a huge supply of welfare services
Speaker 1: provided to urban workers. Meanwhile, marketization was accelerating, and suddenly
Speaker 1: you had CCP princelings racing down the streets in imported
Speaker 1: sports cars, driving past workers on their bikes, and spending
Speaker 1: a year's salary gambling at the racetrack. And this pissed
Speaker 1: people off, so they started organizing. I'm going to read
Speaker 1: a section for a piece by Uron, saying about what
Speaker 1: the workers were doing during the struggle to obstruct the military.
Speaker 1: Workers started to realize the power of their spontaneous organization
Speaker 1: and action. This was self liberation on an unprecedented level.
Speaker 1: A huge wave of self organization ensued. The worker's autonomous
Speaker 1: federation membership grew exponentially, and other workers' organizations both within
Speaker 1: and across the workplace mushroomed. The development of organization led
Speaker 1: to a radicalization of action. Workers started organizing self armed
Speaker 1: quasi militias such as Quote Picket Corps and Quote Dared
Speaker 1: to Die brigades to monitor and broadcast the military's whereabouts.
Speaker 1: These quasi militias were also responsible for maintaining public order
Speaker 1: so as not to provide any pretext for military intervention.
Speaker 1: In a sense, Paijing became a city self managed by workers.
Speaker 1: It was reminiscent of Petrograd's self armed workers organized in
Speaker 1: the months between Russia's February and October revolutions. At the
Speaker 1: same time, Pijing workers built many more barricades and fortifications
Speaker 1: on the street in many factories that organized strikes and
Speaker 1: slow downs. A possible general strike was put on the
Speaker 1: table as well. Many workers started to build connections between
Speaker 1: factories to prepare for a general strike. This was unaccepsible
Speaker 1: to the party, and so for the third time in
Speaker 1: seventy years, the CCP fed its own working class to
Speaker 1: the machine guns. On the night of June third, the
Speaker 1: army began to slaughter its way to the workers defending
Speaker 1: the square. It was the workers who bore the front
Speaker 1: of the massacre. Most of the casualty and later political
Speaker 1: oppression were against members of the workers faction. The army
Speaker 1: soon reached the square itself for the Western press corps
Speaker 1: bore witness to what became known as the Tianaman Square massacre.
Speaker 1: This is where you get tank Man and the most
Speaker 1: famous accounts of the massacre. But by that point it
Speaker 1: was almost all over. The protests were crushed and the
Speaker 1: Chinese working class died with it. But before the last
Speaker 1: bullet had even been fired, every faction under the sun
Speaker 1: began to construct their own narratives about what had just happened.
Speaker 1: The most common narrative is that Tianeman was a clash
Speaker 1: between democracy and authoritarianism, and to some extent it's not
Speaker 1: exactly wrong. There were a lot of other pro democracy
Speaker 1: movements in this period. You see them in Taiwan and Korea.
Speaker 1: They swept across huge swaths of Latin America and eventually
Speaker 1: spread to places like the Philippines. But the real question
Speaker 1: of the pro democracy movements was what kind of democracy.
Speaker 1: The students at Tieneman, to the extent that their democratic
Speaker 1: principles were sincere and not simply cover for a deeply
Speaker 1: authoritarian version of liberalism that demanded rule of law by
Speaker 1: a new class of intellectuals to oversee market reforms, believed
Speaker 1: in a narrow conception of political democracy. This political democracy
Speaker 1: operates at the level of the state. It's based on
Speaker 1: free citizens equal before the law, participating in elections to
Speaker 1: choose representatives who pass laws and generally oversee and manage
Speaker 1: the state bureaucracy. This model of political democracy relegates the
Speaker 1: workplace to a separate economic sphere into which democracy does
Speaker 1: not extend. The capitalist firm or its state owned equivalent,
Speaker 1: remained the absolute dictatorship of the capitalists and their managerial flunkies.
Speaker 1: Even the progressive wings of the pro democracy movements in
Speaker 1: Taiwan and South Korea maintained this private dictatorship. Workers would
Speaker 1: be given rights under the progressive regimes, permission to form unions,
Speaker 1: access to the welfare state, limited protections from the worst
Speaker 1: physical and psychological abuses their bosses could inflict. But no
Speaker 1: matter how progressive the pro democracy movement, the legitimacy of
Speaker 1: the dictatorship of the bosses was not up for dispute.
Speaker 1: To them, democracy meant a democratic state, not a democratic workplace.
Speaker 1: The workers of Tienemen alone disagreed. They stood against not
Speaker 1: only the rest of the world's pro democracy movements, but
Speaker 1: the tide of history itself. By applying the principles of
Speaker 1: the pro democracy movement to their own concerns skyrocketing inflation,
Speaker 1: mounting debt, rampant corruption by government officials, spiraling inequality, and
Speaker 1: petty bureaucratic oppression, Beijing's working class reinvented an old and
Speaker 1: now largely forgotten traditional democracy in the factory, democratic workers
Speaker 1: self management. This is, to a large extent, what Tianmen
Speaker 1: was actually about. It was the culmination of a century
Speaker 1: and a half long war between the democratic wing of
Speaker 1: the classical workers' movement and essentially every other ideological movement
Speaker 1: on Earth. The worker's movement would fight capitalists and communists,
Speaker 1: liberals and fascists, monarchies and republics, social democracies and theocracies,
Speaker 1: and at Tienemen they would lose one final time. That
Speaker 1: defeat is the origin of the modern world. One man
Speaker 1: rule in the factory, in its thousand thousand forms is
Speaker 1: the author of the hell of the twenty first century.
Speaker 1: And when we come back, we're going to look at
Speaker 1: the international part of the struggle that ended at Tianeman.
Speaker 1: To fully understand the magnitude of Tianemen, we need to
Speaker 1: go back to the revolutions of eighteen forty eight. If
Speaker 1: you want a detailed accounting of eighteen forty go listen
Speaker 1: to the Revolutions podcast. It's great. It's also many, many, many, many,
Speaker 1: many many episodes. The short version is that there were
Speaker 1: a bunch of revolutions across Europe in eighteen forty eight,
Speaker 1: collectively known as the Springtime of the Peoples. It was
Speaker 1: the first wave of revolutions where socialists were a real
Speaker 1: political faction. Frederick Engels death that angles of Marx and
Speaker 1: Engels fame was on the barricades with a rifle fighting
Speaker 1: in Prussia. There was a huge revolution in France where
Speaker 1: they deposed the king and the question of how far
Speaker 1: democracy was going to go came for the first time
Speaker 1: to the forefront. Inside of a democratic movement itself, you
Speaker 1: had a split between the sort of French radicals who
Speaker 1: done the original French Revolution, who wanted electoral democracy but
Speaker 1: dictatorship in the workplace, and the new socialists who wanted
Speaker 1: to question property relations and the question of class itself,
Speaker 1: and most importantly for our purposes, whether democracy would extend
Speaker 1: past the political sphere and directly into economics. These prefigures
Speaker 1: a split inside the socialist movement itself. For the most
Speaker 1: radical factions, control over the means of production meant that
Speaker 1: workers would control the production process directly through free associations
Speaker 1: of workers direct democratic unions, a position later known as
Speaker 1: syndicalism or workers councils. But more conservative factions of the
Speaker 1: socialists became enamored with the bureaucratic technologies of the state.
Speaker 1: They watched with envy as the industrializing powers of the
Speaker 1: eighteen sixties and eighteen seventies engage in increasingly elaborate planning schemes,
Speaker 1: first of roads canals in railroads, then of entire cities
Speaker 1: with complex electrical grids, gas lines and plumbing systems, and
Speaker 1: began to believe that centralized state planning, not the democratic
Speaker 1: association of workers, could bring about the long sought after
Speaker 1: cooperative commonwealth of socialism, and that planning obsessed facts began
Speaker 1: to encompass more and more of the left. In Germany,
Speaker 1: home to the powerful German Social Democratic Party, socialists became
Speaker 1: divided between two camps, the Revisionists led by Edward Bernstein,
Speaker 1: who renounced Marxism and Revolution entirely in favor of reforming
Speaker 1: capitalism in the state from within, and Karlkovski's orthodox Marxists. Basically,
Speaker 1: the only two things these factions, who otherwise despise each other,
Speaker 1: agreed on was the primacy of state bureaucratic planning over
Speaker 1: workplace democracy. This led to the Social Democratic Party disastrously
Speaker 1: working to break the workplace autonomy of many of its
Speaker 1: own workers, but were still The person who became most
Speaker 1: obsessed with the potential of bureaucratic state planning was one
Speaker 1: Vladimir Bilitch Lenin. As the anthropologist David Graeber pointed out,
Speaker 1: Lenin's obsession with the German postal service was such that
Speaker 1: he included this passage about the future social state in
Speaker 1: his famous State and Revolution a text written between the
Speaker 1: February October revolutions of nineteen seventeen. Quote a witty German
Speaker 1: social democrat of the seventies of the last century called
Speaker 1: the postal service an example of the socialist economic system.
Speaker 1: This is very true. At present. The postal service is
Speaker 1: a business organized on the lines of a state capitalist monopoly.
Speaker 1: Imperialism is gradually transforming all trust into organizations of a
Speaker 1: similar type to organize the whole national economy on the
Speaker 1: lines of the postal service, so that the technicians, foreman, bookkeepers,
Speaker 1: as well as all officials receive salaries no higher than
Speaker 1: a workman's wage, all under the leadership and control of
Speaker 1: the armed proletariat. This is our immediate aim. Lenin's idealized
Speaker 1: form of socialism would thus take the form of a
Speaker 1: total state bureaucracy tasked with planning the entire economy. This
Speaker 1: would set off a massive series of confrontations with the
Speaker 1: part of the workers movement who wanted workers control over
Speaker 1: the means of production to mean workers making decisions overworked
Speaker 1: themselves and not just working for a different set of bureaucrats.
Speaker 1: The struggle between bureaucracy and democracy in the workers movement
Speaker 1: mirrorred the struggle between the workers movements and the capitalist state.
Speaker 1: By the eighteen eighties, the workers movement had created variable
Speaker 1: states within a state in countries like Germany and Italy.
Speaker 1: These quote unquote states were vast networks of workers' institutions,
Speaker 1: ranging from as grape were described free schools, workers associations,
Speaker 1: friendly societies, libraries and theaters end quote to unions, co ops,
Speaker 1: neighborhood associations, tennis unions, mutual aid societies, and political parties
Speaker 1: ran democratically by workers themselves, which provided vital services to
Speaker 1: workers and their families, and served, so the workers hoped,
Speaker 1: as the basis for a new socialist society. Fearing the
Speaker 1: popularity of these democratic works workers' institutions, Otto von Bismarck
Speaker 1: created bureaucratic, state run versions of the library's, theaters and
Speaker 1: welfare services to replace them. Telling an American observer quote,
Speaker 1: my idea was to bribe the working class, or shall
Speaker 1: I say, to win them over, to regard the state
Speaker 1: as a social institution existing for their sake and interested
Speaker 1: in their welfare. And this works. It was enormously successful.
Speaker 1: Socialists themselves came to confuse Bismarck's welfare state bribe with
Speaker 1: socialism itself, and when they took power, they replicated the
Speaker 1: bureaucratic nature of many of Bismarck's programs, eliminating the democratic
Speaker 1: aspects of the older workers' institutions entirely. But where their
Speaker 1: leaders I'd forgotten the democratic core of the Rowan ideology,
Speaker 1: workers themselves never did. As the nineteenth century drew to
Speaker 1: a close and the twentieth century began, workers who engaged
Speaker 1: in spontaneous uprisings instinctively began to form democratic institutions, particular
Speaker 1: clarly workers councils. The most famous of these councils, of course,
Speaker 1: were formed between the spontaneous Russian revolutions of nineteen oh
Speaker 1: five in nineteen seventeen. These councils, called soviets, were originally
Speaker 1: formed in nineteen oh five out of ad hoc strike
Speaker 1: committees that became formalized elected bodies of representatives in the
Speaker 1: various factions who worked to coordinate the general strike. The
Speaker 1: revolution of nineteen oh five was crushed by the Czar,
Speaker 1: but in nineteen seventeen the Russian working class would once
Speaker 1: again form workers' councils as another revolution commenced. This time,
Speaker 1: the councils would take control of production, directly coordinating between
Speaker 1: various factories and industries, as well as serving as a
Speaker 1: worker's counterpower to the new revolutionary government. The Russian Revolution
Speaker 1: kicked off a period of open warfare that stretched from
Speaker 1: Italy to Argentina between the forces of democracy and the
Speaker 1: factory and the newly formed anti democratic alliance of social Democrats,
Speaker 1: Bolsheviks capitalists. Between nineteen in seventeen and nineteen twenty, workers
Speaker 1: councils formed in Germany, Poland, Austria, Ukraine, and Ireland, and
Speaker 1: were matched by revolts of syndicalist unions in Brazil and Argentina.
Speaker 1: These uprisings were all crushed in Italy, which saw some
Speaker 1: of the most intense conflict between syncalists and the Italian state.
Speaker 1: The famous occupation of the Factories was ended not by
Speaker 1: the Italian government but by the Italian Socialist Party in
Speaker 1: their union, the General Confederation of Labor. This, in large part,
Speaker 1: was how fascism won in Italy and in Germany. Faced
Speaker 1: with workers movements on the verge of seizing power, social
Speaker 1: democrats turned on the working class slaughtered their own comrades,
Speaker 1: propelling the fascists into power in their wake. Ironically, the
Speaker 1: worst defeat of the democratic workers movements will come not
Speaker 1: at the hands of the capitalists or social democrats, but
Speaker 1: from Lenin and the Bolsheviks, the very party at the
Speaker 1: workers councils had put in power. Lenin began to undermine
Speaker 1: the the power of the Soviets almost immediately. Published mere
Speaker 1: days after the October Revolution, his draft Decrees on Workers
Speaker 1: Control stated in no uncertain terms that real power and
Speaker 1: authority lay with the new state and the Bolshevik dominated
Speaker 1: trade unions. In the face of massive and unexpected resistance
Speaker 1: from the workers councils, the decree is needed to be
Speaker 1: modified before they could be implemented. But while publicly declaring
Speaker 1: his support for the workers councils, the Bolshevik slogan was
Speaker 1: after all, all power to the Soviets, Lenin continued to
Speaker 1: trip away at their power until he finally admitted his
Speaker 1: real position of democracy in the Factory in nineteen eighteen
Speaker 1: in the Horrifying the immediate tasks of the Soviet government
Speaker 1: quote unquestioning submission to a single will is absolutely necessary
Speaker 1: for the success of labor processes that are based on
Speaker 1: large scale machine industry today, the revolution demands, in the
Speaker 1: interests of socialism, that the masses on we obey the
Speaker 1: single will of the leaders of the labor process. This
Speaker 1: is obviously one of the most disturbing things I've ever read.
Speaker 1: But to be clear, while Lenin is more candid about
Speaker 1: what one man rule in the factory actually entails, the
Speaker 1: system he's describing isn't actually different from one man rule
Speaker 1: and any other political system. Bolshevik rule in the factory
Speaker 1: would be no different than capitalist, social democratic, or even
Speaker 1: fascist rule. The movement for democracy in the factory now
Speaker 1: faced four implacable enemies willing to put aside their ideological
Speaker 1: differences to ensure that workers would not run their workplaces directly,
Speaker 1: and as the nineteen twenties bled into the nineteen thirties,
Speaker 1: the movement seemed to have all but disappeared in a
Speaker 1: haale of bullets and blood. But they didn't. And next episode,
Speaker 1: our heroes, the collective hero the world's working class will
Speaker 1: be back. They will do any many more revolutions, and
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about why those revolutions happened, what
Speaker 1: the ruling class did to stop them, And then returned
Speaker 1: to the lead up to Tianaman Square to see the
Speaker 1: final stand of the Chinese working class.
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