Tiananmen and the Question of Democracy, Part 2

at all my takeover. So so Sophie unfortunately, fortunately, unfortunately lacks to shear ruthlessness to crush the workers movement. Well we will see. Yeahs to be determined, and I don't buy it, So Sophie, Sophie is very sad. I'm sorry, Sophie. Um So, when when we last left off Lennon, Lennon has like in theory, crushed the last sort of remaining factions of like the workers but who want democracy the factories.

But unfortunately for the Leninist like literally no many how no matter how many workers they kill, and they are going to kill enormous numbers of workers. The demand for democracy, and the factory like just refuses to die for over

a hundred years. The development of the sort of mass factory system and logistical infrastructure that you need to support it, maybe most importantly coal mines and railroads that I use to transport stuff generate this incredibly militant working class that sees you know, democratic control over the workplaces like the

fundamental aspect of its liberation. Um. Ideologically, this is you know, this is this is manifested in like a series of interlocking beliefs about like the nature of the working class and like what class society is, um, all of which are sort of necessary components of this. Like it becomes this like incredibly like this like instinctive formation of workers council at the moment like an uprising happens. And this is something that that's very interesting about about the twentieth century.

Is it, Like yeah, like what when whenever there's like a crisis, someone someone like like about everyone in the factory is like, okay, we're we we've taken control of the factory now like we we were forming a council, were forming a giant assembly, and like we don't do this anymore, and we're gonna come back to like why we don't do this anymore? But like this hasn't happened, Like the last time it happened was like in Argentine and two dozen't one and I don't even know if

Garrison Garrison might have been alive for that. Thanks, But like it's well, I will say. The other time it does happens when after after a recording session, when our boss Sophie leaves, meet me and Chris will stay on the line to talk, usually about Star Wars, and that in a way kind of is a worker's counsel just for the factory of podcasting. Yeah, talk about Star Wars in front of me. I feel so bad for Sophie. Next next, next time, puppy face, that's okay. Featuring your

petite bush wat tactics won't work on me. Oh god, Well, all the people on the Separddit who think that we hate Sophie are going to just have a feel day with this episode. Conspiracy is my favorite recurring conspiracy theory bit. That's a real conspiracy o man o, man wow, I've a lot of catching up on to you. You do

not because it's not true run away. So meanwhile, meanwhile, so it in the period when people actually like did this seriously, you know, there's a lot of sort of ideological things that come together to make it so that when people like you know, like when when bread prices

increased too much, this is what people do. Um. And a lot of this has to do with the physical experience of what being a worker is in like you know, the n centuries, like you have these like these these these these incredibly rapid like technological expansions, and you know, the people who are who are doing this stuff like see themselves as the creative of the new world, right like, and this is like literally this is happening, Like, these are the people who are literally like they are building

the cities, right like all of the sort of the infrastructure of the modern world is physically being created by them. And this creates this you know, like if you're the person who is like who has transformed like this fishing village into this giant industrial city, right um, you know you you you see yourselves as the creator like literally physically the creator of this new world is being developed.

And then the second belief that that it produces that drives this movement is that the people who produced this world should be its inheritors and so and this this, this sort of this is what drives the workers movement in this period, which is that like, okay, so if if you if you are literally physically creating the new world, and you think that because you have created it, it

should be yours. Uh, the next that the thing that you do, because it's not yours, right, like you don't like yeah, you know, like the people who build cities are not the people who owned the cities. And you know if you see this, yeah, like yeah, okay, like in the city is actually owned by like three real estate speculators and like a bunch of cops and more applicable examples like the people who build the cup podcast is not own the podcast. Yeah no, we don't own

the podcast. Like we we are exactly applicable result that you know that can of that. You know, everyone understands that example. Yeah we I actually don't think that people understand that we don't own the podcast. It's actually unclear to me. I I people people have weird things about how podcasting works. But yeah, we don't own the podcast. We just create it and we do all the work. And then Sophie sits in her leather chair looking down

at all the leather chair. Think, I think at all my podcast creations I have created, and then all of us past so bad? How could you think I could sit here on an five degree day in a leather chair to Sophie, at least get your facts right, my

word a chair? Continue, Chris. Okay. So for for for the people who are like actually watching their boss, like sitting around smoking a giant cigar in a factory while they pound like hammers, or like work at a hospital and get a watch like just started a massive cigar and a comically large to prop. But because for the record, whenever I do hang out with my other boss, Robert, he often does sit in some chair smoking a cigar,

and I do think it is in fact leather. Okay, So we're describing Robert before me, the slave away in my laptop writing scripts and yeah, just work in the podcast minds. Yeah, it's it's it is. It is really hard out there, yea, and continue. So okay, So, like the belief that you produced the world and that if

you produce you should own it. It's like this this is not unique to the part of the workers movement that like you know, thinks that also you should like have a democracy and the factory and like you should have the autonomy to decide how you do your work

and what needs to be done. Uh. That those beliefs like broadly comprise the ally of like the entire workers movement, and and by you know, by by the twenty century, the workers movement is really really broad, right, I mean it stretches from sort of like really mild social democratic trade unionists to like the intellectual heads of these like Leninist vanguard parties. But what what makes the democratic wing unique is that their concern is the fundamental alienation of

factory life. And and this this is i mean, originally like it is very much factory life, but like this this gets expanded out as this goes on into sort of the like the fundamental alienation of labor itself, which is just this condition of being reduced to an object by bosses who use you as a tool to do something. And you know, and this this is a concern for everyone in some sense, but but for the Lenins and social democrats, alienation is just like a product of ownership

or distribution. Right. So you know, if if that's what you believe the way you defeat alienation is through the working class of productive capacity, not in it, not in sort of like any kind of like in a human like humanity of creativity. Like all I to do is like, well, okay, you flip a switch, right, and the factory is now owned by the state instead of being owned by like JP Morgan or something like, Now your alienation is gone. That's how it works. Yeah, Or and and your social democracy.

It's like, well, okay, so you you you you flip a switch and taxes get higher, and now you have a union, but you're still working for gold You're still working for the Goldman Sachs. But you know, but for for for for for the wing of the workers movements that you know actually cares about democracy. This doesn't solve anything, right, like, as long as the fundamental relation of being the like

of being an object rights. As long as like you, fundamentally the worker are are not are not a human being who has agency and control and autonomy over their life. As long as you're just an object that you know, like you're you're like you you you're a living human tool that the one man ruler of the factory can like you know, can can wield round to do whatever

they want as as long as that persists. Changes in ownership, structure and need like health benefits missed the entire point, and this kind of the degradation that comes from just being a tool can only be solved by returning agency and autonomy to the working class. And that means like actually giving the class control over the production process. And you know, in in in six in Spain, workers are like funk this and decided to take the entire thing

into their own hands. And they do this by just seizing their workplaces and mass and this becomes known as a Spanish revolution um and it is one of the most extensive sort of experiments. And like workers democratic self managements or like whatever whatever you want to call people making their own decisions in the workplace like that has

ever happened, like especially in the modern era. Like everything from like public utilities to like bakeries to hospitals to shoe factories like falls under the direct control of these

like democratic unions. And once their bosses have been like you know, chased from the premises and like flee and terror uh, these workers set about like transforming the entirety of Spanish society along democratic lines, like they pulled their resources together collectively and that they allocate them democratically for the benefit of society as a whole. And for a

brief moment this works. They have this incredible, like this triumphant experiment democratic self managements, and output increases dramatically and social services are expanded, and like in in In in the span of two years in the middle of a civil war, like the workers of Spain are able to create a universal health care system that expands kara into like like rural areas of Spain where like you couldn't

get it before. But you know, the problem is once again is that this is happening to the civil war and and a lot like you know, using sort of like nominally anti fascism like as as they're sort of like you know, they're using the threat of the need to post fascism as as a sort of front like

a French for what they're actually doing. You get this alliance of liberals, liberal socialists and Stalinists who just like brutally stamp out any attempt that you democratic self management, and like you have like Soviet car duration like n KVD, like Soviet secret police, guys like literally leading armies into into these cities and like like like killing the workers and then physically like taking control of these factories that people had sees and giving them back to the bosses,

which is you know, this is this is great. This is a great communist stuff. And yeah, the you know, and this this this ends exactly how you would expect it to end with. Oh yeah, like this this the Stalinists get everything they want. They murder all of the people who want like a factory council, and then they all get killed by Franco. But you know, undeterred by sort of the casualty tolls of these like massacres by

people who want bosses. Uh, this just keeps happening, and you know, by the time you get to like all this stuff is back like there there's there's factory councils again in Hungary, you get them in Italy and France and the Zichoslovakia eight there's like like they're they're, they're, they're there's councils being like there, there's there's communes being

formed in like Vietnam. There's like they're there. We've talked about the Court on Asonu in in Chile on the show before, Like, these things are happening everywhere, and I think Hungary in particular is a really interesting one because so there's a revolution in Hungary against sort of the Soviets in the X that's it gets a lot of the same liberal mythologizing that you get with Tenemen, but

like kind of more egregious here. So I don't know, I think, like I got taught this revolution in schools is like one of the few ones that we actually get, and they taught it as this like this is like the Hungarian revolution was just like kind of nationalists, like liberal democratic revolution for people who wanted like democracy and

freedom and like free markets. And then like you know, if you go read about what the people were at but people actually doing the revolution we're saying, you get quotes like this, This is a direct quote from a member of one of the Hungarian workers councils the time when the boss is decided, our fate is over, and it's like, ha, these these got these guys do not seem like I don't know, these guys don't steam like

liberal democrats that something weird is happening here. That's something that's actually happening is it like Hungarian workers like sea control of their factories and like the workplaces, and they formed workers councils the overs of the government and then the Russian slaught of them all. But you know, like this is not a liberal democratic revolution at all, that this is a revolt against the tatorship in the workplace.

And there's an identical revolts break out across both the capitalist world and the communist world, and in the newly de colonized society start seeing them too, and you know, and to the sort of like dismay of both the communists and the capitalists who are both like, oh my god, why is and we keep forming workers councils like this solution to alienation, Like it's not like an ideological thing, right, Like it's it's not that there's like a group of

people who are like secretly infiltrating these countries and being like, okay, you needful workers councils. This this is this stuff is happening in places where there's just like none of that. So like what one of one of the sort of like movements that does stuff like this is is the

revolution in Algeria? Um, you know, and they're like they're there they were like Algeria like does have a pretty high level of political education, but the political education they're getting is from like it's it's from the National Liberation Front, which is like asofar As, it's any one thing. It's like it's a nationalist vanguardist movements, which is you know that they're the people who like fight the French colonizers and beat them. And their ideology like asofar As, you

can describe one idea allogion. Like the thing that they want is like the state having this decisive role in national development. But you know, immediately it's taking power off.

And Bambella, who's Algeria's first president, like discovers that, you know, he he's not actually going to be the one like making the decision about what the country's economic cruature is going to be because he takes power and a whole bunch of like French people who live in Algeria of flee, and basically what happens immediately after is that all of like all of these this property that had been originally like held by by by French sort of colonists, like

it gets immediately seized by the Algerian working class and you know, they build their own workers councils, and you know, BenBella is like, Okay, I guess I guess we have like workers councils now, like I guess I guess we have sort of like autonomous democratic production and BenBella is like kind of trying to undermine them. But he doesn't really get a chance too, because once again there's a military coup and BenBella, like he I think he escapes,

it doesn't die. But like the fact that the councils all sort of get dismantled again. But like the number of times this has happened is getting just like completely out of hand, and it's like yeah, okay, the it's like yeah, okay, so every time this happens, they murder everyone.

But like, you know, the revolutions keep happening, and they keep happening, and they keep happening, and you know, even even as late as like the late seventies, like it's not clear that that that like it's it's not clear that the people who want one man role the factory are gonna win. Like there's this moment in Italy nineteen seventy seven where it's like this this like giant student

Student and Worker Coalition almost takes power. Um, Like in Spain even after like fifty years of of like Franco and like the fascist octatorship, like the c n T, which is the anarchist union that had done the revolution like reappears in the seventies again even though everyone thought it was gone, and like, you know, this is a real this is a real source of strife for especially the sort of capitalist managerial elite. Who are you know

they this stuff keeps happening. It's like okay, like it is an unacceptable risk that one of the one day, one of these groups is going to win. And so they start looking for a way to like dismantle this sort of like systemic things that like create that that caused people to do this. But you know, but they're but they're trying to do it in a way that doesn't involve them giving up their power. Um. So yeah,

it's Vicky Austen. While it's out this sort of like this like instinctive embrace of like democracy and the factory, like as a political program, it's only possible as long as factories, as long as like the factory functions is the point of encounter. Her. I think It was her term for which she calls it a darker Gora, which is like, so Gore is like like the sort of like the Greek marketplace in the center of a town.

Everyone goes there and you like talk about things, right, and the factory serves as this kind of like it's this sort of like dark version of it where like, on the one hand, you know, it facilitates these interactions that allow people to sort of like identify with each other and like you know, create collective meaning by like

interacting with each other. But on the other hand, it exists to exploit you, and it's like terrible and you're just getting you know, you're getting physically and socially destroyed like every moment you're in it. But you know it's it's still is a place where you can like assemble an identity as like like you and a bunch of people around you can go like, hey, like we are workers, right, like we are the working class, and this this is like a shared political identity that you have that allows

you to do things. And so the thrust of sort of the attack against this takes the form of this attack on like the shop floor as like a site of like formation of identities that that can allow you to mobilize stuff. And so this takes like a number of forms. Um most famously, there's there's it's the industrialization

and this sort of like spatial relocation of factories. So like like part of what's going on, right is that you have a you have a bunch of people who work in a factory, and then they live like around like right around the factories. Right, they work in a coal mine, and the eyyone lives in a town around the coal mine. And this means that everyone sees each other constantly, and they're like constantly like running into each

other and like physically talking to each other. And you know, this is a really good way to create radical politics. So what happens is you these factories get sent out to the suburbs, and this allows you to create places where you know, workers are isolated from each other, and you know, and the other thing you can do is you turn workers into homeowners and you sort of like buy them all off for this combination of like cheap credit and this promise that like their houses will not

be a financial asset. And so as the sort of eighties rolls on, the sort of the the like the herald of democratization of finance replaces democrazation. The factory is sort of the capitalist class. Like the other thing they do that's like really insidious is they they tied like

the remaining union pensions into the stock market. And this is stuff like you see today with like four O one case, and it means that like if you want to like have a retirement, you are like physically literally invested in the stock market, which ties you know, which ties everyone sort of like into the system. And corporations start to turn workplaces into these like enormous propaganda apparatus.

Is you get like like Walmart in particular, has these like like these vast ideological like programming things that they run that are designed to sort of like get you to identify with like the corporation itself and not with like the other people you're you know, like the other people you're within the class as a whole, and you know, and like the other thing that they're able to do is the fact that capital is mobile and workers like

aren't allows you know, combines with like logistics advances, and it means that like if workers ever start getting an upper hands somewhere, capitalists can just leave. And the process that you see is that as this sort of the total number of people working in in the like in industrial work keeps decreasing, right as a cential of the population, it keeps decreasing. And as this happens, capitalists are just like, okay, scirt, we're gon, we're gonna, We're gonna pick up our tools

and leave. And this spits out like enormous populations who are just like kicked out of pratitional workforce entirely. And these developments, this is what actually like eventually destroys the classical workers t mouvement is the abilability to leave in the sort of destruction of the factory is like a site of stuff. But in order for this to work, the one thing they need is a place to move

to write. They need somewhere with this large exploitable labor supply that has been like crushed enough that it won't revolt against them. And the capitalist class finds that in our products and services, and we're we're we're back. We're we're back, and we're we're back to China. And Okay, so I've been talking about the way this sort of like this this whole system like this whole factory system

mass production stuff like develops. But China is weird because this is the one place where the factory system works like really differently than everywhere else. Um. There's a lot of reasons for this, one of which is it like so Chinese like stayed on firms. It's like almost impossible for them to fire someone because I mean there's a lot of reasons for this, and one of them is that like people's entire sort of social sphere is built

around their work unit. And like their work unit is like it's it's the company you work for, and there's this whole sort of like legal apparatus built around it, and it's like you know, and like this like unit gives you everything from like your retirement, like it like feeds you. Like there's often like entertainment stuff like tied into it, like you healthcare, you get like childcare from it.

And the CP also gets rid of the peace rate system, which is just like this is this thing that like I mean, it's so there's a lot of capitalist places to work with this word's like okay, so the peace rate system is you pay people for like every unit of something they produce, So like you get paid by like I don't know, like how many like how many pounds of like cherities you can pick. And so the USSR brings this back because the USSR and the US

are really not that different. But China is like, nah, this like sucks. This is capitalism, and you know, okay, like I'm gonna say, the fact Chinese factory system is great, but like because they don't have the peace rate system

is because they can't fire people. You get this very you get this weird thing where it's like the people who run the factories like don't have very good ways to force people to work, and because of this, they like they sort of like have to allow this degree of participation in the worker process, like in the labor process that like you don't really see most of the places and the everything they have that I luckily Garrison and I also have this is we have the ability

to criticize our bosses. Although we we have more of this these guys. But one day, go ahead, one one okay, we we we've got it. We we don't we don't have our big character poster yet, but like one day Garrison and I are going to show up to the office with like giant big character posters with your faces on it. They like have specifically Roberts are gonna have a list of crimes on it. My favorite part of like big labor protests when they make those giant like puppets.

If we just make a giant's tick puppet version of Robert and Sophie that we just prayed around the office, that's long as mind's bigger than Robert's, that's fine, we can do that, great right, full support. So we were

got to do this in China. It's it's weird, like you have the ability to do this, but like it's like run to the party, and so if someone gets unpopular enough, like the party will like start a campaign about how bad like that one boss is, and then you can show up to like the meeting and go like, hey, I hate my boss. This guy sucks. But then it's

replacing with like another boss. Right, So it's not like it's not actually a democratic system really, but the way that it works ensures that like the people who are managers are like pretty popular at least to some extents, like are popular and people don't like really hate them.

And this means that you know, because there's all of this stuff that makes the Chinese factor is different from like the other systems, and also because of like structural stuff in Maoism that I mean, I could talk about that, but I don't like talking about Maoism. But basically the product of this is that, like you have in China during this period a lot of demands for democracy, but they're really they're not they're not tied to the workplace

at all. They're they're they're mostly like political demands for like democracy in the party or stuff like that. And that means, like you know, at least in the cities, this system like kind of works okayish until the Cultural Revolution, where everything falls apart. And this means that it is at long last time for me to do the Cultural revolution rant, which is something I have been planning for. Like yeah, I'm very I'm very excited about this. I've

been waiting for an excuse and I finally have one. Okay, So the cultural revolution rant is that everyone gets the Cultural revolution completely wrong, Like everyone every like it's like it's it's one of the rare events where like it's misinterpreted in like exactly the same way by both people who support it and the people who oppose it um

and Okay. The first thing to understand about this, right is, like, okay, so the the initial the very very beginning of the culture revolution, like it's basically a in sort of like teenagers kind of like it's like middle schoolers essentially, and they're attacking these they're attacking like other kids at their school. And these kids are kids who have what's called a black blood background, like black blood, which means that like they're they're the children of people who were from like

quote unquote bad class backgrounds. And this is really weird for a number of reasons. One because you have you have a sort of like a pseudo class system based on like who your parents were, right, you have people who have red blood who had like good class backgrounds, like your parents are workers, or your parents worked with

the party or something. And then you have people who are from like bad class backgrounds quote unquote, who like are persecuted and like, okay, like I don't really care that much if you're like persecuting like a Shanghai oligarch who like collaborated with the French and Japanese imperialists or whatever. But like a this extends to like the children of these people and a lot of the children these people weren't even alive when their parents were like you know,

like doing stuff that was bad. And the other thing is that like the term bad class background this is really loose. Like I I know people whose families were declared like declared like black class backgrounds, who have black blood and like you know, they're they weren't allowed to hold in the government position. And the reason that this happened to them was that her dad had made bird feeders before the revolution and they considered that like petite bourgeois.

And it's like this is like this is like like what like what what are you doing? Like you you you reproduced like you've turned class into like a pseudo race thing that's like her like you like inherit from your parents, even though like their parents don't own property anymore.

Because it's it's really bizarre and and and what's what's happening here is the kids from the red class backgrounds are are are you know, they're they're the kids of the new of the new Chinese elite, and they're just like picking on attacking the kids who are like now this this sort of like like my minority class and so what it amounts to at the beginning of this is a bunch of privileged, rich kids who are like attacking a bunch of kids are being persecuted for stuff.

It's like not their fault at all. And you know, part and the other, the other part of this, like this is the part of the people. I think. Yeah, it's like Mao is trying to like play power games inside the party blah blah blah blah blah. But you know, things get more and more chaotic, and you get you get circutting his attacks on like CCP bureaucrats and cadres and stuff, because Mao is trying to like Mao was trying to solidify his place in the party and he's

like blah blah blah. There's other stuff that's happening. Um but then it gets really interesting. Um. So, so the starts in at six, right, and at the very beginning of sixty seven, there's something there's something called the January Storm, which is where a bunch of rebel workers just seize control of Shanghai and like they run the party out, they run the other they run I think they run the army out too, And you know, and now like

they they control the city of Shanghai. And this is like an oh funk moment from Mao because you know, now he has to deal with this city that has been taking over by its own working class. And I found this this incredible line from Joe and Lai who's having meeting with Mao and they're trying to figure out what to do about the fact that like this, this, this, like that Shanghai has been seized by by these workers

and I'm just gonna read this. When asked whether the new leadership should be elected from the bottom up, Joe and ly replied bluntly that quote anarchism is bound to develop if we immediately implement direct elections of the Paris Commune type. And I think this is like this is this really incredible, like like the thing you can find right, because it's like, okay, well, there's two things that can

happen here. One is either like, okay, you you you you give these people democracy and the ability to vote, right, and Joe and Lyon Matt look at this and you're like,

that would be anarchist if we can't do that. And the second thing is you don't do that, and you oppressed them and they take the second line, and you know, okay, like it takes them a bit to get this ramped up, right, It takes them a bit to get the sort of kind of revolution thing they're doing to like stop all of this rebel stuff that they've started to to get

it takes some about a year. But but by ninety eight, the students and the workers who had like you know, done done this sort of uprising stuff so are getting slaughtered.

Like's just master killed on an unimaginable scale. Uh. And this is this is where everyone gets the Culture Revolution completely wrong, because everyone the entire memory of the Culture Revolution is from basically the first two years of it, right, which is like all the stuff about like like you know, like professors being marched out onto the street and dunce caps and like students like humiliating the professors and like like party officials being like marched around with like placards

on them, and like people like that's something like the chaos of the revolution. Like that's that's stuff everyone remembers. That's the first two years of this. There's still like I mean, you can are like there's there's there's the short the short the quote unquote short culture revolution, which is like the high point of the activity goes from nineteen nineteen nineteen sixty nine, and then there's like a longer one that goes to like the death of maud

If and how you want to count it. But almost all of the actual violence in this period happens in this in in in the third phase, which is the so the first phase of the Didicial uprising, and then the rebel groups start fighting each other. But then phase three is when the state like cracks down on like start starts like starts trying to crush this like rebel

student factions. And I'm going to read from Walder who did ah, so is this guy n in Walder who who went to he did a bunch of work in the Chinese archives, which he like went and like found the death tolls. And I'm gonna read like he like he goes he'll s a bunch of archives. He goes to a bunch of state archives, and he like like tracks down the death certificates and tracks down like who died where? And this this is what he wrote about it.

More than three four of all documented deaths and local animals are due to the actions of authorities in the in this third phase and then more than of those persecuted for alleged political crimes. So what are he's saying here is that seventy five percent of all of the deaths the entire Culture Revolution weren't done by like the revolution parts. They were done by the state murdering the

workers faction, the rebel factions. And not only that, nine of of the actual political persecution was done by the states and not by the rebels. And when when when when you actually look at what this means, Like this means everything everything anyone ever talks about the Culture Revolution is completely wrong. It wasn't like the thing had happened to the Culture Revolution. Wasn't that sort of student radicalism got out of control and they started killing everyone that

preaces all this violence. The thing that actually happens is that there's a student like uprising, right, But what happens is that the sort of conservative and state factions just

slaughter them. And I Walt Walter estimates that the total number of people dead, it's somewhere between one point one and one point six million people, and again, like seventy five percent, and I think it's actually slightly higher than that, like percent of the people who were killed in this are killed by the state, and you know this, this has an enormous effect on I mean just everything that happens in Chinese and Chinese society from then on, because,

on the one hand, the popular memory of the Cultural Revolution persists as this thing that was like, this is what happens if you like if people outside the party and like students in radicals like start like making trouble.

Is that you get all these people dead. But then you know, you have the people inside the state who like know how many people they had to kill in order to hold onto power, right, they kill they kill probably more people than like the you know, there's there's there's there's a very famous massacre of like communists or like suspected communist Indonesia that doesn't get called a genocide because it was technically on political lines, but like it

was one of the worst Eni coommunist massacres in history, and they killed more people from that during this period, and that like that level of violence and the fact that the people running the state understand what they had to do, it means you get you get an elite that's incredibly paranoid about like anything that like smells like organizing happen outside the party. And the other thing happens is that like the most radical students and workers of

this period just get that they're all dead right. They killed they killed like they they killed like a million people the you know, for for for for for every one person who got killed, there's about nineteen people who were like persecuted in a lot of way. And that's like a lot of people are tortured. A lot of these people are like sent to prisons. They're like like

really horrible stuff happens to people. And this process keeps going like through through the seven Like there there's a huge spike in like state killings nineteen seventy, and by by the end of the seventies, like anything that's sort of like could have cohered into into like a movement that like wants democraty in the workplace, for example, it's

just gone. Because all of all of the radicals, like and anyone, anyone who wanted anyone who wanted democraty in factory, any the people who were like even sort of like just like sort of rebellious, like these people have all been killed. And the consequence of this is that throughout the through the eighties, you get the politics that's driven by this like sort of like intellectual liberal like liberal

democratic politics that ignores completely ignores work class entirely. And you know, and these these people start to take power, and you get danjel Paying. Well, I think I think

it's it's like right before it takes power. But danjel Ping wise up implementing the one child policy, which is this like incredibly draconian and really successful attempts just like re established the states like patriarchal control over the household and strips like hundreds of millions of women from like like of of of autonomy over their own bodies, and you know, and and and and and it really looks like through through the through through through like the late

seventies and the eighties, it looks like like the Chinese ruling classes succeeded, right like they finally destroyed that they finally destroyed like any opposition to them. But then you know, things get very weird, which is that itemen happens and you know by by by night nine, like the whole like like as as a rule, like in general everywhere the sort of classical workers neve meant that was like

at demanding democracy the factory. Like they're basically done, and so they're they're unable to sort of do their own revolutions now. The only thing they can do is sort of like latch onto other stuff. But the problem that the party has is that so they've had a lot of measures in place to try to make sure that you never got these kind of movements in China, and

they kind of worked. But when it went through the nighties, like China starts implementing a market economy, right, they start, they started they started like cutting this the welfare state. They start like destroying the sort of like limited control that works has had in the factories, and they kind of like unknowingly reproduced the conditions that have been producing

these revolutions in every other country. And you know, as this massive inflation wave hits, they turned China into this powdern keg and this you know, and this combined with so like the liberal democratic students moving gets you this really interesting and weird ideology that these workers happen. I'm going to read it from from an interview with with

with one of the workers who was a gentleman. Why do a lot of workers agree with democracy and freedom in the workshops, does what the workers say count or what leader says? We later talked about it. In the factory the dictatorship. Sorry, in the factory, the director is a dictator. What one man says goes. If you view the state through the factory, it's about the same one man rule. Our objective is not very high. We just want workers to have their own independent organizations in work units.

It's personal rule. For example, if I want to change jobs, the bus company foreman won't let me go. I ought to go home at five at five pm, but he tells me to work overtime for two hours. And if I don't cut my bonus, this is a personal rule. A factory should have a system. If a worker wants to change jobs, they ought to have a system of

rules to decide how to do it. Also, these rules should be decided upon by everyone and then afterwards anyone who violates it will be punished according to the rules. This is rule by law. Now, we don't have this kind of legal system. And okay, that's a really like I don't know, I think it's a really interesting sort

of like fusion of a whole bunch of stuff. Right, because on the one hand, like the sort of like ruling discourse that's happening that the things that students are talking about is like that we need the democracy, read

the rule of law. And but you know, the workers in these factories are looking at are looking at like the situation they're facing, and they're like, ha, we don't have a democracy like here either, right, And so you get this, you get what's a really conservative framing of the sort of a very sort of very classical like critique of woman ruling the factory that has been happening

for like, you know, like a hundred years. But what's just thinking about this is that like any actual attempt to like do this right get gets you to workers control,

like democratic workers control in the factory. And as Walder who wald Walder also wrote another like he's a guy who went and interviewed a bunch of the people who have been of workers who have been involved with this, and as as they point out like this unlike really like any other time in Chinese history, like the the people who are part of like the Beijing Autonomous Workers Autonomous Federation are you know, they don't they don't have

an intellectual class like this. These are these are just a bunch of workers and they have very little connection like they don't they they have very little like political connections right like beforehand, like to to the laberal circles are just sort of hearing what they're reading and this is this means like what you have here is like

it's not like an intellectra like this is. This is just a bunch of workers and for you know, for for for like one final time, their instinct when when the revolution sort of like starts, is the demand democracy in the factory. And this demand, like above all others, is completely politically unacceptable. And you know, and when when the army markers on Beijing, it's it's these workers that they wipe out, and they wipe them out so thoroughly that the fact that this is what these people were

fighting for is it's it's scrubbed. For the record of the DCP, it's scrubbed like the protomocracy move it doesn't remember it, even though their entire thing is memory. And yeah, and this this ensures that the meeting of these actual events, what the people were fighting for, what they were trying

to do, has been almost completely lost. And I think at this point we can finally ask what what what actually was tianeman Um And in some sense in the in the Chinese context itself, it's a transition between two

different Chinese working classes. These protests are sort of like this is the last like political sort of like mobilization of like the of the old Chinese working class, which is in these people who had been in the cities, who had been like they had been the beneficiaries of this old sort of like socialist period welfare state, and these people in in the streech around Chaneam and they mount the last attack of the of the classical workers stutments.

And when they lose, this entire class like this, this this entire urban working class that had been around since like the twenties, that have been sort of the driver of Chinese radical politics, that had been like that have been have been fighting and striking for like seventy eighty years.

They they're they're gone. They're completely destroyed. And over the course of the economical structure in the nineties there they ceased to exist as a class, and they're replaced by a new Chinese working class, which is drawn from sort of these rural and sort of semi urban under classes of the old social system who are like draggings, who are dragging the cities from from their villages, from their towns, and who now fill actually, well, I don't I don't

know what the numbers are today because it's weird because of COVID, But like there were two and seventy seven billion of these people of this enormous market worker like force who formed the backbone of like the entire Chinese working class. And these people who they have rural house and registrations, and this means that they don't get any of the benefits, like the sort of like welfare benefits

that you would get from living in a city. And this means that they're you know, the they they constitute like an entirely new class of of workers. And instead of you know, like whatever sort of privileges had had been like carved out by the old working class, this one gets nothing. And the other thing that they get is this entire raft to sort of capitalist ideology that's

based into like every aspect of their workplace culture. This this is massive attempt in China to get people to buy homes and you know, the like when where the old working class could at least like positive the factory is like a place where you could have democracy, where like life could be improved by like different controlled factories. Like this new working class like the thing that they want the most is to leave the factory and become

a business owner. And you know, like this this probably sounds familiar to like us, right, Like this is this is the old joke about like about the about the American working class, which is that everyone sees themselves as temporarily temporarily embarrassed millionaires and like yeah, you know, in modern China, it's like, yeah, okay, it's like people consider themselves to be like temporarily embarrassed small business owners. And

this stuff. This, this this ideological self conception of like I'm going to work in the factory, that I'm gonna become a small business owner is completely inimical to the formation of like the classical or reservement. And there hasn't been that kind of formation in China sense. And this this is not really unique thing, right that the death of that workers movement has seen a sort of like complete and total collapse of the demand for like democrat

self management like everywhere across the entire world. And you know, incredibly stubborn lee, like the working class like refuses to sort of cohare itself in the factory. And so in this sense, China is really just relate to the game. They they they got slightly earlier, they got, they got slightly later to the point that we're at now. You said there was gonna be a happier ending. They had. The happy ending was last episode. This episode is this

episode ending is really depressing. Well, I mean, okay, they're they're, they're, they're, they're Okay, there's a slightly less depressing note kind of Okay. The thing that's less depressing here is that for my entire literally my entire lifetime has been the US lurching from one economic leaps so another, and the world, the world,

like the international economic system. Like I think I was born in like the middle of like the dot com collapse, and then I got eight and then like there's been a bunch of economic collapses in the last like three years, and you know, the whole system has like learned from crisis to crisis to crisis. And that means that there's been an incredible, just like a rapidly increasing number of

revolutions everywhere. Even though the sort of like darker gore of the factory, like as ceased to be this thing that like creates the working like the identity of the working class. And this means that you know, okay, so in order to have some kind of mass movement, you need some kind of collective identity to to mobilize around. And you know, if if you can't make this in the factory, the place where it's going to be made

instead is the street. And this means in the last you know, like twenty yes years, like with with without the sort of positive identity in the workplace to to to to hear itself around, workers are really only a sort of mobilize on a mass basis, like indirect opposition to a threat that can that can that can confront like everyone at the same time. And this is the only thing that can do this is really the state.

And you know, the state has the ability to to increase the price that basic commodities and slash wellfare benefits,

and that becomes the only available enemy. And so yeah, if if you look at what revolutions have been in the last twenty years, it's a constant fight against the police, because fighting in the police is the only thing that can that can allow you to create a new social identity, like a sort of sort of collective identification, and you know, and so this means it collected like modern revolts, like

everything we've seen over the last like four years. The form that it takes is mass street movements and you know, continuous confrontation with the police. And you get to literally see this with with occupy, right. Occupied was originally like the like the slogan occupy was about the Argentina in factory occupations in two one. But then you know that stops, like that's the end, like just one like that that that's that's the end of the whole cycle. There's there's

no more factory occupations actually stitude. You get one in Bosnia has A Govia, which is funny because it's like they occupy a bunch of factories, but like they don't know what to do with them, and so you get just like a regular like occupy like in like into the sort of like square occupation you'd get in like New York or whatever, where everyone's sort of like sitting in a circle talking about stuff, but it's happening in a factory. But but they're not like trying to run production.

They're not trying to do any of that stuff. They're just sort of like they're in the factory. Isn't is no longer this sort of like space of like creation and possibility that could be turned into something new. It's just like a place where you go that's like indistinguishable from like a square. And you know, the last ten years it's like people people. Originally it was like it

doesn't let right, so everyone's everyone's occupying squares. But you know, by by Bouz fourteen, people have figured out that you can't, like it's it's almost impossible to hold a square if the police attempt to run you out. And so this gets your place with running street flights with the police.

But this, you know, this places everyone who's trying to do this in this incredibly dangerous bind because you know, the like the old workers councils were able to bring down states, like largely they got crushed by outside militaries, but they are able to bring down states because you know, there is an enormous amount of power in being able

to control production. But the problem is that like you know, if you're in a square, right, like you don't have the ability to do that and with without the sort of without the factory occupations alongside them. There have been a lot of general strikes in the last four years. There's want of peruse one in France, there's someone in Hong Kong and Soudan, and every single one of them

has been crushed. But you know, but but this is a real problem, right because the current labor conditions aren't going to produce another way of factory occupations, and so the way forward for anyone who, like you know, wants to have a democracy in the workplace is completely unclear. And I think, I think that's the actual legacy of

Tiana Man. The workers who are assembled outside Tianamen Square had already left their factories, and you know, for for for all that they spoke the language of the old workers movements, right, they spoke a democracy in the factory and one man rule. They stood and fought and died like we do in the streets. There's this bridge between sort of the classical workers movements and us, and you know,

they face the same revolutionary crisis that we face. The crisis of Popular and Palestine, Columbia, on Iran and Myanmar, or Hong Kong, of this, this crisis of victory that's just beyond the horizon, can't be grasped. You know, I don't think the people at Cenomen have any answers to give us, Like, I don't think they do. I think they ran, They ran headlong into the crisis that we ran into, and they all died. Yeah. I think expecting answers from the dead is demanding too much of those

who before and after us died fighting for liberation. And all we can really do now is find our own way when, with the names of the dead in our lips, build the world they died fighting for. It could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media and more podcasts from cool Zone Media. Visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It could Happen Here, updated

monthly at cool Zone Media dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.