Tiananmen Remastered, Part 1

in twenty twenty one. Europe has been consumed by war. Whole revolutions rose and fell. The fast threat we defeated in the streets returned to power in a new and more terrifying form. In this new, uglier and more brutal world, I wanted to return to Tianeman, to return to one of the great horrors of another age, to see if we can take anything new from the wreckage of the death of Hope. I'm no longer the same person I was when I originally wrote these episodes, and so today

and tomorrow are Tianamen remastered. There were really three Tianemens. The first and most famous Tieneman was a student protest inside Tianaman Square itself. If you've heard the word Tienemen before this story, you know the second Tienemen was the Tienemen of the blocks of Beijing around the Square, blocks sees and transformed by Beijing's working class. If you've heard about this Tienemen at all, it's probably in the context of the tanks rolling through them on their way to

the Square. And then there was the third Tienemen, the protests in other cities, of which we still years after the original piece. No distressingly little about Our focus today is on the first two. The students of the student protests were a weird ideological grab back that cannot simply be reduced down to the simplistic pro democracy label they've been settled with in the three and a half decades

since Tienemen. The short version is this, the students were pissed off about what's called reform and opening not going fast enough, and we should talk about what reform and opening actually was. On the one hand, you had some steps to ease restrictions on free speech, rehabilitate intellectuals and other people were so called bad class backgrounds, and allow for a broader public discourse. This was paired with market reforms I started to bring capitalism back to China. This

was a shit show in a lot of ways. If you want to hear about the CCP reinventing what's essentially dipped P and che about five years into this process, go listen to my Behind the Bastard's episode about the poisoned milk scandal. But Reform and Opening is remembered as a kind of golden age of free expression, a golden age of hope and possibility where things really seemed like

they could be different. This is not entirely accurate. Reform and Opening also saw a bunch of absolutely draconian crackdowns on the social sphere. There was the One Child policy, a hideous expansion of the states into the sphere of social reproduction, replete with forced sterilizations and the reimposition of patriarchal power. It saw the tightening of one man rule in the factory, the destruction of any form of worker's decision making and control over the process of their own labor.

In these horrors, you can see the beginning of the fragmentation of Tiannemen and Chinese politics more broadly, already forming, the students wanted market form to go faster, They wanted more freedom of speech, they sort of wanted democracy, but mostly they wanted to be in charge of the party so they could crush the bureaucracy that was holding market

reforms back. It's worth noting, of course, that many of these students were involved in what became known as neo authoritarianism, which holds that the strong central party should take full control of society and destroy factions in the bureaucracy. It was an ideology that survived the death of the protests and went on to become a major faction of the CCP itself in the nineties and two thousands, and this is where some of the truly weird shit at Tianeman

comes from. The students were, in many ways an incredibly hierarchical movement which escalated to the point where student leaders were kidnapping each other for control over stages and microphones, and these protests, in terms of their nominally stated goal of influencing the factional fights inside the party, were studyingly in a f actual The guy they were trying to defend inside the party wound up getting ousted and put under house arrest for the rest of his life, and

the changes they demanded failed to occur. But Tianeman, as I mentioned earlier, was also the workers, and for most of the protests the students absolutely hated them. Students barred workers from entering the square itself until the final hours of the protests, tried to stop workers from carrying out a general strike, and relations were in general extremely bad. This raises the question what were the workers doing there

in the first place. There's a few answers. The simplest and most immediate one is that the workers were pissed off at how badly the Party was treating students in the square. But there were other things going on too. The late in eighteen eighties in China saw rampant and skyrocketing inflation. The rapid price increases threatened the supply of cheap grain that composed a huge supply of welfare services

provided to urban workers. Meanwhile, marketization was accelerating, and suddenly you had CCP princelings racing down the streets in imported sports cars, driving past workers on their bikes, and spending a year's salary gambling at the racetrack. And this pissed people off, so they started organizing. I'm going to read a section for a piece by Uron, saying about what the workers were doing during the struggle to obstruct the military.

Workers started to realize the power of their spontaneous organization and action. This was self liberation on an unprecedented level. A huge wave of self organization ensued. The worker's autonomous federation membership grew exponentially, and other workers' organizations both within and across the workplace mushroomed. The development of organization led

to a radicalization of action. Workers started organizing self armed quasi militias such as Quote Picket Corps and Quote Dared to Die brigades to monitor and broadcast the military's whereabouts. These quasi militias were also responsible for maintaining public order so as not to provide any pretext for military intervention. In a sense, Paijing became a city self managed by workers. It was reminiscent of Petrograd's self armed workers organized in

the months between Russia's February and October revolutions. At the same time, Pijing workers built many more barricades and fortifications on the street in many factories that organized strikes and slow downs. A possible general strike was put on the table as well. Many workers started to build connections between factories to prepare for a general strike. This was unaccepsible to the party, and so for the third time in seventy years, the CCP fed its own working class to

the machine guns. On the night of June third, the army began to slaughter its way to the workers defending the square. It was the workers who bore the front of the massacre. Most of the casualty and later political oppression were against members of the workers faction. The army soon reached the square itself for the Western press corps bore witness to what became known as the Tianaman Square massacre. This is where you get tank Man and the most

famous accounts of the massacre. But by that point it was almost all over. The protests were crushed and the Chinese working class died with it. But before the last bullet had even been fired, every faction under the sun began to construct their own narratives about what had just happened. The most common narrative is that Tianeman was a clash between democracy and authoritarianism, and to some extent it's not exactly wrong. There were a lot of other pro democracy

movements in this period. You see them in Taiwan and Korea. They swept across huge swaths of Latin America and eventually spread to places like the Philippines. But the real question of the pro democracy movements was what kind of democracy. The students at Tieneman, to the extent that their democratic principles were sincere and not simply cover for a deeply authoritarian version of liberalism that demanded rule of law by a new class of intellectuals to oversee market reforms, believed

in a narrow conception of political democracy. This political democracy operates at the level of the state. It's based on free citizens equal before the law, participating in elections to choose representatives who pass laws and generally oversee and manage the state bureaucracy. This model of political democracy relegates the workplace to a separate economic sphere into which democracy does

not extend. The capitalist firm or its state owned equivalent, remained the absolute dictatorship of the capitalists and their managerial flunkies. Even the progressive wings of the pro democracy movements in Taiwan and South Korea maintained this private dictatorship. Workers would be given rights under the progressive regimes, permission to form unions, access to the welfare state, limited protections from the worst

physical and psychological abuses their bosses could inflict. But no matter how progressive the pro democracy movement, the legitimacy of the dictatorship of the bosses was not up for dispute. To them, democracy meant a democratic state, not a democratic workplace. The workers of Tienemen alone disagreed. They stood against not only the rest of the world's pro democracy movements, but

the tide of history itself. By applying the principles of the pro democracy movement to their own concerns skyrocketing inflation, mounting debt, rampant corruption by government officials, spiraling inequality, and petty bureaucratic oppression, Beijing's working class reinvented an old and now largely forgotten traditional democracy in the factory, democratic workers self management. This is, to a large extent, what Tianmen

was actually about. It was the culmination of a century and a half long war between the democratic wing of the classical workers' movement and essentially every other ideological movement on Earth. The worker's movement would fight capitalists and communists, liberals and fascists, monarchies and republics, social democracies and theocracies, and at Tienemen they would lose one final time. That

defeat is the origin of the modern world. One man rule in the factory, in its thousand thousand forms is the author of the hell of the twenty first century. And when we come back, we're going to look at the international part of the struggle that ended at Tianeman. To fully understand the magnitude of Tianemen, we need to go back to the revolutions of eighteen forty eight. If you want a detailed accounting of eighteen forty go listen

to the Revolutions podcast. It's great. It's also many, many, many, many, many many episodes. The short version is that there were a bunch of revolutions across Europe in eighteen forty eight, collectively known as the Springtime of the Peoples. It was the first wave of revolutions where socialists were a real political faction. Frederick Engels death that angles of Marx and Engels fame was on the barricades with a rifle fighting

in Prussia. There was a huge revolution in France where they deposed the king and the question of how far democracy was going to go came for the first time

to the forefront. Inside of a democratic movement itself, you had a split between the sort of French radicals who done the original French Revolution, who wanted electoral democracy but dictatorship in the workplace, and the new socialists who wanted to question property relations and the question of class itself, and most importantly for our purposes, whether democracy would extend past the political sphere and directly into economics. These prefigures

a split inside the socialist movement itself. For the most radical factions, control over the means of production meant that workers would control the production process directly through free associations of workers direct democratic unions, a position later known as syndicalism or workers councils. But more conservative factions of the socialists became enamored with the bureaucratic technologies of the state.

They watched with envy as the industrializing powers of the eighteen sixties and eighteen seventies engage in increasingly elaborate planning schemes, first of roads canals in railroads, then of entire cities with complex electrical grids, gas lines and plumbing systems, and began to believe that centralized state planning, not the democratic association of workers, could bring about the long sought after cooperative commonwealth of socialism, and that planning obsessed facts began

to encompass more and more of the left. In Germany, home to the powerful German Social Democratic Party, socialists became divided between two camps, the Revisionists led by Edward Bernstein, who renounced Marxism and Revolution entirely in favor of reforming capitalism in the state from within, and Karlkovski's orthodox Marxists. Basically, the only two things these factions, who otherwise despise each other, agreed on was the primacy of state bureaucratic planning over

workplace democracy. This led to the Social Democratic Party disastrously working to break the workplace autonomy of many of its own workers, but were still The person who became most obsessed with the potential of bureaucratic state planning was one

Vladimir Bilitch Lenin. As the anthropologist David Graeber pointed out, Lenin's obsession with the German postal service was such that he included this passage about the future social state in his famous State and Revolution a text written between the February October revolutions of nineteen seventeen. Quote a witty German social democrat of the seventies of the last century called the postal service an example of the socialist economic system.

This is very true. At present. The postal service is a business organized on the lines of a state capitalist monopoly. Imperialism is gradually transforming all trust into organizations of a similar type to organize the whole national economy on the lines of the postal service, so that the technicians, foreman, bookkeepers, as well as all officials receive salaries no higher than a workman's wage, all under the leadership and control of

the armed proletariat. This is our immediate aim. Lenin's idealized form of socialism would thus take the form of a total state bureaucracy tasked with planning the entire economy. This would set off a massive series of confrontations with the part of the workers movement who wanted workers control over the means of production to mean workers making decisions overworked themselves and not just working for a different set of bureaucrats.

The struggle between bureaucracy and democracy in the workers movement mirrorred the struggle between the workers movements and the capitalist state. By the eighteen eighties, the workers movement had created variable states within a state in countries like Germany and Italy.

These quote unquote states were vast networks of workers' institutions, ranging from as grape were described free schools, workers associations, friendly societies, libraries and theaters end quote to unions, co ops, neighborhood associations, tennis unions, mutual aid societies, and political parties ran democratically by workers themselves, which provided vital services to workers and their families, and served, so the workers hoped,

as the basis for a new socialist society. Fearing the popularity of these democratic works workers' institutions, Otto von Bismarck created bureaucratic, state run versions of the library's, theaters and welfare services to replace them. Telling an American observer quote, my idea was to bribe the working class, or shall I say, to win them over, to regard the state as a social institution existing for their sake and interested in their welfare. And this works. It was enormously successful.

Socialists themselves came to confuse Bismarck's welfare state bribe with socialism itself, and when they took power, they replicated the bureaucratic nature of many of Bismarck's programs, eliminating the democratic aspects of the older workers' institutions entirely. But where their leaders I'd forgotten the democratic core of the Rowan ideology,

workers themselves never did. As the nineteenth century drew to a close and the twentieth century began, workers who engaged in spontaneous uprisings instinctively began to form democratic institutions, particular clarly workers councils. The most famous of these councils, of course, were formed between the spontaneous Russian revolutions of nineteen oh

five in nineteen seventeen. These councils, called soviets, were originally formed in nineteen oh five out of ad hoc strike committees that became formalized elected bodies of representatives in the various factions who worked to coordinate the general strike. The revolution of nineteen oh five was crushed by the Czar, but in nineteen seventeen the Russian working class would once

again form workers' councils as another revolution commenced. This time, the councils would take control of production, directly coordinating between various factories and industries, as well as serving as a worker's counterpower to the new revolutionary government. The Russian Revolution kicked off a period of open warfare that stretched from Italy to Argentina between the forces of democracy and the factory and the newly formed anti democratic alliance of social Democrats,

Bolsheviks capitalists. Between nineteen in seventeen and nineteen twenty, workers councils formed in Germany, Poland, Austria, Ukraine, and Ireland, and were matched by revolts of syndicalist unions in Brazil and Argentina. These uprisings were all crushed in Italy, which saw some of the most intense conflict between syncalists and the Italian state. The famous occupation of the Factories was ended not by the Italian government but by the Italian Socialist Party in

their union, the General Confederation of Labor. This, in large part, was how fascism won in Italy and in Germany. Faced with workers movements on the verge of seizing power, social democrats turned on the working class slaughtered their own comrades, propelling the fascists into power in their wake. Ironically, the worst defeat of the democratic workers movements will come not at the hands of the capitalists or social democrats, but from Lenin and the Bolsheviks, the very party at the

workers councils had put in power. Lenin began to undermine the the power of the Soviets almost immediately. Published mere days after the October Revolution, his draft Decrees on Workers Control stated in no uncertain terms that real power and authority lay with the new state and the Bolshevik dominated trade unions. In the face of massive and unexpected resistance from the workers councils, the decree is needed to be

modified before they could be implemented. But while publicly declaring his support for the workers councils, the Bolshevik slogan was after all, all power to the Soviets, Lenin continued to trip away at their power until he finally admitted his real position of democracy in the Factory in nineteen eighteen in the Horrifying the immediate tasks of the Soviet government quote unquestioning submission to a single will is absolutely necessary for the success of labor processes that are based on

large scale machine industry today, the revolution demands, in the interests of socialism, that the masses on we obey the single will of the leaders of the labor process. This is obviously one of the most disturbing things I've ever read. But to be clear, while Lenin is more candid about what one man rule in the factory actually entails, the system he's describing isn't actually different from one man rule

and any other political system. Bolshevik rule in the factory would be no different than capitalist, social democratic, or even fascist rule. The movement for democracy in the factory now faced four implacable enemies willing to put aside their ideological differences to ensure that workers would not run their workplaces directly, and as the nineteen twenties bled into the nineteen thirties, the movement seemed to have all but disappeared in a

haale of bullets and blood. But they didn't. And next episode, our heroes, the collective hero the world's working class will be back. They will do any many more revolutions, and we're going to talk about why those revolutions happened, what the ruling class did to stop them, And then returned to the lead up to Tianaman Square to see the final stand of the Chinese working class.