Tiananmen Remastered, Part 2

one hundred years. The development of the mass factory system and the logistical infrastructure necessary to support it, perhaps most importantly, coal mines and the railroads used to transport that coal, generated an especially militant working class that saw democratic control

over the workplace as a fundamental aspect of its liberation. Ideologically, as the Journal and Notes pointed out, this man infested in a series of interlocking beliefs about the nature of the working class and class society, all of which were necessary for the instinctive formation of workers councils to manifest

themselves in moments of revolutionary crisis. In the midst of the rapid technological expansions of the Second and Third Industrial revolutions, workers came to see themselves as the creators of the new world. This produced the second belief that drove the classical workers movement. The producers of this new world should also be its inheritors. Thus, the goal of the worker's movement was to take control of production in itself and

manage it for the common benefit of workers themselves. These two beliefs in and of themselves were not unique to the democratic wing of the workers movement. They broadly comprised the ideology of the movement as a whole, and by this point the workers movement was extremely broad, stretching from social democratic trade unionists the intellectual heads of the laf

Leninist vanguard parties. What made the democratic wing unique was its concern with the fundamental alienation of factory life, with the condition of being reduced to an object by bosses who simply used workers as human tools. For the Leninists and social Democrats, alienation was simply a product of ownership or distribution. The liberation of the working class would be found in its productive capacity, not in its innate humanity

and creativity. Before the democratic wing of the Workers movement, this solved nothing as long as the fundamental reduction from human to object that characterized one man rule in the factory persisted. Changes in owners of structure and health benefits missed the entire point that degradation could only be solved by returning agency and autonomy to the working class, by giving it the class itself control over the production process

that for so long had controlled them. In nineteen thirty six, Spanish workers decided to take matters into their own hands and seized control over their workplace's end mass. The Spanish Revolution, as it later became known, would become the largest and most extensive experiment in democratic worker self management before or since.

Everything from public utilities to bakeries, to hospitals to shoe factories fell under the control of the direct democratic unions, and once their former bosses had been chased from the premises, the workers set about transforming the entirety of Spanish society along democratic lines, pulling their resources collectively and allocating them democratically for the benefits of everyone. For a brief moment, the triumphant experiments in democratic self management delivered on its promises.

Output increased dramatically, social services were expanded, and the workers of Spain, by their own self organization developed a universal health care system that radically expanded service into rural areas

where KERR was previously inaccessible. But the revolution had begun amidst the Violet Civil War in Spain and under the guise of an anti fascist alliance, Liberal socialist and stoutist forces brutally stamped out any attempt at democratic self management and returned the factories to their owners before losing the

war to the fascist armies of Francisco Franco. Undeterred by the mounting casualty tolls of pro managerial massacres, revolutionary workers formed workers' councils and mass factory assemblies once again in Hungary in nineteen fifty six, and then again in Italy, France and Czechoslovakia in nineteen sixty eight. Hungary in particular is an interesting revolution because over the years it has been subjected to so much of the same liberal mythologization

you get with gienemen, but this time even worse. The Hungarian Revolution is remembered as a liberal democratic revolution. We talked to the actual people who did the revolution. They were saying things like, and this is a direct quote from a member of a Hungarian workers council quote, the

time when the boss decided our fate is over. In reality, far from simply instituting liberal democratic democracy, Hungarian workers seized control of their factories and workplaces, forward workers' councils, and overthrew the governments before Russian tanks slaughtered them. This was not a liberal democratic revolution at all. Almost identical revolts broke out across the capitalist world as well, in Italy, in France and Chile, communes broke out and colonized Vietnam.

They spread everywhere, and to the dismay of capitalists and communists alike. The development and implementation of the democratic solution to alienation these revolts provided was largely instinctual, and it often emerged in places without established workers' movements and their political education effects. Typical of such movements was the course

of the revolution in Algeria. The political education Algerian workers had received was from the nationalist vanguardist National Liberation Front f l EN, which had prosecuted the war against the French colonizers. The afalen's ideology emphasized the decisive role of the state in national development. Upon taking power, however, Ahmed ben Bella, Algeria's first president, discovered the question of the economic structure of Algeria had already been answered for him.

Production would be managed by democratic workers councils built on the properties seized by Algerian workers after the mass exodus of French settlers who fled the country following independents left

much of their property uninhabited. Then Bella's administration took a page out of Lenin's book and publicly supported the councils while privately undermining them, But the whole dispute was made irrelevance by a military coup two years later that dismantled the councils completely and reimposed one man role in the factory. Even by the late seventies, it was by no means clear that one man rule in the factory would triumph

as a political system. Workers and students almost took Italy in nineteen seventy seven, and the CNT, the anarchist union that had led so much of the Spanish Revolution, reappeared after the death of Franco. For a brief fleeting moment in the late nineteen seventies, it really looked like they

were going to do it. The persistence of these revolts in the face of pure military repression caused capitalist managery elites to look for ways to dismantle the systemic structures that produced the democratic revolts without giving up their power.

As author and friend of the show, Viciostre Wilde points out, the instinctive embrace of democracy in the factory was only possible so long as the factory remained a point of encounter, a kind of dark agra that at once both exploited workers and facilitated the interactions that allowed them to identify with each other as a class and find and produce

collective meaning. Thus, the fundamental thrust of the attack against democratic self management would take the form of an attack on the shop floor as a site of collective identity formation and as a space that could be seen in

any way as liberatory. This assault took a number of forms, most famously deindustrialization itself, as well as a spatial relocation of factories from urban centers into the suburbs, where workers could be isolated from each other and turned to homeowners bought off with the combination of cheap credit and the promise that the new homes would also function as assets.

The quote unquote democratization of finance replaced the democratization of the factory as the capitalist class funneled union pensiants into the stock market, thus tying remained of organized labour to the fates of capitalism itself. Corporations began to turn the workplace into an immense propaganda apparatus, replete with mass ideological programming designed to promote identification with the corporation itself and

not the working class as a whole. Worst of all, the mobility of capital and the immobility of workers combined with the new logistics networks and technological advances in containerized shipping to create a world where if workers ever began to get the upper hand, capitalists could simply move elsewhere. As the total size of the industrial working class contracted, capitalists increasingly took that option and left spitting vast populations

out of the traditional workforce entirely. These developments would eventually destroy the classical workers movement, but in order for the anti democratic counter revolution to succeed, it needed somewhere to move their production to, somewhere with a large, exploitable labor supply. The capitalist class found that answer in China in the wake of the CCP's victory in the Chinese Civil War

in nineteen forty nine. The Chinese factory system was extremely different from the system that existed anywhere else in the world. Chinese state owned firms virtually lacked the ability to fire workers. People's entire social sphere was built around their work units, which provided everything from their healthcare to their retirement, to

their food to often their entertainment. The CCP also eliminated the piece rate system, a system in which people were paid per unit they produced, which is, for example, how the USSR worked. This meant that in order to get people to work, bosses had very little leverage. They were thus forced to allow a degree of participation in the labor process and the ability to criticize bosses, because otherwise it was virtually impossible to get anyone to do anything.

Chinese bosses solved this problem through a combination of mass ideological work and a parentalistic, semi democratic system for determining the heads of work. Teams that were out raked by the party ensured that managers would at least be somewhat popular till the process was strictly managed. Workers had the ability to criticize the cadra to govern them and combine the work unit's system of folding home and social life

into the factory system. The product of this system was that because there was already a greater degree of workers participation in Chinese factories than workers elsewhere, and because of some of the structural elements of Maoism, demands for democracy became delinked from the workplace, and it meant that the system, at least in the cities worked sort of okay until the Cultural Revolution. This means that it is time for me to do the culture revolution. Rant everyone gets the

Cultural Revolution completely wrong. The initial targets of the Cultural Revolution were kids with quote unquote black blood, the children of people who had quote bad class backgrounds. These people were heavily persecuted, and you can make arguments about what you do with you know, a Shanghai oligarch collaborates with the Japanese imperialists, But this extends to the children of people from quote unquote bad class backgrounds, and that term

is extremely loose. I know people whose families were declared of black class background, who had quote unquote black blood and weren't allowed to hold government positions because her family had made bird feeders before the revolution. It was as a system absolutely nonsense. So what the early phases of the Cultural Revolution amounted to was a bunch of privileged kids from red class backgrounds in a new system attacking a bunch of kids who were being persecuted for stuff

that was literally not their fault at all. They had no way to control who their parents were now. The initial stages of the Cultural Revolution were largely driven by Mao attempting to play power games inside the party, But as things became more and more chaotic and the attacks on CCP, bear Gratz and Caudra escalated, it spiraled nearly out of Mao's control entirely and produced what's called January Storm, where rebel workers seized control of Shanghai and drove out

the CCP. And this caused what I would describe as a oh fuck moment for Mao, because now, despite all his rhetoric about bombarding the headquarters, he had to actually deal with a worker controlled city. And I found this incredible line from Joe and Lai in a meeting with Mao where they were attempting to figure out what to do with, you know, this New Revolutionary Shanghai quote when asked whether the New leadership should be elected from the

bottom up. Joe and Lai bluntly replied that quote, anarchism is bound to develop if we immediately implement direct election of the Paris commune style. And this was obviously a problem for Mao because there was no way for the party to maintain its long term control if you know, you actually implemented the direct elections in the style of the Paris commun and so instead we saw a full on revolution. By about nineteen sixty eight, rebel workers and

students were getting slaughtered everywhere. The initial uprisings, the stuff that everyone remembers with the dunce caps and the placards, was staggeringly by far the least violent part of the Culture Revolution. Here's from Walder, an academic who spent a significant amount of time studying the actual death records city

by city and province by province in the Chinese archives. Quote, more than three fourths of all documented deaths in local annals are due to the actions of authorities in this third phase, in more than ninety percent of those persecuted for alleged political crimes. This third phase nineteen sixty eight onward, is where most of the people in the cultural revolution gets killed, and this is the opposite of the way

that the culture revolution is understood. Most of the killing wasn't the product of student radicalism gone out of control. It was the state slaughtering its way to the various rebel factions that did most of the killing and the political persecution. And this has enormous effects on subsequent Chinese history.

It creates a ruling class that's incredibly paranoid about anything that even smells like organizing happening outside the party, and the most radical students and workers were simply butchered by the state, and by the late nineteen seventies, radical politics in China that could have produced anything even remotely like democratic control of the workplace had collapsed almost entirely in

the face of state repression. In their wake, politics moved towards more intellectual driven liberal democratic politics that broadly ignored the working class entirely, as dangzhelping unleashed the horrific one Child policy, an in draconian and ultimately successful attempts to re establish the state's patriarchal control over the household and strip hundreds of millions of women of even the limited autonomy they had clawed out of the Cultural Revolution, but

the beginning of marketization, the gradual dismantling of the socialist welfare state, and a wave of inflation produced a series of economic changes that turned Chinese stas society into a powder keg. By nineteen eighty nine, the classical workers movement globally was on its last legs. Unable to spark its own uprisings, it latched onto a series of other social and political movements, most notably pro democracy movement in China.

But democratic self management and its critique of one man rule in the factory was utterly alien to the pro democracy movement, which meant that its developments by the workers of Chiannemen was a spontaneous product of the application of the principles of democracy to their own situation. This led to formulations that would have been unfamiliar to previous incarnations of the workers' movement. One worker interviewed by Walder said

this about democracy in the factory. Why do a lot of workers agree with democracy and freedom in the workshop? Does what the workers say count or what the leader says? We later talked about it. 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 was not very high. We just wanted workers to have their own independent organization 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, but he tells me to work overtime for two hours, and if I don't, he'll cut my bonuses. 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 and decided how to do it. Also, these rules should be decided upon by everyone and then afterwards anyone who

violenced and we punished according to the rules. This is rule by law. Now we don't have this kind of legal system now. This is obviously an extremely conservative framing of the classical critique of one man rule in the factory, couched in the dominant political rhetoric of the rule of law. Attempt to actually implement this system, that which workers controlled the factories they work in, how long they work, and what the bonus rate was democratically to an independent organization

could only end in democratic, self managed workplaces. As Walder and jang If pointed out, the workers at the Beijing Workers Autonomous Federation were uniformly uneducated. It had little or no connection to any of the various liberal intellectual circles. This was as pure workers movement as any in Chinese history, and for one final time, the instinct of that working class was to demand democracy in the factory. This demand,

above all others, was politically unacceptable. When the army marched on Beijing, it was the Chinese working class they wiped out. Even the memory of the demand for democracy in the factory would be scrubbed for the records that the CCP and the pro democracy movements alike, thus ensuring the meaning of the events would be lost. What then was Tianeman. In some sense, it was a transition point between two

different Chinese working classes. The protests were the high water mark of the political mobilization of the old industrial working class, who, in the streets surrounding Tienemen, mounted the final attack of the classical workers movement. Their defeat ended the old working class as a political force, and they were annihilated altogether in the economic restructure of the nineteen nineties, which crushed the last vestides of workers' autonomy in the factory and

destroyed what remained of the Chinese welfare state. They were replaced by a new working class drawn from the rural and semi urban under classes of the old socialist system, who were dragged into the cities to fill the ranks of the two hundred and seventy seven million migrant workers that today comprised the background of China's working class. This new working class, with rural household registration in no way into the remaining state owned factories, would have none of

the benefits of the previous one. It would instead face a full wrapt capitalist ideology she baked into every aspect of workplace culture, and a massive attempt to encourage home ownership. While the previous working class could at least posit a democratic form of the factory to which life could be improved, this new working class's greatest desire was to leave the factory entirely and become a business owner. In this sense, it considers itself to be a temporarily embarrassed batip bourgeoisie.

Such ideological selfconceptions are inimical to the formation of the classical workers movement, and indeed the new Chinese working class has largely failed to find the collective identity in the workplace. The situation is not unique. The death of the classical workers movement has seen the collapse of their demands of democratic self management everywhere in the face of a working class it refuses to cohere itself in the factory. China

was just late to the game. The fact remains, however, that the global economics system has lurned from crisis to crisis the better part of my lifetime, setting off in its wake an increasing number of revolutions, even as the darker gore of the factory ceased to function as a place to form identities for this new working class. If a collective identity couldnot be forged in the factory, it

would be foraged in the street instead. Lacking a positive identity to cohere itself around, workers were only able to mobilize on a mass basis in direct opposition to a force that threatens it. On a cross sectoral basis, The state, with its ability to increase the price of basic commodities and slash welfare benefits, became the only available enemy, and the constant fights against the police became the sole basis

for new collective identity formation. Contemporary revolts have thus taken the form of mass street movements and almost continuous confrontations with the states. Factory occupations were replaced with square occupations, and as the squares were revealed to be indefensible, they

too were replaced by running fights with the police. But this placed the new revolutionaries in a dangerous bind without the leverage against the state the classical workers movement's control over the workplace, provided they lacked the ability to bring down a government firmly committed to fighting it out. Even the attempts over the last five or six years to carry out general strikes in Peru, in France, Hong Kong, and Sudan were, as Melo Testa predicted in the early twenties,

easily defeated without the accompanying factory occupations. But with current labor conditions exceedingly unlikely to produce another wave of factory occupations, the way forward for any political movement that seeks to reintroduce democracy into the economic sphere is unclear. Perhaps that is the greatest legacy of Tianemen. The workers who assembled

outside Tianeman Square had already abandoned their factories. For all that they spoke the language of the old workers movement, they stood and fought and died like we do in

the streets. They were the bridge between the world, the world of the workers movements, and the world we live in today, and thus face the same revolutionary crisis we face today, the crisis of Papua and Palestine, of Columbia and Iran, of me and Maar in Hong Kong, of victory just beyond the horizon that nevertheless cannot yet be grasped.

The workers of Tieneman I, suspect have no answers to give us now, but expecting answers from the dead is demanding too much of those past and present who died fighting for liberation. All we can do now is find our own way, and, with the names of the dead on our lips, build the world they died fighting for. It could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.

For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts can now find sources for It to Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions, Thanks for listening,