It Could Happen Here - Tiananmen and the Question of Democracy, Part 1

Episode Date: June 2, 2022

We talk about the Tiananmen Square massacre and the movement for democracy in the workplace that the workers there were fighting for.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about something that did happen that sucked enormously. I'm Christopher Wong. I'm the host. Also with me is Garrison and Sophie Hello Good morning Just really starting off positive there

It's Look It's This episode The next episode I mean I guess this episode kind of ends in a high note But That's great to hear

I'm so happy I totally believe you It kind of ends in a high note but that's great to hear i'm so happy i totally believe you it kind of does all right yeah uh shereen is also here hello hi sorry my fault keep going no worries so this is this is the 33rd anniversary of the tiananmen square massacre um tomorrow's episode i think will actually be going out on, I guess, the day that it started, kind of. It starts, like, the night of, like, June 3rd.

And, okay, I'm curious what U2's, like, I don't know, like, received, like, cultural memory of Tiananmen is, because, I don't know, I think I got a kind of weird one, like, being from a Chinese family, but As a white Canadian I have zero amount

of my knowledge about the Tiananmen Square Massacre, nor really about Tiananmen. It's just, yeah that is something I never have really learned about Yeah, I know that it happened in 1989 that's america that's the

american uh lesson we got on the history of that massacre that it happened in 1989 really mediocre yeah okay well today and tomorrow, we're going to go – well, we're going to talk, I think, less about what happened there specifically and more about the sort of broader history that it's in. But I guess let's start out. So sometimes there's really three Tiananmen. There's the student protest that's inside Tiananmen Square itself. There's this part of Beijing around the squares, like a bunch of blocks are taken over by workers. And then there's a bunch of protests in other cities. them other than that like they happened but the people who would know aren't talking so for somewhat somewhat obvious reasons um yeah and the students themselves i think like the the the normal version of tiananmen is like there's these students and they're like pro-democracy protesters right but they're way weirder than that there's there's like this weird ideological grab bag thing going on um they're they're basically what they're pissed off about

is that this thing is called the reform and opening like isn't going fast enough and we should talk about what that sort of is so reform and opening is it's this period in china in sort of the 80s and something like the 90s um and on the one hand you have these sort of steps to like ease restrictions on speech and like rehabilitate intellectuals and like allow for a broader public discourse but the other half of it is that like they're bringing they're basically they're bringing markets back to china right and this this is a shit show in a lot of ways if you want to hear about like the ccp reinventing debt peonage in about five years um go listen to my bastards episode the poison milk scandal it's a it's a trip

but on the other hand you have you know so you have kind of like opening up right you you have just more discourse you're they're not persecuting intellectuals again sort of they're they're they're de-persecuting the intellectuals that they had persecuted um but on the other hand you get this absolutely draconian sort of like set of crackdowns in the social sphere you have the one child policy you have this like really powerful tightening of one man rule in the factory and you have the sort of the destruction of these for what we'll get into this more later but like the the sort of limited decision-making capacity that workers had had in the factories um just is sort of dismantled so you see these sort of gaps beginning to form here right like on the one hand you have these students who want

market reforms to go faster they want more freedom of speech. They kind of want democracy, but mostly what they want is to be in charge of the party so they can crush the sort of bureaucracy they see as holding market reforms back. And it's worth noting that a lot of these students are involved in what becomes known as neo-authoritarianism, which is the sort of ideology that holds that the strong central party should take full control of society and destroy the factions and the bureaucracy. And so, you know, and then that, that's how you can lead development. And this stuff,

like that stuff, like neo-authoritarianism survives the protest. It goes on to become like a pretty major faction in the CCP itself in the nineties and two thousands. And, you know, this is, this is where things just get weird.

Right. The student movement itself is very hierarchical. and it gets to the point where, like, by the end of the student movement, they're... The student leaders are, like, kidnapping each other over, like, who has control of the microphones and, like, the stages in the square. It is extremely bizarre and you know in in terms of like the protests actually like if what they're trying to do is they're trying to like influence this factional fight inside the ccp over like the speed at which reformers are going to go and this it doesn't work it's like stunningly ineffectual the guy they're trying to defend like like, winds up getting ousted

and put under house arrest for the rest of his life. So, okay, so those are the student protesters, but the part, and the student protesters are the part of this that, like, everyone knows, partly because some of those people escaped to Hong Kong, and, you know, they're very influential in sort of shaping the memory there. But there's also the workers that I mentioned earlier. And the students basically, like, hate the workers.

For most of the time this protest is going on, and this is months, right? They literally won't, they will not let any of the workers go into Tiananmen Square. Like, they have this whole system, and, like, in order to get into, like, increasing increasing like like closer to the center of the square you have to be a student and then if you get to the center of the square you have to be like a member of the leadership it's very weird and you know and like one of the things the workers are trying to do is they want to carry out a general strike and the students are like no absolutely not do not do a general strike because largely because okay so if these people start doing a general strike like that's not something that's not under our control.

And, you know, okay, so this raises the question, like, if the relationship between the students who are at Tiananmen and the workers at Tiananmen are this bad, like, why are the workers even there? And there's a few answers to this question. The sort of the simplest and most immediate one is that, like, the workers are initially they come out because they're pissed. They see how badly, like, the cops and sort of like the party is treating the students in the square. So they get mad, but there's other stuff inflation and the the sort of rapid increase in prices is a threat to you know the sort of like cheap supply grain which is like the the sort of main subsidy that if you're an urban worker that you get and meanwhile you know you have marketization happening so at the same time that the prices are increasing for everyone and they can't get access to stuff that they need uh you have just like ccp princelings like racing down the street and imported sports cars and like these are like the only these are like CCP princelings like racing down the street and imported sports cars.

And like these are like the only these are like the only cars, right? Like people people. I don't know, like people are starting to get bicycles in mass sort of in this period. But then, you know, it's like, hey, here's here's this like party boss guy who has a sports car. They're like spending years salaries like gambling at racetracks and people just get pissed off. So they they they start organizing. And I'm going to read from a section of a piece by Yuhang Zhang about what they 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 Beijing Workers' Autonomous Federation's membership grew exponentially, and other workers' organizations,

both within and across workplaces, mushroomed. The development of organizations led to a radicalization of action. Workers started organizing self-armed quasi-militias, such as picket corps and dare-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, Beijing became a city self-managed by workers. It was reminiscent of Petrograd's self-armed workers organized in the Soviets in the months between Russia's February and October revolutions. At the same time, Beijing workers built many more barricades and

fortifications on the street in many factories that organized strikes and slowdowns 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 and yeah like this is the part of it that like people don't talk about because it wasn't in the square and i mean the other part the other faction like factor that's going on here is that like so the press corps is like sitting in the square and this is why chanamon is this story is like this is massive spectacle right because all of this everything that's happening here inside the square is happening like in front of the entire western press corps and like people are like you know like people are just like pointing cameras at their window right and you know but on the other hand the the the people

outside of the square like the workers outside of the square are the workers are getting more organized and this is like this is absolutely unacceptable to the party and so yeah on on the night of june 3rd the army just starts killing them. They, there, there had been a couple of attempts earlier to clear, to, to, to clear the sort of fortifications and it hadn't really worked, but this time,

like they, they, they, they're, they're able to bring in military units that aren't from Beijing or like aren't from around the area and they kill an enormous number of people. Yeah. And,

and I think it's, I think it's important to note that like both in terms of the killings that happened immediately and the political persecution like after that it's it's mostly the workers burying this especially in the initial massacre most of the killing happens as the army's like fighting its way into the square and you know i mean they kill people in the square too but you know and eventually they get into the square and this is where you get like tank man and like the sort of the famous accounts of the massacre but like by that point it's basically over right because one of the other things that's happened is that over the course of this protest a lot of

the students have left because they sort of they sort of gave up after the like factional conflict like stopped but so so most of the people like who are there are are on the outs are like other workers on the outside of this go trying to defend it and when those people get killed and the army gets the middle of the square it's the whole thing's already over and you know these protests get crushed and you know like before the last bullet has been fired everyone everyone left standing is trying to create their own narratives but what just happened um the most common one is that chen men is this like clash between democracy and authoritarianism and like okay to to some extent that's not wrong. I mean, you know, we've already mentioned that there are a lot of neo-authoritarian students there. But like, you know, okay, this is kind of a fair interpretation of what's going on.

Like, there's a lot of other pro-democracy movements in this period, like in the region most famously, there's Taiwan and South Korea. But the actual question of what's happening here is really a question of what kind of democracy there's – that these people are fighting for. The students at Tiananmen – to the extent that their democratic principles are sincere and not a cover for a sort of like deeply authoritarian version of liberalism that's demanded know demanded by like a sort of new class of intellectuals that receive market reform so to the extent that they like they actually believe in this right they they believe in a very narrow conception of political democracy and you know this this democracy is sort of political democracy operates at the level of the state right it's based on free citizens who are equal before the law participating in elections to choose representatives who like pass laws and you know oversee and manage state bureaucracy but you know this model of political democracy which is you know this is the one that we live under right it it relegates the

workplace to a a separate economic sphere into which democracy doesn't extend the capitalist firm or its state-owned equivalent remains the absolute dictatorship of capitalists and advantageary of flunkies. And even the sort of progressive wings of the pro-democracy movement in Taiwan and South Korea maintain this private dictatorship. If you're a worker in one of these states, you get rights, you get the ability to form unions, you get access to the welfare state you get you these sort of limited protections from the worst like physical and psychological abuses that your bosses can inflict but no matter how progressive the pro-democracy movements actually are the legitimate the jesus sorry the legitimacy of the dictatorship of the bosses which was not up for dispute

and you know to to these sort of pro-democracy movements, right? Democracy means a democratic state and not a democratic workplace. And this is the huge divide between what's happening at Tiananmen and what's happening everywhere else in the world. The workers at Tiananmen are the only people left in this entire sort of like run of pro-democracy movements that disagree they they are standing against not only that like everyone they're standing not only against their own government against a lot of the the students who are who are also like at these protests they are standing against literally the entire tide

of history itself by by you know by applying the principles of pro-democracy movement to like their own concerns right which is skyrocketing inflation mounting debts like rampant corruption to government officials like spyrocketing and spiraling inequality and petty bureaucratic oppression beijing's working class had reinvented a old and now largely forgotten tradition of democracy in the factory that I'm calling it democratic worker self-management because there's no good name for it and they're all kind of clunky. Fair. I mean, this is based on who these people were at the time. It makes sense that all of their names for things were pretty clunky. things were pretty clunky. Yeah, well, the thing is they don't name... This is one of the things about... One of the real problems with studying Tiananmen, right,

is that, like, okay, so we have really good accounts from the students, right? Because some of the students flee and they're able to make it out. We have, like, jack shit, basically, from the workers. We have... What we do have is we have some of the documents they produced, and we have

a lot of interviews that were done with with people there and they i don't know they have very very idiosyncratic ways of expressing what they believe and so you know you'll get things where like okay they're like okay wait we believe in the rule of law right and then the next sentence will be like i i we we have calculated the exact amount of surplus value that has been extracted from us according to Marx. And it's like, what? Because, yeah, the thing that they're doing is like they're synchronizing this new – they're synchronizing sort of like a political tendency that's trying to address the sort of dual dictatorships they're dealing with, right? That's trying to address the sort of dual dictatorships are dealing with, right? Like, cause they're, they're dealing at the same time with like this political dictatorship,

the party has, and also the fact that their bosses now like completely control everything that they do. And because of this, they, you know, they, they, they wind up being like the last, or I guess technically second to last because Argentina happens. So that that that's sort of convoluted mess in itself but they're they're in the 20th century like they are the last people who are fighting for democracy in the factory and this like to a large extent is what tiananmen is actually about it's the culmination of a century and a half long war between the democratic wing of the classical workers movement and like every single other ideology that exists and these guys over over that century and a half long span

they're going to fight communists are going to fight capitalists are going to fight liberals and fascists and monarchies and republics and social democracies and theocracies and at tiananmen they're going to lose one more time and that defeat the fact that they lose here the fact that these people get slaughtered the fact that like they're crushed so effectively that no one even remembers what they were don't even remember they exist or like much less like what they were fighting for this defeat is the origin of the modern world that one man rule in the factory like the the the individual single boss who has total control and power over you is in in its sort of thousand forms, is the author of the hell that is the 21st century.

And when we come back from this commercial break, we are going to look at the international part of the struggle that Tiananmen is sort of like the conclusion of. So here's some ads, maybe from Amazon. We can get a job working at their distribution center. That seems like a good paying gig. Welcome.

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offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things

that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio the iheart radio app apple podcasts wherever else you get your podcasts check out better offline.com and we're back to uh look at why you too also must live in uh the the the absolute one-man dictatorship in the factory so it's it's not not not not as much one man it's the one algorithm you have to you have to

listen to what your ipad tells you when you're walking through the amazon distribution center that's true yeah they have it is funny because it's like we they've somehow made a worse version of it it was like okay sure have yeah it's like it's like yeah it's like okay now now you are ruled by a computer whose job it is to make one person an extremely large amount of money it's even further like depersonalized and further disjointed from actually being a human yeah it's it's i don't know there's there's the there's some metaphor here which if i wasn't like sick out of my mind uh about how like power depersonalizes it dehumanizes you until the point where you're replaced with a machine that you can make here but uh i i don't know one in one in two days, the rumor randomly starts spitting on me.

So I can't do that. The lesson here is that when you're thinking about factories and how bosses suck and how it's not great to work in a factory and just have a boss that tells you what to do, the lesson is that it can always get worse because it could always be a computer yeah anyway continue so okay to get a sense of like

what this fight is and like how how we got to tiananmen uh we need to go back to the revolutions of 1848 which is at first glance not, not an incredibly obvious place to start. Okay, if you want a really detailed blow-for-blow account of the revolutions of 1848, go listen to the Revolutions podcast. It's good. I am not going to do it here because, oh my god, there's so much stuff. god there's so much stuff but the very short version is that so in 1848 across europe there's a bunch of revolutions that are collectively known while sometimes known as like the springtime of the peoples and this is this is the first revolution this is the first wave of revolutions where socialists are like a real thing um like frederick angles like that angles like the marx and angles angles is like on a barricade with a rifle fighting in prussia there's like yeah i'm not gonna sadly i can't get into august

von willich here but like go go go go google august von willich he's wild there's a huge revolution in france where they like they finally deposed the king and you know this there's this question here at as these revolutions look like they're winning there's this question of how far democracy is going to go and what it's going to mean um and yeah you have a large thing you have this this is in in a lot of ways very similar to what you're dealing with within in china in 1989 inside of france you have the split right you have the split between you know like the people who are like who are like french radicals but in the sense of like the original french revolution

who are you know okay they they they want like they they they want an elected democracy they absolutely do not want to like deal with the fact that the that the workplace is not a democracy and then you know and you have you have a bunch of socialists and the socialists are like hey can we do something about like property relations and like the fact that there's a bunch of poor people with no jobs and you know and the socialists get slaughtered but you know they they don't die i mean. You just said they get slaughtered. That's working. Well, okay, so a lot of these people get horribly

slaughtered, but a lot of them escape and make it out. The ideology lives on. Well, the ideology lives on. There's an interesting story here. A lot of the leaders live on. A lot of these people for example, a bunch of people flee to the US and they wind up being a lot of the officer corps of the Union Army and they wind up being like the like a lot of

the officer corps of the union army in the civil war is made up by these by these socialists who like had to flee after the revolutions failed and like prussia and stuff but yeah so but many of them do in fact die yeah it doesn't go great for them it and and you know and you you you get to see one of the other things that's going to happen a lot which is that okay so like the the the the the sort of like the the the french like like the the the french radicals who are like pro-capitalism but also pro-democracy like ally with the conservative factions and then they also all get killed when napoleon napoleon the third takes power but man it's really it's really it's really hard to root for someone here and that in that yeah i know it's like this is really like like the the revolution

produces his own gravedigger shit like oh hey what did you expect was gonna happen when you allied with like the landlords and i napoleon good thing this good thing this mistake will never no be made again nope uh good good thing we're not about to talk about this yeah yeah pay no mind to the rest of this episode yeah anyway continue so yeah you have the split between people who want electoral democracy but you know dictatorships in the workplace and these people who want like democracy in the workplace and this also prefigures a split inside of socialism itself um for you know for for the and this isn't even i i'm i i like in my script i say like for for the most radical factions of socialism you know like control over the means of production which is like the thing that you want means that like

production is controlled either by like free associations of workers like you know direct democratic unions this is later called syndicalism or like workers councils and that that's you know i say it's the most radical like that that's a very popular conception of like what this is going to be like if you read marx like marx is like oh yeah free associations of workers sure but you know as as the sort of like 1840s roll into the 1860s and the 1870s there's this faction of the movement that becomes just like obsessed with with the bureaucratic technologies of the state and you know like they they they watch the state really get involved in the economy in a way that it like kind of hasn't before then they in over the course of sort of industrialization they watch with like

incredible envy as they see like these incredibly elaborate like planning schemes they see the state building roads and canals and railroads and then entire cities with like these like complex electrical grids and like gas lines and plumbing systems and especially trains like specifically trains this drives them all completely insane and they become they they begin to believe that like a single centralized planning body like not a democratic association of workers like a single centralized state planning body can like you know bring about the long sought after like cooperative commonwealth of socialism and all these people get they get obsessed with like central planning right and this becomes this starts to sort of like consume more and more of

the left um in in germany which is home to like the powerful german social democratic party which is like probably the most powerful socialist party in the world at this point the socialists become divided into two camps there's the revisionists led by edward bernstein who like he like renounces marxism and revolution and like entirely in favor of reforming capitalism in the state from like within and then you know you have these orthodox marxists that are like led by karl kotzky whose whole thing is that he hates bernstein and like the only thing that these two people that these two groups agree on is that i think the only thing they agree on is bureaucratic state planning is the thing you're

supposed to be fighting for and not like democratic workplaces and this leads the sdp to like they they they do a lot of things that are like disastrous um one of the things that they wind up doing a lot is like actively working with the bosses to like destroy the like workplace autonomy for their own unions so like there'll be things where it's like like i don't know there's a famous example like there's like a like i think they're like a they're a metal workers and i think they make knives or something and they have a lot of control over the production process right they can control like how much stuff gets produced the process like how it works like what they're actually doing and the sdp is like no this is bad because it's inefficient and so

they like basically crush their own union and this this goes in really disastrous directions but we're still uh the single person who becomes the most obsessed with the potential of bureaucratic state planning is one very, very, very obscure guy named Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Who I don't expect anyone to have heard of. Friend of the pod. I just said Leninich. Oh, that's funny. Keep that in yeah so as david graver points out uh lenin's obsession with like the german postal service is such that like okay so he writes a very famous book about like what a future socialist state is going to be called

state and revolution and like almost all of it is a lie but he also says this in it um a witty german social democrat of the uh 1870s called the postal service an example of the socialist economic system this is very true at present the postal service is a business organized along the lines of a state capitalist monopoly well imperial this is this whole thing but like imperialism is making everything off of this uh but so to organize the whole national economy on the lines of the postal service so that the technicians foreman bookkeepers as well as all officials that receive no salaries higher than a workman's wage all under the control and leadership of the armed proletariat this is our immediate aim and if you think about what this means for about five seconds, right, what he's saying is that socialism is the entire economy being planned by a bureaucratic state.

And, you know, this this like this sits off this like massive series of confrontations with the part of the workers movement who, you, like, want to control the work that they do. And, you know, like, make, like, you know, the people who, like, who think that, like, the revolution means that they're actually going to be able to make decisions over their work and not, you know, just, like, work for, socialist bureaucrats and, like, democracy in the workers' movement is, you know, it's an enormous part of the struggle that happens here. And there's, like, another version of it happening between the workers' movement itself and the capitalist state. Like, in the 1880s, the workers' movements in, like, in Italy and Germany and, like, France,

to a certain extent, they have these, they form these parties that are called like states within a state and you know these things are these massive networks of these workers institutions they have like free schools they have workers associations they have like fair friendly societies they have libraries they have theaters they have like unions they have co-ops they have like neighborhood associations they have tenant unions they have mutual aid societies and you know and these things are all run democratically by like by by the workers who form the associations and you know and like the people who are doing this

are like you know the the hope is that like this is going to be the basis for the new social society right it's like okay we we can just come together and like do this stuff and we can we can do it democratically and we can administer this stuff ourselves and the and these things are enormously popular um and you know and and this like terrifies this sort of old ruling class um and audubon bismarck who's the guy basically running the german state in this period like he his solution to this is to create like bureaucratic state-run versions of like all of these things so he he creates like state-run libraries state-run theaters like state-run welfare services and he's using these as as like a replacement to the sort of workers institutions and he has this

great line where he tells an american observer quote my idea was to bribe the working classes or shall i say to win them over to regard the state as a social institution existing for their own sake and invested in and interested in their welfare and like this works this is this is an enormous success this is one of the greatest propaganda crews ever because like it it's it's so successful in convincing people that the thing that they're fighting for is like the state bureaucratic version of this thing and not the version where they do it themselves that like when the socialists like take power they confuse bismarck's like literally the welfare state bribe it themselves that like when the socialists like take power they confuse bismarck's like literally the welfare state bribe thing that he like made to buy off the movements like they confuse that with socialism itself and like to this day everyone believes this it's like

it's it's i don't know i lose my mind constantly over this because all of these things that bismarck developed like specifically to destroy the socialist movement everyone was like oh my god this is socialism it's like no no please stop and you know and this is really effective particularly on the leadership of the movement but like the actual like people in these parties like in these movements don't forget it and and as as the sort of like 20th century draws to a close and you get like the sorry as as the 19th century draws to a close and you get like the 20th century the workers who are like doing the uprisings are are not sort of like like you know the the workers who are doing the uprisings haven't like drinking the kool-aid and the thing that they do immediately when they start doing uprisings is they start building these democratic institutions particularly workers

councils um the most famous of these are like other workers councils that form sort of spontaneously in the russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 these are like this is actually like this is what like these they're called soviets because soviet is just like the word for council in russian and these these things are originally these like ad hoc strike committees. And then they eventually become these like formalized, like elected bodies of representatives from like the various factories who are like coordinating a strike. And OK, so 1905, they lose and they all die. But in 1917, they do this again and they form the Soviets again. And this time the council start to take like a larger role in coordinating

production directly and, you know, coordinating between different like factories and industries. And they, they, they, they turn into the sort of like counter power thing to the new government. And this kicks off this open period of warfare that stretches like literally

from Italy to Argentina between the, the different socialist factions who like people like the different factions of this movement who want democracy in the factory and this like a lot newly formed like anti-democratic alliance of like social democrats bolsheviks and capitalists who like you know are like okay well some of them are in favor of like you can have democracy okay there's a whole range of this thing right like the thing that unites all of these movements the social democrats the bolsheviks the capitalists and later the fascists is that they like emphatically like do not want democracy in the factory and

they're willing to put aside their differences to make sure it doesn't happen but you know there's still there's still a huge fight that happens here between between 1917 and 1920 you get workers councils in you get workers councils in germany poland austria ukraine ireland and ireland there's there's these like two giant revolts by syndicalist workers unions in brazil and argentina and these all get crushed um in italy italy has like one of the most intense conflicts between these like a lot of syndicalists in the italian state and they they have this this really famous like set of factory occupations where instead of like, so like before this, people would go on strike,

right? You go on strike and you'll, you leave your factory. And in, in Italy, they were like, okay, wait,

what if we just stayed in the factory and took it over so that they couldn't like, just like restart production with scabs. And we now control the factory. And there's this huge wave of it in, in Italy, in, in the late 19,

19, like teens teens early 1920s and you know it looks like for a little for like a bit like it really looks like they're going to bring down the government but the factory occupations get crushed but they don't they don't get crushed by the government they get crushed by the italian socialist party and like their union the general confederation of labor and like this is how fascism wins in italy like to a large extent it's that like when when like you know and this happens in germany too it's like when when when when sort of the social democrats and the capitalists are faced with this possibility that like workers could take over the factories the social democrats turn on them and just kill them all

and the problem with that is that like okay well, who do you do the killing with? And the answer is the fascists. And then the Social Democrats, like, themselves all get exterminated by the fascists. It's this, like, you know, it is a terrible cycle that we're going to see, like, literally over and over and over again. Yeah, it's bad. That sounds not great, yeah. Yeah. Do you know who else will slaughter your factory council?

Oh, no. Oh, I actually know this one. All right, Harrison, go. We have a few options here. There is our good friends at the Washington State Patrol. If you're trying to set up a highway business next to the highway and run it via workers cancel state patrol come up be like not on this highway yeah you're done um probably also like amazon or something who knows

yeah welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Welcome. I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters inspired by the legends of Latin America.

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Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. out better offline.com and we're back to see you know okay okay we we are back to see like the worst defeats that they're gonna have that like the people who want like a factory council are going to have this period which for once actually has nothing to do with amazon or the capitalists whatsoever which is that like the the worst balling they're going to get is from lenin and the bolsheviks who i i don't know how many people sort of like know the history of the russian revolution but like the factory councils are the people who like basically put the bolsheviks in power in the first place like to a large extent like they're the they're the people who like were the shock troops of this and like literally the moment

lenin takes power he starts undermining the soviets um he publishes this thing like like like three or four days after the october revolution he he publishes this thing called the draft decree on workers control which is like you know he's he basically is like he's trying to like shift power from these councils to the bolshevik party in the state and this doesn't really work initially because these groups are like pretty powerful but in it you know he he publicly lenin's like no we draw we derive our power from the Soviets. We're the people who support these councils. But then Lenin, he's shipping away from them.

And then in 1918, he writes this paragraph from The Immediate Task of the Soviet Government, which is one of the wildest things I've ever read in my life. Which is saying a lot. It's wild.

It is. 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 interest of socialism that the masses unquestioningly obey the

single will of the leaders of the labor process. Which is like what like what how how about you explain to our good viewers why that is so bonkers like okay some of them might just hear that and be like oh leftist words cool moving on even just the first two words unquestioning yeah makes me like that part like a questioning submission the whole thing about like the masses must unquestionably obey the will of the single leader like what no this is like like what is happening this is you know and the thing that's happening here is that lenin lenin is being really candid about what it means for there to be a boss. Like, what it means for there to be someone whose position is above you that can

order you to do literally whatever they want, and if you don't obey them, like, bad things happen and you starve or get shot. Yeah, he's incredibly candid about this, right? Like, this is what, like, having a boss means. It means, like, questioning submission to the single will of a leader this is which is like this this

is how i talk about sophie all the time yeah well shaking her head i'm with you sophie can't believe scare i just said that yeah you're welcome whatever you say sophie thanks gare god i'm thinking about this there's this line um it's sort of substantially related to the story i read this thing once about so the workers who took over the sorbonne actually i think it was the students serve the a bunch of students like take over this uh like like the the like the like the big academy in in paris in 1968 and they send this like i think it's a telegram to like the chinese embassy and like the end of it is what i think if i'm remembering the exact words correctly it's uh the the revolution will not be complete until the revolution will not be complete until the last capitalist is hung with the entrails of the last bureaucrat oh that's incredibly hot yeah 68 was wild that's that's the thing this brought to mind for some reason but you know i mean going back to sort of lenin is like unquestioning

like submission to the single world like he's more candid about what like one man rule in the factory or like having a boss you have to obey like means but the system he's describing like isn't different than any other political system like bolshevik rule in the factory like isn't really different than capitalist social democratic or fascist rule and you know the movement for democracy in the factory as as you know as as as these people are crushed especially in cross in 1921 like the movement for democracy in the factory is faced by four implacable enemies who are willing to put aside all of their ideological differences to ensure that like no one ever like gets to control their workplace and you know and as as the 20s blend to the early 1930s like the movement seemed to have disappeared, but they didn't. They absolutely didn't, even though they got murdered by the fascists, the communists, the social democrats, and the capitalists. They're going to be back next episode to do, like, 12 more revolutions.

come back tomorrow for us talking about like why these revolutions happens uh what the ruling class did to stop them and then yeah the the lead up to tiananmen square to see the sort of like the final stand of the chinese working class and yeah like get to what tiananmen actually was what a cliffhanger it could happen here as a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com. Thanks for listening.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow Brass. Thanks for listening. terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturno on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award. Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th.

Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. Welcome to Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get real and

dive straight into todo lo actual y viral. We're talking musica, los premios, el chisme, and all things trending in my cultura. I'm bringing you all the latest happening in our entertainment world and some fun and impactful interviews with your favorite Latin artists, comedians, actors, and influencers. Each week, we get deep and raw life stories, combos on the issues that matter to us, and it's all packed with gems, fun, straight-up comedia, and that's a song that only Nuestra Gente can sprinkle. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.