It Could Happen Here - Tiananmen and the Question of Democracy, Part 2

Episode Date: June 3, 2022

We discuss the material factors that led to democracy in the factory as a movement and implication and causes of the collapse of the movement itself.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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We've now started the podcast. The podcast that we are starting is It Could Happen Here. And I, it's me, Christopher Wong. I'm doing the host thing. And I have a bunch of other people with me who do a lot of things. I have Garrison. Yes. I have Shireen.

Yes. And I have Sophie. Our lovely boss, Sophie Lichtichterman all praise on high your words bow down your words not mine weird i did not enjoy that at all chris wanna take over so Sophie unfortunately fortunately unfortunately lacks the sheer ruthlessness to crush the workers movement

well we will see that remains to be determined so aww I don't buy it that's sad Sophie is very sad I'm sorry Sophie um I don't buy it. Sophie is very sad.

I'm sorry, Sophie. Thank you. When we last left off, Lenin has, in theory, crushed the last remaining factions of the workers who want democracy in the factories. But unfortunately for the Leninists, literally no matter how many workers

they kill, and they are going to kill enormous numbers of workers, the demand for democracy in the factory just refuses to die. For over 100 years, the development of this sort of mass factory system and logistical infrastructure that you need to support it, maybe most importantly, coal mines and railroads that are used to transport stuff, generate this incredibly militant working class that sees you know democratic control over the workplace is 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 what becomes this like incredibly like this like instinctive formation of workers councils the moment like an uprising happens and this is something that's very interesting about about the 20th century is that like yeah like whenever there's like a crisis someone's someone's like like everyone in the factory is like okay we're like we've taken control of the factory now like we we were forming a council we're 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 argentina in 2001 and i don't even know if garrison garrison might have been alive for that thanks but like i will say the other time it does happen

is when after a recording session when our boss Sophie leaves me and Chris will stay on the line to talk usually about Star Wars and that in a way kind of is a workers council just for the factory of podcasting talk about Star Wars in front of me

I feel so bad for Sophie next time we will her little puppy face it's okay thanks Shireen your petite bourgeois tactics won't work on me Sophie

oh god we've all the people on the subreddit who think that we hate sophie are gonna just have a field day with this episode that is my favorite recurring conspiracy theory bit that's a real conspiracy oh man oh man wow i have a lot to catch you up on to do you don't you do not no you do not because it's not true run away so meanwhile meanwhile so in 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 increase 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 19th and 20th centuries. Like you have these like these incredibly rapid like technological expansions. And, you know, the people who are doing this stuff like see themselves as the creators of the new world right like and this 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 are the person who is like who has transformed like this fishing village into this giant industrial city right um you know you you see yourselves as as the creator like literally physically the creator of this new world that's being developed and then the second belief that that it produces

that drives this movement is that the people who produce 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 the 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, the thing that you do because it's not yours, right? Like, you don't – like, yeah, you – like, the people who build cities are not the people who own the cities. The people who build cities are not the people who own the cities. And, you know, if you see this, yeah, like, yeah, okay. Like 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 podcast does not own the podcast.

Yeah, no, we don't own the podcast. Like we are. Exactly. Applicable result that, you know, that can, that you know everyone understands that example yeah yeah we i actually don't think the 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 of the- My leather chair? It's not a leather chair.

It's a leather chair. Look at all my podcast creations I have created. And then all of us measly podcast writers. Climate change has gotten so bad, how could you think I could sit here on an 85 degree day in a leather chair? If you're going to insult me, at least get your facts right. My word. A leather chair.

Continue, Chris. Okay, so 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 a massive cigar and a comically large. So Robert actually left this for me to give to,

to give 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. He forces me to slave away on my laptop writing scripts,

and just sits in his chair. Look, we work in the podcast minds. Yeah, it is really hard out there. Yeah. Continue. minds yeah it's it's it is it is really hard out there yeah and you continue so okay so like the the the belief that you produce the world and that if you produce you should own it is 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 in 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 ideology of like the entire workers movement and and by you know by by the 20th 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 a democratic wing unique is that their concern is the fundamental alienation of factory life and and this this 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 the like the the fundamental alienation of labor itself which is 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 lenders

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 innate human like humanity or creativity like all you have 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 and like now your alienation is gone uh-huh that's how it works yeah or anyway in your social democracy it's like well okay so, so you flip a switch and taxes get higher, and now you have a union, but you're still working for the Goldman Sachs. But for the wing of the workers' movement that actually cares about democracy, this doesn't solve anything right like as long as the the fundamental relation of being the like of being an object right as long as like you fundamentally the worker 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 you like you you you are a living human tool that the one man ruler of the factory can like you know factory can wield around to do whatever they want. As long as that persists, changes in ownership structure and health benefits miss the entire point. And 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 actually giving the class control over the production process. And in 1936 in spain workers are like fuck this and decide to take the entire thing into their own hands and they do this by just seizing their workplaces in mass and this becomes known as the spanish revolution um and it is one of the most extensive sort of experiments in like workers democratic self-management 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 in terror uh these workers set about like transforming the entirety of spanish society along democratic lines like they pooled their resources together collectively and that they allocate them democratically for the benefit of you know like society as a whole and for a brief moment this works they have this incredible like this triumphant experiment democratic self-management 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 uh like the workers of spain are able to create a universal health care system that expands care 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 using sort of like nominally anti-fascism as their sort of like – they're using the threat of the need to oppose fascism as a sort of threat for what they're actually doing. who just like brutally stamp out any attempt to do democratic self-management and like like you have like soviet cadres and like nkvd like soviet secret police guys like literally leading arby's into into these cities and like like kill like killing the workers and then physically like taking control of these factories that people had seized and giving them back to the bosses which is you know this is this is great this is 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 the stalinists get everything they want they murder all of the 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 the the 1950s 1960s like all this stuff is back like there's there's factory councils again in hungary you get them in italy in france and like czechoslovakia in 1968 there's like like there there there's councils being like there's there's communes being formed in like vietnam There's like – we've talked about the Cordones 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 1956 that's – it gets a lot of the same liberal mythologizing that you get with tiananmen but like kind of more egregious here so i don't know i think like i i got taught this revolution in in school this 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 this like kind of nationalist 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 the 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 bosses decided our fate is over and it's like huh huh these these guys these guys do not seem like i don't know these guys don't seem like liberal democrats so something weird is happening here there's something that's actually happening is like hungarian workers like seize control of their factories and like their workplaces and they form workers councils the earth of the government

and then the russians slaughter them all but you know like this is not a liberal democratic revolution at all this is a revolt against the dictatorship in the workplace and there's an identical revolts break out across both the capitalist world and the communist world and in the newly decolonized societies you 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 everyone keep on 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 need to form workers councils this this is

this stuff is happening in places where there's just like none of that so like what one of the sort of like movements that that does stuff like this is is the revolution in algeria um you know and the the like they're like algeria like does have a pretty high level of political education but the political education they're getting is from like it's from the national liberation front which is like insofar as it's any one thing it's like it's a nationalist vanguardist movement which is you know they're the people who like fight the fresh colonizers and beat them and their ideology like insofar as you can describe one ideology like the thing that they want is like the state having this decisive role in national development but you know immediately upon taking power ahmed ben bella 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 structure is going to be because he takes power and a whole bunch of, like, French people who live in Algeria flee. All of, like, all of these, this property that had been originally, like, held by French sort of, like, colonists, like, it gets immediately seized by the Algerian working class. And, you know, they build their own workers' councils. And, you know, Ben Bella's like, okay, I guess we have, like, workers' councils now. Like, I guess we have sort of, autonomous democratic production and ben bella is like kind of trying to undermine them but he doesn't really get a chance to because once again there's a military coup and ben bella like he i think he he escapes and 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 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 70s like it's not clear that that that like it's it's not clear that the people who want one man ruling the factory are going to win. Like, there's this moment in Italy in 1977 where it's like this giant student worker coalition almost takes power. Like, in Spain, even after, like, 50 years of, like, Franco and, like, the fascist dictatorship, like, the CNT, which is the anarchist union that had done the revolution, reappears in the 70s 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 and it's, 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 cause people to do this. But, you know, but they're trying to do it in a way that doesn't involve them giving up their power. way that doesn't involve them giving up their power um so yeah as vicky ostowall points out this sort of like this like instinctive embrace of like democracy in the factory like as a political

program is only possible as long as factories as long as like the factory functions as a point of encounter um her i think it was her term for it was she calls it a dark agora which is like so agora is like like the 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 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 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 the shop floor as a site of formation of identities that can allow you to mobilize stuff. And so this takes like a number of forms. Most famously, there's deindustrialization 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 everyone lives in a town around the coal mine and this means that everyone sees each other constantly and are like constantly

like running into each other and like physically talking into each other and physically talking to each other. And this is a really good way to create radical politics. So what happens is these factories get sent out to the suburbs, and this allows you to create places where workers are isolated from each other. where workers are isolated from each other. And the other thing you can do is you turn workers into homeowners and you sort of like buy them off with 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 80s rolls on, the sort of like the heralded democratization of finance

replaces democratization of the factory as sort of the capitalist class. Like the other thing they do that's like really insidious is they tie like the remaining union pensions into the stock market and this is stuff like like you see this today with like 401ks and it means that like if 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 enormous propaganda apparatuses. You get – Walmart in particular has these mass ideological

programming things that they run that are designed to sort of get you to identify with the corporation itself and not with the other people you're with in the class as a whole. And the other thing that they're you know, like the other people you're with in the class as a whole. And, you know, 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,

combined with like logistics advances. And it means that like if workers ever start getting an upper hand somewhere, capitalists can just leave. And the process that you see is that as the sort of the total number of people

working in the, like in industrial work keeps decreasing, right? As a percentage of the population, it decreasing and as this happens capitalists are just like okay screw it we're gonna 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 the traditional workforce entirely and these developments this is what actually like eventually destroys the classical workers movement is the ability to leave and 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 right 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 welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter nocturnal 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 to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures.

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Black Lit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life listen to black lit on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast and we're we're back we're back and 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's weird because this is the one place where the factory system works like really differently than everywhere else um and there's a lot of reasons for this one of which is that like so chinese like state-owned 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, so Chinese, like, state-owned 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 the company you work for, and there's this whole sort of, like, legal apparatus built around it. And it, like, you know, and, like, this, like, unit gives you everything from, like, your retirement to, like, it, like, feeds you. Like, there's often, like, entertainment stuff's, like, tied into it. Like, you get healthcare, you get, like your retirement like it like feeds you like there's often like entertainment stuff's like tied into it like you get health care you get like child care from it and the ccp also gets rid of the peace rate system which is this like this is this thing that like i mean it so there's a lot of capitalist places to work with this where it'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 cherries 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 not gonna say the fact chinese factory system is great but like because they don't have the piece 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, like, degree of participation in the worker process, in, like, in like in the labor process that like you don't really see most other places and everything they have that i'd i'd luckily uh garrison and i also have this is we have the ability to criticize our bosses although we we have more of this yeah one day yeah what do you got go ahead i uh i'd want one okay we we've got it we don't we don't have our big character poster yet but like one day garrison and i are gonna

show up to the office with like giant big character posters with your faces on it that like have specifically roberts are gonna have a list of crimes on it great my favorite part of like big labor protests is when they make those giant puppets. Oh, the giant stick puppets? Puppet me. If we just make a giant stick puppet version of Robert and Sophie that we just parade around the office. As long as mine's bigger than Robert's. That's fine. We can do that.

Great. Great. Full support. So we get to do this. In China, 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 they just replace him 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 extent 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 factory system different from like the other systems uh and also because of like structural stuff in maoism that i i mean i could talk about that but i yeah 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 deep they're not they're not tied to the workplace at all. They're mostly political demands for democracy and the party or stuff like that.

And that means, at least in the cities, the system kind of works okay-ish 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 a long time. I know you've been waiting for this.

Yeah, 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. Like it's like it's one of the Every, like, it's, like, it's one of the rare events where, like, it's misinterpreted in, like, exactly the same way

by both the people who support it and the people who oppose it. And, okay, the first thing to understand about this, right, is, like, okay, so the, the, the initial, the very, very beginning of the Cultural Revolution, like, it's basically a bunch 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 work 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 like 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 like declared like black class backgrounds who have black blood and like you know they weren't allowed to hold any 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've 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 you've done social it's it's really

bizarre and and what's happening here is the kids from the red class backgrounds are you know they're the kids of the new of the new Chinese elite and they're just like picking on and attacking the kids who are like now this this sort of like like

minority class and so what it's amounts to is the beginning of this is a bunch of privileged rich kids who are like attacking the bunch of kids who are being persecuted for stuff that's like not their fault at all and you know part and the other the other part of this like this is the part that people i think get it's like mao is trying to like play power game inside the party blah blah blah but you know things get more and more chaotic and you get you get circling his attacks on like ccp bureaucrats and cadres and stuff because mao is to solidify his place in the party, and blah, blah, blah. There's all this stuff that's happening.

But then it gets really interesting. So this starts in 1966, right? And at the very beginning of 1967, 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 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 fuck moment for mao because you know now he has to like deal with this city that has been taking over by its own working class and and i found this incredible line from Zhou Enlai who's having a meeting with Mao and they're trying to figure out what to

do about the fact that this Shanghai has been seized by these workers. And I'm just going to read this. When asked whether the new leadership should be elected from the bottom up, Zhou Enlai 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 thing you can find right because it's like okay well there there's two things that can happen here one is either like okay you you you give these people democracy and the ability to vote right and joe and lion mal look at this and like that would be anarchism we can't do that and the second thing is you don't do that and you repress 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 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 about a year

but but by 1968 the students and the workers who had like you know done done this sort of uprising stuff are getting slaughtered like just massacred killed on an unimaginable scale uh the and this is this is where everyone gets the Cultural Revolution completely wrong, because everyone, the entire memory of the Cultural Revolution is from basically the first two years of it, right? Which is, like, all the stuff about, like, you know, like, professors being marched out onto the street in dunce caps and, like, students, like, humiliating the professors and, like, party officials being, like, marched around with, like, placards on them and, like, people. Like, that's the stuff, and, like, the chaos of the revolution with like placards on them and like people like that's the stuff and 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 you can art like 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 1966 to 1969 and then there's like a longer one that goes to like the death of mao depending

on 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 the the so the the first phase of the initial uprising then the rebel groups are fighting each other but then phase three is when the state like cracks down on like i start starts like starts trying to crush this, like rebel student factions. And I'm going to read from Walder who did a, so there's a guy named Walder who, who went to,

he did a bunch of work in the Chinese archives where she like went and like found the death tolls. And I'm going to read like, he, he, he like, he goes to a bunch of archives. He goes to a bunch of state archives and he like, like tracks death certificates and tracks down who died where. And this is what he wrote about it.

of those persecuted for alleged political crimes so what he's saying here is that 75 percent of all of the deaths in 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 90 percent of the actual political persecution was done by the state and not by the rebels and when when you actually look at what this means like this means everything everything anyone ever talks about the cultural revolution is completely wrong it wasn't like the thing that happened in the cultural revolution wasn't that sort of student radicalism got out of control and they started killing everyone it produces all this violence the thing that actually happens is that there's a student like uprising right right? But what happens is that the,

the, the sort of conservative and state factions just slaughter them. And I, Walter estimates the total number of people dead. It's somewhere between 1.1 and 1.6 million people. And again, like 75%, 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 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 and radicals like start like making trouble is that you get all these people dead but then you know you you have the people inside the state who like know how many people they had to kill in order to hold on to power right they they kill they kill probably more people than like the you know there's there's a very famous massacre of like communists or like suspected communists in indonesia that doesn't get called a genocide because it was technically on political lines but like was one of the worst anti-communist

massacres in history and they killed more people than that in 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 happening outside the party and the other thing happens is that like the most radical students and workers of this period just get they're all dead right they killed they killed like they they killed like a million people the you know for for for every one person who got killed there's about 19 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's a huge spike in like state killings 1970 and but by by the end of the 70s like anything that sort of like could have cohered into into like a movement that like wants democracy in the workplace for example it's just gone because all of all of the radicals like and and anyone anyone who like wanted anyone who wanted democracy in the factory any 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 80s you get this politics that's driven by this like sort of like intellectual

liberal like liberal democratic politics that ignores just like completely ignores working class entirely and you know and these these people start to take power and you get denga ping well i i think i think it's like right before he takes power but denga ping winds up implementing the one child policy which is this like incredibly draconian and really successful attempt just like re-establish the state's like patriarchal control over the household and strips like hundreds of millions of women from like like of of autonomy over their own bodies and you know and and it really looks like through through the through through like the late 70s and the 80s it looks like the like the chinese ruling class has succeeded right like they finally destroyed they finally destroyed like any opposition to them but then you, things get very weird, which is that Tiananmen happens.

And, you know, by 1989, like the whole, like as a rule, like in general everywhere, the sort of classical workers' movement that was like demanding democracy in the factory, like they're basically done. And so they're unable to sort of do their own revolutions. Now the only thing they can do is sort of like latch on to other stuff but the problem that the party has is that so they'd 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 1980s like china starts implementing a market economy right they said They start cutting the welfare state. They start destroying the sort of limited control that workers have had in the factories.

And they kind of unknowingly reproduced the conditions that have been producing these revolutions in every other country. And as this massive inflation wave hits, they turn China into this powder keg. They turn China into this powder keg. And this combined with sort of like the liberal democratic students moving gets you. Why do a lot of workers agree with democracy and freedom? In the workshops, 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 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 5pm, but he tells me to work overtime for two hours, and if I don't, he'll cut my bonus. This is a personal rule. time for two hours and if i don't he'll 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 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, the things the students are talking about and they're like huh 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 this a very sort of very classical like critique

of one man rule in the factory that has been happening for like you know like a hundred years but what's interesting about this is that like any actual attempt to like do this right gets gets you to workers control like democratic workers control in the factory and as walder who walder also wrote um another like he's a guy who went and interviewed a bunch of the people who had 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 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 have an intellectual class. These are just a bunch of workers, and they have very little connection – they have very little political connections beforehand to the liberal circles. They're just sort of hearing what they're reading.

And this means like what you have here is like it's not like an intellectual – this is just a bunch of workers. And for one final time, their instinct when the revolution starts is to demand democracy in the factory. And is what these people were fighting for is – it's scrubbed from the record of the CCP. It's scrubbed – like, the pro-democracy movement doesn't remember it, even though their entire thing is memory. And, yeah, and this ensures that the meeting of these actual events, what these people were fighting for, what they were trying to do, has been almost completely lost. 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 tiananmen um and in some sense in in 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 has been these people who had been in the cities, who had been – they'd been the beneficiaries of this old sort of socialist period welfare state.

And these people in the streets around Tiananmen, they mount the last attack of the classical workers' movement. they mount the last attack of the classical workers movement and when they lose this entire class like this this entire urban working class that had been around since like the 20s that had been sort of the the driver of chinese radical politics that had been like that had been fighting and striking for like 70 80 years, they're gone. They're completely destroyed. And over the course of the economic restructuring in the 1990s, 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 underclasses of the old social system who are dragged into the cities from their villages, from their their towns and who now fill actually well i don't know what the numbers are today because it's weird because of covid but like in in 2019 there were 277 million 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 household 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 that they they constitute like an entirely new class of workers. And instead of whatever sort of privileges had been carved out by the old working class, this one gets nothing.

And the other thing that they get is this entire raft of sort of capitalist ideology that's baked into every aspect of the workplace culture. There's this massive attempt in China to get people to buy homes. place culture this this is massive attempt in china to get people to buy homes and you know like when where the old working class could at least like posit 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 um like about the you about the american working class which is that everyone sees themselves as temporary 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, then I'm going to become a small business owner is completely inimical to the formation of like the classical workers' movement. And there hasn't been that kind of formation in China's sense. And this is not really a unique thing, right? The death of that workers' movement has seen a sort of like complete and total collapse of the demand for like democratic self-management like everywhere across the entire world and you know incredibly stubbornly like the working class like refuses to sort of cohere itself in the

factory and so in this sense china is really just sort of late to the game. They got slightly early. They got slightly later to the point that we're at now. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me as the fire and dare enter Nocturnal 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 to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. X Elite has 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 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 app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he look so fresh.

And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez.

At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or His father in Cuba. Mr. González wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still

this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them.

Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You said there was going to be a happier ending. Oh, the happy ending was last episode. This episode's ending is really depressing well i mean okay 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 u.s lurching from one economic collapse to another and the world the world like the international economic system like i think i was born in like the middle, 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 2008. 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, lurched from crisis to crisis to crisis. And that means that there's been an incredibly – just like a rapidly increasing number of revolutions everywhere, even though the sort of like darker gore of the factory like has ceased to be this thing that like creates the working – like the identity of the working class. Okay, so in order to have some kind of mass movement, you need some kind of collective identity to mobilize around. And if you can't make this in the factory, the to hear itself around workers are really only able to 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 i could do this is really the state and you know the state has the ability to to increase the price of basic commodities and

welfare benefits and that becomes the the only available enemy and so yeah if you look at what revolutions have been in the last 20 years it's a constant fight against the police because fighting the police is the only thing that can that can allow you to create a new social identity like a sort of collective identification and you know and so this means that collective 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 occupy was originally like the the the the like the slogan occupy was about the argentinian factory occupations in in 2001 but then you know that stops like that's the end

like just one like that that's that's the end of the whole cycle there's there's no more factory occupations um actually that's true you get one in bosnia-hezbollah 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 in the sort of like square occupations 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 it the factory isn't is no longer this sort of like space of like creation and

possibility that could like 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 for the last 10 years it's like people people originally it was like it just left right so everyone's everyone's occupying squares but you know by by about 2014 people 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 replaced with running street fights 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 the like the old workers councils were able to bring down states like largely they got crushed by outside militaries but they were 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 if you're in a square, you don't have the ability to do that. And without the factory occupations alongside them, there have been a lot of general strikes in the last four years. There's one in Peru, there's one in France, there's one in Hong Kong, in Sudan, and every single one of them has been crushed. But this is a real problem, right? Because the current labor conditions aren't going to produce another wave of factory occupations. And so the way forward for anyone who wants to have a democracy in the workplace is completely unclear.

And I think that's the actual legacy of Tiananmen. The workers who are assembled outside Tiananmen Square had already left their factories. And, you know, for all that they spoke the language of the old workers' movements, right? They spoke of democracy in the factory and one-man rule. They stood and fought and died like we do in the streets. They're this bridge between sort of the classical workers' movements and us. bridge between sort of the classical workers movement and us and you know they they face the same revolutionary crisis that we face the crisis of papua and palestine and colombia and iran and myanmar and hong kong of is this crisis of victory that's just beyond the horizon can't be grasped

you know i i don't think the people at tiananmen have any answers to give us i'd like i don't think they do i think they they ran they ran headlong into the crisis that we ran into and they all died. 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 on our lips, build the world they died fighting for. 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, 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 slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of right. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturno on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 listen to better offline on the iheart radio apps, wherever else you get your podcasts from. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba?

Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home, and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We'll see you next time. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

New episodes every Thursday.