It Could Happen Here - Tiananmen Remastered, Part 1

Episode Date: June 3, 2025

Mia revisits her episodes situating the Tiananmen Square Massacre in the context of the century long battle over democracy in the workplace. Sources:https://lausancollective.com/2021/communists-crushed-international-workers-movement/ https://chuangcn.org/journal/two/red-dust/sinosphere/ http://www.tsquare.tv/links/Walder.html https://chuangcn.org/2019/06/tiananmen-square-the-march-into-the-institutions/ https://www.marxists.org/archive/brinton/1970/workers-control/ https://endnotes.org.uk/issues/4 https://libcom.org/article/utopia-rules-technology-stupidity-and-secret-joys-bureaucracy-david-graeberSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Welcome to IKEDAPEN here. I'm your host, Mia Wong. Today is the day before the 36th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. We're doing something a little bit different. Three years ago, I wrote a pair of episodes about Tiananmen, democracy, and the International Workers' Movement, expanding off a piece I'd written for Lausanne a year before that. That was a long time ago.

The world is a fundamentally different place than it was in 2021. Europe has been consumed by war. Whole revolutions rose and fell. The fascist threat we defeated in the streets returned to power in a new and more terrifying form. In this new, uglier, and more brutal world, I wanted to return to Tiananmen. To return to one of the great horrors of another age, to see if we can take anything new from the wreckage of the Death of Hope. I'm no longer the same person I was when I originally wrote these episodes, and so today and tomorrow are Tiananmen remastered.

There were really three Tiananmens. The first and most famous Tiananmen was the student protest inside Tiananmen Square itself. If you've heard the word Tiananmen before, this is a story you know. The second Tiananmen was the Tiananmen of the blocks of Beijing around the square. Blocks seized and transformed by Beijing's working class. If you've heard about this Tiananmen at all, it's probably in the context of the tanks rolling through them on their way to the square. And then there was the third Tiananmen, the protests in other cities, of which we still,

years after I wrote the original piece, know distressingly little about. Our focus today is on the first two. The students of the student protests were a weird ideological grab-back that cannot simply be reduced down to the simplistic pro-democracy label they've been saddled with in the three and a half decades since Tiananmen. The short version is this. The students were pissed off about what's called reform and opening, not going fast enough. And we should talk

about what reform and opening actually was. On the one hand, you had some steps to ease restrictions on free speech, rehabilitate intellectuals, and other people with so-called bad class backgrounds, and allow for a broader public discourse. This was paired with market reforms that started to bring capitalism back to China. This was a shit show in a lot of ways. If you want to hear about the CCP reinventing what's essentially debt peonage about five years into this process, go listen to my Behind the Bastards episode about the

poison milk scandal. But reform and opening is remembered as a kind of golden age of free expression, a golden age of hope and possibility, where things really seemed like they could be different. This is not entirely accurate. Reform and opening also saw a bunch of absolutely draconian crackdowns on the social sphere. There was the one-child policy, a hideous expansion of the state into the sphere of social reproduction, replete with forced sterilizations and the reimposition of patriarchal power. It saw the tightening of one-man rule in the factory, the destruction of any form of workers'

decision-making, and control over the process of their own labor. In these horrors, you can see the beginning of the fragmentation of Tiananmen, and Chinese politics more broadly, already forming. The students wanted market reform to go faster. They wanted more freedom of speech. They sort of wanted democracy, but mostly they wanted to be in charge of the party so they could crush the bureaucracy that was holding market reforms back. It's worth noting, of course, that many of these students were involved in what became

known as neo-authoritarianism, which holds that the strong central party should take full control of society and destroy factions in the bureaucracy. It was an ideology that survived the death of the protests and went on to become a major faction of the CCP itself in the 90s and 2000s. And this is where some of the truly weird shit at Tiananmen comes from. The students were in many ways an incredibly hierarchical movement, which escalated to the point where student leaders were kidnapping each other for control over stages and microphones. And these protests, in terms of their nominally stated goal of influencing the factional fights

inside the party, were stunningly ineffectual. The guy they were trying to defend inside the party wound up getting ousted and put under house arrest for the rest of his life, and the changes they demanded failed to occur. But Tandemann, as I mentioned earlier, was also the workers. And for most of the protests, the students absolutely hated them. Students barred workers from entering the square itself until the final hours of the protests, tried to stop workers from carrying out a general strike, and relations were, in general, extremely bad. This raises the

question, what were the workers doing there in the first place? There's a few answers. The simplest and most immediate one is that the workers were pissed off at how badly the party was treating students in the square. But there were other things going on too. The late 1980s in China saw rampant and skyrocketing inflation. The rapid price increases threatened the supply of cheap grain that composed a huge supply of welfare services provided to urban workers. Meanwhile, marketization was accelerating. And suddenly you had CCP princelings racing down the streets in imported sports cars, driving past workers on their bikes and spending a year's salary gambling at the racetrack. And this pissed people off.

So they started organizing. I'm going to read a section from a piece by Yoran Zhang about what the workers were doing. During the struggle to obstruct the military, workers started to realize the power of their spontaneous organization and action. This was self-liberation on an unprecedented level. A huge wave of self-organization ensued. The Workers' Autonomous Federation membership grew exponentially, and other workers'

organizations, both within and across the workplace, mushroomed. The development of organization led to a radicalization of action. Workers started organizing self-armed quasi-militias, such as the Pickett Corps and the 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 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. This was unacceptable to the party.

And so, for the third time in seventy years, the CCP fed its own working class to the machine guns. On the night of June 3rd, the army began to slaughter its way through the workers defending the square. It was the workers who bore the brunt of the massacre. Most of the casualty and later political repression were against members of the workers' faction. The army soon reached the square itself, where the Western press corps bore witness to what became known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

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

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

It's based on free citizens, equal before the law, participating in elections to choose representatives who pass laws and generally oversee and manage the state bureaucracy. This model of political democracy relegates the workplace to a separate economic sphere into which democracy does not extend. The capitalist firm, or its state-owned equivalent, remained the absolute dictatorship of the capitalists and their managerial flunkies. Even the progressive wings of the pro-democracy movements in Taiwan and South Korea maintained this private dictatorship. Workers would be given rights under the progressive regimes, permission to form unions, access

to the welfare state, limited protections from the worst physical and psychological abuses their bosses could inflict. But no matter how progressive the pro-democracy movement, the legitimacy of the dictatorship of the bosses was not up for dispute. To them, democracy meant a democratic state, not a democratic workplace. The workers of Tiananmen alone disagreed. They stood against not only the rest of the world's pro-democracy movements, but the tide of history itself. By applying the principles of the pro-democracy movement

to their own concerns, skyrocketing inflation, mounting debt, rampant corruption by government officials, spiraling inequality, and petty bureaucratic oppression, Beijing's working class reinvented an old and now largely forgotten tradition of democracy in the factory. Democratic Workers' Self-Management This is, to a large extent, what Tiananmen was actually about. It was the culmination of a century and a half long war between the democratic wing of the classical workers movement and essentially every other ideological movement on earth. The workers movement would fight capitalists and communists, liberals and fascists,

monarchies and republics, social democracies and theocracies. And at Yenemen, they would lose one final time. That defeat is the origin of the modern world. One man rule in the factory in its thousand, thousand forms. Is the author of the hell of the 21st century. And when we come back, we're going to look at the international part of the struggle that ended Tiananmen. the world. Live from the underground you'll discover no rules fighting, Japanese street racing, Brazilian favela life and much more. All real completely uncensored. This is unique access

with straightforward on the ground reporting. We're taking you deep into the dirt without the usual airs and graces of legacy media. A way that showcases what the mainstream cannot access. Real underground reporting with real people, no excuses. For the past decade I've been going to places I shouldn't be meeting people I shouldn't know. Now you can come along too. Listen to the Away Days podcast, reporting from the underbelly

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. To fully understand the magnitude of Tiananmen, we need to go back to the Revolutions of 1848. If you want a detailed accounting of 1848, go listen to the Revolutions podcast. It's great. It's also many, many, many, many, many, many episodes. The short version is that there were a bunch of revolutions across Europe in 1848 collectively known as the springtime of the peoples. It was the first wave of revolutions where socialists were a real political faction. Frederick Engels, yeah, that Engels of Marx and Engels fame, was on the barricades with

a rifle fighting in Prussia. There was a huge revolution in France where they deposed the king. And the question of how far democracy was going to go came for the first time to the forefront. Inside of the democratic movement itself, you had a split between the sort of French radicals who'd done the original French Revolution, who wanted electoral democracy but to cater ship in the workplace, and the new socialists who wanted to question property relations and the question of class itself, and most importantly for our purposes, whether democracy would extend past the political

sphere and directly into economics. This pre-figure is a split inside the socialist movement itself. For the most radical factions, control over the means of production meant that workers would control the production process directly through free associations of workers. Direct democratic unions, a position later known as syndicalism, were workers councils. But more conservative factions of the socialists became enamored with the bureaucratic technologies of the state. They watched with envy as the industrializing powers of the 1860s and 1870s engaged in increasingly

elaborate planning schemes, first of roads, canals, and railroads, then of entire cities, complex electrical grids, gas lines, and plumbing systems, and began to believe that centralized state planning, not the democratic association of workers, could bring about the long sought after cooperative commonwealth of socialism, and that planning-obsessed faction began to encompass more and more of the left. In Germany, home to the powerful German Social Democratic Party, socialists became divided between two camps. The revisionists, led by Edward Bernstein, who renounced Marxism and revolution entirely

in favor of reforming capitalism and the state from within, and Karl Wachowski's orthodox Marxists. Basically the only two things these factions, who otherwise despised each other, agreed on was the primacy of state bureaucratic planning over workplace democracy. This led to the Social Democratic Party disastrously working to break the workplace autonomy of many of its own workers. But worse still, the person who became most obsessed with the potential of bureaucratic state planning was one Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. As the anthropologist David Graeber pointed out, Lenin's obsession with the German Postal Service was such that he included this passage about the future socialist state in his famous State

and Revolution, a text written between the February and October revolutions of 1917. Quote, a witty German social democrat of the seventies of the last century called the postal service an example of the socialist economic system. This is very true. At present, the postal Service is a business organized on the lines of a state capitalist monopoly. Imperialism is gradually transforming all trusts into organizations of a similar type, to organize the whole national economy on the lines of the Postal Service, so that technicians, foremen, bookkeepers, as well as all officials

that receive salaries no higher than a quote workman's wage, all under the leadership and control of the armed proletariat, this is our immediate aim. Lenin's idealized form of socialism would thus take the form of a total state bureaucracy tasked with planning the entire economy. This would set off a massive series of confrontations with the part of the workers movement who wanted workers control over the means of production to mean workers making decisions over work themselves and not just working for a different set of bureaucrats. The struggle between bureaucracy and democracy in the workers movement mirrored the struggle between the workers movement

and the capitalist state. By the 1880s, the workers' movements had created variable states within a state, in countries like Germany and Italy. These quote-unquote states were vast networks of workers' institutions, ranging from, as Graeber described, free schools, workers' associations, friendly societies, libraries and theatres, end quote, to unions, co-ops, neighbourhood associations, tennis unions, mutual aid societies, and political parties ran democratically by workers themselves, which provided vital services to workers and their families and served, so the workers hoped, as the basis for a new socialist society.

Fearing the popularity of these democratic workers institutions, Autofund Bismarck created bureaucratic, state-run versions of the libraries, theaters, and welfare services to replace them, telling an American observer, quote, My idea was to bribe the working class, or shall I say, to win them over, to regard the state as a social institution existing for their sake and interest in their welfare. And this works. It was enormously successful. Socialists themselves came to confuse Bismarck's welfare state bribe with socialism itself.

And when they took power, they replicated the bureaucratic nature of many of Bismarck's programs, eliminating the democratic aspects of the older workers' institutions entirely. But where their leaders had forgotten the democratic core of their own ideology, workers themselves never did. As the 19th century drew to a close and the 20th century began, workers who engaged in spontaneous uprisings instinctively began to form democratic institutions, particularly workers' councils. The most famous of these councils, of course, were formed during the spontaneous Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917. These councils,

called Soviets, were originally formed in 1905 out of ad hoc strike committees that became formalized elected bodies of representatives in the various factions who worked to coordinate the general strike. The revolution of 1905 was crushed by the Tsar, but in 1917 the Russian working class would once again form workers councils as another revolution commenced. This time, the councils would take control of production directly, coordinating between various factories and industries as well as serving as a workers' counter power to the new revolutionary government. The Russian Revolution kicked off a period of open warfare that stretched from Italy

to Argentina between the forces of democracy and the factory and the newly formed anti-democratic alliance of social democrats, Bolsheviks, and capitalists. Between 1917 and 1920, workers' councils formed in Germany, Poland, Austria, Ukraine, and Ireland and were matched by revolts of syndicalist unions in Brazil and Argentina. These uprisings were all crushed. In Italy, which saw some of the most intense conflict between syndicalists and the Italian state, the famous occupation of the factories was ended not by the Italian government, but by the Italian Socialist Party and their union, the General Confederation of Labour.

This in large part was how Fascism won in Italy and in Germany. Faced with workers' movements on the verge of seizing power, Social Democrats turned on the working class and slaughtered their own comrades, propelling the fascists into power in their wake. Ironically, the worst defeat of the Democratic Workers' Movement would come not at the hands of the capitalists or Social Democrats, but from Lenin and the Bolsheviks. The very party at the Workers' Councils had put in power. Lenin began to undermine the power of the Soviets almost immediately. Published mere days after the October Revolution, his draft decrees

on workers' control stated in no uncertain terms that real power and authority lay with the new state and the Bolshevik-dominated trade unions. In the face of massive and unexpected resistance from the Workers' Councils, the decree is needed to be modified before they could be implemented. But while publicly declaring his support for the Workers' Councils, the Bolshevik slogan was, after all, all power to the Soviets, Lenin continued to chip away at their power until he finally admitted his real position of democracy in the factory in 1918 in the horrifying The Immediate Tas tasks of the Soviet government, quote, unquestioning

submission to a single will is absolutely necessary for the success of labor processes that are based on large scale machine industry. Today, the revolution demands, in the interest of socialism, that the masses unquestioningly obey the single will of the leaders of socialism, that the masses unquestioningly obey the single will of the leaders of the labor process. This is obviously one of the most disturbing things I've ever read. But to be clear, while Lenin is more candid about what one-man rule in the factory actually entails, the system he's describing isn't actually different from one-man rule

in any other political system. Bolshevik rule in the factory would be no different than capitalist, social-democratic, or even fascist rule. The movement for democracy in the factory now faced four implacable enemies willing to put aside their ideological differences to ensure that workers would not run their workplaces directly. And as the 1920s bled into the 1930s, the movement seemed to have all but disappeared in a hail of bullets and blood. But they didn't. In next episode, our heroes, the collective hero, the world's working class, will be back.

They will do many, many more revolutions. And we're going to talk about why those revolutions happened, what the ruling class did to stop them and then return to the lead up to Tiananmen Square to see the final stand of the Chinese working class. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonedmedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

This is an iHeart podcast. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonedmedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. This is an iHeart podcast. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media.

For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonedmedia.com, or check