Mia Wong (62:33)
Welcome to Kid Happened Here. I'm your host, Mia Wong when we last left The Story of Tiananmen 1 Vladimir Ilyich Lenin had, in theory, crushed the last remnants of the faction of the workers movement that actually wanted democracy to extend into the factories. Unfortunately for the Leninists, no matter how many workers they killed, the demand for democracy in the factory simply refused to die for over a hundred years. The development of the mass factory system and the logistical infrastructure necessary to support it, perhaps most importantly, coal mines and the railroads used to transport that coal, generated an especially militant working class that saw democratic control over the workplace as a fundamental aspect of its liberation. Ideologically. As the journal Endnotes pointed out, this manifested in a series of interlocking beliefs about the nature of the working class and class society, all of which were necessary for the instinctive formation of workers councils to manifest themselves in moments of revolutionary crisis. In the midst of the rapid technological expansions of the second and third industrial revolutions, workers came to see themselves as the creators of the new world. This produced the second belief that drove the classical workers the producers of this new world should also be its inheritors. Thus, the goal of the workers movement was to take control of production itself and manage it for the common benefit of workers themselves. These two beliefs in and of themselves were not unique to the democratic wing of the workers movement. They broadly comprised the ideology of the movement as a whole, and by this point the workers movement was extremely broad, stretching from social democratic trade unionists to the intellectual heads of the Leninist vanguard parties. What made the Democratic wing unique was its concern with the fundamental alienation of factory life, with the condition of being reduced to an object by bosses who simply used workers as human tools. For the Leninists and social democrats, alienation was simply a product of ownership or distribution. The liberation of the working class would be found in its productive capacity, not in its innate humanity and creativity. But for the democratic wing of the workers movement, this solved nothing as long as the fundamental reduction from human to object that characterized one man rule in the factory persisted. Changes in ownership structure and health benefits missed the entire point that degradation could only be solved by returning agency and autonomy to the working class by giving the class itself control over the production process that for so long had controlled them. In 1936, Spanish workers decided to take matters into their own hands and seize control over their workplaces en masse. The Spanish Revolution, as it later became known, would become the largest and most extensive experiment in democratic worker self management before or since. Everything from public utilities to bakeries to hospitals to shoe factories fell under the control of the direct democratic unions. And once their former bosses had been chased from the premises, the workers set about transforming the entirety of Spanish society along democratic lines, pooling their resources collectively and allocating them democratically for the benefit of everyone. For a brief moment, the triumphant experiment in democratic self management delivered on its promises. Output increased dramatically, social services were expanded, and the workers of Spain, by their own self organization, developed a universal healthcare system that dramatically expanded service into rural areas where care was previously inaccessible. But the revolution had begun Amidst a violent civil war in Spain and under the guise of an anti fascist alliance, liberal socialist and Stalinist forces brutally stamped out any attempt at democratic self management and returned the factories to their owners before losing the war to the fascist armies of Francisco Franco. Undeterred by the mounting casualty tolls of pro managerial massacres, revolutionary workers formed workers councils and mass factory assemblies once again in Hungary in 1956, and then again in Italy, France and Czechoslovakia in 1968. Hungary in particular is an interesting revolution because over the years it has been subjected to so much of the same liberal mythologization you get with Tiananmen, but this time even worse. The Hungarian revolution is remembered as a liberal democratic revolution. But if you talk to the actual people who did the revolution, they were saying things like, and this is a direct quote from a member of a Hungarian workers council, the time when the boss decided our fate is over. In reality, far from simply instituting liberal democratic democracy, Hungarian workers seized control of their factories and workplaces, formed workers councils and overthrew the government before Russian tanks slaughtered them. This was not a liberal democratic revolution at all. Almost identical revolts broke out across the capitalist world as well. In Italy, in France, in Chile, communes broke out and colonized Vietnam. They spread everywhere and to the dismay of capitalists and communists alike. The development and implementation of the democratic solution to alienation these revolts provided was largely instinctual, and it often emerged in places without established workers movements and their political education effects. Typical of such movements was the course of the revolution in Algeria. The political education Algerian workers had received was from the nationalist vanguardist National Liberation Front, which had prosecuted the war against the French colonizers. The FLN's ideology emphasized the decisive role of the state in national development. Upon taking power, however, Ahmed Ben Bella, Algeria's first president, discovered the Question of the economic structure of Algeria had already been answered. For him, production would be managed by democratic workers. Councils built on the property seized by Algerian workers after the mass exodus of French settlers who fled the country following independence left much of their property uninhabited. Ben Bello's administration took a page out of Lenin's book and publicly supported the councils while privately undermining them. But the whole dispute was made irrelevant by a military coup two years later that dismantled the councils completely and reimposed one man rule in the factory. Still, even by the late 70s, it was by no means clear that one man rule in the factory would triumph as a political system. Workers and students almost took Italy in 1977, and the CNT, the anarchist union that had led so much of the Spanish Revolution, reappeared after the death of Franco. For a brief, fleeting moment in the late 1970s, it really looked like they were going to do it. The persistence of these revolts in the face of pure military repression caused capitalist managerial elites to look for ways to dismantle the systemic structures that produced the democratic revolts without giving up their power. As author and friend of the show Vicky Osterweil points out, the instinctive embrace of democracy in the factory was only possible so long as the factory remained a point of encounter, a kind of dark agora that at once both exploited workers and facilitated the interactions that allowed them to identify with each other as a class and find and produce collective meaning. Thus, the fundamental thrust of the attack against democratic self management would take the form of an attack on the shop floor as a site of collective identity formation and as a space that could be seen in any way as liberatory. This assault took a number of forms, most famously deindustrialization itself, as well as the spatial relocation of factories from urban centers into the suburbs, where workers could be isolated from each other and turned into homeowners bought off with a combination of cheap credit and the promise that the new homes would also function as assets. The democratization of finance replaced the democratization of the factory, as the capitalist class funneled union pensions into the stock market, thus tying what remained of organized labor to the fate of capitalism itself. Corporations began to turn the workplace into an immense propaganda apparatus, replete with mass ideological programming designed to promote identification with the corporation itself and not the working class as a whole. Worst of all, the mobility of capital and the immobility of workers, combined with the new logistics networks and technological advances in containerized shipping, to create a world where, if workers ever began to get the upper hand, capitalists could simply Move elsewhere. As the total size of the industrial working class contracted, capitalists increasingly took that option and left, spitting vast populations out of the traditional workforce entirely. These developments would eventually destroy the classical workers movement. But in order for the anti democratic counter revolution to succeed, it needed somewhere to move their production to somewhere with a large exploitable labor supply. The capitalist class found that answer in China in the wake of the CCP's victory in the Chinese Civil War in 1949. The Chinese factory system was extremely different from the system that existed anywhere else in the world. Chinese state owned firms virtually lacked the ability to fire workers. People's entire social sphere was built around their work units, which provided everything from their healthcare to their retirement, to their food, to often their entertainment. The CCP also eliminated the peace rate system, a system in which people were paid per unit they produced, which is, for example, how the USSR worked. This meant that in order to get people to work, bosses had very little leverage. They were thus forced to allow a degree of participation in the labor process and the ability to criticize bosses, because otherwise it was virtually impossible to get anyone to do anything. Chinese bosses solved this problem through a combination of mass ideological work and a parentalistic semi democratic system for determining the heads of work teams that, while rigged by the party, ensured that managers would at least be somewhat popular. Though the process was strictly managed, workers had the ability to criticize the cadre who governed them and combined the work unit's system of folding home and social life into the factory system. The product of this system was that because there was already a greater degree of workers participation in Chinese factories than workers elsewhere, and because of some of the structural elements of Maoism, demands for democracy became delinked from the workplace. And it meant that the system, at least in the cities, worked sort of okay until the Cultural Revolution. This means that it is time for me to do the Cultural Revolution rant.
