FRSO - Looking back at Tiananmen Square, the defeat of counter-revolution in China.

[Intelligitimate]

Hey, I'm looking for some reactions to this article. Please read it and tell me what you think.

Looking back at Tiananmen Square, the defeat of counter-revolution in China (http://www.frso.org/about/statements/2009/looking-back-at-tiananmen-square.htm)

[Kwisatz Haderach]

We are publishing it now, because with the 20th anniversary of the events at Tiananmen Square upon us, there are already attempts underway to attack socialism, the Chinese revolution, and those that defend it. We do not see this paper as a definitive statement of our organization on the many political movements and great debates that occurred in China since 1949. Rather we think the paper stands as a rigorous effort to use Marxism to understand the near defeat of the Chinese revolution that took place some 20 years ago.
They've got to be kidding. Deng Xiaoping and his band of wannabe bourgeois were "defending socialism?"

In the events of Tienanmen Square, neither side stood for socialism. But, with the benefit of hindsight, I'd rather support the protesters - because we don't know what they would have done if they had succeeded, while we DO know what the government did after it won. It continued with the restoration of capitalism.

[Yazman]

Counter-revolution was never defeated - china is a full blown modern capitalist state.

[Q]

Here are a few alternative articles to the idiocy that is frso:

New book: Tiananmen 1989 – Seven Weeks that Shook the World (http://chinaworker.info/en/content/news/734/)

Tiananmen 1989: A ‘human wall’ against tanks and machine guns (http://chinaworker.info/en/content/news/749/)

8,000 march in Hong Kong to commemorate Tiananmen massacre (http://chinaworker.info/en/content/news/754/)

[Q]

Here's a movie on the Tienamen Massacre (warning: contains material that may be considered shocking):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9A51jN19zw&feature=player_embedded

How some here consider the working class rising up to a totalitarian regime to be counter-revolutionary is really beyond me...

[Bitter Ashes]

Tank man is so inspiring!
The difference accountability makes! Accountability was provided by having a critical (albiet not for the best motives) media visable at the time. Had cameras not been seen on Tank Man would have been punished for his defiance most severely. It may be that he was caught afterwards, but we dont know. What we do know is that he stood up bravely to the might of the PLA and was not thrown under its treads.

[Martin Blank]

When I first read the headline, I thought you were discussing Workers World's or the PSL's position, since they share the same views as the FRSO (Fight Back!) people.

[Kassad]

When I first read the headline, I thought you were discussing Workers World's or the PSL's position, since they share the same views as the FRSO (Fight Back!) people.
And for good reason. Tiananmen Square in 1989 is a very complex issue. One thing that's ironic is that the Chinese government's suppression of the demonstration was demonized by the Western media, yet if any type of legitimate uprising ever rose up in the United States, it would be put down without even a second thought. If they tear gas peaceful protestors, which I have witnessed and felt, why would they do anything less than suppress any attempt at rebellion or combat?

However, some in the media were not totally ignorant. A June 12th, 1989 article in the Wall Street Journal stated that "aerial pictures of the conflagration and columns of smoke have powerfully bolstered the [Chinese] government's arguments that the troops were victims, not executioners." On June 13th, Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times stated "there is no firm indication that troops fired on students", suggesting that fighting took place outside the Square. This means that students had to have left the square to meet Red Army troops. This should paint a picture that these people were not some kind of peaceful demonstrators. Many of them were, but most of the protest had dispersed long before this. What remained were violent protestors who assaulted Red Army troops who were trying to maintain order.

Unfortunately, most bourgeois scholars and media representatives choose to paint the suppression of a violent (and capitalist) protest as a brutal, bloody repression. This is, of course, not true, as counterrevolutionary aspects were quite evident. Of course the bourgeoisie will align itself with capitalist riots. It should speak lengths that the United States government supported the protest.

What was a primary factor that sparked these protests, though? None other than fucking Mikhail Gorbachev's visit to China. Yeah, these people are so very revolutionary; using the visit of a revisionist and reactionary ruler to spark international attention. This wasn't an accident, but this speaks lengths about the protestor's ideology. Protestors also had many signs in English. Hmm, I wonder who they're trying to appeal to here? Also note the Statue of Liberty effigy used, promoting "liberty" and bourgeois democracy. So now we see that these people are attempting to appeal to the revisionist Soviet Union, which was at this time implementing capitalist reforms, as well as the Western capitalists. Who's side are these people really on?

In a country that has been assaulted by counterrevolution, this was another nail in the coffin of socialist construction in China. If these protestors were a revolutionary force; calling for socialism and an end to market reforms, that would be a totally different aspect. Instead, though, they were calling for bourgeois democracy and they helped the demonization campaign against Chinese self-determination. I would understand the protestors and even support them had the majority of them been calling for revolutionary socialism, but instead, they were calling for capitalism. The protests were suppressed, as they should have been, seeing that the capitalist students were violent and assaulted Red Army troops who didn't march in with the intent to butcher people. The death toll is also highly exaggerated. Sorry, but you're not going to see me whine when China suppresses a capitalist uprising.

So what do we have here? We have a capitalist student uprising (that was tiny, at that) that was suppressed because it was being violent and frankly, killing soldiers who tried to maintain order. These were not revolutionaries and most of them were not Marxists, socialists or anything of the like. I can't comprehend why we would support an uprising that, had it succeeded, would have led to increased capitalist reforms, bourgeois democracy and potentially the dismantling of China and its resources.

The protest serves as an example that market socialism is a total failure and that counterrevolutionary aspects have taken over the Communist Party of China since Mao's death. However, an uprising not led by revolutionaries to restore socialism will ultimately lead to capitalist plunder and the destruction of what remains of the Chinese Revolution.

We cannot throw our support on the bandwagon of protestors who do not oppose the imperialist and colonialist attacks of the United States. The imperialist threat is attempting to dismember China and it is violating their sovereign right to self-determination. We must all stand opposed to this threat.

I reiterate the statement of the Party for Socialism and Liberation: 'In the face of this threat, our Party would offer militant political defense of the Chinese government in spite of our profound differences with so-called "market socialism."

[Yehuda Stern]

This completely flies in the face of reality. Yes, the protests had a reactionary capitalist element within them, but they also had the support of many workers who joined to protest the pro-capitalist reforms, and indeed, the protests actually caused the Stalinists to slow down the reform process. Those who support the Tiananmen massacre in practice support the Stalinist party (no shock there) and its reforms.

[Jenska]

I'm sorry Kassad but some statements of your party are utterly dull. Okay the Western media loves to criticise China i firmly agree with that, but the protests were also a struggle for idealism & change and not only your typical outcry for 'Western style reforms'

I still look with disbelief at chairman Deng's press reaction, depicting the protesters as counter-revolutionaries while Deng Xiaoping himself and his cronies were petty bourgeois (as stated above me) ,what happend 20 years ago was horrible..

[Kwisatz Haderach]

Kassad, while I agree with you that we should not offer any support or sympathy towards the Tiananmen protests, I also don't think that China needs any defending from imperialist aggression - because the Chinese bourgeoisie is on the brink of becoming powerful enough to be an imperialist power in its own right (if it isn't one already).

We must not forget that all capitalist regimes dream of becoming imperialist one day. We may need to defend some of the weaker ones against imperialist aggression, but this is a purely tactical move and they are NOT our friends. They would behave exactly as the current imperialists if given the chance.

And it looks like China got that chance.

[BobKKKindle$]

It's not that surprising to see Stalinists try to apologize for the deaths of protesters at the hands of a capitalist government, because they did the same thing when workers took to the streets and called for socialist democracy in Hungary and Czechoslovakia before the events of Tienanmen. However, I thought I'd clear up a few of the errors that Kassad has made so that people who don't know much about the protests don't end up taking a completely reactionary position on the issue. It is ironic that Kassad seeks to position himself in opposition to the “bourgeois media” because he shares many of the assumptions that underpin the way the events have been understood and narrated by mainstream political commentators – namely the assumption that the only people who were involved in the demonstrations were students from privileged backgrounds who wanted to accelerate the market reform process and transform the PRC into a market-capitalist state along the same lines as what was happening at the time in eastern Europe. This is an important feature of the mainstream account because it allows the supporters of this version to portray the participants as wanting to embrace the political and economic model of the imperialist bloc after experiencing years of neglects under a “socialist” government, thereby affirming Fukayama's thesis that the year 1989 signaled the end of ideology, because capitalist democracy had shown itself to be the only viable way of organizing any society. The reality was actually very different, and Kassad is wrong on so many accounts it's difficult to know where to start. The protests were not started because students knew that the PRC was about to be visited by Gorbachev – what actually sparked the movement and led to thousands of people gathering in central Beijing was the death of Hu Yaobang. Hu had gained the respect of many students as a party leader who was consistently opposed to corruption within the party as well as state-owned enterprises, and as one of the few leaders who supported the extension of democracy. The use of the death of a public figure as the basis for political agitation, directed against broader issues, is an important feature of Chinese political culture as the same strategy was used following the death of Zhou En-Lai in 1976 to voice opposition to the negative aspects of the Cultural Revolution, including the destabilization of the education system.

It is true that the events were initially limited to the student population of Beijing, and it is also true that many (but not all) of these students were calling for the acceleration of market reforms, and probably didn't have any direct experience of life as a worker or peasant during the reform period, but once the protests had got off the ground, they broadened, both in terms of geographical scope, and most importantly from a socialist perspective, in terms of the social groups who were involved, as workers rapidly became a significant component of the movement. This affirms one of Lenin's observations – that class struggle never assumes a “pure” form right from the beginning, and that socialists can't always expect movements that involve workers to have a completely progressive agenda unless we are willing to intervene and shape the political orientation of the participants through debate and leadership. The entry of workers meant that the politics of the movement also became more complex and heterogenous, as, whereas previously demands had been limited to democratic reforms, workers ensured that increasing attention was given to the prices of basic goods such as foodstuffs, the disintegration of the healthcare system, as well as the growing threat of unemployment due to the privatization of state-owned enterprises. These demands were put forward by the associations that were created by workers, which, unlike the state-controlled trade unions, were democratic in their structure and therefore capable of voicing the concerns of their members. Thus, contrary to Kassad's assertion that the only participants were “capitalist students”, it is evident that the base of the Tienanmen protests was the Chinese working class, which positioned itself in opposition to the bureaucratic leadership of a capitalist state. It is also interesting that the workers who were found to have participated and imprisoned for their leading role once the government had responded with violence were generally subject to harsher sentences than the students, which indicates that it was only the intervention of the working class that really gave the government cause for serious concern, because this intervention threatened to undermine the material privileges of the bureaucracy, and could also have led to a trade-union movement not unlike the rise of Solidarity in Poland, under the leadership of Lech Walensa. Kassad, like the Chinese state, propagates the assertion that the total number of participants amounted only to a “tiny handful” but the reality is that even when the protests were generally limited to students, 100,000 people were camping in Tienanmen square, indicating that this was a genuine mass movement, and on the night of the government crackdown, when troops were being ordered into the square even after the protesters had agreed to leave peacefully, it is estimated that a million inhabitants of Beijing took part in the resistance by barricading all of the major roots into the square, including the bridge that gives access from the west, with the aid of rocks and molotov cocktails. An interesting detail that Gray notes is that several hundred thousand of these inhabitants were actually members of the CPC and of these around 50,000 were cadres. It is absurd, in view of these facts, that anyone can see the CPC as genuinely representing the interests of the Chinese working class, reject the level of mass support for the protests, or regard the PRC as being any kind of socialist state. I don't think we need to get into the lies of the government regarding the death toll because the unanimous consensus amongst external organizations as well as the doctors who were forced to treat the wounded is that several thousand people were killed on the 4th of June, and it's only the Chinese government which persists in claiming that less than 300 people died, which isn't surprising, given that the same government has refused to acknowledge the events, and people inside China (with the exception of Hong Kong, where we have an annual march) are still remarkably uninformed, two decades after the massacre.

The key point here is that the Tienanmen protests drew their strength from the working class, and were directed against legitimate economic and political grievances. With each year that passes, the number of protests against land seizures and poverty wages in China grows larger, and it's only a matter of time before the largest working class in the world confronts the bureaucratic leaders that Kassad is apologizing for and casts them into the dustbin of history, just like every other ruling class. We can only assume that Kassad will be on the other side of the barricades.

All facts/arguments: Gray, Rebellions and Revolutions, China from the 1800s to 2000, Oxford University Press, 2002

[Kassad]

I'm sorry Kassad but some statements of your party are utterly dull. Okay the Western media loves to criticise China i firmly agree with that, but the protests were also a struggle for idealism & change and not only your typical outcry for 'Western style reforms'

I still look with disbelief at chairman Deng's press reaction, depicting the protesters as counter-revolutionaries while Deng Xiaoping himself and his cronies were petty bourgeois (as stated above me) ,what happend 20 years ago was horrible..

Okay, well, if you're looking for entertainment value from a Marxist website, I apologize that movies don't cut it for you anymore. Anyway, sorry, but I don't play this little game. Just because a protest is calling for 'change', doesn't mean it's good change. Were the recent Tea Party protests in America good because they were an outcry against oppression? No, they were fucking reactionary. So was the protest at Tiananmen Square. Yes, there were workers there. There were workers at the Tea Party protests too. I'm sure there's workers at Klan rallies, but that doesn't mean that the element of the protest and the potential consequences of the protest would've been positive. An outcry against tyranny needs to be properly observed and understood before we throw support behind it.


Kassad, while I agree with you that we should not offer any support or sympathy towards the Tiananmen protests, I also don't think that China needs any defending from imperialist aggression - because the Chinese bourgeoisie is on the brink of becoming powerful enough to be an imperialist power in its own right (if it isn't one already).

We must not forget that all capitalist regimes dream of becoming imperialist one day. We may need to defend some of the weaker ones against imperialist aggression, but this is a purely tactical move and they are NOT our friends. They would behave exactly as the current imperialists if given the chance.

And it looks like China got that chance.

Sorry, but that's totally absurd. China is still a developing industrial nation. It isn't a modern military or industrial power, let alone one that should be considered a rival of the United States. China is only powerful in world affairs because it maintains a significant amount of economic strength due to the value of its resources and its labor. Granted, I wouldn't rule out the idea that the consistent capitalist development in China could lead to future imperialism, but right now this is about recognizing a country's right to self-determination and self-rule, which the United States is infringing on. I'm not expressing solidarity with capitalist reforms, like some of the narrow-minded folk here would like to suggest. I'm merely defending a nation from imperialism. I mean, let's be rational here. A lot of states would be imperialist and military forces if they could. I'm sure Venezuela and Cuba could become that way without properly progressive leadership, but they still should be defended from imperialism, as all countries should.


It's not that surprising to see Stalinists try to apologize for the deaths of protesters at the hands of a capitalist government, because they did the same thing when workers took to the streets and called for socialist democracy in Hungary and Czechoslovakia before the events of Tienanmen. However, I thought I'd clear up a few of the errors that Kassad has made so that people who don't know much about the protests don't end up taking a completely reactionary position on the issue. It is ironic that Kassad seeks to position himself in opposition to the “bourgeois media” because he shares many of the assumptions that underpin the way the events have been understood and narrated by mainstream political commentators – namely the assumption that the only people who were involved in the demonstrations were students from privileged backgrounds who wanted to accelerate the market reform process and transform the PRC into a market-capitalist state along the same lines as what was happening at the time in eastern Europe. This is an important feature of the mainstream account because it allows the supporters of this version to portray the participants as wanting to embrace the political and economic model of the imperialist bloc after experiencing years of neglects under a “socialist” government, thereby affirming Fukayama's thesis that the year 1989 signaled the end of ideology, because capitalist democracy had shown itself to be the only viable way of organizing any society. The reality was actually very different, and Kassad is wrong on so many accounts it's difficult to know where to start. The protests were not started because students knew that the PRC was about to be visited by Gorbachev – what actually sparked the movement and led to thousands of people gathering in central Beijing was the death of Hu Yaobang. Hu had gained the respect of many students as a party leader who was consistently opposed to corruption within the party as well as state-owned enterprises, and as one of the few leaders who supported the extension of democracy. The use of the death of a public figure as the basis for political agitation, directed against broader issues, is an important feature of Chinese political culture as the same strategy was used following the death of Zhou En-Lai in 1976 to voice opposition to the negative aspects of the Cultural Revolution, including the destabilization of the education system.

It took one sentence for the utter bullshit to become prevalent. Yes, that's fine and dandy that some people were calling for socialism, but counterrevolutionary elements use very veiled and often times invisible tactics to overthrow progressive governments. I mean, fuck. Some labor union leaders have destroyed revolutionary struggle. Gorbachev and Khrushchev called themselves communists. Some good they did. Anyway, I'm very aware as to what sparked the demonstration, which is why I said that Gorbachev's visist was "a primary factor". That means that there were other factors as well. Try to keep up.


It is true that the events were initially limited to the student population of Beijing, and it is also true that many (but not all) of these students were calling for the acceleration of market reforms, and probably didn't have any direct experience of life as a worker or peasant during the reform period, but once the protests had got off the ground, they broadened, both in terms of geographical scope, and most importantly from a socialist perspective, in terms of the social groups who were involved, as workers rapidly became a significant component of the movement. This affirms one of Lenin's observations – that class struggle never assumes a “pure” form right from the beginning, and that socialists can't always expect movements that involve workers to have a completely progressive agenda unless we are willing to intervene and shape the political orientation of the participants through debate and leadership.

There wasn't a class struggle at Tiananmen Square. It wasn't a call for revolution. It was a call for "democracy", and that is not synonymous with revolutionary struggle or socialism. It can be, but it isn't always. Let's keep reading, then.



The entry of workers meant that the politics of the movement also became more complex and heterogenous, as, whereas previously demands had been limited to democratic reforms, workers ensured that increasing attention was given to the prices of basic goods such as foodstuffs, the disintegration of the healthcare system, as well as the growing threat of unemployment due to the privatization of state-owned enterprises. These demands were put forward by the associations that were created by workers, which, unlike the state-controlled trade unions, were democratic in their structure and therefore capable of voicing the concerns of their members. Thus, contrary to Kassad's assertion that the only participants were “capitalist students”, it is evident that the base of the Tienanmen protests was the Chinese working class, which positioned itself in opposition to the bureaucratic leadership of a capitalist state. It is also interesting that the workers who were found to have participated and imprisoned for their leading role once the government had responded with violence were generally subject to harsher sentences than the students, which indicates that it was only the intervention of the working class that really gave the government cause for serious concern, because this intervention threatened to undermine the material privileges of the bureaucracy, and could also have led to a trade-union movement not unlike the rise of Solidarity in Poland, under the leadership of Lech Walensa.

So workers magically flooded the square and the sea of people was turned red as they all magically went bald like Lenin and grew bears that rivaled even that of comrade Marx! Seriously, man? This goes back to Gorbachev's visist. The students were pleased by Gorbachev's capitalist reforms and they were calling for more of them. I'll quote one of the protest organizers himself, Chai Ling. "I feel so sad. How can I tell that what we are actually hoping for is bloodshed, the moment when the government is ready to butcher people brazenly? Only when the Square is awash in blood will the people of China open their eyes." So these weren't peaceful protestors and they weren't a revolutionary force. I never said that every single person at this demonstration was a capitalist, but it was a predominantly reactionary movement of people. It was not a revolutionary force, therefore, had it succeeded in its goals of counterrevolution, it is likely that their kind would have taken control, leading to increased capitalist plunder. I mean, you aren't giving me anything of substance to address. You're just making me reiterate points that prove you wrong.



Kassad, like the Chinese state, propagates the assertion that the total number of participants amounted only to a “tiny handful” but the reality is that even when the protests were generally limited to students, 100,000 people were camping in Tienanmen square, indicating that this was a genuine mass movement, and on the night of the government crackdown, when troops were being ordered into the square even after the protesters had agreed to leave peacefully, it is estimated that a million inhabitants of Beijing took part in the resistance by barricading all of the major roots into the square, including the bridge that gives access from the west, with the aid of rocks and molotov cocktails. An interesting detail that Gray notes is that several hundred thousand of these inhabitants were actually members of the CPC and of these around 50,000 were cadres.

Sorry, but the ANSWER Coalition organized 100,000 people in Washington a few years back, with many more hundreds of thousands across the country. Unfortunately, this doesn't mean that every person there was revolutionary, nor that a revolutionary movement was properly prepared to construct socialism, nor does it mean that all of these people are even interested in truly working for revolutionary change. You're a Leninist. You should realize the need for revolutionary leadership and struggle. This was not present at Tiananmen Square. I haven't heard these estimates of over a million people, but I'll trust your source.


It is absurd, in view of these facts, that anyone can see the CPC as genuinely representing the interests of the Chinese working class, reject the level of mass support for the protests, or regard the PRC as being any kind of socialist state. I don't think we need to get into the lies of the government regarding the death toll because the unanimous consensus amongst external organizations as well as the doctors who were forced to treat the wounded is that several thousand people were killed on the 4th of June, and it's only the Chinese government which persists in claiming that less than 300 people died, which isn't surprising, given that the same government has refused to acknowledge the events, and people inside China (with the exception of Hong Kong, where we have an annual march) are still remarkably uninformed, two decades after the massacre.

Wow, did I type this in invisible ink and you magically uncovered the idea that I said the Chinese government's estimate was correct? No, but I said that I don't trust Western media sources to properly estimate it. Stalin's death toll ranges from a million to 50 million, depending on who you trust. That speaks lengths about bourgeois sources. Anyway, more invisible ink, I suppose, since you somehow think I stated that the current Communist Party of China leadership has the working class in mind. I've repudiated capitalist reforms and rejected them, therefore, your fallacious assertions are totally baseless. What I'm saying is that there was no clear revolutionary movement, let alone a fucking party like Lenin advocated, therefore, expressing solidarity with a demonstration calling primarily for democracy (yeah, some people had portraits of Chairman Mao. I stand with them) is totally absurd, as it had no revolutionary potential. Had the Communist Party of China stood down and allowed more protests to ignite, what would've happened? Instead of the tiny vestiges of state-owned enterprise that are still in existence, there would be none. Capitalist plunder would have taken over because there would have been no revolutionary force to take power, thus, what would we have gained?


The key point here is that the Tienanmen protests drew their strength from the working class, and were directed against legitimate economic and political grievances. With each year that passes, the number of protests against land seizures and poverty wages in China grows larger, and it's only a matter of time before the largest working class in the world confronts the bureaucratic leaders that Kassad is apologizing for and casts them into the dustbin of history, just like every other ruling class. We can only assume that Kassad will be on the other side of the barricades.

And at the end of his ridiculous post, it appears that Bobkindles comes close to the target. In every discussion I have had about China, Tibet, Tiananmen and anything related to them, I have always said that the only means of strengthening socialism in China will be through a revolutionary working class movement. If it's growing, which I believe it is, that's very good. I hope it continues to grow until it is ready to retake control like it did in 1949. At that point, the capitalist reforms can be replaced by revolutionary socialism, as they should, and I will support it totally. Until then, we can only expect that Bonkindles will express his solidarity with bourgeois democracy and that he will consistently believe that the Tiananmen Square demonstrators had the ability to properly steer China towards revolutionary socialism. And until then, I'll continue defending socialism, while you can defend the imperialist agenda.

[The Ungovernable Farce]

As a genuine communist once said:


After the uprising of the 17th June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

[BobKKKindle$]

It took one sentence for the utter bullshit to become prevalent. Yes, that's fine and dandy that some people were calling for socialism, but counterrevolutionary elements use very veiled and often times invisible tactics to overthrow progressive governments.
You keep using the term "counter-revolutionary", which implies that the PRC was under the control of a revolutionary or progressive government which was faced with the threat of being overthrown, but the fact of the matter is that the PRC was a class society, and always has been - to be precise, a class society in which the bureaucracy was able to use their dominant position within the state apparatus to accumulate material privileges at the expense of the working population, showing that the absence of private property as a legally-recognized entity does not negate the existence of class antagonisms. The Chinese state is governing in the interests of the bourgeoisie, including foreign companies which have invested in China to take advantage of low wage rates and cheap raw materials, as is evident from the fact that workers in China still lack the ability to form independent trade unions, as well as countless other policies that do nothing for the working class, including the ongoing privatization process, increasing rates of unemployment, the precarious position of migrant workers, who can be fired at short notice and without compensation if they are living in a city illegally, and the urgent lack of housing in major urban centers, to name but a few. For that reason, it's wrong to see the events as constituting a counter-revolutionary process unless you think that the participants wanted to return to a pre-capitalist mode of production, which you presumably don't. Instead, the Tienanmen protests were a distorted form of class struggle - distorted, because the movement involved a mixture of different ideas, some of which were very reactionary, such as the demand to accelerate privatization, and class struggle, because there were also ideas that reflected the irreconcilable class antagonism between the workers and the bureaucracy, once workers had joined the movement. The existence of a mixed set of ideas is a common feature of many political movements, because of the heterogeneous social composition of those movements, as well as the uneven consciousness of the working class, and it's because of that unclear orientation that socialists always need to get involved with movements that have attracted workers and position themselves in opposition to legitimate grievances. For example, the 1905 protests in Russia were initially rather un-progressive because the participants marched under the leadership of Father Gapon, who was later revealed to be a spy for the Tsarist state, and addressed their demands directly to the Tsar, who was expected to protest workers against the exploitative practices of the Russian bourgeoisie, thereby fulfilling his role as the representative of the nation. It would have been unthinkable for socialists not to get involved in those protests, just because they were not fighting for socialism from the beginning. We orientate ourselves towards the class, and recognize that class struggle can assume a range of different forms, some of which we may not find immediately appealing, especially when the working class is completely disorientated and inexperienced, as in China, in 1989.



It was a call for "democracy", and that is not synonymous with revolutionary struggle or socialism. It can be, but it isn't always. Let's keep reading, then.
As I said, and as every revolutionary should know, the fact that a movement does not begin with a demand for the overthrow of capitalism and the abolition of private property is no reason not to support it, or intervene in it. I've already given the example of 1905, but a more recent example that also demonstrates the concept of a "distorted class struggle" well is the recent "Red Shirt" movement in Thailand. This movement is under the leadership of Thaksin Shinawatra, who is currently exiled in London after being overthrown in 2006 by a military coup. Thaksin was a bourgeois politician and is also recognized as corrupt, but during his time in office he implemented a healthcare program for Thailand's workers and rural communities, and for that reason he has a great deal of support from the working class, and has been able to assume the leadership of this movement, which is directed against the military, as well as the anti-democratic "Yellow Shirt" movement, who are petty-bourgeois in their composition. This movement, as you would expect, has attracted the working class, and is desperately trying to defend democracy against the advancing power of the military, but the elite leadership is trying to stop it from moving towards more radical objectives. Now, I think that it would be wrong of socialists not to enter this movement, because if we don't have a presence then the current leadership will be able to retain their dominance and the movement will be restricted to a very narrow and limited set of objectives. That's why the IST section in Thailand was operating inside it, until our leaders were thrown in jail or forced to go into exile. You seemingly don't want to touch anything that isn't immediately socialist, and that's an ultra-left position in my book.


The students were pleased by Gorbachev's capitalist reforms and they were calling for more of them. I'll quote one of the protest organizers himself, Chai Ling
The students were not the only people participating, though, and even amongst the students, there were many different shades of opinion. I don't see what the comments of one student leader in a demonstration involving more than 100,000 people really proves. The workers who were involved were demanding an end to market reforms and the reinstatement of welfare - these are clearly progressive demands, especially given that they were being put forward by independent workers' organizations, that could be used as the basis for a socialist movement, and so even if you think that the entirety of the student movement was participating solely to accelerate reform, it would still have been worth supporting the protests and encouraging socialists to intervene as a way of splitting the workers from the students, in order to form a movement based solely on the working class, or encouraging workers to take on a more aggressive role in determining the politics of the protests. What we don't do is make simplistic assumptions about who was involved, and applaud bourgeois states when they shoot people.


Unfortunately, this doesn't mean that every person there was revolutionary, nor that a revolutionary movement was properly prepared to construct socialism, nor does it mean that all of these people are even interested in truly working for revolutionary change
Once again, I agree, and that's precisely why intervening in mass movements is an obligation for socialists. If there are no socialists available in a particular country because the working class has been suppressed for such a long period of time then it is still imperative to support progressive movements, such as those demanding greater civil liberties and democracy, because if movements of this kind do manage to win victories, even if victories only come in the form of small concessions from more powerful political actors, the effect will be to give a positive boost to the working class, and to encourage the development of more radical ideas, in much the same way as a country being liberated from national oppression can be seen as the first step towards workers developing a revolutionary perspective. If a government is allowed to repress movements without receiving our condemnation, that signifies a defeat for the working class, even when the movement is question is not directly geared towards working-class demands, because the repression of a particular campaign legitimates the use of violence as a tool of class oppression, and thereby allows it to be used in the future when workers do take action. For example, there is currently a religious group in China called Falun Gong which propagates all sorts of nasty things about homosexuality and is being suppressed by the government, and yet, however much we might disagree with what the adherents of this organization have to say, socialists should still stand up for its right to openly promote and discuss its views, because workers do not have anything to gain from the state having the right to silence dissent.


That speaks lengths about bourgeois sources
I don't want to get into a discussion about death tolls because my position would be the same even if "only" 200 people had died, but don't you think it's strange that you criticize "bourgeois sources" for inflating death figures, but still quote the Wall Street Journal to justify your own position that the massacre was actually a battle?


I stated that the current Communist Party of China leadership has the working class in mind. I've repudiated capitalist reforms and rejected them, therefore, your fallacious assertions are totally baseless. What I'm saying is that there was no clear revolutionary movement, let alone a fucking party like Lenin advocated
If you acknowledge that the leadership of the CPC is not revolutionary, and that the government has instead implemented market reforms, then what basis do you have for speaking of a "counter revolution", given that this implies that the PRC is a non-capitalist country, with post-capitalist relations of production, that would have suffered the restoration of capitalism if the protests had been allowed to continue? What mode of production is the PRC at the moment? What criteria do you use to determine whether a country is capitalist or not? Now, on the issue of the party, I think you make a mistake in assuming that just because a party was not ready to lead the workers who were involved in the protests, it is right for socialists to condone the government response, and oppose the movement. If we look at the only successful working-class revolution to date, that of 1917, we find that a year before the overthrow of capitalism took place under the leadership of the Bolsheviks, Lenin and his comrades were a very weak force, as most of them were living in exile, and in the first elections to the Soviets after the February Revolution the Bolsheviks were one of the smallest parties, both in terms of the number of seats they were able to obtain in the Petrograd Soviet, and the size of their membership, relative to other parties. In fact, it would be naive to speak of the Bolsheviks as being a significant political force either before or just after the February Revolution. However, the Bolsheviks were able to achieve rapid growth during the course of 1917 because they were the only party that was putting forward consistently revolutionary slogans that reflected the demands of the proletariat, and that was how they became the organized vanguard of the proletariat, and the party which carried out the world's first socialist revolution. The lesson here is that parties do not grow gradually and at a constant rate over a long period of time and then suddenly carry out a socialist revolution when they reach a critical mass. Instead, parties emerge or develop during the heat of struggle, often around existing groups of militants, because workers will always form their own organizations to work towards their goals, which manifested itself in 1989 in the form of the autonomous trade unions that were created as an alternative to the state-controlled unions. The kind of party that emerges, or in some cases whether a party is able to emerge at all, will depend on whether socialists are ready to act as leaders - which once again underlines the need for us have an organic connection with the class by joining workers when they take to the streets.

[Kassad]

You keep using the term "counter-revolutionary", which implies that the PRC was under the control of a revolutionary or progressive government which was faced with the threat of being overthrown, but the fact of the matter is that the PRC was a class society, and always has been - to be precise, a class society in which the bureaucracy was able to use their dominant position within the state apparatus to accumulate material privileges at the expense of the working population, showing that the absence of private property as a legally-recognized entity does not negate the existence of class antagonisms. The Chinese state is governing in the interests of the bourgeoisie, including foreign companies which have invested in China to take advantage of low wage rates and cheap raw materials, as is evident from the fact that workers in China still lack the ability to form independent trade unions, as well as countless other policies that do nothing for the working class, including the ongoing privatization process, increasing rates of unemployment, the precarious position of migrant workers, who can be fired at short notice and without compensation if they are living in a city illegally, and the urgent lack of housing in major urban centers, to name but a few.

No, I'm using the term 'counterrevolutionary' because the Chinese revolutionary state that rose after the revolution in 1949 still has remnants of it lingering, including a tiny, but ever-existent revolutionary socialist group in the Communist Party of China, along with some state-owned enterprises. The state owned means of production and some of the socialist reforms that were present after the revolution are still existing in some form, in some aspects. Therefore, that is why my party and I state that a capitalist overthrow of the Communist Party of China would lead to even more capitalist reforms and plunder. At the current time, the United States fears China's growing power. I distinctly recall an incident where a Chinese corporation was trying to buy a crumbling American one, but an American corporation, though it paid less in its bid, obtained it after a demonization campaign by the media. If there was a total collaboration between capitalists in the United States and China, the repercussions would be substantial and it could inevitablly lead to total free market control and the possibly the dismemberment of China. Like I said, I'm not saying I support the capitalist reforms and the havoc they have caused. My party and I both criticize those very critically, but unless a revolutionary government rises to take its place, there is nothing favorable that would come from the destruction of the Communist Party of China. Why is this so difficult for you to grasp? Anyway, the rest of the paragraph after what I quoted is mostly stuff I already realize and understand, therefore there's nothing to address.


The students were not the only people participating, though, and even amongst the students, there were many different shades of opinion. I don't see what the comments of one student leader in a demonstration involving more than 100,000 people really proves. The workers who were involved were demanding an end to market reforms and the reinstatement of welfare - these are clearly progressive demands, especially given that they were being put forward by independent workers' organizations, that could be used as the basis for a socialist movement, and so even if you think that the entirety of the student movement was participating solely to accelerate reform, it would still have been worth supporting the protests and encouraging socialists to intervene as a way of splitting the workers from the students, in order to form a movement based solely on the working class, or encouraging workers to take on a more aggressive role in determining the politics of the protests. What we don't do is make simplistic assumptions about who was involved, and applaud bourgeois states when they shoot people.

Well, every source I've seen has said that Chai Linn was an organizer of the protest. So if the Republican Party organizes a protest of predominantly Republicans and a tiny group of socialists show up, I don't think that makes the protest revolutionary. The leadership and organizing of a demonstration speaks lengths about the ideology behind it. There's a reason that Marxists don't show up for anti-immigrant rallies and blend in. That's because it's a racist rally and we don't support the organizers. Anyway, there's nothing simplistic about it. This wasn't a revolutionary movement. I'll use ANSWER as another example. Right now, class consciousness in the United States does not properly formulate the blueprint for revolution. We protest to try to raise class consciousness and awareness, but we aren't calling for the total destruction of the state at this very moment, as it would be devastating without proper preparation. There was no preparation at Tiananmen Square either, as it was not revolutionary. It was potentially destructive for the Chinese government and it had such a mixed message that no unity would have ever been formulated, thus allowing capitalist destruction to ensue. This isn't hard.


Once again, I agree, and that's precisely why intervening in mass movements is an obligation for socialists. If there are no socialists available in a particular country because the working class has been suppressed for such a long period of time then it is still imperative to support progressive movements, such as those demanding greater civil liberties and democracy, because if movements of this kind do manage to win victories, even if victories only come in the form of small concessions from more powerful political actors, the effect will be to give a positive boost to the working class, and to encourage the development of more radical ideas, in much the same way as a country being liberated from national oppression can be seen as the first step towards workers developing a revolutionary perspective.

Intervening in misled groups and protests is one thing. Watering down your message and saying that bourgeois democracy (thus, capitalist plunder) is acceptable isn't revolutionary in the slightest. Sorry.


I don't want to get into a discussion about death tolls because my position would be the same even if "only" 200 people had died, but don't you think it's strange that you criticize "bourgeois sources" for inflating death figures, but still quote the Wall Street Journal to justify your own position that the massacre was actually a battle?

There's a serious difference between the bourgeois media furthering the imperialist agenda by demonizing a country and refusing it its right to self-determination and a bourgeois media source that may actually be promoting something other than the colonial agenda of the United States. Look at Keith Olbermann. The guy's a center-right reformist and capitalist, but he criticizes Bush torture and war policies. There is some good to be found, even in bourgeoisie infested areas.

I don't even feel like addressing your last paragraph, let alone do I feel like reading it. The protests at Tiananmen Square, even if we acknowledge that there was some worker presence, was not a revolutionary force, let alone, like I said, a revolutionary party. There was no political organization or community activism that could lead a revolutionary struggle. Thus, we come down to a choice between supporting workers movements until it properly develops into the ability to take power, or we can support an infant movement; a protest that did not have revolutionary leadership or goals initially. By supporting this budding movement, we would be supporting the destruction of the Communist Party of China with no real alternative to take power, thus leaving the door open to imperialist intervention. Defending China from imperialist occupation and domination is imperative and right now this isn't an ideal situation. Until a substantial workers movement develops, it's a choice between capitalist reforms or full-blown market exploitation by Western powers. I will not approve of the working class being thrown deeper into shackles because the Communist Party of China is flawed. It is preferable to the total dismemberment of China, however upsetting that may be. We need a revolutionary movement, not a capitalist protest, to spark a proletarian revolution.

[Red Rebel]

Intelligitimate this is a great article. The best quote from the reading is this:

"There is a story in China about an emperor who devotes his entire life to the study of dragons. He reads books about them. Has statues made of them, and covers his wall with pictures of them. One day he finally meets a dragon, and as a result he is nearly frightened to death. In the U.S., there are “revolutionaries” who are just like this. For years they have been whining about China taking the capitalist road. They have catalogued in their minds every rightist error that the Chinese leadership has made since the death of Mao and have built up little arsenals of anecdotes concerning China's social problems. One would think that they would be rejoicing at some of the changes that have taken place in China since June. Many of the mistakes that they have talked so long about are finally being addressed. But for them, the Chinese leadership cannot do a thing right."

If the "democracy protestors" had won in 1989, the PRC would have looked like Russia with a full blown corrupt neo-liberal government and it would be more countries than one.

[Q]

If the "democracy protestors" had won in 1989, the PRC would have looked like Russia with a full blown corrupt neo-liberal government and it would be more countries than one.
On what are you basing this assumption?

[Comrade Ian]

socialistworker.org/2009/06/04/twenty-years-after-tiananmen

Here's an article from Socialist Worker, I don't think it argues in depth enough against the claim that China is a revolutionary state, however the quotes it has from the program of some workers and the description of mass support I think are good. I'd like to learn more about what happened with the Beijing Autonomous Union if anyone knows more about this subject and what the defenders of the Chinese government have to say in response to it.

"The Beijing Autonomous Union had been founded only weeks before by workers who wanted to do something around inflation and corruption, and saw their official state-run union as passive at best, and obstructionist at worst. As one of their posters summarized:
We have calculated carefully, based on Marx's Capital, the rate of exploitation of workers. We discovered that the "servants of the people" swallow all the surplus value produced by the people's blood and sweat...There are only two classes: the rulers and the ruled...The political campaigns of the past 40 years amount to a political method for suppressing the people...History's final accounting has yet to be completed."

[Comrade B]

Tianamen Square massacre was a tragedy. The protesters weren't even anti-communist, only pro-democracy. Democracy and communism do not oppose each other, this was a disgrace to the name of communism. Fuck Deng Xiaoping. He lived in a mansion with an elevator, a rich fuck protecting his own ass, not socialism.

[BobKKKindle$]

This wasn't a revolutionary movementYou keep repeating the Stalinist mantra that this was a reactionary movement so let's actually have a look at what the evidence has to say. I've already mentioned that workers accounted for more than half of the total protesters just before the movement was crushed by the government, and I've also pointed out that these workers created independent trade unions when they were camped in Tienanmen Square, because the state-controlled trade unions were under the control of bureaucrats and generally used to maintain a high rate of exploitation in the workplace instead of allowing workers to fight for their interests, which is what trade unions are supposed to do. There's also other evidence that clearly indicates that these protests were not about wanting to totally privatize the Chinese economy but were focused on opposition to capitalism and oppressive government. When the population of Beijing set up barricades as the troops were moving closer to Tienanmen Square, underground workers cut the power to the tube system to stop it being used to transport troops and supplies, which they wouldn't have done if they thought that the protests had been reactionary in their political orientation, and at roughly the same time, workers at the Capital Iron and Steel Works walked out to protest against the failure of the government to respond to the demands of their comrades, and at the way the protesters were being treated by the security forces. There were also many others stayed away from work, both in Beijing, and other Chinese cities, and immediately after the massacre, one million people came out onto the streets in Hong Kong, where we do have freedom of speech, to show their anger, which is remarkable when you consider that the total population of Hong Kong would have been slightly under 7 million in 1989. The fact that workers took direct action to support the demonstrations is compelling evidence that they agreed with the demands that were being put forward, which suggests that most if not all of the demands were progressive, unless you think that workers were somehow tricked into calling for market reform, which they weren't. There is simply no evidence to support your assertion that the protests were inherently counter-revolutionary, or that workers and socialists only accounted for a minority of the participants. If you're going to make that argument then at least try and give some evidence for it or deal with the evidence that I've put forward, or admit that you're actually more interesting in apologizing for a ruling class, instead of supporting socialism from below. Even if it were actually the case that all of the students were "capitalist students", intent on "restoring" capitalism, and that students made up the majority of protesters, the fact remains that if the protests had somehow been able to succeed without the intervention of the Chinese working class, Chinese workers would not simply have sat back and allowed market reforms to take place - they would have fought, just as Chinese workers are fighting for liberation today, because that's what all workers do when they are faced with an aggressive and exploitative ruling class, however much you might like to see Stalinist bureaucrats as progressive.

I'm going to a memorial march tonight because 20 years ago today, Kassad's friends butchered workers and students in the streets of Beijing. The ruling class is still afraid because Tienanmen and the protests that keep occurring each year show that the regime cannot depend on the support of Chinese workers, and will continue to face revolutionary challenges from below, which will inevitably triumph and kick the Stalinists out of power. There will always be party hacks who try and condemn everything as "counter-revolutionary" to cover up for the crimes of bureaucrats, but that won't stop workers from emancipating themselves, and I look forward to the day when capitalism is abolished once and for all in China, and replaced with genuine democratic socialism, based on the interests of, and run by Chinese workers.

[KurtFF8]

One of the songs that was sung at the Tiananmen events of 1989: The Internationale

[The Ungovernable Farce]

And I stick bananas up my ass.

[Red Rebel]

On what are you basing this assumption?


The article, general history knowledge of what happened to the Eastern bloc and that the protestors wanted to dismantle whatever remains of the socialist state in the PRC.



The protesters weren't even anti-communist, only pro-democracy.


Pro-liberal bourgeois democracy. :thumbdown: Let me quote some of the protestors:



“Talking about China's modernization, I personally like the idea of full-scale westernization.” After talking about his trip to Germany where he visited both Berlins, he gave the summation, “That's why I have come to the conclusion that socialism has failed, from Marx, Lenin, Stalin, all the way to Mao.”


What right does the working class have to exercise leadership over all others?

“What is China's way out? The system of private ownership! The private ownership of a free economy and a society based on a fee economy.”

Not a quote but the article also mentions the 1988 anti-Africa protests by the same students. Not to hard to connect the dots to racism.

[Revy]

It's the US which spun the whole event as "pro-US free-market democracy". The truth is, most of them were sympathetic to socialism, far more than the regime's leaders. Of course, that doesn't go down well in US media.

[Kassad]

I honestly feel like this debate is running in circles. I don't see the need to address any more long and redundant posts, since as already stated, the notion that we should support a ideologically bankrupt demonstration which could have potentially made life many times worse for the working class is beyond me. The Communist Party of China still clashes politically with imperialist states, thus, it has not totally withdrawn all state-owned enterprises and trade barriers. If a non-revolutionary force were to replace the Communist Party, it would result in the working class residing in thicker chains than already.

To commemorate the counterrevolutionary act of the protests at Tiananmen Square, the Party for Socialism and Liberation has posted a few articles about our defense of China and the threat of counterrevolution without a revolutionary movement. They're all from the Summer 2008 issue of Socialism and Liberation magazine.

What do Socialists Defend in China Today? -- Brian Becker
http://www.pslweb.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=12205&news_iv_ctrl=1261

For the Defense of China against counterrevolution, imperialist intervention and dismemberment.
http://www.pslweb.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=12207&news_iv_ctrl=1261

Tiananmen Square and the Threat of Counterrevolution -- Yennica Cortes
http://www.pslweb.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=12203&news_iv_ctrl=1261

[Martin Blank]

For communists, it's not about the student leaders and their opportunism. Yes, they were looking to make a space for themselves in the ruling circles and get a larger share of the spoils of China's burgeoning capitalism, and they saw a glasnost-like reformation as the way to get it. But those elements had made their peace with Deng before the events of June 4, and were on their way out of the Square before the PLA troops began moving in.

It is perhaps an irony of history that it was this clique of "cowards and opportunists" that sparked tens of thousands of workers to rise up and organize themselves. The workers may have used the student protests as an excuse to begin their own activity, and may have focused their own efforts around the Square occupation, but they did so with their own agenda, their own organizations and under their own banners.


The week of May 13-20 saw the largest demonstrations in China's post-war history. On May 17 it is estimated that up to two million people marched through the centre of Beijing; the majority being workers and their families who walked beneath the banners of their work unit or enterprise; students from across China; peasants from nearby rural regions; teachers, public servants and journalists.

Thousands of workers joined the Workers Federation. A steady stream of delegates from factories and work units came to its headquarters to collect literature and donate funds. By the end of May it had 150 full-time organisers in Tiananmen Square, had adopted a constitution, elected leadership committees, established a workers guard to protect the students, was operating a printing facility and had erected a public broadcasting system that each evening drew massive crowds to hear political speeches. A treatise distributed in that week sums up the political outlook they expressed:


“The tyranny of the corrupt officials is nothing short of extreme...The people will no longer believe the lies of the authorities for on our banners appear the words: science, democracy, freedom, human rights and rule by law... We have conscientiously documented the exploitation of the workers. The method of understanding exploitation is based on the method of analysis given in Marx's Das Kapital... We were astonished to find that the 'peoples public servants' have devoured all surplus value created by the people's blood and sweat. The total value of this exploitation comes to an amount unmatched in history! Such ruthlessness and replete with ‘Chinese characteristics'."


The document called for an investigation into the “material consumption and use of palatial retreats” by, among others, Deng Xiaoping, Zhao Ziyang, Li Peng, Chen Yun, Wan Li and Jiang Zemin—and their family members. “Their assets should be immediately frozen and subjected to the scrutiny of a National Peoples Investigative Committee,” it stated.


“The people have acquired political consciousness," it concluded. "They have recognised that there are only two classes: the rulers and the ruled... and that the political movements of the last 40 years have served simply as a political means of oppressing the people."


As a byproduct of the Beijing events, Workers Autonomous Federations formed in major cities around China, including Changsha, Shaoyang, Xiangtan, Hengyang and Yueyang.



...


On May 25 the Workers Federation and student groups organised a political demonstration of close to one million workers. The insurrectionary tone of the slogans and sentiments of the workers' organisation had become more clearly expressed. A statement issued on May 26 read:


“Our nation was created from the struggle and labour of we workers and all other mental and manual labourers. We are the rightful masters of this nation. We must be heard in national affairs. We absolutely must not allow this small band of degenerate scum of the nation and the working class to usurp our name and suppress the students, murder democracy and trample human rights”.


Another statement declared:


“The final struggle has arrived...We have seen that the fascist governments and Stalinist dictatorships spurned by hundreds of millions of people have not, and indeed will not, voluntarily withdraw from the historical stage... Storm this 20th century Bastille, this last stronghold of Stalinism!”


("Ten Years since the Tiananmen Square Massacre (http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/jun1999/tian-j04.shtml)," WSWS)


And whatever you want to say about those student leaders, those who came out to the Square brought with them their own understanding and political perspective:



People didn't want to hear: "You've got to take the road of the West", or "We've got great democratic rights in the West, that's the way you've got to go." As one student put it to me: "Look, if we went capitalist, it would be like India. It wouldn't be like Japan. We've got a billion people here. If the capitalists came to China, they would rip us to shreds economically. We're not under any illusions."


The capitalist journalists made a lot of the so-called "Statue of Liberty" that the students put up in the Square. But to the students that wasn't a symbol of support for US imperialism, or of wanting a return to capitalism. It signified support for democratic rights. And a lot of students were doubtful about having it there. "If we were in South America", they would say to me, "we don't think this would go down so well." Along with this statue being there, the Internationale was being played all the time. There was no question of wanting to return to capitalism.


...


One student said to me: "When we look at the West, we're not stupid. We know that only a minority of people in the West live in countries like Japan, Australia, Britain. And even then we know that the blacks suffer in America. We know there are a lot of people unemployed in America. We know most people in the so-called West, the capitalist world, live in Africa, South and Central America and so on". The people knew what was going on. They wanted to maintain the benefits of the revolution of 1949, in other words the nationalised and planned economy, and the other cultural, social, and economic benefits. But they believed that these benefits were being limited, that the great latent initiative inherent in one billion was being stifled by bureaucratic rule.


(Chapter 5, Eyewitness in China (http://socialistworld.net/pubs/tiananmen/ch05.html), CWI)


Those who point to the political views of the small group of student leaders showcased by the capitalist media as justification for supporting the brutal suppression of the workers' uprising in Tiananmen Square themselves use the same method of those elements. The only difference is that where the bourgeoisie and "democratic" petty bourgeoisie put a plus, they put a minus. Nevertheless, they are little more than two sides of the same coin minted by the exploiting and oppressing classes -- regardless of how "r-r-r-revolutionary" their rhetoric.

[BobKKKindle$]

the notion that we should support a ideologically bankrupt demonstration which could have potentially made life many times worse for the working class is beyond meThat's it, just keep repeating that to yourself. Anyone who reads through this thread will be able to see that I've given numerous examples of workers supporting the protest movement, both as direct participants, and through indirect methods of support such as coming out on strike and sending messages of solidarity. You have yet to recognize the role of the working class, and you have not given any explanation as to why workers chose to take the side of what you see as a movement entirely dominated by students who wanted to impose a neo-liberal agenda. You're actually wrong about the students as well because most of the students who participated focused on the lack of political freedom (especially the absence of a public sphere in which political organizations could be formed without the support or permission of the state, otherwise known as civil society) and did not consider themselves committed supporters of market reforms, as can be observed from the close links between the workers and students, but what really exposes your perspective as plain wrong is your lack of attention to the Chinese working class.

The only way your fellow Stalinists has been able to "explain" this aspect of the movement is by dismissing workers as being "duped" - in other words, workers weren't able to think for themselves, and so the response of the government (including the prison sentences that were handed out to working-class activists without due process or proper legal representation) was actually a sign that the government was acting in the interests of the working class, because workers can't be trusted to act in their own interests. This lack of respect for the ability of workers to emancipate themselves from political and economic oppression is an underlying theme of Stalinist politics that can also be detected in the response of so-called communists to the anti-Stalinist uprising in Hungary (1956), the later struggle in Prague (1968) as well as the strategies that Stalinist organizations have historically endorsed, such as favoring a guerilla struggle as the best way to seize political power, despite the isolation from the working class that this strategy necessarily entails.

As a proponent of self-emancipation and socialism from below, on the other hand, I don't think that workers just blindly follow whatever it is that student leaders tell them to do, but are capable of acting as independent political subjects, especially in the case of Tienanmen, where workers, despite being disorientated by years of bureaucratic rule and the experience of the reform process, were able to rapidly form independent forums in order to address their economic grievances and discuss the way forward. The demands that the workers articulated had nothing to do with wanting to accelerate privatization, and instead reflected the fact that the CPC was leading the attack on the working class by maintaining the oppression of trade unions and carrying out the privatization process in the interests of foreign corporations and the ruling bureaucracy. Your persistent claims that the ideology of the movement was reactionary is completely lacking in analysis or empirical evidence, as is your assumption that the political orientation of the protests was unchanged by the intervention of the working class, but this thread has certainly done a good job of showing whose side Stalinists are liable to take in the event of a class struggle between workers and a bureaucracy that likes to drape itself in red flags.

In sum, either deal with the participation of the working class - which I've proven with many different examples throughout this thread - by showing how you reconcile the involvement of workers with your support for the crackdown, or just accept that you're promoting a bureaucratic anti-worker line on what socialists should see as an inspiring struggle against state capitalism.

[BobKKKindle$]

Who the hell, aside from socialist micros like us, gives a damn about them today? Even the Chinese "dissidents" don't remember them. In their publications and statements, it's all about the useless shit intellectuals. The neoliberals have already won this battle over memory.Nonsense. Hong Kong is the only city in China where people are allowed to demonstrate against the massacre, as well as other political issues, which is why a million people did come out on the streets immediately after the massacre in 1989, with several thousand continuing to do so every year since then, as is evident from the 150,000 people who attended this year's candlelit vigil. To their credit, the section of the CWI in China (link (http://www.chinaworker.org/en/content/news/757/)) who are based in Hong Kong, are attempting to introduce a radical narrative that identifies the central role played by the working class, in place of the bourgeois understanding of events, which ignores the working-class, and assumes that all of the participants were focused on accelerating market reform. The bourgeois narrative is going to remain in place unless socialists do challenge this account, and your own understanding demonstrates that you've actually accepted a lot of what bourgeois commentators have to say, because you've ignored the demands that were raised by workers, as well as the lack of a uniform ideology amongst the students. Within China, the Tienanmen Mothers (link (http://www.protectthehuman.com/actions/support-the-tiananmen-mothers/main)) are also fighting to educate the Chinese people about what really happened, including the scale of the massacre, and to uncover the fate of their sons and daughters. There are people who care, even if you don't.

[Kassad]

That's it, just keep repeating that to yourself. Anyone who reads through this thread will be able to see that I've given numerous examples of workers supporting the protest movement, both as direct participants, and through indirect methods of support such as coming out on strike and sending messages of solidarity.

Stopped reading here. It doesn't matter if workers were supporting it. A significant amount of student leaders and organizers were advocating the full restoration of capitalism, with many others showing non-progressive ideologies. Of course, just because workers support something, doesn't mean that it is properly ready to struggle for revolution at that very moment. The Tiananmen Square demonstrations did not constitute a revolutionary party or organization that could mobilize to formulate a dictatorship of the proletariat. There's nothing to suggest that a socialist revolution would have come from that protest destroying the Chinese government, and if it isn't going to enact socialism, it would merely open the nation up to utmost capitalist plunder and exploitation. Your posts are getting redundant, as I've already addressed the fact that there were some workers there, but that doesn't mean it was capable of claiming power for the proletariat.

[khad]

To their credit, the section of the CWI in China (link (http://www.chinaworker.org/en/content/news/757/)) who are based in Hong Kong, are attempting to introduce a radical narrative that identifies the central role played by the working class, in place of the bourgeois understanding of events, which ignores the working0class, and assumes that all of the participants were focused on accelerating market reform. The bourgeois narrative is going to remain in place unless socialists do challenge this account, and your own understanding demonstrates that you've actually accepted a lot of what bourgeois commentators have to say, because you've ignored the demands that were raised by workers, as well as the lack of a uniform ideology amongst the students.
The CWI is a fringe group. I respect their zeal and what they are trying to do, but the dissident community and its discourse are by-and-large trash.

This is about as pointless as trying to reclaim a radical narrative of the American "Revolution."

[BobKKKindle$]

Of course, just because workers support something, doesn't mean that it is properly ready to struggle for revolution at that very moment.Now we're back to the abstract conception of struggle, which I've already addressed. You will never find a situation in which workers are immediately ready to overthrow capitalism, because the confidence and consciousness that is necessary to do so can only arise through a long series of economic and political struggles, with each victory making the working class more aware of what it needs to do to liberate itself. This is why the first response of the Russian working-class to exploitation in the factories was to march under the leadership of a priest and ask the Tsar to address their problems. Lenin and the Bolsheviks were aware of how consciousness develops, and so they supported this act of resistance, especially when it led to the formation of the first Soviets, despite its ambiguous ideological message. Note also the case of Thailand, which I explained in one of my previous posts, and demonstrates the same concept. You seem to be saying that the only time you would support a political movement in China is if it had clearly articulated goals from the beginning and was intent on overthrowing capitalism. I don't know whether you only adopt this strategy in China because you think that it's somehow a semi-socialist state, or if you think that we should do the same thing in other countries, but either way, it's a bad strategy, because it's shows that you don't have a grasp of the dynamic between struggle and consciousness. Any major movement creates political instability which might allow pro-capitalist forces to assert themselves, in the same way that workers face the risk of being forced to make concessions to employers if they go on strike and then lose, but this is no reason not to support progressive political movements - instead, it's what obligates socialists to intervene, in order to shape the direction of the movement, and encourage the working class to break away from those who are trying to hijack the movement as a way of pushing reactionary goals and ideas. I don't think it's particularly clever to try and guess what might have happened in China because I don't have much respect for speculation and counter-factual history but the fact that workers did form their own organizations and entered into political debate one another suggests that the movement could have become something much more radical and threatening to the power of the bureaucracy if the workers had united with the anti-capitalist section of the student body, and acquired arms, as they did in Russia. Despite your insistence that the only choice was between maintaining the status-quo and capitalist "restoration", you've yet to provide any explanation of how the latter might have come about, and in particular why a more confident and militant working-class would have accepted the imposition of neo-liberalism by a bunch of student leaders who had somehow managed to seize state power.


The CWI is a fringe group. I respect their zeal and what they are trying to do, but the dissident community and its discourse are by-and-large trash.Wrong - Hong Kong is full of debate on these issues, there are many progressive voices, and there is also intense public interest - note the fact that Zhao Ziyang's memoirs sold out in a matter of days when they were published this month. You're making assertions about something you know nothing about.

[Martin Blank]

Stopped reading here. It doesn't matter if workers were supporting it. A significant amount of student leaders and organizers were advocating the full restoration of capitalism, with many others showing non-progressive ideologies. Of course, just because workers support something, doesn't mean that it is properly ready to struggle for revolution at that very moment. The Tiananmen Square demonstrations did not constitute a revolutionary party or organization that could mobilize to formulate a dictatorship of the proletariat. There's nothing to suggest that a socialist revolution would have come from that protest destroying the Chinese government, and if it isn't going to enact socialism, it would merely open the nation up to utmost capitalist plunder and exploitation. Your posts are getting redundant, as I've already addressed the fact that there were some workers there, but that doesn't mean it was capable of claiming power for the proletariat.

I don't know whether to be amused or disgusted by this statement. It is not true that the workers' movement that had formed in the two weeks prior to June 4 "did not constitute a revolutionary party or organization that could mobilize to formulate a dictatorship of the proletariat". In fact, by the end of May, the CWAF had begun calling for workers' control and workers' power:


“Our nation was created from the struggle and labour of we workers and all other mental and manual labourers. We are the rightful masters of this nation. We must be heard in national affairs. We absolutely must not allow this small band of degenerate scum of the nation and the working class to usurp our name and suppress the students, murder democracy and trample human rights”.

Another statement declared: “The final struggle has arrived... We have seen that the fascist governments and Stalinist dictatorships spurned by hundreds of millions of people have not, and indeed will not, voluntarily withdraw from the historical stage... Storm this 20th century Bastille, this last stronghold of Stalinism!”

The only thing that the CWAF lacked was a formal political organization -- a formally-constituted communist party. They had mass support, as was seen in the marches of May, and by the beginning of June WAFs had been formed in many of the industrial cities in China.

Could they have reached a point of challenging for power? In the end, we'll never know, since the movement was brutally crushed by the Beijing regime. I tend to think that, had the trend continued, they had the potential to challenge for power ... and win.

[BobKKKindle$]

That's not the point, and you know it.

[JimmyJazz]

One of the songs that was sung at the Tiananmen events of 1989: The Internationale

I would think it's rather obvious that this could have been a shrewd move by certain protesters to make it harder for the government to crack down on them.

I don't think the fact that they were singing this really tells us anything.

And I have to say, just going on this thread, the evidence presented that the protests were socialist in character has been pretty damn weak compared to the quotes provided from protesters who wanted China to go completely capitalist.


To draw a parallel, Daniel Cohn-Bendit was undoubtedly one of the central leaders of the student uprising in May 1968 and was widely respected by the whole of the student movement due to what appeared to be his uncompromising opposition to capitalism and the war in Vietnam, and yet if we look at where he is now, we find that he is a liberal green, and works as an MEP in the European Parliament, alongside conservatives and social-democrats. If we follow your logic then this would require us to condemn what happened in 1968, including the role that workers played, and despite the fact that the uprising represented a direct challenge to capitalism in a highly industrialized country, because a leader subsequently abandoned revolutionary socialism. This is, needless to say, an absurd conclusion to reach.

So you see no difference between protests against a capitalist, imperialist government (France) and protests against a Communist government which has put in place some market reforms?

I wonder if you would feel the same way about dissident groups in Russia during NEP. No, probably not, because Trotsky hadn't been exiled yet right?

Seriously, what the hell? I don't have to be a hardcore CCP apologist to see the insanity of this comparison.

I'm curious what anyone who supports the protesters sees as the potential outcome of the protests' "success" (although what that means, I'm not sure, since no one who supports them has yet been able to produce a coherent list of their demands). Would it be the overthrow of the CCP? If so, are you actually saying you think this would have resulted in a new socialist regime and the reversal of market reforms more likely than that it would have resulted in capitalism and imperialist subjugation? Really?

And if they were just calling for the CCP to reform itself (more open membership, less privileges, less power over relations of production), then I'd really like someone to show me the list of those demands. But I haven't seen it, and so I can't really help but assume that a bunch of fiery anti-CCP rhetoric plus a lack of concrete demands adds up to a counterrevolutionary protest.

[Glenn Beck]

I've seen presented plenty of evidence that anti-capitalist workers were present and active in force during the Tienanmen Square protests.

I've seen none at all that these workers were in a position to dominate the movement and get their demands met (in fact I haven't seen their specific demands) as opposed to the liberal stooges they united with.

Given my antipathy for the Dengist regime, I would love to believe that the Tienanmen Square protests were really principled and democratic worker's struggles aimed at 'real socialism'. But I can't believe that without being dishonest to myself.

I'm uncomfortable with FRSO's uncritical stance towards the Dengist leadership of China, but I'm just as unimpressed by the evidence that the Tienanmen movement represented a credible leftist alternative to Dengism. My impression is that it was more or less a struggle between counterrevolutionary factions for the future of a worker's state. Whether China would be better if the student movement had succeeded in gaining concessions I don't know enough to judge, but given the track record of liberal reform movements in left regimes I doubt it.

[JimmyJazz]

I've seen presented plenty of evidence that anti-capitalist workers were present and active in force during the Tienanmen Square protests.

What evidence is there of that? I hope it's not in this thread, because I thought I'd read the whole thing carefully. Bobkindles presented some evidence that there were workers supporting the protest, but nothing like the unambiguous quotes from them saying "we want the privatizations reversed" that would be comparable to the unambiguous quotes saying "we want liberal democracy" from some of the students. So I really have no idea what their participation was all about. Miles included some quotes from students who quoted from Capital, but they weren't (in his quotes, at least) calling for anything, just railing against "Stalinism".

Like I said before, I'm not a CCP apologist, but based on what little I know at this point I'm baffled how someone saw anything coming out of these protests besides (1) the repression that actually occurred or (2) a toppling of the CCP, a dismantling of what remained of socialism, and full blown capitalism.

[Martin Blank]

Miles included some quotes from students who quoted from Capital, but they weren't (in his quotes, at least) calling for anything, just railing against "Stalinism".

The quotes were from statements issued by the Capital (Beijing) Workers Autonomous Federation, not from a student group, and they were what I could find in only a few minutes of searching on the web (I don't have full access to their documents at the moment).

[Martin Blank]

I've seen none at all that these workers were in a position to dominate the movement and get their demands met (in fact I haven't seen their specific demands) as opposed to the liberal stooges they united with.

First of all, they really didn't "unite with" the students in the way you're implying. They used the protests of the students more or less as an excuse to come out for their own reasons. They went to Tiananmen because that's where people were focusing their attention, and they wanted to intersect that. There were numerous conflicts between the students and workers over issues, strategies and tactics.

One of the main reasons why the student leaders chose to withdraw from the Tiananmen protests was because the CWAF was becoming more dominant among those who had gathered in the Square, and at the same time was becoming more militant and radical. On June 2 (or 3), there was a rupture between the student leaders and the workers over what to do next, and when the students dithered about next steps, the workers began to rally the occupants. That's when the final decision to deploy the PLA garrison from western China was made, thus setting the stage for the suppression of the protests on June 4. That's also when the student leaders decided to withdraw from the Square, and leave the workers and other protesters to face off against the PLA.

[JimmyJazz]

The quotes were from statements issued by the Capital (Beijing) Workers Autonomous Federation, not from a student group, and they were what I could find in only a few minutes of searching on the web (I don't have full access to their documents at the moment).

Well I would obviously support a movement for independent trade unions in China, but like others have said, I haven't seen any evidence that these groups played a controlling role in the Tiananmen protests (they seem to have jumped onboard with them), so it strikes me as extremely odd that communists would enthusiastically support some student-organized and student-led protests which workers jumped onboard with instead of encouraging independent working class action.

Chinese working class > Chinese Communist Party > Chinese students.

I am interested in this CWAF group though. There doesn't seem to be much about them online. Are they still around?

[Comrade B]

Pro-liberal bourgeois democracy. http://www.revleft.com/vb/../revleft/smilies2/thumbdown.gif Let me quote some of the protestors:
It wasn't a united movement, there were people from a variety of perspectives, sure some were fuck heads, but they still don't deserve to be shot.

[BobKKKindle$]

So you see no difference between protests against a capitalist, imperialist government (France) and protests against a Communist government which has put in place some market reforms?The PRC was not under the control of a Communist government and never has been. It is a capitalist country, and the fact that the state has an important role in managing the economy does not alter this, because private property does not need to be recognized by the government as legal entity for the means of production to be removed from popular ownership and control. The PRC has actually always been a capitalist country, because the revolution that allowed the CPC to overthrow the regime of Chiang Kai-Shek in 1949 and establish political control was not led by the working class - it was a movement that drew the vast majority of its supporters from the peasantry, and was nationalist in its ideological orientation, as Mao was perfectly happy to advocate an alliance with what he saw as the "national bourgeoisie", i.e. the members of the ruling class who were seen as having a progressive role to play in the struggle against imperialism and the development of an industrial base, and even some sections of the landed gentry, to the extent that the Jiangxi and Yan'an Soviets did not implement moderate land reform or otherwise confiscate the property of the landowners, even when the areas in which these Soviets were situated were firmly under the control of Mao and his comrades. The peasant base of the CPC was ultimately derived from the Shanghai Massacre of 1927, when the party's urban activists, along with significant numbers of workers were executed by the KMT, or forced to join Mao's forces in the countryside, due to the decision of the CPC to hand over its weapons at the end of the Northern Expedition and surrender its political autonomy, despite Trotsky's warnings that this would allow the KMT to betray the workers who had participated in the struggle against warlordism as soon as the opportunity arose. It is an elementary principle of Marxism that the working class must always be the agent of its own emancipation, and so it should not surprise us that a revolution that did not allocate any significant role to the working class has not resulted in workers' control being established, and that the government which came to power as a result of the events of 1949 is currently carrying out brutal attacks on workers throughout China, through economic and political coercion.

This does not mean that there is nothing in China worth defending. There are also things that are worth defending in the UK and every other capitalist country, such as the national health service and minimum wage legislation, and it would be stupid if socialists just decided to let these things go when the government launches an attack, given that they have been won through mass struggle, and allow the working class to resist the worst effects of capitalism. However, the existence of these and other features does not negate the fact that China and the UK are both capitalist countries in which the means of production are subject to the control of a small minority of the population that has been able to enrich itself at the expense of the working population. It also does not mean that we can just dismiss such an inspiring event as the Tienanmen movement as reactionary and incapable of achieving anything remotely progressive on the grounds that some of the people who were involved may have put forward reactionary demands, or did not have a clear ideological message. Most importantly of all, it does not mean you can applaud the state deploying its military apparatus against thousands of people, and then refusing to acknowledge that anything went wrong, 20 decades after the event. I don't think the "issue" of whether the government's response was acceptable or not actually has much to do with the political character of the protests because the interests of the working class are always undermined when a government uses violence against citizens who are fighting to make their voices heard, no matter how reactionary their cause. This is because the use of violence against a particular movement diminishes the confidence of those who might otherwise have chosen to fight for their rights through direct action and militant protest at some point in the future, if they know that they are liable to face state-sponsored violence, and it is for this reason (amongst others) that socialists do not call on the state to ban far-right parties, despite our total disagreement with what those parties stand for, and the class interests they represent.

Although, as someone who opposes open borders, you obviously don't have a problem with bourgeois states using violence against the working class.


although what that means, I'm not sure, since no one who supports them has yet been able to produce a coherent list of their demandsThere was no "list" of demands because the protests involved a range of different groups, amongst whom there were key differences of interest. I don't see what's so hard to understand about the idea that the protests were not homogeneous and unchanging, as bourgeois commentators generally lead people to believe.

[JimmyJazz]

The PRC was not under the control of a Communist government and never has been. It is a capitalist country, and the fact that the state has an important role in managing the economy does not alter this, because private property does not need to be recognized by the government as legal entity for the means of production to be removed from popular ownership and control. The PRC has actually always been a capitalist country, because the revolution that allowed the CPC to overthrow the regime of Chiang Kai-Shek in 1949 and establish political control was not led by the working class - it was a movement that drew the vast majority of its supporters from the peasantry, and was nationalist in its ideological orientation, as Mao was perfectly happy to advocate an alliance with what he saw as the "national bourgeoisie", i.e. the members of the ruling class who were seen as having a progressive role to play in the struggle against imperialism and the development of an industrial base, and even some sections of the landed gentry, to the extent that the Jiangxi and Yan'an Soviets did not implement moderate land reform or otherwise confiscate the property of the landowners, even when the areas in which these Soviets were situated were firmly under the control of Mao and his comrades.

How long ago was it that you were going around saying "If I wasn't a Trotskyist, I would be a Maoist"? Has it been a month yet? :lol:

[BobKKKindle$]

How long ago was it that you were going around saying "If I wasn't a Trotskyist, I would be a Maoist"? Has it been a month yet? :lol:

I don't quite remember the context of that - but I think it would still be true if I were somehow prevented from being a Trotskyist, if only because of the stance that most Maoists adopt on national liberation. Anyway, instead of bringing up obscure comments, perhaps you could give a bit more explanation as to why you think that the PRC was ruled by a "Communist government" in 1989, in light of my analysis on the nature and origins of the Chinese Revolution, i.e. the lack of working-class participation, as well as why you support the massacre of workers and students?

[Revy]

Can someone who speaks Chinese translate these? They're pictures from the Tiananmen protests.

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2009/6/5/1244202159552/Tiananmen-protests-1989-P-014.jpg

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2009/6/5/1244200913071/Tiananmen-protests-1989-G-004.jpg

They were on the Guardian website. The rest of the pictures were just pictures of people and tanks, some of the pictures showing the tanks having been set on fire by civilians. These were the only two with text.