Thread by @thecoleslaws

This piece is excellent. It historically situates the movement as a workers movement, recognizing internal contradictions, and counters the framework of both apologists for the repression & liberal cheerleaders of the student movement on how we should understand the consequences

Pulling out sections I especially feel are worth highlighting:

This one is less centrally important to Tiananmen but it highlights the contradictions in the tendency within the socialist movement which has substituted workers control for party domination

Been told I need to read state and rev, when I did this quote jumped the fuck out to me

This is an incredibly conscise summary of what is really the main contradiction within the workers movement:

Important framing of the class nature of the cultural revolution and its repression:

What I take from this is that one need not be an anarchist to assert the necessity of workers control and autonomy for workers. Dispossession, alienation, and disempowerment produce their own dissenters and assert those necessities.

First they kill the workers then they kill their ideas, as such they die two deaths. The counter revolution continues every time they are socially killed again.

On Tiananmen as the transition between different forms of workers struggle, the shift in the site of social struggle from the factory to the street, and the challenges that emerge from this particularly in the lack of ability to assert collective power.

There are no easy answers for this as the article suggests this struggle and others like it were in a sense a response to the reorganization of the world economy to make such struggles impossible (we cannot go back) but there are glimmers of hope to be found.

There are examples like autogestion in Argentina of workers democracy asserted after this but unlike Tiananmen Hungary, Spain, Italy, Russia as mentioned these have been largely filling gaps left by capitalist reshuffling not a direct challenge to capitalist production writ large

The ability to assert collective power as workers or in resistance to capital seems to be shifting from the point of production to crucial nodes along the supply chain. They can now easily move a factory whose workers strike but they cannot as easily change global geography.

The port blockades against Israeli ships, the barricades of Canadian railroads in solidarity with Unistʼotʼen Camp, the blocking of the pipeline itself, even that accidental blocking of the Suez show what might be an alternative.

Missed the alt text for these but don’t want to break the thread so here they are if you need them: