Archives: Lego

Seeing as we have our own history of political lego in Turbulence, I couldn’t pass this picture without nicking it (apologies to Jane Dark’s Sugarhigh).

The non-lego version of this image came to represent the Tiananmen square events in the West. It seemed to sum up the narrative that the western press had forced onto the events, of the merciless Stalinist state apparatus being stopped by a symbol of individualism. At the time I remember the picture being put on a poster by the Federation of Conservatives Students with some slogan like “Stand up to Socialism”. This was alongside their “Hang Nelson Mandela” posters.

However another version of events has gradually emerged which puts those conservative students on the other side of the barricades. In the “The Shock Doctrine”, Naomi Klein quoting Wang Hui, a leading figure in the protests and now a well known Chinese leftist critique of the Chinese Communist Party, puts it like this:

What ignited the protests, he recalls, was popular discontent in the face of Deng’s “revolutionary” economic changes, which were lowering wages, raising prices and causing “a crisis of layoffs and unemployment.” According to Wang, “These changes were the catalyst for the 1989 social mobilisation.”

The demonstrations were not against economic reform per se; they were against the specific Friedmanite nature of the reforms-their speed, ruthlessness and the fact that the process was highly antidemocratic. Wang says that the protesters’ call for elections and free speech were intimately connected to this economic dissent. What drove the demand for democracy was the fact that the party was pushing through changes that were revolutionary in scope, entirely without popular consent. There was, he writes, “a general request for democratic means to supervise the fairness of the reform process and the reorganization of social benefits.”…

Before Tiananmen, (Deng) had been forced to ease off some of the more painful measures; three months after the massacre, he brought them back, and he implemented several of Friedman’s other recommendations, including price deregulation. For Wang Hui, there is an obvious reason why “market reforms that had failed to be implemented in the late 1980s just happened to have been completed in the post-1989 environment”; the reason, he writes, “is that the violence of 1989 served to check the social upheaval brought about by this process, and the new pricing system finally took shape”…

It was this wave of reforms that turned China into the sweatshop of the world, the preferred location for contract factories for virtually every multinational on the planet. No country offered more lucrative conditions than China: low taxes and tariffs, corruptible officials and, most of all, a plentiful low-wage workforce that, for many years, would be unwilling to risk demanding decent salaries or the most basic workplace protections for fear of the most violent reprisals” (From The Shock Doctrine p.187-190).

It seems timely to go back to this event in history as we sit amidst the multiple crisis of neo-liberalism. The production of cheap consumer goods in China was the other half of the story of a boom created at the cost of our personal indebtedness in the West. Every now and then we have to step back and realise just how rooted in class struggle these crisis are, even if we have to trace it back over decades. It also shows how contingent history is, something to remember as we contemplate how to intervene into the present mess.