“As a group of Palestinian Arabs residing in the UK, we hope that through ‘Free Palestine’ we shall contribute our share to a greater understanding and rapport between the British people and the Arabs of Palestine. Thus, in attempting to acquaint those interested with the facts of the situation, we aspire to represent as well as reflect the rights and aspirations of our people. This means we fully subscribe to our people’s legitimate desire to return to a free, secular and democratic Palestine, and that we unreservedly support our people’s armed struggle to achieve these natural and elementary aims in its homeland.”

These items of liberatory press in the form of the newspapers, journals and papers such as Inqaba ya basebenzi gave space for publicised and collective expression of dissent against the injustice of the dominant social order. Periodicals which highlight key engagements of critiques of current socio-economic and political ills, but also resolutions and active movements within the organisation. Inqaba ya basebenzi was produced by the underground movement in exile in English and local African languages. After 1989 the journal was transformed into a supplement and gave way for the Congress Militant, by 1990 Inqaba ya basebenzi had reached 28 issues in English and 4 other local languages with topics ranging from the political status within Southern Africa as well as international coverage.

The publications, each form with their own material histories in China, highlights the unofficial formation of the Workers’ Autonomous Federation (WAF) in the wake of Tiananmen protests in the Spring of 1989. The protests, named after the massacre on Tiananmen Square on June 4th where many workers, students, protestors, civilians and soldiers lives were lost. WAF expressed solidarity with the struggle of the students and held a unified ground for the mobilisation of a labour movement, which included the different sects of labour and their specific outcries. The Chinese workers’ role during Tiananmen lies thus not only in their organizing contributions in the streets of Beijing in May but in their vigorous use of counter-institutional publications to carve out alternate discursive spaces to develop socialist ideas external to the state and yet make demands on it.

In other words, the circumstances and form of workers’ writing was inseparable to how the workers independently practiced new ideas of struggle in Tiananmen. These writings demand “completely independent” forms of autonomous governance that would “supervise” the Communist Party and develop a system of socialist pluralism to take control of and reorganize the Chinese society’s means of production. These perspectives informed the means and tactics of workers’ struggle, from how the workers negotiated their relationship to the students to why they decided to take over certain factory production lines as a means to assist the struggle. The diverse forms of writing were tactical and timed to respond to different moments of the struggle in May from day to day, varying from adjusting their demands with different manifesto flyers to verse poetry and more personalized open letters to specific student bodies.