Speaker 1: I love how often the Holocaust has been trending over
Speaker 1: the last year. Um, that's good. That's the thing you
Speaker 1: want to see trending in. Um, it's it could happen here,
Speaker 1: all right, Chris, continue with your bread riots. Yeah, we're back.
Speaker 1: There's more riots. Uh. Now, last episode we talked about
Speaker 1: historians declaring the end of the bread death of the
Speaker 1: bread riot, and like in the sixties and early seventies, Like,
Speaker 1: I think that this is this is one of the
Speaker 1: ways you can tell that period people genuinely thought the
Speaker 1: bull was going to get better. It was that like
Speaker 1: they genuinely believed that like the centralized state and like
Speaker 1: capitalism can always provide foods you want up bread riots anymore?
Speaker 1: You get mark. You if you were born in that period,
Speaker 1: you like grew up and people were fleeing from dynonic
Speaker 1: ass in the street and like getting getting eaten by
Speaker 1: woolly mammoth's and then by the time you're forty, you've
Speaker 1: got the telegraph. So I get it, right. I get
Speaker 1: why people think that that progress was really back in
Speaker 1: those because they got they wiped out the dynamic as
Speaker 1: this is. Yeah, you have seen Howard Taff building the
Speaker 1: pyramids exactly exactly exactly you have you have you have
Speaker 1: seen the future rise up literally in front of you,
Speaker 1: and he went from eating mud to Hershey's chocolate. It's
Speaker 1: it's an incredibly impressive sort of period of modern historical evolution.
Speaker 1: And you know, and one of the things you see,
Speaker 1: like like you'll see like Marxists calling bread rice primitive
Speaker 1: rebels doing like populist mob politics that's been like displaced
Speaker 1: by proper Marxist class politics. And then like every single
Speaker 1: one of these people was like the most wrong anyone,
Speaker 1: like basically from that period until until the moment the
Speaker 1: end of history. Guy starts writing, they are the most
Speaker 1: wrong people like on the planet. Well, it's also funny
Speaker 1: to hear that idea that like there was something primitive
Speaker 1: about these people's class analysis, because like the Brothers Racky
Speaker 1: and Ancient Republican Rome, a lot of this ship they're saying,
Speaker 1: it is not at all primitive class analysis like this,
Speaker 1: it's it's pretty developed. Yeah, And I mean, like the
Speaker 1: Marxist will do some long argument about how like oh
Speaker 1: they have they have false consciousness, they're not trying to
Speaker 1: abolish the class system or whatever, and it's like, well,
Speaker 1: I mean like I look at the Martin, the Marxist
Speaker 1: in the demolish the classystem either so like yeah, like yeah,
Speaker 1: like that these are these are very Andre's something we're
Speaker 1: gonna be coming back to a lot this episode is
Speaker 1: that the people doing this are incredibly sophisticated political actors.
Speaker 1: And one of the sort of modern version of this
Speaker 1: is in the nineteen seventies, not only did bread riots
Speaker 1: not and there's a new kind of bread riot and
Speaker 1: these riots are collectively known as the I M. F.
Speaker 1: Riots um. From from from January nine, seventy six to
Speaker 1: October nineteen nine two, there are riots in Peru, Egypt, Ghana, Jamaica,
Speaker 1: like Beeria, the Philippines, a year, Turkey, Morocco, Sierra Leon, Sudan, Argentina, Ecuador, Chile, Bolivia, Brazil, Panama, Tunisia,
Speaker 1: the Dominican Republic, Haiti, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Guadibala in Mexico, Yugoslavia, Zambia, Poland, Algeria, Romania, Nigeria, Hungary, Venezuela,
Speaker 1: La Jordan, the every Coast, Nigeria, ron Albania, India, and Nepal.
Speaker 1: Were you just do like the whackou the Whackow Warner's song.
Speaker 1: It's that's literally all the play I found the chart
Speaker 1: that has all of them. Is like, there's just so many.
Speaker 1: They just keep happening. And again that's only like they
Speaker 1: they're they're still happening. And the everything I should mention
Speaker 1: is those are just the ones that are called the
Speaker 1: I m F riots. There's a bunch of other riots,
Speaker 1: some of which are bred riots, that aren't called the
Speaker 1: I m F riots because they're not really sort of
Speaker 1: like directly involved with the I m F. And and
Speaker 1: that that this raises the question of what the fund
Speaker 1: is an IMF riot? Uh, And the answer is that, unfortunately,
Speaker 1: to to understand why people are throwing ball offous through
Speaker 1: bank windows, we have to talk about banking a little bit. Um.
Speaker 1: I I have talked, I guess at length. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: I apologize, but we will we will get back to
Speaker 1: the riots, damn, But I promise we just have do
Speaker 1: a little bit of bank a king. So yeah, I've
Speaker 1: talked extensively on the show about the crisis of the seventies,
Speaker 1: and you know, the short version is that in a
Speaker 1: thing that is completely unrecognizable today, the global economy collapses,
Speaker 1: inflation skyrockets. Countries across the global South start taking out
Speaker 1: these suggestable rate that they've been taking out, these suggestable
Speaker 1: rate loans, and then suddenly the interest rate spike and
Speaker 1: they start defaulting on these loans. Here's our free markets
Speaker 1: and food riots talking about it. Although the causes of
Speaker 1: the crisis run deeper, by the nineteen seventies, many smaller
Speaker 1: nations began to feel the strains of insolvency as a
Speaker 1: result of a world wide recession, successive oil price shocks,
Speaker 1: declining world commodity prices, and accelerating debt service obligations. So basically,
Speaker 1: like if you're a small country, right, the price of
Speaker 1: everything you need to buy, like oil, is going up,
Speaker 1: and the price of what you can sell, which is
Speaker 1: like commodities like copper tin, is collapsing. And these lead
Speaker 1: to what are like these massive what are called balance
Speaker 1: of payments crises, And so we should we talk about
Speaker 1: what about what a balance of payments crisis is? And
Speaker 1: this one was up being really important. Here there's the
Speaker 1: story about che Guevara, like right after like literally right
Speaker 1: after the Cuban Revolution, is he so he goes to
Speaker 1: the US and he's in the he sits. He's in
Speaker 1: this meeting with a bunch of bankers and he's trying
Speaker 1: basically to get Cuba's gold reserves and cup us sort
Speaker 1: of like foreign exchange reserves out of the US. The
Speaker 1: US doesn't steal it. And it was funny about it
Speaker 1: is all the bankers who are talking to him, like
Speaker 1: all of them report afterwards like, woll wow, this guy
Speaker 1: talks like a banker, not a communist. And the specifically
Speaker 1: the reason they were like, oh hey, this guy talks
Speaker 1: like a banker is that he knew what balance of
Speaker 1: payments was. Um. The short answer is at a balance
Speaker 1: of payments crisis is when there's more money flowing out
Speaker 1: of the country than there is coming into it. And
Speaker 1: the result of this is that you run out of money,
Speaker 1: and particularly the thing you run out of his American dollars,
Speaker 1: which is the thing that you need to like buy oil.
Speaker 1: So you get these countries that are massively in debt
Speaker 1: and they run out of money, and the only thing
Speaker 1: they could do is turn to like turn to the
Speaker 1: International Monetary Fund and the i m F, who like
Speaker 1: the only description of the i m F that I
Speaker 1: have is that like they're they're they're basically, you like
Speaker 1: if the cartoon Bank of Evil from Despicable Me like
Speaker 1: ran the entire world economy. I they you know, so
Speaker 1: the I m F shows up to these countries and
Speaker 1: is like loll lmao eat ship, and they force these
Speaker 1: countries to implement, like in order to get loans, They
Speaker 1: force them to implet what are called stabilization programs because
Speaker 1: of the quote conditionality of the loans. They have all
Speaker 1: these like this really technical, boring like neoliberal like legal
Speaker 1: language for it, the like the this is this is
Speaker 1: all sort of banker speak for if you want another
Speaker 1: loans you can buy food, You're gonna have to rob
Speaker 1: every single person you know and hand them and hand
Speaker 1: us all your money. Uh. This eventually becomes now to
Speaker 1: structural adjustment programs. There's all of this sort of technical
Speaker 1: language disguise what's going on. But what's actually going on
Speaker 1: is that in order to pay off, in order to
Speaker 1: pay the bankers for these loans, they are taking food
Speaker 1: from the moles of children. Um. Yeah, here's a more technical,
Speaker 1: I guess explanation of what's happening here. Austerity programs include
Speaker 1: stern measures or shock treatments that trigger market mechanisms to
Speaker 1: stimulate export production and increased government for exchange reserves. So,
Speaker 1: according to the theory, currency devaluation makes three world exports
Speaker 1: more competitive in the international market. Reduced public spending curbs
Speaker 1: inflation and saves money for debt repayments. Privatization of state
Speaker 1: owned corporations generated more productive investment and reduce public payrolls.
Speaker 1: Elimination of protectionism and other restraints on foreign investment larns
Speaker 1: more more efficient export firms. Cuts in public subsidies for
Speaker 1: food and basic necessities helped to get prices right, benefiting
Speaker 1: domestic producers. Wage restraints and higher interest rates reduce inflation
Speaker 1: and enhanced competitiveness, and import restrictions can serve forum exchange
Speaker 1: for debt servicing. So this has winners and losers, and
Speaker 1: the losers are like everyone in the country that is
Speaker 1: happening to and this is and this is pretty cost
Speaker 1: cross class. Like these policies they hit workers, they hit peasants,
Speaker 1: that hir small shopkeepers, the middle classes annihilated odd just
Speaker 1: like people who are consumers you buy goods, and even
Speaker 1: the sort of like the local capitalists just get screwed
Speaker 1: by this. Because what the I m F is doing
Speaker 1: is forcing every wonder have lower wages, taking massive benefit cuts,
Speaker 1: and massively spiking the price of food. And you know,
Speaker 1: I I want to get remind everyone that this this
Speaker 1: is explicitly what the Federal Reserve is trying to do
Speaker 1: to us right now, Like this is this is the
Speaker 1: kind of stuff that they're talking about in order to
Speaker 1: curb inflation, is to just make the pay everyone less,
Speaker 1: make everyone take benefits cuts, and then increase the price
Speaker 1: of ship. So the winners of this are like six bureaucrats,
Speaker 1: international investors, and like a class of like absolutely horrific
Speaker 1: large agricultural landowners. And this this has about the effect
Speaker 1: that you would expect it to. Um. Between nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: six and late Nino, some a hundred and forty six
Speaker 1: incidents of protests occurred, reaching a peak from nineteen eight
Speaker 1: three to nine five, continuing to the present without attenney suation. Now,
Speaker 1: the authors who are writing this right, they're writing this
Speaker 1: in nine So when they say they continue to the
Speaker 1: present without tentiation, they before the thing is the last
Speaker 1: one of those riots ended like a week ago. Oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: they're still they're still going um so and you know,
Speaker 1: and these these riots are slightly different than the sort
Speaker 1: of like classical bread riots, right, because they are about
Speaker 1: the increasing price of food. It's also about the increasing
Speaker 1: price of fuel or sort of broader austerity measures or
Speaker 1: cuts to services and stuff like that. Um here, here's
Speaker 1: here's a quote about like what these things actually look like. Um.
Speaker 1: Demonstrations and riots typically target specific institutions perceived as responsible
Speaker 1: for the depredations. Marches and protesting crowds converge on major
Speaker 1: thoroughfares and government buildings, such as the treasury or the
Speaker 1: national bank or the legislature, the presidential palace. Looters attack
Speaker 1: supermarkets and clothing stores where fuel and transportation subsidies are
Speaker 1: part of the austerity package. Busses and gasoline stations are burned.
Speaker 1: The international dimension of austerity are recognized symbolically in attacks
Speaker 1: on travel agencies for an automobile's luxury hotels and international
Speaker 1: travel agencies or all that too, but also international agency offices.
Speaker 1: And you know this is going to sound familiar from
Speaker 1: last episode. It turns out that just like the eight
Speaker 1: such people, that the attacks of these things are are
Speaker 1: very targeted. The sort of like forms of resistance have
Speaker 1: changed over time, because you know, this is now. We
Speaker 1: we do have modern political organizations, right, Like we get
Speaker 1: general strikes, you get sometimes you get just noble bread riots.
Speaker 1: Sometimes you get these just things that are like large
Speaker 1: protests and then they turn into riots. And what's interesting
Speaker 1: about them is that these are very sort of these
Speaker 1: are very sort of cross class movements. Right. You have
Speaker 1: your sort of classical sectors that are poor. You have
Speaker 1: like particularly in the global South, you can you have
Speaker 1: your shanty dwellers, you have unemployed youth, you have small
Speaker 1: street vendors or like a crucial sort of element of
Speaker 1: these things you have like just your guy selling cigarettes
Speaker 1: on the street. Um, you get you also get like
Speaker 1: parts of the industrial working class. You get sometimes you
Speaker 1: get unions. A lot of times you get students, you
Speaker 1: get public employee sometimes you get professional groups. One of
Speaker 1: one of the interesting things that's reading about this, I've
Speaker 1: read like a few books in this Eric who were
Speaker 1: talking specifically and this this isn't like the nineties, right,
Speaker 1: We're specifically talking about professional groups since Sudan. And it's
Speaker 1: like it's like, okay, it's it's nine. People are talking too.
Speaker 1: Professional groups and Sudan backing rioters against the government. It's
Speaker 1: two thousand and nineteen. People are talking about professional groups
Speaker 1: backing protests against the government. It's like, it's I don't know,
Speaker 1: Like there's this extent to which all of these things,
Speaker 1: like that the I m F riots have just been
Speaker 1: happening over and over and over again for about fifty years,
Speaker 1: and a lot, a lot of the elements are incredibly similar.
Speaker 1: One of the other things that's going on here is
Speaker 1: that these protests are driven are driven by mass organization. Typically,
Speaker 1: austerity protests were precipitated by dramatic overnight price heights resulting
Speaker 1: from the termination of public subsidies on basic goods and services,
Speaker 1: proclaimed by the government as a regrettably necessary reform, urged
Speaker 1: by the I m F and international lenders as conditions
Speaker 1: for new and renegotiated loans. Five deaths in the first
Speaker 1: Peruvian protests to get a pattern of violence. Peru remained
Speaker 1: a hotbed of austerity protests, with students and workers demonstrating
Speaker 1: against increased food prices in followed by followed in eight
Speaker 1: by a march of public employees over state layoffs. This protest,
Speaker 1: so cheered by other public workers watching from surrounding the
Speaker 1: office buildings, was dispersed by police tear gas. So like that,
Speaker 1: that's that's a very sort of yeah, yeah, like we did.
Speaker 1: I mean, this is this was happening. This is happening
Speaker 1: in Peru like last year, right, actually it was it
Speaker 1: last year was earlier this year, I don't know. Time
Speaker 1: is fake. And that's actually like the other thing that
Speaker 1: sort of startling about this is like the places that
Speaker 1: riot are still the places that are rioting in like
Speaker 1: an enormous number of cases. It's it's the same places
Speaker 1: sometimes it's the same people. Um. I think probably the
Speaker 1: most famous protests of the sort of era is it's
Speaker 1: called the Caracazo I'm pronounced nice really badly by my
Speaker 1: apologies in Venezuela, which is a reaction to nine increase
Speaker 1: in training and bus fairs. And there are these are
Speaker 1: like these are massive riots. Um at least a hundred
Speaker 1: and probably like a couple of thousand people are like
Speaker 1: gunned down by the army. And three years later, a
Speaker 1: relatively unknown colonel named Hugo Chavez tried to overthrow the
Speaker 1: government that had carried out the price increases. Travis, you know,
Speaker 1: Travis is better known for his other works, but he's
Speaker 1: the sort of tie between the I m F riots
Speaker 1: and the sort of next phase of political resistance to
Speaker 1: this stuff, which is called the antique, which is like
Speaker 1: known as the anti globalization movements in sort of the
Speaker 1: nineties and nearly two thousands. And the thing that's interesting
Speaker 1: about these things is that I don't know, the I
Speaker 1: m F rights don't go very well, like either they
Speaker 1: lose or at best, what they were able to get
Speaker 1: was like temporarily stall some of these reforms, and I
Speaker 1: say like reforms quote unquote like the serve of near
Speaker 1: level like slashing benefits, so they were able to pause
Speaker 1: them a bit and then they would sort of get
Speaker 1: restarted after people left the street. But in the late
Speaker 1: nineties and the two thousands people start winning um Argentina
Speaker 1: is sort of famously forced to like tell the I
Speaker 1: m F to funk off, and they default on their loans.
Speaker 1: After this like enormous autonomous uprising two thousand one that
Speaker 1: like very nearly overthrows the government and forces that like
Speaker 1: five heads of state. There's the whole sort of pink
Speaker 1: tide in Latin America. The I m F gets like
Speaker 1: driven out of a bunch of countries in East Asia,
Speaker 1: and then she doesn't eight, the entire world economy collapses,
Speaker 1: which it turns out is bad for everyone. And this
Speaker 1: does This does two things for our story. The first
Speaker 1: is that like countries are suddenly going broke again, and
Speaker 1: because they're like just completely broke, the I m F
Speaker 1: is just back and is able to sort of enforce
Speaker 1: programs on places like Greecent Spain. And the second thing
Speaker 1: it did was set off an enormous wave of bread
Speaker 1: riots and uprisings. And I think, like most people, if
Speaker 1: you tell them that two eight set off like an
Speaker 1: enormous wave of like protests, they're They're immediately going to go, oh,
Speaker 1: you mean the Arab spring And I am talking about that,
Speaker 1: But that's actually not specifically what I'm talking about here.
Speaker 1: There there's there were like immediately in two thousan Central
Speaker 1: and immediately after there was another massive wave of bread
Speaker 1: riots that every like just everyone is completely forgotten unless
Speaker 1: the thing that you do specifically is study bread riots.
Speaker 1: Um here here's from Here's from the piece called a
Speaker 1: Political Economy of the Food Riot. In two thousand and
Speaker 1: seven and two, the world witnessed a return of one
Speaker 1: of the oldest forms of collective action, food riot countries
Speaker 1: were protests occurred range from Italy, where pasta protests in
Speaker 1: September seven were directed at a failure at the failure
Speaker 1: of the Prodi government to prevent a thirty percent rise
Speaker 1: in the price of pasta, to Haiti, where protesters railed
Speaker 1: against presidents provolves impassive response to the doubling of the
Speaker 1: price of rice over the course of a single week.
Speaker 1: Other countries in which riots were reported including the Uzbekistan, Morocco, Guiana, Mauritania, Senegal, India, Indonesia, Zimbabwe, Burkina, Fosso,
Speaker 1: camera uined Yemen, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Mexico, and Argentina,
Speaker 1: and some commentators have estimated that thirty countries experienced some
Speaker 1: somewhere foods some sort of food protests over the period.
Speaker 1: Now we've been talking a lot about like food consumers
Speaker 1: in this because that's mostly the people who are involved
Speaker 1: in bread riots. But you know, as was happening in
Speaker 1: seventeen huntres with the sort of original stuff like this
Speaker 1: whole time this is going on, there's there's a sort
Speaker 1: of massive shift in the global food economy happening where
Speaker 1: and this has been happening for a long time now,
Speaker 1: but it's it's sort of it's been accelerating the last
Speaker 1: about half a century, which is that the number of
Speaker 1: people who are like peasants and who produced free for
Speaker 1: themselves has been massively declining, and people are getting forced
Speaker 1: into cities. And this means that there's you know, there's
Speaker 1: there's been a number of other things that have gone
Speaker 1: along with this. Uh, there's been this massive increase in
Speaker 1: like cattle production, for example, you get all these monocultures
Speaker 1: um And another thing I think I've mentioned before is
Speaker 1: the World Trade organizations like Agreement on Agriculture like outlaws
Speaker 1: agricultural subsidies for the global South, but you know, the
Speaker 1: US is still allowed to have like farm subsidies, which
Speaker 1: means that you know, if when you're when you enter
Speaker 1: these free trade agreements, you get all of this like
Speaker 1: enormously cheap food from the U s has dumped into
Speaker 1: all these other countries, and you know, if you're a
Speaker 1: Mexican farmer, suddenly you can't compete with all of this
Speaker 1: food from the US because the food from the US
Speaker 1: is cheap because the American government subsidizing it, but the
Speaker 1: Mexican government can and this just like absolutely and die
Speaker 1: lates any attempt by a country to maintain food security
Speaker 1: by like producing food for themselves. And this this sort
Speaker 1: of class of like self sufficient peasant farmers who had
Speaker 1: been you know, they support themselves by producing their own
Speaker 1: food and selling of the market. These people just can
Speaker 1: annihilated and they get forced into what's called sort of
Speaker 1: casualized labor that they you know that they the later
Speaker 1: versions is like uber, right, but that they're forcing the
Speaker 1: gig work. They're kicked out of sort of the normal economy.
Speaker 1: And you know, but because they don't have sort of
Speaker 1: fixed contracts or you know, it's a lot of people
Speaker 1: are working with for no contract, with no contracts at all,
Speaker 1: they're enormously insecure. And once the people are forced into
Speaker 1: the labor market, like changes in the global economy can
Speaker 1: make them like almost immediately unable to afford food because
Speaker 1: you know, like if the less sort of economic and
Speaker 1: security you are, the more the more you're affected by
Speaker 1: price increases. Which is obvious, but it's worth saying because
Speaker 1: it dictates a lot of like who does bread riots
Speaker 1: and yes, and so governments are not entirely like blind
Speaker 1: to this, and they're concerns that they're gonna get overthrown.
Speaker 1: And so you see a bunch of governments trying to
Speaker 1: respond with sort of price stabilization stuff. I think the
Speaker 1: most famous example of this is that like the Egyptian
Speaker 1: army like literally controls like an enormous number of eagips
Speaker 1: bakeries and they like directly run them, and they directly
Speaker 1: run them so that he control the price of brand
Speaker 1: to try to like stop revolutions from happening. But in
Speaker 1: two thousand eight they just kind of stopped working. Um,
Speaker 1: here's the political economy of the food riot. Again. Over
Speaker 1: the year between two thousand and seven and two thousand eight,
Speaker 1: hundred and thirty percent increase in the global price of
Speaker 1: maize and the seventy percent increase in the price of rice,
Speaker 1: with similar price increases and soybeans and other major food commodities. Um, yes,
Speaker 1: there they are these massive food price increases, and this,
Speaker 1: you know, this does the thing that massive food price
Speaker 1: increases does. Right, there's there's and there's immediately enormous riots,
Speaker 1: and there's the cycle that happens where the protesters, you know,
Speaker 1: the purchesses, immediately blamed the government for the crisis, and
Speaker 1: then the government is like, well, it's actually not our
Speaker 1: fault because you know that it's happening because the things
Speaker 1: outside of our control. And the protesters are like, oh,
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter who we elect, they do the same things,
Speaker 1: and like they're both kind of rights. Like the government
Speaker 1: is just like sucking these people. But it's also true
Speaker 1: that the sort of like the whole food system is
Speaker 1: designed to take like the means of food production out
Speaker 1: of the hands of like the workers who need the
Speaker 1: food and putting them in the hands of like, you know,
Speaker 1: enormous corporations and as people in places like Sri Lanka,
Speaker 1: which you're gonna talk more about later, continually emphasized like this,
Speaker 1: this food sovereignty issue is as much as a political issue,
Speaker 1: Like it's an incredibly political issue, and it's it's it's
Speaker 1: as much like what's at stake in these bread riots
Speaker 1: as the sort of m finosterity stuff. Okay, this is
Speaker 1: probably good place for an ad break, but I can't
Speaker 1: think of a transition. Uh yeah, you know who isn't
Speaker 1: allowed to eat is the products and services that support
Speaker 1: this podcast, all actively star ring to death. So get
Speaker 1: these deals now while you still can, and we're back.
Speaker 1: So all right now, we're gonna talk a little bit
Speaker 1: about the Arabs Spring. We're not gonna talk an enormous
Speaker 1: amount about it, because that's the whole thing. Um. But
Speaker 1: if if, if you've been following like the stuff people
Speaker 1: have written about the Arabs spring, there's an enormous number
Speaker 1: of people who spend like a lot of their time
Speaker 1: arguing about whether or not it was actually sparked by
Speaker 1: food prices. And you know, you'll get a lot of
Speaker 1: analysts to argue that like food prices in Tunisia where
Speaker 1: the air spring starts, like, weren't really higher than normal,
Speaker 1: And what you're seeing instead is like, well, it's not
Speaker 1: actually food prices. It's just that there's a generation of
Speaker 1: people who've been farmers but like can't support themselves anymore,
Speaker 1: who've been forced into like finding non existent wage labor
Speaker 1: in cities and like that that is part of what's happening.
Speaker 1: But I think there's there's a sort of like fundamental
Speaker 1: misunderstanding of what causes a bread riot, right, Like you know,
Speaker 1: as you talked about like in the first episode, one
Speaker 1: of the things that causes bread riots is it's not
Speaker 1: actually necessarily the magnitude of the price increase that causes them. Right,
Speaker 1: what sets what sets off bread riots is people is
Speaker 1: people feeling like they're not getting what they deserve. Now. Obviously,
Speaker 1: like if the price of bread increases, you're going to
Speaker 1: get a lot of people going like, funk this, I
Speaker 1: work my ass off and now I can't feed my family.
Speaker 1: We deserve better, and this is time to riot. But
Speaker 1: sometimes even if red prices are stable, you can you
Speaker 1: can get it. You can get a thing where everyone like,
Speaker 1: you know, the amount of bread is bad. Everything is expensive,
Speaker 1: and one day someone wakes up and just goes, funck this,
Speaker 1: I deserve better, and they do a bread riot and
Speaker 1: and this is the case. And you know, and when
Speaker 1: when that kind of thing is happening, right, When when
Speaker 1: when you're dealing with you know what like moral economy stuff,
Speaker 1: when you're dealing with with this gap between like what
Speaker 1: people think, like like what people think their life should
Speaker 1: be versus the fact that their lives which is absolutely terrible.
Speaker 1: Even if you like decrease the price of bread, that's
Speaker 1: not actually necessarily going to like stop people from rioting.
Speaker 1: And if you look at like occupy for example, to
Speaker 1: like you know, that's also happening in this period, Like
Speaker 1: what brings people there isn't necessarily strictly the price of food.
Speaker 1: It's the sense that like, yeah, I've been screwed by
Speaker 1: and I've been screwed by the ruling class, and I
Speaker 1: deserve better than this and and this is this is
Speaker 1: what you see Indonesia. And one of the things what
Speaker 1: do you see in sort of Phoenicians Syria is that
Speaker 1: like a lot of the uprisings, like they have this
Speaker 1: huge sort of rural core with with this population of
Speaker 1: the population to people who've been kicked out of agricultural
Speaker 1: sector and you know, and like that that is a
Speaker 1: bread riot, right, And it's a bread right in the
Speaker 1: sort of double sense of like it's the people who
Speaker 1: are involved who used to be involved in in grain
Speaker 1: production and now can't be. And then also that like
Speaker 1: you know, people, people have hit the sort of expectation
Speaker 1: gap thing. And what I think is sort of interesting
Speaker 1: about this is that these bread riots, these rural bread riots,
Speaker 1: are like their so the closest thing we have to
Speaker 1: sort of the classical twenty century revolution, right, like that
Speaker 1: that's one of that's the thing that causes like the
Speaker 1: twenty century revolutions are the first generation of people who
Speaker 1: are like but maybe in the first like two or
Speaker 1: three generations people who come from the countryside into the
Speaker 1: factories of the people who do revolutions um. And but
Speaker 1: the thing is this is this is this is the century,
Speaker 1: not the twentieth century. Like if you get kicked out
Speaker 1: of your farm, there's there's no job in a factory,
Speaker 1: like you're just unemployed, and you know, and this changes
Speaker 1: the dynamics of of sort of everything. And I think, okay,
Speaker 1: like people like broadly know the course of like the
Speaker 1: air of spring and the way of uprisings they happen,
Speaker 1: they get crushed largely. But there was another wave of
Speaker 1: these sort of riots, protests and uprisings that started in
Speaker 1: Haiti and like in eighteen over this massive field price hike.
Speaker 1: And here is a partial list of places that like
Speaker 1: people have like rioted in in large numbers since he
Speaker 1: dozen in eighteen had sue Dan, Algeria, Hunduras, Chile, and
Speaker 1: rock Ha Kong Iran like four times, Lebanon, like three times, Columbia,
Speaker 1: like three times. A couple of things happen in France.
Speaker 1: There was Puerto Rico, there was popular There's there was
Speaker 1: Indonesia where in our second Ecuador one. Now there's Catalonia,
Speaker 1: like people righted. In the US there there were massive
Speaker 1: indigenous roadblocks like in Canada, ukimedia Kampa went up, or
Speaker 1: there was stuff. It's a culture. Like there were two
Speaker 1: different ways of protests. In India, there was like Belarus,
Speaker 1: there's Kazahstan, there's Kyrka Stan, there's just Beekistan. There's Molly.
Speaker 1: There's stuff in Nigeria or stuff in Libya, like there's
Speaker 1: stuff in Sri Lanka. We're about to get to this.
Speaker 1: This whole thing has has been happening like everywhere, and
Speaker 1: it's been intensifying the last in the last year of
Speaker 1: like three or four years. Um, we're not basically in
Speaker 1: like year four of this cycle. And and you know, obviously,
Speaker 1: like every single one of these protests has their own
Speaker 1: like local political conditions, and like a lot of these
Speaker 1: aren't even sort of loosely about the price of bread.
Speaker 1: They're just about sort of other stuff that's happening. But
Speaker 1: like like of the opperasons that I mentioned, like something
Speaker 1: like fifteen of them are directly about the price of
Speaker 1: food or the price of like translated fuel. And we're
Speaker 1: gonna talk a little bit about sort of two of
Speaker 1: the most recent like protest waves. We're gonna talk about
Speaker 1: equat word, We're gonna talk about Sri Lanka because they're
Speaker 1: there are two very different kinds of protests, even though
Speaker 1: they're both kind of bread riots or at least I mean,
Speaker 1: they're both very much the modern equivalence of it. Um
Speaker 1: but they look very different. And there there's just I think,
Speaker 1: and I don't know, I think it's like indestring reasons why. Um. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: so we're gonna start with, like with Sri Lanka. Um on.
Speaker 1: On a very basic level, Sri Lanka, it has a
Speaker 1: giant balance of payments crisis. Uh, this is you know,
Speaker 1: it's just like that. This is the sort of like
Speaker 1: large scale political version of famines. Right, Like, there's plenty
Speaker 1: of food and fuel in the world, but the government
Speaker 1: Srlanka does not have dollars to buy it with. Now,
Speaker 1: the reason the government doesn't have dollars to buy fuel
Speaker 1: with is because the government is basically like an incredibly
Speaker 1: corrupt dictatorship that keeps like imputting luxury goods it didn't need.
Speaker 1: And they did a bunch of like tax breaks at
Speaker 1: rich people, and suddenly the government was broken. Everyone was like, wow,
Speaker 1: how did that happened? It must have just been the
Speaker 1: pandemic and it was like no, you like you gave
Speaker 1: all the money to rich people. And then as the
Speaker 1: crisis sort of went on, um, they the government decided
Speaker 1: to ban fertilizer imports, and so this just meant that
Speaker 1: people couldn't get fertilizer. So it's like farmers just didn't
Speaker 1: plant food because curious decision. Yeah, it's like it's it's
Speaker 1: one of those things you look at it. It's just
Speaker 1: like like, like who thought this was a good idea? Yeah?
Speaker 1: What was the positive end of that game plan here?
Speaker 1: I mean, like the only like okay, So, like I
Speaker 1: think what they were thinking is that, like, fertilizer costs dollars, right,
Speaker 1: we're running out of dollars, so we're gonna stop people
Speaker 1: from spending their dollars like on buying this stuff so
Speaker 1: we can keep more dollars in the economy. But like,
Speaker 1: what what are you what is your long term plan
Speaker 1: here if you don't have like anything to get dollars
Speaker 1: with or and you also don't have food. So this,
Speaker 1: to the surprise of exactly zero people except I guess
Speaker 1: the government of Sri Lanka causes a food crisis, food shortage. Um.
Speaker 1: And this is a kind of classic like this is
Speaker 1: the kind of classic like situation in which the I,
Speaker 1: m F we intervene in the seventies and they're tving
Speaker 1: now and you know this, this is a classic like
Speaker 1: struggle against this starting right, you have the ruling class
Speaker 1: blowing up the entire economy by like fueling debt money
Speaker 1: into pointland's infrastructure projects. And now they're doing these like
Speaker 1: massive austerity measures, are trying to get loans to MF.
Speaker 1: This is you know, this is this is this is this,
Speaker 1: this is this is this is stuff we understand that
Speaker 1: we've seen before. Um. But this is also this is
Speaker 1: also a food softigy problem, right. The Sri Lankan government
Speaker 1: has just completely screwed their farmers, which means you have
Speaker 1: to import even more food and and you know the
Speaker 1: result of this is months and months and months a
Speaker 1: very impressive sort of clock cross class protests with like
Speaker 1: basically every social sector in the streets. And that's both
Speaker 1: a good thing and also a thing that is kind
Speaker 1: of a mess because you know, like there's civil war.
Speaker 1: The civil war ended like less than a decade and
Speaker 1: a half ago. Right, so you have people in the
Speaker 1: streets from sectors who like do not like each other
Speaker 1: at all, and I don't know, and you know, you
Speaker 1: get the thing that happens here, right, You get these
Speaker 1: moments of like incredible solidarity and then moments of incredible
Speaker 1: like what the funk are you guys doing? And you know,
Speaker 1: like one of the things that happens a lot in
Speaker 1: these protests, like in all all protests, like this is
Speaker 1: like okay, the protests are like pre tame for literally months, right,
Speaker 1: Like it's just people doing protesting, and then I cops
Speaker 1: and and people like allied with the government start attacking
Speaker 1: their protesters, at which point people like burned down the
Speaker 1: house of the ruling family. They start throwing people. I
Speaker 1: think people probably saw the videos people like throwing cars
Speaker 1: of like government ministers and the rivers, which was a
Speaker 1: good time, and like yeah, like that that stuff was
Speaker 1: you know, a direct reaction to sort of like the
Speaker 1: government's violence. Right. Um, you know, okay, I can't give
Speaker 1: like a full, like detailed political history here because, like
Speaker 1: dear Odd, it is incredibly complicated and I don't understand
Speaker 1: it very well because you know, I don't study Sri Lanka. Um,
Speaker 1: if you want to go to account of this. Brohini
Speaker 1: Hensman's political dimensions of the crisis in Sri Lanka is
Speaker 1: a really good sort of like short like look at
Speaker 1: what's going on here, um, And and this is the
Speaker 1: sort of like this is you know, this is a
Speaker 1: broader trend and like all these protests right like like
Speaker 1: every single bread right takes place in its own unique context,
Speaker 1: Like Sri Lanka, for example, Like Sri Lanka used to
Speaker 1: have the world's best and largest like mass Trotskyite party,
Speaker 1: like they were the Trotskyites is like the only place
Speaker 1: on earth the trot Skates had like a real like
Speaker 1: mass political party and they were like a part of
Speaker 1: the real political process. And then they like sold out
Speaker 1: the working class and entered a bunch of governments that
Speaker 1: like did terrible stuff. And you know, okay that that
Speaker 1: that's like a local context, doesn't happen anywhere else. But
Speaker 1: you know, every single one of these states, right is,
Speaker 1: is embedded in global capitalism. And that means that every
Speaker 1: state is affected by the sort of like broader economic
Speaker 1: trends and sort of beerocratic structures to hold everything together.
Speaker 1: Their affect by the I m F, the World Trade Organization,
Speaker 1: the World Bank. And the thing that this means is
Speaker 1: that the timings of uprisings and riots tend to synchronize
Speaker 1: with each other, and we actually just sort of brought
Speaker 1: her up like economic forces. And the product of this
Speaker 1: is way is these sort of like periodic ways of uprisings.
Speaker 1: And so the closest out we're gonna talk about the
Speaker 1: most recent of these, well, it might actually not be
Speaker 1: the most recently these by time this goes up, but yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: we're we're gonna talk about Ecuador. Um, the situation Ecuador
Speaker 1: is very different from what's happening is to Laka. The
Speaker 1: biggest difference, I guess is that instead of sort of
Speaker 1: like waiting for conditions to get bad enough that like
Speaker 1: an uprising happens like more or less spontaneously, which is
Speaker 1: kind of what happened he doesn't nineteen and Ecuador there
Speaker 1: there's there's there are huge protests there, um, but they
Speaker 1: were largely spontaneous, but instead of like waiting for people
Speaker 1: were just like what if we just called one of
Speaker 1: these And by by people here, I specifically mean the
Speaker 1: Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador or ka and you know, okay, okay.
Speaker 1: As we've seen through this whole sort of thing, right
Speaker 1: like bread riots like adapt to the political organizations around them.
Speaker 1: And in Ecuador we're dealing with a quick essentially modern
Speaker 1: form political organization, which is the Indigenous Confederation. And I
Speaker 1: guess I should sort of like preface this a bit
Speaker 1: with like the specific form of indigenous confederation in in
Speaker 1: Latin America that emerges in this period is like a
Speaker 1: different thing than older ones because there have been indigenous
Speaker 1: confederation for a long time. This is like a this
Speaker 1: is this is a very specific like political thing that
Speaker 1: emerged across Latin America in in sort of the seventies,
Speaker 1: and the really really started struting up in the eighties
Speaker 1: as results of like a lot of things, one of
Speaker 1: which was like how shitty the old like Marxans Lendon's
Speaker 1: vanger groups, like we're on indigenous issues. And one of
Speaker 1: the one of the groups that forms in this period
Speaker 1: is kana and Kanae is one of the world's most
Speaker 1: bilitant like indigenous federations. And since they're founding in Night
Speaker 1: in six, they've called half a dozen uprisings against neoliberal governments.
Speaker 1: And I think I think they knocked off like three presidents,
Speaker 1: which is a pretty impressive track record. And on July two,
Speaker 1: faced with skyrocketing inflation on like basic consumer goods and
Speaker 1: a like really shitty like far right government, they stage
Speaker 1: another one um and this is another sort of I
Speaker 1: don't know. The thing is interesting about this is that
Speaker 1: it's it's part general strike, like part street protests, part riot,
Speaker 1: and part just like mass march for the from the
Speaker 1: sort of periphery of Ecuador to the core. And by
Speaker 1: periphery and cora, I mean in this sort of metaphorical sense,
Speaker 1: like it's a bunch. It's a bunch of indigenous peasant
Speaker 1: groups from all over the country, just like marching on
Speaker 1: descending on the capital Keto. And this is a this
Speaker 1: is a complicated process like that, you know. Okay, like
Speaker 1: the left everywhere has like political divides and mostly they're
Speaker 1: kind of nonsense in a lot of way, like okay,
Speaker 1: like that there's ideological divides and those personal divides and whatever.
Speaker 1: But like Ecuador's left has has real political divides, and
Speaker 1: these aren't these aren't like sort of petty ideological like
Speaker 1: personal stuff, like they're like they were caught under the
Speaker 1: sort of previous like old like leftist, pink tight governments
Speaker 1: of Raphael Carrera. Like there are like soldiers and cops
Speaker 1: who are beating the ship out of indigenous like a
Speaker 1: logical protesters. And you know this means that like yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, okay, So so Carrera is like parties running
Speaker 1: for president again. Careers are running, but careers parties like
Speaker 1: running in an election, right, And you know this means it'
Speaker 1: like yeah, okay, like maybe you're both leftist, right, but
Speaker 1: you know there's a lot of people who are like, oh,
Speaker 1: funck no, like I'm not voting for these guys. These
Speaker 1: are the guys who like sent the army against their
Speaker 1: anti mining protests. And so you know, the thing the
Speaker 1: thing that is interesting here is like like these protests
Speaker 1: don't even pull together the entire recordorian left. Um, there's
Speaker 1: like other stuff going on here too, like that. There
Speaker 1: there's some of the unions that went on strike in
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen, like don't go on strike this time because
Speaker 1: of some political stuff that's happening. But the thing, the
Speaker 1: thing about KNA that's really impressive is that they're still
Speaker 1: organized enough and they still like they're organized enough that
Speaker 1: they're able to just take control of parts of cities.
Speaker 1: And they have a lot of allies supporters amongst other
Speaker 1: students and workers and keto. And this means that when
Speaker 1: the government makes this enormous mistake and arrests karas like
Speaker 1: kind of Newish leader. Ah, okay, this guy's name. This
Speaker 1: guy's name, I guess in Spanish, it's like Leonidas. Is
Speaker 1: that this guy's name is Leonitis. He's the head um,
Speaker 1: he's the head of Kaisans Federation Um. And he sees
Speaker 1: a protest leader. He was a protested leader in twenty nineteen.
Speaker 1: That's how we got elected to like head this organization.
Speaker 1: And they arrest him on day two of the protests.
Speaker 1: And this is a catastrophic mistake. The protest just like
Speaker 1: explode and you know, bye bye bye by like a
Speaker 1: week in. I think that the government's claiming they were
Speaker 1: doing fifty million dollars a damage a day, which I'm
Speaker 1: not actually sure I believe that because governments and corporations
Speaker 1: do this too, and they're talking about like losses from
Speaker 1: like strikes, and they tend to over emphasize how much
Speaker 1: damage is done because it makes them like look better
Speaker 1: in the press and makes the protesters look worse, but
Speaker 1: they they they they're able to damage like significant parts
Speaker 1: of the economy, and by June, like they kind of win. Basically,
Speaker 1: the government's forced to negotiate with them, and they don't
Speaker 1: get all of their demands, but they get price decreases
Speaker 1: for like fuel and gasoline, which is like a huge
Speaker 1: part of why these just happened in the first place.
Speaker 1: They get bands on mining and drilling and indigenous and
Speaker 1: protected areas. They get like strength and price controls. They
Speaker 1: get like local rural loan forgiveness, like interest rate decreases.
Speaker 1: They get sub disdas for farmers to get subsidies for families,
Speaker 1: they get they manage to get the government to declare
Speaker 1: a state of health emergency over COVID. It's like, this
Speaker 1: is this is impressive stuff, and you know, and the
Speaker 1: other part of this is that they're like, Okay, the
Speaker 1: agreement is that we will stop protesting if you do this,
Speaker 1: and if you don't do this, we're gonna do this again.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I guess I guess might sort of wrap
Speaker 1: this up. There's there there's an American proverb that is
Speaker 1: really common amongst sort of like American China watchers, which
Speaker 1: is that I so supposedly the Chinese word for crisis
Speaker 1: is composed of two characters, danger and opportunity. And it's
Speaker 1: like not true, as likelistic and at the polological analysis
Speaker 1: of China that that's not what that's not what the
Speaker 1: characters made. But everyone, like everyone in the US, like
Speaker 1: political stamoshere like believes this right, And you know, but
Speaker 1: like as as an analysis of China, it is completely useless.
Speaker 1: As an analysis of the US, of the American psyche,
Speaker 1: it's incredibly valuable, right because this this, this is the
Speaker 1: way the American ruling class thinks. It's it's every single
Speaker 1: crisis is both a danger and an opportunity. And that's
Speaker 1: something that we in some sense also have to do
Speaker 1: because that's you know, these are the sort of situations
Speaker 1: that we're in, right bread riots are a thing that
Speaker 1: just they happen, right, they will continue to happen. They
Speaker 1: have been happening for that cousens of years, like presumably
Speaker 1: they will happen for thousands of more years. And there's
Speaker 1: no use sort of like either pretending that they don't
Speaker 1: happen or making these sort of moral or tactical arguments
Speaker 1: like for against them, because they just happen. And the
Speaker 1: question that we're that we're faced with is what are
Speaker 1: we actually going to do about it? Right? Are we
Speaker 1: going to set them out? Are we gonna side with
Speaker 1: the state and repressing them in the name of sort
Speaker 1: of like stamping out color revolutions, are like providing order
Speaker 1: a stability, or like protecting small businesses, or are we
Speaker 1: going to you know, take to the streets and fight
Speaker 1: alongside them to sort of break the system that creates them.
Speaker 1: And this is the second question from here is if
Speaker 1: we're going to do this how and what? What what
Speaker 1: we've seen from Ecuador in the past month or so
Speaker 1: is that if you take the fight to them and
Speaker 1: you're sufficiently organized, you can win. And that means the
Speaker 1: question now, as our food prices continue to increase, as
Speaker 1: food prices are only going to continue to increase, what
Speaker 1: are we going to do? And Yeah, that that's all
Speaker 1: I got I have. I have a single question, yep,
Speaker 1: what are we going to do? Well? I'm I'm kind
Speaker 1: of bummed we never brought up are good friend Pete
Speaker 1: Buddha j Edge in his uh bread his bread press
Speaker 1: fixing ordeals? Yeah, I mean that that that that's kind
Speaker 1: of a sign of just like how kind of like
Speaker 1: I guess you could say masculalized, Like our culture has
Speaker 1: been that, Like people didn't riot over that because like
Speaker 1: that is a thing like if if if if if
Speaker 1: you said, Pete budda edge back to like a late
Speaker 1: Frets village and she tries to do this thing like
Speaker 1: he he does the systematic like bride bread price fixing, right,
Speaker 1: like all of these people would have been getting hit
Speaker 1: by rocks. So yeah, I do that again. Yeah, do
Speaker 1: that again? Wow, barons just brasen incitement. Yeah, yeah, it's great.
Speaker 1: Well that is it for us today. We love to incite.
Speaker 1: Thanks folks. Until next time, go incite yourselves. It could
Speaker 1: Happen here as a production of cool Zone Media. For
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Speaker 1: Thanks for listening.