Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let
Speaker 1: you know. This is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 1: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 1: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 1: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 1: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 1: there's gonna be nothing new here for you, but you
Speaker 1: can make your own decisions. A welcome to It could
Speaker 1: happen here, a show about things falling apart and also
Speaker 1: putting things back together. Today we have an episode about
Speaker 1: well it's this is This is kind of a big one, folks.
Speaker 1: So everyone who listens to the show regularly will know that.
Speaker 1: There have been a rash of attacks by the far
Speaker 1: right on drag Queen's Story hours and kind of similar
Speaker 1: events to that. Events that are LGBT friendly, events that
Speaker 1: also involved children have been regularly attacked all over the
Speaker 1: United States. At the same time, there have been escalating
Speaker 1: attacks by wingers, often the very same people, on reproductive
Speaker 1: healthcare resources clinics that sort of thing. Um. This is
Speaker 1: happening all over the country, but one place where things
Speaker 1: have been particularly aggressive as of late is in New York, um,
Speaker 1: New York City, and today we're going to be speaking
Speaker 1: with a couple of different people who live in New
Speaker 1: York who have been present at some of these actions
Speaker 1: and who want to talk about what's been going on
Speaker 1: with the far right and the attempts to defend these
Speaker 1: people in these organizations from from right wing aggression. So
Speaker 1: I want to introduce Talia now. Talia, you are known
Speaker 1: to our audience. You've been on this show and some
Speaker 1: of our other shows a couple of times in the past.
Speaker 1: Welcome to the show, Thanks for having me, and hello
Speaker 1: to everyone who still remembers what I sound like. And
Speaker 1: do you wanna you wanna drop your your your Twitter
Speaker 1: and stuff up at the top here too, because you
Speaker 1: do a lot of on the ground reporting at different
Speaker 1: times and in this to young it's pretty simple. It's
Speaker 1: Talia O t G as an on the ground UM
Speaker 1: and yeah that's where I do my reporting on events,
Speaker 1: analysis all that dumb ship. And then our other guests
Speaker 1: are two New Yorker is sorry New York people, um,
Speaker 1: who are both anti fascist activists who have been present
Speaker 1: in the streets for a number of these recent events.
Speaker 1: I'd like to introduce Tom and Barry. Do we want
Speaker 1: to go around and do pronounced real quick? Here? Um,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm he him, Yeah, sure, I'm she are they?
Speaker 1: This is Tom, I'm here him and I'm she her. Awesome?
Speaker 1: All right, Well that is so, I guess I'd like
Speaker 1: to kind of start and and hand it over to
Speaker 1: to Talia if she wants to give kind of an
Speaker 1: overview of how all of this has has has gone down.
Speaker 1: But basically we've seen. I mean, the thing that surprised
Speaker 1: me most in the coverage that I have watched from
Speaker 1: a distance is how aggressive and large some of the
Speaker 1: right wing presence has been at like reproductive health clinics
Speaker 1: in New York City. I was kind of surprised to
Speaker 1: see that in New York. Yes. So there's a group
Speaker 1: in New York called NYC for Abortion Rights and they
Speaker 1: host once monthly clinic defenses at the Planned Parenthood on
Speaker 1: Bleaker in Lower Manhattan. UM. And they do that because
Speaker 1: there is a church nearby the basilica of Old St.
Speaker 1: Pat's that hosts a a coalition of anti abortion religious
Speaker 1: zelic groups. They organized these large they're usually processions to
Speaker 1: the Planned Parenthood where they pray outside they throw holy
Speaker 1: water on the building. They attempt to hand out UM
Speaker 1: propaganda and literature and intimidate people who are coming into
Speaker 1: the clinic for necessary health services. UM. And these same
Speaker 1: individuals have been seen attending anti vaxx rallies that the
Speaker 1: man who leads the procession to the Planned Parenthood UM,
Speaker 1: his name is Christopher Mansinski. He's also known as Fidelist.
Speaker 1: And he has invaded clinics in White Plains, New York
Speaker 1: in I think UM East Hempstead. UM. He has been
Speaker 1: trying to revive Red Rose Rescue, which UM. People who
Speaker 1: are familiar with the fight for reproductive rights are probably
Speaker 1: aware that that is the primary group that invades clinics
Speaker 1: and tries to harass patients. UM, threatens doctors and care
Speaker 1: workers and all all sorts of things. That the main
Speaker 1: people who lead Red Rose are either in jail or
Speaker 1: have died thankfully. UM. And he's trying to revive that
Speaker 1: here in New York. UM. And he has attended um
Speaker 1: rallies organized by far right conspiracists anti vax conspiracists. UM.
Speaker 1: And it's like, you know, he he went to d
Speaker 1: C for the March for Life, and then he stuck
Speaker 1: around for the my body, my choice, anti vax rallies.
Speaker 1: It's it's very it's it's very contradictory. But we see
Speaker 1: these same people because they're aligning on conservativism, on crystal fascism,
Speaker 1: and we're seeing him pop up um insured spaces pretty
Speaker 1: frequently in New York in ways that I think are
Speaker 1: more transparent or like more easy to clock here, even
Speaker 1: if there is like a larger density of them that
Speaker 1: do mobilize to these specific things like clinic Crossman's Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's um, that's a really interesting point. And that's also
Speaker 1: what we've seen a lot in the Pacific Northwest. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, we just had an attempt rally at a
Speaker 1: drag Queen story our and Eugene and it was a
Speaker 1: lot of the same old crowd who used to rally
Speaker 1: in Portland before they got scared off of Portland. Now
Speaker 1: I'm wondering kind of what how would you characterize the
Speaker 1: response of the police to these events and how they
Speaker 1: kind of have have have treated the right wing at
Speaker 1: these well, it is about it's uh cliche as cliche comes,
Speaker 1: because every single time, um, when I've covered clinic defenses specifically,
Speaker 1: the police are helping move the procession along and threatening
Speaker 1: clinic defenders with arrest on the basis that they're blocking
Speaker 1: the roadway. Um. They are. They they essentially work as
Speaker 1: like secondary of security. Um. Sometimes they will split off
Speaker 1: from the other police and be like pushing and shoving
Speaker 1: clinic defenders on their own in a way that doesn't
Speaker 1: make any sort of strategic sense. But it's like they're
Speaker 1: getting enjoyment from doing that. Um. It's it's the same
Speaker 1: story over and over again. You know. We see it
Speaker 1: in in San Diego when anti fascists were mobilizing against uh,
Speaker 1: like Trump's supporters that were being very violent. The Trump
Speaker 1: supporters were doing the violence, and it was the police
Speaker 1: that were attacking the anti fascists trying to fight against
Speaker 1: like trying to defend themselves against the far right. Um.
Speaker 1: And we saw the same thing at Penn State just
Speaker 1: the other night. The there was a gaggle of like
Speaker 1: proud boys or or I think Tess Owen referred to
Speaker 1: them as fascists in all black, who were macing the
Speaker 1: crowd and they they you know, I didn't do anything.
Speaker 1: The police escorted there was an incident where a proud
Speaker 1: boy was assaulting or like somehow there was a fight
Speaker 1: that happened with a demonstrator and a proud boy, and
Speaker 1: the demonstrator the police threw the demonstrator on the ground
Speaker 1: and then escorted the proud boy into the building where
Speaker 1: Gavin mcinness and Alex Stein were supposed to put on
Speaker 1: a very bad it didn't end up happening, lead him
Speaker 1: back to his friends. Jesus Christ. Yeah, I asked that question,
Speaker 1: and I know everybody like listening, and I know all
Speaker 1: of you knew like what the answer was going to be.
Speaker 1: I feel like you still have to like ask it. Um.
Speaker 1: I am curious. The NYPD has a kind of manpower,
Speaker 1: access to manpower, and access to surveillance equipment that, in
Speaker 1: my experience out does most nations I've been in. And
Speaker 1: I'm interested particularly and everyone's responses are welcome, but particularly
Speaker 1: what what Tom and Barry might have to say about
Speaker 1: what sort of roadblocks that provides towards organizing responses to
Speaker 1: these events and kind of how activists have had to
Speaker 1: adapt to that. Uh, this is Tom here. I mean,
Speaker 1: I will say it's very clear that the NYPD constantly
Speaker 1: monitors any sort of online space whatsoever, and I think
Speaker 1: most people know to organize, you know, in person or
Speaker 1: on signal with a small group of their friends, rather
Speaker 1: than trying to get a larger group of people to
Speaker 1: come to a thing publicly on the internet, because any
Speaker 1: time that happens, it's like there's instantly you know, that
Speaker 1: much larger of a police presency. Get dozens and dozens
Speaker 1: of what's called the s RG, their Strategic Response group,
Speaker 1: which I think probably can maybe speak on that a
Speaker 1: little more, but they're basically the hats and bats that
Speaker 1: come bust up protests. Yeah, definitely agree with that UM.
Speaker 1: And I would also say that because of the sheer
Speaker 1: volume of the vests that these exact same groups of
Speaker 1: people who are now attacking UM drag story hours and clinics,
Speaker 1: because we know this group already and they were having
Speaker 1: on these daily anti bax rallies which objectively stopped kind
Speaker 1: of being a thing to them, consider try to mobilize
Speaker 1: accountable test for UM. So I think there is kind
Speaker 1: of a large disconnect right now, which there by design
Speaker 1: or accidentally where I think a lot of people feel
Speaker 1: like UM, people who might attend account of protest that
Speaker 1: is might feel like, oh no, it's just those same
Speaker 1: idiots up to their nonsense again, you know that that's
Speaker 1: we don't worry about that. But tell me if it's
Speaker 1: the proud voice coming and we'll mobilized kind of protest. Um. So,
Speaker 1: I honestly feel that it's sort of the mental kind
Speaker 1: of the mental associations that we have with these familiar faces. Um.
Speaker 1: I mean, despite the fact that it's been kind of
Speaker 1: obviously Bond observed that the anti vax stuff is direct
Speaker 1: pipeline and radicalization, um, platform for these more extremelyst Cristal
Speaker 1: fascists and transford with actions, now people still can't really
Speaker 1: detach that, you know, this is actually serious now. So um,
Speaker 1: But yeah, I agree with what Tom said that it's
Speaker 1: a matter of not dropping it. I'm sorry. I mean
Speaker 1: that that gets to another kind of advantage these folks have,
Speaker 1: which is because is of how much additional state repression
Speaker 1: y'all are dealing with the kind of personal cost of
Speaker 1: attending these events encountering the right is higher, both in
Speaker 1: terms of potential risk and just kind of in terms
Speaker 1: of the trauma incurred. I know from personal experience. I mean,
Speaker 1: I haven't been out in the street in quite a while,
Speaker 1: about a year at this point, and I know a
Speaker 1: lot of other people who are in the same place,
Speaker 1: because it just kind of you know, you can only
Speaker 1: take so much as an individual. What are some ways
Speaker 1: in which y'all is a community try to cope with
Speaker 1: burnouts that you can continue to meet the pace at
Speaker 1: which the right is doing this stuff. I mean, I
Speaker 1: think it's really relying on other people, like the same
Speaker 1: one two or three or four or five people can't
Speaker 1: keep doing everything well, so as people start to get exhausted,
Speaker 1: I think that it's time to you know, take a
Speaker 1: step back, take a week off, take three weeks off,
Speaker 1: like there have to be other people that are ready
Speaker 1: to step up, um, you know, throughout your community, but
Speaker 1: throughout everywhere. Yeah, and definitely I think there's going to
Speaker 1: be more of a need to emphasize that this requires
Speaker 1: every day and a fascists. I think in New York
Speaker 1: City especially, we kind of fell into a traveler any
Speaker 1: kind of public fall encounter. It was very I mean,
Speaker 1: they looks into style and boarding, you know, very clear
Speaker 1: that it's a cab there, black the water, things like that,
Speaker 1: and the kinds of people that are just meaning members
Speaker 1: that we actually do need to also show up and
Speaker 1: saw the fascists that they're not welcoming their neighbors either,
Speaker 1: they're not going to respond to something like that multitude
Speaker 1: of reasons. And UH, what can you say about sort
Speaker 1: of the numbers that you're seeing kind of on on
Speaker 1: both sides on the ground here, what's like a normal
Speaker 1: action looking like in terms of that? UM? I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, just from reporting and keeping tabs on different
Speaker 1: types of protests. In New York City, we have a
Speaker 1: lot of UH nonprofits and more established type groups that
Speaker 1: organize larger events UM, and those are typically just marches
Speaker 1: for visibility and awareness UM. And when it comes to
Speaker 1: a counter or some sort of direct action like mutual
Speaker 1: Aid for example, UM, we see much smaller numbers. But
Speaker 1: those numbers that I mean that I see at least
Speaker 1: is that these are people who've built community and UM
Speaker 1: communicate together. As opposed to seeing a flyer and showing
Speaker 1: up just for that one day. These are people who
Speaker 1: consistently are engaging with one another and with that space. So,
Speaker 1: like I mentioned mutual Aid, we have UM Washington Square
Speaker 1: Park mutually which meets every Friday, and the core group
Speaker 1: that UM sets it up and distributes and everything is
Speaker 1: relatively small. But the people who have shown up to
Speaker 1: support in some capacity in the past two years that
Speaker 1: it has been active. Um, they all know each other,
Speaker 1: and that doesn't mean that, you know, they're like necessarily
Speaker 1: like going to birthday parts together for um, you know,
Speaker 1: donating kidneys to one another or something like that. It's
Speaker 1: not necessarily like best friend groups. But it's people who
Speaker 1: have built a sort of neighborhood in this ideology and
Speaker 1: in this space in this time. I would also say
Speaker 1: like these particular events have kind of brought in like
Speaker 1: a different group of people. It's not like the same
Speaker 1: cruise of people that we're doing other things, because there's
Speaker 1: more kind of liberal people getting involved that are like
Speaker 1: coming to these drag string court, drag queen story our
Speaker 1: defenses to you know, be joyful and hold up signs
Speaker 1: and saying and like welcome people into the library. So
Speaker 1: that's also made it more easy to keep these going
Speaker 1: because we've kind of got a larger revolving door of
Speaker 1: people rather than you know, smaller groups. Yeah, that makes sense,
Speaker 1: as like particularly is a way to not burn people out.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm curious as to what have you seen
Speaker 1: as far like one of the major tactics anti fascists
Speaker 1: always uses identification UM and exposing people who are attending
Speaker 1: these events rallying with fascist organizations. Have you noticed a
Speaker 1: difference on how well this works for the people who
Speaker 1: are showing up to protest like drag Queen story Our
Speaker 1: events versus UM the people showing up at at reproductive
Speaker 1: healthcare clinics, at planned parenthoods and such. Because it kind
Speaker 1: of strikes me that one of those is more mainstream
Speaker 1: maybe than the other. Although perhaps I'm being kind of
Speaker 1: optimistic in that, but I'm wondering, does that does it
Speaker 1: appear to be more effective against kind of one kind
Speaker 1: of rally than it is in another kind, if that
Speaker 1: makes any sense. So, a lot of the people who
Speaker 1: are engaging in the clan carassments are known among their networks,
Speaker 1: and because their goal is to present a sort of
Speaker 1: legitimizing face for opposing abortion UM, they don't typically show
Speaker 1: up to things that are a little bit more volatile.
Speaker 1: But we have seen that with so it as it
Speaker 1: happens that this the people who are harassing Drag story
Speaker 1: Our for the most part, have been a part of
Speaker 1: one specific core group of people that I've been monitoring
Speaker 1: and reporting on for the past year, so I know
Speaker 1: all of their names, which has pigeonholed them into what
Speaker 1: they can and can't do. We had there's there's this
Speaker 1: far right propagandist or in Levy. His brother was at ah.
Speaker 1: He was trying to harass a drag story Hour at
Speaker 1: the Andrew High Scale Library for the Blind and that
Speaker 1: was an event put on for NEUROW divergent children and
Speaker 1: he was attempting to harass that. He ended up pepper
Speaker 1: spraying to people. And because he has known, his name
Speaker 1: is out there, his face is known, and he is
Speaker 1: identifiable across all social media networks. It was very easy
Speaker 1: for those people to be able to file complaints against him. Um. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And another thing too, is it because this one group
Speaker 1: does all of these harassments together. They started out doing
Speaker 1: anti vax stuff where they were going and harassing a
Speaker 1: restaurant called Dame in Um I think it's in the
Speaker 1: village or yeah, it's in the village. They were harassing
Speaker 1: that restaurant for a while, and then they started harassing
Speaker 1: the Health Commissioner's house and then Gracie Mansion, which is
Speaker 1: where Eric Adams lives. And they were all doing these
Speaker 1: things together. So their network was very easy to monitor
Speaker 1: and trace UM, and so when they started harassing Drag
Speaker 1: Story Hour, which was undeniably they were doing that as
Speaker 1: a result of far right propaganda that was being pushed
Speaker 1: into all of their social media spaces, trying to convince
Speaker 1: them that Drag Story Hour is, you know, the Satan incarnate,
Speaker 1: and they start showing up and trying to harass those
Speaker 1: and immediately they're known. They tried to harass Um, they
Speaker 1: tried to disrupt um aoc at a listening event she
Speaker 1: was doing in Queens. Immediately they were known. It was
Speaker 1: like I saw the footage and I was like, that's
Speaker 1: Robert White, that's you know, Cliff Lee, that's our Ronan Levy.
Speaker 1: And it's doing that because they're known. Because it's clear
Speaker 1: that it's one group that's showing up and doing this,
Speaker 1: trying to trying to follow the lead on what is
Speaker 1: the trending outrage on the far right that week. It
Speaker 1: limits the number of people who are interested in joining them,
Speaker 1: because it's they rely on making it seem like they
Speaker 1: are just neighbors and constituents who aren't happy with X,
Speaker 1: y Z, and it's like, no, you're a coordinated group
Speaker 1: of harassers. We know who you are, so that mask
Speaker 1: being off definitely I think has helped to reduce the
Speaker 1: willingness to grow in those harassments. But I can't necessarily
Speaker 1: speak to the future on what would hold or like
Speaker 1: what other people have been inspired by them, because we
Speaker 1: have seen you not to show up in other states
Speaker 1: to protest drag story. I were the same way that
Speaker 1: these this little you know band harassers has been harassing
Speaker 1: the story hours. Yeah, um yeah, sorry, just a direct
Speaker 1: response to that that I definitely agree um that. Yeah.
Speaker 1: We've been monitoring the movement of the main actors in
Speaker 1: the anti backs movement for a while, but I did
Speaker 1: want to say that it is occasionally other groups, but
Speaker 1: that they all have the same thing in common and
Speaker 1: that they attached to the kind of hot topic issue
Speaker 1: that they see happening in other cities and states. So
Speaker 1: we did have actually like very like certainly Crystal cashis
Speaker 1: group um uh TMP. I believe that it was called
Speaker 1: whom you know had publicly next a rally to harass
Speaker 1: the story. Our initially flashed onto that, um. But all
Speaker 1: of it is kind of following national trends. Um. But
Speaker 1: as they are initially trying to make see ur t
Speaker 1: and schools be the thing that was a multitude of
Speaker 1: different groups that are trying, and you know, they're looking
Speaker 1: for something that sticks, and they're looking for something that
Speaker 1: passers by any given passers by walking by will see
Speaker 1: their side of if they hear it. Um. But their
Speaker 1: lack of success though, is because of their violence and
Speaker 1: um not especially convincing and very human on sounding antics
Speaker 1: to where it is clear that they are not actually
Speaker 1: they're protesting what they playing themselves. They're protesting, UM. You know,
Speaker 1: they're they're losing sympathy because eventually their signs started being
Speaker 1: about Antifa instead of about electracy protecting the children themselves. UM.
Speaker 1: So their own messaging kind of probably also at fault there.
Speaker 1: But this issue is still always going to be at
Speaker 1: risk for attracting different new Nazi groups. UM. I mean
Speaker 1: we've seen Orlando and Ow there's a relition of Nazi
Speaker 1: surgery together to attack story Hour. We've actually seen some
Speaker 1: of that in New York. And it was just coincidence
Speaker 1: that this crazy atax um showing to a tax story
Speaker 1: I was the same day. Perhaps other groups were um
Speaker 1: say too much something. Yeah, I was just gonna say,
Speaker 1: I mean about the you know, neo Nazis and other
Speaker 1: areas coming in protesting these drug Queen Story Hours. I
Speaker 1: mean that the first bigger one we did was at
Speaker 1: Elmhurst Library. There were not only somebody who was at
Speaker 1: a neo Nazi rally in front of Trump Tower once
Speaker 1: we had a January six insurrectionists and I think Holly
Speaker 1: can probably speak to those two characters a little more.
Speaker 1: But then there was some other there was another drug
Speaker 1: Queen Story Hour where someone from g d L showed up.
Speaker 1: And I'm sure you're familiar with g d L, Robert right, yes, yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: the Goyam Defense League, these guys around the hate bus
Speaker 1: flying the swastika there. Yeah, I mean you just said swastika.
Speaker 1: But in place people are not aware of what Goyam means.
Speaker 1: What you need to know is the Gham Defense League
Speaker 1: or hardcore not Zis. Yeah, like they are legitimate, straight
Speaker 1: up neo Nazis. They fly to swastika, they go harassed
Speaker 1: Jewish neighborhoods um in those yeah capital m Nazi. Yeah,
Speaker 1: one of them went and harassed one of the drag
Speaker 1: Queen story I was recently. Uh then he ran off
Speaker 1: and said he was going to get his friends and
Speaker 1: didn't show up with anyone else from what then, Speaking
Speaker 1: of neo Nazis, you probably know Jovie Valve. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: Jovie and I had a conversation a couple of years
Speaker 1: ago with with my good friend Goad. Yeah, your old buddy.
Speaker 1: Mm hmmm. Well, he showed up at um I believe
Speaker 1: it was a pediatric health care facility. I don't know
Speaker 1: if they do gender affirming care, but he was in
Speaker 1: front of it to sign I'm sorry, I said, neither
Speaker 1: did he? Yeah, exactly. It was literally because the clinic
Speaker 1: had pried flags in the window. Yeah, okay, because he
Speaker 1: was holding up a sign that said I'd rather a
Speaker 1: Nazi than a pedophile, which is just like a nonsensible
Speaker 1: and be like, we all know, just say you're a
Speaker 1: fucking Nazi. Why is that the choice. It's so funny
Speaker 1: because there's like pictures of him with the swastic netflace,
Speaker 1: like doing the Roman salute, like everyone knows you're a Nazi.
Speaker 1: You know, he's completely unashamed. And that's the weirdest part
Speaker 1: about him, because you know, he learned an interesting lesson
Speaker 1: about wearing just a you know, a maga hat in
Speaker 1: a bar in Brooklyn a few years ago. If anyone
Speaker 1: knows what incident I'm talking about, Oh yeah, So I
Speaker 1: find it interesting that this actually did not deter him
Speaker 1: from ever leaving his house again, you know, nearly losing
Speaker 1: his entire nose, um so, and then still deciding to
Speaker 1: just double down and actually start carrying the Nazi flags,
Speaker 1: thinking it'll go better this time. Um And apparently he
Speaker 1: just guys trying to make Nazi ship. He's trying to
Speaker 1: make his name again in two like jovie Val is,
Speaker 1: like he's he's expired, and he doesn't seem to realize
Speaker 1: that he's one of You know, what I'm gonna do
Speaker 1: is I'm gonna show up and I'm gonna have nobody
Speaker 1: with me, and I'm just gonna be standing in front
Speaker 1: of a closed pediatric clinic, like with a sign telling
Speaker 1: people all they see from a distance is the word
Speaker 1: pedophile and the word Nazi. But I mean, he did
Speaker 1: have his one little body with him in fairness, according
Speaker 1: to his own videos that he posted of the encounter,
Speaker 1: and that buddy of his, whoever he was, could be
Speaker 1: heard saying, uh something like hey man, you know I
Speaker 1: can't fight actually got posted on Telegram and he said, Jovie,
Speaker 1: I can't find I can't find man, I can't find
Speaker 1: you can also hear Jovi Yeah, like what are you doing?
Speaker 1: What are you doing? As he gets tossed into like
Speaker 1: a construction area, and he's such an embarrassment to like
Speaker 1: even other Nazis. They're even making fun of him online.
Speaker 1: I mean somebody literally said that, why does jovie always
Speaker 1: get his ass kicked? This is ridiculous. He is he
Speaker 1: is the kind of he is the kind and generation
Speaker 1: of Nazi that other Nazis consider cringe like fucking Jovie
Speaker 1: valve ate him so much. At the same time, though,
Speaker 1: it is a little bit alarming because all of this
Speaker 1: attention on UH figures such as Jovie Vale failing every
Speaker 1: time and like stepping on rakes metaphorically every time he
Speaker 1: goes outside, it does kind of open a nerving vacuum
Speaker 1: up to like, oh what, I can be a way
Speaker 1: better Nazi than that. So that is the part that
Speaker 1: concerns me. If the constant attention is that, um, you know,
Speaker 1: Jovie Val did not succeed in organizing a transphobic Nazi
Speaker 1: rally outside of a closed pediatric clinic. Okay, I guess
Speaker 1: that's a win. But who else sees that and sees
Speaker 1: and thinks, oh, we can do so much better because
Speaker 1: we do have a problem with unidentified Nazis throughout New
Speaker 1: York City. There's you know, there's been increases in all
Speaker 1: sorts of graffiti all over the subways, um Nazi literature
Speaker 1: being put on trains and lefted places. It's, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: so who is seeing this and how what is the
Speaker 1: messaging exactly to say that you won't succeed if you
Speaker 1: try this either, just because you know, Jovi keeps getting
Speaker 1: his ship rocked, like we need you to know he will,
Speaker 1: you will get your ship. I mean, that's the most
Speaker 1: important thing, at least in my experience, and that is
Speaker 1: mostly as an observer. I'm not an organizer, but I've
Speaker 1: I've watched what's happened in the Pacific Northwest. And the
Speaker 1: reason why these people don't rally in Portland's the way
Speaker 1: they used to is they were faced with consequences and
Speaker 1: that required I mean, that was that was not a
Speaker 1: simple process. It took fucking five years, and a lot
Speaker 1: of people got broken bones and a number of them
Speaker 1: got killed. But like that is that is the thing
Speaker 1: people like. These people's lives have to be created. And
Speaker 1: one of the things that is a real problem is
Speaker 1: that it's a lot easier to create people for rallying,
Speaker 1: or it used to be. Number one, it used to
Speaker 1: be easier to create people's lives because they were willing
Speaker 1: to rally with Nazis. But also now the right has
Speaker 1: succeeded in mainstreaming these two specific things, going after drag
Speaker 1: Queen story our events and going after reproductive healthcare clinics
Speaker 1: and the people using them, to such a degree that
Speaker 1: it's gotten a lot harder to ruin people's lives over
Speaker 1: this sort of thing. That's that's true. But at the
Speaker 1: same time, there is an increase in so many of
Speaker 1: them who are just unabashedly that way, beset their full names, addresses,
Speaker 1: photos they say, you know, identifying or doc see them
Speaker 1: is not there. It's just actually almost hyeah is in vogue,
Speaker 1: like most like a large chunk of the country is
Speaker 1: totally fine if you're a crazy bigot. The far right
Speaker 1: is radicalizing in a sort of gradual pace over the
Speaker 1: course of many years. UM And what's happening with um
Speaker 1: people who are countering them is that there is this
Speaker 1: density of media and pundits sort of um looking down
Speaker 1: their nose at the decorum of countering them. So you know,
Speaker 1: we look at Penn State, UM students showed up in mass,
Speaker 1: hundreds of them, UM significantly outnumbered the Proud Boys that
Speaker 1: did show up, the fascist that did show up and
Speaker 1: successfully shut the event down. But there's still this like
Speaker 1: armchair pungentry reflex to say, oh, well, they didn't do
Speaker 1: it right. There's no like it's not the right way
Speaker 1: to protest. And I think, um, what Barry is sort
Speaker 1: of Verry mentioned earlier about everyday anti fascists, and that's
Speaker 1: again like with your neighbors and recognizing that it's not
Speaker 1: this weird, um inaccessible, like isolated group of people who
Speaker 1: solely show up very militant and in black block and
Speaker 1: they've got like all this training and all these like
Speaker 1: slogans and slang and words, and you know, it's it's
Speaker 1: none of that iconography. Because that is also the conservative
Speaker 1: media i e. Andy know constantly refers to all sorts
Speaker 1: of things as, oh, this is just antifa, and the
Speaker 1: purpose of that is to make it seem like you
Speaker 1: can't do that too, when in reality he uh andy
Speaker 1: know that little ship stain. He referred to the defense
Speaker 1: of the successful defense at the Elmhurst Library. He claimed
Speaker 1: that it was ANTIFA militants. When I happen to know,
Speaker 1: there was as a pastor who was there. There was
Speaker 1: a nursing mother with her infant and her toddler who
Speaker 1: was there. There were librarians present, and there were people
Speaker 1: who showed up because they were in the neighborhood and
Speaker 1: they heard that far right extremists were going to try
Speaker 1: and grass And sure enough, just like Tom mentioned, there
Speaker 1: was a J six insurrectionist who tried to get into
Speaker 1: the building. I recognize, Yeah, he tried to rush in.
Speaker 1: I recognized him. His name is Mitchell Bosh. He's best
Speaker 1: known for getting arrested for taking a knee in a
Speaker 1: burger king. Get arrested, okay, hoodie. Yeah, this guy tried
Speaker 1: to rush in and I don't know how it happened,
Speaker 1: but all of a sudden, my arm was hooked into
Speaker 1: his arm, twisting his upper body slightly, so he didn't
Speaker 1: have a good he didn't have good leverage to try
Speaker 1: and burst into the building where I knew that if
Speaker 1: he got in, he would refuse to leave until he
Speaker 1: was physically removed by police, so then he could then
Speaker 1: go online and say that he was fighting for freedom
Speaker 1: and collect bullshit donations for bullshit legal funds. So getting
Speaker 1: all back to this though, is that the media and
Speaker 1: like these these pundits and everything, they are complicit in
Speaker 1: making it harder for people to build community. But people
Speaker 1: need to understand it is literally your neighbors. It is
Speaker 1: your local librarians, it is your UH friends, it is
Speaker 1: your coworkers, it's regular people. The same way people showed
Speaker 1: up to protest in they you know, oh, should I
Speaker 1: bring a sign? Should I bring a bottle of water?
Speaker 1: Should I bring my a d what should I bring?
Speaker 1: And they just showed up and they mark you can
Speaker 1: do the same thing because when you have a significant
Speaker 1: number of people, you don't need to worry about being
Speaker 1: militant because you outnumber them. And across the board, if
Speaker 1: you look at data, the positions and the politics that
Speaker 1: these people hold and the things that they're pushing are
Speaker 1: in the significant minority of opinion. A majority of people
Speaker 1: are totally fine with trans people. They're totally fine dregs
Speaker 1: story our like it's not a thing. But people aren't
Speaker 1: showing up to remind them that their opinion is the
Speaker 1: minority and they are outnumbered. Yeah. I was going to
Speaker 1: say I agree with that last point, And unfortunately the
Speaker 1: problem seems to be about our kind of cultural um
Speaker 1: inability to agree on the definition of violence and how
Speaker 1: even though people are okay largely with queer and trans
Speaker 1: people and protecting trans kids, UM, and they definitely do
Speaker 1: not support Nazis, UM, they still do not think that
Speaker 1: UM any kind of militant action, including violence against these
Speaker 1: people is ever appropriate. UM. And just a direct response
Speaker 1: to the Penn State thing that goes beyond punditory, even
Speaker 1: because Penn State itself released a statement saying that UM
Speaker 1: that it does not condone violence without saying who started
Speaker 1: the violence, ak the Proud Boys, who are amazing people. UM,
Speaker 1: they said that, uh, just because you don't agree with
Speaker 1: a speaker and their right to free speech the game
Speaker 1: UM hateful tour of Gavin mcinnesson the Proud Boys, UM
Speaker 1: that there is no excuse for violence. So they denounced
Speaker 1: the content of the message as well as the response
Speaker 1: to the message. So we're kind of in this limbo
Speaker 1: where people who have the voice to send these messages
Speaker 1: are still playing the meat at the dinner table both sides.
Speaker 1: Surely we can come to a peaceful resolution and then
Speaker 1: blaming the side that actually is militantly opposed to it
Speaker 1: and how to overcome that, I don't know, but I
Speaker 1: do think the like Tolly also said, every day anti
Speaker 1: fascism is a pretty good start. Yeah, I mean with
Speaker 1: every day anti fascism, like the right does this grassritt
Speaker 1: organizing and gets people to like tacitly agree with what
Speaker 1: the Proud Boys and these fascist groups do. I think
Speaker 1: there's plenty of like normal people who would tacitly agree
Speaker 1: with what we're doing on this side of things. Um,
Speaker 1: but I mean you look at like I think it
Speaker 1: was a body campaigning for Maybe it was Ron de Santis,
Speaker 1: Robert you know about this. It was like a literal
Speaker 1: neo Nazi who got it was a Ruby Rubio and
Speaker 1: it was the guy was a member of the He
Speaker 1: was a Cuban fascist who was a member of the
Speaker 1: League of the South. Like there was a journalist online
Speaker 1: who was like this is awful. Somebody's like he's literally
Speaker 1: a Nazi. And then you look up this journalists like
Speaker 1: history of articles she's written, and one was like this
Speaker 1: is why you should be friends with the Nazi or
Speaker 1: I'm paraphrasing, but that's literally like we should be friend Nazis.
Speaker 1: Like it's it is ridiculous how so much of the
Speaker 1: Mazed dream is like, let's come to the table and
Speaker 1: be polite. I mean, I really think, and I think
Speaker 1: a lot of other people think, when it comes to
Speaker 1: Nazis and fascists in the far right, you have to
Speaker 1: make it as costly as possible, whatever that means to you.
Speaker 1: You have to make it as costly as possible for
Speaker 1: them so they are deterred from doing this. Organizer. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that's the the most durable conclusion certainly that
Speaker 1: I have. Seems like what y'all have experienced too and
Speaker 1: are continuing to experience. Is there is there anything else
Speaker 1: y'all wanted to get into about about what's been happening
Speaker 1: in with with these events before we kind of close
Speaker 1: out for the day. The only thing I could think
Speaker 1: to add was that that it's not over. And um
Speaker 1: people might think, oh, they stopped coming to Drag Story
Speaker 1: hours for whatever reason, but they're going to find the
Speaker 1: next thing, the next issue, the next clinic, the next hospital,
Speaker 1: the next healthcare provider. The next family was trans children. Uh,
Speaker 1: they have dresses, they have names, they know where to go.
Speaker 1: They're just looking for when they feel most emboldened to
Speaker 1: do so. Um, And it's kind of it's hard to
Speaker 1: communicate that because people think, oh, Okay, that was a
Speaker 1: successful action. You know, we're done, We're done with them
Speaker 1: for now. But I don't know, it's it's it's just
Speaker 1: it's really hard to communicate the message that, like, you know,
Speaker 1: it's like head on this level, this is the this
Speaker 1: is the hardest thing to not just to get across
Speaker 1: to people, but to kind of like actively except for yourself,
Speaker 1: because it's it's one of the most frustrating realities of
Speaker 1: living in our society, and there's no way to get
Speaker 1: around it, which is that like not being eaten by
Speaker 1: these people is the result of constant vigilance against them.
Speaker 1: Like they win if you don't continue showing up and
Speaker 1: one day in in in the bright blue yonder. I
Speaker 1: do believe that if people continue showing up and continue
Speaker 1: making it clear that their cause is hopeless, these people
Speaker 1: will I'll drink themselves to death or whatever. But um,
Speaker 1: you know that's that's not an immediate term sort of thing. No,
Speaker 1: I know, and I mean for just my personal note, like, yes,
Speaker 1: that is exactly the mode I'm in now. And I
Speaker 1: mean I'm a Jewish anti fascist organizer. It's almost this
Speaker 1: kind of history repeating itself ancestral um to keep at it.
Speaker 1: And I'm one of many people UM in the same
Speaker 1: kind of mindset towards not an option to rest and
Speaker 1: wait until they you know, strike when they think we're
Speaker 1: not looking. Yeah, but it's it's you know, obviously yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean we have like, we have evidence that they
Speaker 1: are looking for the next thing. We have evidence that UM.
Speaker 1: You know, there's this one woman who got heavily involved
Speaker 1: with UM, the anti vax group New York Freedom Rally UM,
Speaker 1: and she would go on you know, Instagram live stream
Speaker 1: saying a lot of like transphobic stuff. But she never
Speaker 1: transferred that over onto public spaces until this week, where
Speaker 1: she reiterated the same points that she was making in
Speaker 1: the privacy of her home on that live stream to
Speaker 1: her little audience. She's now saying it on a stage
Speaker 1: that she's sharing with the candidate for governor, Lee z Eldon. UM.
Speaker 1: She's she's repeating these same things, So it's showing also
Speaker 1: that they are finding it. They're finding themselves more comfortable
Speaker 1: in saying these uh bigoted things and pushing more extreme
Speaker 1: things and expecting for their followers and their friends to
Speaker 1: follow suit. There's people who have shown up to these
Speaker 1: harassments of drag story art who have said directly to
Speaker 1: me that they don't really agree with the harassment itself,
Speaker 1: but that their friends are they're doing the harassment, and
Speaker 1: so they're showing up for them, and that's a very
Speaker 1: quick road to they are going to decide to care
Speaker 1: about this very deeply and go very hard about it.
Speaker 1: But what has worked is when people show up and
Speaker 1: make it not happy and not good for them, when
Speaker 1: their footage is ruined, when their sound bites are sucked up,
Speaker 1: when they are blocked from doing the thing that they're
Speaker 1: trying to do to generate that content to feed that
Speaker 1: like bigoted beast. When people show up, when those events
Speaker 1: keep happening, that's a big thing is that like the
Speaker 1: venues that host these events need to not cancel them,
Speaker 1: because when those venues cancel, it tells the biggests that
Speaker 1: they are winning. And what needs to happen is the
Speaker 1: venues feeling brave to put out calls for community support
Speaker 1: the same way that had been in Eugene. Because when
Speaker 1: that then you put out that ask, they got hundreds
Speaker 1: of people and they outnumbered the biggests ten to one.
Speaker 1: I was just gonna say I was, I'm very heartened
Speaker 1: by like how supportive the UH people in the neighborhoods
Speaker 1: and libraries have been, whether they're allowed to officially support
Speaker 1: anything or not, it's been you know, nice to know
Speaker 1: that people are happy we're there. And also I would
Speaker 1: really love to see a name of Jovie Val stepping
Speaker 1: on a rank. Now you had that image in my head. Yah, Um,
Speaker 1: was there anything else we wanted to get to? UH?
Speaker 1: Self defense is community effect defense and if people are interested. UM.
Speaker 1: People in New York created something called I fact Fund
Speaker 1: where you donate funds and then people who want to
Speaker 1: receive individual first aid kits UM can request one and
Speaker 1: receive one for free. UM. And it was created in
Speaker 1: honor of a anti fascist badass named torch Um who
Speaker 1: is always present a UM. But yeah, if if people
Speaker 1: wanted to check that out, it's UH. The Twitter account
Speaker 1: is just at I fact Fund, I f a k
Speaker 1: fund UM if they want to donate I think it's
Speaker 1: uh cash app is I fact fund? I think you
Speaker 1: know someone else could look at up to check dollar
Speaker 1: sign fund. Oh, I'm sorry dollar signed I fact fund.
Speaker 1: Thank you whatever. Yeah, Um, and you know it's it's
Speaker 1: just a matter of like knowing that we keep us
Speaker 1: safe in every sense of the word. Yeah. And I
Speaker 1: think that's a that's a perfect note to end on.
Speaker 1: Thank you all for your time, Thank you for continuing
Speaker 1: to be out there in the streets. Um and everybody
Speaker 1: else get out there and make a fascist stay worse.
Speaker 1: We live in an age of uprising. From Haydi to
Speaker 1: Hong Kong, from Ecuador to Sudan, from Chile to Myanmar,
Speaker 1: from the US to Iran, an entire generation has been
Speaker 1: confronted with the horror of our world and took the
Speaker 1: simple expedient of picking up a brick and throwing it
Speaker 1: at a cop. Yet, as the uprising swept the globe,
Speaker 1: there was one country where it was considered impossible. Every expert,
Speaker 1: every policymaker, every kid on a street corner new there
Speaker 1: was simply no chance of a mass street movement in China.
Speaker 1: On Monday, it was unimaginable. On Friday, it was everywhere
Speaker 1: welcome to it could happen here. What we've been watching
Speaker 1: for the past three weeks now is the failure of
Speaker 1: one of the most sophisticated political regimes in human history,
Speaker 1: a political, social, and economic regime designed specifically to stop this.
Speaker 1: One moment, after thirty years of repression, the national mass
Speaker 1: street movement has returned to China. This is what it
Speaker 1: was all about, everything from the censorship policies to union
Speaker 1: busting to subsidize mortgages from a rising Chinese middle class.
Speaker 1: It was about keeping people from going back to the streets,
Speaker 1: to make even the idea of it impossible. And yet
Speaker 1: here we are. In one sense, the Party is little
Speaker 1: to fear from this round of protests, barring an immense
Speaker 1: intensification of violence, which at the moment seems extremely unlikely.
Speaker 1: But in another sense, the CCP is perhaps the last
Speaker 1: regime on earth that truly remembers the previous age of revolution,
Speaker 1: that remembers when the workers took Shanghai in sixty seven,
Speaker 1: very nearly took Beijing and eighty nine. These are people
Speaker 1: who understand that China's political system is built on shaving
Speaker 1: a sleeping bear, and no matter how profitable that system
Speaker 1: is there's always a chance that one day that bear
Speaker 1: is going to wake up. Now the bear isn't fully
Speaker 1: awake yet. We are not watching in China full scale
Speaker 1: uprising unless you're Dan or Myanmar. But that bear the
Speaker 1: air too, maybe the most militant working class and modern
Speaker 1: world has ever seen, is starting to open its eyes.
Speaker 1: So what is the CCP currently facing. Since about November,
Speaker 1: there have been widespread anti government protests in China. Unlike
Speaker 1: anything we've seen in the last thirty year years. These
Speaker 1: protests are everywhere. They're in Beijing, They're in Nanjing, They're
Speaker 1: in Shanghai. There in guang Show, there in Shing. John
Speaker 1: will get back to that one in a second. There
Speaker 1: in Wuhan, reports I saw said that there were protests
Speaker 1: at seventy seven universities. That number is almost certainly an
Speaker 1: under account now and these student protests are not just
Speaker 1: taking place at small colleges in the middle of nowhere.
Speaker 1: There were protests at singh Qua University, which for an
Speaker 1: American audience I would compare to China's version of Harvard.
Speaker 1: It's the college that produces the upper echelon if the
Speaker 1: Chinese ruling class. Hi Jimping graduated from there, so did
Speaker 1: his predecessor, Hu Jintao. And the only reason that ju
Speaker 1: Jintao's predecessor did not graduate from there is that that
Speaker 1: guy was so old that he went to college under
Speaker 1: the Japanese occupation. When I was originally writing this, I
Speaker 1: had a joke here about how the only city where
Speaker 1: there haven't been protest is Harbin, which is the city
Speaker 1: in the absolute middle of nowhere in northern China. But no,
Speaker 1: I googled it, and it turns out there have been
Speaker 1: protests in bloody Harbin. For people who aren't very good
Speaker 1: at Chinese geography, which is probably most people. This means
Speaker 1: these protests are everywhere. There in the north, there in
Speaker 1: the south, they're in the east, there in the west,
Speaker 1: they're in the far West. And it's true that a
Speaker 1: lot of these protests are not that big, although some
Speaker 1: of them are absolutely massive. But the importance here is
Speaker 1: that this is the first time in thirty years that
Speaker 1: we've seen widespread national protests over a single issue in China,
Speaker 1: the anormity of which is compounded by the fact that
Speaker 1: people in the streets of cities like Shanghai are openly
Speaker 1: calling for the fall of the CCP and Sijianping, something
Speaker 1: that by itself can get you a decade in prison
Speaker 1: just for saying we can ask what these protests are
Speaker 1: actually about. The version you see in the American press
Speaker 1: is that these are anti lockdown protests, are protests against
Speaker 1: China's COVID zero policy, or that they're also pro democracy
Speaker 1: protests against the entire regime. And this is sort of
Speaker 1: true as far as it goes, but it doesn't capture
Speaker 1: the core of what's going on, which is that what
Speaker 1: we're seeing is a widespread fusion of labor rebellion, anti
Speaker 1: police brutality protests, and a revolt against the authoritarian state.
Speaker 1: The thing that's brought all of this together is the
Speaker 1: CCPs COVID policy, but that's because that policy is the
Speaker 1: most visible and most concentrated expression of the state's general
Speaker 1: authoritarian is a bit brutal war against the working class.
Speaker 1: We can learn a lot about what's actually been happening
Speaker 1: by going back a little bit to the very start
Speaker 1: of the protests. There are three specific events that sparked
Speaker 1: the protests, two of which are pretty well covered and
Speaker 1: one of which has been basically ignored because of how
Speaker 1: long ago it happened. The first spark is essentially an
Speaker 1: event in its own right. This is what I would
Speaker 1: call the fox Con revolts, a series of worker uprisings
Speaker 1: against the manufacturer of the iPhone, which with a single factory,
Speaker 1: controls vast portions of the regional economy of Hainan Province,
Speaker 1: whereas large as factory is based. The fox Con revolt
Speaker 1: is I'm brewing for a long time. It began essentially
Speaker 1: when fox Con began to impose what's called the closed
Speaker 1: loop system. The closed loop system was originally developed by
Speaker 1: the NBA to run an NBA season during the beginning
Speaker 1: of the pandemic. The idea is that you keep everyone
Speaker 1: inside a closed loop. This means that everyone in the
Speaker 1: production process has no contact with the outside world at
Speaker 1: all for as long as the manufacturing cycle goes. The
Speaker 1: CCP started adopting the closed loop as they hit problems
Speaker 1: with their twin imperatives to both stop COVID and also
Speaker 1: to make sure that fox Con hit its production targets
Speaker 1: so Apple could have enough iPhones for the Christmas rush.
Speaker 1: The result was that as an October wave of infections
Speaker 1: hit Hangan Province, where fox CON's largest factory, was located.
Speaker 1: Two hundred thousand workers were put into a closed loop system,
Speaker 1: which meant they were trapped in the factory in their dormitories.
Speaker 1: In order to keep this factory running, fox Con needs
Speaker 1: about a hundred thousand migrant workers. The problem from capital
Speaker 1: perspective with MiCT workers is that they can, if things
Speaker 1: get bad enough, just go home, and that's exactly what happens.
Speaker 1: Workers inside the fox Con plant started to be quarantined
Speaker 1: with people who were sick in the same dormitory. And
Speaker 1: it's worth noting here that these dormitories are tiny. The
Speaker 1: conditions even outside of lockdown are atrocious, and when people
Speaker 1: were suddenly getting quarantined with people who were sick, workers
Speaker 1: essentially just said no and started to stage massive breakouts.
Speaker 1: There are incredible videos of these trains of people like
Speaker 1: along the road walking home as sort of hitching rides
Speaker 1: on people's trucks, fleeing the factory. We don't actually know
Speaker 1: how many workers escaped, but it was enough to be
Speaker 1: a massive problem for Capital. Again, they need these workers
Speaker 1: in order to make enough iPhones this for Christmas. Current
Speaker 1: estimates suggest that Apple is somewhere between eleven and fifteen
Speaker 1: million units behind what it needs to make the Christmas rush.
Speaker 1: So fox Con had the local government recruiting people to
Speaker 1: go work in a factory. What they told these workers
Speaker 1: was that if they entered the closed loop for thirty days,
Speaker 1: they'd be given three thousand yuan which is about four
Speaker 1: hundred and fifteen dollars to live on for the next month,
Speaker 1: and then get paid thirty on or about four dollars
Speaker 1: an hour, and then after the end of the next
Speaker 1: dirty days they'd get another three thousand john In the US,
Speaker 1: this would be a subminimum wage poverty job for a
Speaker 1: Chinese worker. This is a lot of money, or it
Speaker 1: would have been had it not been for one minor problem.
Speaker 1: All of it was bullshit. Fox Con and the CCP
Speaker 1: were lying out of their asses. After workers were already
Speaker 1: in the closed loop, they learned that the two three
Speaker 1: thousand yuan bonuses weren't going to be paid until March
Speaker 1: and May of next year, meaning that in order to
Speaker 1: get what they were promised for two months of work,
Speaker 1: they were going to have to work for seven months. Also,
Speaker 1: the thirty U on an hour wage that they were
Speaker 1: promised was a lie. They were getting paid substantially less
Speaker 1: than that. So on Tuesday of November, workers who had
Speaker 1: emerged from quarantine to start work only to learn that
Speaker 1: they had been systematically lied to by both the governments
Speaker 1: and Chinese and Taiwanese capitalists came out of their dormitories
Speaker 1: and demanded that they either get their money or be
Speaker 1: allowed to leave. There's another part of this account that
Speaker 1: I think complicates a lot of the sort of narratives
Speaker 1: that we've heard about what the Chinese poster about that
Speaker 1: did not make the Western press at all, which is
Speaker 1: that these workers were also demanding that their bosses quote
Speaker 1: implement pandemic prevention and control measures. Um, it's not entirely
Speaker 1: clue what the specific demands refers to, but it seems
Speaker 1: to be about not quarantining sick people in the same
Speaker 1: dorms as healthy people, a thing that seems relatively obvious,
Speaker 1: but capitalism regardless. The product of bosses ignoring these demands
Speaker 1: was several days of full scale fighting with the police.
Speaker 1: On November twenty three, a bunch of videos began to
Speaker 1: spread of work is taking those metal police barricades that
Speaker 1: you see all the time in the US that are
Speaker 1: essentially an arch with a bunch of bars and not
Speaker 1: get into a flat base. You've you've probably seen these
Speaker 1: picking them up and straight up throwing them at cops
Speaker 1: or grabbing them and beating police riot shields with them.
Speaker 1: I have I have never seen anything like it. It
Speaker 1: was absolutely wild. At this point, after several days of fighting,
Speaker 1: after their own regular security people literally refused to show
Speaker 1: up to go fight these workers, and police from outside
Speaker 1: had to be called in. Fox Con gave up said okay,
Speaker 1: we will give you ten thousand yond to literally leave
Speaker 1: right now, please just stop, And a lot of people
Speaker 1: took the money and left. And in any other year,
Speaker 1: in any other moment, that would have been the end
Speaker 1: of it. The fox Con riots would be another episode
Speaker 1: in the never ending series of they tried not to
Speaker 1: pay us riots that are the most common one of
Speaker 1: the most common forms of workers protests in China. Instead,
Speaker 1: on Thanksgiving Day in the United States, videos started to
Speaker 1: circulate of a fire in a residential block in a
Speaker 1: room Sheet, the capital of shing Jong. There are several
Speaker 1: videos of the fire. In one that journalists were able
Speaker 1: to verify, you can hear people screaming from inside the
Speaker 1: building as they tried and failed to escape the flames.
Speaker 1: Further videos showed that cops had barricaded off the streets
Speaker 1: with metal wires as a way to enforcing John's one
Speaker 1: hundred day long lockdown, which prevented firefighters from getting to
Speaker 1: the scene. Firefighters can be seen firing water hoses at
Speaker 1: the building, only for the hoses arc to fall shorts
Speaker 1: trapped behind barricades that prevented them from getting any closer.
Speaker 1: Speculation about whether the doors of the apartment building themselves
Speaker 1: have been sealed shut with locks or barricaded from the outside,
Speaker 1: as had happened to so many other people's homes during
Speaker 1: the lockdown, ran rampant. One video I saw from another
Speaker 1: city appeared to show workers and has met suits who
Speaker 1: become known as the Big Whites, literally welding someone's door
Speaker 1: shut to keep them in. To make matters worse, the
Speaker 1: head of the roomsche city Fire Rescue department blamed the
Speaker 1: families for their own deaths, saying quote some residents abilities
Speaker 1: to rescue themselves were too weak. These are the videos
Speaker 1: the fragments of Nightmares brought to life that started the
Speaker 1: mass protests. This is a revolution scene at thirty second intervals.
Speaker 1: Everyone is trying to beat the sensors, clips float back
Speaker 1: and forth between weach at, Twitter telegram back to weach
Speaker 1: hat again. Ironically, many sensors were ready home for the weekend,
Speaker 1: allowing clips and posts that otherwise would have been removed
Speaker 1: immediately to circulate for hours and sometimes even days. These
Speaker 1: brought back the memory of the third Spark, the one
Speaker 1: that's basically been forgotten about in the West, if anyone
Speaker 1: even cared to know about it in the first place.
Speaker 1: In September, a bus full of people with COVID and
Speaker 1: Guangzho that the government was shipping to a quarantine center
Speaker 1: crashed and killed twenty seven people, wounding twenty others. Condition
Speaker 1: in these centers, which COVID patients are often forced to
Speaker 1: go to rather than quarantining in their homes, are atrocious.
Speaker 1: Pictures and videos circulate constantly of bathrooms covered in human
Speaker 1: ship from failing drainage systems, as China's already over tax
Speaker 1: medical systems simply failed to keep up with the demands
Speaker 1: on a place by the government, which, like the American government,
Speaker 1: has and continues to systematically refuse to invest in medical infrastructure.
Speaker 1: Intimate familiarity with these wretched conditions and the raw horror
Speaker 1: at the deaths and Shing John and Guangzho sparked protests
Speaker 1: across the country. In a room sheet and now seventy
Speaker 1: percent Han City under constant police occupation, Han protesters appeared
Speaker 1: to be moved in solidarity with the weaker families killed
Speaker 1: in the fire, and fought the police with a ferocity
Speaker 1: unmatched anywhere but the migrant worker villages of Guangzho along
Speaker 1: the Parer River Delta, one of China's great manufacturing hubs.
Speaker 1: These desperate struggles were given relatively little attention by a
Speaker 1: Western media class enamored with the image of students carrying blank,
Speaker 1: white pieces of paper to protest the censorship, a common
Speaker 1: form of protests in places like Hong Kong. This time,
Speaker 1: at least, they were tied to a particularly funny piece
Speaker 1: of media censorship. As protests mounted, people started posting an
Speaker 1: article version of a speech by Mao called let the
Speaker 1: People Speak, the Sky will not Fall. Chinese censors quickly
Speaker 1: ran into a classic CCP problem, which is that in
Speaker 1: a state whose heroes are communist revolutionaries, celebrated historical figures
Speaker 1: produced an immense repertoire of slogans and quotes for subsequent
Speaker 1: generations and revolutionaries to draw from, which has caused the CCP,
Speaker 1: at various points in time to ban the opening of
Speaker 1: its own national anthem arise Ye who refused to be
Speaker 1: slaves as sensors banned Let the people speak, the sky
Speaker 1: will not fall. People began posting the article, but with
Speaker 1: the words replaced by squares. This too was also deleted
Speaker 1: and then posting simply blanks white squares themselves, which saw
Speaker 1: their if auction in the students in the streets. The
Speaker 1: CCP in turn retreated to its traditional tactic of blaming
Speaker 1: the protests on foreign forces interfering in China, a claim
Speaker 1: which is less incredible on a country that has rolled
Speaker 1: up the CIA's entire in country intelligence network at least
Speaker 1: once in the last decade. There's an incredible exchange has
Speaker 1: made the rounds between a cop who is telling a
Speaker 1: group of protesters that there are quote foreign forces around
Speaker 1: manipulating the protests, who is immediately yelled at by a
Speaker 1: guy screaming who are the foreign forces? Marks and angles
Speaker 1: Stalin and Lenin. Another man appears and asks, Hi, can
Speaker 1: I ask if it was foreign forces who started the
Speaker 1: fire in Shing? John was the Guigo bus overturned by
Speaker 1: foreign forces. Another man grabs the mic and says, was
Speaker 1: everyone told to come here by foreign forces? The crowd
Speaker 1: shouts no. He then makes an incredibly obvious point, We
Speaker 1: can't even access to foreign internets. How are foreign forces
Speaker 1: meant to be communicating with us? Another man says, we
Speaker 1: only have domestic forces, not allowing us to govern themselves.
Speaker 1: Where are these foreign forces from the moon? Still managing
Speaker 1: these accusations to become a constant part of the protests,
Speaker 1: with calls from protesters to stop chanting things like down
Speaker 1: with the CCP, and attempts to keep the demands focused
Speaker 1: on COVID policy like ending COVID zero. And this is
Speaker 1: where things get incredibly muddled by a Western press that
Speaker 1: decided to stop giving a shit about COVID deaths a
Speaker 1: year ago, and a set of contrarians arguing that no, actually,
Speaker 1: China's COVID policy is actually good. This entire debate hinges
Speaker 1: on the conflation of the state of government policy of
Speaker 1: zero COVID, which is an attempt to stop all cases
Speaker 1: of COVID, and the actual execution of the policy, which
Speaker 1: has taken the form of a war against China's working
Speaker 1: class and a set of draconian police state abuses. One
Speaker 1: thing that Western quote unquote experts have been quick to
Speaker 1: point out is that will the CCP has to keep
Speaker 1: doing COVID zero or one point five million people will die.
Speaker 1: There was a tiny bit of truth to this in
Speaker 1: that one reason Chinese COVID restriction so so harsh is
Speaker 1: that if COVID was simply let rip like it has
Speaker 1: been in the US, it would go through China's largely unvaccinated,
Speaker 1: rural elderly population like a chainsaw. And unlike in the US,
Speaker 1: if a million people died in China because the government
Speaker 1: fucked up a pandemic response, party officials would be getting
Speaker 1: beaten to death in the streets. And part of the
Speaker 1: reason for the crisis in China in the first place
Speaker 1: is that the rest of the world gave up on
Speaker 1: trying to contain COVID entirely. If the rest of the
Speaker 1: world had, you know, done their jobs and stamped out
Speaker 1: the virus, none of us would be here right now.
Speaker 1: On the other hand, no, absolutely not. You do not
Speaker 1: actually need to wield people into their houses or drag
Speaker 1: them by force out of their home so they can
Speaker 1: die and bus crashes on their way to unsafe and
Speaker 1: unsanitary pseudo hospitals with bathroom floors literally covered ship in
Speaker 1: order to contain the pandemic. Lots of pandemics across human
Speaker 1: history have contained without doing this ship just because the
Speaker 1: two great world powers have decided that the COVID responses
Speaker 1: are kill a million people by forcing everyone back to
Speaker 1: work so that no one has to actually deal with
Speaker 1: the political consequences of telling a bunch of unbelievably deranged
Speaker 1: and heavily armed fascists no and lock two people in
Speaker 1: a factory and forced them to make iPhones and then
Speaker 1: beat the absolute shit out of them when it turns
Speaker 1: out you lied to them about their pay. Doesn't mean
Speaker 1: that there aren't other options that we could take for
Speaker 1: pandemic responses if we decided to stop letting a bunch
Speaker 1: of venal and corrupt assholes rule us all. And this
Speaker 1: is something that people in China also understand. Even if
Speaker 1: the Western press corps dead set on presenting their demands
Speaker 1: as if they're American anti maskers, you can tell, obviously
Speaker 1: the Chinese protesters are not simply a copy of right
Speaker 1: wing American fascists by simply looking at a picture of
Speaker 1: a protest and seeing how many people are wearing masks.
Speaker 1: China is not the US. Regular people actually do care
Speaker 1: about containing the pandemic. This is why there is a
Speaker 1: real pandemic response in the first place, after the government
Speaker 1: utterly boshed it. If you look at the actual demands
Speaker 1: of the protesters, you will see things that normally would
Speaker 1: seem more at home with liberal American protesters attempting to
Speaker 1: see pandemic restrictions enforced properly, things like our pandemic response
Speaker 1: must be based on science. But people, even people who
Speaker 1: don't want to die of a plague, do not want
Speaker 1: to be horribly abused by cops or horrifically exploited by
Speaker 1: the state and capitalists. And that, I think is something
Speaker 1: we do all understand. Only time can tell what will
Speaker 1: happen to these protests. The government is quietly making concessions
Speaker 1: and not so quietly hunting down people who took to
Speaker 1: the streets. It is entirely possible that the protest will
Speaker 1: simply die, and that in two or three years most
Speaker 1: people will have forgot they ever happened. From a sort
Speaker 1: of brutal materialist perspective, however, it seems unlikely. China's social
Speaker 1: system could function fine as long as growth was at
Speaker 1: fifteen or ten percent, or even eight percent, But when
Speaker 1: growth inevitably comes down to two percent, but the deal
Speaker 1: of keep your head down and everyone will get rich
Speaker 1: starts to look a lot less attractive. Covid is simply
Speaker 1: intensified all of the traditional contradictions in side Chinese society
Speaker 1: and made visible the horrors that previously had been obscured.
Speaker 1: And it seems unlikely that those contradictions will someday vanish.
Speaker 1: But here in the presence, the impossible continues, and every
Speaker 1: day it does is another day that the gates of
Speaker 1: possibility in h a bit further open. This espina could
Speaker 1: happened here. You can find us that happened here pot
Speaker 1: on Twitter or Instagram. We have a website closoned Media
Speaker 1: dot com where you can see the sources for this
Speaker 1: In other episodes, Enjoy your week, and remember that you
Speaker 1: too can defeat your own ruling class. It could happen here.
Speaker 1: Rail Strike Edition. I'm Robert Evans, Garrison, Davis, Chris. How
Speaker 1: are we all? How are we all doing? How's this?
Speaker 1: We were talking about a rail strike today. We're praying,
Speaker 1: we're praying for it. It hasn't happened. If you're listening
Speaker 1: to this, you probably know the broad strokes of this,
Speaker 1: which is that the people who make the trains go,
Speaker 1: and by the way, trains are like a critical part
Speaker 1: of us all not starving to death or running out
Speaker 1: of insulin or whatever. The people who make those trains
Speaker 1: go have a pretty hard job and there's not a
Speaker 1: lot of them. And for a variety of reasons, that
Speaker 1: boiled down to companies not wanting to spend money. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's impossible for that. They don't get sick days. Um,
Speaker 1: So there were a bunch of other ship things like
Speaker 1: things that were shipped about the job, including pay, especially
Speaker 1: since rail company profits have been at like record levels,
Speaker 1: so they were threatening to strike. There were union negotiations.
Speaker 1: Some of the union leaders reached an agreement with the
Speaker 1: rail companies, but it wasn't it didn't include the sick days.
Speaker 1: So a lot of workers, potentially most of them are,
Speaker 1: we're at least willing to strike. And then Biden came
Speaker 1: in and had Congress basically say do the same thing
Speaker 1: Reagan did to the air traffic controllers in the eighties,
Speaker 1: where it's like, no, if you strike, it's illegal because
Speaker 1: this is a too critical a service for the country. Anyway,
Speaker 1: that's broadly the situation. Chris, you know this a lot
Speaker 1: better than I, the most pro labor president, the most
Speaker 1: pro labor precord. Okay, this is I think this is
Speaker 1: actually like that's that's why I don't like, that's my knowledge,
Speaker 1: and I think that's close to a layman's knowledge. So
Speaker 1: I'm waiting for you to fill in the gap. All right,
Speaker 1: let's let's let's start with what Biden has actually done,
Speaker 1: because it's it's it's slightly different than what Reagan was
Speaker 1: doing there with the air traffic controllers. Um. Part of
Speaker 1: the reason everything is fucked up with the railroads is that,
Speaker 1: like railroads almost since their inception have had like an
Speaker 1: almost entirely different regulatory framework than like anything else. So
Speaker 1: you know, your normal strike is covered by the National
Speaker 1: Labor Relations Act, Right, you go through your National Labor
Speaker 1: Relations Board, you do your votes, blah blah blah blah. Uh.
Speaker 1: If your railroad workers are not covered by that, they're
Speaker 1: covered something by something called the Railway Labor Act, which
Speaker 1: lets Congress just be like no, fuck you, you have
Speaker 1: to take this contract and the other thing it does.
Speaker 1: I mean, there is like a it is a oh
Speaker 1: I didn't realize that so well before, so well before,
Speaker 1: like you know, the modern era, and Reagan did his
Speaker 1: ship with the air traffic controllers. There was a it
Speaker 1: was written into the law that Congress could say like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you're a to a rail strike. That's really interesting, I guess.
Speaker 1: And it goes back to the days when they were
Speaker 1: literally making them out of human bones. Yeah. I mean
Speaker 1: it's been so it's been amended over time, and it's
Speaker 1: changed a bit. And there's some other stuff that happened
Speaker 1: in the nineties. After there's a there's a there's a
Speaker 1: failed rail strike in the nineties where Congress is also
Speaker 1: just like no, fuck you, you have to take this contract.
Speaker 1: But yeah, the the important thing about this is that like, okay,
Speaker 1: so in order to even potentially strike, you have to
Speaker 1: go through so much bullshit. It's called self help in
Speaker 1: the law. Like the people have been trying to strike
Speaker 1: for two years, and everything that we're seeing now is
Speaker 1: the product of two years of bullshit of these like
Speaker 1: there's all of this nonsense you have to go through.
Speaker 1: There's these like cooling off mandatory cooling off periods. You
Speaker 1: can't like, uh, you know, you have to like wait
Speaker 1: before you do anything else, and you you have to go
Speaker 1: to the next step, the next step, and the final
Speaker 1: step is Joe Biden had the choice to either let
Speaker 1: these rail workers strike and actually get the things that
Speaker 1: they fucking needed, or he could tell them to funk
Speaker 1: off and just eat a contract. And that that that
Speaker 1: that's what's happened right now, is that Joe Biden has
Speaker 1: just and also again with the support of both houses
Speaker 1: of Congress. And I also like explicitly want to mention
Speaker 1: here that a lot a lot of nominally socialist politicians,
Speaker 1: including like a lot of social Democrats vote talk about
Speaker 1: that too, because that that's that's another part of it.
Speaker 1: That again, so my my surface and I guess I'm
Speaker 1: playing playing the podcast idiot in this one, which is
Speaker 1: not abnormal for me. But my like layman's understanding of
Speaker 1: what happened with this is that, uh, there was a
Speaker 1: bill up in Congress as to whether or not to
Speaker 1: endorse this, and uh a bunch of progressives said that
Speaker 1: they wouldn't vote on it unless it included seven days
Speaker 1: of paid sick leave, including Sanders that got pushed off
Speaker 1: into a separate bill, and there was like some kind
Speaker 1: of sketchy wording about like well we won't you know,
Speaker 1: like I I don't, I don't understand the congressional hijinks,
Speaker 1: but I know they just wound up voting for the
Speaker 1: the negotiate like what the union had negotiated without any
Speaker 1: sick leaf like it. Yeah, Like it seems like it
Speaker 1: kind of provided an opportunity for a bunch of progressives
Speaker 1: in the House to vote yes on the sick leave
Speaker 1: knowing that it wouldn't pass the sent it and knowing
Speaker 1: that the strike would still get stopped. Right Like what
Speaker 1: am I um? I mean it's basically that like the
Speaker 1: I'm not a congress nowhere. Yeah, I mean, there there's
Speaker 1: a bunch of sort of hiji inks that were happening
Speaker 1: in Congress where there's there's a slightly different version of
Speaker 1: the bill in the House, and they had this whole thing.
Speaker 1: But okay, the House, the House one for sick leaved
Speaker 1: did pass with support of every Yeah, and it's three
Speaker 1: three Republicans. But okay, the thing I think I want
Speaker 1: to point out here and I want to move away
Speaker 1: from the sick leave thing, because the sick. That's the
Speaker 1: fact that these people don't have sick leave is important.
Speaker 1: This is also not like the main thing the strike
Speaker 1: was about, like things are, things are things are so
Speaker 1: much worse like things are, things are so much like
Speaker 1: infinitely worse than people like at all understands. Like what
Speaker 1: the thing that the thing that's real strike is about,
Speaker 1: if you if you go like actually talk to the
Speaker 1: people who are doing it, is that these people are
Speaker 1: on call for nine of their lives, like and and
Speaker 1: when I say nine percent of their lives, they're on
Speaker 1: call while they were asleep. They're on call constant. Uh,
Speaker 1: there's there's there's no way to even there's no way
Speaker 1: to plan a consistant sly schedule because you can just
Speaker 1: be on call and you know, and part part part
Speaker 1: of what's going on here. And if if you read
Speaker 1: the sort of detailed accounts, you will see a lot
Speaker 1: of people talking about this thing called precision scheduled railroading. Yeah,
Speaker 1: precision scheduled railroading was it was a great theory kind
Speaker 1: of that was implemented so atrociously badly. It's basically fucked
Speaker 1: like the entire economy. Um that the idea behind it
Speaker 1: was like you could you could schedule when like a
Speaker 1: freight railroad was going to go right, and this this
Speaker 1: would give you a bunch of efficiency bonuses. You could
Speaker 1: plan like you could schedule things around each other. Um,
Speaker 1: this just didn't happen people implementing it. But what they
Speaker 1: implemented was just this nightmarror like amalgamation of we're going
Speaker 1: to reduce a bunch of staff and then we're going
Speaker 1: to make these trains that have like two cars on them.
Speaker 1: And this has been a catastrophe. It's called monster trains
Speaker 1: that there's there's Justin Rosniak, who's podcast doesn't see it
Speaker 1: doesn't seem like a good solution to the problem of
Speaker 1: not enough guys to make trains work is make the
Speaker 1: trains huge. Yeah, it's like it's just denorable train crap.
Speaker 1: It's awful. Again, these are your tw orter trains long right,
Speaker 1: so if if you don't get the weight you ship
Speaker 1: you should write, the train will fucking fall over. They
Speaker 1: keep doing this this this has been happening for like
Speaker 1: several years now. Is there's just trains everywhere derailing. There's
Speaker 1: like no coverage of it. The reason, you know, you know,
Speaker 1: you know, you know where I knew that from Chris
Speaker 1: Garrison will tell you when I get when I get
Speaker 1: drunk or something late at night. My favorite thing to
Speaker 1: watch his videos of trains hitting stuff and train crashes
Speaker 1: are amazing to watch. It's incredible to think of all
Speaker 1: the human ingenuity it took to make that big, big boom.
Speaker 1: There's thousands of videos on YouTube of cool cargo getting
Speaker 1: stuck on train tracks and train happening through there yea
Speaker 1: boxes being pulverized in the air, they vaporized. It's so cool.
Speaker 1: So the downside is that one day we're going to
Speaker 1: have one of these trains that is run by a
Speaker 1: person who has had three hours of sleep in the
Speaker 1: last forty eight hours, and it's going to be caring,
Speaker 1: like fucking I don't know, it's gonna be carrying like
Speaker 1: sodium nitrate on it or some ship and it's just
Speaker 1: going to explode and it is going to kill enormous
Speaker 1: every pole. That just actually happened in Canada like a
Speaker 1: decade ago. But yeah, like these trains are too big.
Speaker 1: They're so big they don't fit in the fucking rail yards.
Speaker 1: Like they're so big that most the training infrastructure doesn't
Speaker 1: work for them. They are so everything is okay. They're
Speaker 1: they're really really really badly planned, despite the fact that
Speaker 1: this is supposed to be precision scheduled railroading. Like they're
Speaker 1: unbelievably badly planned. You have people just like being forced
Speaker 1: to just like sit there for twelve hours in a train,
Speaker 1: like waiting for the rest of like the other like
Speaker 1: ninety five cars that are supposed to be on this
Speaker 1: train to show up. You know. The whole situation just
Speaker 1: like it is utterly nightmares. And the ever thing about this,
Speaker 1: right is, if you're an engineer, right, and you're in
Speaker 1: one of these trains and you're sitting there for twelve
Speaker 1: fucking hours in this train, you legally can't have your
Speaker 1: phone because you know, I mean, this is a safety thing, right,
Speaker 1: And in some sense this makes sense. It's like a
Speaker 1: safety measure. You can't of your phone because you know,
Speaker 1: you can't be distracted what you're driving. But you're just
Speaker 1: sucking sitting on the tracks for like twelve hours, and
Speaker 1: you know this this this stuff is, you know, and
Speaker 1: the fact that the fact that people are on call constantly,
Speaker 1: the fact that the entire rail network is just physically
Speaker 1: falling apart because the other thing about these trains rise
Speaker 1: they make an enormous amount of money. None of them
Speaker 1: ever fucking show up on time. It's a disgaster. It's
Speaker 1: a catastrophe, like like like genuinely like part of the
Speaker 1: reason why we're having all these supply issues is that
Speaker 1: no train has fucking showed up on time in like
Speaker 1: four years. And it's a new contract. It's okay that
Speaker 1: the new contracts signed in says that workers can have
Speaker 1: up to three unpaid days off for medical appointments. Oh wow,
Speaker 1: that's something. It's a three unpaid tab stays off from
Speaker 1: pre made medical appointments. Yeah, none for whatever. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: again like like like these people are on call for
Speaker 1: pent of their lives. You can't even like like you
Speaker 1: can't schedule when you're going to sleep because you might
Speaker 1: be on call, and call might be you have to
Speaker 1: fucking like drive like several hours to a place so
Speaker 1: you can get on a train, and the train cannot leave,
Speaker 1: and the train eventually leaves like six hours later, and
Speaker 1: you fucking drive and then you're just like dropped off
Speaker 1: somewhere in the middle of nowhere and then unpaid, you
Speaker 1: have to go back to like where you live. It
Speaker 1: is like, like, Okay, the thing, the thing I wanted
Speaker 1: to get out of this is like the railroading system
Speaker 1: in general, that the system of freight railroading that we
Speaker 1: have in the US is in the midst of collapsing.
Speaker 1: Like it it is falling apart, It is not working,
Speaker 1: it is is becoming increasingly dangerous. It is I mean,
Speaker 1: utterly inhumane for the people working on it. And and
Speaker 1: you know, none of the fucking even this even the
Speaker 1: sick Bowl contract, like didn't do anything for it. Right,
Speaker 1: The only way this actually could have been resolved is
Speaker 1: if Joe Biden and in a fifth the Democrats and
Speaker 1: if Congress hadn't been fucking cowards and had let these
Speaker 1: people strike because these kinds of concessions like and you know,
Speaker 1: I also like, I don't want to let the fucking
Speaker 1: unions off the hook here to be because they know
Speaker 1: all of this. But again, most of the sort of
Speaker 1: like senior union people are very tight with a very
Speaker 1: tight with Democratic Party. This is part of why all
Speaker 1: of this ship was postponed till after the elections, because
Speaker 1: they didn't, you know, they didn't want to deal with
Speaker 1: this ship. They've been trying to force people to sign
Speaker 1: these contract too, and it's it's it's a ship show.
Speaker 1: It is a just absolute catastrophe on on every every level. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's almost as if the rail system probably
Speaker 1: shouldn't be run by private interests. Yeah, because there's going
Speaker 1: to be now a hundred hundred rail workers who are
Speaker 1: forced to work under these still not great conditions. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: the managers and the owners of the railroads get to
Speaker 1: go back to just making tons of money. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: again record profits. None of this is happening. Not that
Speaker 1: that would make it okay, but none of this is
Speaker 1: happening in an environment well, well, you know, we're running
Speaker 1: at a loss, and we we have no money and
Speaker 1: no ability to like like they have. They're making hundreds
Speaker 1: of billions of dollars profits like this is this is
Speaker 1: like one of the most profitable times to run a railroad,
Speaker 1: and US can thence and devise more people to be
Speaker 1: railroad road workers if the job isn't a fucking nightmare.
Speaker 1: For example, what if instead of not being able to
Speaker 1: have their phones, we gave each of them a DVD
Speaker 1: player in a screen with a DVD of Step Brothers
Speaker 1: and they could watch step Brothers as much as they
Speaker 1: want while piloting a train. I think that would actually
Speaker 1: get I think that would cause mass mass layoff set
Speaker 1: a rail yard. That's that's how we get the strike.
Speaker 1: We include this in the next provision for destruction. I
Speaker 1: was I was stealthy in my accelerationist beliefs here. This
Speaker 1: is the fastest way he can transit infrastructure. He got
Speaker 1: like two years before this holding fucking implodes anyways, because
Speaker 1: part part of what's keeping people in the railroading system
Speaker 1: is that so railroading also has its own pension system
Speaker 1: that's like disconnected from the regular pension system, and you
Speaker 1: have to you have to work there for ten years
Speaker 1: in order to collector pension. This is why like enormous
Speaker 1: numbers of people just haven't left, right. People have been leaving, right,
Speaker 1: But there's a there's a huge number of people who
Speaker 1: were hiring these giant expansion in two thousand four, and
Speaker 1: you know, like we're two years out from that contract
Speaker 1: from from all these people being able to collect their
Speaker 1: pensions and fucking leaving. Yeah, that's it's like, this is
Speaker 1: the only chance I have to ever not work myself
Speaker 1: to death, so I have to tough it out. But yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: but these those those people are those people are going
Speaker 1: to leave, and you know, this is this is the
Speaker 1: sort of like this is the sort of hammer that
Speaker 1: capitalism has built over its own head, which is that like, yeah,
Speaker 1: congratulations you you successfully flexibilized and casualized your entire workforce.
Speaker 1: That means that if people like don't want to do
Speaker 1: your shitty job, they can leave and find another job.
Speaker 1: And at some point, like there are there is a
Speaker 1: ship that in this economy that like actually does need
Speaker 1: to be done. But these people have been sort of
Speaker 1: like so blinded by just like you know, they're so
Speaker 1: so blinded by Lyne grow goes up. They're so blinded
Speaker 1: by short term profit that they really don't understand that
Speaker 1: at some point there's just not gonna be fucking workers
Speaker 1: to run the railroad. Yeah. I mean a lot of
Speaker 1: this situation is built off of and instead of being
Speaker 1: compared to Reagan's stuff for their traffic controllers, it's actually
Speaker 1: more similar to what Carter did with some with some
Speaker 1: airline workers. Um. Then also with the with the nineteen
Speaker 1: eight kind of a Railroad de Regulation act um which
Speaker 1: which caused would would you which gave a lot more
Speaker 1: power to companies to run the railroads. And that's that
Speaker 1: is what kind of shifted shifted things to our to
Speaker 1: our current, our current problem because they were they gave
Speaker 1: permission for these rail companies to close down lines that
Speaker 1: were less profitable and to set their own um freight rates.
Speaker 1: And it's it's not being controlled by the inter State
Speaker 1: Commerce Commission. Instead it's being controlled by execuity. That that
Speaker 1: thing's weird, right because like, on the one hand, like
Speaker 1: the wave of corporatesalidation that happened after that is like
Speaker 1: a disaster, and the fact that there's basically like four
Speaker 1: real like rail companies now is a disaster. On the
Speaker 1: other hand, like it is also true that the Interstate
Speaker 1: Common Board was like dogshitted his jaws, it also s yes,
Speaker 1: absolutely it sucked, and for a short period of time
Speaker 1: it actually did improve things. But now it's it's it's
Speaker 1: it's powers coalescing again into the very types of monopolies
Speaker 1: that caused the that caused railroad regulation to be necessary
Speaker 1: back in the nineteenth century. Like in the first place,
Speaker 1: um power is being consolidated again, and it's it's this vicious,
Speaker 1: vicious cycle that are that fundamentally puts short term profits
Speaker 1: above of the conditions of workers. Yeah, I think, like,
Speaker 1: you know, Okay, so there have been a lot of
Speaker 1: people talking about like what the potential solutions to this
Speaker 1: are in a sort of macro sense, because like, okay,
Speaker 1: even even even with a better contract, right, like, something
Speaker 1: actually has to be done in order to force the
Speaker 1: railroads to not fucking suck and to like actually properly
Speaker 1: scheduled our goddamn trains and not work if one to death.
Speaker 1: And you know, I want to put that it is
Speaker 1: worth noting like we actually did like have national nationalized
Speaker 1: railroad company for a while, and it was kind of
Speaker 1: a ship show like it. Okay, Okay, this is something
Speaker 1: that's also important. Think about this, Like there's a lot
Speaker 1: of like there's a lot of different kinds of nationalization,
Speaker 1: right Like there there there was a huge difference between
Speaker 1: a firm that's like like you know, like we we
Speaker 1: we we sort of technically nationalized a bunch of the
Speaker 1: like car companies after two thousand and eight, right we
Speaker 1: bailed them out, but you know, like we like when
Speaker 1: in that stuff, we didn't really like take it. We
Speaker 1: we owned, we owned like a bunch of their stock.
Speaker 1: We didn't like take a control and like we we
Speaker 1: got like Nick tonight, like proto neoliberal nationalization of the
Speaker 1: railroads last time, and it kind of contributed to the
Speaker 1: problems we have now. There was also a period where
Speaker 1: Conrail's union was trying to like buy like the railroad,
Speaker 1: so we all we almost we almost got a railroad
Speaker 1: system that was run by its but it was owned
Speaker 1: by its own union, and then the company just like
Speaker 1: refused to sell it to them because they were like
Speaker 1: waiting to hold on, we can't have a worker run railroad.
Speaker 1: But one thing, one thing I am interested in is
Speaker 1: I I don't actually know this. What would what would
Speaker 1: the how would how would an illegal strike actually work? Like,
Speaker 1: what's what's the how? What is the differences between people
Speaker 1: striking illegally? Now, like there's some some discussion of that,
Speaker 1: who knows that's actually actually happened, But what is the
Speaker 1: main kind of difference between that and um, the non
Speaker 1: illegal strow? Okay, so the big thing is okay, So
Speaker 1: the thing about the National Labor Relations Act, right, which
Speaker 1: is the thing that covers normal strikes, was that like
Speaker 1: and this is also true to see I sat under
Speaker 1: the room, but like, okay, so if you're doing a
Speaker 1: legal strike, you have legal protections, right, like there there
Speaker 1: are there are things corporations can't do to you. Um,
Speaker 1: like yeah, there there there's there's a bunch of stuff
Speaker 1: that can't Like I don't like it's it's it's a
Speaker 1: lot harder to just sort of fire people. The other
Speaker 1: thing is that also, like especially something like this, there's
Speaker 1: a like you you if you do if you do
Speaker 1: a wildcats trick like this and you you a specifically
Speaker 1: a strike that is like that is specifically illegal under
Speaker 1: this act, like you can all get fired. Um, I'm
Speaker 1: I think that I think they could technically arrest you.
Speaker 1: Like it It's it's I don't know that that part
Speaker 1: of it's not exactly clear to me, But yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't know. I mean there there's sort of like I
Speaker 1: feel like if if if they arrest you just for
Speaker 1: not going to your job, I feel like that is
Speaker 1: I mean that that has happened to people, Like I
Speaker 1: know people have been yes, like in the long history
Speaker 1: of labor struggles, people have been straight up killed. Um,
Speaker 1: but at least in you, I think it would be
Speaker 1: a bad look. Yeah, I mean I think Okay, So
Speaker 1: I mean I think where we're headed, and I think
Speaker 1: what they ought to do is just force get all
Speaker 1: of like the worst criminals, and I mean the murderers,
Speaker 1: the terrorists, all of those guys, and you make them
Speaker 1: run the trains. Whoever blew up all of those power
Speaker 1: transformers in North Carolina. You make them run the trains,
Speaker 1: and it'll be fine. Nothing bad will happen as a
Speaker 1: result of this. It'll work out perfectly well. The the
Speaker 1: the alternative plan and the thing that maybe these rail
Speaker 1: companies are just holding out for because maybe they're just
Speaker 1: making conditions be not great and underpaying and not giving
Speaker 1: sick days, is because they're waiting for trains just to
Speaker 1: become autonomous. They're already planning to severely cut down the
Speaker 1: crews that are on the trains. There's already trains in
Speaker 1: Australia that are a totally autonomously run that carry mining
Speaker 1: materials over for hundreds of miles, and that is the
Speaker 1: future that these that these companies want, because then they
Speaker 1: don't they need to pay for employees to actually run
Speaker 1: the train. Frustrating because like in an actual if we
Speaker 1: were an evening that approached a society that like dealt
Speaker 1: with things ethically and humanely, uh and equitably. Then this
Speaker 1: would be good, like because it seems like working on
Speaker 1: train sucks, and it would be great if we could
Speaker 1: automate most of that work. Uh, and then people less
Speaker 1: people would have to work in order to keep society running.
Speaker 1: But that's people don't have to work. We're just going
Speaker 1: to run through these people's bodies by like as we
Speaker 1: get up to autonomy automization, and then we will throw
Speaker 1: them away. Yeah, and then they will and then because
Speaker 1: they'll do it badly, there's going to be a disastrous
Speaker 1: train crash caused by the fact that they got all
Speaker 1: of the people off of a train hauling nitro glycerin
Speaker 1: or whatever, and it's going to destroy I don't know,
Speaker 1: duluth um, which you know, not the worst to lose,
Speaker 1: but I I sorry to Luke. Y'all are fucked well, okay,
Speaker 1: it's it's worth meesying. Like this stuff, like the automation
Speaker 1: stuff is already happening right like that we have right
Speaker 1: we have like this well and I mean it's like
Speaker 1: a very real sense that there's this sort of nightmare.
Speaker 1: Is one of the other sort of nightmare things that's
Speaker 1: going on right now, is that there are these like
Speaker 1: like I don't know, like driver assistance programs basically that
Speaker 1: are being run on trains. Now, where that are that are?
Speaker 1: You know that they're supposed to be like making decisions
Speaker 1: like for and with the drivers, but ay, they suck
Speaker 1: ass um be there. They're they're design. They're designed to
Speaker 1: basically maximize design to maximize profitability, right, And the way
Speaker 1: you maximize profitability is by running trains really really slowly,
Speaker 1: and you know that's contributing to the fact that every
Speaker 1: train is fucking late now and the phrases that doesn't work.
Speaker 1: And the third problem is that these is that these
Speaker 1: things keep fucking running trains off Like this is another
Speaker 1: reason why trains keep sucking crashing is that they suck.
Speaker 1: They keep they keep running trains off the tracks, and
Speaker 1: like you know and like that there's there's there's like
Speaker 1: there's there's a lot of ship here, right because it's
Speaker 1: like if you if you override the system, like you
Speaker 1: can you can get disciplined for for for overwriting the system.
Speaker 1: But then you have this sort of like you have
Speaker 1: this thing where it's like okay, so do I do
Speaker 1: I get disciplined for overriding system and not making the
Speaker 1: train crash, or do I just make the fucking train
Speaker 1: crash and doing the trolley problem? Yeah yeah, it's literally yeah,
Speaker 1: just like you love that this is just gonna inevitably
Speaker 1: gonna result in an exact recreation of the trolley proffle.
Speaker 1: It's already like this is already happening to people, and
Speaker 1: it's just like like it's none of the none of
Speaker 1: the stuff works automatic into this orphanage. I can divert
Speaker 1: it instead of this old folks. So it's like it's
Speaker 1: literally happening, like it's just like none of this stuff, Like, Okay.
Speaker 1: The thing that's like frustrating about this, right is okay,
Speaker 1: if any of the people at the sort of like
Speaker 1: at the level of where they're planning these trains could
Speaker 1: even sort of do their job right that this isn't
Speaker 1: even a thing that's like an inevitable contradiction between capital
Speaker 1: and labor. Like this is just if any of these
Speaker 1: people could actually fucking schedule the railroads, which is the
Speaker 1: thing they're supposed to be trying to do. If they
Speaker 1: could actually schedule when the train was supposed to go
Speaker 1: and when it was supposed to leave, you wouldn't have
Speaker 1: these problems because then all of the people who worked
Speaker 1: there would also be told when the fucking train was
Speaker 1: leaving and they could schedule around it. But no, they
Speaker 1: can't fucking do it because they're too fucking lazy, they're
Speaker 1: too fucking stupid, and they don't want to spend the
Speaker 1: money to actually make any of these systems fucking work,
Speaker 1: And so the consequence is just this bullshit. And then
Speaker 1: also because again and this is everything like that, like
Speaker 1: capital is also really falling down on the job here,
Speaker 1: because like the rest of capital needs to get their
Speaker 1: ship together and force the railroad to do something, because like,
Speaker 1: it's your asses on the line too, if this railroad
Speaker 1: then collapses. But because of because of the sort of
Speaker 1: immediate amount of money that that that these these shitty
Speaker 1: rail companies that pumped into Congress, they were able to
Speaker 1: buy people off, and the rest of capital was just like, yeah,
Speaker 1: we don't care. That's like three years out, we don't
Speaker 1: have to care about this ship. It's like guys like
Speaker 1: Bernie Sanders is fighting to save capitalism, right, These people
Speaker 1: are trying to save you from yourselves, and you know
Speaker 1: you won't won't even let That's that's their entire job,
Speaker 1: though of course it's like, yeah, what what what is
Speaker 1: happening here? Is that like is liberalism is running an
Speaker 1: acceleration is program to like cause the American American infrastructure
Speaker 1: to fall apart, and social democracy is attempting to save
Speaker 1: capital from itself, and capital was like literally fuck you
Speaker 1: eat ship. No, it's it's i've i've. I'm reading right
Speaker 1: now in interview with a railroad Workers United member and
Speaker 1: they're they're talking about how like there's this plan to increase,
Speaker 1: uh increase their pay over the next five years, and
Speaker 1: he's there, like he says that lots of the railroad
Speaker 1: workers that he's talked to as a part of the
Speaker 1: union is saying, like people are willing to work for
Speaker 1: less money and take a job at like an Amazon
Speaker 1: factory or like a trucking job because at least those
Speaker 1: offer slightly more consistent hours, and like, yeah, like it's
Speaker 1: it's at least you when you're not working, you're not working. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I just wanted to mention that because because we
Speaker 1: were bringing up like how these people are getting not
Speaker 1: very good pay, which is which is true, but for
Speaker 1: a lot of people it isn't even just to pay
Speaker 1: question it's it's it's just overall working conditions and like
Speaker 1: when you're thinking about moving to an Amazon factory instead
Speaker 1: because they have better working conditions, like oh god, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like, I mean, they've they've managed to create like
Speaker 1: one of the worst systems that is imposed on like
Speaker 1: any worker in the country. Like it is. It is
Speaker 1: genuinely stunning. And right now again they're they're getting bailed
Speaker 1: out that people are by the fact that people are
Speaker 1: stuck in because they want their pensions. But like, but
Speaker 1: as soon as a people are done and we start
Speaker 1: moving to more autonomous things, then it's not it's not
Speaker 1: going to be worth it. I know, media companies have
Speaker 1: spent decades trying to convince kids to work for trains,
Speaker 1: with Thomas the Train chuggington for for decades and decades,
Speaker 1: you've tried to send train propaganda to these kids, and
Speaker 1: I I don't think I don't think they're gonna buy it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: did you guys know that in Thomas the Tank Engine,
Speaker 1: canonically World War Two happened and canonically all of the
Speaker 1: diesel engine signed sided with the Nazis. Well, that doesn't
Speaker 1: first today and that is official. Thomas the Tank in
Speaker 1: Jin Laura. I wonder how many other zoomers will um
Speaker 1: symbolize with me on this. I recently found out that
Speaker 1: Thomas the Train wasn't just the uncanny train segments that
Speaker 1: used to have live action actors in like little inter
Speaker 1: cut scenes, because it was fucked up because by the
Speaker 1: time Thomas the Train was airing on television when I
Speaker 1: was a kid, all of those were re edited. They
Speaker 1: had they had, they had no live actions segments at all.
Speaker 1: It was all the weird stop motion animation, which is
Speaker 1: still very uncanny, with like the faces. But I had
Speaker 1: no idea until like a year ago that there was
Speaker 1: live action actors in the original additions of Thomas the Train.
Speaker 1: Fletely oblivious. Well, I'm glad, I'm glad we could have
Speaker 1: this important union discussion. I am too. I'm gonna I'm
Speaker 1: gonna admit to you all right now. There was a
Speaker 1: moment earlier where Chris You kept saying that that the
Speaker 1: owners of the railroads were blinded, and I very nearly
Speaker 1: went into a bit where I just started reading the
Speaker 1: lyrics to Bruce Springsteen's Blinded by the Light. But I
Speaker 1: didn't do it. I didn't do it that I'm glad
Speaker 1: we were saved from that. That's that's that's because everybody, nobody,
Speaker 1: nobody gets the lyrics to that one, right because of
Speaker 1: the Manford Man's earth band version, which makes it sound
Speaker 1: like he's saying douche when he's really saying deuce and
Speaker 1: talking about an engine, which is why it would have
Speaker 1: been relevant to railroads. But none of you all would
Speaker 1: have gotten that, and you would have fucking made a
Speaker 1: big thing about it on Reddit. So to hell with
Speaker 1: you all. Anyway, support rail workers if they do an
Speaker 1: illegal strike, make sure we set up things so that
Speaker 1: they get protected and they get food and things to
Speaker 1: fight cops, go make rail way. I mean, people like,
Speaker 1: just keep it, keep an eye on what's going on,
Speaker 1: and if it happens, there will be ways. There will
Speaker 1: be ways to support these through the US government, Like
Speaker 1: I don't know things of this nature. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: that would be that, that would be nice. But if
Speaker 1: we got to put a pin in that, you know,
Speaker 1: keep an eye on the situation and if these people
Speaker 1: go on strike, there will be community resources and whatnot
Speaker 1: popping up to support the wildcat strike. It's the thing
Speaker 1: that's happened before. Wildcat strikes have a long history in
Speaker 1: this country too, um, you know, and we will we
Speaker 1: will be collecting resources if that happens, for ways people
Speaker 1: can help with the wildcatters. So this is a thing
Speaker 1: to have on the old, on the old noggain as
Speaker 1: we as we lurch forward into the holidays and uh
Speaker 1: possibly gigantic labor battle we'll see. And I like people
Speaker 1: in the UK have been doing rail strikes, uh like
Speaker 1: for a good part of this year, like they've been,
Speaker 1: they've been. There's been on and off rail strikes for
Speaker 1: most of for like, for like the most of the
Speaker 1: past few months. Um, it's possible, except again they're they're
Speaker 1: they're they're British, so they stopped doing the strike when
Speaker 1: the queen died. Well of course, so look, look there's
Speaker 1: certain realities that can't ever be a clipstograph. Here's the
Speaker 1: here's the thing. We have thrown off the shackles of
Speaker 1: the anglos are where a rail strikes stops for no one,
Speaker 1: al right except for the most pro labor president, Joe Biden. Alright,
Speaker 1: And that's the episode. It's the episode. And remember, if
Speaker 1: you see a diesel train, it is a Nazi. You
Speaker 1: you were obliged to punch it. Welcome to Dake bap
Speaker 1: in here a podcast at it happening somewhere else, you know. Okay,
Speaker 1: the theme, the theme of the show has gone slightly
Speaker 1: slightly off the rails since it was first conceived. However, Comma,
Speaker 1: I do think this is something that is very important
Speaker 1: to talk about, which is getting some more sort of
Speaker 1: background information and an understanding of what the history of
Speaker 1: sort of labor in general protest is in China as
Speaker 1: we look at a certain the sort of current protest
Speaker 1: wave that is going on there. And with me to
Speaker 1: talk about this is Eli Friedman, who teaches at Cornell
Speaker 1: University and is the author of the book The Urbanization
Speaker 1: of People, The Politics of Development, Labor, markets, and Schooling
Speaker 1: in the Chinese City. So, Eli, welcome to the show.
Speaker 1: It's good to be here. Yeah. So I'm excited to
Speaker 1: talk with you about this um partially because I think, Okay,
Speaker 1: so insofar as you've gotten sort of mainstream coverage of it,
Speaker 1: there's been a lot of focus UM in term in
Speaker 1: terms of this sort of current way of protests, There's
Speaker 1: been a lot of focus on like the A four
Speaker 1: paper stuff and people sort of you know, hanging signs, up,
Speaker 1: and as as the coverage has gone on, there's been
Speaker 1: a lot less about the fox con stuff. There's been
Speaker 1: a lot less about the broader trajectory of what protests
Speaker 1: has looked like in China in the last twenty years,
Speaker 1: as everyone sort of like immediately reaches back for their
Speaker 1: stock tienem in comparisons. I think you're very good. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: So I guess I guess we could in some sense
Speaker 1: start with genomen because I think this is this is
Speaker 1: has nothing really to do with it. But I guess
Speaker 1: we could start with why why are the chan in
Speaker 1: comparisons bad? And why is everyone still reaching for them
Speaker 1: thirty years later? Yeah, I mean they're there's maybe a
Speaker 1: couple of reasons why. So. Um, the the the unsympathetic
Speaker 1: take on it is that you have a lot of
Speaker 1: people outside of China, particularly in the United States, who
Speaker 1: hope for things to go poorly in China as part
Speaker 1: of our imperial competition. And so UH was a bad
Speaker 1: year for China, whichever side of of that movement you
Speaker 1: you were on UH, and so they believe that it heralds,
Speaker 1: you know, that the downfall of the Communist Party, and
Speaker 1: you know, therefore America can march into the rest of
Speaker 1: the century without any real competitors, so that that is
Speaker 1: a real thing, right um. And that I think the
Speaker 1: somewhat more sympathetic take on this is that the Chinese government,
Speaker 1: and particularly under Stigent Ping, sets a ridiculously high standard
Speaker 1: for what qualifies as social stability. Right. So minor d
Speaker 1: deviations from um absolute harmony as conceived of by this state,
Speaker 1: which means you know, no street protests, it means relatively
Speaker 1: little descent online. And to the extent that you do
Speaker 1: see forms of collective action, they remain pretty small scale
Speaker 1: and fractured um. And so when you see deviations from that,
Speaker 1: that suggests that, well, they've kind of lost control because
Speaker 1: they do want to maintain this, you know, absolute image
Speaker 1: of placidity um. And if we look at the whole
Speaker 1: sequence of events that led up to where we are now,
Speaker 1: I think we have to trace it back. Well, there's
Speaker 1: a bunch of things, but one of them is the
Speaker 1: setone bridge protest um, which is just a single person
Speaker 1: hanging banners off a bridge in Beijing, um, and a
Speaker 1: single person hanging banners or holding signs in any other
Speaker 1: big city around the world does not create that kind
Speaker 1: of a stir, right. I mean, you know, you you're
Speaker 1: in Washington, d C. Or Or you're in Berlin or
Speaker 1: or Tokyo or whatever. You know, nobody cares, right, so
Speaker 1: that but that just shows a little bit of a
Speaker 1: crack in the system, and so then people let their
Speaker 1: imaginations kind of run wild. Um. And we're clearly not
Speaker 1: in a nine situation right now. It's not inconceivable that
Speaker 1: it would develop in that way in the future. Um.
Speaker 1: At the same time, I don't think it's particularly likely
Speaker 1: for for all sorts of reasons. And we can get
Speaker 1: into that if you want. Yeah, I mean one of
Speaker 1: the things that I think, I don't know one of
Speaker 1: the things that I've been looking at with these protests
Speaker 1: versus eight nine. I partially it's just the sort of
Speaker 1: class composition is just very very different. Like there are
Speaker 1: student protests, but it's it's they're like these these the
Speaker 1: students now, like are not the nine nine students, Like
Speaker 1: this is just if this is a very different sort
Speaker 1: of like it's's very different student body. It's a very
Speaker 1: different like the class competition of those people are different.
Speaker 1: The experience that they've had in the Chinese system is
Speaker 1: very different, and then also, I think someone more interestingly
Speaker 1: is like, it's it's not the same working class that
Speaker 1: showed up in because that class doesn't really exist anymore.
Speaker 1: And yeah, and I guess that that's another part of
Speaker 1: this that I think, I don't know. There is definitely
Speaker 1: extent to which these protests are weird, in that it
Speaker 1: is like it's it's it's it's a bunch of people
Speaker 1: in different places who are protesting about the same thing
Speaker 1: which hasn't which you know, hasn't really happened for a
Speaker 1: long time. But also like I don't know, there seems
Speaker 1: to be this reluctance to talk about the fact that
Speaker 1: there have been like not in significant protests in the
Speaker 1: last thirty years, like especially in the nineties, there are
Speaker 1: these huge protests against sort of like the industrialization, like
Speaker 1: the destruction of sort of the Chinese welfare system. And
Speaker 1: I guess one of the things I'm interested, I don't
Speaker 1: know it asking you more about is like there's there's
Speaker 1: a kind of jectory of what urban sort of protest
Speaker 1: has looked like and like as as as the sort
Speaker 1: of like as the Chinese working classes like increasingly become
Speaker 1: a sort of vigrant working class and so yeah, I
Speaker 1: guess we could jump off from there to also also
Speaker 1: I guess because that's the other thing is like Chinese
Speaker 1: cities are very different now than they were thirty years ago,
Speaker 1: which is the thing that is both incredibly obvious and
Speaker 1: also like people don't really seem to understand very well. Yeah,
Speaker 1: let's see, there's a lot in that question. Maybe we
Speaker 1: should circle back around to the question of the class
Speaker 1: composition of the students and the workers today in comparison
Speaker 1: to nineteen eighty nine. But first let's just talk a
Speaker 1: little bit about the sequence of labor protests over the past.
Speaker 1: And there is a lot of me going through stuff there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, all all really important insights um, each deserving
Speaker 1: a little bit of their own attention. So you know,
Speaker 1: after nine, Uh, there's this big divergence in the UM
Speaker 1: in in the opportunities that are afforded to the two
Speaker 1: constituent groups that were in Tanneman Square and other places
Speaker 1: around China. So you have the students and you have
Speaker 1: the workers, right, and there's there's other people, but like
Speaker 1: that's the sort of the social backbone of that movement. Uh.
Speaker 1: The students basically get this deal with the state, which
Speaker 1: is they demand compliance and political acquiescence in exchange for
Speaker 1: which they will enjoy a couple of generation, a couple
Speaker 1: of decades of unbelievably fast growth. And if you are
Speaker 1: graduating with a degree from one of these elite universities
Speaker 1: in Beijing or even not super elite universities and in
Speaker 1: other cities, there's a pretty good chance that you're going
Speaker 1: to experience upwards social mobility, that you'll be able to
Speaker 1: buy an apartment that you know, you will feel more
Speaker 1: materially secure than was the case for your parents, right, UM,
Speaker 1: I think that that deal is coming undone right now,
Speaker 1: which explains the students that we say out in the street, UM,
Speaker 1: but in any of and that that certainly was the
Speaker 1: case for for you know, for about thirty years after UM,
Speaker 1: or at least you know, twenty five years after after tenement.
Speaker 1: The workers who were in the square in nineteen nine
Speaker 1: had almost diametrically opposed social trajectory because immediately thereafter UH
Speaker 1: they were subjected to a brutal regime of privatization, of dispossession,
Speaker 1: of theft of public property. They were thrown out of
Speaker 1: these jobs that they had believed they were going to
Speaker 1: have forever. It was called the Iron Rice bul Um.
Speaker 1: One of the main architects of that was Johnsman, who's
Speaker 1: just died. He along with Drew g So I saw.
Speaker 1: I saw a great quote where someone was like, this
Speaker 1: is basically China, George W. Bush, where everyone's remember again
Speaker 1: fondly because things are so bad now. But oh my god,
Speaker 1: this guy was awful, Like dying dying right now is
Speaker 1: maybe the best thing he ever did. Like yeah, and
Speaker 1: it really is a testament to how bad things are now.
Speaker 1: But he is I think, um, the most neoliberal anyway
Speaker 1: of China's leaders, more so than than dung shopping in
Speaker 1: some important ways. Uh. And so you know that old
Speaker 1: working class who was told that they were the masters
Speaker 1: of the nation, um, you know under Jungs them in
Speaker 1: front in the late nineties, they were just they were
Speaker 1: just subjected to these real subsistence crises. And in response
Speaker 1: to that, actually the largest mobilizations to have happened since
Speaker 1: nineteen nine occurred in the like nineties and really the
Speaker 1: early two thousands. In some cases, you have these protest
Speaker 1: movements with many tens of thousands of people out on
Speaker 1: the street resisting privatization, resisting the theft of their pensions,
Speaker 1: um and and basically this you know, private profiteering and
Speaker 1: theft of public property. And I think that even the
Speaker 1: protests that we've seen in the last a week or
Speaker 1: two are are still not on the scale of those
Speaker 1: worker uprisings that we saw twenty years ago. Yeah, which
Speaker 1: I guess, you know, like part part of the reason
Speaker 1: why we are where we are now is that those
Speaker 1: people lost. And I think that's been one of the
Speaker 1: other sort of themes of like Chinese protests. Lie. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think like like some some of the local ones
Speaker 1: like when, but the large scale ones have kind of
Speaker 1: just been like just like really just been getting owned
Speaker 1: for the last like twenty really like thirty years. Like
Speaker 1: it's it's been kind of a bleak march. And I mean,
Speaker 1: I actually I want to circle back around a bit,
Speaker 1: talk a bit more about the d industrialization, because I
Speaker 1: think this is a thing that like really is badly understood,
Speaker 1: especially on the left. Um. The other thing I wanted
Speaker 1: to talk about in that is, Okay, so you have
Speaker 1: this massive wave of privatization, you have this industrialization, and
Speaker 1: can we talk a little bit of also about how
Speaker 1: like for the people for the people who held on
Speaker 1: and say on the industries, what the transformations happen inside
Speaker 1: there was like because I think that's also like not understood. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: so you have two prosessies. One is um the they
Speaker 1: talk about as a smashing the iron rice ball, right,
Speaker 1: and and that involved of two process. One is just unemployment.
Speaker 1: And there's been a lot of um efforts to try
Speaker 1: to estimate how many people lost their jobs. It is
Speaker 1: very hard. Political scientists named Dirthy Salinger wrote an article
Speaker 1: called why It's impossible to know how many unemployed people?
Speaker 1: There are some something to that effect. Um, but certainly
Speaker 1: tons of millions of people lost lost their jobs and
Speaker 1: we're just kind of thrown out into the market. And
Speaker 1: it's worth remembering that they're thrown out into the market
Speaker 1: largely in regions where the market was not at all dynamic, right,
Speaker 1: so in the northeastern part of the country, which did
Speaker 1: not have the booming economy of Guangdong Province or you know,
Speaker 1: jong Su Province or places like that. Um. So, so
Speaker 1: there were those people. People also probably know that there
Speaker 1: are still a lot of state on enterprises and something
Speaker 1: like a quarter to you know, maybe a third of
Speaker 1: China's economy is still accounted for by state on enterprises,
Speaker 1: but those enterprises have increasingly come to function like capitalist enterprises,
Speaker 1: at least with respect to the labor relations. They still
Speaker 1: receive a lot of subsidies from the state. They still
Speaker 1: enjoy um monopolies, right, so they you know, they don't
Speaker 1: face competition from other firms, at least domestically UM, and
Speaker 1: like monopoly based firms in capitalist countries, they offer somewhat
Speaker 1: better UM pay and somewhat better benefits to their core workforce. Right. So,
Speaker 1: I mean, if you think of of GM or four
Speaker 1: in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States,
Speaker 1: or you can think about Facebook or Google today, you know,
Speaker 1: these companies that are also basically enjoy monopoly position. Their
Speaker 1: core workers enjoy, you know, somewhat better pay. Right. But
Speaker 1: the other thing that's happened is they have increasingly come
Speaker 1: to be surrounded by a very large contingent of temporary
Speaker 1: and flexible workers, right um, and so in in in
Speaker 1: many of these state owned firms, UM, more than fifty
Speaker 1: of the employees are what they call in China dispatch workers. Right,
Speaker 1: they don't enjoy any of those same benefits they don't
Speaker 1: enjoy the same job stabilities um, and they eat in
Speaker 1: eat in response to market fluctuations and profitability. Those are
Speaker 1: always the first ones to be let let go, right.
Speaker 1: So you know, the fact that they are state owned,
Speaker 1: I think matters to some extent um, but when But
Speaker 1: it doesn't mean that the old labor regime from you know,
Speaker 1: the nineteen seventies has kind of continued unchanged. Like they
Speaker 1: are being these firms are being subjected to market pressures
Speaker 1: and that's reflected and how they treat labor. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean that's something that like if if if you, if
Speaker 1: you listen to and Ping like actually talk about what's
Speaker 1: going on. He just constantly, every every like two speeches
Speaker 1: that he gives there is a line about how like
Speaker 1: the economy is directed by the market, and like, yeah,
Speaker 1: he's very clear about it, and in some ways he's
Speaker 1: he's like very Reganite, like he's just like, we don't
Speaker 1: we don't want what these lazy people just enjoy welfare benefits,
Speaker 1: like they believe in the power of the market to
Speaker 1: discipline people. There's no question about it. Yeah, And I
Speaker 1: guess the other sort of consequence of this is China's
Speaker 1: enormous market worker population. And that's definitely another thing I
Speaker 1: wanted to talk about because that was another round of
Speaker 1: protest happens in two thousands. That's about uh, this giant
Speaker 1: fight over household registration that I guess was the last
Speaker 1: kind of successful, like really mass protest thing in China.
Speaker 1: We talked about that a little bit. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: there haven't been the same scale of of collective protests
Speaker 1: by migrant workers. But um, you know, just as a
Speaker 1: little bit of background, you have the old state state
Speaker 1: owned working classes kind of declining or subjected to the
Speaker 1: market pressures that we're talking about, and so unrest um
Speaker 1: in that sector becomes a little bit less significant over
Speaker 1: the course of the two thousands. But that's happening at
Speaker 1: precisely at the same time that the working class in
Speaker 1: the private firms is increasingly constituted by these rural urban
Speaker 1: migrant workers. When they come to the city's they are
Speaker 1: treated essentially a second class citizens and don't have guaranteed
Speaker 1: access to all kinds of social services healthcare, pensions, education, etcetera. Um,
Speaker 1: and so there is a lot of mobilization. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, the the Juko household system, household registration systems
Speaker 1: still exists, and it still has an important role in
Speaker 1: structuring people's UM classed experiences. UM, but it's it's a
Speaker 1: little bit less coersive than it used to be. So
Speaker 1: in two thousand three, there was this famous case UM.
Speaker 1: A migrant named Soon You're goung Um was taken into custody,
Speaker 1: as frequently happened, you know at the time, like police
Speaker 1: would just ask people for their papers on the street
Speaker 1: if they looked suspicious, and they had a thing in
Speaker 1: place at the time called custody and repatriation where they
Speaker 1: would take you into custody and they would they would
Speaker 1: repatriate you back to your village. Right, So very similar
Speaker 1: you know to like ice rates against Chinese people. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: like they had even this is I think one of
Speaker 1: the things about like, insofar as you can make comparisons
Speaker 1: between like the Chinese system of the Soviet systems like that,
Speaker 1: that's one of the few things that was I think
Speaker 1: kind of similar, is that you do have these very
Speaker 1: intense into well okay, it's simultaneous that you have these
Speaker 1: very intense like internal restrictions on migration, but also very
Speaker 1: similar to the U S system. It's like the the
Speaker 1: economy is based on everyone breaking these things, that's right.
Speaker 1: Simultaneously it's illegal, yeah, yeah, right, exactly, Like there's no
Speaker 1: illegal immigration to the United States, but the economy would
Speaker 1: obviously collapse without undocumented workers. And it's exactly the same
Speaker 1: in China. Like, you know, they're like, we we know
Speaker 1: that these people are here, we know that our economy,
Speaker 1: particularly the coastal cities, is completely dependent on them, but
Speaker 1: we're still gonna have cops ask you for your papers
Speaker 1: on the street, and if they don't like you, they can,
Speaker 1: you know, round you up and send you home. In
Speaker 1: this in this particular case back in two thousand and three,
Speaker 1: the guy they got, it's like he was the quote
Speaker 1: unquote wrong guy because he was actually a university student
Speaker 1: and they they they detained him and killed him. And
Speaker 1: so when this came out and they're like, oh, they
Speaker 1: killed a college student. Like if had they killed a
Speaker 1: normal migrant worker, that would be one thing, but he's
Speaker 1: a college student. So so that created a big fuss
Speaker 1: and as a result, you know, they actually got rid
Speaker 1: of of the tention and repatriation, which is good, um there,
Speaker 1: And so migrant workers today when they're on the streets
Speaker 1: in the big cities are are not likely to you know,
Speaker 1: just have cops randomly asked them to see their papers.
Speaker 1: But they're still subjected to all kinds of social discrimination
Speaker 1: and definitely, um, you know, institutional discrimination. Yeah, So okay,
Speaker 1: we're sp speaking of institutional discrimination. We're going to take
Speaker 1: an ad break and then we will come back and
Speaker 1: talk or about this. So I enjoy some ads from
Speaker 1: companies who are probably benefiting from all of this, and
Speaker 1: we're back. So okay that That's another thing that I
Speaker 1: I do want to sort of, I guess, use this
Speaker 1: to push us forward a little bit, which is that, okay,
Speaker 1: this this is obviously skipping a lot of riots in
Speaker 1: til USand and eleven. But one of the big things
Speaker 1: about the COVID restrictions that I don't think people understand
Speaker 1: has been how bad it's been affecting megicant workers and
Speaker 1: the extent to which, you know, because one one of
Speaker 1: the things about the House of Registration system is like,
Speaker 1: as best I can tell, this is this is the
Speaker 1: way a lot of like a lot of resources in
Speaker 1: terms of like here's how you're getting food haven't being
Speaker 1: distributed and if you know, if you're in a place
Speaker 1: that's not weird house. The registration is just like, well, okay,
Speaker 1: the state's not giving you your food, how are you
Speaker 1: going to deal with this stuff? And yeah, they're not
Speaker 1: doing that. That that that That's been a big thing that, like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, a lot of this has been me
Speaker 1: being upset with the media coverage of these protests because
Speaker 1: like people will just say COVID zero and then not
Speaker 1: explain what the actual consequences of this are. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: I was wondering if you could talk about sort of
Speaker 1: specifically how how the lockdowns, especially as lockdowns have gone on,
Speaker 1: have been affecting my co workers, and then how that's
Speaker 1: and yeah, okay, well so we'll start start there before
Speaker 1: I jump into a question with seven parts. I mean,
Speaker 1: I do think it's really important to understand why people
Speaker 1: are opposed to zero COVID, and sometimes for people outside
Speaker 1: of China, they think back to the spring of when
Speaker 1: you know, in the United States, we had like libertarians
Speaker 1: with guns being like in the lockdown, like we want
Speaker 1: our freedom, Like it is not that for all sorts
Speaker 1: of reasons, um and and the way to get at
Speaker 1: why it's different is to understand some of the classed
Speaker 1: differences that zero COVID has has entailed. And I should
Speaker 1: just say it's been pretty terrible for everybody, including rich people,
Speaker 1: and like you know, we can we can feel some
Speaker 1: sympathy for them to UM, but but it's had some
Speaker 1: particularly nefarious consequences for for migrant workers. This became really
Speaker 1: clear in the Shanghai lockdown. It's also worth noting that
Speaker 1: there are three hundred million migrant workers in China. So
Speaker 1: this is not like this this is like half the
Speaker 1: population of Europe like so many people are talking about here.
Speaker 1: It's it's it's almost an America sized population of people
Speaker 1: who are not living where their household registration is. And
Speaker 1: so the basic thing is, as you were just sort
Speaker 1: of saying that when they're is a lockdown and you're
Speaker 1: a migrant worker, you you kind of don't exist from
Speaker 1: the states, or you might exist, but like you might
Speaker 1: also be overlooked from the perspective of the state. So
Speaker 1: one very concrete way that this UM screwed people over
Speaker 1: was in these hard lockdowns, you're not allowed out of
Speaker 1: your house and you're dependent on the neighborhood committee, which
Speaker 1: is which is connected to the state. It's kind of
Speaker 1: the lowest level of the state. You were dependent on
Speaker 1: them for the delivery of everything that you need to survive,
Speaker 1: right critically food and medicine. Yeah, can back up and
Speaker 1: say something about this. This is something This is something
Speaker 1: very very different than the American lockdowns, which is like, well, okay,
Speaker 1: it depends on a like it it depends on a
Speaker 1: on on like a province of profit s basis. Like
Speaker 1: I know, my family was in Mogolia. They like in
Speaker 1: the Mogolia like you you just you like. The lockdown
Speaker 1: isn't like you don't go to work. The lockdown is
Speaker 1: you cannot leave your house like you can. You can say,
Speaker 1: I think I think their lockdown, their first one was
Speaker 1: one person in their house once a week can leave
Speaker 1: to go get groceries. But it's like it's not like yeah,
Speaker 1: like it's it's you, like you physically cannot leave. You
Speaker 1: will be if you attempt to leave, you will be
Speaker 1: prevented from doing so. And this means that you don't
Speaker 1: really have an independent way of like getting food or
Speaker 1: like going shopping or yeah, like getting I don't know,
Speaker 1: like toilet paper, like yeah, not toilet resonates with with
Speaker 1: Americans in our in our toilet paper shortage of but
Speaker 1: I mean in some cases, like people would actually just
Speaker 1: be literally chained into their apartments, right, So like this
Speaker 1: is not whatever people in in in the U s.
Speaker 1: Or even even in parts of Western Europe, you know,
Speaker 1: where the lockdowns were a little bit more intensely police like,
Speaker 1: it is not that it is a qualitatively different thing.
Speaker 1: And so yeah, you're completely dependent on the state. So
Speaker 1: therefore it's really really important that the state know that
Speaker 1: you are there and that the state feels itself to
Speaker 1: be tasked with your survival and if you're a migrant worker.
Speaker 1: So so one of the very greet ways that this
Speaker 1: effective migrant workers is that a lot of them live
Speaker 1: in informal housing, even in the biggest cities, even in
Speaker 1: place like Shanhai and Beijing, because those are the only
Speaker 1: places that they can live as far as the state's concerned,
Speaker 1: Like that informal housing might not exist, they are very
Speaker 1: very frequently more people living in those dwellings than are
Speaker 1: sort of legally accounted for. So you know, like there's
Speaker 1: ten people living in an apartment that's supposed to be
Speaker 1: for for you know, a family of three, and so
Speaker 1: they deliver three people's worth of food, but there's actually
Speaker 1: ten people living there. That's a subsistence crisis, right. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, the medical stuff is just like astonishing and
Speaker 1: very harrowing. I mean, you know, just people just dying
Speaker 1: in their apartment because like they can't get insolent or
Speaker 1: all kinds. I know, I know people whose family died
Speaker 1: because they had cancer and they couldn't get treatment for
Speaker 1: it because yeah, yeah, like yeah, it's disaster. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: so that's that's the situation. That's one of the problems
Speaker 1: with them for the migrant workers. And then in the
Speaker 1: very intense lockdowns at least in in Shanghai, back in
Speaker 1: in the spring of this year. Um, you know, they
Speaker 1: also can't leave. So like one option would be like okay,
Speaker 1: will you go back to the place where you do
Speaker 1: have your household registration, you know, back in the village
Speaker 1: and you have a piece of land and like you
Speaker 1: can survive. They couldn't leave, right, there's no transportation, um,
Speaker 1: And so they were trapped in this situation where they
Speaker 1: couldn't work, the government wasn't you know, delivering them food,
Speaker 1: and they couldn't go to some place some other place
Speaker 1: where they could get food. And so you know, there's
Speaker 1: been a lot of attention to these recent protests, which
Speaker 1: are extremely important and qualitatively different. But even back in
Speaker 1: in April, we saw food riots, like in Shanghai, a
Speaker 1: group of group of migrant workers just like requisitions like
Speaker 1: a truck full of cabbage, you know, and just started
Speaker 1: like tossing cabbages to people on the street because people
Speaker 1: were like literally starving. So I mean, yeah, so there's
Speaker 1: a real problem for the bigrant workers. And on that note,
Speaker 1: this has been nic could happen here? Join us tomorrow
Speaker 1: for part two of this episode. We'll be talking more
Speaker 1: about lockdowns, similar problems with workers and this all going
Speaker 1: Welcome to Dick It Happened Here, the podcast that you're
Speaker 1: listening to right now. It's your host, Christopher Long, and
Speaker 1: we are back with part two of our interview with
Speaker 1: Eli Friedman about the reason protests in China. I want
Speaker 1: to go back and talk about lying flat and that
Speaker 1: whole kind of I don't know, movement discourse that was
Speaker 1: happening last year, because it seems like the kind of
Speaker 1: I don't know if nihilism is the right word, but
Speaker 1: this kind of like collective understanding that the whole sort
Speaker 1: of bargain of the Chinese social system of you know,
Speaker 1: and this was to some extent extended to everyone, right,
Speaker 1: like the bargain of the Chinese social system of everyone
Speaker 1: everyone keep your head down while get rich together, or
Speaker 1: it suddenly became clear that this just wasn't gonna happen.
Speaker 1: And you know, I mean, I think like, in some
Speaker 1: sense it's possible to sort of like, you know, you
Speaker 1: can you can put on your sort of like hard
Speaker 1: materialist hat and you can like look at like the
Speaker 1: number of hammers banging out, and you can just look
Speaker 1: at the show of Chinese GDP graph of the last
Speaker 1: decade and be like, okay, well so eventually like when
Speaker 1: what what what it hit like two percent? Eventually we
Speaker 1: were going to have protests. But yeah, I guess, I
Speaker 1: guess I I wanted to talk a bit about like, yeah,
Speaker 1: what lying flat was? We covered this on the show
Speaker 1: a long time ago when it was happening, but and
Speaker 1: then also sort of how that attitude shift was important
Speaker 1: or wasn't important. I don't know, Maybe it wasn't. I
Speaker 1: think it was, but yeah, I think it's very important. Right, So, yeah,
Speaker 1: you can't just be a crude materialist and like mechanically
Speaker 1: read social protest off of some chart of you know,
Speaker 1: falling profitability or something like that. Um, but there it
Speaker 1: is a cultural expression of real fundamental changes in the
Speaker 1: organization of the Chinese economy. Uh. You know, we already
Speaker 1: talked about how the post eighty nine generation was like
Speaker 1: you go to college and like you come out and
Speaker 1: you know you'll you'll be middle class right on average,
Speaker 1: And that's just not at all the case anymore. And
Speaker 1: young people in China and and older people, middle aged
Speaker 1: people you know, who are who have children, who are
Speaker 1: who are going through the system, um, feel immense pressure
Speaker 1: in like immense competition in all spheres of life, beginning
Speaker 1: from a young age in elementary school, all the way
Speaker 1: up through high school, through the super competitive and intense
Speaker 1: university admissions process, and then after graduating university and getting
Speaker 1: a job, and then getting a job that can you know,
Speaker 1: um uh, you can earn enough money to be able
Speaker 1: to afford an apartment. And so here we have to
Speaker 1: understand you know, the cost of housing and all of
Speaker 1: the other costs associated with social reproduction. So the like
Speaker 1: the cost of care workers. Right, middle class people in
Speaker 1: places like Shanghai and Beijing expect to have domestic workers, um,
Speaker 1: you know, looking after their children. They expect to be
Speaker 1: able to hire tutors who can um you know, and
Speaker 1: comtutor their children in English or in math um. And
Speaker 1: so just people feel under unbelievable pressure. And this is
Speaker 1: in a situation. The part of the reason that the
Speaker 1: pressure has is really ramped up is that there are
Speaker 1: fewer good paying jobs. You know, youth unemployment now in
Speaker 1: China is around um and so one of the responses
Speaker 1: to that is just forget about it. We're you know,
Speaker 1: we're gonna lie flat, We're gonna we're gonna reject all
Speaker 1: of this. There's different expressions, and I don't actually the
Speaker 1: sort of like you know, sociologists and me is like, well,
Speaker 1: we don't actually have numbers to know how many people
Speaker 1: are are lying flat, and like that is true, Like
Speaker 1: maybe most people are still just going to work and
Speaker 1: you know, doing their job. But there's enough you know,
Speaker 1: stories and certainly in terms of cultural residence of people
Speaker 1: just doing the bare minimum at work or working for
Speaker 1: short periods of time, earning just enough money to survive
Speaker 1: and not worrying about meeting those kind of social expectations
Speaker 1: around buying a car, buying an apartment, getting married, having kids,
Speaker 1: because people just see it as as kind of it's
Speaker 1: kind of hopeless. Um. And so I think that's a
Speaker 1: really important backdrop, because we have to understand at some
Speaker 1: level that these protests are about a sense of hopelessness,
Speaker 1: right be at economic opportunities, be at the political system
Speaker 1: where cigent being is going to rain as long as
Speaker 1: he wants, or be at zero COVID where you know,
Speaker 1: at any given moment, you're gonna be locked inside your
Speaker 1: apartment and you're not gonna be able to see your
Speaker 1: friends or or do anything. So um, yeah, So I
Speaker 1: think it's very relevant. Yeah, and I wanted to I
Speaker 1: guess also too. This is something I talked about on
Speaker 1: this podcast a lot. But I need to like drill
Speaker 1: into people's heads, like just the sheer amount that people
Speaker 1: in China are working, just like like the number of hours,
Speaker 1: a number of days a week, the the amount of
Speaker 1: effort that is being put in is like it it is,
Speaker 1: it it is. It is a level of rowser plus
Speaker 1: value extraction that like like like most places in the
Speaker 1: world haven't seen in like a quarter, like in like
Speaker 1: half a century. It is like or even longer than that,
Speaker 1: Like it is, it is a a truly stunning like
Speaker 1: there's a truly stunning level of exploitation in terms of
Speaker 1: things like nine six, in terms of the people who
Speaker 1: are working schedules that are way worse than that, who
Speaker 1: don't really ever get like talked about because they're not
Speaker 1: tech workers or they're not people who have sort of
Speaker 1: like a platform Chinese society. Yeah, it's it's extremely normalized,
Speaker 1: you know, I mean like thing which which first of all,
Speaker 1: it is maybe worth mentioning that China legally has a
Speaker 1: forty hour work week. You're only allowed to work thirty
Speaker 1: six hours of overtime a month, right, so probably you know,
Speaker 1: not more than forty nine or fifty hours a week.
Speaker 1: That's that's like the legal the legal standard. Nobody even
Speaker 1: remotely pretends like that is a thing in any industry.
Speaker 1: There's legal debates about like whether it applies to professional
Speaker 1: white collar you know, salaried workers or not. But um,
Speaker 1: you know, when the n S thing came out and
Speaker 1: there was a pretty cool i think movement based mostly
Speaker 1: online among tech workers, it was it was great, it
Speaker 1: was very inspiring, and also every single blue collar worker,
Speaker 1: like we've been waiting the United six for decades, you know,
Speaker 1: um and so so it is, it is very normal
Speaker 1: across these these different kinds of of stratum for sure. Um.
Speaker 1: One of the cool things about nine six is people
Speaker 1: were we're revolting against it and saying like this is
Speaker 1: an unacceptable way to live. And again it comes back
Speaker 1: to this whole thing of like all of these feelings
Speaker 1: of you know, these enhanced pressures right where it's just
Speaker 1: like how do I live in this city? How do
Speaker 1: I find like decent housing? Like if you know, if
Speaker 1: I want to have like a social life, which is
Speaker 1: the thing that some people in their twenties want to have,
Speaker 1: you know, how do I do that? It's impossible under
Speaker 1: those circumstances. Um. So so again, like you can't read
Speaker 1: these movements mechanically off of these these uh, these structural changes.
Speaker 1: But like that is a thing that has been happening
Speaker 1: that is unresolved. It's not at least for the you know,
Speaker 1: the blank paper protesters, the kind of the more elite
Speaker 1: students and stuff. They haven't specifically articulated um, their grievances
Speaker 1: as labor demands. Um. But it's it's at least an
Speaker 1: important backdrop to what's happening today? Yeah, and I think
Speaker 1: it's remember like how I think I think this was
Speaker 1: like mide twenty night keeen. I'm trying to remember when
Speaker 1: I when I saw this specific video. But there there, there,
Speaker 1: there there was a video from the Hong Kong protests
Speaker 1: that was like it's almost it was it was like
Speaker 1: literally one of these classic like like sort of Twitter things,
Speaker 1: but like what do you want out? What do you
Speaker 1: want to do after the revolution, And it was like
Speaker 1: most of it was like I want to start a bakery,
Speaker 1: like I want to work in a library. And it
Speaker 1: strikes me that there's these things that get subsumed under
Speaker 1: you know when when when when you see a pro
Speaker 1: democracy movement, right when when you see you know, like
Speaker 1: the sort of well, I I guess that there's something
Speaker 1: interesting to hear about the like like day one of
Speaker 1: the protests, there were a lot of videos that we're
Speaker 1: talking about Iran and that kind of seemed to like
Speaker 1: like the very early videos were about sort of solidarity
Speaker 1: with the protests in a room she and then like
Speaker 1: it was like it was like specifically tying that to
Speaker 1: Iran and then to sort of pro democracy demands and
Speaker 1: then later on you get the sort of like like
Speaker 1: the Shanghai like down with the party, Downianping, like we
Speaker 1: went to bocracy and free speech stuff. But it strikes
Speaker 1: me that like a lot of the times when you
Speaker 1: see people making those demands, it's because they think that
Speaker 1: like you know, it's like there there there's a whole
Speaker 1: set of of like things that they things that they
Speaker 1: believe about the future and about what will happen in
Speaker 1: the future that are like not articulated in the demands,
Speaker 1: but if you talked about if you talk about them,
Speaker 1: like if you talk to people about what they think
Speaker 1: is going to happen after that, there's this whole sort
Speaker 1: of like opening up of social stuff that they think
Speaker 1: will be like the necessary results of like the end
Speaker 1: of the one party state. And it's like, you know,
Speaker 1: I don't want him, Like I don't know. I had
Speaker 1: this debate a lot with like like there there's kind
Speaker 1: of like Chinese international student you get in the US
Speaker 1: who like comes to the US and it's like immediately
Speaker 1: like enormously enamored with the US. It's it's it's sort
Speaker 1: of the mirror image of how we have a bunch
Speaker 1: of people who are like incredibly enamored with the Chinese state,
Speaker 1: and then you get people who come here and are
Speaker 1: like incredibly enamored the American state, and it's like, well, yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: this politician will see you and they will talk to you. However, Comma,
Speaker 1: in about two years they will be voting to throw
Speaker 1: you in prison. So like, but like obviously, like both
Speaker 1: people in China understand the Chinese system sucks and that
Speaker 1: the promises that people like in the US believe about
Speaker 1: it are fake, and then people in the U s
Speaker 1: understand that you can get a multiparty democracy and things
Speaker 1: because still be absolutely shit. But yeah, yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: it strikes me that there's a lot of stuff sort
Speaker 1: of embedded in in these demands that are like not
Speaker 1: really explicitly articulated until later. And then that's also, I guess,
Speaker 1: been a hard part about these protests that like, I
Speaker 1: don't know, it's hard to get information out. You can
Speaker 1: get shortened views with people. Mostly what you're getting are
Speaker 1: like thirty seconds of footage of people yelling at a cop. Right, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean there's a lot going on. Like if you
Speaker 1: have this one, this tiny little opening, and then instantly
Speaker 1: you have protests in like all of these cities all
Speaker 1: over the country, dozens of universities, protests among you know,
Speaker 1: working class migrants, like middle class people in Shanghai, like
Speaker 1: you know, all across the country. Like that suggests that
Speaker 1: people have a variety of sets of grievances and they're
Speaker 1: kind of funneling them through this this meta narrative around
Speaker 1: ending the lockdown, which is not to minished the significance
Speaker 1: of the actual lockdowns, which are are called causing real
Speaker 1: human suffering. But there's definitely a lot going on, and
Speaker 1: you know, one of the big ones is what's happening
Speaker 1: in shin Jong, Like it's we still don't really know
Speaker 1: how Weakers are feeling about all of this. The fact
Speaker 1: that like all of the all the Protestants in the
Speaker 1: big Eastern cities are about commemorating what happened in ermchi
Speaker 1: uh in a fire that killed mostly if not exclusively, weaker.
Speaker 1: It's like that that that deserves to be talked about. Um,
Speaker 1: we don't really know how Like the Han people on
Speaker 1: the streets in the Eastern cities, like if they're thinking
Speaker 1: about this this backdrop of you know, massive repression, surveillance
Speaker 1: and mass internment of of weakers and other Moslim minorities. Um,
Speaker 1: but that's another thing. Uh And and I think the
Speaker 1: same thing goes for the treatment of migrant workers in
Speaker 1: in fox Con and these other um blue collar workers
Speaker 1: who were put into the closed loop. Like to what
Speaker 1: extent our urban um Han people still kind of willing
Speaker 1: to go along with sacrificing migrant workers and treating them
Speaker 1: as as as second class citizens or is there a
Speaker 1: possibility of developing some real sense of of solidarity um
Speaker 1: with ending not just the closed loop, but ending you know,
Speaker 1: like kuko based discrimination, ending the camps in Shinjong, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean, you can kind of spin out from there
Speaker 1: if if you are interested in thinking about what it
Speaker 1: would mean to democratize China in like a in a
Speaker 1: robust sense of the word, I think points out of
Speaker 1: everything about these protests that are complicated, right, which is
Speaker 1: that like they are cross class in a lot of ways.
Speaker 1: But I don't know, it seems to me like the
Speaker 1: way they're manifesting is very much down class lines. Like Okay,
Speaker 1: I genuinely don't understand what's going on in Guangzho that
Speaker 1: like every single video I see at a Gwangho is
Speaker 1: like seventy people throwing bottles at a cop, and like
Speaker 1: every video I see out of like Shanghai is like
Speaker 1: six people holding a piece of paper. But it very
Speaker 1: much seems like, you know, like when when it when
Speaker 1: when when the cops are getting to like these these
Speaker 1: sort of like these working class neighborhood these neighborhoods that
Speaker 1: are like a informal housing, these neighborhoods that are full
Speaker 1: of migrant workers. There were these really really intense conflicts
Speaker 1: with the police in ways that like kind of aren't happening. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, okay, that's because the kind of stuff seems
Speaker 1: to be happening in a room sheet and I think
Speaker 1: it's happening there partially because you know, this is like
Speaker 1: well okay, I don't know off thought in my head
Speaker 1: whether it's more militarized than Tibet, but like one of
Speaker 1: the most militarized, like one of the most heavily police
Speaker 1: places in China. And then also people are just really
Speaker 1: like the the the immediate and palpable anger seems to
Speaker 1: be the highest there because you know, I mean, like
Speaker 1: like it you're you're going to be more piste off
Speaker 1: when it's people in your city or like you know,
Speaker 1: you you maybe were like three blocks away from this fire.
Speaker 1: Yeahs like these people. But yeah, one of one piece
Speaker 1: about about urch is that they've been in some form
Speaker 1: of lockdown for like a hundred days, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so that's not and and part of that has to
Speaker 1: do with the fact that it is this colonial setting
Speaker 1: where they feel like they can do things to people
Speaker 1: that they can't do in Beijing and Chong like people
Speaker 1: are not going to do that, right, It's just like
Speaker 1: it's inconceivable. Um, there's obviously a lot of Han people
Speaker 1: in An She is actually a majority Han, now yeah,
Speaker 1: I think, yeah, um that that sounds right to me,
Speaker 1: and shin Jong is increasingly Han as well, although I
Speaker 1: believe we are still constitute a plurality. So you know,
Speaker 1: there's just like each the lockdowns kind of filtered down
Speaker 1: to these different localities and into different communities with their
Speaker 1: different social and class compositions in different kinds of ways
Speaker 1: and have different kinds of effects. Right, So you can
Speaker 1: put people in lockdown in shin Jong for a hundred
Speaker 1: days and they're going to be really pissed when they
Speaker 1: get out. In the case of Guang Joe, you know,
Speaker 1: this was also part of the sequence that I think
Speaker 1: has been written out of the official narrative. It's not
Speaker 1: it wasn't just fox Con. You had the initial fox
Speaker 1: Con escape in in October early in November, and then
Speaker 1: you had these pretty intense riots that happened in Guangzho.
Speaker 1: But those were in these urban villages, so called urban villages,
Speaker 1: largely informal housing, very densely populated, that are overwhelmingly migrant workers.
Speaker 1: In this case, it was mostly people from Hubei Um,
Speaker 1: which is which is where Wuhan is and Um and
Speaker 1: so you know, just those migrant communities were put into
Speaker 1: lockdown in Guangho. So if you were over in yeah,
Speaker 1: if you over in Tianaha District, which is the sort
Speaker 1: of the the newer like fancier part of Guangho with
Speaker 1: lots of high rises, um, you know, those places were
Speaker 1: not under lockdown. And so they they put the migrant communities.
Speaker 1: And I saw some like really not nice stuff, you know,
Speaker 1: people just being like oh yeah, you know. The the
Speaker 1: local Guanggo people on the other side of the river
Speaker 1: are just like going about their life and and they're
Speaker 1: they're okay with what's happening to the migrants, and the
Speaker 1: migrants were, as is the case in some of these
Speaker 1: earlier lockdowns, actually facing real subsistence crisis, like they didn't
Speaker 1: have enough food to eat, and they couldn't leave to
Speaker 1: try to get food. Um. So that's why you saw
Speaker 1: these super intense riots, and that's why you see them
Speaker 1: confronting the police and you know, screaming at them, throwing
Speaker 1: things at them. You see tear gas, all of these things,
Speaker 1: I think. So, I think that's the only place I've
Speaker 1: seen tear gas so far, like a room. I'm not
Speaker 1: there may have been a video, I don't I don't
Speaker 1: remember specifically by the room sheet, but definitely like going
Speaker 1: only place I've seen that level of repression. Yeah, yeah, no,
Speaker 1: it was. It was. I mean, you know, the Jung
Speaker 1: Joe Fox con was probably the most violent and the
Speaker 1: larger scale. Um, but you know that was it was
Speaker 1: a little bit different Gwangjoe. It's kind of like smaller streets.
Speaker 1: They're fighting, you know, street by street. So um yeah,
Speaker 1: so they have a different experience of people in Shanghai. Again,
Speaker 1: not to minimize their demands, and I think it's it's
Speaker 1: important for people to find points of commonality, um against
Speaker 1: this policy. Um, but it's you know, it's not like
Speaker 1: that if if you're if you're a middle class person
Speaker 1: Han person in Shanghai, which is again not to minimize
Speaker 1: the very real difficulties that those folks have been facing
Speaker 1: as well. Something this kind of you know, I think
Speaker 1: that there there's there's like another group of people who
Speaker 1: should probably talk about a little bit, which is like
Speaker 1: this sort of downwardly mobile class a business owners who
Speaker 1: have been kind of just getting a dilated by the lockdowns.
Speaker 1: And does that that happen in the US too, although
Speaker 1: the Chinese version of it seems they're like less marginally
Speaker 1: less absolutely psychotic, like they haven't tried, they haven't tried
Speaker 1: to like kidnap a governor yet, Like they're not like
Speaker 1: they're not as fascist as their American counterparts. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: it's it's it seems it seems like there's a kind
Speaker 1: of interesting I don't know, there's there's a class dynamic
Speaker 1: that kind of reminds me of occupy and that you
Speaker 1: have this sort of like kind of tenuous alliance between
Speaker 1: like some some parts of the working class, these elite
Speaker 1: students and like this downwardly mobile middle class. But it
Speaker 1: strikes me that, you know, I mean, the the sort
Speaker 1: of defining thing about occupying I think, like the defining
Speaker 1: thing about the whole sort of two thousand eleven doesn't
Speaker 1: thirteen wave of protests, was that, like it was it
Speaker 1: was really really easy to get people together into a
Speaker 1: physical space, and when when you were in that single
Speaker 1: physical space, it was like, yeah, it's not it's not
Speaker 1: like classes appeared, but it was like, you know, it was,
Speaker 1: it was, it was. It was it was a way
Speaker 1: in which sort of like classes were mixing and you
Speaker 1: could form this new kind of like identity based around
Speaker 1: like what you're doing in this place. And it doesn't
Speaker 1: really seem like that's possible here. It really seems like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, like there's this huge like you know,
Speaker 1: this this this is a protest that is like happening
Speaker 1: in a lot of different places at the same time.
Speaker 1: But it's like it doesn't. Yeah, the segments they don't
Speaker 1: and they don't they don't really have a sort of
Speaker 1: like cohesive social identity that in a way that you
Speaker 1: could get out of a bunch of people being in
Speaker 1: the same place. Yeah. No, I think that's right. I mean,
Speaker 1: they're spatially segmented. Um. Something someone pointed out on Twitter
Speaker 1: I can remember who. But they're drawing comparisons to the
Speaker 1: protests and the kind of the physical arrangements where people
Speaker 1: are living and so particularly given you know, the online censorship,
Speaker 1: like that's been really important. So you have these worker
Speaker 1: dormitories and fox Con like you can organize by actually
Speaker 1: talking to people with student dormitories, right, Um, and then
Speaker 1: you have much smaller protests among the you know, the
Speaker 1: middle class people who are able to circulate things online.
Speaker 1: And so the consequence of that is is they are
Speaker 1: pretty segmented. And I think you know, everyone has their
Speaker 1: own grievance with zero COVID, but these grievances are actually
Speaker 1: pretty different. Right. So the fox Con workers don't like
Speaker 1: the closed loop management system where you know, where they
Speaker 1: can't leave, where where they're subjected to unsafe conditions, etcetera. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, the petty bourgeoise like they don't like the
Speaker 1: fact that there's no foot traffic, you know, coming into
Speaker 1: their shops. Right. And UM, I don't know if you
Speaker 1: saw the video of the guy like kicking down the
Speaker 1: wall with a soup latal and yeah, specifically yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean it was. It was very theatrical and dramatic and
Speaker 1: uh and a great video you know in terms of
Speaker 1: like the class position, and yeah, you can see how
Speaker 1: it can kind of capsize into fash quickly. Um. And
Speaker 1: then like the students, you know, they want to be
Speaker 1: able to live normal student lives and like leave their dormitories.
Speaker 1: And that's the thing that I think students anywhere can
Speaker 1: associate with. So it's like, yeah, they're all against the
Speaker 1: zero COVID policy, but then it's kind of like what
Speaker 1: are their politics after that? And I think if if
Speaker 1: this is going to open up, um, you know, some
Speaker 1: kind of more expansive political vision, like, it's gonna be
Speaker 1: hard to maintain that like that unity. Right. The students
Speaker 1: are already talking about like you know, censorship, freedom of speech,
Speaker 1: those things which I support, I think are very good.
Speaker 1: You're probably not gonna get the petty bougeoisie to like
Speaker 1: risk arrest and violence with the cops, you know, over
Speaker 1: like holding up a blank white piece of paper, um,
Speaker 1: you know. And then the micrant workers have another whole
Speaker 1: set of things you know, around like basic like health infrastructure,
Speaker 1: like you know, can they get access to decent healthcare
Speaker 1: in the places where they're where they're living, and that's
Speaker 1: not going to resonate to the same extent with the students.
Speaker 1: So yeah, the one I think about a lot was
Speaker 1: like that there there's a video going around it this
Speaker 1: guy being like I don't care about politics, I just
Speaker 1: want to go to the movies, and I was like,
Speaker 1: this is the most American person in China, Like this
Speaker 1: is the one person that I'm like, okay, like that,
Speaker 1: you know, and and like that there is that kind
Speaker 1: of sort of like I just I just want to
Speaker 1: live my normal life like thing that's happening. And then
Speaker 1: that that I think is a kind of recognizable American impulse.
Speaker 1: But then you have the stuff that's like did you
Speaker 1: see did you see those pictures that were going around
Speaker 1: of like the hospitals they were putting vgicant workers in
Speaker 1: were just like the entire bathroom floor is just like
Speaker 1: covered in poop and like no, awful. Yeah, it's like
Speaker 1: the whole whole bathroom floors is just flooded. There's like
Speaker 1: just like the the the you can't flush toilet paper
Speaker 1: down it, so there's just these like mountains of toilet
Speaker 1: paper and I think like, yeah, it's awful like that
Speaker 1: the difference between the people whose things are like I
Speaker 1: want to go to the movies and the people who's
Speaker 1: demand is like please stop locking me in this like
Speaker 1: like people like you know that that was I guess.
Speaker 1: I guess the other sort of lost thing that seemed
Speaker 1: to be pretty big in Chinese social media that I
Speaker 1: don't that wasn't talked about much here was the uh
Speaker 1: there was this bus that capsized that killed like twenty
Speaker 1: seven people who were being taken like to a facility
Speaker 1: to specifically to hold, like you know, this is like
Speaker 1: what one of one of these sort of like I
Speaker 1: don't I don't even really want to dignify them by
Speaker 1: calling them hospitals because they're like like just a complete
Speaker 1: disaster um. But where were people were being held like
Speaker 1: held because they had yeah, yeah, and I don't know,
Speaker 1: it seems like that there's a really big sort of
Speaker 1: like you know, I mean, I guess it's like like
Speaker 1: the the protests are reflecting all of all of the
Speaker 1: sort of like existing classified in Chinese society in ways
Speaker 1: that I think are are pretty obvious if you look
Speaker 1: at it, which I guess in some sense, like this
Speaker 1: this does strike me as the most gentlemin esque thing
Speaker 1: we look. The most unuminous thing about it is the
Speaker 1: way that the media has been like specifically covering the
Speaker 1: grievances of exactly like two groups of people, which is
Speaker 1: like the students and like and then all of the
Speaker 1: labor stuff has just vanished after about day two. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: yeah for sure. Um. And I mean I don't have
Speaker 1: much optimism that that that the coverage will um, but
Speaker 1: you know, there there is an experience, um that middle
Speaker 1: class people I think have had pretty acutely going back
Speaker 1: at least to the Shanghai lockdown, of this realization that
Speaker 1: there actually are no limits on state power, right, and
Speaker 1: that to them was kind of like a shock. You know.
Speaker 1: They're like, oh, like I thought I was just gonna
Speaker 1: be able to go about my life like as long
Speaker 1: as I didn't you know, demand to be able to
Speaker 1: vote for the president. Like I can have a job, job,
Speaker 1: I can um, you know, go eat hot pot or
Speaker 1: you know, get whatever kind of delicious food I want.
Speaker 1: Living in these big cities, can travel internationally. You know,
Speaker 1: all of these things are you know more or less Okay, Um,
Speaker 1: there's been lots of you know there's lots of other
Speaker 1: people in training society for him, that's never been the experience, right,
Speaker 1: most importantly the minorities and the workers and the migrant
Speaker 1: workers who have always you know, experienced that raw and
Speaker 1: unchecked power of the state. And so you know, does
Speaker 1: does this have the capacity to kind of bring them together?
Speaker 1: You know, it's going to be extremely difficult to do,
Speaker 1: especially because there aren't like spaces for political organizing and
Speaker 1: working through these differences in a constructive way. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: I will see. The one thing that kind of that
Speaker 1: strikes me is something that like is just different about
Speaker 1: this cycle is that, like I don't know, I don't, like,
Speaker 1: I don't think I've ever seen in my lifetime outside
Speaker 1: of like really tiny maoist sex like people openly calling
Speaker 1: for the downfall of the government, like just in in
Speaker 1: a kind of like a large systemic way, and like
Speaker 1: it it seems like, I don't know, maybe maybe the
Speaker 1: censors will sort of get control back, but it really
Speaker 1: seems like there's been this kind of floodgate that's opened
Speaker 1: where suddenly, like there's a there's a brief moment where
Speaker 1: like it suddenly became possible to talk about things where
Speaker 1: you know, like like two months ago, it was like
Speaker 1: one guy laid aside on a bridge and like this
Speaker 1: was this was like the biggest thing that had ever
Speaker 1: happened in Chinese society whatever, etcetera, etcetera. And then suddenly,
Speaker 1: like you know, you just have people on the streets
Speaker 1: are shrun high, like just chanting stuff that wasn't even
Speaker 1: on that banner, and like, I don't know, like it
Speaker 1: really seems like like it's it's not like they've actually
Speaker 1: like fully lost control of the country or anything like,
Speaker 1: they're not even close to that, but it's it's like
Speaker 1: the sort of like the sort of regime of terror
Speaker 1: and fear that had been in place to keep people
Speaker 1: from doing this kind of stuff has fallen off a
Speaker 1: little bit. Yeah. I mean, I I'd be very curious
Speaker 1: to know what the vibe is like in China, and
Speaker 1: obviously I have not been there for a while. Um,
Speaker 1: but like, and this is wildly speculative, and if you
Speaker 1: have any Chinese listeners who want to correct me, I
Speaker 1: would be glad to have some more information about this.
Speaker 1: But my feeling from Hofar is that you know, like
Speaker 1: she Jinping is just like you can't you can't say
Speaker 1: anything about him, and that even in like private spaces,
Speaker 1: you know, people just like don't feel like the ability
Speaker 1: to kind of imagine something different and like that has
Speaker 1: been changed. Like I don't think we're going to see
Speaker 1: a lot more people on the streets chanting down to
Speaker 1: down with the Communist Party like that's you know, it's
Speaker 1: a risky it's a risky thing to do. But I
Speaker 1: do think that like now, at least people know that
Speaker 1: there's other other people in the country that are thinking
Speaker 1: the same things that they're thinking. And then at least
Speaker 1: within you know, like you know, face to face interactions,
Speaker 1: that people might be a little bit more willing to
Speaker 1: kind of say like, oh, like these protests happened, that
Speaker 1: was pretty crazy, Like let's talk about that, um and
Speaker 1: so so so that to me is optimistic. UM. And
Speaker 1: I do hope that more of this organizing can take place,
Speaker 1: you know, offline, because I think that's the only safe
Speaker 1: way to do it. Um. So So, yeah, I I
Speaker 1: think something has changed significantly, and you see it here,
Speaker 1: you know. I mean, I've been teaching Chinese students for
Speaker 1: ten years. Um, there's no question that people are interested,
Speaker 1: um in talking about things now in a in a
Speaker 1: more open way than was the case a couple of
Speaker 1: years ago. And like Herett Cornell, we had we had
Speaker 1: a little vigil for um Fer and she as well,
Speaker 1: and people were chanting, you know, down with Hi Jin
Speaker 1: ping Um, which is kind of like okay, you're you know,
Speaker 1: you're the good New York Like it's not dangerous. Well,
Speaker 1: I think students feel it to be dangerous, And definitely
Speaker 1: a month or two ago would have felt it to
Speaker 1: be quite dangerous. So yeah, and I guess we probably
Speaker 1: shouldn't like completely downplay the fact that like the CCP
Speaker 1: has international networks in a way that's like the way
Speaker 1: it tends to get covered in the press is very
Speaker 1: sort of like this kind of like right wing fear mongering.
Speaker 1: But was like, no, these people do exist, and like, yeah,
Speaker 1: like it is possible for you to like tweet something
Speaker 1: while you're in the US and then like someone in
Speaker 1: China finds out about it and things start to go
Speaker 1: very badly for you very quickly, And that's for sure,
Speaker 1: Like that's that's that's a real danger that yeah, and
Speaker 1: regardless of how many spies there are, how pervasive they are,
Speaker 1: like it is a real experience, real fear of the
Speaker 1: Chinese students here have right, they don't feel comfortable. You know,
Speaker 1: they might feel more comfortable speaking openly here than they
Speaker 1: do actually within China, but they still don't feel totally free,
Speaker 1: and and that is a very widespread sentiment. I guess,
Speaker 1: sort of enclosing, I don't know, my, I don't think
Speaker 1: anyone can really have much of an analysis that's better
Speaker 1: than them guessing about what's going to happen next, because
Speaker 1: this already was something that like two weeks ago, like
Speaker 1: if you'd ask anyone, like anyone in China or outside
Speaker 1: of China who wasn't like I don't know, like in
Speaker 1: the following Gong or something, whether whether they were suddenly
Speaker 1: going to be large deal like protested China, everyone would
Speaker 1: have been like, are you nuts? But yeah, I'm wondering
Speaker 1: how what you think is going to happen next? I
Speaker 1: don't know. My my, my sort of tentative read of
Speaker 1: it was like, it seems like I don't know. It's
Speaker 1: it seems to me that for for a very very
Speaker 1: long time, the Chinese political system was specifically set up
Speaker 1: to stop this, like like this was this was the
Speaker 1: exact thing. It was. It was designed to make sure
Speaker 1: there would never be another sort of like like that
Speaker 1: there would never be a large well you know, we
Speaker 1: don't know how how long this is going to go on, right,
Speaker 1: but there was there was never there was never supposed
Speaker 1: to be another street movement that was like coordinated between cities,
Speaker 1: that was large and that had real political demands. And
Speaker 1: you know, I like, I I don't know. Maybe maybe
Speaker 1: I could, I could be the most brog I've ever been,
Speaker 1: but I cannot imagine this like this specific round of
Speaker 1: protests really like challenging the government at all, Like I
Speaker 1: don't know, some something something would have to like I
Speaker 1: don't know, like aliens would have to like descend from
Speaker 1: the sky or something like. I don't know. I don't like,
Speaker 1: I don't I don't think they can do it. But
Speaker 1: the frequency at which these kinds of things break out
Speaker 1: has been increasing steadily for the past probably twenty or
Speaker 1: thirty years. I mean in the nineties are sort of
Speaker 1: a low point for this stuff. But you know, like
Speaker 1: if if you're if you're in a country like Ecuador, right,
Speaker 1: You've seen like two pretty large scale like mass street
Speaker 1: movements in like three years, right, And you know it's
Speaker 1: it's it's, it's, it's. It seems to be sort of
Speaker 1: broadly the there's there, there's, there's been this sort of
Speaker 1: like the decaying economic conditions are combined with this like
Speaker 1: the general decaying ability of the state to prevent like
Speaker 1: a subsequent movement from from unfolding. And so I don't know,
Speaker 1: Like I I my senses that this one's not gonna
Speaker 1: do anything, but we might see another one of these
Speaker 1: in like three years or something. Yeah, I don't think
Speaker 1: we're going to see this movement in the in the
Speaker 1: weeks and months to come to like cohere into this
Speaker 1: like massive politically potent force that has the capacity to
Speaker 1: either continue to exert demands on the central state or
Speaker 1: threatened state power. Like, I don't think that that's going
Speaker 1: to happen. Um, I do think. I think I think
Speaker 1: the first thing is to acknowledge and to chalk up
Speaker 1: the victories that have already been Um one, So Fox
Speaker 1: foxne workers got paid, you know, they went out the
Speaker 1: rioted like Fox's like, here's ten thousand un for you
Speaker 1: to leave that even for you to do your job right,
Speaker 1: so like, and those were workers that came in after
Speaker 1: the other workers escaped so they have been there in
Speaker 1: quarantine for like a couple of days. Rioted got ten
Speaker 1: thousand un which is almost U S. Dollars like they
Speaker 1: so so they did really well. Um And but I
Speaker 1: think more broadly, you know, around the zero COVID, the
Speaker 1: government has already made changes. They will never acknowledge we're
Speaker 1: doing this because people protested, like that's not how they operate.
Speaker 1: But um, you know, they said, Okay, we're actually gonna
Speaker 1: get more serious about vaccinating people, which is what they
Speaker 1: need to do in order to have sort of an
Speaker 1: exit strategy. There have been some some signals, low key
Speaker 1: ones about further loosening. I mean, I think that there's
Speaker 1: a real question about how they go about doing this
Speaker 1: because if they just let it rip tomorrow, like actually,
Speaker 1: hundreds of thousands of people will die. Yeah. So like
Speaker 1: I think what they need to do is they need
Speaker 1: to vaccinate people, and they need to build a real
Speaker 1: public health infrastructure that includes migrant workers. But you know,
Speaker 1: that's we'll see if that happens. So so I think
Speaker 1: that those are already victories like which which we should
Speaker 1: which you know, we should take account of. And I
Speaker 1: think moving forward, the ability to repress like the the
Speaker 1: street demonstrations should not be under underestimated, like the state
Speaker 1: has immense resources at its capacity. I don't think that
Speaker 1: we're going to continue to see people chanting, you know,
Speaker 1: down with the Communist Party in the streets regularly. Um
Speaker 1: So I think that they'll be able to at least
Speaker 1: push that down a little bit and maybe with some concessions,
Speaker 1: people will be satisfied. You know, the guy who just
Speaker 1: wants to be able to go to the movie, like
Speaker 1: next year this time, there's a good chance he will
Speaker 1: just be able to go to the movies. To kind
Speaker 1: of continue with my labor centric perspective, though, I think
Speaker 1: it's going to be harder for for workers. I think
Speaker 1: it's going to be harder for them to repress that
Speaker 1: as long as the closed loop management systems are in
Speaker 1: effect and lockdowns are happening. I mean, it just puts
Speaker 1: insane demands on these workers, and there were revolts against
Speaker 1: it when it first happened in Shanghai back in April,
Speaker 1: uh and I think that those will continue to exist.
Speaker 1: Um but I think we'll probably see this kind of
Speaker 1: reversion to what's existed for the last couple of decades,
Speaker 1: which is lots of you know, small scale, somewhat manageable
Speaker 1: and localized protests. The question is, like, does this kind
Speaker 1: of open up, um the possibility of politicization, which we
Speaker 1: have not really seen since nine um in a in
Speaker 1: a robust way at least, And so does this kind
Speaker 1: of open up some of those possibilities so those local
Speaker 1: protests can begin to to speak to each other with
Speaker 1: some sort of common language. UM, and and coher some
Speaker 1: kind of political force that's harder for the state to tame. UM.
Speaker 1: We'll see. Yeah, And I guess I guess the other
Speaker 1: sort of X factor here is like can can can
Speaker 1: the CCP get the growth rate above like five? But yeah,
Speaker 1: like yeah, I I I don't. I don't know how
Speaker 1: they do it like that. I don't know, like I
Speaker 1: I short of like short of like actually just letting
Speaker 1: all of the sort of like like all all of
Speaker 1: the sort of like slack and excess capacity just get
Speaker 1: like you know, just just like intention like tanking the
Speaker 1: entire economy and just like running all of these sort
Speaker 1: of unprofitab business in the ground. Like yeah, I don't,
Speaker 1: I don't see how they do that. And that does
Speaker 1: seem to me, like you know, to be a kind
Speaker 1: of like the sort of like looming horizon over. I
Speaker 1: mean this and this is really true of everyone, like
Speaker 1: the the sort of looming horizon over. Like every government
Speaker 1: in the world has been that the growth rate has
Speaker 1: been collapsing for like the last forty years. And China was,
Speaker 1: you know, trying to change the comedy was like the
Speaker 1: last thing that was really driving in and that's like
Speaker 1: not really true anymore. It's it's a disaster. I mean.
Speaker 1: And then even even without COVID, it was sort of
Speaker 1: like not going great. I mean, it wasn't like you know,
Speaker 1: I mean, it hadn't reached like it hadn't like reached
Speaker 1: like you know, like recession or i hadn't really reached
Speaker 1: like sort of post industrialized country levels of like here's
Speaker 1: your two percent growth every year, be happy with it,
Speaker 1: but like I don't know, yeah, but but the growth,
Speaker 1: I mean this is maybe like another whole conversation, but
Speaker 1: like the growth has become less effective, right, It's just
Speaker 1: it's this like investment led growth. It's there, there's massive
Speaker 1: growth in debt and they can you know, build another bridge,
Speaker 1: build another airport, building. I mean, they're not building the
Speaker 1: apartment blocks as much anymore. But they do that they
Speaker 1: can prop up the growth a little bit, right, But
Speaker 1: like the fundamental problem that they've been unable to address
Speaker 1: is like increasing domestic consumption and having a more equitable
Speaker 1: model of growth, And the reason that they can't do
Speaker 1: that is fundamentally a political problem, Like they can't figure
Speaker 1: out a way to give working class people more money
Speaker 1: and to give them some social protections, um and like
Speaker 1: until they resolve that political problem, Like I just don't
Speaker 1: see them being able to deal with with that economic problem.
Speaker 1: So that means you are going to continue to have
Speaker 1: this kind of ongoing forms of stagnation. Zero COVID really
Speaker 1: hurts it a lot more. Of course, the geo political
Speaker 1: conflict with the US and and Biden, you know, trying
Speaker 1: to economically unique at them like that doesn't help. And
Speaker 1: then the demographics of you know, like all of these
Speaker 1: things are making making their lives much more difficult. And
Speaker 1: so one way to interpret what's happened um under under
Speaker 1: zero COVID is the expansion of a massive and terrifying
Speaker 1: surveillance state that will allow them to weather whatever political
Speaker 1: storms are coming in the future. Yeah, and I guess
Speaker 1: I don't know well well well, well, well well we'll see,
Speaker 1: we'll see whether that works for them. I am somewhat
Speaker 1: skeptical in that, like I don't know, like good luck,
Speaker 1: actually terrible luck. I hope it goes badly for them,
Speaker 1: the worst of luck. Yeah. So, Eli, thank you so
Speaker 1: much for coming on the show. Yeah, it's been a pleasure. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And okay, where where can people find you and find
Speaker 1: the stuff that you do? Uh well, I'm on Twitter
Speaker 1: as long as it's still there, um Eli D Friedman
Speaker 1: And uh yeah, I'm on the Internet. I don't know,
Speaker 1: that's that's the main place. Come if you're in Ithaca,
Speaker 1: come on by, all right. Yeah, this this has been
Speaker 1: Make it Happen here, drag every government into perpetual and
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