July 13, 2022 • 40 mins
In part 2 we look at the a new kind of bread riot that continues to this day: the IMF riots, and then take a look at the two latest uprisings in Sri Lanka and Ecuador.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
I love how often the Holocaust has been trending over
the last year. Um, that's good. That's the thing you
want to see trending in. Um, it's it could happen here,
all right, Chris, continue with your bread riots. Yeah, we're back.
There's more riots. Uh. Now, last episode we talked about
(00:26):
historians declaring the end of the bread death of the
bread riot, and like in the sixties and early seventies, Like,
I think that this is this is one of the
ways you can tell that period people genuinely thought the
bull was going to get better. It was that like
they genuinely believed that like the centralized state and like
capitalism can always provide foods you want up bread riots anymore?
You get mark. You if you were born in that period,
(00:48):
you like grew up and people were fleeing from dynonic
ass in the street and like getting getting eaten by
woolly mammoth's and then by the time you're forty, you've
got the telegraph. So I get it, right. I get
why people think that that progress was really back in
those because they got they wiped out the dynamic as
this is. Yeah, you have seen Howard Taff building the
(01:09):
pyramids exactly exactly exactly you have you have you have
seen the future rise up literally in front of you,
and he went from eating mud to Hershey's chocolate. It's
it's an incredibly impressive sort of period of modern historical evolution.
And you know, and one of the things you see,
like like you'll see like Marxists calling bread rice primitive
(01:32):
rebels doing like populist mob politics that's been like displaced
by proper Marxist class politics. And then like every single
one of these people was like the most wrong anyone,
like basically from that period until until the moment the
end of history. Guy starts writing, they are the most
wrong people like on the planet. Well, it's also funny
(01:53):
to hear that idea that like there was something primitive
about these people's class analysis, because like the Brothers Racky
and Ancient Republican Rome, a lot of this ship they're saying,
it is not at all primitive class analysis like this,
it's it's pretty developed. Yeah, And I mean, like the
Marxist will do some long argument about how like oh
they have they have false consciousness, they're not trying to
(02:15):
abolish the class system or whatever, and it's like, well,
I mean like I look at the Martin, the Marxist
in the demolish the classystem either so like yeah, like yeah,
like that these are these are very Andre's something we're
gonna be coming back to a lot this episode is
that the people doing this are incredibly sophisticated political actors.
And one of the sort of modern version of this
(02:35):
is in the nineteen seventies, not only did bread riots
not and there's a new kind of bread riot and
these riots are collectively known as the I M. F.
Riots um. From from from January nine, seventy six to
October nineteen nine two, there are riots in Peru, Egypt, Ghana, Jamaica,
like Beeria, the Philippines, a year, Turkey, Morocco, Sierra Leon, Sudan, Argentina, Ecuador, Chile, Bolivia, Brazil, Panama, Tunisia,
(02:58):
the Dominican Republic, Haiti, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Guadibala in Mexico, Yugoslavia, Zambia, Poland, Algeria, Romania, Nigeria, Hungary, Venezuela,
La Jordan, the every Coast, Nigeria, ron Albania, India, and Nepal.
Were you just do like the whackou the Whackow Warner's song.
It's that's literally all the play I found the chart
(03:19):
that has all of them. Is like, there's just so many.
They just keep happening. And again that's only like they
they're they're still happening. And the everything I should mention
is those are just the ones that are called the
I m F riots. There's a bunch of other riots,
some of which are bred riots, that aren't called the
I m F riots because they're not really sort of
like directly involved with the I m F. And and
that that this raises the question of what the fund
(03:41):
is an IMF riot? Uh, And the answer is that, unfortunately,
to to understand why people are throwing ball offous through
bank windows, we have to talk about banking a little bit. Um.
I I have talked, I guess at length. Yeah, I
I apologize, but we will we will get back to
the riots, damn, But I promise we just have do
a little bit of bank a king. So yeah, I've
(04:02):
talked extensively on the show about the crisis of the seventies,
and you know, the short version is that in a
thing that is completely unrecognizable today, the global economy collapses,
inflation skyrockets. Countries across the global South start taking out
these suggestable rate that they've been taking out, these suggestable
rate loans, and then suddenly the interest rate spike and
they start defaulting on these loans. Here's our free markets
(04:22):
and food riots talking about it. Although the causes of
the crisis run deeper, by the nineteen seventies, many smaller
nations began to feel the strains of insolvency as a
result of a world wide recession, successive oil price shocks,
declining world commodity prices, and accelerating debt service obligations. So basically,
like if you're a small country, right, the price of
everything you need to buy, like oil, is going up,
(04:45):
and the price of what you can sell, which is
like commodities like copper tin, is collapsing. And these lead
to what are like these massive what are called balance
of payments crises, And so we should we talk about
what about what a balance of payments crisis is? And
this one was up being really important. Here there's the
story about che Guevara, like right after like literally right
after the Cuban Revolution, is he so he goes to
(05:07):
the US and he's in the he sits. He's in
this meeting with a bunch of bankers and he's trying
basically to get Cuba's gold reserves and cup us sort
of like foreign exchange reserves out of the US. The
US doesn't steal it. And it was funny about it
is all the bankers who are talking to him, like
all of them report afterwards like, woll wow, this guy
talks like a banker, not a communist. And the specifically
(05:27):
the reason they were like, oh hey, this guy talks
like a banker is that he knew what balance of
payments was. Um. The short answer is at a balance
of payments crisis is when there's more money flowing out
of the country than there is coming into it. And
the result of this is that you run out of money,
and particularly the thing you run out of his American dollars,
which is the thing that you need to like buy oil.
(05:48):
So you get these countries that are massively in debt
and they run out of money, and the only thing
they could do is turn to like turn to the
International Monetary Fund and the i m F, who like
the only description of the i m F that I
have is that like they're they're they're basically, you like
if the cartoon Bank of Evil from Despicable Me like
ran the entire world economy. I they you know, so
the I m F shows up to these countries and
(06:09):
is like loll lmao eat ship, and they force these
countries to implement, like in order to get loans, They
force them to implet what are called stabilization programs because
of the quote conditionality of the loans. They have all
these like this really technical, boring like neoliberal like legal
language for it, the like the this is this is
(06:30):
all sort of banker speak for if you want another
loans you can buy food, You're gonna have to rob
every single person you know and hand them and hand
us all your money. Uh. This eventually becomes now to
structural adjustment programs. There's all of this sort of technical
language disguise what's going on. But what's actually going on
is that in order to pay off, in order to
pay the bankers for these loans, they are taking food
from the moles of children. Um. Yeah, here's a more technical,
(06:53):
I guess explanation of what's happening here. Austerity programs include
stern measures or shock treatments that trigger market mechanisms to
stimulate export production and increased government for exchange reserves. So,
according to the theory, currency devaluation makes three world exports
more competitive in the international market. Reduced public spending curbs
(07:14):
inflation and saves money for debt repayments. Privatization of state
owned corporations generated more productive investment and reduce public payrolls.
Elimination of protectionism and other restraints on foreign investment larns
more more efficient export firms. Cuts in public subsidies for
food and basic necessities helped to get prices right, benefiting
domestic producers. Wage restraints and higher interest rates reduce inflation
(07:37):
and enhanced competitiveness, and import restrictions can serve forum exchange
for debt servicing. So this has winners and losers, and
the losers are like everyone in the country that is
happening to and this is and this is pretty cost
cross class. Like these policies they hit workers, they hit peasants,
that hir small shopkeepers, the middle classes annihilated odd just
(08:00):
like people who are consumers you buy goods, and even
the sort of like the local capitalists just get screwed
by this. Because what the I m F is doing
is forcing every wonder have lower wages, taking massive benefit cuts,
and massively spiking the price of food. And you know,
I I want to get remind everyone that this this
is explicitly what the Federal Reserve is trying to do
(08:22):
to us right now, Like this is this is the
kind of stuff that they're talking about in order to
curb inflation, is to just make the pay everyone less,
make everyone take benefits cuts, and then increase the price
of ship. So the winners of this are like six bureaucrats,
international investors, and like a class of like absolutely horrific
large agricultural landowners. And this this has about the effect
(08:48):
that you would expect it to. Um. Between nineteen seventy
six and late Nino, some a hundred and forty six
incidents of protests occurred, reaching a peak from nineteen eight
three to nine five, continuing to the present without attenney suation. Now,
the authors who are writing this right, they're writing this
in nine So when they say they continue to the
present without tentiation, they before the thing is the last
(09:10):
one of those riots ended like a week ago. Oh yeah, yeah,
they're still they're still going um so and you know,
and these these riots are slightly different than the sort
of like classical bread riots, right, because they are about
the increasing price of food. It's also about the increasing
price of fuel or sort of broader austerity measures or
(09:33):
cuts to services and stuff like that. Um here, here's
here's a quote about like what these things actually look like. Um.
Demonstrations and riots typically target specific institutions perceived as responsible
for the depredations. Marches and protesting crowds converge on major
thoroughfares and government buildings, such as the treasury or the
national bank or the legislature, the presidential palace. Looters attack
(09:55):
supermarkets and clothing stores where fuel and transportation subsidies are
part of the austerity package. Busses and gasoline stations are burned.
The international dimension of austerity are recognized symbolically in attacks
on travel agencies for an automobile's luxury hotels and international
travel agencies or all that too, but also international agency offices.
(10:16):
And you know this is going to sound familiar from
last episode. It turns out that just like the eight
such people, that the attacks of these things are are
very targeted. The sort of like forms of resistance have
changed over time, because you know, this is now. We
(10:39):
we do have modern political organizations, right, Like we get
general strikes, you get sometimes you get just noble bread riots.
Sometimes you get these just things that are like large
protests and then they turn into riots. And what's interesting
about them is that these are very sort of these
are very sort of cross class movements. Right. You have
your sort of classical sectors that are poor. You have
(11:01):
like particularly in the global South, you can you have
your shanty dwellers, you have unemployed youth, you have small
street vendors or like a crucial sort of element of
these things you have like just your guy selling cigarettes
on the street. Um, you get you also get like
parts of the industrial working class. You get sometimes you
get unions. A lot of times you get students, you
get public employee sometimes you get professional groups. One of
(11:24):
one of the interesting things that's reading about this, I've
read like a few books in this Eric who were
talking specifically and this this isn't like the nineties, right,
We're specifically talking about professional groups since Sudan. And it's
like it's like, okay, it's it's nine. People are talking too.
Professional groups and Sudan backing rioters against the government. It's
two thousand and nineteen. People are talking about professional groups
backing protests against the government. It's like, it's I don't know,
(11:47):
Like there's this extent to which all of these things,
like that the I m F riots have just been
happening over and over and over again for about fifty years,
and a lot, a lot of the elements are incredibly similar.
One of the other things that's going on here is
that these protests are driven are driven by mass organization. Typically,
(12:08):
austerity protests were precipitated by dramatic overnight price heights resulting
from the termination of public subsidies on basic goods and services,
proclaimed by the government as a regrettably necessary reform, urged
by the I m F and international lenders as conditions
for new and renegotiated loans. Five deaths in the first
Peruvian protests to get a pattern of violence. Peru remained
(12:28):
a hotbed of austerity protests, with students and workers demonstrating
against increased food prices in followed by followed in eight
by a march of public employees over state layoffs. This protest,
so cheered by other public workers watching from surrounding the
office buildings, was dispersed by police tear gas. So like that,
that's that's a very sort of yeah, yeah, like we did.
(12:51):
I mean, this is this was happening. This is happening
in Peru like last year, right, actually it was it
last year was earlier this year, I don't know. Time
is fake. And that's actually like the other thing that
sort of startling about this is like the places that
riot are still the places that are rioting in like
an enormous number of cases. It's it's the same places
sometimes it's the same people. Um. I think probably the
(13:15):
most famous protests of the sort of era is it's
called the Caracazo I'm pronounced nice really badly by my
apologies in Venezuela, which is a reaction to nine increase
in training and bus fairs. And there are these are
like these are massive riots. Um at least a hundred
(13:37):
and probably like a couple of thousand people are like
gunned down by the army. And three years later, a
relatively unknown colonel named Hugo Chavez tried to overthrow the
government that had carried out the price increases. Travis, you know,
Travis is better known for his other works, but he's
(13:57):
the sort of tie between the I m F riots
and the sort of next phase of political resistance to
this stuff, which is called the antique, which is like
known as the anti globalization movements in sort of the
nineties and nearly two thousands. And the thing that's interesting
about these things is that I don't know, the I
m F rights don't go very well, like either they
(14:17):
lose or at best, what they were able to get
was like temporarily stall some of these reforms, and I
say like reforms quote unquote like the serve of near
level like slashing benefits, so they were able to pause
them a bit and then they would sort of get
restarted after people left the street. But in the late
nineties and the two thousands people start winning um Argentina
(14:37):
is sort of famously forced to like tell the I
m F to funk off, and they default on their loans.
After this like enormous autonomous uprising two thousand one that
like very nearly overthrows the government and forces that like
five heads of state. There's the whole sort of pink
tide in Latin America. The I m F gets like
driven out of a bunch of countries in East Asia,
and then she doesn't eight, the entire world economy collapses,
(14:58):
which it turns out is bad for everyone. And this
does This does two things for our story. The first
is that like countries are suddenly going broke again, and
because they're like just completely broke, the I m F
is just back and is able to sort of enforce
programs on places like Greecent Spain. And the second thing
(15:19):
it did was set off an enormous wave of bread
riots and uprisings. And I think, like most people, if
you tell them that two eight set off like an
enormous wave of like protests, they're They're immediately going to go, oh,
you mean the Arab spring And I am talking about that,
But that's actually not specifically what I'm talking about here.
There there's there were like immediately in two thousan Central
(15:41):
and immediately after there was another massive wave of bread
riots that every like just everyone is completely forgotten unless
the thing that you do specifically is study bread riots.
Um here here's from Here's from the piece called a
Political Economy of the Food Riot. In two thousand and
seven and two, the world witnessed a return of one
of the oldest forms of collective action, food riot countries
(16:01):
were protests occurred range from Italy, where pasta protests in
September seven were directed at a failure at the failure
of the Prodi government to prevent a thirty percent rise
in the price of pasta, to Haiti, where protesters railed
against presidents provolves impassive response to the doubling of the
price of rice over the course of a single week.
Other countries in which riots were reported including the Uzbekistan, Morocco, Guiana, Mauritania, Senegal, India, Indonesia, Zimbabwe, Burkina, Fosso,
(16:30):
camera uined Yemen, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Mexico, and Argentina,
and some commentators have estimated that thirty countries experienced some
somewhere foods some sort of food protests over the period.
Now we've been talking a lot about like food consumers
in this because that's mostly the people who are involved
in bread riots. But you know, as was happening in
(16:53):
seventeen huntres with the sort of original stuff like this
whole time this is going on, there's there's a sort
of massive shift in the global food economy happening where
and this has been happening for a long time now,
but it's it's sort of it's been accelerating the last
about half a century, which is that the number of
people who are like peasants and who produced free for
themselves has been massively declining, and people are getting forced
into cities. And this means that there's you know, there's
(17:18):
there's been a number of other things that have gone
along with this. Uh, there's been this massive increase in
like cattle production, for example, you get all these monocultures
um And another thing I think I've mentioned before is
the World Trade organizations like Agreement on Agriculture like outlaws
agricultural subsidies for the global South, but you know, the
US is still allowed to have like farm subsidies, which
(17:39):
means that you know, if when you're when you enter
these free trade agreements, you get all of this like
enormously cheap food from the U s has dumped into
all these other countries, and you know, if you're a
Mexican farmer, suddenly you can't compete with all of this
food from the US because the food from the US
is cheap because the American government subsidizing it, but the
Mexican government can and this just like absolutely and die
(18:00):
lates any attempt by a country to maintain food security
by like producing food for themselves. And this this sort
of class of like self sufficient peasant farmers who had
been you know, they support themselves by producing their own
food and selling of the market. These people just can
annihilated and they get forced into what's called sort of
casualized labor that they you know that they the later
versions is like uber, right, but that they're forcing the
(18:22):
gig work. They're kicked out of sort of the normal economy.
And you know, but because they don't have sort of
fixed contracts or you know, it's a lot of people
are working with for no contract, with no contracts at all,
they're enormously insecure. And once the people are forced into
the labor market, like changes in the global economy can
make them like almost immediately unable to afford food because
(18:45):
you know, like if the less sort of economic and
security you are, the more the more you're affected by
price increases. Which is obvious, but it's worth saying because
it dictates a lot of like who does bread riots
and yes, and so governments are not entirely like blind
to this, and they're concerns that they're gonna get overthrown.
(19:06):
And so you see a bunch of governments trying to
respond with sort of price stabilization stuff. I think the
most famous example of this is that like the Egyptian
army like literally controls like an enormous number of eagips
bakeries and they like directly run them, and they directly
run them so that he control the price of brand
to try to like stop revolutions from happening. But in
two thousand eight they just kind of stopped working. Um,
(19:28):
here's the political economy of the food riot. Again. Over
the year between two thousand and seven and two thousand eight,
hundred and thirty percent increase in the global price of
maize and the seventy percent increase in the price of rice,
with similar price increases and soybeans and other major food commodities. Um, yes,
there they are these massive food price increases, and this,
you know, this does the thing that massive food price
(19:50):
increases does. Right, there's there's and there's immediately enormous riots,
and there's the cycle that happens where the protesters, you know,
the purchesses, immediately blamed the government for the crisis, and
then the government is like, well, it's actually not our
fault because you know that it's happening because the things
outside of our control. And the protesters are like, oh,
it doesn't matter who we elect, they do the same things,
(20:12):
and like they're both kind of rights. Like the government
is just like sucking these people. But it's also true
that the sort of like the whole food system is
designed to take like the means of food production out
of the hands of like the workers who need the
food and putting them in the hands of like, you know,
enormous corporations and as people in places like Sri Lanka,
which you're gonna talk more about later, continually emphasized like this,
(20:34):
this food sovereignty issue is as much as a political issue,
Like it's an incredibly political issue, and it's it's it's
as much like what's at stake in these bread riots
as the sort of m finosterity stuff. Okay, this is
probably good place for an ad break, but I can't
think of a transition. Uh yeah, you know who isn't
allowed to eat is the products and services that support
(20:57):
this podcast, all actively star ring to death. So get
these deals now while you still can, and we're back.
So all right now, we're gonna talk a little bit
(21:19):
about the Arabs Spring. We're not gonna talk an enormous
amount about it, because that's the whole thing. Um. But
if if, if you've been following like the stuff people
have written about the Arabs spring, there's an enormous number
of people who spend like a lot of their time
arguing about whether or not it was actually sparked by
food prices. And you know, you'll get a lot of
(21:40):
analysts to argue that like food prices in Tunisia where
the air spring starts, like, weren't really higher than normal,
And what you're seeing instead is like, well, it's not
actually food prices. It's just that there's a generation of
people who've been farmers but like can't support themselves anymore,
who've been forced into like finding non existent wage labor
in cities and like that that is part of what's happening.
(22:01):
But I think there's there's a sort of like fundamental
misunderstanding of what causes a bread riot, right, Like you know,
as you talked about like in the first episode, one
of the things that causes bread riots is it's not
actually necessarily the magnitude of the price increase that causes them. Right,
what sets what sets off bread riots is people is
people feeling like they're not getting what they deserve. Now. Obviously,
(22:21):
like if the price of bread increases, you're going to
get a lot of people going like, funk this, I
work my ass off and now I can't feed my family.
We deserve better, and this is time to riot. But
sometimes even if red prices are stable, you can you
can get it. You can get a thing where everyone like,
you know, the amount of bread is bad. Everything is expensive,
and one day someone wakes up and just goes, funck this,
(22:42):
I deserve better, and they do a bread riot and
and this is the case. And you know, and when
when that kind of thing is happening, right, When when
when you're dealing with you know what like moral economy stuff,
when you're dealing with with this gap between like what
people think, like like what people think their life should
be versus the fact that their lives which is absolutely terrible.
Even if you like decrease the price of bread, that's
(23:03):
not actually necessarily going to like stop people from rioting.
And if you look at like occupy for example, to
like you know, that's also happening in this period, Like
what brings people there isn't necessarily strictly the price of food.
It's the sense that like, yeah, I've been screwed by
and I've been screwed by the ruling class, and I
deserve better than this and and this is this is
what you see Indonesia. And one of the things what
(23:25):
do you see in sort of Phoenicians Syria is that
like a lot of the uprisings, like they have this
huge sort of rural core with with this population of
the population to people who've been kicked out of agricultural
sector and you know, and like that that is a
bread riot, right, And it's a bread right in the
sort of double sense of like it's the people who
are involved who used to be involved in in grain
production and now can't be. And then also that like
(23:47):
you know, people, people have hit the sort of expectation
gap thing. And what I think is sort of interesting
about this is that these bread riots, these rural bread riots,
are like their so the closest thing we have to
sort of the classical twenty century revolution, right, like that
that's one of that's the thing that causes like the
twenty century revolutions are the first generation of people who
(24:09):
are like but maybe in the first like two or
three generations people who come from the countryside into the
factories of the people who do revolutions um. And but
the thing is this is this is this is the century,
not the twentieth century. Like if you get kicked out
of your farm, there's there's no job in a factory,
like you're just unemployed, and you know, and this changes
the dynamics of of sort of everything. And I think, okay,
(24:31):
like people like broadly know the course of like the
air of spring and the way of uprisings they happen,
they get crushed largely. But there was another wave of
these sort of riots, protests and uprisings that started in
Haiti and like in eighteen over this massive field price hike.
And here is a partial list of places that like
(24:51):
people have like rioted in in large numbers since he
dozen in eighteen had sue Dan, Algeria, Hunduras, Chile, and
rock Ha Kong Iran like four times, Lebanon, like three times, Columbia,
like three times. A couple of things happen in France.
There was Puerto Rico, there was popular There's there was
Indonesia where in our second Ecuador one. Now there's Catalonia,
(25:13):
like people righted. In the US there there were massive
indigenous roadblocks like in Canada, ukimedia Kampa went up, or
there was stuff. It's a culture. Like there were two
different ways of protests. In India, there was like Belarus,
there's Kazahstan, there's Kyrka Stan, there's just Beekistan. There's Molly.
There's stuff in Nigeria or stuff in Libya, like there's
stuff in Sri Lanka. We're about to get to this.
This whole thing has has been happening like everywhere, and
(25:35):
it's been intensifying the last in the last year of
like three or four years. Um, we're not basically in
like year four of this cycle. And and you know, obviously,
like every single one of these protests has their own
like local political conditions, and like a lot of these
aren't even sort of loosely about the price of bread.
They're just about sort of other stuff that's happening. But
like like of the opperasons that I mentioned, like something
like fifteen of them are directly about the price of
(25:57):
food or the price of like translated fuel. And we're
gonna talk a little bit about sort of two of
the most recent like protest waves. We're gonna talk about
equat word, We're gonna talk about Sri Lanka because they're
there are two very different kinds of protests, even though
they're both kind of bread riots or at least I mean,
they're both very much the modern equivalence of it. Um
(26:19):
but they look very different. And there there's just I think,
and I don't know, I think it's like indestring reasons why. Um. Yeah. So,
so we're gonna start with, like with Sri Lanka. Um on.
On a very basic level, Sri Lanka, it has a
giant balance of payments crisis. Uh, this is you know,
it's just like that. This is the sort of like
large scale political version of famines. Right, Like, there's plenty
(26:39):
of food and fuel in the world, but the government
Srlanka does not have dollars to buy it with. Now,
the reason the government doesn't have dollars to buy fuel
with is because the government is basically like an incredibly
corrupt dictatorship that keeps like imputting luxury goods it didn't need.
And they did a bunch of like tax breaks at
rich people, and suddenly the government was broken. Everyone was like, wow,
how did that happened? It must have just been the
(27:01):
pandemic and it was like no, you like you gave
all the money to rich people. And then as the
crisis sort of went on, um, they the government decided
to ban fertilizer imports, and so this just meant that
people couldn't get fertilizer. So it's like farmers just didn't
(27:23):
plant food because curious decision. Yeah, it's like it's it's
one of those things you look at it. It's just
like like, like who thought this was a good idea? Yeah?
What was the positive end of that game plan here?
I mean, like the only like okay, So, like I
think what they were thinking is that, like, fertilizer costs dollars, right,
we're running out of dollars, so we're gonna stop people
(27:44):
from spending their dollars like on buying this stuff so
we can keep more dollars in the economy. But like,
what what are you what is your long term plan
here if you don't have like anything to get dollars
with or and you also don't have food. So this,
to the surprise of exactly zero people except I guess
(28:05):
the government of Sri Lanka causes a food crisis, food shortage. Um.
And this is a kind of classic like this is
the kind of classic like situation in which the I,
m F we intervene in the seventies and they're tving
now and you know this, this is a classic like
struggle against this starting right, you have the ruling class
blowing up the entire economy by like fueling debt money
into pointland's infrastructure projects. And now they're doing these like
(28:27):
massive austerity measures, are trying to get loans to MF.
This is you know, this is this is this is this,
this is this is this is stuff we understand that
we've seen before. Um. But this is also this is
also a food softigy problem, right. The Sri Lankan government
has just completely screwed their farmers, which means you have
to import even more food and and you know the
result of this is months and months and months a
very impressive sort of clock cross class protests with like
(28:51):
basically every social sector in the streets. And that's both
a good thing and also a thing that is kind
of a mess because you know, like there's civil war.
The civil war ended like less than a decade and
a half ago. Right, so you have people in the
streets from sectors who like do not like each other
at all, and I don't know, and you know, you
(29:12):
get the thing that happens here, right, You get these
moments of like incredible solidarity and then moments of incredible
like what the funk are you guys doing? And you know,
like one of the things that happens a lot in
these protests, like in all all protests, like this is
like okay, the protests are like pre tame for literally months, right,
Like it's just people doing protesting, and then I cops
(29:32):
and and people like allied with the government start attacking
their protesters, at which point people like burned down the
house of the ruling family. They start throwing people. I
think people probably saw the videos people like throwing cars
of like government ministers and the rivers, which was a
good time, and like yeah, like that that stuff was
you know, a direct reaction to sort of like the
government's violence. Right. Um, you know, okay, I can't give
(29:56):
like a full, like detailed political history here because, like
dear Odd, it is incredibly complicated and I don't understand
it very well because you know, I don't study Sri Lanka. Um,
if you want to go to account of this. Brohini
Hensman's political dimensions of the crisis in Sri Lanka is
a really good sort of like short like look at
what's going on here, um, And and this is the
(30:18):
sort of like this is you know, this is a
broader trend and like all these protests right like like
every single bread right takes place in its own unique context,
Like Sri Lanka, for example, Like Sri Lanka used to
have the world's best and largest like mass Trotskyite party,
like they were the Trotskyites is like the only place
on earth the trot Skates had like a real like
mass political party and they were like a part of
the real political process. And then they like sold out
(30:40):
the working class and entered a bunch of governments that
like did terrible stuff. And you know, okay that that
that's like a local context, doesn't happen anywhere else. But
you know, every single one of these states, right is,
is embedded in global capitalism. And that means that every
state is affected by the sort of like broader economic
trends and sort of beerocratic structures to hold everything together.
Their affect by the I m F, the World Trade Organization,
(31:01):
the World Bank. And the thing that this means is
that the timings of uprisings and riots tend to synchronize
with each other, and we actually just sort of brought
her up like economic forces. And the product of this
is way is these sort of like periodic ways of uprisings.
And so the closest out we're gonna talk about the
most recent of these, well, it might actually not be
(31:21):
the most recently these by time this goes up, but yeah, yeah,
we're we're gonna talk about Ecuador. Um, the situation Ecuador
is very different from what's happening is to Laka. The
biggest difference, I guess is that instead of sort of
like waiting for conditions to get bad enough that like
an uprising happens like more or less spontaneously, which is
(31:43):
kind of what happened he doesn't nineteen and Ecuador there
there's there's there are huge protests there, um, but they
were largely spontaneous, but instead of like waiting for people
were just like what if we just called one of
these And by by people here, I specifically mean the
Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador or ka and you know, okay, okay.
(32:05):
As we've seen through this whole sort of thing, right
like bread riots like adapt to the political organizations around them.
And in Ecuador we're dealing with a quick essentially modern
form political organization, which is the Indigenous Confederation. And I
guess I should sort of like preface this a bit
with like the specific form of indigenous confederation in in
(32:25):
Latin America that emerges in this period is like a
different thing than older ones because there have been indigenous
confederation for a long time. This is like a this
is this is a very specific like political thing that
emerged across Latin America in in sort of the seventies,
and the really really started struting up in the eighties
as results of like a lot of things, one of
which was like how shitty the old like Marxans Lendon's
(32:47):
vanger groups, like we're on indigenous issues. And one of
the one of the groups that forms in this period
is kana and Kanae is one of the world's most
bilitant like indigenous federations. And since they're founding in Night
in six, they've called half a dozen uprisings against neoliberal governments.
And I think I think they knocked off like three presidents,
which is a pretty impressive track record. And on July two,
(33:12):
faced with skyrocketing inflation on like basic consumer goods and
a like really shitty like far right government, they stage
another one um and this is another sort of I
don't know. The thing is interesting about this is that
it's it's part general strike, like part street protests, part riot,
(33:33):
and part just like mass march for the from the
sort of periphery of Ecuador to the core. And by
periphery and cora, I mean in this sort of metaphorical sense,
like it's a bunch. It's a bunch of indigenous peasant
groups from all over the country, just like marching on
descending on the capital Keto. And this is a this
is a complicated process like that, you know. Okay, like
the left everywhere has like political divides and mostly they're
(33:55):
kind of nonsense in a lot of way, like okay,
like that there's ideological divides and those personal divides and whatever.
But like Ecuador's left has has real political divides, and
these aren't these aren't like sort of petty ideological like
personal stuff, like they're like they were caught under the
sort of previous like old like leftist, pink tight governments
(34:15):
of Raphael Carrera. Like there are like soldiers and cops
who are beating the ship out of indigenous like a
logical protesters. And you know this means that like yeah,
you know, okay, So so Carrera is like parties running
for president again. Careers are running, but careers parties like
running in an election, right, And you know this means it'
like yeah, okay, like maybe you're both leftist, right, but
you know there's a lot of people who are like, oh,
(34:36):
funck no, like I'm not voting for these guys. These
are the guys who like sent the army against their
anti mining protests. And so you know, the thing the
thing that is interesting here is like like these protests
don't even pull together the entire recordorian left. Um, there's
like other stuff going on here too, like that. There
there's some of the unions that went on strike in
twenty nineteen, like don't go on strike this time because
(34:58):
of some political stuff that's happening. But the thing, the
thing about KNA that's really impressive is that they're still
organized enough and they still like they're organized enough that
they're able to just take control of parts of cities.
And they have a lot of allies supporters amongst other
students and workers and keto. And this means that when
the government makes this enormous mistake and arrests karas like
(35:19):
kind of Newish leader. Ah, okay, this guy's name. This
guy's name, I guess in Spanish, it's like Leonidas. Is
that this guy's name is Leonitis. He's the head um,
he's the head of Kaisans Federation Um. And he sees
a protest leader. He was a protested leader in twenty nineteen.
(35:42):
That's how we got elected to like head this organization.
And they arrest him on day two of the protests.
And this is a catastrophic mistake. The protest just like
explode and you know, bye bye bye by like a
week in. I think that the government's claiming they were
doing fifty million dollars a damage a day, which I'm
not actually sure I believe that because governments and corporations
(36:03):
do this too, and they're talking about like losses from
like strikes, and they tend to over emphasize how much
damage is done because it makes them like look better
in the press and makes the protesters look worse, but
they they they they're able to damage like significant parts
of the economy, and by June, like they kind of win. Basically,
the government's forced to negotiate with them, and they don't
(36:24):
get all of their demands, but they get price decreases
for like fuel and gasoline, which is like a huge
part of why these just happened in the first place.
They get bands on mining and drilling and indigenous and
protected areas. They get like strength and price controls. They
get like local rural loan forgiveness, like interest rate decreases.
They get sub disdas for farmers to get subsidies for families,
they get they manage to get the government to declare
a state of health emergency over COVID. It's like, this
(36:46):
is this is impressive stuff, and you know, and the
other part of this is that they're like, Okay, the
agreement is that we will stop protesting if you do this,
and if you don't do this, we're gonna do this again.
So yeah, I guess I guess might sort of wrap
this up. There's there there's an American proverb that is
(37:07):
really common amongst sort of like American China watchers, which
is that I so supposedly the Chinese word for crisis
is composed of two characters, danger and opportunity. And it's
like not true, as likelistic and at the polological analysis
of China that that's not what that's not what the
characters made. But everyone, like everyone in the US, like
political stamoshere like believes this right, And you know, but
(37:31):
like as as an analysis of China, it is completely useless.
As an analysis of the US, of the American psyche,
it's incredibly valuable, right because this this, this is the
way the American ruling class thinks. It's it's every single
crisis is both a danger and an opportunity. And that's
something that we in some sense also have to do
because that's you know, these are the sort of situations
(37:52):
that we're in, right bread riots are a thing that
just they happen, right, they will continue to happen. They
have been happening for that cousens of years, like presumably
they will happen for thousands of more years. And there's
no use sort of like either pretending that they don't
happen or making these sort of moral or tactical arguments
like for against them, because they just happen. And the
(38:15):
question that we're that we're faced with is what are
we actually going to do about it? Right? Are we
going to set them out? Are we gonna side with
the state and repressing them in the name of sort
of like stamping out color revolutions, are like providing order
a stability, or like protecting small businesses, or are we
going to you know, take to the streets and fight
alongside them to sort of break the system that creates them.
And this is the second question from here is if
(38:37):
we're going to do this how and what? What what
we've seen from Ecuador in the past month or so
is that if you take the fight to them and
you're sufficiently organized, you can win. And that means the
question now, as our food prices continue to increase, as
food prices are only going to continue to increase, what
are we going to do? And Yeah, that that's all
(39:04):
I got I have. I have a single question, yep,
what are we going to do? Well? I'm I'm kind
of bummed we never brought up are good friend Pete
Buddha j Edge in his uh bread his bread press
(39:25):
fixing ordeals? Yeah, I mean that that that that's kind
of a sign of just like how kind of like
I guess you could say masculalized, Like our culture has
been that, Like people didn't riot over that because like
that is a thing like if if if if if
you said, Pete budda edge back to like a late
Frets village and she tries to do this thing like
(39:48):
he he does the systematic like bride bread price fixing, right,
like all of these people would have been getting hit
by rocks. So yeah, I do that again. Yeah, do
that again? Wow, barons just brasen incitement. Yeah, yeah, it's great.
(40:09):
Well that is it for us today. We love to incite.
Thanks folks. Until next time, go incite yourselves. It could
Happen here as a production of cool Zone Media. For
more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
zone media dot com, or check us out on the
I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
(40:30):
to podcasts. You can find sources for It could Happen here,
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Thanks for listening.
I love how often the Holocaust has been trending over
the last year. Um, that's good. That's the thing you
want to see trending in. Um, it's it could happen here,
all right, Chris, continue with your bread riots. Yeah, we're back.
There's more riots. Uh. Now, last episode we talked about
(00:26):
historians declaring the end of the bread death of the
bread riot, and like in the sixties and early seventies, Like,
I think that this is this is one of the
ways you can tell that period people genuinely thought the
bull was going to get better. It was that like
they genuinely believed that like the centralized state and like
capitalism can always provide foods you want up bread riots anymore?
You get mark. You if you were born in that period,
(00:48):
you like grew up and people were fleeing from dynonic
ass in the street and like getting getting eaten by
woolly mammoth's and then by the time you're forty, you've
got the telegraph. So I get it, right. I get
why people think that that progress was really back in
those because they got they wiped out the dynamic as
this is. Yeah, you have seen Howard Taff building the
(01:09):
pyramids exactly exactly exactly you have you have you have
seen the future rise up literally in front of you,
and he went from eating mud to Hershey's chocolate. It's
it's an incredibly impressive sort of period of modern historical evolution.
And you know, and one of the things you see,
like like you'll see like Marxists calling bread rice primitive
(01:32):
rebels doing like populist mob politics that's been like displaced
by proper Marxist class politics. And then like every single
one of these people was like the most wrong anyone,
like basically from that period until until the moment the
end of history. Guy starts writing, they are the most
wrong people like on the planet. Well, it's also funny
(01:53):
to hear that idea that like there was something primitive
about these people's class analysis, because like the Brothers Racky
and Ancient Republican Rome, a lot of this ship they're saying,
it is not at all primitive class analysis like this,
it's it's pretty developed. Yeah, And I mean, like the
Marxist will do some long argument about how like oh
they have they have false consciousness, they're not trying to
(02:15):
abolish the class system or whatever, and it's like, well,
I mean like I look at the Martin, the Marxist
in the demolish the classystem either so like yeah, like yeah,
like that these are these are very Andre's something we're
gonna be coming back to a lot this episode is
that the people doing this are incredibly sophisticated political actors.
And one of the sort of modern version of this
(02:35):
is in the nineteen seventies, not only did bread riots
not and there's a new kind of bread riot and
these riots are collectively known as the I M. F.
Riots um. From from from January nine, seventy six to
October nineteen nine two, there are riots in Peru, Egypt, Ghana, Jamaica,
like Beeria, the Philippines, a year, Turkey, Morocco, Sierra Leon, Sudan, Argentina, Ecuador, Chile, Bolivia, Brazil, Panama, Tunisia,
(02:58):
the Dominican Republic, Haiti, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Guadibala in Mexico, Yugoslavia, Zambia, Poland, Algeria, Romania, Nigeria, Hungary, Venezuela,
La Jordan, the every Coast, Nigeria, ron Albania, India, and Nepal.
Were you just do like the whackou the Whackow Warner's song.
It's that's literally all the play I found the chart
(03:19):
that has all of them. Is like, there's just so many.
They just keep happening. And again that's only like they
they're they're still happening. And the everything I should mention
is those are just the ones that are called the
I m F riots. There's a bunch of other riots,
some of which are bred riots, that aren't called the
I m F riots because they're not really sort of
like directly involved with the I m F. And and
that that this raises the question of what the fund
(03:41):
is an IMF riot? Uh, And the answer is that, unfortunately,
to to understand why people are throwing ball offous through
bank windows, we have to talk about banking a little bit. Um.
I I have talked, I guess at length. Yeah, I
I apologize, but we will we will get back to
the riots, damn, But I promise we just have do
a little bit of bank a king. So yeah, I've
(04:02):
talked extensively on the show about the crisis of the seventies,
and you know, the short version is that in a
thing that is completely unrecognizable today, the global economy collapses,
inflation skyrockets. Countries across the global South start taking out
these suggestable rate that they've been taking out, these suggestable
rate loans, and then suddenly the interest rate spike and
they start defaulting on these loans. Here's our free markets
(04:22):
and food riots talking about it. Although the causes of
the crisis run deeper, by the nineteen seventies, many smaller
nations began to feel the strains of insolvency as a
result of a world wide recession, successive oil price shocks,
declining world commodity prices, and accelerating debt service obligations. So basically,
like if you're a small country, right, the price of
everything you need to buy, like oil, is going up,
(04:45):
and the price of what you can sell, which is
like commodities like copper tin, is collapsing. And these lead
to what are like these massive what are called balance
of payments crises, And so we should we talk about
what about what a balance of payments crisis is? And
this one was up being really important. Here there's the
story about che Guevara, like right after like literally right
after the Cuban Revolution, is he so he goes to
(05:07):
the US and he's in the he sits. He's in
this meeting with a bunch of bankers and he's trying
basically to get Cuba's gold reserves and cup us sort
of like foreign exchange reserves out of the US. The
US doesn't steal it. And it was funny about it
is all the bankers who are talking to him, like
all of them report afterwards like, woll wow, this guy
talks like a banker, not a communist. And the specifically
(05:27):
the reason they were like, oh hey, this guy talks
like a banker is that he knew what balance of
payments was. Um. The short answer is at a balance
of payments crisis is when there's more money flowing out
of the country than there is coming into it. And
the result of this is that you run out of money,
and particularly the thing you run out of his American dollars,
which is the thing that you need to like buy oil.
(05:48):
So you get these countries that are massively in debt
and they run out of money, and the only thing
they could do is turn to like turn to the
International Monetary Fund and the i m F, who like
the only description of the i m F that I
have is that like they're they're they're basically, you like
if the cartoon Bank of Evil from Despicable Me like
ran the entire world economy. I they you know, so
the I m F shows up to these countries and
(06:09):
is like loll lmao eat ship, and they force these
countries to implement, like in order to get loans, They
force them to implet what are called stabilization programs because
of the quote conditionality of the loans. They have all
these like this really technical, boring like neoliberal like legal
language for it, the like the this is this is
(06:30):
all sort of banker speak for if you want another
loans you can buy food, You're gonna have to rob
every single person you know and hand them and hand
us all your money. Uh. This eventually becomes now to
structural adjustment programs. There's all of this sort of technical
language disguise what's going on. But what's actually going on
is that in order to pay off, in order to
pay the bankers for these loans, they are taking food
from the moles of children. Um. Yeah, here's a more technical,
(06:53):
I guess explanation of what's happening here. Austerity programs include
stern measures or shock treatments that trigger market mechanisms to
stimulate export production and increased government for exchange reserves. So,
according to the theory, currency devaluation makes three world exports
more competitive in the international market. Reduced public spending curbs
(07:14):
inflation and saves money for debt repayments. Privatization of state
owned corporations generated more productive investment and reduce public payrolls.
Elimination of protectionism and other restraints on foreign investment larns
more more efficient export firms. Cuts in public subsidies for
food and basic necessities helped to get prices right, benefiting
domestic producers. Wage restraints and higher interest rates reduce inflation
(07:37):
and enhanced competitiveness, and import restrictions can serve forum exchange
for debt servicing. So this has winners and losers, and
the losers are like everyone in the country that is
happening to and this is and this is pretty cost
cross class. Like these policies they hit workers, they hit peasants,
that hir small shopkeepers, the middle classes annihilated odd just
(08:00):
like people who are consumers you buy goods, and even
the sort of like the local capitalists just get screwed
by this. Because what the I m F is doing
is forcing every wonder have lower wages, taking massive benefit cuts,
and massively spiking the price of food. And you know,
I I want to get remind everyone that this this
is explicitly what the Federal Reserve is trying to do
(08:22):
to us right now, Like this is this is the
kind of stuff that they're talking about in order to
curb inflation, is to just make the pay everyone less,
make everyone take benefits cuts, and then increase the price
of ship. So the winners of this are like six bureaucrats,
international investors, and like a class of like absolutely horrific
large agricultural landowners. And this this has about the effect
(08:48):
that you would expect it to. Um. Between nineteen seventy
six and late Nino, some a hundred and forty six
incidents of protests occurred, reaching a peak from nineteen eight
three to nine five, continuing to the present without attenney suation. Now,
the authors who are writing this right, they're writing this
in nine So when they say they continue to the
present without tentiation, they before the thing is the last
(09:10):
one of those riots ended like a week ago. Oh yeah, yeah,
they're still they're still going um so and you know,
and these these riots are slightly different than the sort
of like classical bread riots, right, because they are about
the increasing price of food. It's also about the increasing
price of fuel or sort of broader austerity measures or
(09:33):
cuts to services and stuff like that. Um here, here's
here's a quote about like what these things actually look like. Um.
Demonstrations and riots typically target specific institutions perceived as responsible
for the depredations. Marches and protesting crowds converge on major
thoroughfares and government buildings, such as the treasury or the
national bank or the legislature, the presidential palace. Looters attack
(09:55):
supermarkets and clothing stores where fuel and transportation subsidies are
part of the austerity package. Busses and gasoline stations are burned.
The international dimension of austerity are recognized symbolically in attacks
on travel agencies for an automobile's luxury hotels and international
travel agencies or all that too, but also international agency offices.
(10:16):
And you know this is going to sound familiar from
last episode. It turns out that just like the eight
such people, that the attacks of these things are are
very targeted. The sort of like forms of resistance have
changed over time, because you know, this is now. We
(10:39):
we do have modern political organizations, right, Like we get
general strikes, you get sometimes you get just noble bread riots.
Sometimes you get these just things that are like large
protests and then they turn into riots. And what's interesting
about them is that these are very sort of these
are very sort of cross class movements. Right. You have
your sort of classical sectors that are poor. You have
(11:01):
like particularly in the global South, you can you have
your shanty dwellers, you have unemployed youth, you have small
street vendors or like a crucial sort of element of
these things you have like just your guy selling cigarettes
on the street. Um, you get you also get like
parts of the industrial working class. You get sometimes you
get unions. A lot of times you get students, you
get public employee sometimes you get professional groups. One of
(11:24):
one of the interesting things that's reading about this, I've
read like a few books in this Eric who were
talking specifically and this this isn't like the nineties, right,
We're specifically talking about professional groups since Sudan. And it's
like it's like, okay, it's it's nine. People are talking too.
Professional groups and Sudan backing rioters against the government. It's
two thousand and nineteen. People are talking about professional groups
backing protests against the government. It's like, it's I don't know,
(11:47):
Like there's this extent to which all of these things,
like that the I m F riots have just been
happening over and over and over again for about fifty years,
and a lot, a lot of the elements are incredibly similar.
One of the other things that's going on here is
that these protests are driven are driven by mass organization. Typically,
(12:08):
austerity protests were precipitated by dramatic overnight price heights resulting
from the termination of public subsidies on basic goods and services,
proclaimed by the government as a regrettably necessary reform, urged
by the I m F and international lenders as conditions
for new and renegotiated loans. Five deaths in the first
Peruvian protests to get a pattern of violence. Peru remained
(12:28):
a hotbed of austerity protests, with students and workers demonstrating
against increased food prices in followed by followed in eight
by a march of public employees over state layoffs. This protest,
so cheered by other public workers watching from surrounding the
office buildings, was dispersed by police tear gas. So like that,
that's that's a very sort of yeah, yeah, like we did.
(12:51):
I mean, this is this was happening. This is happening
in Peru like last year, right, actually it was it
last year was earlier this year, I don't know. Time
is fake. And that's actually like the other thing that
sort of startling about this is like the places that
riot are still the places that are rioting in like
an enormous number of cases. It's it's the same places
sometimes it's the same people. Um. I think probably the
(13:15):
most famous protests of the sort of era is it's
called the Caracazo I'm pronounced nice really badly by my
apologies in Venezuela, which is a reaction to nine increase
in training and bus fairs. And there are these are
like these are massive riots. Um at least a hundred
(13:37):
and probably like a couple of thousand people are like
gunned down by the army. And three years later, a
relatively unknown colonel named Hugo Chavez tried to overthrow the
government that had carried out the price increases. Travis, you know,
Travis is better known for his other works, but he's
(13:57):
the sort of tie between the I m F riots
and the sort of next phase of political resistance to
this stuff, which is called the antique, which is like
known as the anti globalization movements in sort of the
nineties and nearly two thousands. And the thing that's interesting
about these things is that I don't know, the I
m F rights don't go very well, like either they
(14:17):
lose or at best, what they were able to get
was like temporarily stall some of these reforms, and I
say like reforms quote unquote like the serve of near
level like slashing benefits, so they were able to pause
them a bit and then they would sort of get
restarted after people left the street. But in the late
nineties and the two thousands people start winning um Argentina
(14:37):
is sort of famously forced to like tell the I
m F to funk off, and they default on their loans.
After this like enormous autonomous uprising two thousand one that
like very nearly overthrows the government and forces that like
five heads of state. There's the whole sort of pink
tide in Latin America. The I m F gets like
driven out of a bunch of countries in East Asia,
and then she doesn't eight, the entire world economy collapses,
(14:58):
which it turns out is bad for everyone. And this
does This does two things for our story. The first
is that like countries are suddenly going broke again, and
because they're like just completely broke, the I m F
is just back and is able to sort of enforce
programs on places like Greecent Spain. And the second thing
(15:19):
it did was set off an enormous wave of bread
riots and uprisings. And I think, like most people, if
you tell them that two eight set off like an
enormous wave of like protests, they're They're immediately going to go, oh,
you mean the Arab spring And I am talking about that,
But that's actually not specifically what I'm talking about here.
There there's there were like immediately in two thousan Central
(15:41):
and immediately after there was another massive wave of bread
riots that every like just everyone is completely forgotten unless
the thing that you do specifically is study bread riots.
Um here here's from Here's from the piece called a
Political Economy of the Food Riot. In two thousand and
seven and two, the world witnessed a return of one
of the oldest forms of collective action, food riot countries
(16:01):
were protests occurred range from Italy, where pasta protests in
September seven were directed at a failure at the failure
of the Prodi government to prevent a thirty percent rise
in the price of pasta, to Haiti, where protesters railed
against presidents provolves impassive response to the doubling of the
price of rice over the course of a single week.
Other countries in which riots were reported including the Uzbekistan, Morocco, Guiana, Mauritania, Senegal, India, Indonesia, Zimbabwe, Burkina, Fosso,
(16:30):
camera uined Yemen, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Mexico, and Argentina,
and some commentators have estimated that thirty countries experienced some
somewhere foods some sort of food protests over the period.
Now we've been talking a lot about like food consumers
in this because that's mostly the people who are involved
in bread riots. But you know, as was happening in
(16:53):
seventeen huntres with the sort of original stuff like this
whole time this is going on, there's there's a sort
of massive shift in the global food economy happening where
and this has been happening for a long time now,
but it's it's sort of it's been accelerating the last
about half a century, which is that the number of
people who are like peasants and who produced free for
themselves has been massively declining, and people are getting forced
into cities. And this means that there's you know, there's
(17:18):
there's been a number of other things that have gone
along with this. Uh, there's been this massive increase in
like cattle production, for example, you get all these monocultures
um And another thing I think I've mentioned before is
the World Trade organizations like Agreement on Agriculture like outlaws
agricultural subsidies for the global South, but you know, the
US is still allowed to have like farm subsidies, which
(17:39):
means that you know, if when you're when you enter
these free trade agreements, you get all of this like
enormously cheap food from the U s has dumped into
all these other countries, and you know, if you're a
Mexican farmer, suddenly you can't compete with all of this
food from the US because the food from the US
is cheap because the American government subsidizing it, but the
Mexican government can and this just like absolutely and die
(18:00):
lates any attempt by a country to maintain food security
by like producing food for themselves. And this this sort
of class of like self sufficient peasant farmers who had
been you know, they support themselves by producing their own
food and selling of the market. These people just can
annihilated and they get forced into what's called sort of
casualized labor that they you know that they the later
versions is like uber, right, but that they're forcing the
(18:22):
gig work. They're kicked out of sort of the normal economy.
And you know, but because they don't have sort of
fixed contracts or you know, it's a lot of people
are working with for no contract, with no contracts at all,
they're enormously insecure. And once the people are forced into
the labor market, like changes in the global economy can
make them like almost immediately unable to afford food because
(18:45):
you know, like if the less sort of economic and
security you are, the more the more you're affected by
price increases. Which is obvious, but it's worth saying because
it dictates a lot of like who does bread riots
and yes, and so governments are not entirely like blind
to this, and they're concerns that they're gonna get overthrown.
(19:06):
And so you see a bunch of governments trying to
respond with sort of price stabilization stuff. I think the
most famous example of this is that like the Egyptian
army like literally controls like an enormous number of eagips
bakeries and they like directly run them, and they directly
run them so that he control the price of brand
to try to like stop revolutions from happening. But in
two thousand eight they just kind of stopped working. Um,
(19:28):
here's the political economy of the food riot. Again. Over
the year between two thousand and seven and two thousand eight,
hundred and thirty percent increase in the global price of
maize and the seventy percent increase in the price of rice,
with similar price increases and soybeans and other major food commodities. Um, yes,
there they are these massive food price increases, and this,
you know, this does the thing that massive food price
(19:50):
increases does. Right, there's there's and there's immediately enormous riots,
and there's the cycle that happens where the protesters, you know,
the purchesses, immediately blamed the government for the crisis, and
then the government is like, well, it's actually not our
fault because you know that it's happening because the things
outside of our control. And the protesters are like, oh,
it doesn't matter who we elect, they do the same things,
(20:12):
and like they're both kind of rights. Like the government
is just like sucking these people. But it's also true
that the sort of like the whole food system is
designed to take like the means of food production out
of the hands of like the workers who need the
food and putting them in the hands of like, you know,
enormous corporations and as people in places like Sri Lanka,
which you're gonna talk more about later, continually emphasized like this,
(20:34):
this food sovereignty issue is as much as a political issue,
Like it's an incredibly political issue, and it's it's it's
as much like what's at stake in these bread riots
as the sort of m finosterity stuff. Okay, this is
probably good place for an ad break, but I can't
think of a transition. Uh yeah, you know who isn't
allowed to eat is the products and services that support
(20:57):
this podcast, all actively star ring to death. So get
these deals now while you still can, and we're back.
So all right now, we're gonna talk a little bit
(21:19):
about the Arabs Spring. We're not gonna talk an enormous
amount about it, because that's the whole thing. Um. But
if if, if you've been following like the stuff people
have written about the Arabs spring, there's an enormous number
of people who spend like a lot of their time
arguing about whether or not it was actually sparked by
food prices. And you know, you'll get a lot of
(21:40):
analysts to argue that like food prices in Tunisia where
the air spring starts, like, weren't really higher than normal,
And what you're seeing instead is like, well, it's not
actually food prices. It's just that there's a generation of
people who've been farmers but like can't support themselves anymore,
who've been forced into like finding non existent wage labor
in cities and like that that is part of what's happening.
(22:01):
But I think there's there's a sort of like fundamental
misunderstanding of what causes a bread riot, right, Like you know,
as you talked about like in the first episode, one
of the things that causes bread riots is it's not
actually necessarily the magnitude of the price increase that causes them. Right,
what sets what sets off bread riots is people is
people feeling like they're not getting what they deserve. Now. Obviously,
(22:21):
like if the price of bread increases, you're going to
get a lot of people going like, funk this, I
work my ass off and now I can't feed my family.
We deserve better, and this is time to riot. But
sometimes even if red prices are stable, you can you
can get it. You can get a thing where everyone like,
you know, the amount of bread is bad. Everything is expensive,
and one day someone wakes up and just goes, funck this,
(22:42):
I deserve better, and they do a bread riot and
and this is the case. And you know, and when
when that kind of thing is happening, right, When when
when you're dealing with you know what like moral economy stuff,
when you're dealing with with this gap between like what
people think, like like what people think their life should
be versus the fact that their lives which is absolutely terrible.
Even if you like decrease the price of bread, that's
(23:03):
not actually necessarily going to like stop people from rioting.
And if you look at like occupy for example, to
like you know, that's also happening in this period, Like
what brings people there isn't necessarily strictly the price of food.
It's the sense that like, yeah, I've been screwed by
and I've been screwed by the ruling class, and I
deserve better than this and and this is this is
what you see Indonesia. And one of the things what
(23:25):
do you see in sort of Phoenicians Syria is that
like a lot of the uprisings, like they have this
huge sort of rural core with with this population of
the population to people who've been kicked out of agricultural
sector and you know, and like that that is a
bread riot, right, And it's a bread right in the
sort of double sense of like it's the people who
are involved who used to be involved in in grain
production and now can't be. And then also that like
(23:47):
you know, people, people have hit the sort of expectation
gap thing. And what I think is sort of interesting
about this is that these bread riots, these rural bread riots,
are like their so the closest thing we have to
sort of the classical twenty century revolution, right, like that
that's one of that's the thing that causes like the
twenty century revolutions are the first generation of people who
(24:09):
are like but maybe in the first like two or
three generations people who come from the countryside into the
factories of the people who do revolutions um. And but
the thing is this is this is this is the century,
not the twentieth century. Like if you get kicked out
of your farm, there's there's no job in a factory,
like you're just unemployed, and you know, and this changes
the dynamics of of sort of everything. And I think, okay,
(24:31):
like people like broadly know the course of like the
air of spring and the way of uprisings they happen,
they get crushed largely. But there was another wave of
these sort of riots, protests and uprisings that started in
Haiti and like in eighteen over this massive field price hike.
And here is a partial list of places that like
(24:51):
people have like rioted in in large numbers since he
dozen in eighteen had sue Dan, Algeria, Hunduras, Chile, and
rock Ha Kong Iran like four times, Lebanon, like three times, Columbia,
like three times. A couple of things happen in France.
There was Puerto Rico, there was popular There's there was
Indonesia where in our second Ecuador one. Now there's Catalonia,
(25:13):
like people righted. In the US there there were massive
indigenous roadblocks like in Canada, ukimedia Kampa went up, or
there was stuff. It's a culture. Like there were two
different ways of protests. In India, there was like Belarus,
there's Kazahstan, there's Kyrka Stan, there's just Beekistan. There's Molly.
There's stuff in Nigeria or stuff in Libya, like there's
stuff in Sri Lanka. We're about to get to this.
This whole thing has has been happening like everywhere, and
(25:35):
it's been intensifying the last in the last year of
like three or four years. Um, we're not basically in
like year four of this cycle. And and you know, obviously,
like every single one of these protests has their own
like local political conditions, and like a lot of these
aren't even sort of loosely about the price of bread.
They're just about sort of other stuff that's happening. But
like like of the opperasons that I mentioned, like something
like fifteen of them are directly about the price of
(25:57):
food or the price of like translated fuel. And we're
gonna talk a little bit about sort of two of
the most recent like protest waves. We're gonna talk about
equat word, We're gonna talk about Sri Lanka because they're
there are two very different kinds of protests, even though
they're both kind of bread riots or at least I mean,
they're both very much the modern equivalence of it. Um
(26:19):
but they look very different. And there there's just I think,
and I don't know, I think it's like indestring reasons why. Um. Yeah. So,
so we're gonna start with, like with Sri Lanka. Um on.
On a very basic level, Sri Lanka, it has a
giant balance of payments crisis. Uh, this is you know,
it's just like that. This is the sort of like
large scale political version of famines. Right, Like, there's plenty
(26:39):
of food and fuel in the world, but the government
Srlanka does not have dollars to buy it with. Now,
the reason the government doesn't have dollars to buy fuel
with is because the government is basically like an incredibly
corrupt dictatorship that keeps like imputting luxury goods it didn't need.
And they did a bunch of like tax breaks at
rich people, and suddenly the government was broken. Everyone was like, wow,
how did that happened? It must have just been the
(27:01):
pandemic and it was like no, you like you gave
all the money to rich people. And then as the
crisis sort of went on, um, they the government decided
to ban fertilizer imports, and so this just meant that
people couldn't get fertilizer. So it's like farmers just didn't
(27:23):
plant food because curious decision. Yeah, it's like it's it's
one of those things you look at it. It's just
like like, like who thought this was a good idea? Yeah?
What was the positive end of that game plan here?
I mean, like the only like okay, So, like I
think what they were thinking is that, like, fertilizer costs dollars, right,
we're running out of dollars, so we're gonna stop people
(27:44):
from spending their dollars like on buying this stuff so
we can keep more dollars in the economy. But like,
what what are you what is your long term plan
here if you don't have like anything to get dollars
with or and you also don't have food. So this,
to the surprise of exactly zero people except I guess
(28:05):
the government of Sri Lanka causes a food crisis, food shortage. Um.
And this is a kind of classic like this is
the kind of classic like situation in which the I,
m F we intervene in the seventies and they're tving
now and you know this, this is a classic like
struggle against this starting right, you have the ruling class
blowing up the entire economy by like fueling debt money
into pointland's infrastructure projects. And now they're doing these like
(28:27):
massive austerity measures, are trying to get loans to MF.
This is you know, this is this is this is this,
this is this is this is stuff we understand that
we've seen before. Um. But this is also this is
also a food softigy problem, right. The Sri Lankan government
has just completely screwed their farmers, which means you have
to import even more food and and you know the
result of this is months and months and months a
very impressive sort of clock cross class protests with like
(28:51):
basically every social sector in the streets. And that's both
a good thing and also a thing that is kind
of a mess because you know, like there's civil war.
The civil war ended like less than a decade and
a half ago. Right, so you have people in the
streets from sectors who like do not like each other
at all, and I don't know, and you know, you
(29:12):
get the thing that happens here, right, You get these
moments of like incredible solidarity and then moments of incredible
like what the funk are you guys doing? And you know,
like one of the things that happens a lot in
these protests, like in all all protests, like this is
like okay, the protests are like pre tame for literally months, right,
Like it's just people doing protesting, and then I cops
(29:32):
and and people like allied with the government start attacking
their protesters, at which point people like burned down the
house of the ruling family. They start throwing people. I
think people probably saw the videos people like throwing cars
of like government ministers and the rivers, which was a
good time, and like yeah, like that that stuff was
you know, a direct reaction to sort of like the
government's violence. Right. Um, you know, okay, I can't give
(29:56):
like a full, like detailed political history here because, like
dear Odd, it is incredibly complicated and I don't understand
it very well because you know, I don't study Sri Lanka. Um,
if you want to go to account of this. Brohini
Hensman's political dimensions of the crisis in Sri Lanka is
a really good sort of like short like look at
what's going on here, um, And and this is the
(30:18):
sort of like this is you know, this is a
broader trend and like all these protests right like like
every single bread right takes place in its own unique context,
Like Sri Lanka, for example, Like Sri Lanka used to
have the world's best and largest like mass Trotskyite party,
like they were the Trotskyites is like the only place
on earth the trot Skates had like a real like
mass political party and they were like a part of
the real political process. And then they like sold out
(30:40):
the working class and entered a bunch of governments that
like did terrible stuff. And you know, okay that that
that's like a local context, doesn't happen anywhere else. But
you know, every single one of these states, right is,
is embedded in global capitalism. And that means that every
state is affected by the sort of like broader economic
trends and sort of beerocratic structures to hold everything together.
Their affect by the I m F, the World Trade Organization,
(31:01):
the World Bank. And the thing that this means is
that the timings of uprisings and riots tend to synchronize
with each other, and we actually just sort of brought
her up like economic forces. And the product of this
is way is these sort of like periodic ways of uprisings.
And so the closest out we're gonna talk about the
most recent of these, well, it might actually not be
(31:21):
the most recently these by time this goes up, but yeah, yeah,
we're we're gonna talk about Ecuador. Um, the situation Ecuador
is very different from what's happening is to Laka. The
biggest difference, I guess is that instead of sort of
like waiting for conditions to get bad enough that like
an uprising happens like more or less spontaneously, which is
(31:43):
kind of what happened he doesn't nineteen and Ecuador there
there's there's there are huge protests there, um, but they
were largely spontaneous, but instead of like waiting for people
were just like what if we just called one of
these And by by people here, I specifically mean the
Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador or ka and you know, okay, okay.
(32:05):
As we've seen through this whole sort of thing, right
like bread riots like adapt to the political organizations around them.
And in Ecuador we're dealing with a quick essentially modern
form political organization, which is the Indigenous Confederation. And I
guess I should sort of like preface this a bit
with like the specific form of indigenous confederation in in
(32:25):
Latin America that emerges in this period is like a
different thing than older ones because there have been indigenous
confederation for a long time. This is like a this
is this is a very specific like political thing that
emerged across Latin America in in sort of the seventies,
and the really really started struting up in the eighties
as results of like a lot of things, one of
which was like how shitty the old like Marxans Lendon's
(32:47):
vanger groups, like we're on indigenous issues. And one of
the one of the groups that forms in this period
is kana and Kanae is one of the world's most
bilitant like indigenous federations. And since they're founding in Night
in six, they've called half a dozen uprisings against neoliberal governments.
And I think I think they knocked off like three presidents,
which is a pretty impressive track record. And on July two,
(33:12):
faced with skyrocketing inflation on like basic consumer goods and
a like really shitty like far right government, they stage
another one um and this is another sort of I
don't know. The thing is interesting about this is that
it's it's part general strike, like part street protests, part riot,
(33:33):
and part just like mass march for the from the
sort of periphery of Ecuador to the core. And by
periphery and cora, I mean in this sort of metaphorical sense,
like it's a bunch. It's a bunch of indigenous peasant
groups from all over the country, just like marching on
descending on the capital Keto. And this is a this
is a complicated process like that, you know. Okay, like
the left everywhere has like political divides and mostly they're
(33:55):
kind of nonsense in a lot of way, like okay,
like that there's ideological divides and those personal divides and whatever.
But like Ecuador's left has has real political divides, and
these aren't these aren't like sort of petty ideological like
personal stuff, like they're like they were caught under the
sort of previous like old like leftist, pink tight governments
(34:15):
of Raphael Carrera. Like there are like soldiers and cops
who are beating the ship out of indigenous like a
logical protesters. And you know this means that like yeah,
you know, okay, So so Carrera is like parties running
for president again. Careers are running, but careers parties like
running in an election, right, And you know this means it'
like yeah, okay, like maybe you're both leftist, right, but
you know there's a lot of people who are like, oh,
(34:36):
funck no, like I'm not voting for these guys. These
are the guys who like sent the army against their
anti mining protests. And so you know, the thing the
thing that is interesting here is like like these protests
don't even pull together the entire recordorian left. Um, there's
like other stuff going on here too, like that. There
there's some of the unions that went on strike in
twenty nineteen, like don't go on strike this time because
(34:58):
of some political stuff that's happening. But the thing, the
thing about KNA that's really impressive is that they're still
organized enough and they still like they're organized enough that
they're able to just take control of parts of cities.
And they have a lot of allies supporters amongst other
students and workers and keto. And this means that when
the government makes this enormous mistake and arrests karas like
(35:19):
kind of Newish leader. Ah, okay, this guy's name. This
guy's name, I guess in Spanish, it's like Leonidas. Is
that this guy's name is Leonitis. He's the head um,
he's the head of Kaisans Federation Um. And he sees
a protest leader. He was a protested leader in twenty nineteen.
(35:42):
That's how we got elected to like head this organization.
And they arrest him on day two of the protests.
And this is a catastrophic mistake. The protest just like
explode and you know, bye bye bye by like a
week in. I think that the government's claiming they were
doing fifty million dollars a damage a day, which I'm
not actually sure I believe that because governments and corporations
(36:03):
do this too, and they're talking about like losses from
like strikes, and they tend to over emphasize how much
damage is done because it makes them like look better
in the press and makes the protesters look worse, but
they they they they're able to damage like significant parts
of the economy, and by June, like they kind of win. Basically,
the government's forced to negotiate with them, and they don't
(36:24):
get all of their demands, but they get price decreases
for like fuel and gasoline, which is like a huge
part of why these just happened in the first place.
They get bands on mining and drilling and indigenous and
protected areas. They get like strength and price controls. They
get like local rural loan forgiveness, like interest rate decreases.
They get sub disdas for farmers to get subsidies for families,
they get they manage to get the government to declare
a state of health emergency over COVID. It's like, this
(36:46):
is this is impressive stuff, and you know, and the
other part of this is that they're like, Okay, the
agreement is that we will stop protesting if you do this,
and if you don't do this, we're gonna do this again.
So yeah, I guess I guess might sort of wrap
this up. There's there there's an American proverb that is
(37:07):
really common amongst sort of like American China watchers, which
is that I so supposedly the Chinese word for crisis
is composed of two characters, danger and opportunity. And it's
like not true, as likelistic and at the polological analysis
of China that that's not what that's not what the
characters made. But everyone, like everyone in the US, like
political stamoshere like believes this right, And you know, but
(37:31):
like as as an analysis of China, it is completely useless.
As an analysis of the US, of the American psyche,
it's incredibly valuable, right because this this, this is the
way the American ruling class thinks. It's it's every single
crisis is both a danger and an opportunity. And that's
something that we in some sense also have to do
because that's you know, these are the sort of situations
(37:52):
that we're in, right bread riots are a thing that
just they happen, right, they will continue to happen. They
have been happening for that cousens of years, like presumably
they will happen for thousands of more years. And there's
no use sort of like either pretending that they don't
happen or making these sort of moral or tactical arguments
like for against them, because they just happen. And the
(38:15):
question that we're that we're faced with is what are
we actually going to do about it? Right? Are we
going to set them out? Are we gonna side with
the state and repressing them in the name of sort
of like stamping out color revolutions, are like providing order
a stability, or like protecting small businesses, or are we
going to you know, take to the streets and fight
alongside them to sort of break the system that creates them.
And this is the second question from here is if
(38:37):
we're going to do this how and what? What what
we've seen from Ecuador in the past month or so
is that if you take the fight to them and
you're sufficiently organized, you can win. And that means the
question now, as our food prices continue to increase, as
food prices are only going to continue to increase, what
are we going to do? And Yeah, that that's all
(39:04):
I got I have. I have a single question, yep,
what are we going to do? Well? I'm I'm kind
of bummed we never brought up are good friend Pete
Buddha j Edge in his uh bread his bread press
(39:25):
fixing ordeals? Yeah, I mean that that that that's kind
of a sign of just like how kind of like
I guess you could say masculalized, Like our culture has
been that, Like people didn't riot over that because like
that is a thing like if if if if if
you said, Pete budda edge back to like a late
Frets village and she tries to do this thing like
(39:48):
he he does the systematic like bride bread price fixing, right,
like all of these people would have been getting hit
by rocks. So yeah, I do that again. Yeah, do
that again? Wow, barons just brasen incitement. Yeah, yeah, it's great.
(40:09):
Well that is it for us today. We love to incite.
Thanks folks. Until next time, go incite yourselves. It could
Happen here as a production of cool Zone Media. For
more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
zone media dot com, or check us out on the
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(40:30):
to podcasts. You can find sources for It could Happen here,
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