It Could Happen Here Weekly 62

putting things back together. Today we have an episode about well it's this is This is kind of a big one, folks. So everyone who listens to the show regularly will know that. There have been a rash of attacks by the far right on drag Queen's Story hours and kind of similar events to that. Events that are LGBT friendly, events that also involved children have been regularly attacked all over the

United States. At the same time, there have been escalating attacks by wingers, often the very same people, on reproductive

healthcare resources clinics that sort of thing. Um. This is happening all over the country, but one place where things have been particularly aggressive as of late is in New York, um, New York City, and today we're going to be speaking with a couple of different people who live in New York who have been present at some of these actions and who want to talk about what's been going on with the far right and the attempts to defend these

people in these organizations from from right wing aggression. So I want to introduce Talia now. Talia, you are known to our audience. You've been on this show and some of our other shows a couple of times in the past. Welcome to the show, Thanks for having me, and hello to everyone who still remembers what I sound like. And do you wanna you wanna drop your your your Twitter and stuff up at the top here too, because you do a lot of on the ground reporting at different

times and in this to young it's pretty simple. It's Talia O t G as an on the ground UM and yeah that's where I do my reporting on events, analysis all that dumb ship. And then our other guests are two New Yorker is sorry New York people, um, who are both anti fascist activists who have been present in the streets for a number of these recent events. I'd like to introduce Tom and Barry. Do we want to go around and do pronounced real quick? Here? Um, I'm I'm he him, Yeah, sure, I'm she are they?

This is Tom, I'm here him and I'm she her. Awesome? All right, Well that is so, I guess I'd like to kind of start and and hand it over to to Talia if she wants to give kind of an overview of how all of this has has has gone down. But basically we've seen. I mean, the thing that surprised me most in the coverage that I have watched from a distance is how aggressive and large some of the right wing presence has been at like reproductive health clinics in New York City. I was kind of surprised to

see that in New York. Yes. So there's a group in New York called NYC for Abortion Rights and they host once monthly clinic defenses at the Planned Parenthood on Bleaker in Lower Manhattan. UM. And they do that because there is a church nearby the basilica of Old St. Pat's that hosts a a coalition of anti abortion religious zelic groups. They organized these large they're usually processions to the Planned Parenthood where they pray outside they throw holy

water on the building. They attempt to hand out UM propaganda and literature and intimidate people who are coming into the clinic for necessary health services. UM. And these same individuals have been seen attending anti vaxx rallies that the man who leads the procession to the Planned Parenthood UM, his name is Christopher Mansinski. He's also known as Fidelist. And he has invaded clinics in White Plains, New York in I think UM East Hempstead. UM. He has been

trying to revive Red Rose Rescue, which UM. People who are familiar with the fight for reproductive rights are probably aware that that is the primary group that invades clinics and tries to harass patients. UM, threatens doctors and care workers and all all sorts of things. That the main people who lead Red Rose are either in jail or have died thankfully. UM. And he's trying to revive that here in New York. UM. And he has attended um

rallies organized by far right conspiracists anti vax conspiracists. UM. And it's like, you know, he he went to d C for the March for Life, and then he stuck around for the my body, my choice, anti vax rallies.

It's it's very it's it's very contradictory. But we see these same people because they're aligning on conservativism, on crystal fascism, and we're seeing him pop up um insured spaces pretty frequently in New York in ways that I think are more transparent or like more easy to clock here, even if there is like a larger density of them that do mobilize to these specific things like clinic Crossman's Yeah, that's um, that's a really interesting point. And that's also

what we've seen a lot in the Pacific Northwest. Um. You know, we just had an attempt rally at a drag Queen story our and Eugene and it was a lot of the same old crowd who used to rally

in Portland before they got scared off of Portland. Now I'm wondering kind of what how would you characterize the response of the police to these events and how they kind of have have have treated the right wing at these well, it is about it's uh cliche as cliche comes, because every single time, um, when I've covered clinic defenses specifically, the police are helping move the procession along and threatening clinic defenders with arrest on the basis that they're blocking

the roadway. Um. They are. They they essentially work as like secondary of security. Um. Sometimes they will split off from the other police and be like pushing and shoving clinic defenders on their own in a way that doesn't make any sort of strategic sense. But it's like they're getting enjoyment from doing that. Um. It's it's the same story over and over again. You know. We see it in in San Diego when anti fascists were mobilizing against uh,

like Trump's supporters that were being very violent. The Trump supporters were doing the violence, and it was the police that were attacking the anti fascists trying to fight against like trying to defend themselves against the far right. Um. And we saw the same thing at Penn State just the other night. The there was a gaggle of like proud boys or or I think Tess Owen referred to them as fascists in all black, who were macing the crowd and they they you know, I didn't do anything.

The police escorted there was an incident where a proud boy was assaulting or like somehow there was a fight that happened with a demonstrator and a proud boy, and the demonstrator the police threw the demonstrator on the ground and then escorted the proud boy into the building where Gavin mcinness and Alex Stein were supposed to put on a very bad it didn't end up happening, lead him

back to his friends. Jesus Christ. Yeah, I asked that question, and I know everybody like listening, and I know all of you knew like what the answer was going to be. I feel like you still have to like ask it. Um. I am curious. The NYPD has a kind of manpower, access to manpower, and access to surveillance equipment that, in

my experience out does most nations I've been in. And I'm interested particularly and everyone's responses are welcome, but particularly what what Tom and Barry might have to say about what sort of roadblocks that provides towards organizing responses to these events and kind of how activists have had to

adapt to that. Uh, this is Tom here. I mean, I will say it's very clear that the NYPD constantly monitors any sort of online space whatsoever, and I think most people know to organize, you know, in person or on signal with a small group of their friends, rather than trying to get a larger group of people to come to a thing publicly on the internet, because any time that happens, it's like there's instantly you know, that

much larger of a police presency. Get dozens and dozens of what's called the s RG, their Strategic Response group, which I think probably can maybe speak on that a little more, but they're basically the hats and bats that come bust up protests. Yeah, definitely agree with that UM.

And I would also say that because of the sheer volume of the vests that these exact same groups of people who are now attacking UM drag story hours and clinics, because we know this group already and they were having on these daily anti bax rallies which objectively stopped kind of being a thing to them, consider try to mobilize

accountable test for UM. So I think there is kind of a large disconnect right now, which there by design or accidentally where I think a lot of people feel like UM, people who might attend account of protest that is might feel like, oh no, it's just those same idiots up to their nonsense again, you know that that's we don't worry about that. But tell me if it's the proud voice coming and we'll mobilized kind of protest. Um. So, I honestly feel that it's sort of the mental kind

of the mental associations that we have with these familiar faces. Um. I mean, despite the fact that it's been kind of obviously Bond observed that the anti vax stuff is direct pipeline and radicalization, um, platform for these more extremelyst Cristal fascists and transford with actions, now people still can't really detach that, you know, this is actually serious now. So um, But yeah, I agree with what Tom said that it's

a matter of not dropping it. I'm sorry. I mean that that gets to another kind of advantage these folks have, which is because is of how much additional state repression y'all are dealing with the kind of personal cost of attending these events encountering the right is higher, both in terms of potential risk and just kind of in terms

of the trauma incurred. I know from personal experience. I mean, I haven't been out in the street in quite a while, about a year at this point, and I know a lot of other people who are in the same place, because it just kind of you know, you can only take so much as an individual. What are some ways in which y'all is a community try to cope with burnouts that you can continue to meet the pace at

which the right is doing this stuff. I mean, I think it's really relying on other people, like the same one two or three or four or five people can't keep doing everything well, so as people start to get exhausted, I think that it's time to you know, take a step back, take a week off, take three weeks off, like there have to be other people that are ready to step up, um, you know, throughout your community, but

throughout everywhere. Yeah, and definitely I think there's going to be more of a need to emphasize that this requires every day and a fascists. I think in New York City especially, we kind of fell into a traveler any

kind of public fall encounter. It was very I mean, they looks into style and boarding, you know, very clear that it's a cab there, black the water, things like that, and the kinds of people that are just meaning members that we actually do need to also show up and saw the fascists that they're not welcoming their neighbors either, they're not going to respond to something like that multitude

of reasons. And UH, what can you say about sort of the numbers that you're seeing kind of on on both sides on the ground here, what's like a normal action looking like in terms of that? UM? I mean, you know, just from reporting and keeping tabs on different types of protests. In New York City, we have a lot of UH nonprofits and more established type groups that organize larger events UM, and those are typically just marches

for visibility and awareness UM. And when it comes to a counter or some sort of direct action like mutual Aid for example, UM, we see much smaller numbers. But those numbers that I mean that I see at least is that these are people who've built community and UM communicate together. As opposed to seeing a flyer and showing up just for that one day. These are people who

consistently are engaging with one another and with that space. So, like I mentioned mutual Aid, we have UM Washington Square Park mutually which meets every Friday, and the core group that UM sets it up and distributes and everything is relatively small. But the people who have shown up to support in some capacity in the past two years that

it has been active. Um, they all know each other, and that doesn't mean that, you know, they're like necessarily like going to birthday parts together for um, you know, donating kidneys to one another or something like that. It's not necessarily like best friend groups. But it's people who have built a sort of neighborhood in this ideology and in this space in this time. I would also say like these particular events have kind of brought in like

a different group of people. It's not like the same cruise of people that we're doing other things, because there's more kind of liberal people getting involved that are like coming to these drag string court, drag queen story our defenses to you know, be joyful and hold up signs and saying and like welcome people into the library. So that's also made it more easy to keep these going because we've kind of got a larger revolving door of

people rather than you know, smaller groups. Yeah, that makes sense, as like particularly is a way to not burn people out. You know, I'm curious as to what have you seen as far like one of the major tactics anti fascists always uses identification UM and exposing people who are attending

these events rallying with fascist organizations. Have you noticed a difference on how well this works for the people who are showing up to protest like drag Queen story Our events versus UM the people showing up at at reproductive healthcare clinics, at planned parenthoods and such. Because it kind of strikes me that one of those is more mainstream

maybe than the other. Although perhaps I'm being kind of optimistic in that, but I'm wondering, does that does it appear to be more effective against kind of one kind of rally than it is in another kind, if that makes any sense. So, a lot of the people who are engaging in the clan carassments are known among their networks, and because their goal is to present a sort of legitimizing face for opposing abortion UM, they don't typically show up to things that are a little bit more volatile.

But we have seen that with so it as it happens that this the people who are harassing Drag story Our for the most part, have been a part of one specific core group of people that I've been monitoring and reporting on for the past year, so I know all of their names, which has pigeonholed them into what they can and can't do. We had there's there's this far right propagandist or in Levy. His brother was at ah.

He was trying to harass a drag story Hour at the Andrew High Scale Library for the Blind and that was an event put on for NEUROW divergent children and he was attempting to harass that. He ended up pepper spraying to people. And because he has known, his name is out there, his face is known, and he is identifiable across all social media networks. It was very easy for those people to be able to file complaints against him. Um. Yeah. And another thing too, is it because this one group

does all of these harassments together. They started out doing anti vax stuff where they were going and harassing a restaurant called Dame in Um I think it's in the village or yeah, it's in the village. They were harassing that restaurant for a while, and then they started harassing the Health Commissioner's house and then Gracie Mansion, which is where Eric Adams lives. And they were all doing these

things together. So their network was very easy to monitor and trace UM, and so when they started harassing Drag Story Hour, which was undeniably they were doing that as a result of far right propaganda that was being pushed into all of their social media spaces, trying to convince them that Drag Story Hour is, you know, the Satan incarnate, and they start showing up and trying to harass those

and immediately they're known. They tried to harass Um, they tried to disrupt um aoc at a listening event she was doing in Queens. Immediately they were known. It was like I saw the footage and I was like, that's Robert White, that's you know, Cliff Lee, that's our Ronan Levy. And it's doing that because they're known. Because it's clear that it's one group that's showing up and doing this, trying to trying to follow the lead on what is

the trending outrage on the far right that week. It limits the number of people who are interested in joining them, because it's they rely on making it seem like they are just neighbors and constituents who aren't happy with X, y Z, and it's like, no, you're a coordinated group of harassers. We know who you are, so that mask being off definitely I think has helped to reduce the

willingness to grow in those harassments. But I can't necessarily speak to the future on what would hold or like what other people have been inspired by them, because we have seen you not to show up in other states to protest drag story. I were the same way that these this little you know band harassers has been harassing the story hours. Yeah, um yeah, sorry, just a direct response to that that I definitely agree um that. Yeah.

We've been monitoring the movement of the main actors in the anti backs movement for a while, but I did want to say that it is occasionally other groups, but that they all have the same thing in common and that they attached to the kind of hot topic issue that they see happening in other cities and states. So we did have actually like very like certainly Crystal cashis group um uh TMP. I believe that it was called whom you know had publicly next a rally to harass

the story. Our initially flashed onto that, um. But all of it is kind of following national trends. Um. But as they are initially trying to make see ur t and schools be the thing that was a multitude of different groups that are trying, and you know, they're looking for something that sticks, and they're looking for something that passers by any given passers by walking by will see

their side of if they hear it. Um. But their lack of success though, is because of their violence and um not especially convincing and very human on sounding antics to where it is clear that they are not actually they're protesting what they playing themselves. They're protesting, UM. You know, they're they're losing sympathy because eventually their signs started being

about Antifa instead of about electracy protecting the children themselves. UM. So their own messaging kind of probably also at fault there. But this issue is still always going to be at risk for attracting different new Nazi groups. UM. I mean we've seen Orlando and Ow there's a relition of Nazi surgery together to attack story Hour. We've actually seen some of that in New York. And it was just coincidence that this crazy atax um showing to a tax story

I was the same day. Perhaps other groups were um say too much something. Yeah, I was just gonna say, I mean about the you know, neo Nazis and other areas coming in protesting these drug Queen Story Hours. I mean that the first bigger one we did was at Elmhurst Library. There were not only somebody who was at a neo Nazi rally in front of Trump Tower once we had a January six insurrectionists and I think Holly can probably speak to those two characters a little more.

But then there was some other there was another drug Queen Story Hour where someone from g d L showed up. And I'm sure you're familiar with g d L, Robert right, yes, yes, yeah, the Goyam Defense League, these guys around the hate bus flying the swastika there. Yeah, I mean you just said swastika. But in place people are not aware of what Goyam means. What you need to know is the Gham Defense League or hardcore not Zis. Yeah, like they are legitimate, straight

up neo Nazis. They fly to swastika, they go harassed Jewish neighborhoods um in those yeah capital m Nazi. Yeah, one of them went and harassed one of the drag Queen story I was recently. Uh then he ran off and said he was going to get his friends and didn't show up with anyone else from what then, Speaking of neo Nazis, you probably know Jovie Valve. Oh yeah, Jovie and I had a conversation a couple of years ago with with my good friend Goad. Yeah, your old buddy.

Mm hmmm. Well, he showed up at um I believe it was a pediatric health care facility. I don't know if they do gender affirming care, but he was in front of it to sign I'm sorry, I said, neither did he? Yeah, exactly. It was literally because the clinic had pried flags in the window. Yeah, okay, because he was holding up a sign that said I'd rather a Nazi than a pedophile, which is just like a nonsensible and be like, we all know, just say you're a

fucking Nazi. Why is that the choice. It's so funny because there's like pictures of him with the swastic netflace, like doing the Roman salute, like everyone knows you're a Nazi. You know, he's completely unashamed. And that's the weirdest part about him, because you know, he learned an interesting lesson about wearing just a you know, a maga hat in

a bar in Brooklyn a few years ago. If anyone knows what incident I'm talking about, Oh yeah, So I find it interesting that this actually did not deter him from ever leaving his house again, you know, nearly losing his entire nose, um so, and then still deciding to just double down and actually start carrying the Nazi flags, thinking it'll go better this time. Um And apparently he

just guys trying to make Nazi ship. He's trying to make his name again in two like jovie Val is, like he's he's expired, and he doesn't seem to realize that he's one of You know, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna show up and I'm gonna have nobody with me, and I'm just gonna be standing in front of a closed pediatric clinic, like with a sign telling people all they see from a distance is the word

pedophile and the word Nazi. But I mean, he did have his one little body with him in fairness, according to his own videos that he posted of the encounter, and that buddy of his, whoever he was, could be heard saying, uh something like hey man, you know I can't fight actually got posted on Telegram and he said, Jovie, I can't find I can't find man, I can't find you can also hear Jovi Yeah, like what are you doing?

What are you doing? As he gets tossed into like a construction area, and he's such an embarrassment to like even other Nazis. They're even making fun of him online. I mean somebody literally said that, why does jovie always get his ass kicked? This is ridiculous. He is he is the kind of he is the kind and generation of Nazi that other Nazis consider cringe like fucking Jovie

valve ate him so much. At the same time, though, it is a little bit alarming because all of this attention on UH figures such as Jovie Vale failing every time and like stepping on rakes metaphorically every time he goes outside, it does kind of open a nerving vacuum up to like, oh what, I can be a way better Nazi than that. So that is the part that concerns me. If the constant attention is that, um, you know, Jovie Val did not succeed in organizing a transphobic Nazi

rally outside of a closed pediatric clinic. Okay, I guess that's a win. But who else sees that and sees and thinks, oh, we can do so much better because we do have a problem with unidentified Nazis throughout New York City. There's you know, there's been increases in all sorts of graffiti all over the subways, um Nazi literature

being put on trains and lefted places. It's, uh, you know, so who is seeing this and how what is the messaging exactly to say that you won't succeed if you try this either, just because you know, Jovi keeps getting his ship rocked, like we need you to know he will, you will get your ship. I mean, that's the most important thing, at least in my experience, and that is mostly as an observer. I'm not an organizer, but I've

I've watched what's happened in the Pacific Northwest. And the reason why these people don't rally in Portland's the way they used to is they were faced with consequences and that required I mean, that was that was not a simple process. It took fucking five years, and a lot of people got broken bones and a number of them got killed. But like that is that is the thing

people like. These people's lives have to be created. And one of the things that is a real problem is that it's a lot easier to create people for rallying, or it used to be. Number one, it used to be easier to create people's lives because they were willing

to rally with Nazis. But also now the right has succeeded in mainstreaming these two specific things, going after drag Queen story our events and going after reproductive healthcare clinics and the people using them, to such a degree that it's gotten a lot harder to ruin people's lives over

this sort of thing. That's that's true. But at the same time, there is an increase in so many of them who are just unabashedly that way, beset their full names, addresses, photos they say, you know, identifying or doc see them is not there. It's just actually almost hyeah is in vogue, like most like a large chunk of the country is totally fine if you're a crazy bigot. The far right is radicalizing in a sort of gradual pace over the

course of many years. UM And what's happening with um people who are countering them is that there is this density of media and pundits sort of um looking down their nose at the decorum of countering them. So you know, we look at Penn State, UM students showed up in mass, hundreds of them, UM significantly outnumbered the Proud Boys that did show up, the fascist that did show up and

successfully shut the event down. But there's still this like armchair pungentry reflex to say, oh, well, they didn't do it right. There's no like it's not the right way

to protest. And I think, um, what Barry is sort of Verry mentioned earlier about everyday anti fascists, and that's again like with your neighbors and recognizing that it's not this weird, um inaccessible, like isolated group of people who solely show up very militant and in black block and they've got like all this training and all these like slogans and slang and words, and you know, it's it's

none of that iconography. Because that is also the conservative media i e. Andy know constantly refers to all sorts of things as, oh, this is just antifa, and the purpose of that is to make it seem like you can't do that too, when in reality he uh andy know that little ship stain. He referred to the defense of the successful defense at the Elmhurst Library. He claimed that it was ANTIFA militants. When I happen to know,

there was as a pastor who was there. There was a nursing mother with her infant and her toddler who was there. There were librarians present, and there were people who showed up because they were in the neighborhood and they heard that far right extremists were going to try and grass And sure enough, just like Tom mentioned, there was a J six insurrectionist who tried to get into the building. I recognize, Yeah, he tried to rush in.

I recognized him. His name is Mitchell Bosh. He's best known for getting arrested for taking a knee in a

burger king. Get arrested, okay, hoodie. Yeah, this guy tried to rush in and I don't know how it happened, but all of a sudden, my arm was hooked into his arm, twisting his upper body slightly, so he didn't have a good he didn't have good leverage to try and burst into the building where I knew that if he got in, he would refuse to leave until he was physically removed by police, so then he could then go online and say that he was fighting for freedom

and collect bullshit donations for bullshit legal funds. So getting all back to this though, is that the media and like these these pundits and everything, they are complicit in making it harder for people to build community. But people need to understand it is literally your neighbors. It is your local librarians, it is your UH friends, it is your coworkers, it's regular people. The same way people showed up to protest in they you know, oh, should I

bring a sign? Should I bring a bottle of water? Should I bring my a d what should I bring? And they just showed up and they mark you can do the same thing because when you have a significant number of people, you don't need to worry about being militant because you outnumber them. And across the board, if you look at data, the positions and the politics that these people hold and the things that they're pushing are in the significant minority of opinion. A majority of people

are totally fine with trans people. They're totally fine dregs story our like it's not a thing. But people aren't showing up to remind them that their opinion is the

minority and they are outnumbered. Yeah. I was going to say I agree with that last point, And unfortunately the problem seems to be about our kind of cultural um inability to agree on the definition of violence and how even though people are okay largely with queer and trans people and protecting trans kids, UM, and they definitely do not support Nazis, UM, they still do not think that UM any kind of militant action, including violence against these

people is ever appropriate. UM. And just a direct response to the Penn State thing that goes beyond punditory, even because Penn State itself released a statement saying that UM that it does not condone violence without saying who started the violence, ak the Proud Boys, who are amazing people. UM, they said that, uh, just because you don't agree with a speaker and their right to free speech the game UM hateful tour of Gavin mcinnesson the Proud Boys, UM

that there is no excuse for violence. So they denounced the content of the message as well as the response to the message. So we're kind of in this limbo where people who have the voice to send these messages are still playing the meat at the dinner table both sides. Surely we can come to a peaceful resolution and then blaming the side that actually is militantly opposed to it and how to overcome that, I don't know, but I do think the like Tolly also said, every day anti

fascism is a pretty good start. Yeah, I mean with every day anti fascism, like the right does this grassritt organizing and gets people to like tacitly agree with what the Proud Boys and these fascist groups do. I think there's plenty of like normal people who would tacitly agree with what we're doing on this side of things. Um, but I mean you look at like I think it was a body campaigning for Maybe it was Ron de Santis,

Robert you know about this. It was like a literal neo Nazi who got it was a Ruby Rubio and it was the guy was a member of the He was a Cuban fascist who was a member of the League of the South. Like there was a journalist online who was like this is awful. Somebody's like he's literally

a Nazi. And then you look up this journalists like history of articles she's written, and one was like this is why you should be friends with the Nazi or I'm paraphrasing, but that's literally like we should be friend Nazis. Like it's it is ridiculous how so much of the Mazed dream is like, let's come to the table and

be polite. I mean, I really think, and I think a lot of other people think, when it comes to Nazis and fascists in the far right, you have to make it as costly as possible, whatever that means to you. You have to make it as costly as possible for them so they are deterred from doing this. Organizer. Yeah, I think that's the the most durable conclusion certainly that I have. Seems like what y'all have experienced too and

are continuing to experience. Is there is there anything else y'all wanted to get into about about what's been happening in with with these events before we kind of close out for the day. The only thing I could think to add was that that it's not over. And um people might think, oh, they stopped coming to Drag Story hours for whatever reason, but they're going to find the next thing, the next issue, the next clinic, the next hospital,

the next healthcare provider. The next family was trans children. Uh, they have dresses, they have names, they know where to go. They're just looking for when they feel most emboldened to do so. Um, And it's kind of it's hard to communicate that because people think, oh, Okay, that was a successful action. You know, we're done, We're done with them

for now. But I don't know, it's it's it's just it's really hard to communicate the message that, like, you know, it's like head on this level, this is the this is the hardest thing to not just to get across to people, but to kind of like actively except for yourself, because it's it's one of the most frustrating realities of living in our society, and there's no way to get around it, which is that like not being eaten by these people is the result of constant vigilance against them.

Like they win if you don't continue showing up and one day in in in the bright blue yonder. I do believe that if people continue showing up and continue making it clear that their cause is hopeless, these people will I'll drink themselves to death or whatever. But um, you know that's that's not an immediate term sort of thing. No, I know, and I mean for just my personal note, like, yes, that is exactly the mode I'm in now. And I

mean I'm a Jewish anti fascist organizer. It's almost this kind of history repeating itself ancestral um to keep at it. And I'm one of many people UM in the same kind of mindset towards not an option to rest and wait until they you know, strike when they think we're not looking. Yeah, but it's it's you know, obviously yeah, I mean we have like, we have evidence that they are looking for the next thing. We have evidence that UM.

You know, there's this one woman who got heavily involved with UM, the anti vax group New York Freedom Rally UM, and she would go on you know, Instagram live stream saying a lot of like transphobic stuff. But she never transferred that over onto public spaces until this week, where she reiterated the same points that she was making in the privacy of her home on that live stream to her little audience. She's now saying it on a stage

that she's sharing with the candidate for governor, Lee z Eldon. UM. She's she's repeating these same things, So it's showing also that they are finding it. They're finding themselves more comfortable in saying these uh bigoted things and pushing more extreme things and expecting for their followers and their friends to

follow suit. There's people who have shown up to these harassments of drag story art who have said directly to me that they don't really agree with the harassment itself, but that their friends are they're doing the harassment, and so they're showing up for them, and that's a very quick road to they are going to decide to care about this very deeply and go very hard about it.

But what has worked is when people show up and make it not happy and not good for them, when their footage is ruined, when their sound bites are sucked up, when they are blocked from doing the thing that they're trying to do to generate that content to feed that like bigoted beast. When people show up, when those events keep happening, that's a big thing is that like the venues that host these events need to not cancel them, because when those venues cancel, it tells the biggests that

they are winning. And what needs to happen is the venues feeling brave to put out calls for community support the same way that had been in Eugene. Because when that then you put out that ask, they got hundreds of people and they outnumbered the biggests ten to one. I was just gonna say I was, I'm very heartened by like how supportive the UH people in the neighborhoods and libraries have been, whether they're allowed to officially support anything or not, it's been you know, nice to know

that people are happy we're there. And also I would really love to see a name of Jovie Val stepping on a rank. Now you had that image in my head. Yah, Um, was there anything else we wanted to get to? UH? Self defense is community effect defense and if people are interested. UM. People in New York created something called I fact Fund where you donate funds and then people who want to receive individual first aid kits UM can request one and

receive one for free. UM. And it was created in honor of a anti fascist badass named torch Um who is always present a UM. But yeah, if if people wanted to check that out, it's UH. The Twitter account is just at I fact Fund, I f a k fund UM if they want to donate I think it's uh cash app is I fact fund? I think you know someone else could look at up to check dollar sign fund. Oh, I'm sorry dollar signed I fact fund.

Thank you whatever. Yeah, Um, and you know it's it's just a matter of like knowing that we keep us safe in every sense of the word. Yeah. And I think that's a that's a perfect note to end on. Thank you all for your time, Thank you for continuing to be out there in the streets. Um and everybody else get out there and make a fascist stay worse.

We live in an age of uprising. From Haydi to Hong Kong, from Ecuador to Sudan, from Chile to Myanmar, from the US to Iran, an entire generation has been confronted with the horror of our world and took the simple expedient of picking up a brick and throwing it at a cop. Yet, as the uprising swept the globe, there was one country where it was considered impossible. Every expert, every policymaker, every kid on a street corner new there was simply no chance of a mass street movement in China.

On Monday, it was unimaginable. On Friday, it was everywhere welcome to it could happen here. What we've been watching for the past three weeks now is the failure of one of the most sophisticated political regimes in human history, a political, social, and economic regime designed specifically to stop this. One moment, after thirty years of repression, the national mass

street movement has returned to China. This is what it was all about, everything from the censorship policies to union busting to subsidize mortgages from a rising Chinese middle class. It was about keeping people from going back to the streets, to make even the idea of it impossible. And yet here we are. In one sense, the Party is little to fear from this round of protests, barring an immense intensification of violence, which at the moment seems extremely unlikely.

But in another sense, the CCP is perhaps the last regime on earth that truly remembers the previous age of revolution, that remembers when the workers took Shanghai in sixty seven, very nearly took Beijing and eighty nine. These are people who understand that China's political system is built on shaving a sleeping bear, and no matter how profitable that system is there's always a chance that one day that bear is going to wake up. Now the bear isn't fully

awake yet. We are not watching in China full scale uprising unless you're Dan or Myanmar. But that bear the air too, maybe the most militant working class and modern world has ever seen, is starting to open its eyes. So what is the CCP currently facing. Since about November, there have been widespread anti government protests in China. Unlike anything we've seen in the last thirty year years. These protests are everywhere. They're in Beijing, They're in Nanjing, They're

in Shanghai. There in guang Show, there in Shing. John will get back to that one in a second. There in Wuhan, reports I saw said that there were protests at seventy seven universities. That number is almost certainly an under account now and these student protests are not just taking place at small colleges in the middle of nowhere. There were protests at singh Qua University, which for an American audience I would compare to China's version of Harvard.

It's the college that produces the upper echelon if the Chinese ruling class. Hi Jimping graduated from there, so did his predecessor, Hu Jintao. And the only reason that ju Jintao's predecessor did not graduate from there is that that guy was so old that he went to college under the Japanese occupation. When I was originally writing this, I had a joke here about how the only city where there haven't been protest is Harbin, which is the city

in the absolute middle of nowhere in northern China. But no, I googled it, and it turns out there have been protests in bloody Harbin. For people who aren't very good at Chinese geography, which is probably most people. This means these protests are everywhere. There in the north, there in the south, they're in the east, there in the west, they're in the far West. And it's true that a lot of these protests are not that big, although some

of them are absolutely massive. But the importance here is that this is the first time in thirty years that we've seen widespread national protests over a single issue in China, the anormity of which is compounded by the fact that people in the streets of cities like Shanghai are openly calling for the fall of the CCP and Sijianping, something that by itself can get you a decade in prison just for saying we can ask what these protests are

actually about. The version you see in the American press is that these are anti lockdown protests, are protests against China's COVID zero policy, or that they're also pro democracy protests against the entire regime. And this is sort of true as far as it goes, but it doesn't capture the core of what's going on, which is that what we're seeing is a widespread fusion of labor rebellion, anti police brutality protests, and a revolt against the authoritarian state.

The thing that's brought all of this together is the CCPs COVID policy, but that's because that policy is the most visible and most concentrated expression of the state's general authoritarian is a bit brutal war against the working class. We can learn a lot about what's actually been happening by going back a little bit to the very start

of the protests. There are three specific events that sparked the protests, two of which are pretty well covered and one of which has been basically ignored because of how long ago it happened. The first spark is essentially an event in its own right. This is what I would call the fox Con revolts, a series of worker uprisings against the manufacturer of the iPhone, which with a single factory, controls vast portions of the regional economy of Hainan Province,

whereas large as factory is based. The fox Con revolt is I'm brewing for a long time. It began essentially when fox Con began to impose what's called the closed loop system. The closed loop system was originally developed by the NBA to run an NBA season during the beginning of the pandemic. The idea is that you keep everyone inside a closed loop. This means that everyone in the production process has no contact with the outside world at

all for as long as the manufacturing cycle goes. The CCP started adopting the closed loop as they hit problems with their twin imperatives to both stop COVID and also to make sure that fox Con hit its production targets so Apple could have enough iPhones for the Christmas rush. The result was that as an October wave of infections hit Hangan Province, where fox CON's largest factory, was located.

Two hundred thousand workers were put into a closed loop system, which meant they were trapped in the factory in their dormitories. In order to keep this factory running, fox Con needs about a hundred thousand migrant workers. The problem from capital perspective with MiCT workers is that they can, if things get bad enough, just go home, and that's exactly what happens. Workers inside the fox Con plant started to be quarantined with people who were sick in the same dormitory. And

it's worth noting here that these dormitories are tiny. The conditions even outside of lockdown are atrocious, and when people were suddenly getting quarantined with people who were sick, workers essentially just said no and started to stage massive breakouts. There are incredible videos of these trains of people like along the road walking home as sort of hitching rides on people's trucks, fleeing the factory. We don't actually know how many workers escaped, but it was enough to be

a massive problem for Capital. Again, they need these workers in order to make enough iPhones this for Christmas. Current estimates suggest that Apple is somewhere between eleven and fifteen million units behind what it needs to make the Christmas rush. So fox Con had the local government recruiting people to

go work in a factory. What they told these workers was that if they entered the closed loop for thirty days, they'd be given three thousand yuan which is about four hundred and fifteen dollars to live on for the next month, and then get paid thirty on or about four dollars an hour, and then after the end of the next dirty days they'd get another three thousand john In the US, this would be a subminimum wage poverty job for a

Chinese worker. This is a lot of money, or it would have been had it not been for one minor problem. All of it was bullshit. Fox Con and the CCP were lying out of their asses. After workers were already in the closed loop, they learned that the two three thousand yuan bonuses weren't going to be paid until March and May of next year, meaning that in order to get what they were promised for two months of work,

they were going to have to work for seven months. Also, the thirty U on an hour wage that they were promised was a lie. They were getting paid substantially less than that. So on Tuesday of November, workers who had emerged from quarantine to start work only to learn that they had been systematically lied to by both the governments and Chinese and Taiwanese capitalists came out of their dormitories and demanded that they either get their money or be

allowed to leave. There's another part of this account that I think complicates a lot of the sort of narratives that we've heard about what the Chinese poster about that did not make the Western press at all, which is that these workers were also demanding that their bosses quote

implement pandemic prevention and control measures. Um, it's not entirely clue what the specific demands refers to, but it seems to be about not quarantining sick people in the same dorms as healthy people, a thing that seems relatively obvious, but capitalism regardless. The product of bosses ignoring these demands was several days of full scale fighting with the police.

On November twenty three, a bunch of videos began to spread of work is taking those metal police barricades that you see all the time in the US that are essentially an arch with a bunch of bars and not get into a flat base. You've you've probably seen these picking them up and straight up throwing them at cops or grabbing them and beating police riot shields with them. I have I have never seen anything like it. It

was absolutely wild. At this point, after several days of fighting, after their own regular security people literally refused to show up to go fight these workers, and police from outside had to be called in. Fox Con gave up said okay, we will give you ten thousand yond to literally leave right now, please just stop, And a lot of people took the money and left. And in any other year, in any other moment, that would have been the end

of it. The fox Con riots would be another episode in the never ending series of they tried not to pay us riots that are the most common one of the most common forms of workers protests in China. Instead, on Thanksgiving Day in the United States, videos started to circulate of a fire in a residential block in a room Sheet, the capital of shing Jong. There are several

videos of the fire. In one that journalists were able to verify, you can hear people screaming from inside the building as they tried and failed to escape the flames. Further videos showed that cops had barricaded off the streets with metal wires as a way to enforcing John's one hundred day long lockdown, which prevented firefighters from getting to

the scene. Firefighters can be seen firing water hoses at the building, only for the hoses arc to fall shorts trapped behind barricades that prevented them from getting any closer. Speculation about whether the doors of the apartment building themselves have been sealed shut with locks or barricaded from the outside, as had happened to so many other people's homes during

the lockdown, ran rampant. One video I saw from another city appeared to show workers and has met suits who become known as the Big Whites, literally welding someone's door shut to keep them in. To make matters worse, the head of the roomsche city Fire Rescue department blamed the families for their own deaths, saying quote some residents abilities to rescue themselves were too weak. These are the videos the fragments of Nightmares brought to life that started the

mass protests. This is a revolution scene at thirty second intervals. Everyone is trying to beat the sensors, clips float back and forth between weach at, Twitter telegram back to weach hat again. Ironically, many sensors were ready home for the weekend, allowing clips and posts that otherwise would have been removed

immediately to circulate for hours and sometimes even days. These brought back the memory of the third Spark, the one that's basically been forgotten about in the West, if anyone even cared to know about it in the first place. In September, a bus full of people with COVID and Guangzho that the government was shipping to a quarantine center

crashed and killed twenty seven people, wounding twenty others. Condition in these centers, which COVID patients are often forced to go to rather than quarantining in their homes, are atrocious.

Pictures and videos circulate constantly of bathrooms covered in human ship from failing drainage systems, as China's already over tax medical systems simply failed to keep up with the demands on a place by the government, which, like the American government, has and continues to systematically refuse to invest in medical infrastructure. Intimate familiarity with these wretched conditions and the raw horror at the deaths and Shing John and Guangzho sparked protests

across the country. In a room sheet and now seventy percent Han City under constant police occupation, Han protesters appeared to be moved in solidarity with the weaker families killed in the fire, and fought the police with a ferocity unmatched anywhere but the migrant worker villages of Guangzho along the Parer River Delta, one of China's great manufacturing hubs.

These desperate struggles were given relatively little attention by a Western media class enamored with the image of students carrying blank, white pieces of paper to protest the censorship, a common form of protests in places like Hong Kong. This time, at least, they were tied to a particularly funny piece of media censorship. As protests mounted, people started posting an article version of a speech by Mao called let the

People Speak, the Sky will not Fall. Chinese censors quickly ran into a classic CCP problem, which is that in a state whose heroes are communist revolutionaries, celebrated historical figures produced an immense repertoire of slogans and quotes for subsequent generations and revolutionaries to draw from, which has caused the CCP, at various points in time to ban the opening of its own national anthem arise Ye who refused to be slaves as sensors banned Let the people speak, the sky

will not fall. People began posting the article, but with the words replaced by squares. This too was also deleted and then posting simply blanks white squares themselves, which saw their if auction in the students in the streets. The CCP in turn retreated to its traditional tactic of blaming the protests on foreign forces interfering in China, a claim which is less incredible on a country that has rolled up the CIA's entire in country intelligence network at least

once in the last decade. There's an incredible exchange has made the rounds between a cop who is telling a group of protesters that there are quote foreign forces around manipulating the protests, who is immediately yelled at by a guy screaming who are the foreign forces? Marks and angles Stalin and Lenin. Another man appears and asks, Hi, can I ask if it was foreign forces who started the fire in Shing? John was the Guigo bus overturned by foreign forces. Another man grabs the mic and says, was

everyone told to come here by foreign forces? The crowd shouts no. He then makes an incredibly obvious point, We can't even access to foreign internets. How are foreign forces meant to be communicating with us? Another man says, we only have domestic forces, not allowing us to govern themselves.

Where are these foreign forces from the moon? Still managing these accusations to become a constant part of the protests, with calls from protesters to stop chanting things like down with the CCP, and attempts to keep the demands focused on COVID policy like ending COVID zero. And this is where things get incredibly muddled by a Western press that decided to stop giving a shit about COVID deaths a year ago, and a set of contrarians arguing that no, actually,

China's COVID policy is actually good. This entire debate hinges on the conflation of the state of government policy of zero COVID, which is an attempt to stop all cases of COVID, and the actual execution of the policy, which has taken the form of a war against China's working class and a set of draconian police state abuses. One thing that Western quote unquote experts have been quick to point out is that will the CCP has to keep doing COVID zero or one point five million people will die.

There was a tiny bit of truth to this in that one reason Chinese COVID restriction so so harsh is that if COVID was simply let rip like it has been in the US, it would go through China's largely unvaccinated, rural elderly population like a chainsaw. And unlike in the US, if a million people died in China because the government fucked up a pandemic response, party officials would be getting

beaten to death in the streets. And part of the reason for the crisis in China in the first place is that the rest of the world gave up on trying to contain COVID entirely. If the rest of the world had, you know, done their jobs and stamped out the virus, none of us would be here right now.

On the other hand, no, absolutely not. You do not actually need to wield people into their houses or drag them by force out of their home so they can die and bus crashes on their way to unsafe and unsanitary pseudo hospitals with bathroom floors literally covered ship in

order to contain the pandemic. Lots of pandemics across human history have contained without doing this ship just because the two great world powers have decided that the COVID responses are kill a million people by forcing everyone back to work so that no one has to actually deal with the political consequences of telling a bunch of unbelievably deranged and heavily armed fascists no and lock two people in a factory and forced them to make iPhones and then

beat the absolute shit out of them when it turns out you lied to them about their pay. Doesn't mean that there aren't other options that we could take for pandemic responses if we decided to stop letting a bunch of venal and corrupt assholes rule us all. And this

is something that people in China also understand. Even if the Western press corps dead set on presenting their demands as if they're American anti maskers, you can tell, obviously the Chinese protesters are not simply a copy of right wing American fascists by simply looking at a picture of a protest and seeing how many people are wearing masks. China is not the US. Regular people actually do care

about containing the pandemic. This is why there is a real pandemic response in the first place, after the government utterly boshed it. If you look at the actual demands of the protesters, you will see things that normally would seem more at home with liberal American protesters attempting to see pandemic restrictions enforced properly, things like our pandemic response

must be based on science. But people, even people who don't want to die of a plague, do not want to be horribly abused by cops or horrifically exploited by the state and capitalists. And that, I think is something we do all understand. Only time can tell what will happen to these protests. The government is quietly making concessions and not so quietly hunting down people who took to the streets. It is entirely possible that the protest will simply die, and that in two or three years most

people will have forgot they ever happened. From a sort of brutal materialist perspective, however, it seems unlikely. China's social system could function fine as long as growth was at fifteen or ten percent, or even eight percent, But when growth inevitably comes down to two percent, but the deal of keep your head down and everyone will get rich

starts to look a lot less attractive. Covid is simply intensified all of the traditional contradictions in side Chinese society and made visible the horrors that previously had been obscured. And it seems unlikely that those contradictions will someday vanish. But here in the presence, the impossible continues, and every day it does is another day that the gates of possibility in h a bit further open. This espina could happened here. You can find us that happened here pot

on Twitter or Instagram. We have a website closoned Media dot com where you can see the sources for this In other episodes, Enjoy your week, and remember that you too can defeat your own ruling class. It could happen here. Rail Strike Edition. I'm Robert Evans, Garrison, Davis, Chris. How are we all? How are we all doing? How's this? We were talking about a rail strike today. We're praying,

we're praying for it. It hasn't happened. If you're listening to this, you probably know the broad strokes of this, which is that the people who make the trains go, and by the way, trains are like a critical part of us all not starving to death or running out of insulin or whatever. The people who make those trains go have a pretty hard job and there's not a lot of them. And for a variety of reasons, that boiled down to companies not wanting to spend money. Uh,

it's impossible for that. They don't get sick days. Um, So there were a bunch of other ship things like things that were shipped about the job, including pay, especially since rail company profits have been at like record levels, so they were threatening to strike. There were union negotiations. Some of the union leaders reached an agreement with the rail companies, but it wasn't it didn't include the sick days. So a lot of workers, potentially most of them are,

we're at least willing to strike. And then Biden came in and had Congress basically say do the same thing Reagan did to the air traffic controllers in the eighties, where it's like, no, if you strike, it's illegal because this is a too critical a service for the country. Anyway, that's broadly the situation. Chris, you know this a lot better than I, the most pro labor president, the most

pro labor precord. Okay, this is I think this is actually like that's that's why I don't like, that's my knowledge, and I think that's close to a layman's knowledge. So I'm waiting for you to fill in the gap. All right, let's let's let's start with what Biden has actually done, because it's it's it's slightly different than what Reagan was

doing there with the air traffic controllers. Um. Part of the reason everything is fucked up with the railroads is that, like railroads almost since their inception have had like an almost entirely different regulatory framework than like anything else. So you know, your normal strike is covered by the National Labor Relations Act, Right, you go through your National Labor

Relations Board, you do your votes, blah blah blah blah. Uh. If your railroad workers are not covered by that, they're covered something by something called the Railway Labor Act, which lets Congress just be like no, fuck you, you have to take this contract and the other thing it does. I mean, there is like a it is a oh I didn't realize that so well before, so well before, like you know, the modern era, and Reagan did his

ship with the air traffic controllers. There was a it was written into the law that Congress could say like, yeah, you're a to a rail strike. That's really interesting, I guess. And it goes back to the days when they were literally making them out of human bones. Yeah. I mean it's been so it's been amended over time, and it's changed a bit. And there's some other stuff that happened

in the nineties. After there's a there's a there's a failed rail strike in the nineties where Congress is also just like no, fuck you, you have to take this contract. But yeah, the the important thing about this is that like, okay, so in order to even potentially strike, you have to go through so much bullshit. It's called self help in

the law. Like the people have been trying to strike for two years, and everything that we're seeing now is the product of two years of bullshit of these like there's all of this nonsense you have to go through.

There's these like cooling off mandatory cooling off periods. You can't like, uh, you know, you have to like wait before you do anything else, and you you have to go to the next step, the next step, and the final step is Joe Biden had the choice to either let these rail workers strike and actually get the things that they fucking needed, or he could tell them to funk

off and just eat a contract. And that that that that's what's happened right now, is that Joe Biden has just and also again with the support of both houses of Congress. And I also like explicitly want to mention here that a lot a lot of nominally socialist politicians, including like a lot of social Democrats vote talk about that too, because that that's that's another part of it. That again, so my my surface and I guess I'm playing playing the podcast idiot in this one, which is

not abnormal for me. But my like layman's understanding of what happened with this is that, uh, there was a bill up in Congress as to whether or not to endorse this, and uh a bunch of progressives said that they wouldn't vote on it unless it included seven days of paid sick leave, including Sanders that got pushed off into a separate bill, and there was like some kind of sketchy wording about like well we won't you know, like I I don't, I don't understand the congressional hijinks,

but I know they just wound up voting for the the negotiate like what the union had negotiated without any sick leaf like it. Yeah, Like it seems like it kind of provided an opportunity for a bunch of progressives in the House to vote yes on the sick leave knowing that it wouldn't pass the sent it and knowing that the strike would still get stopped. Right Like what am I um? I mean it's basically that like the

I'm not a congress nowhere. Yeah, I mean, there there's a bunch of sort of hiji inks that were happening in Congress where there's there's a slightly different version of the bill in the House, and they had this whole thing. But okay, the House, the House one for sick leaved did pass with support of every Yeah, and it's three three Republicans. But okay, the thing I think I want to point out here and I want to move away

from the sick leave thing, because the sick. That's the fact that these people don't have sick leave is important. This is also not like the main thing the strike was about, like things are, things are things are so much worse like things are, things are so much like

infinitely worse than people like at all understands. Like what the thing that the thing that's real strike is about, if you if you go like actually talk to the people who are doing it, is that these people are on call for nine of their lives, like and and when I say nine percent of their lives, they're on

call while they were asleep. They're on call constant. Uh, there's there's there's no way to even there's no way to plan a consistant sly schedule because you can just be on call and you know, and part part part of what's going on here. And if if you read the sort of detailed accounts, you will see a lot of people talking about this thing called precision scheduled railroading. Yeah, precision scheduled railroading was it was a great theory kind

of that was implemented so atrociously badly. It's basically fucked like the entire economy. Um that the idea behind it was like you could you could schedule when like a freight railroad was going to go right, and this this would give you a bunch of efficiency bonuses. You could plan like you could schedule things around each other. Um,

this just didn't happen people implementing it. But what they implemented was just this nightmarror like amalgamation of we're going to reduce a bunch of staff and then we're going to make these trains that have like two cars on them. And this has been a catastrophe. It's called monster trains that there's there's Justin Rosniak, who's podcast doesn't see it doesn't seem like a good solution to the problem of not enough guys to make trains work is make the

trains huge. Yeah, it's like it's just denorable train crap. It's awful. Again, these are your tw orter trains long right, so if if you don't get the weight you ship you should write, the train will fucking fall over. They keep doing this this this has been happening for like several years now. Is there's just trains everywhere derailing. There's like no coverage of it. The reason, you know, you know, you know, you know where I knew that from Chris Garrison will tell you when I get when I get

drunk or something late at night. My favorite thing to watch his videos of trains hitting stuff and train crashes are amazing to watch. It's incredible to think of all the human ingenuity it took to make that big, big boom. There's thousands of videos on YouTube of cool cargo getting stuck on train tracks and train happening through there yea boxes being pulverized in the air, they vaporized. It's so cool.

So the downside is that one day we're going to have one of these trains that is run by a person who has had three hours of sleep in the last forty eight hours, and it's going to be caring, like fucking I don't know, it's gonna be carrying like sodium nitrate on it or some ship and it's just going to explode and it is going to kill enormous every pole. That just actually happened in Canada like a decade ago. But yeah, like these trains are too big.

They're so big they don't fit in the fucking rail yards. Like they're so big that most the training infrastructure doesn't work for them. They are so everything is okay. They're they're really really really badly planned, despite the fact that this is supposed to be precision scheduled railroading. Like they're

unbelievably badly planned. You have people just like being forced to just like sit there for twelve hours in a train, like waiting for the rest of like the other like ninety five cars that are supposed to be on this train to show up. You know. The whole situation just

like it is utterly nightmares. And the ever thing about this, right is, if you're an engineer, right, and you're in one of these trains and you're sitting there for twelve fucking hours in this train, you legally can't have your phone because you know, I mean, this is a safety thing, right, And in some sense this makes sense. It's like a safety measure. You can't of your phone because you know,

you can't be distracted what you're driving. But you're just sucking sitting on the tracks for like twelve hours, and you know this this this stuff is, you know, and the fact that the fact that people are on call constantly, the fact that the entire rail network is just physically falling apart because the other thing about these trains rise they make an enormous amount of money. None of them

ever fucking show up on time. It's a disgaster. It's a catastrophe, like like like genuinely like part of the reason why we're having all these supply issues is that no train has fucking showed up on time in like four years. And it's a new contract. It's okay that the new contracts signed in says that workers can have up to three unpaid days off for medical appointments. Oh wow, that's something. It's a three unpaid tab stays off from

pre made medical appointments. Yeah, none for whatever. Yeah. And again like like like these people are on call for

pent of their lives. You can't even like like you can't schedule when you're going to sleep because you might be on call, and call might be you have to fucking like drive like several hours to a place so you can get on a train, and the train cannot leave, and the train eventually leaves like six hours later, and you fucking drive and then you're just like dropped off somewhere in the middle of nowhere and then unpaid, you

have to go back to like where you live. It is like, like, Okay, the thing, the thing I wanted to get out of this is like the railroading system in general, that the system of freight railroading that we have in the US is in the midst of collapsing. Like it it is falling apart, It is not working, it is is becoming increasingly dangerous. It is I mean, utterly inhumane for the people working on it. And and you know, none of the fucking even this even the

sick Bowl contract, like didn't do anything for it. Right, The only way this actually could have been resolved is if Joe Biden and in a fifth the Democrats and if Congress hadn't been fucking cowards and had let these people strike because these kinds of concessions like and you know, I also like, I don't want to let the fucking unions off the hook here to be because they know all of this. But again, most of the sort of like senior union people are very tight with a very

tight with Democratic Party. This is part of why all of this ship was postponed till after the elections, because they didn't, you know, they didn't want to deal with this ship. They've been trying to force people to sign these contract too, and it's it's it's a ship show. It is a just absolute catastrophe on on every every level. Yeah. I mean, it's almost as if the rail system probably

shouldn't be run by private interests. Yeah, because there's going to be now a hundred hundred rail workers who are forced to work under these still not great conditions. Meanwhile, the managers and the owners of the railroads get to go back to just making tons of money. Yeah, and again record profits. None of this is happening. Not that that would make it okay, but none of this is happening in an environment well, well, you know, we're running at a loss, and we we have no money and

no ability to like like they have. They're making hundreds of billions of dollars profits like this is this is like one of the most profitable times to run a railroad, and US can thence and devise more people to be railroad road workers if the job isn't a fucking nightmare. For example, what if instead of not being able to have their phones, we gave each of them a DVD player in a screen with a DVD of Step Brothers and they could watch step Brothers as much as they

want while piloting a train. I think that would actually get I think that would cause mass mass layoff set a rail yard. That's that's how we get the strike. We include this in the next provision for destruction. I was I was stealthy in my accelerationist beliefs here. This

is the fastest way he can transit infrastructure. He got like two years before this holding fucking implodes anyways, because part part of what's keeping people in the railroading system is that so railroading also has its own pension system that's like disconnected from the regular pension system, and you have to you have to work there for ten years in order to collector pension. This is why like enormous

numbers of people just haven't left, right. People have been leaving, right, But there's a there's a huge number of people who were hiring these giant expansion in two thousand four, and you know, like we're two years out from that contract from from all these people being able to collect their pensions and fucking leaving. Yeah, that's it's like, this is the only chance I have to ever not work myself

to death, so I have to tough it out. But yeah, yeah, but these those those people are those people are going to leave, and you know, this is this is the sort of like this is the sort of hammer that capitalism has built over its own head, which is that like, yeah, congratulations you you successfully flexibilized and casualized your entire workforce. That means that if people like don't want to do your shitty job, they can leave and find another job.

And at some point, like there are there is a ship that in this economy that like actually does need to be done. But these people have been sort of like so blinded by just like you know, they're so so blinded by Lyne grow goes up. They're so blinded by short term profit that they really don't understand that at some point there's just not gonna be fucking workers

to run the railroad. Yeah. I mean a lot of this situation is built off of and instead of being compared to Reagan's stuff for their traffic controllers, it's actually more similar to what Carter did with some with some airline workers. Um. Then also with the with the nineteen eight kind of a Railroad de Regulation act um which which caused would would you which gave a lot more

power to companies to run the railroads. And that's that is what kind of shifted shifted things to our to our current, our current problem because they were they gave permission for these rail companies to close down lines that were less profitable and to set their own um freight rates. And it's it's not being controlled by the inter State

Commerce Commission. Instead it's being controlled by execuity. That that thing's weird, right because like, on the one hand, like the wave of corporatesalidation that happened after that is like a disaster, and the fact that there's basically like four real like rail companies now is a disaster. On the other hand, like it is also true that the Interstate Common Board was like dogshitted his jaws, it also s yes, absolutely it sucked, and for a short period of time

it actually did improve things. But now it's it's it's it's powers coalescing again into the very types of monopolies that caused the that caused railroad regulation to be necessary back in the nineteenth century. Like in the first place, um power is being consolidated again, and it's it's this vicious, vicious cycle that are that fundamentally puts short term profits

above of the conditions of workers. Yeah, I think, like, you know, Okay, so there have been a lot of people talking about like what the potential solutions to this are in a sort of macro sense, because like, okay, even even even with a better contract, right, like, something actually has to be done in order to force the railroads to not fucking suck and to like actually properly scheduled our goddamn trains and not work if one to death.

And you know, I want to put that it is worth noting like we actually did like have national nationalized railroad company for a while, and it was kind of a ship show like it. Okay, Okay, this is something

that's also important. Think about this, Like there's a lot of like there's a lot of different kinds of nationalization, right Like there there there was a huge difference between a firm that's like like you know, like we we we we sort of technically nationalized a bunch of the like car companies after two thousand and eight, right we bailed them out, but you know, like we like when in that stuff, we didn't really like take it. We we owned, we owned like a bunch of their stock.

We didn't like take a control and like we we got like Nick tonight, like proto neoliberal nationalization of the railroads last time, and it kind of contributed to the

problems we have now. There was also a period where Conrail's union was trying to like buy like the railroad, so we all we almost we almost got a railroad system that was run by its but it was owned by its own union, and then the company just like refused to sell it to them because they were like waiting to hold on, we can't have a worker run railroad. But one thing, one thing I am interested in is I I don't actually know this. What would what would

the how would how would an illegal strike actually work? Like, what's what's the how? What is the differences between people striking illegally? Now, like there's some some discussion of that, who knows that's actually actually happened, But what is the main kind of difference between that and um, the non

illegal strow? Okay, so the big thing is okay, So the thing about the National Labor Relations Act, right, which is the thing that covers normal strikes, was that like and this is also true to see I sat under the room, but like, okay, so if you're doing a legal strike, you have legal protections, right, like there there are there are things corporations can't do to you. Um, like yeah, there there there's there's a bunch of stuff that can't Like I don't like it's it's it's a

lot harder to just sort of fire people. The other thing is that also, like especially something like this, there's a like you you if you do if you do a wildcats trick like this and you you a specifically a strike that is like that is specifically illegal under this act, like you can all get fired. Um, I'm I think that I think they could technically arrest you. Like it It's it's I don't know that that part of it's not exactly clear to me, But yeah, I

don't know. I mean there there's sort of like I feel like if if if they arrest you just for not going to your job, I feel like that is I mean that that has happened to people, Like I know people have been yes, like in the long history of labor struggles, people have been straight up killed. Um, but at least in you, I think it would be

a bad look. Yeah, I mean I think Okay, So I mean I think where we're headed, and I think what they ought to do is just force get all of like the worst criminals, and I mean the murderers, the terrorists, all of those guys, and you make them run the trains. Whoever blew up all of those power transformers in North Carolina. You make them run the trains, and it'll be fine. Nothing bad will happen as a

result of this. It'll work out perfectly well. The the the alternative plan and the thing that maybe these rail companies are just holding out for because maybe they're just making conditions be not great and underpaying and not giving sick days, is because they're waiting for trains just to become autonomous. They're already planning to severely cut down the

crews that are on the trains. There's already trains in Australia that are a totally autonomously run that carry mining materials over for hundreds of miles, and that is the future that these that these companies want, because then they don't they need to pay for employees to actually run the train. Frustrating because like in an actual if we were an evening that approached a society that like dealt

with things ethically and humanely, uh and equitably. Then this would be good, like because it seems like working on train sucks, and it would be great if we could automate most of that work. Uh, and then people less people would have to work in order to keep society running. But that's people don't have to work. We're just going to run through these people's bodies by like as we get up to autonomy automization, and then we will throw

them away. Yeah, and then they will and then because they'll do it badly, there's going to be a disastrous train crash caused by the fact that they got all of the people off of a train hauling nitro glycerin or whatever, and it's going to destroy I don't know, duluth um, which you know, not the worst to lose, but I I sorry to Luke. Y'all are fucked well, okay,

it's it's worth meesying. Like this stuff, like the automation stuff is already happening right like that we have right we have like this well and I mean it's like a very real sense that there's this sort of nightmare. Is one of the other sort of nightmare things that's going on right now, is that there are these like like I don't know, like driver assistance programs basically that are being run on trains. Now, where that are that are?

You know that they're supposed to be like making decisions like for and with the drivers, but ay, they suck ass um be there. They're they're design. They're designed to basically maximize design to maximize profitability, right, And the way you maximize profitability is by running trains really really slowly, and you know that's contributing to the fact that every train is fucking late now and the phrases that doesn't work.

And the third problem is that these is that these things keep fucking running trains off Like this is another reason why trains keep sucking crashing is that they suck. They keep they keep running trains off the tracks, and like you know and like that there's there's there's like there's there's a lot of ship here, right because it's like if you if you override the system, like you can you can get disciplined for for for overwriting the system.

But then you have this sort of like you have this thing where it's like okay, so do I do I get disciplined for overriding system and not making the train crash, or do I just make the fucking train crash and doing the trolley problem? Yeah yeah, it's literally yeah, just like you love that this is just gonna inevitably gonna result in an exact recreation of the trolley proffle. It's already like this is already happening to people, and it's just like like it's none of the none of

the stuff works automatic into this orphanage. I can divert it instead of this old folks. So it's like it's literally happening, like it's just like none of this stuff, Like, Okay. The thing that's like frustrating about this, right is okay, if any of the people at the sort of like at the level of where they're planning these trains could even sort of do their job right that this isn't even a thing that's like an inevitable contradiction between capital

and labor. Like this is just if any of these people could actually fucking schedule the railroads, which is the thing they're supposed to be trying to do. If they could actually schedule when the train was supposed to go and when it was supposed to leave, you wouldn't have these problems because then all of the people who worked there would also be told when the fucking train was

leaving and they could schedule around it. But no, they can't fucking do it because they're too fucking lazy, they're too fucking stupid, and they don't want to spend the money to actually make any of these systems fucking work,

And so the consequence is just this bullshit. And then also because again and this is everything like that, like capital is also really falling down on the job here, because like the rest of capital needs to get their ship together and force the railroad to do something, because like, it's your asses on the line too, if this railroad

then collapses. But because of because of the sort of immediate amount of money that that that these these shitty rail companies that pumped into Congress, they were able to buy people off, and the rest of capital was just like, yeah, we don't care. That's like three years out, we don't

have to care about this ship. It's like guys like Bernie Sanders is fighting to save capitalism, right, These people are trying to save you from yourselves, and you know you won't won't even let That's that's their entire job, though of course it's like, yeah, what what what is

happening here? Is that like is liberalism is running an acceleration is program to like cause the American American infrastructure to fall apart, and social democracy is attempting to save capital from itself, and capital was like literally fuck you

eat ship. No, it's it's i've i've. I'm reading right now in interview with a railroad Workers United member and they're they're talking about how like there's this plan to increase, uh increase their pay over the next five years, and he's there, like he says that lots of the railroad workers that he's talked to as a part of the union is saying, like people are willing to work for less money and take a job at like an Amazon factory or like a trucking job because at least those

offer slightly more consistent hours, and like, yeah, like it's

it's at least you when you're not working, you're not working. Yeah, And I just wanted to mention that because because we were bringing up like how these people are getting not very good pay, which is which is true, but for a lot of people it isn't even just to pay question it's it's it's just overall working conditions and like when you're thinking about moving to an Amazon factory instead because they have better working conditions, like oh god, yeah,

it's like, I mean, they've they've managed to create like one of the worst systems that is imposed on like any worker in the country. Like it is. It is genuinely stunning. And right now again they're they're getting bailed out that people are by the fact that people are stuck in because they want their pensions. But like, but as soon as a people are done and we start moving to more autonomous things, then it's not it's not

going to be worth it. I know, media companies have spent decades trying to convince kids to work for trains, with Thomas the Train chuggington for for decades and decades, you've tried to send train propaganda to these kids, and I I don't think I don't think they're gonna buy it. Yeah, did you guys know that in Thomas the Tank Engine, canonically World War Two happened and canonically all of the diesel engine signed sided with the Nazis. Well, that doesn't

first today and that is official. Thomas the Tank in Jin Laura. I wonder how many other zoomers will um symbolize with me on this. I recently found out that Thomas the Train wasn't just the uncanny train segments that used to have live action actors in like little inter cut scenes, because it was fucked up because by the time Thomas the Train was airing on television when I was a kid, all of those were re edited. They had they had, they had no live actions segments at all.

It was all the weird stop motion animation, which is still very uncanny, with like the faces. But I had no idea until like a year ago that there was live action actors in the original additions of Thomas the Train. Fletely oblivious. Well, I'm glad, I'm glad we could have this important union discussion. I am too. I'm gonna I'm

gonna admit to you all right now. There was a moment earlier where Chris You kept saying that that the owners of the railroads were blinded, and I very nearly went into a bit where I just started reading the lyrics to Bruce Springsteen's Blinded by the Light. But I didn't do it. I didn't do it that I'm glad

we were saved from that. That's that's that's because everybody, nobody, nobody gets the lyrics to that one, right because of the Manford Man's earth band version, which makes it sound like he's saying douche when he's really saying deuce and talking about an engine, which is why it would have been relevant to railroads. But none of you all would have gotten that, and you would have fucking made a big thing about it on Reddit. So to hell with

you all. Anyway, support rail workers if they do an illegal strike, make sure we set up things so that they get protected and they get food and things to fight cops, go make rail way. I mean, people like, just keep it, keep an eye on what's going on, and if it happens, there will be ways. There will be ways to support these through the US government, Like I don't know things of this nature. Yeah, I mean

that would be that, that would be nice. But if we got to put a pin in that, you know, keep an eye on the situation and if these people go on strike, there will be community resources and whatnot popping up to support the wildcat strike. It's the thing that's happened before. Wildcat strikes have a long history in this country too, um, you know, and we will we will be collecting resources if that happens, for ways people

can help with the wildcatters. So this is a thing to have on the old, on the old noggain as we as we lurch forward into the holidays and uh possibly gigantic labor battle we'll see. And I like people in the UK have been doing rail strikes, uh like for a good part of this year, like they've been, they've been. There's been on and off rail strikes for most of for like, for like the most of the

past few months. Um, it's possible, except again they're they're they're they're British, so they stopped doing the strike when the queen died. Well of course, so look, look there's certain realities that can't ever be a clipstograph. Here's the here's the thing. We have thrown off the shackles of the anglos are where a rail strikes stops for no one, al right except for the most pro labor president, Joe Biden. Alright, And that's the episode. It's the episode. And remember, if

you see a diesel train, it is a Nazi. You you were obliged to punch it. Welcome to Dake bap in here a podcast at it happening somewhere else, you know. Okay, the theme, the theme of the show has gone slightly

slightly off the rails since it was first conceived. However, Comma, I do think this is something that is very important to talk about, which is getting some more sort of background information and an understanding of what the history of sort of labor in general protest is in China as we look at a certain the sort of current protest

wave that is going on there. And with me to talk about this is Eli Friedman, who teaches at Cornell University and is the author of the book The Urbanization of People, The Politics of Development, Labor, markets, and Schooling in the Chinese City. So, Eli, welcome to the show.

It's good to be here. Yeah. So I'm excited to talk with you about this um partially because I think, Okay, so insofar as you've gotten sort of mainstream coverage of it, there's been a lot of focus UM in term in terms of this sort of current way of protests, There's been a lot of focus on like the A four paper stuff and people sort of you know, hanging signs, up, and as as the coverage has gone on, there's been

a lot less about the fox con stuff. There's been a lot less about the broader trajectory of what protests has looked like in China in the last twenty years, as everyone sort of like immediately reaches back for their stock tienem in comparisons. I think you're very good. Yeah, yeah, So I guess I guess we could in some sense start with genomen because I think this is this is has nothing really to do with it. But I guess we could start with why why are the chan in

comparisons bad? And why is everyone still reaching for them thirty years later? Yeah, I mean they're there's maybe a couple of reasons why. So. Um, the the the unsympathetic take on it is that you have a lot of people outside of China, particularly in the United States, who hope for things to go poorly in China as part

of our imperial competition. And so UH was a bad year for China, whichever side of of that movement you you were on UH, and so they believe that it heralds, you know, that the downfall of the Communist Party, and you know, therefore America can march into the rest of the century without any real competitors, so that that is

a real thing, right um. And that I think the somewhat more sympathetic take on this is that the Chinese government, and particularly under Stigent Ping, sets a ridiculously high standard for what qualifies as social stability. Right. So minor d deviations from um absolute harmony as conceived of by this state, which means you know, no street protests, it means relatively little descent online. And to the extent that you do see forms of collective action, they remain pretty small scale

and fractured um. And so when you see deviations from that, that suggests that, well, they've kind of lost control because they do want to maintain this, you know, absolute image of placidity um. And if we look at the whole sequence of events that led up to where we are now,

I think we have to trace it back. Well, there's a bunch of things, but one of them is the setone bridge protest um, which is just a single person hanging banners off a bridge in Beijing, um, and a single person hanging banners or holding signs in any other big city around the world does not create that kind of a stir, right. I mean, you know, you you're in Washington, d C. Or Or you're in Berlin or

or Tokyo or whatever. You know, nobody cares, right, so that but that just shows a little bit of a crack in the system, and so then people let their imaginations kind of run wild. Um. And we're clearly not in a nine situation right now. It's not inconceivable that it would develop in that way in the future. Um. At the same time, I don't think it's particularly likely for for all sorts of reasons. And we can get

into that if you want. Yeah, I mean one of the things that I think, I don't know one of the things that I've been looking at with these protests versus eight nine. I partially it's just the sort of class composition is just very very different. Like there are student protests, but it's it's they're like these these the students now, like are not the nine nine students, Like this is just if this is a very different sort

of like it's's very different student body. It's a very different like the class competition of those people are different. The experience that they've had in the Chinese system is very different, and then also, I think someone more interestingly is like, it's it's not the same working class that showed up in because that class doesn't really exist anymore. And yeah, and I guess that that's another part of

this that I think, I don't know. There is definitely extent to which these protests are weird, in that it is like it's it's it's it's a bunch of people in different places who are protesting about the same thing which hasn't which you know, hasn't really happened for a

long time. But also like I don't know, there seems to be this reluctance to talk about the fact that there have been like not in significant protests in the last thirty years, like especially in the nineties, there are these huge protests against sort of like the industrialization, like

the destruction of sort of the Chinese welfare system. And I guess one of the things I'm interested, I don't know it asking you more about is like there's there's a kind of jectory of what urban sort of protest has looked like and like as as as the sort of like as the Chinese working classes like increasingly become a sort of vigrant working class and so yeah, I guess we could jump off from there to also also I guess because that's the other thing is like Chinese

cities are very different now than they were thirty years ago, which is the thing that is both incredibly obvious and also like people don't really seem to understand very well. Yeah, let's see, there's a lot in that question. Maybe we should circle back around to the question of the class composition of the students and the workers today in comparison to nineteen eighty nine. But first let's just talk a little bit about the sequence of labor protests over the past.

And there is a lot of me going through stuff there. Yeah, I mean, all all really important insights um, each deserving a little bit of their own attention. So you know, after nine, Uh, there's this big divergence in the UM in in the opportunities that are afforded to the two constituent groups that were in Tanneman Square and other places around China. So you have the students and you have the workers, right, and there's there's other people, but like

that's the sort of the social backbone of that movement. Uh. The students basically get this deal with the state, which is they demand compliance and political acquiescence in exchange for which they will enjoy a couple of generation, a couple

of decades of unbelievably fast growth. And if you are graduating with a degree from one of these elite universities in Beijing or even not super elite universities and in other cities, there's a pretty good chance that you're going to experience upwards social mobility, that you'll be able to buy an apartment that you know, you will feel more materially secure than was the case for your parents, right, UM, I think that that deal is coming undone right now,

which explains the students that we say out in the street, UM, but in any of and that that certainly was the case for for you know, for about thirty years after UM, or at least you know, twenty five years after after tenement. The workers who were in the square in nineteen nine had almost diametrically opposed social trajectory because immediately thereafter UH they were subjected to a brutal regime of privatization, of dispossession,

of theft of public property. They were thrown out of these jobs that they had believed they were going to have forever. It was called the Iron Rice bul Um. One of the main architects of that was Johnsman, who's just died. He along with Drew g So I saw. I saw a great quote where someone was like, this is basically China, George W. Bush, where everyone's remember again fondly because things are so bad now. But oh my god, this guy was awful, Like dying dying right now is

maybe the best thing he ever did. Like yeah, and it really is a testament to how bad things are now. But he is I think, um, the most neoliberal anyway of China's leaders, more so than than dung shopping in some important ways. Uh. And so you know that old working class who was told that they were the masters of the nation, um, you know under Jungs them in front in the late nineties, they were just they were

just subjected to these real subsistence crises. And in response to that, actually the largest mobilizations to have happened since nineteen nine occurred in the like nineties and really the early two thousands. In some cases, you have these protest movements with many tens of thousands of people out on the street resisting privatization, resisting the theft of their pensions, um and and basically this you know, private profiteering and

theft of public property. And I think that even the protests that we've seen in the last a week or two are are still not on the scale of those worker uprisings that we saw twenty years ago. Yeah, which I guess, you know, like part part of the reason why we are where we are now is that those people lost. And I think that's been one of the

other sort of themes of like Chinese protests. Lie. I mean, I think like like some some of the local ones like when, but the large scale ones have kind of just been like just like really just been getting owned for the last like twenty really like thirty years. Like it's it's been kind of a bleak march. And I mean, I actually I want to circle back around a bit, talk a bit more about the d industrialization, because I think this is a thing that like really is badly understood,

especially on the left. Um. The other thing I wanted to talk about in that is, Okay, so you have this massive wave of privatization, you have this industrialization, and can we talk a little bit of also about how like for the people for the people who held on and say on the industries, what the transformations happen inside there was like because I think that's also like not understood. Well, yeah, so you have two prosessies. One is um the they talk about as a smashing the iron rice ball, right,

and and that involved of two process. One is just unemployment. And there's been a lot of um efforts to try to estimate how many people lost their jobs. It is very hard. Political scientists named Dirthy Salinger wrote an article called why It's impossible to know how many unemployed people? There are some something to that effect. Um, but certainly tons of millions of people lost lost their jobs and

we're just kind of thrown out into the market. And it's worth remembering that they're thrown out into the market largely in regions where the market was not at all dynamic, right, so in the northeastern part of the country, which did not have the booming economy of Guangdong Province or you know, jong Su Province or places like that. Um. So, so

there were those people. People also probably know that there are still a lot of state on enterprises and something like a quarter to you know, maybe a third of China's economy is still accounted for by state on enterprises, but those enterprises have increasingly come to function like capitalist enterprises, at least with respect to the labor relations. They still

receive a lot of subsidies from the state. They still enjoy um monopolies, right, so they you know, they don't face competition from other firms, at least domestically UM, and like monopoly based firms in capitalist countries, they offer somewhat better UM pay and somewhat better benefits to their core workforce. Right. So, I mean, if you think of of GM or four in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States, or you can think about Facebook or Google today, you know,

these companies that are also basically enjoy monopoly position. Their core workers enjoy, you know, somewhat better pay. Right. But the other thing that's happened is they have increasingly come to be surrounded by a very large contingent of temporary and flexible workers, right um, and so in in in many of these state owned firms, UM, more than fifty

of the employees are what they call in China dispatch workers. Right, they don't enjoy any of those same benefits they don't enjoy the same job stabilities um, and they eat in eat in response to market fluctuations and profitability. Those are always the first ones to be let let go, right. So you know, the fact that they are state owned, I think matters to some extent um, but when But it doesn't mean that the old labor regime from you know,

the nineteen seventies has kind of continued unchanged. Like they are being these firms are being subjected to market pressures and that's reflected and how they treat labor. Yeah, I mean that's something that like if if if you, if you listen to and Ping like actually talk about what's

going on. He just constantly, every every like two speeches that he gives there is a line about how like the economy is directed by the market, and like, yeah, he's very clear about it, and in some ways he's he's like very Reganite, like he's just like, we don't we don't want what these lazy people just enjoy welfare benefits, like they believe in the power of the market to discipline people. There's no question about it. Yeah, And I guess the other sort of consequence of this is China's

enormous market worker population. And that's definitely another thing I wanted to talk about because that was another round of protest happens in two thousands. That's about uh, this giant fight over household registration that I guess was the last kind of successful, like really mass protest thing in China. We talked about that a little bit. Yeah, I mean, there haven't been the same scale of of collective protests

by migrant workers. But um, you know, just as a little bit of background, you have the old state state owned working classes kind of declining or subjected to the market pressures that we're talking about, and so unrest um in that sector becomes a little bit less significant over the course of the two thousands. But that's happening at precisely at the same time that the working class in the private firms is increasingly constituted by these rural urban

migrant workers. When they come to the city's they are treated essentially a second class citizens and don't have guaranteed access to all kinds of social services healthcare, pensions, education, etcetera. Um, and so there is a lot of mobilization. I mean, you know, the the Juko household system, household registration systems still exists, and it still has an important role in structuring people's UM classed experiences. UM, but it's it's a

little bit less coersive than it used to be. So in two thousand three, there was this famous case UM. A migrant named Soon You're goung Um was taken into custody, as frequently happened, you know at the time, like police would just ask people for their papers on the street if they looked suspicious, and they had a thing in place at the time called custody and repatriation where they would take you into custody and they would they would repatriate you back to your village. Right, So very similar

you know to like ice rates against Chinese people. Yeah, yeah, like they had even this is I think one of the things about like, insofar as you can make comparisons between like the Chinese system of the Soviet systems like that, that's one of the few things that was I think kind of similar, is that you do have these very intense into well okay, it's simultaneous that you have these very intense like internal restrictions on migration, but also very

similar to the U S system. It's like the the economy is based on everyone breaking these things, that's right. Simultaneously it's illegal, yeah, yeah, right, exactly, Like there's no illegal immigration to the United States, but the economy would obviously collapse without undocumented workers. And it's exactly the same

in China. Like, you know, they're like, we we know that these people are here, we know that our economy, particularly the coastal cities, is completely dependent on them, but we're still gonna have cops ask you for your papers on the street, and if they don't like you, they can, you know, round you up and send you home. In this in this particular case back in two thousand and three, the guy they got, it's like he was the quote unquote wrong guy because he was actually a university student

and they they they detained him and killed him. And so when this came out and they're like, oh, they killed a college student. Like if had they killed a normal migrant worker, that would be one thing, but he's

a college student. So so that created a big fuss and as a result, you know, they actually got rid of of the tention and repatriation, which is good, um there, And so migrant workers today when they're on the streets in the big cities are are not likely to you know, just have cops randomly asked them to see their papers. But they're still subjected to all kinds of social discrimination and definitely, um, you know, institutional discrimination. Yeah, So okay,

we're sp speaking of institutional discrimination. We're going to take an ad break and then we will come back and talk or about this. So I enjoy some ads from companies who are probably benefiting from all of this, and we're back. So okay that That's another thing that I I do want to sort of, I guess, use this to push us forward a little bit, which is that, okay, this this is obviously skipping a lot of riots in

til USand and eleven. But one of the big things about the COVID restrictions that I don't think people understand has been how bad it's been affecting megicant workers and the extent to which, you know, because one one of the things about the House of Registration system is like, as best I can tell, this is this is the way a lot of like a lot of resources in terms of like here's how you're getting food haven't being distributed and if you know, if you're in a place

that's not weird house. The registration is just like, well, okay, the state's not giving you your food, how are you going to deal with this stuff? And yeah, they're not doing that. That that that That's been a big thing that, like, I don't know, a lot of this has been me being upset with the media coverage of these protests because like people will just say COVID zero and then not

explain what the actual consequences of this are. So, yeah, I was wondering if you could talk about sort of specifically how how the lockdowns, especially as lockdowns have gone on, have been affecting my co workers, and then how that's and yeah, okay, well so we'll start start there before

I jump into a question with seven parts. I mean, I do think it's really important to understand why people are opposed to zero COVID, and sometimes for people outside of China, they think back to the spring of when you know, in the United States, we had like libertarians with guns being like in the lockdown, like we want our freedom, Like it is not that for all sorts of reasons, um and and the way to get at why it's different is to understand some of the classed

differences that zero COVID has has entailed. And I should just say it's been pretty terrible for everybody, including rich people, and like you know, we can we can feel some sympathy for them to UM, but but it's had some particularly nefarious consequences for for migrant workers. This became really clear in the Shanghai lockdown. It's also worth noting that

there are three hundred million migrant workers in China. So this is not like this this is like half the population of Europe like so many people are talking about here. It's it's it's almost an America sized population of people who are not living where their household registration is. And so the basic thing is, as you were just sort of saying that when they're is a lockdown and you're a migrant worker, you you kind of don't exist from the states, or you might exist, but like you might

also be overlooked from the perspective of the state. So one very concrete way that this UM screwed people over was in these hard lockdowns, you're not allowed out of your house and you're dependent on the neighborhood committee, which is which is connected to the state. It's kind of the lowest level of the state. You were dependent on them for the delivery of everything that you need to survive, right critically food and medicine. Yeah, can back up and

say something about this. This is something This is something very very different than the American lockdowns, which is like, well, okay, it depends on a like it it depends on a on on like a province of profit s basis. Like I know, my family was in Mogolia. They like in the Mogolia like you you just you like. The lockdown isn't like you don't go to work. The lockdown is

you cannot leave your house like you can. You can say, I think I think their lockdown, their first one was one person in their house once a week can leave to go get groceries. But it's like it's not like yeah, like it's it's you, like you physically cannot leave. You will be if you attempt to leave, you will be

prevented from doing so. And this means that you don't really have an independent way of like getting food or like going shopping or yeah, like getting I don't know, like toilet paper, like yeah, not toilet resonates with with Americans in our in our toilet paper shortage of but I mean in some cases, like people would actually just be literally chained into their apartments, right, So like this is not whatever people in in in the U s. Or even even in parts of Western Europe, you know,

where the lockdowns were a little bit more intensely police like, it is not that it is a qualitatively different thing. And so yeah, you're completely dependent on the state. So therefore it's really really important that the state know that you are there and that the state feels itself to be tasked with your survival and if you're a migrant worker.

So so one of the very greet ways that this effective migrant workers is that a lot of them live in informal housing, even in the biggest cities, even in place like Shanhai and Beijing, because those are the only places that they can live as far as the state's concerned, Like that informal housing might not exist, they are very very frequently more people living in those dwellings than are

sort of legally accounted for. So you know, like there's ten people living in an apartment that's supposed to be for for you know, a family of three, and so they deliver three people's worth of food, but there's actually ten people living there. That's a subsistence crisis, right. Um. You know, the medical stuff is just like astonishing and very harrowing. I mean, you know, just people just dying in their apartment because like they can't get insolent or

all kinds. I know, I know people whose family died because they had cancer and they couldn't get treatment for it because yeah, yeah, like yeah, it's disaster. Yeah. So so that's that's the situation. That's one of the problems with them for the migrant workers. And then in the very intense lockdowns at least in in Shanghai, back in in the spring of this year. Um, you know, they

also can't leave. So like one option would be like okay, will you go back to the place where you do have your household registration, you know, back in the village and you have a piece of land and like you can survive. They couldn't leave, right, there's no transportation, um, And so they were trapped in this situation where they couldn't work, the government wasn't you know, delivering them food, and they couldn't go to some place some other place

where they could get food. And so you know, there's been a lot of attention to these recent protests, which are extremely important and qualitatively different. But even back in in April, we saw food riots, like in Shanghai, a group of group of migrant workers just like requisitions like a truck full of cabbage, you know, and just started like tossing cabbages to people on the street because people were like literally starving. So I mean, yeah, so there's

a real problem for the bigrant workers. And on that note, this has been nic could happen here? Join us tomorrow for part two of this episode. We'll be talking more about lockdowns, similar problems with workers and this all going Welcome to Dick It Happened Here, the podcast that you're listening to right now. It's your host, Christopher Long, and we are back with part two of our interview with

Eli Friedman about the reason protests in China. I want to go back and talk about lying flat and that whole kind of I don't know, movement discourse that was happening last year, because it seems like the kind of I don't know if nihilism is the right word, but this kind of like collective understanding that the whole sort of bargain of the Chinese social system of you know, and this was to some extent extended to everyone, right, like the bargain of the Chinese social system of everyone

everyone keep your head down while get rich together, or it suddenly became clear that this just wasn't gonna happen. And you know, I mean, I think like, in some sense it's possible to sort of like, you know, you can you can put on your sort of like hard materialist hat and you can like look at like the number of hammers banging out, and you can just look at the show of Chinese GDP graph of the last decade and be like, okay, well so eventually like when

what what what it hit like two percent? Eventually we were going to have protests. But yeah, I guess, I guess I I wanted to talk a bit about like, yeah, what lying flat was? We covered this on the show a long time ago when it was happening, but and then also sort of how that attitude shift was important or wasn't important. I don't know, Maybe it wasn't. I

think it was, but yeah, I think it's very important. Right, So, yeah, you can't just be a crude materialist and like mechanically read social protest off of some chart of you know, falling profitability or something like that. Um, but there it is a cultural expression of real fundamental changes in the

organization of the Chinese economy. Uh. You know, we already talked about how the post eighty nine generation was like you go to college and like you come out and you know you'll you'll be middle class right on average,

And that's just not at all the case anymore. And young people in China and and older people, middle aged people you know, who are who have children, who are who are going through the system, um, feel immense pressure in like immense competition in all spheres of life, beginning from a young age in elementary school, all the way up through high school, through the super competitive and intense university admissions process, and then after graduating university and getting

a job, and then getting a job that can you know, um uh, you can earn enough money to be able to afford an apartment. And so here we have to understand you know, the cost of housing and all of the other costs associated with social reproduction. So the like the cost of care workers. Right, middle class people in places like Shanghai and Beijing expect to have domestic workers, um, you know, looking after their children. They expect to be able to hire tutors who can um you know, and

comtutor their children in English or in math um. And so just people feel under unbelievable pressure. And this is in a situation. The part of the reason that the pressure has is really ramped up is that there are fewer good paying jobs. You know, youth unemployment now in China is around um and so one of the responses to that is just forget about it. We're you know, we're gonna lie flat, We're gonna we're gonna reject all

of this. There's different expressions, and I don't actually the sort of like you know, sociologists and me is like, well, we don't actually have numbers to know how many people are are lying flat, and like that is true, Like maybe most people are still just going to work and

you know, doing their job. But there's enough you know, stories and certainly in terms of cultural residence of people just doing the bare minimum at work or working for short periods of time, earning just enough money to survive and not worrying about meeting those kind of social expectations around buying a car, buying an apartment, getting married, having kids, because people just see it as as kind of it's

kind of hopeless. Um. And so I think that's a really important backdrop, because we have to understand at some level that these protests are about a sense of hopelessness, right be at economic opportunities, be at the political system where cigent being is going to rain as long as he wants, or be at zero COVID where you know, at any given moment, you're gonna be locked inside your apartment and you're not gonna be able to see your friends or or do anything. So um, yeah, So I

think it's very relevant. Yeah, and I wanted to I guess also too. This is something I talked about on this podcast a lot. But I need to like drill into people's heads, like just the sheer amount that people in China are working, just like like the number of hours, a number of days a week, the the amount of effort that is being put in is like it it is, it it is. It is a level of rowser plus value extraction that like like like most places in the world haven't seen in like a quarter, like in like

half a century. It is like or even longer than that, Like it is, it is a a truly stunning like there's a truly stunning level of exploitation in terms of things like nine six, in terms of the people who are working schedules that are way worse than that, who don't really ever get like talked about because they're not tech workers or they're not people who have sort of

like a platform Chinese society. Yeah, it's it's extremely normalized, you know, I mean like thing which which first of all, it is maybe worth mentioning that China legally has a forty hour work week. You're only allowed to work thirty six hours of overtime a month, right, so probably you know, not more than forty nine or fifty hours a week. That's that's like the legal the legal standard. Nobody even remotely pretends like that is a thing in any industry.

There's legal debates about like whether it applies to professional white collar you know, salaried workers or not. But um, you know, when the n S thing came out and there was a pretty cool i think movement based mostly online among tech workers, it was it was great, it was very inspiring, and also every single blue collar worker, like we've been waiting the United six for decades, you know, um and so so it is, it is very normal

across these these different kinds of of stratum for sure. Um. One of the cool things about nine six is people were we're revolting against it and saying like this is an unacceptable way to live. And again it comes back to this whole thing of like all of these feelings of you know, these enhanced pressures right where it's just like how do I live in this city? How do

I find like decent housing? Like if you know, if I want to have like a social life, which is the thing that some people in their twenties want to have, you know, how do I do that? It's impossible under those circumstances. Um. So so again, like you can't read these movements mechanically off of these these uh, these structural changes. But like that is a thing that has been happening that is unresolved. It's not at least for the you know, the blank paper protesters, the kind of the more elite

students and stuff. They haven't specifically articulated um, their grievances as labor demands. Um. But it's it's at least an important backdrop to what's happening today? Yeah, and I think it's remember like how I think I think this was like mide twenty night keeen. I'm trying to remember when

I when I saw this specific video. But there there, there, there there was a video from the Hong Kong protests that was like it's almost it was it was like literally one of these classic like like sort of Twitter things, but like what do you want out? What do you want to do after the revolution, And it was like most of it was like I want to start a bakery,

like I want to work in a library. And it strikes me that there's these things that get subsumed under you know when when when when you see a pro democracy movement, right when when you see you know, like the sort of well, I I guess that there's something interesting to hear about the like like day one of the protests, there were a lot of videos that we're talking about Iran and that kind of seemed to like like the very early videos were about sort of solidarity

with the protests in a room she and then like it was like it was like specifically tying that to Iran and then to sort of pro democracy demands and then later on you get the sort of like like the Shanghai like down with the party, Downianping, like we

went to bocracy and free speech stuff. But it strikes me that like a lot of the times when you see people making those demands, it's because they think that like you know, it's like there there there's a whole set of of like things that they things that they believe about the future and about what will happen in the future that are like not articulated in the demands, but if you talked about if you talk about them, like if you talk to people about what they think

is going to happen after that, there's this whole sort of like opening up of social stuff that they think will be like the necessary results of like the end of the one party state. And it's like, you know, I don't want him, Like I don't know. I had this debate a lot with like like there there's kind of like Chinese international student you get in the US who like comes to the US and it's like immediately

like enormously enamored with the US. It's it's it's sort of the mirror image of how we have a bunch of people who are like incredibly enamored with the Chinese state, and then you get people who come here and are like incredibly enamored the American state, and it's like, well, yeah, okay, this politician will see you and they will talk to you. However, Comma, in about two years they will be voting to throw

you in prison. So like, but like obviously, like both people in China understand the Chinese system sucks and that the promises that people like in the US believe about it are fake, and then people in the U s understand that you can get a multiparty democracy and things because still be absolutely shit. But yeah, yeah, you know, it strikes me that there's a lot of stuff sort of embedded in in these demands that are like not

really explicitly articulated until later. And then that's also, I guess, been a hard part about these protests that like, I don't know, it's hard to get information out. You can get shortened views with people. Mostly what you're getting are like thirty seconds of footage of people yelling at a cop. Right, yeah, yeah,

I mean there's a lot going on. Like if you have this one, this tiny little opening, and then instantly you have protests in like all of these cities all over the country, dozens of universities, protests among you know, working class migrants, like middle class people in Shanghai, like

you know, all across the country. Like that suggests that people have a variety of sets of grievances and they're kind of funneling them through this this meta narrative around ending the lockdown, which is not to minished the significance of the actual lockdowns, which are are called causing real human suffering. But there's definitely a lot going on, and you know, one of the big ones is what's happening in shin Jong, Like it's we still don't really know

how Weakers are feeling about all of this. The fact that like all of the all the Protestants in the big Eastern cities are about commemorating what happened in ermchi uh in a fire that killed mostly if not exclusively, weaker. It's like that that that deserves to be talked about. Um, we don't really know how Like the Han people on the streets in the Eastern cities, like if they're thinking about this this backdrop of you know, massive repression, surveillance

and mass internment of of weakers and other Moslim minorities. Um, but that's another thing. Uh And and I think the same thing goes for the treatment of migrant workers in in fox Con and these other um blue collar workers

who were put into the closed loop. Like to what extent our urban um Han people still kind of willing to go along with sacrificing migrant workers and treating them as as as second class citizens or is there a possibility of developing some real sense of of solidarity um with ending not just the closed loop, but ending you know, like kuko based discrimination, ending the camps in Shinjong, you know, I mean, you can kind of spin out from there if if you are interested in thinking about what it

would mean to democratize China in like a in a robust sense of the word, I think points out of everything about these protests that are complicated, right, which is that like they are cross class in a lot of ways. But I don't know, it seems to me like the

way they're manifesting is very much down class lines. Like Okay, I genuinely don't understand what's going on in Guangzho that like every single video I see at a Gwangho is like seventy people throwing bottles at a cop, and like every video I see out of like Shanghai is like

six people holding a piece of paper. But it very much seems like, you know, like when when it when when when the cops are getting to like these these sort of like these working class neighborhood these neighborhoods that are like a informal housing, these neighborhoods that are full of migrant workers. There were these really really intense conflicts

with the police in ways that like kind of aren't happening. Well, I mean, okay, that's because the kind of stuff seems to be happening in a room sheet and I think it's happening there partially because you know, this is like well okay, I don't know off thought in my head whether it's more militarized than Tibet, but like one of the most militarized, like one of the most heavily police

places in China. And then also people are just really like the the the immediate and palpable anger seems to be the highest there because you know, I mean, like like it you're you're going to be more piste off when it's people in your city or like you know, you you maybe were like three blocks away from this fire. Yeahs like these people. But yeah, one of one piece about about urch is that they've been in some form

of lockdown for like a hundred days, you know. Yeah, so that's not and and part of that has to do with the fact that it is this colonial setting where they feel like they can do things to people that they can't do in Beijing and Chong like people are not going to do that, right, It's just like

it's inconceivable. Um, there's obviously a lot of Han people in An She is actually a majority Han, now yeah, I think, yeah, um that that sounds right to me, and shin Jong is increasingly Han as well, although I believe we are still constitute a plurality. So you know, there's just like each the lockdowns kind of filtered down to these different localities and into different communities with their different social and class compositions in different kinds of ways

and have different kinds of effects. Right, So you can put people in lockdown in shin Jong for a hundred days and they're going to be really pissed when they get out. In the case of Guang Joe, you know, this was also part of the sequence that I think has been written out of the official narrative. It's not it wasn't just fox Con. You had the initial fox Con escape in in October early in November, and then you had these pretty intense riots that happened in Guangzho.

But those were in these urban villages, so called urban villages, largely informal housing, very densely populated, that are overwhelmingly migrant workers. In this case, it was mostly people from Hubei Um, which is which is where Wuhan is and Um and so you know, just those migrant communities were put into

lockdown in Guangho. So if you were over in yeah, if you over in Tianaha District, which is the sort of the the newer like fancier part of Guangho with lots of high rises, um, you know, those places were not under lockdown. And so they they put the migrant communities. And I saw some like really not nice stuff, you know,

people just being like oh yeah, you know. The the local Guanggo people on the other side of the river are just like going about their life and and they're they're okay with what's happening to the migrants, and the migrants were, as is the case in some of these earlier lockdowns, actually facing real subsistence crisis, like they didn't have enough food to eat, and they couldn't leave to

try to get food. Um. So that's why you saw these super intense riots, and that's why you see them confronting the police and you know, screaming at them, throwing things at them. You see tear gas, all of these things, I think. So, I think that's the only place I've seen tear gas so far, like a room. I'm not there may have been a video, I don't I don't remember specifically by the room sheet, but definitely like going only place I've seen that level of repression. Yeah, yeah, no,

it was. It was. I mean, you know, the Jung Joe Fox con was probably the most violent and the larger scale. Um, but you know that was it was a little bit different Gwangjoe. It's kind of like smaller streets. They're fighting, you know, street by street. So um yeah, so they have a different experience of people in Shanghai. Again, not to minimize their demands, and I think it's it's important for people to find points of commonality, um against

this policy. Um, but it's you know, it's not like that if if you're if you're a middle class person Han person in Shanghai, which is again not to minimize the very real difficulties that those folks have been facing as well. Something this kind of you know, I think that there there's there's like another group of people who should probably talk about a little bit, which is like this sort of downwardly mobile class a business owners who have been kind of just getting a dilated by the lockdowns.

And does that that happen in the US too, although the Chinese version of it seems they're like less marginally less absolutely psychotic, like they haven't tried, they haven't tried to like kidnap a governor yet, Like they're not like

they're not as fascist as their American counterparts. Yeah, but it's it's it seems it seems like there's a kind of interesting I don't know, there's there's a class dynamic that kind of reminds me of occupy and that you have this sort of like kind of tenuous alliance between like some some parts of the working class, these elite

students and like this downwardly mobile middle class. But it strikes me that, you know, I mean, the the sort of defining thing about occupying I think, like the defining thing about the whole sort of two thousand eleven doesn't thirteen wave of protests, was that, like it was it was really really easy to get people together into a physical space, and when when you were in that single physical space, it was like, yeah, it's not it's not like classes appeared, but it was like, you know, it was,

it was, it was. It was it was a way in which sort of like classes were mixing and you could form this new kind of like identity based around like what you're doing in this place. And it doesn't really seem like that's possible here. It really seems like, I don't know, like there's this huge like you know, this this this is a protest that is like happening in a lot of different places at the same time.

But it's like it doesn't. Yeah, the segments they don't and they don't they don't really have a sort of like cohesive social identity that in a way that you could get out of a bunch of people being in the same place. Yeah. No, I think that's right. I mean, they're spatially segmented. Um. Something someone pointed out on Twitter

I can remember who. But they're drawing comparisons to the protests and the kind of the physical arrangements where people are living and so particularly given you know, the online censorship, like that's been really important. So you have these worker dormitories and fox Con like you can organize by actually talking to people with student dormitories, right, Um, and then you have much smaller protests among the you know, the middle class people who are able to circulate things online.

And so the consequence of that is is they are pretty segmented. And I think you know, everyone has their own grievance with zero COVID, but these grievances are actually pretty different. Right. So the fox Con workers don't like the closed loop management system where you know, where they can't leave, where where they're subjected to unsafe conditions, etcetera. Um, you know, the petty bourgeoise like they don't like the fact that there's no foot traffic, you know, coming into

their shops. Right. And UM, I don't know if you saw the video of the guy like kicking down the wall with a soup latal and yeah, specifically yeah, I mean it was. It was very theatrical and dramatic and uh and a great video you know in terms of like the class position, and yeah, you can see how it can kind of capsize into fash quickly. Um. And then like the students, you know, they want to be able to live normal student lives and like leave their dormitories.

And that's the thing that I think students anywhere can associate with. So it's like, yeah, they're all against the zero COVID policy, but then it's kind of like what are their politics after that? And I think if if this is going to open up, um, you know, some kind of more expansive political vision, like, it's gonna be

hard to maintain that like that unity. Right. The students are already talking about like you know, censorship, freedom of speech, those things which I support, I think are very good. You're probably not gonna get the petty bougeoisie to like risk arrest and violence with the cops, you know, over like holding up a blank white piece of paper, um,

you know. And then the micrant workers have another whole set of things you know, around like basic like health infrastructure, like you know, can they get access to decent healthcare in the places where they're where they're living, and that's not going to resonate to the same extent with the students.

So yeah, the one I think about a lot was like that there there's a video going around it this guy being like I don't care about politics, I just want to go to the movies, and I was like, this is the most American person in China, Like this is the one person that I'm like, okay, like that, you know, and and like that there is that kind of sort of like I just I just want to live my normal life like thing that's happening. And then that that I think is a kind of recognizable American impulse.

But then you have the stuff that's like did you see did you see those pictures that were going around of like the hospitals they were putting vgicant workers in were just like the entire bathroom floor is just like covered in poop and like no, awful. Yeah, it's like

the whole whole bathroom floors is just flooded. There's like just like the the the you can't flush toilet paper down it, so there's just these like mountains of toilet paper and I think like, yeah, it's awful like that the difference between the people whose things are like I want to go to the movies and the people who's demand is like please stop locking me in this like like people like you know that that was I guess.

I guess the other sort of lost thing that seemed to be pretty big in Chinese social media that I don't that wasn't talked about much here was the uh there was this bus that capsized that killed like twenty seven people who were being taken like to a facility to specifically to hold, like you know, this is like what one of one of these sort of like I don't I don't even really want to dignify them by calling them hospitals because they're like like just a complete

disaster um. But where were people were being held like held because they had yeah, yeah, and I don't know, it seems like that there's a really big sort of like you know, I mean, I guess it's like like the the protests are reflecting all of all of the sort of like existing classified in Chinese society in ways that I think are are pretty obvious if you look at it, which I guess in some sense, like this this does strike me as the most gentlemin esque thing

we look. The most unuminous thing about it is the way that the media has been like specifically covering the grievances of exactly like two groups of people, which is like the students and like and then all of the labor stuff has just vanished after about day two. Yeah, yeah,

yeah for sure. Um. And I mean I don't have much optimism that that that the coverage will um, but you know, there there is an experience, um that middle class people I think have had pretty acutely going back at least to the Shanghai lockdown, of this realization that there actually are no limits on state power, right, and that to them was kind of like a shock. You know.

They're like, oh, like I thought I was just gonna be able to go about my life like as long as I didn't you know, demand to be able to vote for the president. Like I can have a job, job, I can um, you know, go eat hot pot or you know, get whatever kind of delicious food I want.

Living in these big cities, can travel internationally. You know, all of these things are you know more or less Okay, Um, there's been lots of you know there's lots of other people in training society for him, that's never been the experience, right, most importantly the minorities and the workers and the migrant workers who have always you know, experienced that raw and unchecked power of the state. And so you know, does does this have the capacity to kind of bring them together?

You know, it's going to be extremely difficult to do, especially because there aren't like spaces for political organizing and working through these differences in a constructive way. Yeah, I mean,

I will see. The one thing that kind of that strikes me is something that like is just different about this cycle is that, like I don't know, I don't, like, I don't think I've ever seen in my lifetime outside of like really tiny maoist sex like people openly calling for the downfall of the government, like just in in a kind of like a large systemic way, and like it it seems like, I don't know, maybe maybe the censors will sort of get control back, but it really

seems like there's been this kind of floodgate that's opened where suddenly, like there's a there's a brief moment where like it suddenly became possible to talk about things where you know, like like two months ago, it was like one guy laid aside on a bridge and like this was this was like the biggest thing that had ever

happened in Chinese society whatever, etcetera, etcetera. And then suddenly, like you know, you just have people on the streets are shrun high, like just chanting stuff that wasn't even on that banner, and like, I don't know, like it really seems like like it's it's not like they've actually like fully lost control of the country or anything like, they're not even close to that, but it's it's like the sort of like the sort of regime of terror and fear that had been in place to keep people

from doing this kind of stuff has fallen off a little bit. Yeah. I mean, I I'd be very curious to know what the vibe is like in China, and obviously I have not been there for a while. Um, but like, and this is wildly speculative, and if you have any Chinese listeners who want to correct me, I would be glad to have some more information about this.

But my feeling from Hofar is that you know, like she Jinping is just like you can't you can't say anything about him, and that even in like private spaces, you know, people just like don't feel like the ability to kind of imagine something different and like that has been changed. Like I don't think we're going to see a lot more people on the streets chanting down to down with the Communist Party like that's you know, it's

a risky it's a risky thing to do. But I do think that like now, at least people know that there's other other people in the country that are thinking the same things that they're thinking. And then at least within you know, like you know, face to face interactions, that people might be a little bit more willing to kind of say like, oh, like these protests happened, that was pretty crazy, Like let's talk about that, um and

so so so that to me is optimistic. UM. And I do hope that more of this organizing can take place, you know, offline, because I think that's the only safe way to do it. Um. So So, yeah, I I think something has changed significantly, and you see it here, you know. I mean, I've been teaching Chinese students for ten years. Um, there's no question that people are interested, um in talking about things now in a in a more open way than was the case a couple of

years ago. And like Herett Cornell, we had we had a little vigil for um Fer and she as well, and people were chanting, you know, down with Hi Jin ping Um, which is kind of like okay, you're you know, you're the good New York Like it's not dangerous. Well, I think students feel it to be dangerous, And definitely a month or two ago would have felt it to

be quite dangerous. So yeah, and I guess we probably shouldn't like completely downplay the fact that like the CCP has international networks in a way that's like the way it tends to get covered in the press is very sort of like this kind of like right wing fear mongering.

But was like, no, these people do exist, and like, yeah, like it is possible for you to like tweet something while you're in the US and then like someone in China finds out about it and things start to go very badly for you very quickly, And that's for sure, Like that's that's that's a real danger that yeah, and regardless of how many spies there are, how pervasive they are, like it is a real experience, real fear of the

Chinese students here have right, they don't feel comfortable. You know, they might feel more comfortable speaking openly here than they do actually within China, but they still don't feel totally free,

and and that is a very widespread sentiment. I guess, sort of enclosing, I don't know, my, I don't think anyone can really have much of an analysis that's better than them guessing about what's going to happen next, because this already was something that like two weeks ago, like if you'd ask anyone, like anyone in China or outside of China who wasn't like I don't know, like in the following Gong or something, whether whether they were suddenly

going to be large deal like protested China, everyone would have been like, are you nuts? But yeah, I'm wondering how what you think is going to happen next? I don't know. My my, my sort of tentative read of it was like, it seems like I don't know. It's it seems to me that for for a very very long time, the Chinese political system was specifically set up to stop this, like like this was this was the

exact thing. It was. It was designed to make sure there would never be another sort of like like that there would never be a large well you know, we don't know how how long this is going to go on, right, but there was there was never there was never supposed to be another street movement that was like coordinated between cities, that was large and that had real political demands. And

you know, I like, I I don't know. Maybe maybe I could, I could be the most brog I've ever been, but I cannot imagine this like this specific round of protests really like challenging the government at all, Like I don't know, some something something would have to like I don't know, like aliens would have to like descend from the sky or something like. I don't know. I don't like,

I don't I don't think they can do it. But the frequency at which these kinds of things break out has been increasing steadily for the past probably twenty or thirty years. I mean in the nineties are sort of a low point for this stuff. But you know, like if if you're if you're in a country like Ecuador, right, You've seen like two pretty large scale like mass street movements in like three years, right, And you know it's

it's it's, it's, it's. It seems to be sort of broadly the there's there, there's, there's been this sort of like the decaying economic conditions are combined with this like the general decaying ability of the state to prevent like a subsequent movement from from unfolding. And so I don't know, Like I I my senses that this one's not gonna do anything, but we might see another one of these

in like three years or something. Yeah, I don't think we're going to see this movement in the in the weeks and months to come to like cohere into this like massive politically potent force that has the capacity to either continue to exert demands on the central state or threatened state power. Like, I don't think that that's going

to happen. Um, I do think. I think I think the first thing is to acknowledge and to chalk up the victories that have already been Um one, So Fox foxne workers got paid, you know, they went out the rioted like Fox's like, here's ten thousand un for you to leave that even for you to do your job right, so like, and those were workers that came in after the other workers escaped so they have been there in

quarantine for like a couple of days. Rioted got ten thousand un which is almost U S. Dollars like they so so they did really well. Um And but I think more broadly, you know, around the zero COVID, the government has already made changes. They will never acknowledge we're doing this because people protested, like that's not how they operate. But um, you know, they said, Okay, we're actually gonna get more serious about vaccinating people, which is what they need to do in order to have sort of an

exit strategy. There have been some some signals, low key ones about further loosening. I mean, I think that there's a real question about how they go about doing this because if they just let it rip tomorrow, like actually, hundreds of thousands of people will die. Yeah. So like I think what they need to do is they need to vaccinate people, and they need to build a real public health infrastructure that includes migrant workers. But you know,

that's we'll see if that happens. So so I think that those are already victories like which which we should which you know, we should take account of. And I think moving forward, the ability to repress like the the street demonstrations should not be under underestimated, like the state has immense resources at its capacity. I don't think that we're going to continue to see people chanting, you know,

down with the Communist Party in the streets regularly. Um So I think that they'll be able to at least push that down a little bit and maybe with some concessions, people will be satisfied. You know, the guy who just wants to be able to go to the movie, like next year this time, there's a good chance he will just be able to go to the movies. To kind of continue with my labor centric perspective, though, I think

it's going to be harder for for workers. I think it's going to be harder for them to repress that as long as the closed loop management systems are in effect and lockdowns are happening. I mean, it just puts insane demands on these workers, and there were revolts against it when it first happened in Shanghai back in April, uh and I think that those will continue to exist.

Um but I think we'll probably see this kind of reversion to what's existed for the last couple of decades, which is lots of you know, small scale, somewhat manageable and localized protests. The question is, like, does this kind of open up, um the possibility of politicization, which we have not really seen since nine um in a in a robust way at least, And so does this kind of open up some of those possibilities so those local protests can begin to to speak to each other with

some sort of common language. UM, and and coher some kind of political force that's harder for the state to tame. UM. We'll see. Yeah, And I guess I guess the other sort of X factor here is like can can can the CCP get the growth rate above like five? But yeah, like yeah, I I I don't. I don't know how

they do it like that. I don't know, like I I short of like short of like actually just letting all of the sort of like like all all of the sort of like slack and excess capacity just get like you know, just just like intention like tanking the entire economy and just like running all of these sort of unprofitab business in the ground. Like yeah, I don't, I don't see how they do that. And that does seem to me, like you know, to be a kind

of like the sort of like looming horizon over. I mean this and this is really true of everyone, like the the sort of looming horizon over. Like every government in the world has been that the growth rate has been collapsing for like the last forty years. And China was, you know, trying to change the comedy was like the last thing that was really driving in and that's like not really true anymore. It's it's a disaster. I mean. And then even even without COVID, it was sort of

like not going great. I mean, it wasn't like you know, I mean, it hadn't reached like it hadn't like reached like you know, like recession or i hadn't really reached like sort of post industrialized country levels of like here's your two percent growth every year, be happy with it, but like I don't know, yeah, but but the growth, I mean this is maybe like another whole conversation, but like the growth has become less effective, right, It's just

it's this like investment led growth. It's there, there's massive growth in debt and they can you know, build another bridge, build another airport, building. I mean, they're not building the

apartment blocks as much anymore. But they do that they can prop up the growth a little bit, right, But like the fundamental problem that they've been unable to address is like increasing domestic consumption and having a more equitable model of growth, And the reason that they can't do that is fundamentally a political problem, Like they can't figure out a way to give working class people more money and to give them some social protections, um and like

until they resolve that political problem, Like I just don't see them being able to deal with with that economic problem. So that means you are going to continue to have this kind of ongoing forms of stagnation. Zero COVID really hurts it a lot more. Of course, the geo political conflict with the US and and Biden, you know, trying to economically unique at them like that doesn't help. And then the demographics of you know, like all of these

things are making making their lives much more difficult. And so one way to interpret what's happened um under under zero COVID is the expansion of a massive and terrifying surveillance state that will allow them to weather whatever political storms are coming in the future. Yeah, and I guess I don't know well well well, well, well well we'll see, we'll see whether that works for them. I am somewhat skeptical in that, like I don't know, like good luck,

actually terrible luck. I hope it goes badly for them, the worst of luck. Yeah. So, Eli, thank you so much for coming on the show. Yeah, it's been a pleasure. Yeah. And okay, where where can people find you and find the stuff that you do? Uh well, I'm on Twitter as long as it's still there, um Eli D Friedman And uh yeah, I'm on the Internet. I don't know, that's that's the main place. Come if you're in Ithaca,

come on by, all right. Yeah, this this has been Make it Happen here, drag every government into perpetual and terminal crisis until it stops existing. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is 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,

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