The History of Bread Riot, Part 2

There's more riots. Uh. Now, last episode we talked about historians declaring the end of the bread death of the bread riot, and like in the sixties and early seventies, Like, I think that this is this is one of the ways you can tell that period people genuinely thought the bull was going to get better. It was that like they genuinely believed that like the centralized state and like capitalism can always provide foods you want up bread riots anymore?

You get mark. You if you were born in that period, you like grew up and people were fleeing from dynonic ass in the street and like getting getting eaten by woolly mammoth's and then by the time you're forty, you've got the telegraph. So I get it, right. I get why people think that that progress was really back in those because they got they wiped out the dynamic as

this is. Yeah, you have seen Howard Taff building the pyramids exactly exactly exactly you have you have you have seen the future rise up literally in front of you, and he went from eating mud to Hershey's chocolate. It's it's an incredibly impressive sort of period of modern historical evolution. And you know, and one of the things you see, like like you'll see like Marxists calling bread rice primitive rebels doing like populist mob politics that's been like displaced

by proper Marxist class politics. And then like every single one of these people was like the most wrong anyone, like basically from that period until until the moment the end of history. Guy starts writing, they are the most

wrong people like on the planet. Well, it's also funny to hear that idea that like there was something primitive about these people's class analysis, because like the Brothers Racky and Ancient Republican Rome, a lot of this ship they're saying, it is not at all primitive class analysis like this,

it's it's pretty developed. Yeah, And I mean, like the Marxist will do some long argument about how like oh they have they have false consciousness, they're not trying to abolish the class system or whatever, and it's like, well, I mean like I look at the Martin, the Marxist in the demolish the classystem either so like yeah, like yeah, like that these are these are very Andre's something we're gonna be coming back to a lot this episode is

that the people doing this are incredibly sophisticated political actors. And one of the sort of modern version of this is in the nineteen seventies, not only did bread riots not and there's a new kind of bread riot and these riots are collectively known as the I M. F.

Riots um. From from from January nine, seventy six to October nineteen nine two, there are riots in Peru, Egypt, Ghana, Jamaica, like Beeria, the Philippines, a year, Turkey, Morocco, Sierra Leon, Sudan, Argentina, Ecuador, Chile, Bolivia, Brazil, Panama, Tunisia, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Guadibala in Mexico, Yugoslavia, Zambia, Poland, Algeria, Romania, Nigeria, Hungary, Venezuela, La Jordan, the every Coast, Nigeria, ron Albania, India, and Nepal.

Were you just do like the whackou the Whackow Warner's song. It's that's literally all the play I found the chart that has all of them. Is like, there's just so many. They just keep happening. And again that's only like they they're they're still happening. And the everything I should mention is those are just the ones that are called the

I m F riots. There's a bunch of other riots, some of which are bred riots, that aren't called the I m F riots because they're not really sort of like directly involved with the I m F. And and that that this raises the question of what the fund is an IMF riot? Uh, And the answer is that, unfortunately, to to understand why people are throwing ball offous through bank windows, we have to talk about banking a little bit. Um.

I I have talked, I guess at length. Yeah, I I apologize, but we will we will get back to the riots, damn, But I promise we just have do a little bit of bank a king. So yeah, I've talked extensively on the show about the crisis of the seventies, and you know, the short version is that in a thing that is completely unrecognizable today, the global economy collapses,

inflation skyrockets. Countries across the global South start taking out these suggestable rate that they've been taking out, these suggestable rate loans, and then suddenly the interest rate spike and they start defaulting on these loans. Here's our free markets and food riots talking about it. Although the causes of the crisis run deeper, by the nineteen seventies, many smaller nations began to feel the strains of insolvency as a result of a world wide recession, successive oil price shocks,

declining world commodity prices, and accelerating debt service obligations. So basically, like if you're a small country, right, the price of everything you need to buy, like oil, is going up, and the price of what you can sell, which is like commodities like copper tin, is collapsing. And these lead to what are like these massive what are called balance of payments crises, And so we should we talk about what about what a balance of payments crisis is? And

this one was up being really important. Here there's the story about che Guevara, like right after like literally right after the Cuban Revolution, is he so he goes to the US and he's in the he sits. He's in this meeting with a bunch of bankers and he's trying basically to get Cuba's gold reserves and cup us sort of like foreign exchange reserves out of the US. The

US doesn't steal it. And it was funny about it is all the bankers who are talking to him, like all of them report afterwards like, woll wow, this guy talks like a banker, not a communist. And the specifically the reason they were like, oh hey, this guy talks like a banker is that he knew what balance of payments was. Um. The short answer is at a balance of payments crisis is when there's more money flowing out

of the country than there is coming into it. And the result of this is that you run out of money, and particularly the thing you run out of his American dollars, which is the thing that you need to like buy oil.

So you get these countries that are massively in debt and they run out of money, and the only thing they could do is turn to like turn to the International Monetary Fund and the i m F, who like the only description of the i m F that I have is that like they're they're they're basically, you like if the cartoon Bank of Evil from Despicable Me like

ran the entire world economy. I they you know, so the I m F shows up to these countries and is like loll lmao eat ship, and they force these countries to implement, like in order to get loans, They force them to implet what are called stabilization programs because

of the quote conditionality of the loans. They have all these like this really technical, boring like neoliberal like legal language for it, the like the this is this is all sort of banker speak for if you want another loans you can buy food, You're gonna have to rob every single person you know and hand them and hand us all your money. Uh. This eventually becomes now to structural adjustment programs. There's all of this sort of technical

language disguise what's going on. But what's actually going on is that in order to pay off, in order to pay the bankers for these loans, they are taking food from the moles of children. Um. Yeah, here's a more technical, I guess explanation of what's happening here. Austerity programs include stern measures or shock treatments that trigger market mechanisms to

stimulate export production and increased government for exchange reserves. So, according to the theory, currency devaluation makes three world exports more competitive in the international market. Reduced public spending curbs inflation and saves money for debt repayments. Privatization of state owned corporations generated more productive investment and reduce public payrolls. Elimination of protectionism and other restraints on foreign investment larns

more more efficient export firms. Cuts in public subsidies for food and basic necessities helped to get prices right, benefiting domestic producers. Wage restraints and higher interest rates reduce inflation and enhanced competitiveness, and import restrictions can serve forum exchange for debt servicing. So this has winners and losers, and the losers are like everyone in the country that is happening to and this is and this is pretty cost

cross class. Like these policies they hit workers, they hit peasants, that hir small shopkeepers, the middle classes annihilated odd just like people who are consumers you buy goods, and even the sort of like the local capitalists just get screwed by this. Because what the I m F is doing is forcing every wonder have lower wages, taking massive benefit cuts,

and massively spiking the price of food. And you know, I I want to get remind everyone that this this is explicitly what the Federal Reserve is trying to do to us right now, Like this is this is the kind of stuff that they're talking about in order to curb inflation, is to just make the pay everyone less, make everyone take benefits cuts, and then increase the price of ship. So the winners of this are like six bureaucrats, international investors, and like a class of like absolutely horrific

large agricultural landowners. And this this has about the effect that you would expect it to. Um. Between nineteen seventy six and late Nino, some a hundred and forty six incidents of protests occurred, reaching a peak from nineteen eight three to nine five, continuing to the present without attenney suation. Now, the authors who are writing this right, they're writing this in nine So when they say they continue to the present without tentiation, they before the thing is the last

one of those riots ended like a week ago. Oh yeah, yeah, they're still they're still going um so and you know, and these these riots are slightly different than the sort of like classical bread riots, right, because they are about the increasing price of food. It's also about the increasing price of fuel or sort of broader austerity measures or cuts to services and stuff like that. Um here, here's

here's a quote about like what these things actually look like. Um. Demonstrations and riots typically target specific institutions perceived as responsible for the depredations. Marches and protesting crowds converge on major thoroughfares and government buildings, such as the treasury or the national bank or the legislature, the presidential palace. Looters attack supermarkets and clothing stores where fuel and transportation subsidies are

part of the austerity package. Busses and gasoline stations are burned. The international dimension of austerity are recognized symbolically in attacks on travel agencies for an automobile's luxury hotels and international travel agencies or all that too, but also international agency offices. And you know this is going to sound familiar from last episode. It turns out that just like the eight such people, that the attacks of these things are are

very targeted. The sort of like forms of resistance have changed over time, because you know, this is now. We we do have modern political organizations, right, Like we get general strikes, you get sometimes you get just noble bread riots. Sometimes you get these just things that are like large protests and then they turn into riots. And what's interesting about them is that these are very sort of these are very sort of cross class movements. Right. You have

your sort of classical sectors that are poor. You have like particularly in the global South, you can you have your shanty dwellers, you have unemployed youth, you have small street vendors or like a crucial sort of element of these things you have like just your guy selling cigarettes on the street. Um, you get you also get like parts of the industrial working class. You get sometimes you get unions. A lot of times you get students, you

get public employee sometimes you get professional groups. One of one of the interesting things that's reading about this, I've read like a few books in this Eric who were talking specifically and this this isn't like the nineties, right, We're specifically talking about professional groups since Sudan. And it's like it's like, okay, it's it's nine. People are talking too. Professional groups and Sudan backing rioters against the government. It's

two thousand and nineteen. People are talking about professional groups backing protests against the government. It's like, it's I don't know, Like there's this extent to which all of these things, like that the I m F riots have just been happening over and over and over again for about fifty years, and a lot, a lot of the elements are incredibly similar. One of the other things that's going on here is

that these protests are driven are driven by mass organization. Typically, austerity protests were precipitated by dramatic overnight price heights resulting from the termination of public subsidies on basic goods and services, proclaimed by the government as a regrettably necessary reform, urged by the I m F and international lenders as conditions for new and renegotiated loans. Five deaths in the first

Peruvian protests to get a pattern of violence. Peru remained a hotbed of austerity protests, with students and workers demonstrating against increased food prices in followed by followed in eight by a march of public employees over state layoffs. This protest, so cheered by other public workers watching from surrounding the office buildings, was dispersed by police tear gas. So like that, that's that's a very sort of yeah, yeah, like we did.

I mean, this is this was happening. This is happening in Peru like last year, right, actually it was it last year was earlier this year, I don't know. Time is fake. And that's actually like the other thing that sort of startling about this is like the places that riot are still the places that are rioting in like an enormous number of cases. It's it's the same places

sometimes it's the same people. Um. I think probably the most famous protests of the sort of era is it's called the Caracazo I'm pronounced nice really badly by my apologies in Venezuela, which is a reaction to nine increase in training and bus fairs. And there are these are like these are massive riots. Um at least a hundred and probably like a couple of thousand people are like gunned down by the army. And three years later, a relatively unknown colonel named Hugo Chavez tried to overthrow the

government that had carried out the price increases. Travis, you know, Travis is better known for his other works, but he's the sort of tie between the I m F riots and the sort of next phase of political resistance to this stuff, which is called the antique, which is like known as the anti globalization movements in sort of the

nineties and nearly two thousands. And the thing that's interesting about these things is that I don't know, the I m F rights don't go very well, like either they lose or at best, what they were able to get was like temporarily stall some of these reforms, and I say like reforms quote unquote like the serve of near level like slashing benefits, so they were able to pause them a bit and then they would sort of get

restarted after people left the street. But in the late nineties and the two thousands people start winning um Argentina is sort of famously forced to like tell the I m F to funk off, and they default on their loans. After this like enormous autonomous uprising two thousand one that like very nearly overthrows the government and forces that like five heads of state. There's the whole sort of pink

tide in Latin America. The I m F gets like driven out of a bunch of countries in East Asia, and then she doesn't eight, the entire world economy collapses, which it turns out is bad for everyone. And this does This does two things for our story. The first is that like countries are suddenly going broke again, and because they're like just completely broke, the I m F is just back and is able to sort of enforce

programs on places like Greecent Spain. And the second thing it did was set off an enormous wave of bread riots and uprisings. And I think, like most people, if you tell them that two eight set off like an enormous wave of like protests, they're They're immediately going to go, oh, you mean the Arab spring And I am talking about that, But that's actually not specifically what I'm talking about here.

There there's there were like immediately in two thousan Central and immediately after there was another massive wave of bread riots that every like just everyone is completely forgotten unless the thing that you do specifically is study bread riots. Um here here's from Here's from the piece called a

Political Economy of the Food Riot. In two thousand and seven and two, the world witnessed a return of one of the oldest forms of collective action, food riot countries were protests occurred range from Italy, where pasta protests in September seven were directed at a failure at the failure of the Prodi government to prevent a thirty percent rise in the price of pasta, to Haiti, where protesters railed against presidents provolves impassive response to the doubling of the

price of rice over the course of a single week. Other countries in which riots were reported including the Uzbekistan, Morocco, Guiana, Mauritania, Senegal, India, Indonesia, Zimbabwe, Burkina, Fosso, camera uined Yemen, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Mexico, and Argentina, and some commentators have estimated that thirty countries experienced some somewhere foods some sort of food protests over the period.

Now we've been talking a lot about like food consumers in this because that's mostly the people who are involved

in bread riots. But you know, as was happening in seventeen huntres with the sort of original stuff like this whole time this is going on, there's there's a sort of massive shift in the global food economy happening where and this has been happening for a long time now, but it's it's sort of it's been accelerating the last about half a century, which is that the number of people who are like peasants and who produced free for themselves has been massively declining, and people are getting forced

into cities. And this means that there's you know, there's there's been a number of other things that have gone

along with this. Uh, there's been this massive increase in like cattle production, for example, you get all these monocultures um And another thing I think I've mentioned before is the World Trade organizations like Agreement on Agriculture like outlaws agricultural subsidies for the global South, but you know, the US is still allowed to have like farm subsidies, which means that you know, if when you're when you enter these free trade agreements, you get all of this like

enormously cheap food from the U s has dumped into all these other countries, and you know, if you're a Mexican farmer, suddenly you can't compete with all of this food from the US because the food from the US is cheap because the American government subsidizing it, but the Mexican government can and this just like absolutely and die lates any attempt by a country to maintain food security

by like producing food for themselves. And this this sort of class of like self sufficient peasant farmers who had been you know, they support themselves by producing their own food and selling of the market. These people just can annihilated and they get forced into what's called sort of casualized labor that they you know that they the later versions is like uber, right, but that they're forcing the gig work. They're kicked out of sort of the normal economy.

And you know, but because they don't have sort of fixed contracts or you know, it's a lot of people are working with for no contract, with no contracts at all, they're enormously insecure. And once the people are forced into the labor market, like changes in the global economy can make them like almost immediately unable to afford food because you know, like if the less sort of economic and security you are, the more the more you're affected by

price increases. Which is obvious, but it's worth saying because it dictates a lot of like who does bread riots and yes, and so governments are not entirely like blind to this, and they're concerns that they're gonna get overthrown. And so you see a bunch of governments trying to

respond with sort of price stabilization stuff. I think the most famous example of this is that like the Egyptian army like literally controls like an enormous number of eagips bakeries and they like directly run them, and they directly run them so that he control the price of brand to try to like stop revolutions from happening. But in two thousand eight they just kind of stopped working. Um,

here's the political economy of the food riot. Again. Over the year between two thousand and seven and two thousand eight, hundred and thirty percent increase in the global price of maize and the seventy percent increase in the price of rice, with similar price increases and soybeans and other major food commodities. Um, yes, there they are these massive food price increases, and this, you know, this does the thing that massive food price

increases does. Right, there's there's and there's immediately enormous riots, and there's the cycle that happens where the protesters, you know, the purchesses, immediately blamed the government for the crisis, and then the government is like, well, it's actually not our fault because you know that it's happening because the things outside of our control. And the protesters are like, oh, it doesn't matter who we elect, they do the same things,

and like they're both kind of rights. Like the government

is just like sucking these people. But it's also true that the sort of like the whole food system is designed to take like the means of food production out of the hands of like the workers who need the food and putting them in the hands of like, you know, enormous corporations and as people in places like Sri Lanka, which you're gonna talk more about later, continually emphasized like this, this food sovereignty issue is as much as a political issue,

Like it's an incredibly political issue, and it's it's it's as much like what's at stake in these bread riots as the sort of m finosterity stuff. Okay, this is probably good place for an ad break, but I can't think of a transition. Uh yeah, you know who isn't allowed to eat is the products and services that support this podcast, all actively star ring to death. So get these deals now while you still can, and we're back. So all right now, we're gonna talk a little bit

about the Arabs Spring. We're not gonna talk an enormous amount about it, because that's the whole thing. Um. But if if, if you've been following like the stuff people have written about the Arabs spring, there's an enormous number of people who spend like a lot of their time arguing about whether or not it was actually sparked by

food prices. And you know, you'll get a lot of analysts to argue that like food prices in Tunisia where the air spring starts, like, weren't really higher than normal, And what you're seeing instead is like, well, it's not actually food prices. It's just that there's a generation of people who've been farmers but like can't support themselves anymore, who've been forced into like finding non existent wage labor in cities and like that that is part of what's happening.

But I think there's there's a sort of like fundamental misunderstanding of what causes a bread riot, right, Like you know, as you talked about like in the first episode, one of the things that causes bread riots is it's not actually necessarily the magnitude of the price increase that causes them. Right, what sets what sets off bread riots is people is

people feeling like they're not getting what they deserve. Now. Obviously, like if the price of bread increases, you're going to get a lot of people going like, funk this, I work my ass off and now I can't feed my family. We deserve better, and this is time to riot. But sometimes even if red prices are stable, you can you can get it. You can get a thing where everyone like,

you know, the amount of bread is bad. Everything is expensive, and one day someone wakes up and just goes, funck this, I deserve better, and they do a bread riot and

and this is the case. And you know, and when when that kind of thing is happening, right, When when when you're dealing with you know what like moral economy stuff, when you're dealing with with this gap between like what people think, like like what people think their life should be versus the fact that their lives which is absolutely terrible. Even if you like decrease the price of bread, that's not actually necessarily going to like stop people from rioting.

And if you look at like occupy for example, to like you know, that's also happening in this period, Like what brings people there isn't necessarily strictly the price of food. It's the sense that like, yeah, I've been screwed by and I've been screwed by the ruling class, and I deserve better than this and and this is this is

what you see Indonesia. And one of the things what do you see in sort of Phoenicians Syria is that like a lot of the uprisings, like they have this huge sort of rural core with with this population of the population to people who've been kicked out of agricultural sector and you know, and like that that is a bread riot, right, And it's a bread right in the sort of double sense of like it's the people who are involved who used to be involved in in grain

production and now can't be. And then also that like you know, people, people have hit the sort of expectation

gap thing. And what I think is sort of interesting about this is that these bread riots, these rural bread riots, are like their so the closest thing we have to sort of the classical twenty century revolution, right, like that that's one of that's the thing that causes like the twenty century revolutions are the first generation of people who are like but maybe in the first like two or three generations people who come from the countryside into the

factories of the people who do revolutions um. And but the thing is this is this is this is the century, not the twentieth century. Like if you get kicked out of your farm, there's there's no job in a factory, like you're just unemployed, and you know, and this changes the dynamics of of sort of everything. And I think, okay, like people like broadly know the course of like the air of spring and the way of uprisings they happen,

they get crushed largely. But there was another wave of these sort of riots, protests and uprisings that started in Haiti and like in eighteen over this massive field price hike. And here is a partial list of places that like people have like rioted in in large numbers since he dozen in eighteen had sue Dan, Algeria, Hunduras, Chile, and rock Ha Kong Iran like four times, Lebanon, like three times, Columbia, like three times. A couple of things happen in France.

There was Puerto Rico, there was popular There's there was Indonesia where in our second Ecuador one. Now there's Catalonia, like people righted. In the US there there were massive indigenous roadblocks like in Canada, ukimedia Kampa went up, or there was stuff. It's a culture. Like there were two different ways of protests. In India, there was like Belarus, there's Kazahstan, there's Kyrka Stan, there's just Beekistan. There's Molly. There's stuff in Nigeria or stuff in Libya, like there's

stuff in Sri Lanka. We're about to get to this. This whole thing has has been happening like everywhere, and it's been intensifying the last in the last year of like three or four years. Um, we're not basically in like year four of this cycle. And and you know, obviously, like every single one of these protests has their own like local political conditions, and like a lot of these aren't even sort of loosely about the price of bread.

They're just about sort of other stuff that's happening. But like like of the opperasons that I mentioned, like something like fifteen of them are directly about the price of food or the price of like translated fuel. And we're gonna talk a little bit about sort of two of

the most recent like protest waves. We're gonna talk about equat word, We're gonna talk about Sri Lanka because they're there are two very different kinds of protests, even though they're both kind of bread riots or at least I mean, they're both very much the modern equivalence of it. Um but they look very different. And there there's just I think, and I don't know, I think it's like indestring reasons why. Um. Yeah. So, so we're gonna start with, like with Sri Lanka. Um on.

On a very basic level, Sri Lanka, it has a giant balance of payments crisis. Uh, this is you know, it's just like that. This is the sort of like large scale political version of famines. Right, Like, there's plenty of food and fuel in the world, but the government

Srlanka does not have dollars to buy it with. Now, the reason the government doesn't have dollars to buy fuel with is because the government is basically like an incredibly corrupt dictatorship that keeps like imputting luxury goods it didn't need. And they did a bunch of like tax breaks at rich people, and suddenly the government was broken. Everyone was like, wow, how did that happened? It must have just been the pandemic and it was like no, you like you gave

all the money to rich people. And then as the crisis sort of went on, um, they the government decided to ban fertilizer imports, and so this just meant that people couldn't get fertilizer. So it's like farmers just didn't plant food because curious decision. Yeah, it's like it's it's one of those things you look at it. It's just like like, like who thought this was a good idea? Yeah? What was the positive end of that game plan here?

I mean, like the only like okay, So, like I think what they were thinking is that, like, fertilizer costs dollars, right, we're running out of dollars, so we're gonna stop people from spending their dollars like on buying this stuff so we can keep more dollars in the economy. But like, what what are you what is your long term plan here if you don't have like anything to get dollars with or and you also don't have food. So this, to the surprise of exactly zero people except I guess

the government of Sri Lanka causes a food crisis, food shortage. Um. And this is a kind of classic like this is the kind of classic like situation in which the I, m F we intervene in the seventies and they're tving now and you know this, this is a classic like struggle against this starting right, you have the ruling class blowing up the entire economy by like fueling debt money

into pointland's infrastructure projects. And now they're doing these like massive austerity measures, are trying to get loans to MF. This is you know, this is this is this is this, this is this is this is stuff we understand that we've seen before. Um. But this is also this is

also a food softigy problem, right. The Sri Lankan government has just completely screwed their farmers, which means you have to import even more food and and you know the result of this is months and months and months a very impressive sort of clock cross class protests with like basically every social sector in the streets. And that's both a good thing and also a thing that is kind of a mess because you know, like there's civil war. The civil war ended like less than a decade and

a half ago. Right, so you have people in the streets from sectors who like do not like each other at all, and I don't know, and you know, you get the thing that happens here, right, You get these moments of like incredible solidarity and then moments of incredible

like what the funk are you guys doing? And you know, like one of the things that happens a lot in these protests, like in all all protests, like this is like okay, the protests are like pre tame for literally months, right, Like it's just people doing protesting, and then I cops and and people like allied with the government start attacking their protesters, at which point people like burned down the

house of the ruling family. They start throwing people. I think people probably saw the videos people like throwing cars of like government ministers and the rivers, which was a good time, and like yeah, like that that stuff was you know, a direct reaction to sort of like the government's violence. Right. Um, you know, okay, I can't give like a full, like detailed political history here because, like dear Odd, it is incredibly complicated and I don't understand

it very well because you know, I don't study Sri Lanka. Um,

if you want to go to account of this. Brohini Hensman's political dimensions of the crisis in Sri Lanka is a really good sort of like short like look at what's going on here, um, And and this is the sort of like this is you know, this is a broader trend and like all these protests right like like every single bread right takes place in its own unique context, Like Sri Lanka, for example, Like Sri Lanka used to have the world's best and largest like mass Trotskyite party,

like they were the Trotskyites is like the only place on earth the trot Skates had like a real like mass political party and they were like a part of the real political process. And then they like sold out the working class and entered a bunch of governments that like did terrible stuff. And you know, okay that that that's like a local context, doesn't happen anywhere else. But you know, every single one of these states, right is,

is embedded in global capitalism. And that means that every state is affected by the sort of like broader economic trends and sort of beerocratic structures to hold everything together. Their affect by the I m F, the World Trade Organization, the World Bank. And the thing that this means is that the timings of uprisings and riots tend to synchronize with each other, and we actually just sort of brought

her up like economic forces. And the product of this is way is these sort of like periodic ways of uprisings. And so the closest out we're gonna talk about the most recent of these, well, it might actually not be the most recently these by time this goes up, but yeah, yeah, we're we're gonna talk about Ecuador. Um, the situation Ecuador

is very different from what's happening is to Laka. The biggest difference, I guess is that instead of sort of like waiting for conditions to get bad enough that like an uprising happens like more or less spontaneously, which is kind of what happened he doesn't nineteen and Ecuador there there's there's there are huge protests there, um, but they were largely spontaneous, but instead of like waiting for people were just like what if we just called one of

these And by by people here, I specifically mean the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador or ka and you know, okay, okay. As we've seen through this whole sort of thing, right like bread riots like adapt to the political organizations around them. And in Ecuador we're dealing with a quick essentially modern

form political organization, which is the Indigenous Confederation. And I guess I should sort of like preface this a bit with like the specific form of indigenous confederation in in Latin America that emerges in this period is like a different thing than older ones because there have been indigenous

confederation for a long time. This is like a this is this is a very specific like political thing that emerged across Latin America in in sort of the seventies, and the really really started struting up in the eighties as results of like a lot of things, one of which was like how shitty the old like Marxans Lendon's vanger groups, like we're on indigenous issues. And one of the one of the groups that forms in this period is kana and Kanae is one of the world's most

bilitant like indigenous federations. And since they're founding in Night in six, they've called half a dozen uprisings against neoliberal governments. And I think I think they knocked off like three presidents, which is a pretty impressive track record. And on July two, faced with skyrocketing inflation on like basic consumer goods and a like really shitty like far right government, they stage another one um and this is another sort of I

don't know. The thing is interesting about this is that it's it's part general strike, like part street protests, part riot, and part just like mass march for the from the sort of periphery of Ecuador to the core. And by periphery and cora, I mean in this sort of metaphorical sense, like it's a bunch. It's a bunch of indigenous peasant groups from all over the country, just like marching on descending on the capital Keto. And this is a this

is a complicated process like that, you know. Okay, like the left everywhere has like political divides and mostly they're kind of nonsense in a lot of way, like okay, like that there's ideological divides and those personal divides and whatever. But like Ecuador's left has has real political divides, and these aren't these aren't like sort of petty ideological like personal stuff, like they're like they were caught under the sort of previous like old like leftist, pink tight governments

of Raphael Carrera. Like there are like soldiers and cops who are beating the ship out of indigenous like a logical protesters. And you know this means that like yeah, you know, okay, So so Carrera is like parties running for president again. Careers are running, but careers parties like running in an election, right, And you know this means it' like yeah, okay, like maybe you're both leftist, right, but you know there's a lot of people who are like, oh,

funck no, like I'm not voting for these guys. These are the guys who like sent the army against their anti mining protests. And so you know, the thing the thing that is interesting here is like like these protests don't even pull together the entire recordorian left. Um, there's like other stuff going on here too, like that. There there's some of the unions that went on strike in twenty nineteen, like don't go on strike this time because

of some political stuff that's happening. But the thing, the thing about KNA that's really impressive is that they're still organized enough and they still like they're organized enough that they're able to just take control of parts of cities. And they have a lot of allies supporters amongst other students and workers and keto. And this means that when the government makes this enormous mistake and arrests karas like kind of Newish leader. Ah, okay, this guy's name. This

guy's name, I guess in Spanish, it's like Leonidas. Is that this guy's name is Leonitis. He's the head um, he's the head of Kaisans Federation Um. And he sees a protest leader. He was a protested leader in twenty nineteen. That's how we got elected to like head this organization. And they arrest him on day two of the protests. And this is a catastrophic mistake. The protest just like explode and you know, bye bye bye by like a

week in. I think that the government's claiming they were doing fifty million dollars a damage a day, which I'm not actually sure I believe that because governments and corporations do this too, and they're talking about like losses from like strikes, and they tend to over emphasize how much damage is done because it makes them like look better in the press and makes the protesters look worse, but they they they they're able to damage like significant parts

of the economy, and by June, like they kind of win. Basically, the government's forced to negotiate with them, and they don't get all of their demands, but they get price decreases for like fuel and gasoline, which is like a huge part of why these just happened in the first place. They get bands on mining and drilling and indigenous and protected areas. They get like strength and price controls. They get like local rural loan forgiveness, like interest rate decreases.

They get sub disdas for farmers to get subsidies for families, they get they manage to get the government to declare a state of health emergency over COVID. It's like, this is this is impressive stuff, and you know, and the other part of this is that they're like, Okay, the agreement is that we will stop protesting if you do this, and if you don't do this, we're gonna do this again. So yeah, I guess I guess might sort of wrap

this up. There's there there's an American proverb that is really common amongst sort of like American China watchers, which is that I so supposedly the Chinese word for crisis is composed of two characters, danger and opportunity. And it's like not true, as likelistic and at the polological analysis of China that that's not what that's not what the

characters made. But everyone, like everyone in the US, like political stamoshere like believes this right, And you know, but like as as an analysis of China, it is completely useless. As an analysis of the US, of the American psyche, it's incredibly valuable, right because this this, this is the way the American ruling class thinks. It's it's every single

crisis is both a danger and an opportunity. And that's something that we in some sense also have to do because that's you know, these are the sort of situations that we're in, right bread riots are a thing that just they happen, right, they will continue to happen. They have been happening for that cousens of years, like presumably

they will happen for thousands of more years. And there's no use sort of like either pretending that they don't happen or making these sort of moral or tactical arguments like for against them, because they just happen. And the question that we're that we're faced with is what are we actually going to do about it? Right? Are we

going to set them out? Are we gonna side with the state and repressing them in the name of sort of like stamping out color revolutions, are like providing order a stability, or like protecting small businesses, or are we going to you know, take to the streets and fight alongside them to sort of break the system that creates them. And this is the second question from here is if

we're going to do this how and what? What what we've seen from Ecuador in the past month or so is that if you take the fight to them and you're sufficiently organized, you can win. And that means the question now, as our food prices continue to increase, as food prices are only going to continue to increase, what are we going to do? And Yeah, that that's all I got I have. I have a single question, yep,

what are we going to do? Well? I'm I'm kind of bummed we never brought up are good friend Pete Buddha j Edge in his uh bread his bread press

fixing ordeals? Yeah, I mean that that that that's kind of a sign of just like how kind of like I guess you could say masculalized, Like our culture has been that, Like people didn't riot over that because like that is a thing like if if if if if you said, Pete budda edge back to like a late Frets village and she tries to do this thing like he he does the systematic like bride bread price fixing, right, like all of these people would have been getting hit

by rocks. So yeah, I do that again. Yeah, do that again? Wow, barons just brasen incitement. Yeah, yeah, it's great. Well that is it for us today. We love to incite. Thanks folks. Until next time, go incite yourselves. It could Happen here as a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen

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