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CIVIL UNREST AUSTERITY NEOLIBERALISM

Welcome to the Global Rebellion Against

Neoliberalism
As distinct as the protests seem, the uprisings rocking Bolivia, Lebanon, and scores of other countries all
have a common theme.
By Ben Ehrenreich

NOVEMBER 25, 2019

A supporter of former president Evo Morales holds a Bolivian flag during clashes with police in La Paz, Bolivia, on
November 13, 2019. (Natacha Pisarenko / AP Photo)

S omething—someone—keeps knocking at the door. It’s

cold out there and getting colder, but the people inside

Subscribe To are cozy on the sofa with the TV on and a blanket on their

The Nation laps. But there’s that knock again: at the front door now,
Subscribe now for as then the side door, then the back. Maybe it’s the wind. Now
little as $2 a month! there’s knocking at the windows and the roof and the walls
SUBSCRIBE of the house—who knew they were so thin? It’s hard to
understand: How could so many people be knocking all at
once?

But they are, and it’s getting louder. Last week you could hear the banging in Colombia—in
Bogotá, Cali, Cartagena, Barranquilla, Medellín, a curfew declared, the army in the streets—and
the week before that in Iran, a steady beat that quickly spread to more than 100 cities. At least
100 protesters have been killed so far. It’s hard to know if there were more, or exactly what is
going on: The government shut off the Internet on the protests’ second day. But even when
there’s a steady connection, it’s hard to put it all together: Protests have been roiling through
Algeria, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Egypt, France, Germany, Guinea, Haiti, Honduras,
Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, the Netherlands, Spain, Sudan, the UK, and
Zimbabwe—I’m sure I’m leaving someplace out—and that’s only since September. Some have
been the fleeting, routine sort that snarls up traffic for a day. Others look more like revolutions,
big enough to topple governments, shut down entire nations.

Something is happening here. But what? And why now? In the last 12 weeks, protests have
spanned five continents—most of the planet—from wealthy London and Hong Kong to hungry
Tegucigalpa and Khartoum. They are so geographically disparate and apparently heterogeneous
in cause and composition that I have not yet seen any serious attempt to view them as a unified
phenomenon. (I don’t count The New York Times’ determination that the discontent can be traced
to “pocketbook issues”—as close to class analysis as the paper of record gets.)

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On the face of it, there appears to be little that unites them. In Iran, the announcement of a 50
percent hike in fuel prices set it off. In Germany, the Netherlands, and France, farmers blocked
highways to protest environmental regulations. The outrage that has been shaking Hong Kong
since June started with proposed legislation that would have allowed extraditions to mainland
China. In Chile the spark was a hike in the cost of public transportation, in Indonesia an
oppressive crime bill, in Lebanon the announcement of new taxes on everything from gasoline
to WhatsApp calls.

Some of these movements have been organized by unions or formal opposition parties, but
many are of the horizontal, leaderless sort. (“Be like water,” as the Hong Kong protesters put it,
channeling Bruce Lee.) No overarching revolutionary ideology unites them. No vanguard party
is rushing to the front. The single left-right axis on which the world was split for most of the last
century is no longer always helpful. Right-wingers, and the United States government, have
cheered the democratic aspirations of demonstrators in Hong Kong, Iran, and Bolivia—before
the coup that toppled Evo Morales anyway—while scorning or ignoring them more or less
everywhere else. The more doctrinaire quarters of the left have sniffed imperialist
interventionism behind the Hong Kong and Iranian protests while affirming the legitimacy of
pretty much every other popular movement on the planet.

I f you can squint past the smoke from the barricades, the commonalities start to stand out. In
Chile, anger over a  3 percent raise in metro fares revealed a population not merely miffed by
“pocketbook issues”—the fare hike pushed transit costs to 21 percent of the monthly salary of a
worker earning the minimum wage—but so exhausted by austerity, so squeezed by low wages
and long hours and debt, so fed up with the greed and blindness of the wealthy few who run the
country that they were ready to burn almost everything down. A few hours after declaring a state
of emergency and dispatching the military into the streets, billionaire President Sebastián Piñera
went on TV to remind the citizenry that Chile’s “stable democracy” and growing economy make
it a “true oasis” on an otherwise chaotic continent. “The practices that underpin prosperity are
not popular,” The Economist drily observed.

In another corner of the same echo chamber, not long after Egyptian police rounded up
thousands who dared to demonstrate in September, the country’s finance minister lamented that
the “fruits of [Egypt’s] economic reform were not captured by ordinary people.” Measures
imposed by the International Monetary Fund had in fact caused inflation to rise 60 percent over
three years, plunging millions into poverty. This is what a Morgan Stanley analyst recently called
the “best reform story in the Middle East.”

The disconnect between elite perception and mass experience is as widespread as it is

fundamental: All of the countries recently experiencing popular revolts—and most of the rest of
the planet—have for decades been ruled by a single economic model, in which the “growth”
celebrated by the pedigreed few means immiseration for the many, and capital streams into
American and European accounts as reliably as sewage flows downhill. Chile was a notorious
early laboratory: Pinochet’s assassination squads worked in tandem with Chicago-trained
economists to create an “economic miracle” that only the fortunate, the unscrupulous, and the
blind were able to appreciate. Should popular mobilizations in Bolivia fail to reverse the
November 10 coup, they can expect similar acts of god.

The word gets thrown around a lot these days, but this is what neoliberalism means: a globally
applicable method for preserving the current overwhelming imbalance of power. It works
microcosmically on a municipal level—think decaying public transit systems with an apparently
bottomless budget for racist fare enforcement, while billionaires hop in helicopters from rooftop
to rooftop—and macrocosmically on a planetary scale, in which national elites collude with
multinational corporations and international financial institutions to keep labor cheap and
wealth and resources confined into established channels.

For most of the early 2000s, abundant Chinese capital and high prices for commodities like oil,
gas, minerals, and agricultural products meant that some poor countries had options. For a little
while, they could avoid the draconian “reform” traps attached to IMF loans: the usual slash-and-
burn austerity recipe of public-sector cuts, privatization of state-held resources, and the gutting
of labor protections in the name of “liberalization.” In Latin America, leftist governments won
ground, and poverty and inequality plummeted. But the commodities boom sputtered out, the
Chinese economy has stalled, and, after years of what must have been painful soul-searching, the
IMF has stepped back in with the same old and discredited solutions.

Local elites have been happy to play along, hacking away at their own populations to keep the
money flowing. In March, Ecuadorean President Lenín Moreno signed a deal with the IMF for a
$4.2 billion loan, and in October, as required, slashed public sector wages and fuel subsidies,
causing the price of diesel to double—and many thousands of mainly indigenous Ecuadoreans to
pour into the streets. (Moreno soon fled the capital and agreed to abandon the austerity
package.) In Lebanon, Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri announced a raft of new consumer taxes—
on fuel, tobacco, and phone calls made via Internet messaging services—as part of a deficit-
reduction package required by foreign lenders to secure an $11 billion loan. After 12 days of
protests in which as much as a quarter of Lebanon’s population took part, Hariri resigned. The
protesters haven’t quit.

The same model applies even in countries where the IMF and World Bank are forbidden from
doing business: Iran, hobbled by four decades of US sanctions, has turned for years to the usual
array of austerity measures. If they had widely failed to provide the economic panacea that they
promised, they could at least reliably cushion the elite, passing the suffering on to classes
deemed expendable. Until they couldn’t, that is.

Dignity is a funny thing: Once you reclaim it, it’s even harder to give up. Protesters’ demands
have almost everywhere expanded far beyond the original outrage that set them off. In Hong
Kong, demonstrators quickly determined that the withdrawal of the Extradition Bill was not
nearly enough: They wanted universal suffrage too. (Half the seats in the city’s Legislative
Council are directly elected by “functional constituencies,” such as bankers, manufacturers, and
developers; inequality and housing costs are higher than anywhere in the world.) In Chile,
protesters’ demands expanded from rolling back transit hikes to scrapping the country’s
Pinochet-era Constitution. (It looks like they’ll get both—Piñera has reversed the fare hike and
agreed to a referendum for a new Constitution.)

In Lebanon, protesters are now debating whether their movement counts as a revolution. (It
should be no surprise that such fierce protests have arisen in Beirut, Hong Kong, and Chile,
some of the most heavily privatized places on the planet.) In Sudan, an uprising that started
when the government of Omar al-Bashir cut wheat and fuel subsidies—“at the suggestion of
international lending partners,” The New York Times politely put it—ended up toppling his 30-
year regime, and has not stopped fighting yet. In Haiti too, protests began more than a year ago
when President Jovenel Moïse precipitously raised fuel prices to please the IMF. Protesters were
soon demanding the US-backed Moïse’s resignation and have been at it ever since.

I t is hard not to notice that not only in Haiti but in at least half a dozen countries from
Ecuador to Zimbabwe protests were sparked by increases to the price of gasoline. It is no
secret that we have to begin weaning ourselves off fossil fuels immediately if we are to have any
hope of preserving some bearable version of human life on earth, but although nearly all of
these countries have been hurt by the climate crisis—and their most vulnerable citizens hurt the
hardest—these fuel hikes were not about reducing emissions. The IMF frequently ties loans to
cuts in energy subsidies, and fuel taxes are an easy if regressive way to defray public debt: two
tactics for getting the poor, and all those who have not benefited from official corruption, to bail
out those who have.

On the other side of the global divide, wealthy European countries have seen protests directly
linked to climate policy—either because governments are doing too little, as in the UK, or
because the measures they are taking unevenly distribute the pain, as in the Netherlands and
Germany, where farmers have reacted to restrictions on pesticides and nitrogen emissions by
blocking highways with thousands of tractors, and France, where an environmentally motivated
fuel tax coupled with tax cuts for the rich let loose more than a year of fighting in the streets.

From both sides, the lessons here are very clear. First, that any attempt to tackle the climate
crisis that does not also take on the basic needs of the overwhelming majority of the earth’s
inhabitants will catastrophically fail. And second, that those basic needs include not just food,
health care, and housing, but also dignity and forms of solidarity that the current system does
everything it can to destroy.

Is it any wonder that so many uprisings, all at once, barely rate a mention on the TV news?
Earlier this month, the novelist Dominique Eddé wrote of the popular uprisings in Lebanon that
it is “as if hundreds of thousands of solitary people had discovered at the same time, after an
endless hibernation, that they were not alone.” If we would only look, we would see that the
same thing is happening all across the globe, people waking up together, looking around, and
finding each other looking back.

Ben Ehrenreich Ben Ehrenreich’s most recent book, The Way to the Spring, is based on his reporting from the West Bank.
His next book, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time, will be published in July by Counterpoint Press.

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JAILS AND PRISONS CRIMINAL JUSTICE NEW YORK CITY

Closing Rikers Island Is a Matter of Life and Death

Isaabdul Karim wasn’t sentenced to death. In fact, he was never sentenced at all.
By Katrina vanden Heuvel

TODAY 8:53 AM
Advocacy and activist groups attempt to deliver a mock coffin to New York City Hall with the inscription “Shut Down
Rikers Island,” February 23, 2016. (Erik McGregor / Sipa via AP Images)

EDITOR’S NOTE: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s column at the
WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.

I saabdul Karim wasn’t sentenced to death. In fact, he was never sentenced at all. But after the
father of two was accused of a nonviolent parole violation and sent to Rikers Island, on
September 19, he became the 11th person this year to die in a New York city jail.

A wheelchair user with health complications, Karim was kept in an intake cell for 10 days
without adequate access to food or medication. His lawyers asked for early release in a hearing
cut short when Karim suffered an asthma attack; before Karim could return to court, he
contracted Covid-19 and died.

Karim is just one victim of Rikers’s horrific conditions. Nearly 6,000 people are detained there,
most of whom await trial. Detainees have gone without food, water, toilets, showers, or access to
lawyers and doctors. And chronic mismanagement—staff shifts are still organized on index cards
—has left the prison unable to handle hundreds of employees’ calling out sick, even though the
remaining officer-to-prisoner ratio is well above the national average.

Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.

Katrina vanden Heuvel Katrina vanden Heuvel is editorial director and publisher of The Nation, America’s leading
source of progressive politics and culture. She served as editor of the magazine from 1995 to 2019.

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