Add new comment

The most notorious subsistance revolts at the end of the last century were those in Argentina in 1989, during the hyperinflation of the last days of Raúl Alfolsín’s government, highlighting the proliferation of “popular pots” and the collective expropriation of the Cruce Castelar shopping center in the municipality of Moreno in Buenos Aires(31). That experience would soon be neutralized with official measures of containment through the provision of food to popular areas, consolidating as clientelist practices that favoured the empowerment of leaders and social leaders as mediators to the system of domination, guaranteeing social control and systemic recovery. The subsistence riots would be repeated in the southern country at the beginning of this century, originating with the uprising of December 2001 that produced the fall of Fernando De la Rúa’s government. Once again they would be pacified with clubs, bread and circuses, while the future of the Kirchners (2003 to date) was being paved with the assured vote for the Left.

In the course of the 21st century, there has been a long string of protests and rebellions over hunger. In January 2007, under the slogan “without corn there is no country” and against the ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), tens of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Mexico City to protest the rise in the price of corn. In September of that same year, in Myanmar (formerly Burma), the increase in the prices of food and gasoline provoked the insurrection of the Buddhist nuns and monks known as the “saffron revolution”. During the spring of 2008, riots broke out in different cities in Egypt, Morocco, Haiti, the Philippines, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Senegal, the Ivory Coast, Cameroon and Burkina Faso.

The rebellions of misery intensified with the so-called “international financial crisis” that aggravated hunger around the world with the growing volatility of agricultural products being included in the “commodity” exchanges, as a result of the incursion of speculative funds in these areas. Since then, prices have continued to rise, throwing more than 100 million people into misery. The paradox is that with the industrialization of agriculture – hand in hand with pesticides and biotechnological manipulation – current agricultural overproduction is exuberant. Today, famines are not due to hardship or misfortune, but to other factors.

Financial speculation in food products has forced 820 million people around the world to live in extreme poverty, of which 265 million could die of hunger, according to the most conservative projections of the UN World Food Program. An estimated 12,000 people will die of hunger every day as a result of the economic impact of the pandemic, far more than those who will die from the after-effects of the Covid-19 virus. Meanwhile, eight of the largest food and beverage corporations have distributed more than $18 billion to their shareholders since the health crisis began. Economists expect that the contraction of global production will generate around 450 million unemployed people in the world but, from January to date, the 12 wealthiest billionaires on the planet have increased their fortunes by more than 40%.

Very probably, this announced misery will give rise to countless rebellions that will facilitate the rise of new clowns/prophets and the establishment of new populist governments. But none will lead to the decline of capitalism or the end of domination. With the “new-normality” imposed on us, capital is reinvented and domination is renewed, returning to strong states and nationalist rhetoric, in a framework of reorganization that once again leaves individual and collective freedom outside the text in search of “urgent solutions”, strengthening the authoritarian temptations.

https://anarchistnews.org/content/rebellions-misery