[News] When the People Have Nothing More to Eat, They Will Eat the Rich

[Anti-Imperialist News]

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*When the People Have Nothing More to Eat, They Will Eat the Rich: The 
Third Newsletter (2023)*


Maruja Mallo (Spain), La Verbena (‘The Fair’), 1927.

Maruja Mallo (Spain), /La Verbena /(‘The Fair’), 1927.

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research 
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On 8 January, large crowds of people dressed in colours of the Brazilian 
flag descended 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=24b927ff42&e=d206d0a40d> on 
the country’s capital, Brasília. They invaded federal buildings, 
including the Congress, Supreme Court, and presidential palace, and 
vandalised 
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property. The attack, carried out by supporters of former President Jair 
Bolsonaro, came as no surprise, since the rioters had been planning 
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‘weekend demonstrations’ on social media for days. When Luiz Inácio Lula 
da Silva (known as Lula) was formally sworn in 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=4997d30179&e=d206d0a40d> as 
Brazil’s new president one week prior, on 1 January, there was no such 
melee; it appears that the vandals were waiting until the city was quiet 
and Lula was out of town. For all its bluster, the attack was an act of 
extreme cowardice.

Meanwhile, the defeated Bolsonaro was nowhere near Brasília. He fled 
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Brazil prior to the inauguration – presumably to escape prosecution – 
and sought haven in Orlando, Florida (in the United States). Even though 
Bolsonaro was not in Brasília, the Bolsonaristas, as his supporters are 
known, left their mark throughout the city. Even before Bolsonaro lost 
the election to Lula this past October, /Le Monde Diplomatique Brasil/ 
suggested 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=12702a51e1&e=d206d0a40d> that 
Brazil was going to experience ‘Bolsonarism without Bolsonaro’. This 
prediction is supported by the fact that the far-right Liberal Party, 
which served as Bolsonaro’s political vehicle during his presidency, 
holds the largest bloc in the country’s Chamber of Deputies and Senate, 
while the toxic influence of the right wing persists both in Brazil’s 
elected bodies and political climate, especially on social media.

Mayo (Egypt), /Un soir à Cannes /(‘An Evening in Cannes’), 1948.

The two men responsible for public safety in Brasília – Anderson Torres 
(the secretary of public security of the Federal District) and Ibaneis 
Rocha (the governor of the Federal District) – are close to Bolsonaro. 
Torres served 
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as the minister of justice and public security in Bolsonaro’s 
government, while Rocha formally supported 
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Bolsonaro during the election. As the Bolsonaristas prepared their 
assault on the capital, both men appeared to have abdicated their 
responsibilities: Torres was on holiday 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=51f05bcdfe&e=d206d0a40d> in 
Orlando, while Rocha took 
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the afternoon off on the last working day before the coup attempt. For 
this complicity 
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the violence, Torres has been dismissed from his post and faces charges, 
and Rocha has been suspended. The federal government has taken charge of 
security and arrested over a thousand 
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these ‘fanatic Nazis’, as Lula called 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=96952dfa94&e=d206d0a40d> them. 
There is a good case 
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to be made that these ‘fanatic Nazis’ do not deserve amnesty.

The slogans and signs that pervaded Brasília on 8 January were less 
about Bolsonaro and more about the rioters’ hatred for Lula and the 
potential of his pro-people government. This sentiment is shared by big 
business sectors – mainly agribusiness – which are furious about the 
reforms proposed by Lula. The attack was partly the result of the 
built-up frustration felt by people who have been led 
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by intentional misinformation campaigns and the use of the judicial 
system to unseat the Lula’s party, the Workers’ Party (PT), through 
‘lawfare’, to believe that Lula is a criminal – even though the courts 
have ruled 
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to be false. It was also a warning from Brazil’s elites. The unruly 
nature of the attack on Brasília resembles the 6 January 2021 attack on 
the US Capitol by supporters of former US President Donald Trump. In 
both cases, far-right illusions, whether about the dangers of the 
‘socialism’ of US President Joe Biden or the ‘communism’ of Lula, 
symbolise the hostile opposition of the elites to even the mildest 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=83c32d9408&e=d206d0a40d> rollback 
of neoliberal austerity.

Kartick Chandra Pyne (India), /Workers/, 1965.

The attacks on government offices in the United States (2021) and Brazil 
(2023), as well as the recent coup 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=b56eb37d5d&e=d206d0a40d> 
in Peru (2022), are not random events; beneath them is a pattern that 
requires examination. At Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, 
we have been engaged in this study since our founding five years ago. In 
our first publication, /In the Ruins of the Present/ 
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(March 2018), we offered a preliminary analysis of this pattern, which I 
will develop further below.

After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and the Third World Project 
withered as a result of the debt crisis, the US-driven agenda of 
neoliberal globalisation prevailed. This programme was characterised by 
the state’s withdrawal from the regulation of capital and by the erosion 
of social welfare policies. The neoliberal framework had two major 
consequences: first, a rapid increase in social inequality, with the 
growth of billionaires at one pole and the growth of poverty at the 
other, along with an exacerbation of inequality along North-South lines; 
and second, the consolidation of a ‘centrist’ political force that 
pretended that history, and therefore politics, had ended, leaving only 
administration (which in Brazil is well-named as /centrão/, or the 
‘centre’) remaining. Most countries around the world fell victim to both 
the neoliberal austerity agenda and this ‘end of politics’ ideology, 
which became increasingly anti-democratic, making the case for 
technocrats to be in charge. However, these austerity policies, cutting 
close to the bone of humanity, created their own new politics on the 
streets, a trend that was foreshadowed by the IMF riots and bread riots 
of the 1980s and later coalesced into the ‘anti-globalisation’ protests. 
The US-driven globalisation agenda produced new contradictions that 
belied the argument that politics had ended.

Leonora Carrington (Mexico), /Figuras fantásticas a caballo 
/(‘Fantastical Figures on Horseback’), 2011.

The Great Recession that set in with the global financial crisis of 
2007–08 increasingly invalidated the political credentials of the 
‘centrists’ who had managed the austerity regime. The /World Inequality 
Report 2022/ 
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is an indictment of neoliberalism’s legacy. Today, wealth inequality is 
as bad as it was in the early years of the twentieth century: on 
average, the poorest half of the world’s population owns just $4,100 per 
adult (in purchasing power parity), while the richest 10 percent owns 
$771,300 – roughly 190 times as much wealth. Income inequality is 
equally harsh, with the richest 10 percent absorbing 52 percent of world 
income, leaving the poorest 50 percent with merely 8.5 percent of world 
income. It gets worse if you look at the ultra-rich. Between 1995 and 
2021, the wealth of the top one percent grew astronomically, capturing 
38 percent of global wealth while the bottom 50 percent only ‘captured a 
frightening two percent’, the authors of the report write. During the 
same period, the share of global wealth owned by the top 0.1 percent 
rose from 7 percent to 11 percent. This obscene wealth – largely untaxed 
– provides this tiny fraction of the world’s population with a 
disproportionate amount of power over political life and information and 
increasingly squeezes the ability of the poor to survive.

The World Bank’s /Global Economic Prospects/ report 
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(January 2023) forecasts that, at the end of 2024, gross domestic 
product (GDP) in 92 of the world’s poorer countries will be 6 percent 
below the level expected on the eve of the pandemic. Between 2020 and 
2024, these countries are projected to suffer a cumulative loss in GDP 
equal to roughly 30 percent of their 2019 GDP. As central banks in the 
richest countries tighten their monetary policies, capital for 
investment in the poorer nations is drying up and the cost of debts 
already held has increased. Total debt in these poorer countries, the 
World Bank notes, ‘is at a 50-year high’. Roughly one in five of these 
countries are ‘effectively locked out of global debt markets’, up from 
one in fifteen in 2019. All of these countries – excluding China – 
‘suffered an especially sharp investment contraction of more than 8 
percent’ during the pandemic, ‘a deeper decline than in 2009’, in the 
throes of the Great Recession. The report estimates that aggregate 
investment in these countries will be 8 percent lower in 2024 than had 
been expected in 2020. Faced with this reality, the World Bank offers 
the following prognosis: ‘Sluggish investment weakens the rate of growth 
of potential output, reducing the capacity of economies to increase 
median incomes, promote shared prosperity, and repay debts’. In other 
words, the poorer nations will slide deeper into a debt crisis and into 
a permanent condition of social distress.

Roberto Matta (Chile), /Invasion of the Night/, 1942.

The World Bank has sounded the alarm, but the forces of ‘centrism’ – 
beholden to the billionaire class and the politics of austerity – simply 
refuse to pivot away from the neoliberal catastrophe. If a leader of the 
centre-left or left tries to wrench their country out of persistent 
social inequality and polarised wealth distribution, they face the wrath 
of not merely the ‘centrists’, but the wealthy bondholders in the North, 
the International Monetary Fund, and the Western states. When Pedro 
Castillo won the presidency in Peru in July 2021, he was not permitted 
to pursue even a Scandinavian form of social democracy; the coup 
machinations against him began before he was inaugurated. The civilised 
politics that would end hunger and illiteracy are simply not permitted 
by the billionaire class, who spend vast amounts of money on think tanks 
and media to undermine any project of decency and fund the dangerous 
forces of the far right, who shift the blame for social chaos away from 
the tax-free ultra-rich and the capitalist system and onto the poor and 
marginalised.

The hallucinatory insurrection in Brasília emerged from the same dynamic 
that produced the coup in Peru: a process in which ‘centrist’ political 
forces are funded and brought to power in the Global South to ensure 
that their own citizens remain at the rear of the queue, while the 
wealthy tax-free bondholders of the Global North remain at the front.

Ivan Sagita (Indonesia), /A Dish for Life/, 2014.

On the barricades of Paris on 14 October 1793, Pierre Gaspard Chaumette, 
the president of the Paris Commune who himself fell to the guillotine to 
which he sent many others, quoted these fine words from Jean-Jacques 
Rousseau: ‘When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat 
the rich’.

Warmly,

Vijay

Website <www.eltricontinental.org>

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Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research · Shadipur · New Delhi, 
New Delhi 110008 · India
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