[DEBATE] : Re: urban poor=bomb

Fri Jun 16 15:50:22 BST 2006

David,

I'd like to know more about what happened to the UNCHS (Habitat). They used
to have a good grip on a set of ideas that corresponded to the thinking of
John Turner ("Housing by People"): autonomy versus heteronomy, "Who
Decides?", and all that. They had good publications along those lines. These
ideas come down from before Ebenezer Howard and Steen Eiler Rasmussen. They
represent a viable transitional provision for the petty bourgeois masses of
poor, the peasants in the city, those whom Mike Davis has discovered as a
new phenomenon but who were historically the mass material of urbanism long
before the rise of "Manchester Capitalism". Of course it is a mistake to
apply Engels' "Housing Question" logic as a one-size-fits-all. Rather, the
urban peasant should be granted his or her wishes, with all the subtlety
that Turner (and e.g. the Swaziland architect Pieter Smoor) was able to
conceive, on an analogy with the granting of land to the tiller after the
French and Russian revolutions.

At the same time, but separately, massive worker-appropriate, top-grade,
fully equipped and developed modern urban environments should be created.

"RDP Houses" are neither fish nor fowl at best. At worst they are a careless
gesture of indiscriminate, inadequate, temporising palliation. Spending more
money on them would not make them better. They are wrongly conceived
altogether.

The basic trouble with something like UNCHS seems to be that although for a
while they might be able to conceive of useful ways forward for the urban
petty-bourgeoisie, the latter are a "sack of potatoes" with no organised
power on a large scale. Hence as soon as UNCHS initiatives grew to the point
of making other interests uncomfortable, they were incapable of resisting
infiltration, co-option, vulgarisation, and betrayal. When Billy Cobbett
re-deployed himself to UNCHS about ten years ago one assumed that the game
was already up. As South Africa we were not able to learn anything from
UNCHS (in spite of the valiant efforts of Lalith Lankatilleke). Instead, we
exported our own one-eyed utilitarianism back to them.

The sack-of-potatoes syndrome is an inescapable circumstance. Abahalali
baseMjondolo, for example, looks to me an easy prey for any politician with
a cheque-book, unless it can team up with the politicised proletariat. I'd
like to know how Richard Pithouse could show me I'm wrong about that.
Perhaps he agrees with me. The example of the subversion by grants of the
once-huge Homeless People's Federation looms very large. They took their
autonomy too far. They should have made a treaty with the working class,
and/or established joint democratic institutions of popular power.

The only mass organised force of sufficient power to push through a
historically adequate transitional provision for the urban petty-bourgeois
poor is the working class. The working class has the potential power and
sufficiently clear vision to do the job, as it did the job for the rural
peasants of Russia and China.

Dominic.

Web site at: http://amadlandawonye.wikispaces.com/
Blog at: http://domza.net/
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-----Original Message-----
From: debate-bounces at lists.kabissa.org
[mailto:debate-bounces at lists.kabissa.org]On Behalf Of David McDonald
Sent: 16 June 2006 03:02 PM
To: 'debate: SA discussion list '
Subject: [DEBATE] : Re: urban poor=bomb

>> in connection with Anna Tibaijuka's theory of revolution, it seems
reasonable to draw a contrast between hers and that of Karl Marx...

It is even simpler than this Dominic.  There is nothing "revolutionary"
about Tibaijuka.  Her vision of change (and that of the UN-Habitat in
general) is that of more private sector investment in basic needs for the
poor (with the emphasis on "basic, of course) in order to keep the ticking
"time bomb" at bay.  It's amazing how liberals love to use the language of
crisis but never admit that there is an actual crisis.

David

-----Original Message-----
From: debate-bounces at lists.kabissa.org
[mailto:debate-bounces at lists.kabissa.org] On Behalf Of Dominic Tweedie
Sent: June 16, 2006 4:06 AM
To: debate: SA discussion list
Subject: [DEBATE] : Re: urban poor=bomb

Tony Roshan Samara

Nobody is forced to be a Marxist. Marx himself refused the tag. But in
connection with Anna Tibaijuka's theory of revolution, it seems reasonable
to draw a contrast between hers and that of Karl Marx. Tibaijuka says:

"When a critical mass of people are in one place, if you don't empower them
they will empower themselves through revolution"

This is concise reprise of the revolutionary "theory" advanced by Wilhelm
Weitling and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Marx's opponents in the mid-1840s, at
the genesis of the revolutionary theory which has been the mainstay of
actual revolutions ever since.

In other words Marx was influential (from his mid-twenties onwards)
precisely because he opposed the view that "When a critical mass of people
are in one place, if you don't empower them they will empower themselves
through revolution." This was fully expressed in the book called "The
Poverty of Philosophy", published in 1847, one year before the "Communist
Manifesto" of 1848. Lenin called "The Poverty of Philosophy" "the first
mature work of Marxism.'

Tibaijuka's formula is no more than a neurotic re-telling of the guilty
fantasies of the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie. It expresses the fear of
(or alternatively the perverse longing for) the "night of the long knives".
As such it is really part of the rationalisation for the suppression and
further punishment of the dispossessed by means of extreme violence, as is
happening right now in Gaza and Iraq, and as happened not long ago in
Zimbabwe.

After Tibaijuka's visit there following Murambatsvina, not a lot happened.
As I recall, it was the unilateral intervention of the South African
government, if anything, which put a stop to Murambatsvina

Dominic.

Web site at: http://amadlandawonye.wikispaces.com/
Blog at: http://domza.net/
Subscribe for free e-mail updates at:
http://groups.google.com/group/Communist-University/
Library of documents at: http://cu.domza.net/

-----Original Message-----
From: debate-bounces at lists.kabissa.org
[mailto:debate-bounces at lists.kabissa.org]On Behalf Of tony roshan samara
Sent: 16 June 2006 09:34 AM
To: debate at lists.kabissa.org
Subject: [DEBATE] : urban poor=bomb

Forgotten urban poor a living time bomb: UN

By Jeremy LovellThu Jun 15, 7:39 PM ET

The world's growing number of poor slum dwellers is a ticking time
bomb that governments dare not ignore, the United Nations said on
Friday.

The world will pass a critical point in 2007 when the majority of its
6 billion people will be urbanized, the world body said.

One-third of them will be slum dwellers, many trapped in poverty but
overlooked by governments and with no prospects of improvement.

"When a critical mass of people are in one place, if you don't
empower them they will empower themselves through revolution," Anna
Tibaijuka, head of UN-HABITAT said in London, presenting the agency's
State of the World's Cities 2006/7 report.

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