[Debate] FW: I Thus Caught That Colonial Mind-Set At Work
peter waterman
peterwaterman1936 at gmail.com
Tue Apr 17 13:44:14 BST 2012
Thanks for that, Russell, now I don't feel so bad about not having read the
book. Makes sense also.
In any case neither the Proletariat, the Precariat, the Slumdwellers, the
Information Proletariat, the Women, the Gays, the Blacks or the Whites are
or are going to be the privileged bearers of social emancipation.
Emancipation (which I favour as a concept over R/Evolution), in any case
requires self-activity by all those alienated categories, on all the
'questions' (gender, sex, ecology, culture).
Pw
On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 12:59 PM, grinker at mweb.co.za <grinker at mweb.co.za>wrote:
> What are these SMs and where do they come from? Some points drawn from
> Mike Davis’ *City of Slums* might be relevant to this discussion.
>
>
>
> Davis argues that social theorists have been proved wrong:
>
> • They associated economic and population growth with
> industrialisation and an increase in job opportunities
>
> • But modern slums are not products of industrial revolutions
>
> • The size of a city’s economy often bears little relation to its
> population size
>
> • European colonialism, Asian Stalinism and Latin American
> dictatorships (and South African apartheid) prevented the twin urbanising
> criteria of entry and citizenship
>
> • This resulted in retarded growth of cities in the period from
> 1900 to 1950
>
> • Since 1950s public and state-assisted housing in the Third World
> has primarily benefited the urban middle classes and elites, through both
> high levels of municipal services and clientelist politics
>
> • Slums are created in gaps between housing provision and formal
> employment opportunities.
>
>
>
> Slums are a consequence of *urbanisation without industrialization:*
>
> • Are the legacy of a global political conjuncture
>
> • IMF and the World Bank Structural Adjustment Programmes drove the
> creation of modern slums:
>
> – Rapid urban growth happened in the context of structural
> adjustment, currency devaluations, state retrenchments, and little or no
> housing provision.
>
> – State as a ‘market enabler’ led to the privatisation of utilities
> and services, and massive decreases in provision
>
> – Ideas of the magic power of people’s capitalism providing land
> titles simply accelerated social differentiation in the slums, and did
> nothing to aid renters, the actual majority of the poor in many cities
>
> – Individuals’ needs - affordable commodities, accommodation close
> to jobs, security, and the possibility of owning property - were simply
> ignored by the imposition of ill-suited neoliberal ‘boot-strap capitalism’.
>
>
>
> The key question is: Do slums [and social movements that develop there],
> ‘however deadly and insecure, have a brilliant future’ (There will be two
> billion slum-dwellers by 2030 or 2040)?
>
>
>
> Davis says on future prospects:
>
> “…[t]hus, the cities of the future, rather than being made out of glass
> and steel as envisioned by earlier generations of urbanists, are instead
> largely constructed out of crude brick, straw, recycled plastic, cement
> blocks, and scrap wood. Instead of cities of light soaring toward heaven,
> much of the twenty-first century urban world squats in squalor, surrounded
> by pollution, excrement, and decay.”
>
>
>
> Future prospects
>
> • Will be determined by the political processes on the ground,
> rather than by uncontrollable economic developments
>
> • Will depend on future slum based resistance to global capitalism
>
> • A central factor that will determine the future of the slum will
> be the relation of its shifting, informal economy to political mobilisation
> behind radical causes
>
> • The informal sector (where ‘urban involution’ has led to the
> sub-dividing of existing jobs rather than job creation) is crucial to the
> prevention of any active ‘proletarianisation’ of slum dwellers in line with
> historical precedent
>
> • Whether these vast informal proletariats possess ‘historical
> agency’ is incredibly difficult to assess except through case studies
>
>
>
> The future:
>
> • Is left open
>
> • Slum populations are growing at a rate of 25 million a year
> without really large-scale migration to the rich countries
>
> • Slum dwellers are potentially the fastest growing class in the
> history of the world
>
>
>
> Are the slums volcanoes waiting to erupt? Or will ruthless, state-endorsed
> competition lead to increased involution and ‘self-annihilating communal
> violence’ ?
>
>
>
> There is a wide range of responses:
>
> • charismatic churches
>
> • returns to witchcraft and superstition
>
> • street gangs
>
> • neoliberal NGOs
>
> • ethnic militias
>
>
>
> and we might add: movements with inputs from radical academics
>
>
>
> He argues that it is no exaggeration to say that the future of the whole
> of human solidarity depends on the nature of the response of the ‘victims
> of the metropolis’ to the marginality that late capitalism has attempted to
> assign to them.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> From: riaz.tayob at gmail.com
> Sent: 2012/04/17 12:07:30 PM
> To: debate-list at fahamu.org
> Cc:
> Subject: RE: Re: [Debate] FW: I Thus Caught That Colonial Mind-Set At Work
> ------------------------------
>
> Thanks for that. Actually it is more important than your brief note makes
> out. I think here you actually touch upon something in SMs that needs to be
> looked at, they are often "new" or approach issues without the fetters of
> the old in their circumstances as they find them.
>
> On 2012/04/17 12:18 PM, Neville Adams wrote:
>
> Just to add Riaz that there also appears to be a fundamental
> misunderstanding about what SM’s are and are not; they cannot be coopted
> to, and conflated with, a reimagined class revolution in which the ‘Poor’
> play the part of the new collective historical agents. This is the new
> metaphysics.
>
>
>
> Neville
>
>
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