<http://newleftreview.org/A2496>
New Left Review 26, March-April 2004
Mike Davis
PLANET OF SLUMS
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6. Marx and the Holy Ghost
[The Lord says:] The time will come when the poor man will say that he
has nothing to eat and work will be shut down . . . That is going to
cause the poor man to go to these places and break in to get food.
This will cause the rich man to come out with his gun to make war with
the labouring man. . . . blood will be in the streets like an
outpouring rain from heaven.
A prophecy from the 1906 'Azusa Street Awakening'
The late capitalist triage of humanity, then, has already taken place.
The global growth of a vast informal proletariat, moreover, is a
wholly original structural development unforeseen by either classical
Marxism or modernization pundits. Slums indeed challenges social
theory to grasp the novelty of a true global residuum lacking the
strategic economic power of socialized labor, but massively
concentrated in a shanty-town world encircling the fortified enclaves
of the urban rich.
Tendencies toward urban involution, of course, existed during the
nineteenth century. The European industrial revolutions were
incapable of absorbing the entire supply of displaced rural labour,
especially after continental agriculture was exposed to the
devastating competition of the North American prairies from the 1870s.
But mass immigration to the settler societies of the Americas and
Oceania, as well as Siberia, provided a dynamic safety-valve that
prevented the rise of mega-Dublins as well as the spread of the kind
of underclass anarchism that had taken root in the most immiserated
parts of Southern Europe. Today surplus labour, by contrast, faces
unprecedented barriers -- a literal 'great wall' of high-tech border
enforcement -- blocking large-scale migration to the rich countries.
Likewise, controversial population resettlement programmes in
'frontier' regions like Amazonia, Tibet, Kalimantan and Irian Jaya
produce environmental devastation and ethnic conflict without
substantially reducing urban poverty in Brazil, China and Indonesia.
Thus only the slum remains as a fully franchised solution to the
problem of warehousing the twenty-first century's surplus humanity.
But aren't the great slums, as a terrified Victorian bourgeoisie once
imagined, volcanoes waiting to erupt? Or does ruthless Darwinian
competition, as increasing numbers of poor people compete for the same
informal scraps, ensure self-consuming communal violence as yet the
highest form of urban involution? To what extent does an informal
proletariat possess that most potent of Marxist talismans: 'historical
agency'? Can disincorporated labour be reincorporated in a global
emancipatory project? Or is the sociology of protest in the
immiserated megacity a regression to the pre-industrial urban mob,
episodically explosive during consumption crises, but otherwise easily
managed by clientelism, populist spectacle and appeals to ethnic
unity? Or is some new, unexpected historical subject, à la Hardt and
Negri, slouching toward the supercity?
In truth, the current literature on poverty and urban protest offers
few answers to such large-scale questions. Some researchers, for
example, would question whether the ethnically diverse slum poor or
economically heterogeneous informal workers even constitute a
meaningful 'class in itself', much less a potentially activist 'class
for itself'. Surely, the informal proletariat bears 'radical chains'
in the Marxist sense of having little or no vested interest in the
preservation of the existing mode of production. But because uprooted
rural migrants and informal workers have been largely dispossessed of
fungible labour-power, or reduced to domestic service in the houses of
the rich, they have little access to the culture of collective labour
or large-scale class struggle. Their social stage, necessarily, must
be the slum street or marketplace, not the factory or international
assembly line.
Struggles of informal workers, as John Walton emphasizes in a recent
review of research on social movements in poor cities, have tended,
above all, to be episodic and discontinuous. They are also usually
focused on immediate consumption issues: land invasions in search of
affordable housing and riots against rising food or utility prices.
In the past, at least, 'urban problems in developing societies have
been more typically mediated by patron-client relations than by
popular activism.'91 Since the debt crisis of the 1980s, neopopulist
leaders in Latin America have had dramatic success in exploiting the
desperate desire of the urban poor for more stable, predictable
structures of daily life. Although Walton doesn't make the point
explicitly, the urban informal sector has been ideologically
promiscuous in its endorsement of populist saviours: in Peru rallying
to Fujimori, but in Venezuela embracing Chávez.92 In Africa and South
Asia, on the other hand, urban clientelism too often equates with the
dominance of ethno-religious bigots and their nightmare ambitions of
ethnic cleansing. Notorious examples include the anti-Muslim militias
of the Oodua People's Congress in Lagos and the semi-fascist Shiv Sena
movement in Bombay.93
Will such 'eighteenth-century' sociologies of protest persist into the
middle twenty-first century? The past is probably a poor guide to the
future. History is not uniformitarian. The new urban world is
evolving with extraordinary speed and often in unpredictable
directions. Everywhere the continuous accumulation of poverty
undermines existential security and poses even more extraordinary
challenges to the economic ingenuity of the poor. Perhaps there is a
tipping point at which the pollution, congestion, greed and violence
of everyday urban life finally overwhelm the ad hoc civilities and
survival networks of the slum. Certainly in the old rural world there
were thresholds, often calibrated by famine, that passed directly to
social eruption. But no one yet knows the social temperature at which
the new cities of poverty spontaneously combust.
Indeed, for the moment at least, Marx has yielded the historical stage
to Mohammed and the Holy Ghost. If God died in the cities of the
industrial revolution, he has risen again in the postindustrial cities
of the developing world. The contrast between the cultures of urban
poverty in the two eras is extraordinary. As Hugh McLeod has shown in
his magisterial study of Victorian working-class religion, Marx and
Engels were largely accurate in their belief that urbanization was
secularizing the working class. Although Glasgow and New York were
partial exceptions, 'the line of interpretation that associates
working-class detachment from the church with growing class
consciousness is in a sense incontestable'. If small churches and
dissenting sects thrived in the slums, the great current was active or
passive disbelief. Already by the 1880s, Berlin was scandalizing
foreigners as 'the most irreligious city in the world' and in London,
median adult church attendance in the proletarian East End and
Docklands by 1902 was barely 12 per cent (and that mostly Catholic).94
In Barcelona, of course, an anarchist working class sacked the
churches during the Semana Trágica, while in the slums of St.
Petersburg, Buenos Aires and even Tokyo, militant workers avidly
embraced the new faiths of Darwin, Kropotkin and Marx.
Today, on the other hand, populist Islam and Pentecostal Christianity
(and in Bombay, the cult of Shivaji) occupy a social space analogous
to that of early twentieth-century socialism and anarchism. In
Morocco, for instance, where half a million rural emigrants are
absorbed into the teeming cities every year, and where half the
population is under 25, Islamicist movements like 'Justice and
Welfare', founded by Sheik Abdessalam Yassin, have become the real
governments of the slums: organizing night schools, providing legal
aid to victims of state abuse, buying medicine for the sick,
subsidizing pilgrimages and paying for funerals. As Prime Minister
Abderrahmane Youssoufi, the Socialist leader who was once exiled by
the monarchy, recently admitted to Ignacio Ramonet, 'We [the Left]
have become embourgeoisified. We have cut ourselves off from the
people. We need to reconquer the popular quarters. The Islamicists
have seduced our natural electorate. They promise them heaven on
earth.' An Islamicist leader, on the other hand, told Ramonet:
'confronted with the neglect of the state, and faced with the
brutality of daily life, people discover, thanks to us, solidarity,
self-help, fraternity. They understand that Islam is humanism.'95
The counterpart of populist Islam in the slums of Latin America and
much of sub-Saharan Africa is Pentecostalism. Christianity, of
course, is now, in its majority, a non-Western religion (two-thirds of
its adherents live outside Europe and North America), and
Pentecostalism is its most dynamic missionary in cities of poverty.
Indeed the historical specificity of Pentecostalism is that it is the
first major world religion to have grown up almost entirely in the
soil of the modern urban slum. With roots in early ecstatic Methodism
and African-American spirituality, Pentecostalism 'awoke' when the
Holy Ghost gave the gift of tongues to participants in an interracial
prayer marathon in a poor neighbourhood of Los Angeles (Azusa Street)
in 1906. Unified around spirit baptism, miracle healing, charismata
and a premillennial belief in a coming world war of capital and
labour, early American Pentecostalism -- as religious historians have
repeatedly noted -- originated as a 'prophetic democracy' whose rural
and urban constituencies overlapped, respectively, with those of
Populism and the IWW.96 Indeed, like Wobbly organizers, its early
missionaries to Latin America and Africa 'lived often in extreme
poverty, going out with little or no money, seldom knowing where they
would spend the night, or how they would get their next meal.'97 They
also yielded nothing to the IWW in their vehement denunciations of the
injustices of industrial capitalism and its inevitable destruction.
Symptomatically, the first Brazilian congregation, in an anarchist
working-class district of São Paulo, was founded by an Italian artisan
immigrant who had exchanged Malatesta for the Spirit in Chicago.98 In
South Africa and Rhodesia, Pentecostalism established its early
footholds in the mining compounds and shanty towns; where, according
to Jean Comaroff, 'it seemed to accord with indigenous notions of
pragmatic spirit forces and to redress the depersonalization and
powerlessness of the urban labour experience.'99 Conceding a larger
role to women than other Christian churches and immensely supportive
of abstinence and frugality, Pentecostalism -- as R. Andrew Chesnut
discovered in the baixadas of Belém -- has always had a particular
attraction to 'the most immiserated stratum of the impoverished
classes': abandoned wives, widows and single mothers.100 Since 1970,
and largely because of its appeal to slum women and its reputation for
being colour-blind, it has been growing into what is arguably the
largest self-organized movement of urban poor people on the planet.101
Although recent claims of 'over 533 million Pentecostal/charismatics
in the world in 2002' are probably hyperbole, there may well be half
that number. It is generally agreed that 10 per cent of Latin America
is Pentecostal (about 40 million people) and that the movement has
been the single most important cultural response to explosive and
traumatic urbanization.102 As Pentecostalism has globalized, of
course, it has differentiated into distinct currents and sociologies.
But if in Liberia, Mozambique and Guatemala, American-sponsored
churches have been vectors of dictatorship and repression, and if some
US congregations are now gentrified into the suburban mainstream of
fundamentalism, the missionary tide of Pentecostalism in the Third
World remains closer to the original millenarian spirit of Azusa
Street.103 Above all, as Chesnut found in Brazil, 'Pentecostalism . .
. remains a religion of the informal periphery' (and in Belém, in
particular, 'the poorest of the poor'). In Peru, where Pentecostalism
is growing almost exponentially in the vast barriadas of Lima, Jefrey
Gamarra contends that the growth of the sects and of the informal
economy 'are a consequence of and a response to each other'.104 Paul
Freston adds that it 'is the first autonomous mass religion in Latin
America . . . Leaders may not be democratic, but they come from the
same social class'.105
In contrast to populist Islam, which emphasizes civilizational
continuity and the trans-class solidarity of faith, Pentecostalism, in
the tradition of its African-American origins, retains a fundamentally
exilic identity. Although, like Islam in the slums, it efficiently
correlates itself to the survival needs of the informal working class
(organizing self-help networks for poor women; offering faith healing
as para-medicine; providing recovery from alcoholism and addiction;
insulating children from the temptations of the street; and so on),
its ultimate premise is that the urban world is corrupt, injust and
unreformable. Whether, as Jean Comaroff has argued in her book on
African Zionist churches (many of which are now Pentecostal), this
religion of 'the marginalized in the shantytowns of neocolonial
modernity' is actually a 'more radical' resistance than 'participation
in formal politics or labour unions', remains to be seen.106 But,
with the Left still largely missing from the slum, the eschatology of
Pentecostalism admirably refuses the inhuman destiny of the Third
World city that Slums warns about. It also sanctifies those who, in
every structural and existential sense, truly live in exile.
91 John Walton, 'Urban Conflict and Social Movements in Poor
Countries: Theory and Evidence of Collective Action', paper to 'Cities
in Transition Conference', Humboldt University, Berlin, July 1987.
92 Kurt Weyland, 'Neopopulism and Neoliberalism in Latin America: how
much affinity?', Third World Quarterly, vol. 24, no. 6, 2003, pp.
1095–115.
93 For a fascinating if frightening account of Shiv Sena's ascendancy
in Bombay at the expense of older Communist and trade-union politics,
see Thomas Hansen, Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in
Postcolonial Bombay, Princeton 2001. See also Veena Das, ed., Mirrors
of Violence: Communities, Riots and Survivors in South Asia, New York
1990.
94 Hugh McLeod, Piety and Poverty: Working-Class Religion in Berlin,
London and New York, 1870–1914, New York 1996, pp. xxv, 6, 32.
95 Ignacio Ramonet, 'Le Maroc indécis', Le Monde diplomatique, July
2000, pp. 12–13. Another former leftist told Ramonet: 'Nearly 65 per
cent of the population lives under the poverty line. The people of
the bidonvilles are entirely cut off from the elites. They see the
elites the way they used to see the French.'
96 In his controversial sociological interpretation of
Pentecostalism, Robert Mapes Anderson claimed that 'its unconscious
intent', like other millenarian movements, was actually
'revolutionary'. (Vision of the Disinherited: The Making of American
Pentecostalism, Oxford 1979, p. 222.)
97 Anderson, Vision of the Disinherited, p. 77.
98 R. Andrew Chesnut, Born Again in Brazil: The Pentecostal Boom and
the Pathogens of Poverty, New Brunswick 1997, p. 29. On the
historical associations of Pentecostalism with anarchism in Brazil,
see Paul Freston, 'Pentecostalism in Latin America: Characteristics
and Controversies', Social Compass, vol. 45, no. 3, 1998, p. 342.
99 David Maxwell, 'Historicizing Christian Independency: The Southern
Africa Pentecostal Movement, c. 1908–60', Journal of African History
40, 1990, p. 249; and Jean Comaroff, Body of Power, Spirit of
Resistance, Chicago 1985, p. 186.
100 Chesnut, Born Again, p. 61. Indeed, Chesnut found that the Holy
Ghost not only moved tongues but improved family budgets. 'By
eliminating expenditures associated with the male prestige complex,
Assembelianos were able to climb from the lower and middle ranks of
poverty to the upper echelons, and some Quandrangulares migrated from
poverty . . . to the lower rungs of the middle class': p. 18.
101 'In all of human history, no other non-political,
non-militaristic, voluntary human movement has grown as rapidly as the
Pentecostal-Charismatic movement in the last twenty years': Peter
Wagner, foreward to Vinson Synan, The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition,
Grand Rapids 1997, p. xi.
102 The high estimate is from David Barret and Todd Johnson, 'Annual
Statistical Table on Global Mission: 2001,' International Bulletin of
Missionary Research, vol. 25, no. 1, January 2001, p. 25. Synan says
there were 217 million denominated Pentecostals in 1997 (Holiness, p.
ix). On Latin America, compare Freston, 'Pentecostalism', p. 337;
Anderson, Vision of the Disinherited; and David Martin, 'Evangelical
and Charismatic Christianity in Latin America', in Karla Poewe, ed.,
Charismatic Christianity as a Global Culture, Columbia 1994, pp. 74-5.
103 See Paul Gifford's brilliant Christianity and Politics in Doe's
Liberia, Cambridge 1993. Also Peter Walshe, Prophetic Christianity
and the Liberation Movement in South Africa, Pietermaritzburg 1995,
especially pp. 110-1.
104 Jefrey Gamarra, 'Conflict, Post-Conflict and Religion: Andean
Responses to New Religious Movements', Journal of Southern African
Studies, vol. 26, no. 2, June 2000, p. 272. Andres Tapia quotes the
Peruvian theologian Samuel Escobar who sees Sendero Luminoso and the
Pentecostals as 'flip sides of the same coin' -- 'both were seeking a
powerful break with injustices, only the means were different.' 'With
Shining Path's decline, Pentecostalism has emerged as the winner for
the souls of poor Peruvians.' ('In the Ashes of the Shining Path',
Pacific News Service, 14 Feburary 1996).
105 Freston, 'Pentecostalism', p. 352.
106 Comaroff, Body of Power, pp. 259-63.
--
Yoshie
