"Just about what I was expecting...."
I would propose integrating with this the article in this week's NYT
magazine: "The War Against Contraception",
and one begins to wonder if what the neo-cons and their confederates are
"up to" is even
more radical than one (i.e., I) had previously imagined.....
"Aw, heck", how about a little artistic relief from all this? Maybe
things aren't going to
be all that bad after all....
http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/jpg/brueghel.jpg
\brad mccormick
Ed Weick wrote:
The following is a review of a highly thought provoking book. It
appears in the current issue of Mother Jones. I've read most of the
book, but have had to put it down many times because of its intensity
and because it makes you think deeply about the prospects it raises.
I've highlighted a paragraph in blue below because it addresses the
very thing I witnessed in my slum sojourn in Sao Paulo and among poor
farmers in Costa Rica. Where other approaches fail, organized religion
can mobilize people into helping each other and being their brothers'
and sisters' keepers. Read the review and then read the book. While
the book is only about two hundred pages long, it's not a quick read
because it makes you think.
Ed
------------------------------------------------------------------------
/Planet of Slums/
By Mike Davis
/Verso/
Reviewed by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
THOUGH WE SCARCELY NOTICED, our descendants will look back on 2005 as
the year the planet crossed into a new epoch: for the first time in
history, more of the earth’s inhabitants lived in cities than outside
them. From this point onward, all future growth in the earth’s
population—which is expected to reach 10 billion by 2050—will take
place in cities. Of this growth, the overwhelming majority will occur
in the cities of developing countries, where the /bidonvilles,
favelas,/and /villas miserias/ of the very poor—characterized by
astonishing density, decrepit housing, disease-laden water, horrid
sanitation, minimal or nonexistent social services, and unemployment
upwards of 50%—will continue their inexorable expansion.
In /Planet of Slums/, Mike Davis begins in these dark places, offering
the reader a sharply drawn sketch of the growing urban anti-world, but
what distinguishes his essay is his determined attempt to explain how
it came to be. Davis offers a concise analysis of this global ghetto’s
past half-century, in typically kinetic prose. But what the reader
ultimately takes away from his account is a persistent tone of
apocalypse, and a grim preview of what an ever-swelling,
billion-strong slum population portends for the political future of
the planet.
From Brazil to New Guinea, Senegal to Pakistan, farmers, sheepherders,
and other rural people have been abandoning centuries-old ways of life
and streaming toward their nations’ crowded cities. In Africa and
Latin America, many are driven to cities by war or famine; in China
and Southeast Asia, many are drawn by the lure of jobs in the
factories that produce the world’s sneakers, t-shirts, and
toothbrushes. This mass movement from countryside to city is of course
not new; it has been ongoing since at least the first Industrial
Revolution. What is new today—aside from its sheer magnitude—is how
often such migration appears not to depend on economic growth in the
cities. Unlike the industrial pilgrims who once flocked to Manchester,
Chicago, Tokyo and the other great capitalist centers of the 19th and
20th centuries, country-dwellers in the developing world today stream
toward cities that hold little promise of real jobs. They arrive with
everything they have; they settle in the city’s slums, or the squatter
camps and shantytowns that ring its perimeter, and survive, in a line
Davis takes from the Martinican novelist Patrick Chamoiseau, by
“[holding] onto the city ‘by its thousand survival-cracks.’”
In /Planet of Slums/, Davis’s first concern is to explain this puzzle
of “urbanization without growth,” which has baffled development
economists for years—especially those working in sub-Saharan African,
where mega-cities like Lagos, Kinshasa, and Dar Es Salaam go on
attracting tens of thousands of new arrivals each year even as their
formal economies stagnate or even contract. Davis finds the answer to
this puzzle in the imposition of neoliberal economic policies on the
Third World—policies dating, in particular, from the debt crises of
the 1970s and 80s, and the subsequent restructuring of Third World
economies in the 1980s and 90s, led by the International Monetary Fund.
For Davis, the so-called “Structural Adjustment Programs” of the
IMF—designed to help poor countries both pay down foreign debt and
attract foreign investment—are the single most important factor in the
dramatic exodus from the countryside and consequent spike in urban
poverty in the developing world since the 1970s. Under the IMF’s
tutelage, governments were forced to cut spending and limit
regulation: to slash funding for hospitals and schools; privatize
public utilities; lay off civil servants; eliminate agricultural
subsidies; slash their tariffs and throw open their borders to foreign
imports. In Davis's account, it was these policies (especially
eliminating subsidies that support farmers and the tariffs that
protect them from competition from cheaply grown foreign food) that
destroyed rural livelihoods and drove country-dwellers to the
cities—where, at precisely that moment, the government, under pressure
to slash public spending, was ceasing to build the public
infrastructure that might have housed and transported them, and
ceasing to fund the basic social services that might have kept them
healthy. Rural economies, in other words, were decimated at the very
moment when cities were being made unable to incorporate new arrivals.
DAVIS'S ANALYSIS MIGHT SEEM like predictable leftist critique, which
locates the source of all evil in the IMF and the other demonic
acronyms of the “Washington Consensus.” And one can certainly quibble
with his causal history: the harshness of Structural Adjustment varied
greatly from country to country; other factors, ranging from drought
to corruption, played a larger role in many. What is inarguable,
however, is that, over the last few decades, the governments of many
the world’s poor countries, saddled with unpayable debts, have been
forced to abdicate the promise of providing for the common good in the
societies they govern. The United Nations, in its landmark habitat
survey /Challenge of the Slums/ (2003), concludes with precisely this
point: “the main single cause of increases in poverty and inequality
during 1980s and 1990s was the retreat of the state.” What is also
inarguable is that the scope and nature of urban poverty everywhere
has dramatically changed. In cities lacking both industry and public
services, an astonishing number of persons subsist beyond the surveil
of state authorities and economic planners—through scavenging, illicit
trade, prostitution, domestic servitude, sweatshop manufacturing.
“Informal survivalism,” as Davis writes, “is the new primary mode of
livelihood in the majority of Third World cities.”
It is when Davis turns from analysis of causes to the prospect for
political change that his vision of these new slums reaches its most
incisive, and its darkest. How do we understand – understand
politically – these tens of millions of city-dwellers almost wholly
excluded from the formal economy? They certainly cannot be seen as a
traditional proletariat. In the absence of organized industry,
building the labor unions and the worker’s parties that have
traditionally emerged from them is impossible. And a Maoist or
Guevarist guerilla uprising is designed for the rural peasants of the
Third World’s past, not the urban poor of its present. The grim fact
is, that in these new urban milieus, /none/ of the Left’s traditional
strategies for organizing the economically oppressed are of much use.
Without formal work, and without the entry into secular politics that
such work has traditionally provided, how do the poorest of the urban
poor organize their social and political life? What offers them a
“communal structure”? To this critical question, Davis offers a
one-word answer: religion. “If God died in the cities of the
industrial revolution,” Davis writes, “he has risen again in the
postindustrial cities of the developing world.”
*Today, religious organizations—Islamist, Hindu, Evangelical—are the
single most important source of social cohesion among citydwellers in
the developing world. Beyond spiritual sustenance and community,
religious organizations offer social services no longer provided by
the state, laws for virtuous conduct in chaotic environs, and
membership in a global polity that transcends the corrupt nation-state
that has excluded them. Political Islam continues to spread in power
and influence from Cairo to Jakarta; the ascendance of its political
parties—and their grassroots appeal—has received nervous attention
from the Western media. Hindu fundamentalism, if remarked upon less
often, has had an analogous trajectory in the /bustees/ of Delhi and
Mumbai. Pentecostal sects attract new adherents at astonishing rates
from Brasilia to Johannesburg, altering political and community life
in ways as yet not understood.*
Religious groups, however, don’t have the slums entirely to
themselves. Non-Governmental Organizations have also stepped into the
breach vacated by the state; they direct an ever-greater portion of
social welfare programs and development projects in Third World
cities. Major international funders—the World Bank, the UN Development
Program, USAID—“have,” as Davis notes, “increasingly bypassed
governments to work directly with regional and neighborhood NGOs.”
Tens of thousands of such organizations are now active in developing
countries—from global giants like Oxfam down to neighborhood food
banks; they vary greatly in their ideologies, methods, and
effectiveness. Yet for Davis, the essential significance of the “NGO
revolution” is to shift responsibility for social welfare further from
the government (the only entity capable of redistributing wealth or
enacting systemic change), and to an often uncoordinated panoply of
local charities and international partners, each with their own
distinct program for “empowering the poor.”
Davis is unpersuaded by those who offer a more sanguine view of such
programs, or by those, such as the celebrated Peruvian economist
Hernando de Soto, who see in the “informal sector” an untapped
stirring of entrepreneurial dynamism that needs only a formal process
of “titling” to take flight. De Soto argues that granting squatters
legal title to their shacks and meager possessions could allow such
persons to borrow on credit, build businesses, and join the formal
economy. For Davis, this “bootstrap capitalism” is little more than a
fantasy cure-all, a romantic vision that fails to account for the
great number of slum residents (especially children and women) who are
neither squatters nor self-employed entrepreneurs, but rather
street-dwellers, low-level renters, or destitute laborers. The
“informal sector,” in Davis’s view, is not a prospective component of
the formal economy, but rather its permanent outside—the garbage can
into which a “surplus humanity” can be tossed and discarded, abandoned
to a life of bare subsistence.
PLANET OF SLUMS, LIKE much of Davis’s work—/Late Victorian Holocausts,
The Monster at Our Door, Dead Cities/—is shot through with apocalyptic
foreboding, and the book’s concision and intensity—it runs to barely
two hundred short pages of text—only compounds the sense of doom.
Davis presents an ambitious account of urban poverty that, while
global in scope, rarely expends more than a paragraph or two on any
single locale. Reading this book, one imagines Francis Ford Coppola’s
operatic adaptation: a helicopter-borne camera racing over the surface
of the earth, swooping down into one demonic concrete jungle after
another, ominous chords suggesting an epic end-of-days battle to come.
By taking this chopper-eye view, Davis rarely ventures close enough to
take account of local nuance, or to notice successful urban reform
when it is achieved, be it by Chavista /misiones/ in Caracas, or
micro-financers among the women of Dhaka. He also ignores the views of
the many urbanists toiling at earth-level —planners, anthropologists,
activists—who remain stubbornly if cautiously hopeful about the new
politics emerging in cities, particularly in those places where the
grip of clientelist regimes has waned. Davis’s more serious failing is
his tendency to ignore the will and desires—the so-called “agency”—of
the slum-dwellers themselves; in his effort to indict the global
structures that oppress them, Davis too often portrays the people that
are (after all) his subject only in the abstract, as insurrectionary
mass whose future “depends upon [their] militant refusal to accept
their terminal marginality within global capitalism.” The quote is
revealing: he sees their power as, essentially, one of refusal.
The question is: in what will such “refusal” consist? Though it never
becomes explicit, an air of eventual but inevitable violence hangs
over this account. A “planet of the slums,” in the long view, is a
planet doomed to violent encounters between those living in the slums
and those outside them; Davis is hardly alone in this appraisal.
Inside the Pentagon, strategists “now assert,” as Davis writes, “that
the ‘feral, failed cities’ of the Third World will be the distinctive
battlespace of the twenty-first century.” Spurred by the recent
travails of their forces in the blighted alleyways of Mogadishu,
Fallujah, and Sadr City, the military’s sharpest minds—who a short
time ago were devising counter-insurgency tactics for the jungles of
South East Asia or Central America—have turned to the challenges of
“Military Operations in Urbanized Terrain” – MOUT, in Pentagonese.
Davis concludes /Planet of Slums/ with the war planners; he leaves us
with a Blade Runner vision of the dystopic urban future: “hornetlike
helicopter gunships [stalking] enigmatic enemies in the narrow streets
of the slum districts, pouring hellfire into the shanties night after
night, the slums [replying each morning] with suicide bombers and
eloquent explosions.”
Such melodramatic flights aside, Davis is a synthesist and rhetorician
of rare abilities. In /Planet of Slums/ he has written an important,
necessary book. Already these dark places occupy the center of our
politics. They will be the stage on which our history will play,
whether or not we can bring ourselves to look.
*Joshua Jelly-Schapiro is a San Francisco-based writer and a graduate
student in geography at the University of California, Berkeley.*
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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