Features > April 12, 2006
The New Slum Dwellers (cont’d)
Listen to an audio version of this interview on the In These Times radio show, "Fire on the Prairie."
I’d like to go back to the structural adjustment programs, and describe how they affected this growing urban population.
Well, first of all, in the ’70s when developing countries were induced by every means possible to take on large burdens of debt, most of the loan money was designed to be invested in export sectors in agriculture. In other words, it was used to convert traditional agriculture to export agriculture, to increase the supply of raw materials, particularly for countries like Japan. Then the crunch came at the end of the ’70s. Raw material prices and export prices fell to almost historic lows, reducing these countries’ incomes. The IMF stepped in to take over the administration of really nasty short term adjusted countries, but the World Bank—which had emerged out of the reconstruction of Europe—took on the newly appointed role of managing the medium and long-term adjustment of countries.
Almost everywhere this meant slashing public employment and reducing public expenditure, often reducing the footprint of city government. It also meant policies that eliminated protected industries, like manufacturing for the home market. This had devastating impact, first of all on formal employment in cities of the Third World. But it had these longer-term devastating impacts because of the shortfall of urban investment vis-a-vis population growth. For instance, many of the countries of East Africa suffered a massive flight of medical personnel in the ’80s. Just before AIDS popped up on the horizons, nurses and doctors were leaving countries like Zimbabwe or Kenya because of the structural adjustment programs’ downsizing of public health expenditures. At the same time, more people than ever were moving into cities, and in the case of Kenya, almost all population growth over the last generation has been accommodated in urban slums.
So the ’80s was a pivotal decade in the history of world urbanization, and it’s in this decade that investment and formal employment growth became so radically disconnected. The state disappeared from the scene in terms of providing housing or ensuring employment. In some cases this has reached nightmarish extents, the limit case being Kinshasa in the Congo, where 95 percent of the economy is informal.
You write about the witches of Kinshasa…
Only because they’re a symptom of what happens at the very limits of economic informalism—this paradigm that expects that the poor can somehow always heroically and creatively invent solutions for their own dilemmas. In a society where people deeply love children and the family nexus is everything, families in Kinshasa are now stretched to the utter breaking point, so children are cast into the street as witches. It’s basically a socially acceptable formula for the abandonment of children. Most of the people who write about it see it as a symptom of the extremity of the human situation in Kinshasa.
You note that the “deep thinkers” at the big think tanks have yet to grasp the geo-political implications of this exploding slum population.
That’s because they think too deeply in traditional paradigms. But the more empirical thinkers in the United States—the Armed Forces war planners—are very much on top of this. A large literature exists on the level of Pentagon war planning and strategic thinking. It’s very focused and precisely formulated. They’ve grasped that the biggest dilemma for America is control and domination of these peri-urban areas. The United States can dominate any urban system that’s hierarchical and centrally organized: We can surgically take out all the crucial nodes. But what do you do when faced with an invertebrate organization of sprawling slum-peripheries? Even the indigenous administrations of these cities know very little of what goes on in the labyrinth of these shantytowns.
Surely the Pentagon’s concern also stems from the fact that the poor are automatically equated with criminals.
Of course. And it also comes out of empirical experience. First, Mogadishu in 1993 revealed that within the labyrinth of the Third World city, American military superiority rapidly began to break down. And then, in Iraq, unexpectedly, the occupation had to deal with this problem in Sadr City and Fallujah. From these empirical adaptations then begin to come generalizations, which usually take the form that in the future we can expect to find this miscellanea of different criminal and fanatical groups.
In other words, the military doesn’t believe that there’s a single enemy—al Qaeda or something like that. They believe that there’s a single terrain that affords a huge variety of potential foes with strategic and tactical advantages, and that the chief aim of American military planning must be to find a way to overwhelm them with technology. This means first acquiring knowledge of these terrains, which we know most about from aerial and satellite photographs. This is how people study peri-urban slums these days.
Can you talk about the sequel you’re co-writing with Forrest Hylton about the resistance within these slums?
Originally, I wanted to look at the diversity of what I call “governments of the poor” that have emerged in the last generation. It’s impossible to begin with generalizations about the urban poor; you need to start with case studies and see where that goes. Poor urban dwellers are experimenting with every possible kind of solution to their plight, from the Holy Ghost to ethnic militias, from traditional radical politics to millenarian cults. We have a new historical category of people here. To what extent they have the capacity of “historical agency”—that classical radical social theory attributed to the working class—remains to be seen.
My own hunch is that a lot of what is taken fundamentally as the “clash of civilizations” is actually transitional in form. Obviously, religious fundamentalism has taken hold with such force—in the Middle East and North Africa particularly—because of the destruction and decline of traditional Arab law. But I don’t see any reason to believe that the hegemony of fundamentalism is necessarily an eternal one. There may be a lot more fluidity here than there appears.
However, there is a very interesting contrast between the Arab world and Latin America. In the big cities of the Arab world, the religious middle classes—particularly the professional middle classes like doctors, lawyers and engineers—are deeply involved in the lives of the poor through Muslim Brotherhood-dominated professional organizations. They’re involved in the life of the slums, providing services that the state fails to provide. This creates a wealth of connections between the fundamentalist middle classes and the poor. It’s completely different from Latin America.
What’s always scary about Latin America is that any serious radicalization always leads to huge confrontations of class against class, with the middle class solidly lined up on the side of the rich. It’s striking to me that in Caracas, Chavez had to bring in Cuban doctors because so few Venezuelan doctors were willing to volunteer for his outreach program in the slums. Whereas in Cairo and other Muslim cities, one of the most effective ways the Muslim Brotherhood is able to organize is by taking over the professional association of doctors—with the doctors going into the slums, running clinics, creating this dual power. This creates a parallel society that can then de-legitimize and confront the corruption of the state.
In other words, in comparing situations of the urban poor across the world, you need to take into account the totality of social relations and class relations in cities that can differ greatly. And of course, I’m not discounting that anyone can find hundreds of upwardly mobile slums in the world. But having digested a rather huge body of literature over the last year or two, the unanimity of findings among researchers in such different places on every continent are strikingly uniform: the materials, the resources, and the potential for bootstrapping and self-help solutions are diminishing. And they’re diminishing everywhere.
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