A left in our slums

The waves of destruction visited on human communities and nature by the increasing subordination of society to capital are ripping through the world with an ever more frenetic relentlessness. Everything sacred is profaned – destroyed, plundered and sold, and then simulated and resold. Nothing is safe: music, architecture, medicine, journalism, sport, spiritual yearning, community, the academy, resistance – nothing. Everywhere the poor are becoming poorer and the rich richer. But the left is generally failing to develop thinking about viable routes towards meaningful confrontations with domination. With the possible exception of Venezuela Third World nationalism has degenerated to an alibi for local relations of domination or, as in the case of NEPAD, an alibi for the rule of global capital. The old faith in ‘the party’ is, especially after the failure of the Brazilian Workers’ Party to use Lula’s victory to good effect, generally in tatters. The situation is such that most ‘left’ intellectuals are working for domination. This most commonly takes the forms of occupying a niche market in the business of mopping up scattered resistances and turning them into ‘civil society’ or seeking to mask their singularity, which is the original source of their power, via symbolic subjection to theoretical abstractions.

When real resistance, the material and intellectual constitution of sites and streams of counter-power, is contemplated it is often deeply compromised by two long standing problems around the question of agency. The first is a vertical elitism that expresses itself in a basic contempt for the intelligence of the dominated. The second is a horizontal elitism that expresses itself in contempt for intellectual work undertaken outside of the European and North American intellectual milieu. At times these prejudices, often with others in the mix, take the form of basic contempt for the thinking in the struggles of the most destitute – the Third World poor. This failure is fundamental to the weakness of the left. After all, as C.L.R. James, told us a long time ago “It is force that counts, and chiefly the organised force of the masses…It is what they think that matters”

But in the mid 1990s the Zapatista uprising in rural Mexico and, later, the Brazilian Landless Movement the MST, inspired many left intellectuals to ground their theorising in the struggles of Third World peasants. But this significant step forward left out the emerging global majority – the urban underclass in the cities of the Third World.

An increasingly massive portion of humanity lives in shack settlements, in what we in South Africa call emijondolo. Mike Davis’ celebrated New Left Review article “Planet of Slums” has recently confronted the left literati with the magnitude of this fact. The U.N.’s global 2001 numbers are staggering – 921 million slum dwellers, 100 million street children, two million children lost to diarrhoea a year and the fact that Lagos “is simply the biggest node in the shanty-town corridor of 70 million people that stretches from Abidjan to Ibadan”. Many will know Chris Abani’s beautiful and searing novel Graceland which develops a profound account of just one life made on the wrong side of the razor wire in Lagos. The scale of suffering is incomprehensible.

Davis shows that World Bank led structural adjustment is a key factor in the recent explosive growth of shack settlements; that residential and office themeparks are the antipodes to the slum; that valorisation of the ‘informal sector’ is perverse as “the real macroeconomic trend of informal labour…is the reproduction of absolute poverty”; and that the urban poor “are everywhere forced to settle on hazardous and otherwise unbuildable terrains – over-steep hillslopes, river banks and floodplains. Likewise they squat in the deadly shadows of refineries, chemical factories, toxic dumps, or in the margins of railroads and highways”; and that “chronic diarrhoeal diseases” are the most immediate threat to the lives of millions of people. “The UN” he tells us “considers that two out of five African slum-dwellers live in a poverty that is literally ‘life-threatening’”.

Davis concludes that “for the moment at least, Marx has yielded the historical stage to Mohammed and the Holy Ghost” and “with the Left still largely missing from the slum, the eschatology of Pentecostalism…sanctifies those who, in every structural and existential sense, truly live in exile.” Davis’ Manichean split between religion and resistance is historically uninformed. A second key weakness of Davis’s paper is that it draws exclusively, and without any reflection on this, on colonial (anthropology) and neo-colonial (World Bank and UN studies) modes of ‘knowing’ the slum that are uniformly objectifying. Struggle emerging from and expressed within the lifeworld of the dominated should be the habitation of radical thought and not its object.

In the London Review of Books Slavoj Zizek argues that the explosive growth of the slum “is perhaps the crucial geopolitical event of our times”. He argues that it is surprising how far slum dwellers “confirm to the old Marxist definition of the proletarian revolutionary subject…they are a large collective, forcibly thrown into a situation where they have to invent some mode of being-together, and simultaneously deprived of support for their traditional ways of life.” He concludes that “The new forms of social awareness that emerge from slum collectives will be the germ of the future.”

Neo-liberalism’s final position on the slum is not clear. At different times the slum is presented as an unexplored market, a potential explosion of entrepreneurship, a camp where surplus people are kept at the level of bare life, a prison where dangerous people are contained and labour without real pay, and a threatening insurgence of subaltern autonomy. In principle it seems that neo-liberalism’s most common line is to use rhetoric about entrepreneurship to legitimate a position that, in practice, takes the position that the slum is a camp for surplus people. But the market never manages to escape the reality of society. In practice the rarefied logic of capital has to contest with the embodied fear and power of ordinarily rich people. And it is clear that the rich generally have profound anxieties about the insurgence and sustained presence of autonomous communities of poor people within cities. These anxieties are well able to become a material economic fact. So the rural slum, and even the hidden city slum, is mostly tolerable but the city slum visible in the heart of the bourgeois world is a disease to be rooted out. And so from Nairobi to Durban ‘slum clearance’ has returned to policy documents. ‘Slum clearance’ generally means removing people from autonomous urban slums to state built rural ghettos. Slum dwellers often resist this fiercely because being close to the city means being close to opportunities for livelihood.

In Durban, where it is estimated that 800 000 of the city’s population of 3 million people live in shacks, there is most certainly a left in the slums. A rebellion against threatened forced removals to rural ghettos that began in one settlement, Kennedy Road, has now spread to more than 20 settlements and mobilised more than 20 000 people. The movement that has emerged from this rebellion, Abahlali base mjondolo, is deeply democratic and entirely self funded. Its central demand is for land and housing in the city. This demand cannot be met while profit governs the sale and development of urban land. The state will either have to begin to expropriate urban land to house the urban poor or it will have to crush or deflect the shack dwellers’ movement. Last week serious work was begun along both of the latter lines. A march from the Foreman Road settlement was illegally banned by the Municipality and protestors were beaten back into the settlement with a major display of state violence. The next day the Mayor announced a R10 billion development to be undertaken in partnership with the city’s largest private land owner, the Anglo-American owned Moreland. The development will produce 5 000 homes for shack dwellers and people from the most militant settlements will be first on the list. The new development appears to be another public subsidy for private profit but the Municipality must be hoping that it will be enough to ease the pressure that has produced the largest post-apartheid social movement to emerge on its turf to confront its policies.

It remains typical for left intellectuals to dismiss shack dwellers as ‘lumpens’ and their struggles as ‘spontaneous’ without considering it necessary to speak to any of the people actually waging these struggles. If we are to edge towards some viable hope then radical intellectuals need to be where the people are – this has long been established in principle with regard to the place of work – be it the factory, mine, or farm – and the media, church, university and popular culture but it is time to add the slum. More progressive intellectuals need to learn to begin their most important discussions with a prayer and a carefully shared meal and to conduct these discussion by candlelight, in shacks and, if they are in Durban, in Zulu.