Mute Vol 2 #3 - Naked Cities – Struggle in the Global Slums

As I write this I am sitting in my ex-local authority flat, looking out over the new vertical growth of London’s pounding financial heart. My flat is in a highrise too, a block built in the late ‘60s at the peak of the social housing boom of the welfare state. No matter how its construction displaced and arguably helped destroy the community it apparently served, this style of development nonetheless aimed at providing London’s working class with (relatively) spacious, light, central and well serviced homes. Now highrises are strictly for business – office blocks or yuppie apartments. I’ve watched several blowdowns in my neighbourhood in the past few years, as tower blocks take the blame for the ‘dangerous’ and ‘alienated’ existence of the urban poor. Meanwhile, out of my window, corporate highrises are slung up apace. Obviously there is nothing innately wrong with them – so long as they are pulsing with cash and city workers. Or, as in my case, sold off to private leaseholders.
The increasing gulf between these vertiginous bastions of capital and, when they are built at all, the low-rise dingy barracks of affordable housing, dramatises the general state of the world’s divided cities. The poor, though required to build and service the swelling megalopolises, are apparently not welcome here. Mike Davis, whose book Planet of Slums has largely provoked this issue of Mute, cites figures which unquestionably prove the mass influx of humanity from the countryside into urban slums. However, these slums are themselves under threat. Largely the product of neoliberal economics – its sell-off of public assets, spiralling living costs and structural adjustment programmes which render traditional modes of rural subsistence untenable, etc. – slums, as with the UK’s social housing under Thatcher, are now public enemy number one. They often occupy centrally located zones which, once considered unsavoury because too industrial, are now highly desirable and hence valuable. While plans to build thousands of new homes in the Thames Gateway may well end up creating a sink of poor quality housing for London’s low-paid service workers, the centres of cities are becoming off limits to anyone but the middle class and business.
This is nothing short of a new enclosure – real estate is bearing the brunt of a general economic crisis in which credit fuelled consumption masks an underlying lack of productivity and economic expansion. Inflation and expropriation go hand in hand. Squatters are thrown off the land without, in many cases, any viable rehousing plans, just as the poor are shunted from welfare to workfare, without any real prospect of employment. Another mode of expropriation is also occurring at a cultural level – the spectre of what at Mute we’ve been calling the ‘shanty chic’ aesthetic. As the bubble of convenience culture and technologised hyper-mediation numbs the cultural class, a vicarious worship of all things bricolaged, improvised and threadbare – read pauperised – has taken hold. The acid bath of poverty is the urbane consumer’s psychic chemical peel of choice. This admiration has strayed from the art world into the culture industry in general – a new chain of restaurants in Paris and London shamelessly, almost unconsciously, named Favela Chic now serves up top-dollar cuisine at soup-kitchen style collective tables, overlooked by an artlessly bricolaged DJ booth. Meanwhile the spectacle of the South’s slum dwellers is served up to the cinema goers of the North, mixing equal measures of desperation and glamorous dreams of life beyond the law. 
In this issue we have tried to explore both the production and abduction of a ‘surplus humanity’ adrift in the world’s cities. While cautious of the tendency to lapse into a Rem Koolhaas style celebration of the improvisatory ingenuity of the precarious class, to Learn from Lagos as it were, this issue nevertheless attempts to reveal a ‘politics of the poor’, which meshes together dissent in the slums of Port au Prince, Delhi, Durban and São Paulo with the pen pricks of poets and the living words of dead rappers.

Urban analyst Mike Davis’ bleak prognosis for the future of the city in his article Planet of the Slums has catalysed much discussion and helped spark this issue of Mute. Here, Iain Boal reviews Davis’ book-length study of the same name

While crews were still excavating the remains of dead firefighters and stockbrokers from the crater that was once the World Trade Center, the Larsen B ice shelf in Antarctic suddenly collapsed. Sixty stories thick and covering more than 1300 square miles, the shelf had survived every warm pulse since the end of the Pleistocene. Yet in a mere few weeks, it pulverised – like a window hit by a cannonball – into thousands of iceberg shards…We don’t need Derrida to know which way the wind blows or why the pack ice is disappearing.– Mike Davis, postscript to ‘Strange Times Begin’ [1]

To anyone inside, and to many beyond, what passes for the radical academy, this is the unmistakable voice of Mike Davis, anatomist-in-chief of what Naomi Klein has dubbed ‘disaster capitalism’.

His dispatch from post-Katrina New Orleans – a powerful blend of vivid reportage and trenchant analysis – was vintage Davis. It is hard to think of anyone else with his ability to jump scale so tellingly from the micro-topographies of class and race to the hydrometeorology of the Mexican Gulf. Davis’ bulletins from the disaster zones of modernity are beacons in a dark time.

He announced his arrival as a writer with a remarkable three-part essay, composed in the mid-1980s, which appeared as the front half of his first book, Prisoners of the American Dream. The essay, ‘Labour and American Politics’ is still an essential synopsis for students of the history of the American working class. When, four years later, Davis published his noir history of Los Angeles, City of Quartz was immediately recognised as a modern classic in urban studies, even if LA boosters resented his muckraking and called him a pornographer of apocalypse. Davis made even his friends nervous when he quite seriously proposed, in Ecology of Fear, to ‘let Malibu burn’, on the grounds that it was a natural fire corridor that would inevitably burn anyway and that anything else amounted to a massive hidden subsidy to entertainment industry plutocrats. Kevin Starr, the dean of California historians, proclaimed that fifty years ago Davis would have made a good priest, but that ‘If he doesn’t watch it, he’ll become a crank’. The Monster at Our Door, Davis’s recent book on the likelihood of an avian flu pandemic under prevailing conditions of poultry capitalism in Asia, probably confirmed Starr in his judgment. The cover art may have verged on parody, but the analysis inside is rooted in a materialist account of the factors now favouring the lethal evolution of the H5N1 virus.

It is now over a decade since Davis, in his contribution to an eco-socialist forum convened on the UC Santa Cruz campus by the economist James ‘Crisis’ O’Connor, turned his attention to the emerging mega-slums of the global south. He called them, ‘sociologically, UFOs’. Davis was pushing into new territory for a Californian urbanist, far removed from the lilywhite utopianism of an Ernest Callenbach dreaming of a green Berkeley, with the ghettoes of Oakland and Richmond nowhere to be seen.

A significant pair of closely related words – derived from the Latin adjective urbanus – entered the English language simultaneously at the beginning of the 17th century. The historical identification of ‘urban’ with ‘urbane’ may not survive contact with the developments portrayed in Davis’ latest work. If urbanity seems outdated, even residual, it turns out that the career of ‘urban’ is only just beginning.

Planet of Slums is the opening salvo of a large project first announced in a manifesto with the same title published in New Left Review 26 in the spring of 2004. In that landmark essay Mike Davis laid out the rationale for an urbanism adequate to the 21st century. Davis opened with two striking observations – that worldwide, for the first time in human history, there are now more people living in cities than in the countryside; and secondly, because the global hinterland has reached its maximum population, all future growth in the number of humans will happen in cities.

What makes these milestones ominous as well as striking is a third observation – that ‘95 percent of this final buildout of humanity will occur in the urban areas of developing countries’. The context, in other words, is military neoliberalism and the policies (‘There is No Alternative’) pursued by the specialists in immiseration belonging to the IMF/World Bank/US Treasury nexus. The result is, and will be, ‘gigantic concentrations of poverty’.

Davis acknowledges the work of Jan Breman (The Labouring Poor in India, Oxford, 2003) and Jeremy Seabrook (In the Cities of the South, Verso, 1996) as models of the new urbanism, and in the immediate background, both as stimulus and framework, UN-Habitat’s report The Challenge of the Slums: Global Report on Human Settlements 2003. Davis uses these three texts as lodestars to navigate the virtually uncharted world of the new mega-cities. He is a master of the astounding statistic: who would possibly have guessed that 85 percent of the urban residents of the developing world ‘occupy property illegally’.

We have to wait, however, until the final chapter, ‘A Surplus Humanity?’, to find the conceptual centre of Planet of Slums. In what amounts to a research programme for critical urbanism in the 21st century, Davis frames it by drawing a theoretical connection to the 19th century city. He posits that the recent growth of a vast global informal proletariat living in the new slum-world is undergoing a process of ‘urban involution’. This is by analogy with Clifford Geertz’s notion of ‘agricultural involution’ describing the spiral of labour self-exploitation in the Indonesian countryside in the early 1960s. Davis suggests that the potential for urban involution existed among the displaced peasantries of the 19th century European industrial revolutions, but the rise of mega-Dublins was prevented by mass emigration to the settler societies of the western hemisphere and Siberia. Today, surplus labour faces hardened borders, making large-scale migrations impossible; slums become sinks of human labour and are the only ‘solution’ to the warehousing of the surplus humanity produced by the structural adjustment programs of the IMF. These settlements have, says Davis the ironist, ‘a brilliant future’, and will contain perhaps 20 billion people by the year 2030. Davis the Marxist ponders the historical fate of ‘this fastest growing and most unprecedented social class on earth.’ He muses: ‘To what extent does an informal proletariat possess that most potent of Marxist talismans: “historical agency”?…Or is some new, unexpected historical subject, á la Hardt and Negri, slouching toward the supercity?’

These questions drive to the heart of the Marxist imaginary and its view of human agency in contrast to the traditional anarchist faith in autonomy – the inertness of the masses versus the self-activity of the populus. Although he has previously called for a re-visiting of the anarchist urbanism of figures like Pietr Kropotkin and Patrick Geddes (given the mostly disastrous record of 20th century liberal-Keynesian and Stalinist city-planning), Davis the Ironic Marxist, in the chapter on ‘Illusions of Self-Help’, really puts the boot into John Turner, disciple of Geddes and erstwhile contributor to Freedom, the journal founded by Kropotkin. Turner, an arts-and-crafts-inspired architect (his grandfather had worked with William Morris, and May Morris was his mother’s godparent), had an epiphany after the big Peruvian earthquake of 1958, when he saw the results of facilitating communal self-help in the barriadas of Arequipa. Later, in 1976, the year of the first UN-Habitat conference, Turner published the fruits of his long experience with poor city-dwellers in Housing by People: Towards Autonomy in Building Environments. Its message turned out to be congenial to the agenda of Robert McNamara at the World Bank, or as Davis puts it, Turner ‘was mesmerised by the creative genius he discerned at work in squatter housing…[and his] core program of self-help, incremental construction, and legalisation of spontaneous urbanisation was exactly the kind of pragmatic cost-effective approach to the urban crisis that McNamara favored.’ (p.71-2) However naïve or complicit or undialectical Turner may have been – and Davis does not hesitate to call his case an ‘intellectual marriage’ between anarchism and neoliberalism – it was certainly not the first or last time that a radical programme has been suborned. (‘Flexible hours’ was once a demand of radical feminists; ‘We'll give you flexi-time’, said Business, ‘all of it!’ And Marxists, shall we say, hardly have an unblemished record in the matter of collaboration with ruling powers.) Still, the essential point is that opponents of capitalism’s life-world – whether they fly a red or a black flag – face a truly serious task, to theorise afresh popular agency in conditions of late modernity, and to understand why we find ourselves, as Retort put it in Afflicted Powers, ‘living in an age defined by a terrible atavism – a plunging backward into forms of ideological and geo-political struggle that call to mind now the Scramble for Africa, now the Wars of Religion.’ (p.14)

Certainly Marx and Engels would have been surprised by the decline of secular radicalism. For the moment at least, notes Davis, Marx has yielded the historical stage to Mohammed and the Holy Ghost. The rise of militant Islam and Pentecostal Christianity is only one of many striking features of the social ecology of the slumworld. Davis systematically skewers the regnant myths about the world’s informal working class; urban studies at this level is now, it seems, theoretically bankrupt. The De Soto vision of bootstrap capitalism, of the global informal sector as ‘a frenzied beehive’ of micro-entrepreneurs – a view which underpins the World Bank/IMF/NGO strategy of the transubstantiation of poverty into capital – is predicated on a raft of false premises. In reality: De Soto’s heroic voluntary micro-entrepreneurs are mostly displaced public sector workers forced into sub-subsistence; most participants in the informal economy are not, as imagined, self-employed but work for someone else – via, for example, the consignment of goods or the rental of a pushcart or rickshaw; there is growing inequality within the informal sector as well as between it and the formal sector; informality ensures extreme abuse of women and children; the informal economy generates jobs by fragmenting existing work and thus subdividing incomes (the ‘urban involution’ phenomenon); slum-dwellers turn in vast numbers to quasi-magical wealth appropriation, such as lotteries, pyramid schemes and religious devotion; micro-credit and cooperative lending initiatives have become ‘something of an urban cargo cult among well-meaning NGOs’ but they have little macro impact on the reduction of poverty, even in Dhaka, home of the Grameen Bank;[2] increasing competition within the informal sector is dissolving self-help networks and social solidarities essential to the survival of the very poor; the rise of the informal sector goes hand-in-hand with the growth in ethno-religious or sectarian violence.

It is no surprise, as Davis notes, that this last development has drawn the attention of the Pentagon, whose neo-Orientalist consultants and wargamers are assuming that the slum outskirts of ‘feral, failed cities’ of the Third World will be ‘the distinctive battlespace of the twenty-first century’.

As if suspicious of his own attraction to the overdrawn and the terminal, and in this indispensible book to what might be called ‘demographic reductionism’ – whereby myriads of flesh-and-blood humans become pulverised into the dramatic statistics of poverty and immiseration, ‘an existential ground zero beyond which there are only death camps, famine, and Kurtzian horror’ – Davis closes Planet of Slums on the promise of a companion volume (co-authored with Forrest Hylton) whose topic will be ‘the history and future of slum-based resistance to global capitalism’. That book will no doubt contain tales of heroic improvisation against tremendous odds, and insist on the role of human agency. (There is after all plenty of material fast accruing at the sites of Forrest Hylton’s courageous dispatches and field work – Bolivia and the Andean region.)

And yet the book that Davis is really preparing to write will demand that extraordinary jumping of scale in time and space that is the Davis hallmark, thinking the quotidian-human and the geological together. It will stretch even the Davisian canvas. What such a book will entail he actually tells us in his original NLR manifesto: it will mean exploring ‘the ominous terrain of…interaction’ between ‘the dangers of global warming [and] the global catastrophe of urban poverty.’

If the conditions requiring such a report do come to pass (and who can say they won’t?), Davis will not be able to write it from either of his two favourite cities, lying at sea level on the Pacific and Atlantic littorals – Los Angeles and Belfast. One minor consolation will be the inundation of the Santa Monica real estate brokers who tried to defame the author of Ecology of Fear, and now of Planet of Slums, naively believing that disasters, and rumors of disasters, were bad for business.

Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, Verso, 2006.
ISBN: 1844670228

[1] Mike Davis 2002 postscript to  ‘Strange Times Begin’ in Dead Cities, Verso, 2002 (p.414).

[2] The Grameen Bank is a microfinance organisation started in Bangladesh that makes small loans (known as microcredit) to the impoverished without requiring collateral, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grameen_Bank

Iain Boal <retort AT sonic.net> is a social historian of science and technics, associated with Retort. Their new broadside All Quiet on the Eastern Front follows on Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (Verso, 2006, 2nd edition)

Taking up the gauntlet of pessimism thrown down by Mike Davis’ account of the global slum epidemic, Planet of Slums, Richard Pithouse draws on his involvement with the struggles of slum dwellers in Durban to offer an alternative and engaged perspective. Against Davis’ homogenisation of slum life, misrepresentation of slum politics, and ‘imperialist’ methodology, he argues for an analysis grounded in specific settlements, histories, people and struggles – a ‘politics of the poor’

In 1961 Frantz Fanon, the great philosopher of African anti-colonialism, described the shack settlements that ‘circle the towns tirelessly, hoping that one day or another they will be let in’ as ‘the gangrene eating into the heart of colonial domination’. He argued that ‘this cohort of starving men, divorced from tribe and clan, constitutes one of the most spontaneously and radically revolutionary forces of a colonised people’. Colonial power tended to agree and often obliterated shanty towns, usually in the name of public health and safety, at times of heightened political tension.

But by the late 1980s the World Bank backed elite consensus was that shack settlements, now called ‘informal settlements’ rather than ‘squatter camps’, were opportunities for popular entrepreneurship rather than a threat to white settlers, state and capital. NGOs embedded in imperial power structures were deployed to teach the poor that they could only hope to help themselves via small businesses while the rich got on with big business. At the borders of the new gated themeparks where the rich now worked, shopped, studied and entertained themselves the armed enforcement of segregation, previously the work of the state, was carried out by private security.

There are now a billion people in the squatter settlements in the cities of the South. Many states, NGOs and their academic consultants have returned to the language that presents slums as a dirty, diseased, criminal and depraved threat to society. The UN actively supports ‘slum clearance’ and in many countries shack settlements are again under ruthless assault from the state. Lagos, Harare and Bombay are the names of places where men with guns and bulldozers come to turn neighbourhoods into rubble. The US military is planning to fight its next wars in the ‘feral failed cities’ of the South with technology that can sense body heat behind walls. Once no one can be hidden, soldiers can drive or fire through walls as if they weren’t there. Agent Orange has been upgraded. Gillo Pontecorvo’s great film The Battle of Algiers is used as a training tool at West Point. The lesson seems to be that that kind of battle, with its walls and alleys that block and bewilder outsiders and give refuge and opportunity to insiders, must be blown into history. The future should look more like Fallujah.

Image: March from the Kennedy Road Settlement, early 2005. Indymedia South Africa

Leftist theories that seek one agent of global redemption are generally less interested in the shack settlement than the NGOs, UN or US military. Some Marxists continue to fetishise the political agency of the industrial working class and contemptuously dismiss shack dwellers as inevitably reactionary ‘lumpens’. The form of very metropolitan leftism that heralds a coming global redemption by immaterial labourers is more patronising than contemptuous and concludes, in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s words, that: ‘To the extent that the poor are included in the process of social production … they are potentially part of the multitude’. Computer programmers in Seattle are automatically part of the multitude but the global underclass can only gain this status to the extent that their ‘biopolitical production’ enters the lifeworld of those whose agency is taken for granted. The continuities with certain colonial modes of thought are clear.

But other metropolitan leftists are becoming more interested in the prospects for resistance in shanty towns. Mike Davis’ first intervention, a 2004 New Left Review article, ‘Planet of Slums’, famously concluded that ‘for the moment at least, Marx has yielded the historical stage to Mohammed and the Holy Ghost’ and so ‘the Left (is) still largely missing from the slum’. This was a little too glib. For a start the left is not reducible to the genius of one theorist working from one time and place. And as Davis wrote these words militant battles were being fought in and from shack settlements in cities like Johannesburg, Caracas, Bombay, Sao Paulo and Port-au-Prince. Moreover proposing a Manichean distinction between religion and political militancy is as ignorant as it is silly. Some of the partisans in these battles were religious. Others were not. In many instances these struggles where not in themselves religious but rooted their organising in social technologies developed in popular religious practices. Davis’ pessimism derived, at least in part, from a fundamental methodological flaw. He failed to speak to the people waging these struggles, or even to read the work produced from within these resistances and often read his imperial sources – the UN, World Bank, donor agencies, anthropologists, etc – as colleagues rather than enemies.

At around the same time as Davis wrote his Slums paper Slavoj Zizek, writing in the London Review of Books, argued that the explosive growth of the slum ‘is perhaps the crucial geopolitical event of our times’. He concluded that we are confronted by:

The rapid growth of a population outside the law, in terrible need of minimal forms of self organisation … One should resist the easy temptation to elevate and idealise slum-dwellers into a new revolutionary class. It is nonetheless surprising how far they conform to the old Marxist definition of the proletarian revolutionary subject: they are ‘free’ in the double meaning of the word, even more than the classical proletariat (‘free’ from all substantial ties; dwelling in a free space, outside the regulation of the state); 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. ... The new forms of social awareness that emerge from slum collectives will be the germ of the future ...

Zizek, being Zizek, failed to ground his speculative (although tentative) optimism in any examination of the concrete. But it had the enormous merit of, at least in principle, taking thinking in the slum seriously.

As Alain Badiou explains, with typical precision, there can be no formula for mass militancy that holds across time and space:

A political situation is always singular; it is never repeated. Therefore political writings – directives or commands – are justified inasmuch as they inscribe not a repetition but, on the contrary, the unrepeatable. When the content of a political statement is a repetition the statement is rhetorical and empty. It does not form part of thinking. On this basis one can distinguish between true political activists and politicians ... True political activists think a singular situation; politicians do not think.

The billion actual shack dwellers live in actual homes in communities in places with actual histories that collide with contemporary circumstances to produce actual presents. Many imperial technologies of domination do have a global range and do produce global consequences but there can be no global theory of how they are lived, avoided and resisted. Even within the same parts of the same cities the material and political realities in neighbouring shack settlements can be hugely different. This is certainly the case in Durban, the South African port city, from which this article is written. There are 800,000 shack dwellers in Durban but the settlements I know best are in a couple of square kilometres in valleys, on river banks and against the municipal dump in the suburb of Clare Estate. In this small area there are eight settlements with often strikingly different material conditions, modes of governance, relations to the party and state, histories of struggle, ethnic make-ups, degrees of risk of forced removal and so on. In the Lacey Road settlement, ruled by an armed former ANC soldier last elected many years ago, organising openly will quickly result in credible death threats. In the Kennedy Road settlement there is a radically open and democratic political culture. Kennedy Road has a large vegetable garden, a hall and an office and some access to electricity. In the Foreman Road settlement the shacks are packed far too densely for there to be any space for a garden and there is no hall, office or meeting room and no access to electricity.

Some are militants in the MST or the PKK. Some just live for work or church or Saturday night at a club. In the Kiberia settlement in Nairobi he lived with squatters in mud shacks. In the Sultanbeyli settlement in Istanbul there is a ‘seven-story squatter city hall, with an elevator and a fountain in the lobby’. Neuwirth also describes the very different policy and legal regimes against which squatters make their lives, the equally diverse modes of governance and organisation within squatter settlements and the varied forms and trajectories of a number of squatter movements.

Davis sees slums in explicitly Hobbesian terms. As he rushes to his apocalyptic conclusions he pulls down numbers and quotes from a dazzling range of literature and some of the research that he cites points to general tendencies that are often of urgent importance. Parts of his account of the material conditions in the global slum illuminate important facets of places like Kennedy Road, Jadhu Place and Foreman Road, which were the first strongholds of Abahlali baseMjondolo, as well as aspects of the broader situation people in these settlements confront. For example, Davis notes that major sports events often mean doom for squatters and here in Durban the city has promised to ‘clear the slums’, mostly via apartheid style forced removal to rural ghettos, before the 2010 football World Cup is held in South Africa. It is possible to list the ways in which Davis’ account of the global slum usefully illuminate local conditions – post-colonial elites have aggressively adapted racial zoning to class and tend to withdraw to residential and commercial themeparks; the lack of toilets is a key women’s issue; NGOs generally act to demobilise resistance and many people do make their lives, sick and tired, on piles of shit, in endless queues for water, amidst the relentless struggle to wring a little money out of a hard, corrupt world. The brown death, diarrhoea, constantly drains the life force away. And there is the sporadic but terrifyingly inevitable threat of the red death – the fires that roar and dance through the night.

But even when the material horror of settlements built and then rebuilt on shit after each fire has some general truth, it isn’t all that is true. It is also the case that for many people these settlements provide a treasured node of access to the city with its prospects for work, education, cultural, religious and sporting possibilities; that they can be spaces for popular cosmopolitanism and cultural innovation and that everyday life is often characterised, more than anything else, by its ordinariness – people drinking tea, cooking supper, playing soccer, celebrating a child’s birthday, doing school homework or at choir practice. It is this ordinariness, and in certain instances hopefulness, that so firmly divorces purely tragic or apocalyptic accounts of slum life from even quite brief encounters with the lived reality of the shack settlement. Furthermore, in so far as general comments about such diverse places are useful, an adequate theory of the squatter settlement needs to get to grips with the fundamental ambiguity that often characterises life in these places.

On the one hand the absence of the state often means the material deprivation and suffering that comes from the absence of the basic state services (water, electricity, sanitation, refuse removal, etc) required for a viable urban life. But the simultaneous absence of the state and traditional authority and proximity to the city can also enable a rare degree of political and cultural autonomy. This ambiguity is often a central feature of squatters’ lives and struggles. A.W.C. Champion was the head of the famous African Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU) that helped to organise resistance against the atrocious material conditions in the huge Umkumbane settlement in Durban. Speaking in 1960, just afterthe state had destroyed the settlement and moved its residents to formal township houses outside of the city, he recalled Umkumbane, not only as a bad memory of shit and fire, but also as ‘the place in Durban where families could breath the air of freedom’.

Neuwirth is able to capture this ambiguous aspect of shack life. He doesn’t shy away from the horror of the conditions in some settlements. Indeed he begins with Tema, a resident of the Rocinha settlement in Rio, telling him that ‘The Third World is a video game’ and goes on to show why this statement matters. But because he has lived in the places that he describes and spoken to the people that he writes about he is able to capture the ordinariness of the ordinary life of people and communities and the fact that there are, at times, certain attractions to slum life. He quotes Armstrong O’Brian, a resident of the Southland settlement in Nairobi, who says, ‘This place is very addictive. It’s a simple life, but no one is restricting you. Nobody is controlling you. Once you have stayed here, you cannot go back.’ Perhaps it is rumours of this air of freedom, this lack of control, that fill the sail on Zizek’s radical hopes for the slum.

The question of the possibilities for shanty town radicalism should not, as Davis and Zizek assume, automatically be posed toward the future. Around the world there are long histories of shack dweller militancy. In Durban in June 1959 an organisation in the Umkumbane settlement called Women of Cato Manor led a militant charge against patriarchal relations within the settlement, against the moderate reformism of the elite nationalists in the ANC Women’s League and against the apartheid state. This event still stands as a potent challenge to most contemporary feminisms. And progressive social innovation has not always taken the form of direct confrontation with the state. It is interesting, against the often highly racialised stereotypes of shack dwellers as naturally and inevitably deeply reactionary on questions of gender, to note that institutionalised homosexual marriage was in fact pioneered in South Africa in the Umkumbane settlement in the early 1950s. But the cultural innovation from shanty towns has not only been for the subaltern. It has often become part of suburban life. Bob Marley wouldn’t have become Bob Marley without Trench Town and so much American music (Dylan, Springsteen, etc) stems from a shack dweller – Woody Guthrie.

It also needs to be recognised that shanty towns are very often consequent to land invasions and that services, especially water and electricity, are often illegally appropriated from the state.  Fanon insisted that ‘The shanty town is the consecration of the colonised’s biological decision to invade the enemy citadel at all costs’. Most of the writing produced by contemporary imperialism tends to take a tragic and naturalising form and to present squatters as being passively washed into shack settlements by the tides of history. Unfortunately Davis generally fails to mark the insurgent militancy that is often behind the formation and ongoing survival of the shack settlement. So, for example, his naturalising description of Soweto as ‘having grown from a suburb to a satellite city’ leaves out the history of the shack dwellers’ movement Sofasonke which, in 1944, led more than ten thousand people to occupy the land that would later become Soweto. However, Neuwirth’s book is very good at showing that the shanty town often has its origins in popular reappropriation of land and often survives by battles to defend and extend those gains and to appropriate state services.

No doubt Human Rights discourse takes on a concrete reality when one is being bombed in its name. But when grasped as a tool by the militant poor it invariably turns out to contain a strange emptiness. Hence the importance of Neuwirth’s assertion of the value of the fact that squatters are ‘not seizing an abstract right, they are taking an actual place’. But he sensibly avoids the mistake of assuming that popular reappropriation is automatically about creating a democratic commons. If the necessity or choice of a move to the city renders rural life impossible or undesireable, and if the cosmopolitanism of so many shanty towns puts them at an unbridgeable remove from traditional modes of governance, there is no guarantee that the need to invent new social forms will result in progressive outcomes. Shiv Senna, the Hindu fascist movement that built its first base in the shanty towns of Bombay, is one of many instances of deeply reactionary responses to the need for social innovation. At a micro-local level the authoritarianism and misogyny that characterises the governance of the Overcome Heights settlement, founded after a successful land invasion in Cape Town earlier this year, is another. As Neuwirth shows, choices are made, struggles are fought and outcomes vary. Many settlements are dominated by slum lords of various types. But this is not inevitable and does not justify Davis’ Hobbesian pessimism about life in shack settlements. Communal ownership and democracy are also possible and there are numerous concrete instances in which they occur.

Neuwirth wisely resists the temptation to produce a policy model for making things better and insists that ‘The legal instrument is not important. The political instrument is’ and that ‘Actual control, not legal control is key.’ His solution is old-fashioned people power – the ‘messy, time consuming’ praxis of organising. It is not a solution that sees squatters as a new proletariat, a messiah to redeem the whole world. It is a solution that sees squatters struggling to make their lives better. The point is not that the squatters must subordinate themselves to some external authority or provide the ‘base’ for some apparently grander national or global struggle. Squatters should be asking the questions that matter to them and waging their fights on their terms.

That is as far as the popular literature takes us. But the experience and thinking of shack dwellers’ movements, some of which will travel well and some of which will not, can take us further. In Durban the experience of Abahlali baseMjondolo has shown that the will to fight has no necessary connection to the degree of material deprivation or material threat from state power. It is always a cultural and intellectual rather than a biological phenomenon. It therefore requires cultural and intellectual work to be produced and sustained. Spaces and practices in which the courage and resilience to stay committed to this work can be nurtured are essential. Drawing from the diverse lifeworlds that come together to make the settlements and the movement requires a hybrid new to be woven from the strands of the old. Formal meetings are necessary to enable the careful collective reflection on experience that produces and develops the movement’s ideas and principles. The music and meals and games and prayers and stories and funerals that weave togetherness are essential to sustain both a collective commitment to the movement’s principles and a will to fight.

The Abahlali have also found that even if there is a growing will to fight no collective militancy is possible when settlements are not run democratically and autonomously. If they are dominated by party loyalists, the ragged remnants of a defeated aristocracy, slum lords or some combination thereof this will have to be challenged. Often lives will be at risk during the early moments of this challenge but the power of local tyrants simply has to be broken. The best tactic is to use the strength of nearby democratic settlements to ensure protection for the few courageous people who take the initiative to organise some sort of open display of a mass demand for democratisation. If a clear majority of people in a settlement come out to a meeting against the slum lords, and if the people who break the power of the local tyrants immediately act to make open and democratic meetings the real (rather than performed) space of politics, then a radical politics becomes possible. Part of making a meeting democratic is declaring its resolute autonomy from state, party and civil society. Then and only then is it fully accountable to the people in whose name it is constituted. A movement must be ruthlessly principled about not working with settlements that are not democratic.

People fight constituted power to gain their share and to constitute counter power. Choices have to be made and adhered to. Any conception of shanty town politics that sees the mere fact of insurgency into bourgeois space as necessarily progressive in and by itself risks complicity with micro-local relations of domination and, because local despotisms so often become aligned to larger forces of domination, complicities with larger relations of domination. Despite the speculative optimism of certain Negrians, the fact of mere movement driven by mere desire for more life is not sufficient for a radical politics. A genuinely radical politics can only be built around an explicit thought out commitment to community constructed around a political and material commons. The fundamental political principle must be that everybody matters. In each settlement each person counts for one and in a broader movement the people in each settlement count equally.

After a movement has become able to put tens of thousands on the streets, brought the state to heel and made it into the New York Times, swarms of middle class ‘activists’ will descend in the name of left solidarity. Some will be sincere and alliances across class will be important for enabling access to certain kinds of resources, skills and networks. Sincere middle class solidarity will scrupulously subordinate itself to democratic processes and always work to put the benefits of its privilege in common. But, as Fanon warned, most of these ‘activists’ will ‘try to regiment the masses according to a predetermined schema’. Usually they will try to deliver the movement’s mass to some other political project in which their careers or identities have an investment. This can be at the level of theory in which case lies will be told in order that the movement can be claimed to confirm some theory with currency in the metropole. It can also be at the level of more material representation in which case the movement’s numbers will be claimed for some political project that has no mass support but does have donor funding, or the approval of the metropolitian left so attractive to local and visiting elites. Tellingly these kinds of machinations tend to remain entirely uninterested in what ordinary people in the movement actually think, attempting instead to separate off and co-opt a couple of leaders to create an illusion of mass support – to turn genuine mass democratic movements into more easily malleable simulations of their formerly autonomous and insubordinate selves. Often struggle tourists will get grants to leave the alternative youth cultures of the metropole for a few weeks to come and assert their personal revolutionary superiority over the poor by writing articles ridden with basic factual inaccuracies that condemn the movement as insufficiently revolutionary. Invariably it will not occur to these people that it may be a good idea to ask the people in the movement who are missing work, getting beaten, threatened with murder, shot at and arrested in the course of their struggle what they think about their political choices. Old assumptions about who should do the thinking and judging in this world show no signs of withering away. Indeed, on the safety of the elite terrain the middle class left will often openly express contempt for the people that they want to regiment. At times this is highly racialised. This is no local perversion. In Davis’ book slums, and the people that make their lives in them, often appear as demonic.

People who share some of the terrain of the middle class left (access to email, positions in universities or NGOs, etc) and who do not find casual contempt for the underclass to be problematic, or who refuse to allow themselves to be used as bridges for attempts at co-option, will be excoriated on that terrain as divisive trouble makers. However, they will, as Fanon wrote, find ‘a mantle of unimagined tenderness and vitality’ in the settlements where politics is a serious project – where, in Alain Badiou’s words, ‘meetings, or proceedings, have as their natural content protocols of delegation and inquest whose discussion is no more convivial or superegotistical than that of two scientists involved in debating a very complex question’.

The middle class tendency to assume a right to lead usually expresses itself in overt and covert attempts to shift power away from the spaces in which the poor are strong. However, the people that constitute the movement will in fact know what the most pressing issues are, where resistance can press most effectively and how best to mobilise. A politics that cannot be understood and owned by everyone is poison – it will always demobilise and disempower even if it knows more about the World Bank, the World Social Forum, Empire, Trotsky or some fashionable theory than the people who know about life and struggle in the settlements. The modes, language, jargon, concerns, times and places of a genuinely radical politics must be those in which the poor are powerful and not those in which they are silenced as they are named, directed and judged from without. Anyone wanting to offer solidarity must come to the places where the poor are powerful and work in the social modes within which the poor are powerful. Respect on this terrain must be earned via sustained commitment and not bought. All resources and networks and skills brought here must be placed in common. There must be no personalised branding or appropriation of work done. The Post-Seattle struggle tourists must be dealt with firmly when they call the inevitable disinterest in their assumed right to lead ‘silencing’ and try to present that as an important issue. Local donor funded socialists must be dealt with equally firmly when they call people ‘ignorant’ for wanting to focus their struggle on the relations of domination that most immediately restrict their aspirations and which are within reach of their ability to organise a collective and effective fight back. Democratic popular struggle is a school and will develop its range and reach as it progresses. But a permanently ongoing collective reflection on the lived experience of struggle is necessary for resistances to be able to be able to sustain their mass character as they grow and to develop. It is necessary to create opportunities for as many people as possible to keep talking and thinking in a set of linked intellectual spaces within the settlements. Progress comes from the quality of the work done in these spaces – not from a few people learning the jargon of the middle class left via NGO workshops held on the other side of the razor wire. This jargon will tend to be fundamentally disempowering because of its general indifference to the local relations of domination that usually present a movement with both its most immediate threats and opportunities for an effective fight back. Moreover the accuracy and usefulness of its analysis will often be seriously compromised by its blindness to local relations of domination and how these connect to broader forces. People who represent the movement to the media, in negotiations and various forums, must be elected, mandated, accountable and rotated. There must be no professionalisation of the struggle as this produces a vulnerability to co-option from above. The state, parties, NGOs and the middle class left must be confronted with a hydra not a head. There needs to be a self conscious development of what S’bu Zikode, chair of Abahlali baseMjondolo, calls ‘a politics of the poor – a homemade politics that everyone can understand and find a home in’.

Some will say that none of this means that global capital is at risk. This is not entirely true – stronger squatters inevitably mean weaker relations of local and global domination. Given that states are subordinate to imperialism and local elites, confrontation with the state is inevitable and necessary. Because some of the things that squatters need can only be provided by the state the struggle can not just be to drive the coercive aspects of the state away. There also has to be a fight to subordinate the social aspects of state to society beginning with its most local manifestations and moving on from there. But in so far as it is true that squatter struggles are unlikely to immediately, as Davis will have it, produce ‘resistance to global capitalism’ what right has someone like Davis to demand that the global underclass fight global capital when he himself does not have the courage to take its representatives on his terrain as enemies? He concludes his book with the image of squatters fighting the US military with car bombs while he, as his book keeps making clear, has cordial and collegial relations with academic consultants for imperialism. This is not untypical. How many left intellectuals will really fight on their own terrain? We must all, surely, assume the responsibility to make our stand where we are rather than projecting that responsibility on to others. And if we are going to enquire into the capacity of the global underclass to resist we should, at the very least, do this via discussion with people in the movements of the poor rather than via entirely speculative and profoundly objectifying social science. This is a route to a left version of the World Bank’s mass production of social science that blames the poor for being poor by rendering poverty an ontological rather than historical condition.

The experience of Abahlali is that for most squatters the fight begins with these toilets, this land, this eviction, this fire, these taps, this slum lord, this politician, this broken promise, this developer, this school, this crèche, these police officers, this murder. Because the fight begins from a militant engagement with the local its thinking immediately pits material force against material force – bodies and songs and stones against circling helicopters, tear gas and bullets. It is real from the beginning. And if it remains a mass democratic project, permanently open to innovation from below as it develops, it will stay real. This is what the Abahlali call ‘the politics of the strong poor’. This is why the Abahlali have marched under banners that declare them to be part of the ‘University of Abahlali baseMjondolo’.

Richard Pithouse <Pithouser AT ukzn.ac.za> lives in Durban where he has studied and taught philosophy. He has been part of Abahlali baseMjondolo since the movement's inception.

For additional material and background on Abahlali baseMjondolo see http://www.metamute.org/taxonomy/term/181

Two years after the bicentenary of its independence, Haiti is paradigmatic of the dramatic new phase of capital accumulation occurring globally. Haiti, the first slave republic and inspiration to the liberation movements of Africa and the Caribbean, is more than just the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Having been exposed to 20 years of neoliberalisation and nearly 500 years of imperialism, Haiti presents both a concentrated vision of the ravages of capitalism upon a population and provides a study of the desperate means available to those who would oppose it.

Haiti is still in transition from the ‘neo-colonial protectorate’ (administered by the UN mission led by Brazilian, Canadian, French and Libyan forces under the moniker MINUSTAH) to a democratically elected government led by the coalition, Fwon Lespwa (Front of Hope), headed by René Préval, elected president on February 7, 2006. Préval is seen by many as the place holder for Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the popular politician-priest who rose to power at the head of the coalition of civil society organisations known as Lavalas (The Flood), and who was involuntarily exiled under the ‘diplomatic protection’ of US Marines in 2004.

Image: Boulevard 'Dread' Wilmer named in honour of the murdered rapper and community activist

These self-organised approaches are in stark contrast to those initiated by Wyclef Jean of hip hop band The Fugees. His USAID supported charity ‘Yele Haiti’ celebrated its one year anniversary recently, bringing Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt to pose in front of children’s prisons and other sites of interest in Port-au-Prince. Wyclef encourages Haiti’s poor to accept the conditions violently imposed by UN soldiers including an unelected provisional government and the minimum wage of $2 a day.

Jean has so much street cred that he has convinced aspiring young slum rappers to compete for the best jingle about such socially conscious topics as cleaning streets or protecting the environment.[14]

While Wyclef, exemplary poor-kid-made-good through the music industry, tries to instill liberal values in the downtrodden and absolutely exposed, the Haitian proletariat are busy with the ‘anti-social’ practice of feeding, housing and defending themselves in the adverse conditions imposed by Wyclef’s sponsors, the US state department, MINUSTAH and, indirectly, The World Bank and the IMF. The pragmatism of Haitians in the face of this obscene military-industrial-entertainment complex is attested to by the apt conclusion of Wyclef’s vainglorious triumphal march through Port-au-Prince:

Decked out as Haiti’s revolutionary hero Jean-Jacques Dessalines, complete with a tri-cornered hat, swashbuckler’s boots, glittering sword and ruffled shirt, the former Fugees front man would ride a float in Haiti’s biggest festival, a real lion at his side ... And when Jean left his float at the end of Carnival, hordes of people stormed it, carting off instruments and a laptop. The crowds also tried to let the lion loose.15

[1] Peter Hallward, 'Option Zero in Haiti', http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR26102.shtml

[2] Corvée labour '... a type of annual tax that is payable as labour by the serf or villein for the monarch, vassal, overlord or lord of the manor... The corvée was abolished in France on August 4, 1789. It had been a hated feature of the ancien régime. Today the term is also used for other forms of unpaid mandatory labour.' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corv%C3%A9e

[3] 'Since 1793 the abolition of slavery has raised a political, social and economic dilemma which until now has not been equitably resolved: the transition from forced free labour to waged labour.' Franck Laraque 'The Relentless Struggle of the Haitian Masses for Liberty and Survival'
http://www.tanbou.com/2005/RelentlessStruggleMasses.htm

[4] Peace Brigades International - Haiti Bulletin #7 - July 1997
http://www.peacebrigades.org/haiti/hap97-02.html

[5] Eric Verhoogen, 'The US in Haiti: How to Get Rich on 11 Cents an Hour -
A Report Prepared for The National Labor Committee', January 1996
http://www.doublestandards.org/verhoogen1.html

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid. 

[8] Peace Brigades International - Haiti Bulletin #7 - July 1997, http://www.peacebrigades.org/haiti/hap97-02.html

[9] 'Rice coming from the United States costs almost half local rice, and a Haitian egg is 50% more expensive than an imported one', Ibid.

[10] 'The pig's resilience allowed Haitian peasants to raise these pigs with little resources. The peasants characterised their pigs as never getting sick. Creole Pigs served as a type of savings account for the Haitian peasant. They were sold or slaughtered to pay for marriages, medical emergencies, schooling, seeds for crops, or a voodoo ceremony. The resilience and boisterous nature of the pigs, as well as their incorporation into voodoo folklore and the oral history of the Haitian revolution made them a symbol for the independence ... of the Haitian people.' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole_Pig

[11] Leslie Bagg and Aaron Lakoff, 'Haiti's Deadly Class Divide: Class war takes on a new meaning in Cite Soley', http://www.infoshop.org/inews/article.php?story=2006011212511774&mode=print

[12] Haiti Information Project (HIP) 'The UN's disconnect with the poor in Haiti', December 25 2005, http://www.haitiaction.net/News/HIP/12_25_5/12_25a_5.html

[13] 'We Won't Be Peaceful and Let Them Kill Us Any Longer - Interview with Haitian Activist', Rosean Baptiste interviewed by Lyn Duff, http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=9059

[14] Letta Tayler, 'Wyclef Jean brings hip-hop hope to Haiti', http://www.hiphoparchive.org/thecircle/?p=520

[15] Ibid.

Anthony Iles <anthony AT metamute.org> is assistant editor of Mute

Since the deposition of Haiti’s elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide in February 2004 the global media, ‘civil society’ and murderous UN ‘peacekeepers’ have been working hard to ignore popular demands for his reinstatement, reports Kevin Pina

For most, Haiti’s second name is ‘the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere’, a well-worn rhetorical device that brings us no closer to understanding the socio-political landscape than reminding ourselves that the United States is the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth. Yet there they are, the two extremes of wealth and poverty in the western hemisphere inexorably caught in a deadly dance. On one side there is Washington’s policy of protecting Haitian elites through a myriad of NGOs hell bent on ‘enhancing democracy’, and, on the other, close to a million economically dispossessed people able to paralyse the capital at the drop of a hat. It is this dynamic that continues to define the political landscape and the ongoing battle between US foreign policy objectives and the majority of the Haitian people.

That was exactly the dynamic in play when hundreds of thousands of supporters of ousted president Jean-Bertrand Aristide took to the streets to beat back the attempt by the UN/US-backed Provisional Election Council to steal recent presidential elections from René Préval through fraud. Their protests also combined with the results of the elections to expose the big lie that was used as the pretext and justification for Aristide’s removal from office – a key piece of misinformation that continues to confuse those watching events unfold in Haiti today. 

                                  
Image: Cité Soleil, Anne E. Shroeder, http://www.language-works.com/

The overarching thrust of the lie was that Aristide was yet another Haitian dictator in democrat’s clothing who had fallen prey to his own thirst for power. His forced departure, and the two years of severe repression that followed, was portrayed as a necessary evil to liberate Haiti from his tyrannical rule. Yet the results of the presidential elections showed that the political parties representing the movement to oust Aristide could not garner a combined tally of more than 30 percent of the vote cast in the elections. Most of these parties polled in single digit numbers exposing what was portrayed as a popular uprising against Aristide for the paper tiger and media creation it actually was. The venerable journalists of the corporate media feed unsuspecting consumers a false image of the strength and numbers of demonstrations against Aristide while virtually ignoring much larger demonstrations like the one on 7 February, 2004. While stories and photos of demonstrations led by sweatshop owner Andre Apaid and his Group 184 chewed up the bandwidth, hundreds of thousands demonstrating for Aristide and his Famni Lavalas political party went largely unreported and were treated with indifference by the press.
 
This also helps to explain the human rights situation in Haiti following 29 February, 2004. If the premise behind the ousting of Aristide was that he had lost the support of the Haitian people, what did it mean when hundreds of thousands continued to take to the streets in a series of endless marches and protests demanding his return? Why were the Haitian police compelled to brutally suppress the demonstrations by firing on unarmed demonstrators as the UN and the international community stood by ready to pounce at the slightest sign of armed resistance to the killings? The answer to those who followed the situation on the ground was simple. Every large demonstration for Aristide’s return ran contrary to the very justification for his ousting. The US-installed regime of Gerard Latortue, that assumed power with the blessing of the international community following Aristide’s deposition, had no choice but to contain this truth through demonising and brutalising the growing protests. While the peoples of the US, Latin America and Europe were led to believe that the real problem in Haiti was dark and nefarious gangs of killers tied to Aristide, hundreds of thousands of Haitians were risking their lives in almost daily protests where Haitian police with high-powered telescopic rifles would pick them off indiscriminately with a single bullet to the head.

It is no secret that the reason behind Préval’s victory was that the base of Aristide’s Lavalas party voted for him in overwhelming numbers with three objectives in mind. First and foremost was that they wanted to put an end to the previous two years of human rights hell in Haiti. Summary executions, armed raids and arbitrary arrests took a huge toll on people living in the poorest neighbourhoods of the capital as they continued to resist the US-installed government. Battle fatigue was beginning to set in as these neighbourhoods were forced to continue to fight on two fronts. They managed to fight and resist the brutal Haitian police and the subsequent UN efforts to pacify them, but the time had come to adopt a new strategy. Préval’s entering the race, after the corrupt Provisional Electoral Council blocked the candidacy of the Lavalas favorite Catholic priest Gerard Jean-Juste, provided another avenue around the US and its now famous chorus a.k.a. the international community. They also calculated that the quickest way to insure Aristide’s return and secure the release of Lavalas political prisoners was to elect Préval president. That is why, when the fraud in the elections became apparent, they were willing to give the international community an ultimatum: either let Préval win the first round of balloting as initially projected by the polls or risk the country breaking out into civil war with the Haitian police and the UN battling the majority of the population in the streets.

Image: Soldiers distributing food in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 2006. UN, http://www.un.org

The US and their allies in the Haitian elite and the international community blinked. In an obscure agreement dubbed the ‘Belgium option’, the international community brokered an arrangement with the Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) where thousands of blank ballots were distributed evenly among the candidates giving Préval the votes he needed to rise above the 50 percent threshold to avoid a runoff. The arrangement also helped to mask the failure of the international community to sponsor clean and fair elections in Haiti after investing an estimated 76 million dollars as well as providing a UN army for security and logistical support to the process.

Central to the current struggle between the wealthiest nation on earth and the poorest nation in the western hemisphere is this very question of the return of Aristide. By now it is public knowledge that the US and its closest partners in Haiti, France and Canada, have made it clear that Aristide is not welcome back. The Haitian people thwarted the plans of the CEP to defeat Préval through manipulation and fraud, yet the international community still managed to blame the victim and turn it to their advantage. Then acting US Chargé d’Affaires, Timothy Carney, reminded the new president that a veritable Sword of Damocles hangs over his head. In an Associated Press article written by Stevenson Jacobs on 19 February, 2006 – titled ‘American: Haiti Leader Must Perform’ – Carney stated, ‘If he [Préval] doesn’t perform, yes it [the electoral settlement] could weaken him.’ Carney then added the caveat, ‘If he does perform, nobody will remember it.’ Carney had already made it clear that part of the expected performance from Préval included not allowing Aristide to return to Haiti. In a statement the day after the elections Carney said, ‘Aristide is on his way to becoming as irrelevant to Haiti as Jean-Claude [Duvalier], and with no future. Aristide is now demonstrated to be a man of the past.’ They have also made it clear to Préval that if he even considers allowing Aristide to return he can expect the sharp end of a lance.

In spite of threats by the US and its allies, a demonstration estimated at well over 50,000 took place this last Saturday [article submitted 17 July, 2006] in Port-au-Prince demanding once again that Aristide be returned to Haiti. One of the main themes of the demonstration was that Préval had been elected for the express purpose of returning Aristide and releasing political prisoners still held in Haitian jails today. Despite protesters forcing their way past armed policemen to march in front of Haiti’s National Palace, there was no reported violence and it is expected that this movement will continue to grow in volume and frequency over the next few weeks and months. If the recent past is any indicator, it is only a matter of time before the negative propaganda machine, fed by certain foreign embassies and the local elite, goes into hyper-drive once again to demonise and marginalise the protesters. Then you can expect violence and it will, as always, be blamed on the supporters of Lavalas and Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Kevin Pina <kevinpina AT yahoo.com> is a freelance reporter

Tourist, don't take my picture

Don't take my picture, tourist

I'm too ugly

Too dirty

Too skinny

Don't take my picture, white man

Mr. Eastman won't be happy

I'm too ugly

Your camera will break

I'm too dirty

Too black

Whites like you won't be content

I'm too ugly

I'm gonna crack your kodak

Don't take my picture, tourist

Leave me be, white man

Don't take a picture of my burro

My burro's load's too heavy

And he's too small

And he has no food here

Don't take a picture of my animal

Tourist, don't take a picture of the house

My house is of straw

Don't take a picture of my hut

My hut's made of earth

The house already smashed up

Go shoot a picture of the Palace

Or the Bicentennial grounds

Don't take a picture of my garden

I have no plow

No truck

No tractor

Don't take a picture of my tree

Tourist, I'm barefoot

My clothes are torn as well

Poor people don't look at whites

But look at my hair, tourist

Your kodak's not used to my colour

Your barber's not used to my hair

Tourist, don't take my picture

You don't understand my position

You don't understand anything

About my business, tourist

‘Gimme fie cents’

And then, be on your way, tourist.

By Félix Morisseau-Leroy, translated from Haitan Creole by Jack Hirschman

Text I

In the morning’s mirror

The day proceeds step by baby step

    When the dust of the sun smudges the horizon

In the heart of all people in Haiti

Hope lifts anchor

On the open-market’s web

Our spirit yearning for bits of inspiration

We’re resolving our misery’s quandary

And all flowers that have sadly lost their fragrance

Are returning to the nests of their buds

Many minutes slide down

Onto a dawn that stands broken-down

                      In the focal point of the sky

A big clock’s dancing in folkloric rhythm

To force the dew to flow into leaves

Children are fooling around with the wind

Unwrapping the rope of hopes

                                      In the air

They are flying toward the moon

                                     With their kites

And what we take for beautiful trust

                      In our consciousness

Are the drawings of the garden we’d want to

Sketch into life

When the morning’s mirror

Pitches out its fragment of shadows

Oh, say!

Will the land lift its head again

Oh! With elegance

Will the sunflower finally rise?

Text  III

Where did that death come from?

Circling the border of existence

Whence did that mourning emerge

That weeds out life in the garden of the future

The street develops a sorrow

                                            This long!

All houses are painted the colour of distress

Desolation spreads over all the walls

Alongside all the sidings of farmhouses

It hacks up the cornfields of our heart

Sorrow’s a pair of scissors shearing our hopes

Cutting our spirit into tiny pieces

Birds high up trace a curve ’round the sun

Windmills are turning the wheels of the sea

Chicken-nests flourish on city’s pillars

Thatched houses seem like bones on mountaintops

Where people act like toy soldiers at

                                                Attention!

Their faces bathed in a mist of sadness

Wind balancing on their heads

Women are mountaineering toward

                                            The moon

Keeping perfect symmetry between

Their waists and

                                    The road

They are throwing themselves in front

                                        Of their existence

Throwing their beliefs in the direction of

                                            The stars

Oh, friends,

Looting bedbugs are plucking our patience

Plundering our lovely cherry garden of light

Oh, friends,

Poverty hangs itself on our country’s luggage rack

Desolation is rolling across all mountains and over all plains

Trying to slow down the wheel of our resistance

Text  XXIX

A hurricane slaps at the stars

And a downpour of lightning strikes the universe

People in the corridor of their existence

Start yelling for help!

Children break into a run

Birds dash at high speed toward

             The centre of a falling star

The wind lifts my town high up

                And dashes it to the ground

Houses break into tiny pieces

The church crumbles and spreads over the waterfront

                   Streets tumble into ravines

People!

The wind has killed God the Father

Everyone on their knees

Let's telephone the Virgin Mary

Hello, Jesus, Hello, Mary!

Where does this fire of wind come from?

That is burning our souls

Wind turning hope upside down

Murdering our common sense

Strangling our patience

Throwing our lives

                        Into the abyss

People!

There's a pile-up of wind on top of Central America

Where trucks are lying wheels in the air

A pile-up of tornadoes embracing the earth

Throwing stars around God's spiritual houses

People!

A shard of a bottle tears the face of St. George

Werewolves bite the butt of a butler

Dust mixed with rock stones the moon

People!

The wind's blowing on our hearts

The rain's scattering the sorrow inside us

All the fires are dying in the stars

Life has surrendered to the attack of the rain

And the hurricane is coming back

With its pile-up of abysmal

Wind

Poems taken from Keep On Keepin' On, by Josaphat-Robert Large, translated from Haitian Creole by Jack Hirschman with the participation of Boadiba: iUniverse Incorporated, March 2006

Brazil has long sold its sunny side to holiday makers, but since the blockbuster film City of God a flood of movies and TV shows have capitalised on the narrative potential of the country’s plentiful favelas, adolescent drug soldiers and ultraviolence.

Melanie Gilligan explores the cinema of slums and asks is representation the answer to ‘social exclusion’ or one of the mechanisms of its reproduction?

The Brazilian documentary Bus 174 by José Padhila opens as we swoop over Rio de Janeiro’s favela covered hills. Dramatic aerial shots of Brazil’s vast slum cities are a common gambit in the country’s burgeoning output of films depicting its favelas, crime and poverty. These top-down vistas economically communicate an incalculably vast scale of privation. Bus 174 chronicles the hijacking of a public bus in Rio in 2000 by one ill-fated resident of the slums. Broadcast live on TV, the hijacking achieved record viewing figures and ended when the police murdered its protagonist. This incident constituted the intersection of two major forces of daily life for Brazil’s working and wageless classes: television and state violence.

Image: Bus 174, directed by José Padilha, 2002

The hijacker, Sandro, was a former street kid, and had survived the infamous Candelaria massacre in 1993 when police fired on 70 children sleeping rough in front of a church, killing eight. Throughout the hijacking, Sandro shouted at the police and media, reproaching them for the Candelaria massacre and the violent oppression in the favelas. The film presents the hijacking as Sandro’s desperate plea for recognition from ‘Brazilian society’, a desire supposedly felt by the whole of the so-called invisible class living in the favelas and streets of Brazil.

The alleged renaissance of Brazilian cinema seems dedicated to answering Bus 174’s plea that the country’s disenfranchised be represented. Brazil’s favelas have enjoyed ‘increased visibility’ with films like City of God and have played a lead role in the ‘sudden stardom’ of Third World slums in First World cinemas.[1] With its nearly unrivalled economic inequality and 51.[7] million favela inhabitants, the nation has ample material to feed a growing market for depictions of its poverty, crime and economic polarisation.[2]
 
While a decade ago Brazil’s government rented New York museums and private galleries for exhibitions of Brazilian art in an effort to improve its international image, today Brazil’s corporate media mine the entertainment value of its ‘social problems’ to produce popular film and television commodities for the domestic and global market.[3] Film and TV unabashedly portray the brutal results of the country’s extreme disparities in wealth, sometimes indicting this situation through the mouths of their characters. However, they ‘raise awareness’ only to support the underlying economic conditions. At the same time Brazilian President Luiz Inácio ‘Lula’ da Silva’s culture minister, Gilberto Gil, promises to foster the creative industries, calling them the new motor for Brazil’s ‘developing’ economy, and places the movie business atop his list of creative messiahs.

The internationally distributed Brazilian films we see today are products of increasingly commercial imperatives. All government-funded programmes supporting the Brazilian film industry were cut in 1991. Subsequently, the ‘Audiovisual law’ was created in 1993 to subsidise private investment in the film industry by granting Brazil’s immensely wealthy corporations the right to invest up to 70 percent of their yearly income tax in film. The intention was to foster private investment in the film industry so that, when this initiative was phased out in 2003, corporations would continue financing films. The credits of internationally exported Brazilian film such as Lower City or City of God list some of Brazil’s biggest multinationals, for example Petrobras, many banks, and of course the monolithic Globo, who run 60 percent of national media. Unsurprisingly, the pressure to deliver high returns on investments ushered in an era of increasingly mainstream Americanised film-making in Brazil.

Image: City of God, directed by Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, 2002

City of God, directed by Fernando Meirelles and co-directed by Kátia Lund (2002), epitomises the manner in which Brazil’s urban poverty is currently being projected. The film employs a style of fast cutting, abbreviated exposition, tinted colour palettes and perpetually moving handheld photography; techniques which have undeniably become a reified visual ‘pre-set’ for representing Latin American experience below subsistence level. City of God restages epochal class conflicts as a series of personal narratives, beginning in the 1960s when the military dictatorship ‘cleaned up the city’ for the rich by means of slum evictions and real estate development.[4] Adapting the technique of first person voice-over commentary deployed in Scorsese’s crime epics Casino and Goodfellas, the film’s narrator, Rocket, is a young (and like most favela residents, black) slum dweller relocated to the City of God, obscures the political significance of his eviction by giving the cause as flooding and ‘acts of arson in the slums’. Passing over this primordial act of state violence, the film jumps forward to the spectacular gang warfare between the narco-traficantes who gained control of Rio’s favelas in the ‘70s.

While City of God renders most of the substantive history in quick strokes, more detail about the political formation of Rio’s gangs is given in the documentary that accompanies the DVD version of the film. Widespread arrests of political dissidents during the military dictatorship of the Medici administration 1969-74, landed insurgents in a maximum-security prison with so-called ‘common criminals’.[5] According to popular legend, educated middle class political prisoners radicalised the working class inmates who then began a movement to self-organise against the systemic violence and deprivation imposed by the state, giving birth to Rio’s powerful drug gang Comando Vermelho (Red Command).[6]

William da Silva Lima, one of Comando Vermelho’s founders, said the group ‘was not an organisation but, above all, a kind of behavior, a way of surviving in times of adversity.’7 Comando Vermelho, initially known as o colectivo, spread an ethos of collective organisation. This laid the basis for the contemporary gangs, which today form ‘parallel polities’ in the favelas and prisons, supplying people with essential resources withheld by the state. Soup kitchens, daycare centres, and money for medicines, as well as brutally enforced security, form part of this alternative welfare and justice system adopted by populations disdained and abused by the official state. By some accounts, the drug gangs are businesses, providing services in return for the support of the favela communities, ‘accomplices of the bourgeois state’ that couch their endeavours in politicised rhetoric while obstructing the possibility of organised working class political action.[8] It may be that gang strikes on the middle class areas of Rio have replaced, and contained, what previously manifested as direct working class antagonism – for instance the riots of the late 1980s in which residents of the slum Rocinha attacked a nearby wealthy district.[9] Furthermore, the Brazilian state is known to cooperate with the drug gangs which operate like mini-states within the borders of the larger nation. The police, for example, sell weapons to the gangs and engage in transactions involving contraband, though of course they’re ostensibly fighting trafficking. This symbiotic relationship goes far beyond individual police corruption and says a great deal about the dependence of the state and ruling classes on the continuation of the drug trade.

City of God’s popularity in Brazil lead to a TV drama spin-off called City of Men, attempting the same handheld documentary ‘gritty realism’ in a modern-day Rio favela. The first TV drama set in the favelas, it was shot in slums like Rocinha, Rio’s largest, and watched by 35 million people in Brazil, spawning several other favela soaps. The protagonists amaze audiences with their resourcefulness and entrepreneurial zeal, getting themselves out of the tight spots and near death experiences that living in a community regulated by arbitrary police and gang violence creates. In other words, it celebrates the slum as a dangerous but creative place where people improvise solutions.

Critical moments do occur intermittently in City of Men. A protagonist leaves the favela, telling us he is crossing the frontier between two countries and the police are the border guards. Later he says, ‘the playboys [i.e. middle class] watch the slums on TV and think it’s better to live where they are. They only come here to buy drugs or make documentaries and films. They need drugs to live there with all the cameras and bars.’ Yet one is struck by the way the programme mitigates the force of its own content. After focusing on the lives of favela kids for a few episodes, a middle class character is introduced as point of identification and reemployed in increasingly unlikely scenarios. Ostensibly focused on the lives of favela dwellers, the show incessantly revisits their relationship to the middle class. A day at the beach is loaded with race and class tensions, while another episode compares the lives of a young ‘playboy’ and the working class protagonist, finding the former gets a bit depressed, the latter starves, but the moral is that they both share the same existential angst.

In the guise of offering ‘positive representation’ to ‘socially excluded’ residents of the favelas, exposing the economic and racial segregation they experience, the show transparently attempts to manage class tensions and assuage middle class guilt. (One candidly propagandistic episode narrates the legend of Lula’s working-class childhood, offering a ‘working class’ hero as point of identification for those viewers not feeling sufficiently ‘represented’ already). If any viewer doubts the importance of being portrayed on the channels of nation’s most powerful TV monopoly, Globo, the recurrent shots of densely clustered satellite dishes atop favela shacks drive the point home.

City of God contains similar nods to the power and comlicity of the Brazilian media. Gang members compete to get their photos in the newspapers, TV and news journalism intensify the conflict they chronicle. During the 1960s and ‘70s Brazil’s military dictatorship fostered a powerful television dominated ‘culture industry’ as a means to cohere national identity, promoting consumerism and controlling the political sphere. Globo governed official public discourse in Brazil until the end of the dictatorship in 1984, and has been influencing political outcomes, electoral and otherwise, ever since. City of Men supplements its documentary aesthetic with mock TV news interviews, while a media circus is Bus 174’s starting point for discussing life on the streets and in prison. The fascination with mediation in these films reflects more than just the spectacularisation of daily life. It indexes the self-consciousness of an industry that has long exploited the frisson of favela culture and violence. However, placing the interdependence of Brazil’s official ‘cultural’ and ‘informal’ or illegitimate economies in plain sight could seem to cynically reinforce and normalise its inevitability.[10]

The monolithic media of Brazil presents a means for liberal audiences to reconcile themselves with the brutality of state repression against the working class. Despite the intention of exposing state violence which informs films like Bus 174 and Hector Babenco’s Carandiru (2000), these films’ critical challenge to the brutality of the present order is blunted into a kind of empathic supplement to it. Carandiru tells the story of the infamous 1992 massacre in a Sao Paulo prison. Police, called to quell a riot, killed 111 unarmed prisoners. Numerous inmates were murdered execution-style, some several hours after the riot was suppressed. This extermination returned to haunt the gated ‘communities’ of Sao Paulo this May. The Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) gang, formed in response to the massacre and sworn to avenge it, declared war on the state, starting 75 separate prison riots and attacking the stations, cars and homes of the police.[11]

Image: Carandiru, directed by Hector Babenco, 2003 

Like the Comando Vermelho, the PCC constitute a parallel state controlling 90 percent of the prison system in the state of Sao Paulo and even funding their own electoral candidates. Each member swears to a manifesto-like list of statutes which pledge unceasing struggle against the injustices and oppression inside prisons, solidarity with all members, and to be the ‘Terror of the Powerful oppressors’ who run the prisons. The gang has ‘reduced the level of violence (in prisons) … won better visiting rights … [and] defense lawyers for their members’. Although Comando Vermelho have been responsible for prison bloodbaths of their own, the PCC has now allied with them to strengthen their influence on the nation’s prison system.12 Rio gangs have conducted many similar attacks, but the scale of the PCC’s actions this year and their unequivocal demands for prison reform suggest a more developed political agenda. When the PCC shut down the country’s richest city, killing 40 police officers and threatening the heavily guarded safety of the ruling elite, the police responded as they had at Carandiru: by sending death squads through the favelas and assassinating random slum-dwellers. Suspiciously, the police revised the total civilian body count down from 109 to 79, of whom 34 are acknowledged to have been killed by death squads.[13]

Bus 174 also presents images of the prisons and the appalling conditions endured by the likes of Sandro, who was interned many times in the years prior to the hijacking. One of his cells was 40º C and so overcrowded that half the inmates had to stand so the other half could sit. In the documentary, prisoners in cramped cells denounce the state for its negligence, corruption and injustice. Once again the assumption is that Brazil’s street kids and favela inhabitants want desperately to be represented and recognised in Brazilian society. This view is explicitly stated by Luis Eduardo Soares, Rio’s former subsecretary of public security, in an interview that is interspersed throughout the film. Audaciously, Soares asserts that this need for acknowledgement is the biggest problem facing street kids today (not hunger or getting shot or brained with rocks while asleep). This position resonates with the strategy of City of Men and indeed, on a macro level, with Brazil’s attempted conversion to a culture economy. In other words, represent the working class in the media and hopefully demands for economic parity will decrease.

The director claims that the film reopened debate about the hijacking, this time creating discussion about the reasons for Sandro’s action, instead of vilifying him as a drugged-up hoodlum. However, without addressing the basic material needs of the population and curbing the murderous domination of the police-gang state repressive apparatus such debate is likely to remain sterile.

Brazilian culture minister Gilberto Gil points to the 1 trillion 300 billion US dollars in revenue generated by global ‘creative industries’ this year and proposes that increased production of cultural exports is the key to prosperity for Brazil.[14] Culture in the favelas has long been profitable. For instance, samba, once a central part of favela life, was turned into a mainstream commodity and official national culture. Today, samba’s social function in the favelas is mostly fulfilled by ‘Baile Funk’, itself an increasingly popular cultural export. A recent investor-oriented Financial Times article spoke of the atmosphere in Rocinha as ‘like stepping into the tempting chaos of a rock concert’ indicating that Rio’s favelas are gaining a reputation for edgy culture that could attract many more such capitalisations. Gil encourages Brazilians to become cultural producers. We hear the same message in Favela Rising, a documentary by American filmmakers Matt Mochary and Jeff Zimbalist, which zealously deploys the now formulaic MTV-povera aesthetic of City of God (etc). Once again, a collective story about community music group Afro Reggae becomes the tale of one man, Anderson Sá, and his fight to improve life in the favelas. Interviews with Sá carry a clear message – he preaches the salvation of cultural work as the way to pull oneself out of the slums. Artists have long been able to transgress class barriers, but it is unlikely that all the kids Sá would like to save from the trenches of the drug wars can become middle class creative workers. The economic situation in Brazil would not allow for it. Incidentally, the message of City of God is quite similar – Rocket ‘gets out’ precisely because he is lucky enough to land a job as a photographer on the basis that he can get close to the gang action in the favelas. Thus the hypothetical lucky ones become cultural workers that subsist by documenting the lot or selling the culture of the unlucky.

Despite the creative economy line being fed by the Lula administration and the production of new rags-to-cultural-work-riches films (such as recent release 2 Filhos de Francisco, the biggest hit at Brazilian box offices in 20 years), those living in favelas will continue to be portrayed in cultural commodities but are unlikely to benefit from their production. Furthermore, the box office and broadcast hits bringing favela life to middle class Brazilian and western audiences are taking place in a context of growing economic disparity and a ‘drastic diminution of the intersections between the lives of the rich and the poor’.[15] Sao Paulo’s 300 hundred gated communities, serviced by the world’s highest volume of civilian helicopter traffic, and the Rio government’s plan to build a 7 foot wall around several favelas, push the working class further out of sight.[16] As material segregations proliferate in the cities of Brazil, it seems unlikely that the new market for consumer-friendly representations of the favelas will lead to anything more than profits off the backs of those who are, so to speak, providing the content.

[1] Rana Dasgupta, ‘The Sudden Stardom of the Third-World City’, http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0603/msg00031.html

[2] The richest 10% of Brazil owns between 48% to over 50% of the nation’s wealth while the poorest 10% own 1%.

[3] Barry Schwabsky, ‘Art from Brazil in New York’, Artforum, Summer, 1995, http://linkme2.net/9j

[4] ‘Evoking the threat of a tiny urban foco of Marxist guerillas, the military razed 80 favelas and evicted almost 140,000 poor people from the hills overlooking Rio. With financial support from USAID, other favelas were later demolished to clear the way for industrial expansion or to “beautify” the borders of upper income areas. Although the authorities failed in their goal of eliminating all “slums within Rio within a decade”, the dictatorships ignited conflicts between bourgeois neighbourhoods and the favelas, and between the police and slum youth, which continue to rage three decades later.’ Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, Verso, London, p. 108.

[5] In Brazil today ‘98% of prison inmates lived in poor or modest economic conditions prior to their arrest’. Marie-Eve Sylvestre, ‘Crime, Law & Society – Exploring the Relationship Between Crime, Punitive Practices, Poverty and Social Exclusion in Contemporary Societies’, Harvard Law School, http://www.law.harvard.edu/academics/graduate/sjd_candidates/marie-evesylvestre/syllabus.doc

[6] ‘Conditions in the prisons included systematic torture and no basic amenities (mattresses, linens, blankets, soap)’, Elizabeth Leeds, ‘Cocaine and Parallel Polities in the Brazilian Urban Periphery: Constraints on Local-Level Democratization’, Latin American Research Review, Vol. 31, 1996, p.54.

Comando Vermelho orchestrated a series of attacks on Rio’s middle class neighbourhoods during the same week that City of God won the BAFTA for best editing. The gang told the press they were retaliating against ‘oppressive and cowardly’ policing in the slums and politicians’ violence against the poor.Would this also qualify as a plea for recognition? ‘Rio gangs cast violent shadow over carnival’, The Guardian, http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/2-25-2003-36272.asp

[7] Elizabeth Leeds, op. cit., p.54.

[8] Hector Benoit, ‘Brazil: The social contradictions underlying the violent eruption in Sao Paulo’, World Socialist Web Site, May 2006, http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/may2006/braz-m18_prn.shtml

[9] Elizabeth Leeds, op. cit., p. 48-49