[Marxism] RE: Planet of Slums

["Tony Abdo" <gojack10@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

The article posted by Lou, Platnet of Slums by Mike Davis, highlights the
changing environment which the working class now finds itself living in.
Hypercities replacing ravaged countryside is becoming the norm.  And it also
highlights that the environment of the giant cities will be more and more
that of a gigiantic slum, where the working class will be largely only
marginally employed.  How different that is from the idealized concept of
the working class held by orthodox marxists, like those residing in the US
SWP for just one tiny example.  Because the working class of the future may
well consist of only about half of it employed, even in 'normal' times.

And how different the main opponents to marxists in the working class from
those conceptialized by orthodox marxist sects!  They invisionalize
themselves fighting secular labor bureaucrats to gain the upper hand amongst
a relatively highly skilled block of employed industrial workers. But the
real core of workers will be marginalized and often very dependent on
marginalized informal market employment, where friendship with a neighbor of
two might be the only difference from one's family starving. This is why
Pentacostalism and Islam spring up, because they provide a network of
privatized (in a manner of speaking) social services, that neither marxists
nor capitalists are too willing to provide, or able to provide.

An article that should be a real prod to do some thinking about how working
class organization must be done in the years ahead. What will it take to
vitally compete with Fundamentalist Chrisitans and Muslims for leadership
within the international working class?  Maybe the idea of SOLIDARITY needs
an entirely new set of definitions for marxism to move forward into having
success in the new landscape of world capitalism?

Tony Abdo
```````````````````````````````
the concluding portion from the Planet of Slums article by Mike Davis

Indeed, for the moment at least, Marx has yielded the historical stage to
Mohammed and the Holy Ghost. If God died in the cities of the industrial
revolution, he has risen again in the postindustrial cities of the
developing world. The contrast between the cultures of urban poverty in the
two eras is extraordinary. As Hugh McLeod has shown in his magisterial study
of Victorian working-class religion, Marx and Engels were largely accurate
in their belief that urbanization was secularizing the working class.
Although Glasgow and New York were partial exceptions, ?the line of
interpretation that associates working-class detachment from the church with
growing class consciousness is in a sense incontestable?. If small churches
and dissenting sects thrived in the slums, the great current was active or
passive disbelief. Already by the 1880s, Berlin was scandalizing foreigners
as ?the most irreligious city in the world? and in London, median adult
church attendance in the proletarian East End and Docklands by 1902 was
barely 12 per cent (and that mostly Catholic). [94] In Barcelona, of course,
an anarchist working class sacked the churches during the Semana Trágica,
while in the slums of St. Petersburg, Buenos Aires and even Tokyo, militant
workers avidly embraced the new faiths of Darwin, Kropotkin and Marx.

Today, on the other hand, populist Islam and Pentecostal Christianity (and
in Bombay, the cult of Shivaji) occupy a social space analogous to that of
early twentieth-century socialism and anarchism. In Morocco, for instance,
where half a million rural emigrants are absorbed into the teeming cities
every year, and where half the population is under 25, Islamicist movements
like ?Justice and Welfare?, founded by Sheik Abdessalam Yassin, have become
the real governments of the slums: organizing night schools, providing legal
aid to victims of state abuse, buying medicine for the sick, subsidizing
pilgrimages and paying for funerals. As Prime Minister Abderrahmane
Youssoufi, the Socialist leader who was once exiled by the monarchy,
recently admitted to Ignacio Ramonet, ?We [the Left] have become
embourgeoisified. We have cut ourselves off from the people. We need to
reconquer the popular quarters. The Islamicists have seduced our natural
electorate. They promise them heaven on earth.? An Islamicist leader, on the
other hand, told Ramonet: ?confronted with the neglect of the state, and
faced with the brutality of daily life, people discover, thanks to us,
solidarity, self-help, fraternity. They understand that Islam is humanism.?
[95]

The counterpart of populist Islam in the slums of Latin America and much of
sub-Saharan Africa is Pentecostalism. Christianity, of course, is now, in
its majority, a non-Western religion (two-thirds of its adherents live
outside Europe and North America), and Pentecostalism is its most dynamic
missionary in cities of poverty. Indeed the historical specificity of
Pentecostalism is that it is the first major world religion to have grown up
almost entirely in the soil of the modern urban slum. With roots in early
ecstatic Methodism and African-American spirituality, Pentecostalism ?awoke?
when the Holy Ghost gave the gift of tongues to participants in an
interracial prayer marathon in a poor neighbourhood of Los Angeles (Azusa
Street) in 1906. Unified around spirit baptism, miracle healing, charismata
and a premillennial belief in a coming world war of capital and labour,
early American Pentecostalism?as religious historians have repeatedly
noted?originated as a ?prophetic democracy? whose rural and urban
constituencies overlapped, respectively, with those of Populism and the iww.
[96] Indeed, like Wobbly organizers, its early missionaries to Latin America
and Africa ?lived often in extreme poverty, going out with little or no
money, seldom knowing where they would spend the night, or how they would
get their next meal.? [97] They also yielded nothing to the iww in their
vehement denunciations of the injustices of industrial capitalism and its
inevitable destruction.

Symptomatically, the first Brazilian congregation, in an anarchist
working-class district of São Paulo, was founded by an Italian artisan
immigrant who had exchanged Malatesta for the Spirit in Chicago. [98] In
South Africa and Rhodesia, Pentecostalism established its early footholds in
the mining compounds and shanty towns; where, according to Jean Comaroff,
?it seemed to accord with indigenous notions of pragmatic spirit forces and
to redress the depersonalization and powerlessness of the urban labour
experience.? [99] Conceding a larger role to women than other Christian
churches and immensely supportive of abstinence and frugality,
Pentecostalism?as R. Andrew Chesnut discovered in the baixadas of Belém?has
always had a particular attraction to ?the most immiserated stratum of the
impoverished classes?: abandoned wives, widows and single mothers. [100]
Since 1970, and largely because of its appeal to slum women and its
reputation for being colour-blind, it has been growing into what is arguably
the largest self-organized movement of urban poor people on the planet.
[101]

Although recent claims of ?over 533 million Pentecostal/charismatics in the
world in 2002? are probably hyperbole, there may well be half that number.
It is generally agreed that 10 per cent of Latin America is Pentecostal
(about 40 million people) and that the movement has been the single most
important cultural response to explosive and traumatic urbanization. [102]
As Pentecostalism has globalized, of course, it has differentiated into
distinct currents and sociologies. But if in Liberia, Mozambique and
Guatemala, American-sponsored churches have been vectors of dictatorship and
repression, and if some us congregations are now gentrified into the
suburban mainstream of fundamentalism, the missionary tide of Pentecostalism
in the Third World remains closer to the original millenarian spirit of
Azusa Street. [103] Above all, as Chesnut found in Brazil, ?Pentecostalism .
. . remains a religion of the informal periphery? (and in Belém, in
particular, ?the poorest of the poor?). In Peru, where Pentecostalism is
growing almost exponentially in the vast barriadas of Lima, Jefrey Gamarra
contends that the growth of the sects and of the informal economy ?are a
consequence of and a response to each other?. [104] Paul Freston adds that
it ?is the first autonomous mass religion in Latin America . . . Leaders may
not be democratic, but they come from the same social class?. [105]

In contrast to populist Islam, which emphasizes civilizational continuity
and the trans-class solidarity of faith, Pentecostalism, in the tradition of
its African-American origins, retains a fundamentally exilic identity.
Although, like Islam in the slums, it efficiently correlates itself to the
survival needs of the informal working class (organizing self-help networks
for poor women; offering faith healing as para-medicine; providing recovery
from alcoholism and addiction; insulating children from the temptations of
the street; and so on), its ultimate premise is that the urban world is
corrupt, injust and unreformable. Whether, as Jean Comaroff has argued in
her book on African Zionist churches (many of which are now Pentecostal),
this religion of ?the marginalized in the shantytowns of neocolonial
modernity? is actually a ?more radical? resistance than ?participation in
formal politics or labour unions?, remains to be seen. [106] But, with the
Left still largely missing from the slum, the eschatology of Pentecostalism
admirably refuses the inhuman destiny of the Third World city that Slums
warns about. It also sanctifies those who, in every structural and
existential sense, truly live in exile.

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