Where to Look for a Revolutionary Potential?

[Yoshie Furuhashi <critical.montages@xxxxxxxxx>]

For once, I agree with Slavoj Žižek 100%, as far as the South is
concerned.  What of the North, though?  -- Yoshie

<http://adbusters.org/the_magazine/57/Where_to_look_for_a_revolutionary_potential.html>
Where to look for a revolutionary potential?
by Slavoj Žižek

Today, there are many candidates for the position of "universal
individual," the particular group whose fate stands for the injustice
of today's world: Palestinians, Guantanamo prisoners . . . Palestine
is the site of a potential event precisely because all the standard
'pragmatic' solutions to the Middle East crisis repeatedly fail, so
that a utopian invention of a new space is the only 'realistic'
choice. Furthermore, Palestinians are a good candidate on account of
their paradoxical position of being the victims of the Ultimate
Victims themselves (Jews), which, of course, puts them in an extremely
difficult spot: when they resist, their resistance can immediately be
denounced as a prolongation of anti-Semitism, as a secret solidarity
with the Nazi Final Solution. Indeed, if – as Lacanian Zionists like
to claim – Jews are the objet petit a among nations, the troubling
excess of Western history, how can one resist them with impunity? Is
it possible to be the objet a of objet a itself? It is precisely this
ethical blackmail that one should reject.

However, there is a privileged site in this series: what if the new
proletarian position is that of the inhabitants of slums in the new
megalopolises? The explosive growth of slums in the last decades,
especially in the third world megalopolises from Mexico City and other
Latin American capitals through Africa (Lagos, Chad) to India, China,
Philippines and Indonesia, is perhaps the crucial geopolitical event
of our times. The case of Lagos, the biggest node in the shanty-town
corridor of 70 million people that stretches from Abidjan to Ibadan,
is exemplary here: according to the official sources themselves, about
two-thirds of Lagos' total land mass of 3.6 square kilometers could be
classified as shanties or slums; no one even knows the size of its
population – officially it is six million, but most experts estimate
it at 10 million. Since sometime very soon (or maybe, given the
imprecision of the third world censuses, it has already happened), the
urban population of the Earth will outnumber the rural population, and
since slum inhabitants will compose the majority of the urban
population, we are in no way dealing with a marginal phenomenon.

We are thus witnessing the fast growth of the population outside state
control, living in conditions half outside the law, in terrible need
of the minimal forms of self-organization. Although their population
is composed of marginalized laborers, redundant civil servants and
ex-peasants, they are not simply a redundant surplus: they are
incorporated into the global economy in numerous ways, many of them
working as informal wage workers or self-employed entrepreneurs, with
no adequate health or social security coverage. (The main source of
their rise is the inclusion of the third world countries in the global
economy, with cheap food imports from the first world countries
ruining local agriculture.) They are the true 'symptom' of slogans
like 'Development,' 'Modernization,' and 'World Market.'

No wonder that the hegemonic form of ideology in slums is Pentecostal
Christianity, with its mixture of
charismatic-miracles-and-spectacles-oriented fundamentalism, social
programs like community kitchens, and taking care of children and the
old. While, of course, one should resist the easy temptation to
elevate and idealize the slum dwellers into a new revolutionary class,
one should nonetheless, in Badiou's terms, perceive slums as one of
the few authentic "evental sites" in today's society – the
slum-dwellers are literally a collection of those who are the "part of
no part," the "surnumerary" element of society, excluded from the
benefits of citizenship, the uprooted and dispossessed, those who
effectively "have nothing to lose but their chains." It is effectively
surprising how many features of slum dwellers fit the good old Marxist
determination of the proletarian revolutionary subject: they are
"free" in the double meaning of the word even more than the classic
proletariat ("freed" from all substantial ties, dwelling in a free
space, outside the police regulations of the state); and they are a
large collective, forcibly thrown together, "thrown" into a situation
where they have to invent some mode of being-together, and
simultaneously deprived of any support in traditional ways of life, in
inherited religious or ethnic life-forms.

What one finds in the "really-existing slums" is, of course, a mixture
of improvised modes of social life, from religious fundamentalist
groups held together by a charismatic leader to criminal gangs, up to
germs of new 'socialist' solidarity. The slum dwellers are the
counter-class to the other newly emerging class, the so-called
"symbolic class" (managers, journalists and PR people, academics,
artists, etc.) which is also uprooted and perceives itself as directly
universal (a New York academic has more in common with a Slovene
academic than with blacks in Harlem half a mile from his campus). Is
this the new axis of class struggle, or is the "symbolic class"
inherently split, so that one can make the emancipatory wager on the
coalition between the slum-dwellers and the progressive part of the
symbolic class? What we should be looking for are the signs of the new
forms of social awareness that will emerge from the slum collectives:
they will be the germs of the future.

Slavoj Žižek, Marxist philosopher and psychoanalyst, now lives in
Buenos Aires, Argentina. His latest book is Iraq: The borrowed kettle.
--
Yoshie