Planet of Slums

One major development of the 20th century is that cities have become the dumping grounds for a surplus of unskilled and low wage workers. This passive proletarianization dissolves "traditional forms of (re)production, which for the great majority of direct producers does not translate into a salaried position in the formal labor market" (175). This often-unemployed working class gives city economies an abundance of labor without commensurate job opportunities. For example, in Zimbabwe in the early 1990s, 10,000 jobs were created each year, while the workforce increased by 300,000 people per year. The global informal working class (those without trades or hard skills) now numbers over one billion people.

Jan Breman, a researcher of poverty in India and Indonesia, has concluded that upward mobility within this group is largely a myth. Concurring, Davis disputes Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto’s theory that this group is teeming with extralegal entrepreneurs who just need microcredit lines and land titling for squatters to become upwardly mobile. Davis argues that de Soto’s beliefs are full of epistemological fallacies. He accuses de Soto of failing to distinguish between two groups within the informal working class: the intermediate sector, which does contain entrepreneurs, and the community of poor, under-employed laborers. He points out that because much informal labor is done outside of traditional employment structures, workers have few rights in terms of bargaining, contracts, and legal proceedings; moreover, the informality of these jobs ensures the abuse of women and children. Another key point is that contrary to the bootstraps ideologies like de Soto’s, the informal sector does not create jobs through new innovating fields, but through fragmenting already existing work, which subdivides income; moreover, many informal laborers turn to suspect means of subsistence like gambling, pyramid schemes, and lotteries—industries that states have a vested interest in decreasing. Finally, Davis argues that microcredit and cooperative lending have little impact on reducing poverty, while “increasing competition within the informal sector depletes social capital and dissolves self-help networks and solidarities essential to the survival of the very poor—again, especially women and children” (184).

De Soto’s approach ignores the fact that neoliberal policies have created “a living museum of human exploitation” (186), which most severely affects children. In a slum in Dhaka, nearly half of children ages 10 to 14 were working for income and only seven percent of girls and five percent of boys aged five to 16 attended school. Varanasi, the sacred Hindu city, is the capitol of enslaved and indentured children, with over 200,000 children under the age of 14 working, often for tiny loans and cash payments set up after families sold their children to predatory contractors. Even worse than child labor are the industries of child prostitution and organ harvesting.

The city of Kinshasa offers a sobering case study. Fewer than five percent of the city’s inhabitants earn a regular salary because its economy has been destroyed by kleptocracy, Cold War geopolitics, wars, and structural adjustments. The Mobuto dictatorship, which brutalized Congo for 32 years, was sustained by the IMF, World Bank, the US and France, during which time Mobuto borrowed money using the nation’s mineral industries as collateral. The IMF’s SAP made Congo pay off the incurred debts with interest, effectively destroying the civil service as one of its conditions of repayment. When the resulting hyperinflation wrecked the monetary system, many Kinois were forced to bet on horse races, lotteries, and invest in a pyramid scheme secretly controlled by the military. Disasters and violence followed. Although many poor Kinois people sought to self-organize by reconstituting villages, churches, prayer groups, and offering healing communes—many women-led—their efforts are necessarily limited. Moreover, religious fervor has led to cruelties like banishing child “witches.” The plight of Kinshasa shows the wide-reaching and horrific effects of slum life.

In the 1960s, many state leaders and governments saw the growth of slums, poverty, and joblessness as problems that needed attention. In response, the Kennedy administration prescribed ambitious housing programs and land reforms, while Colombia subsidized huge housing projects in many cities. However, this reaction to the growth of slum living did not fit in the neoliberal vision of the future.

Davis wonders whether the largest class of people (the informal worker class that lives in slums) possesses the Marxist historical agency to break their chains and restructure the world. Possibly, less radically, the structure of the current world could be remade to reduce poverty, joblessness, and slum populations in a healthy way.

Most American and European policy think tanks have failed to think of the geopolitical implications of a “planet of slums”—particularly, how these places will factor into the future of warfare. Instead, Davis worries that the Pentagon sees this population as an asset: “with coldblooded lucidity, they now assert that the ‘feral, failed cities’ of the Third World—especially their slum outskirts—will be the distinctive battlespace of the twenty-first century” (205).