Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere (26 page)

In Athens, Tehran and then spectacularly across North Africa and the Middle East, people who had never heard of
The Coming Insurrection
‘found each other' and acted in ways that conformed to its imperatives. They formed ‘communes' of a type many anarchists might find difficult to imagine: ‘communes' of Google executives, rebel army officers, off-duty cops, Obama campaign staffers; communes of the non-political and the unschooled. Strangest of all, communes of people who had no intention of fighting for communism.

It is something of a paradox that the only mainstream media figure in the US to notice the book—and to understand the importance of its message—was Glenn Beck. In July 2009, Beck warned viewers of Fox News:

The Invisible Committee … want to bring down capitalism and the Western way of life. This started in France and started to spread to countries like Greece and Iceland, where people are out of work, out of money and out of patience. Now, it's about to come here to America.

That is the spectre: that the insurrectionary wave becomes linked to mass disillusion with the economic system and leads to an inchoate struggle for something different. As with Marx and Engels, the bohe-mian desperadoes who first imagined it stand way to the left of what the mass of people actually want; but they have still captured what's in the air.

The endgame is dictated by economics

The revolutionary wave of 1848 ended in defeat: all the monarchies under threat survived, except the French, which upgraded to Empire status. But it nevertheless ushered in modernity. Napoleon III industrialized France; Prussia unified Germany. In Italy the republican radicals of 1848 would go on to refight the war of independence, unifying Italy as a kingdom by 1861. The age of Balzac gave way to the age of Zola, the age of secret societies to the age of trade unions.

But it is not clear what, even if defeated, 2011 will leave behind. The masses in Tahrir chanted: ‘Bread, Freedom, Social Justice'—and the ‘social justice agenda' seems pervasive. So too does democracy: it will be difficult in future for any Western policymaker to argue that a certain race, culture or religion makes authoritarianism ‘durable'.

Everything depends on the outcome of the economic crisis. Before 2008, globalization ‘delivered' in a rough-and-ready way to the poor of the developing world. It dragged one billion people out of rural poverty and into urban slums, and created an extra 1.5 billion waged workers. It provided access to life-changing technology. And it offset the decline in prosperity and status for the manual workers of the rich world with unlimited access to credit. At the same time it made the rich of every country richer, and inequality greater—even in the developing world, where real incomes rose.

If the West's economy now flatlines—suffering a decade of stagnation, as Japan did in the 1990s—the whole deal is off. As HSBC economist Stephen King put it:

With the West now in economic permafrost, paper wealth is vulnerable to loss … Any plausible resolution to the current financial crisis must involve burden-sharing on a scale not seen since the 1930s. Unemployment, defaults, inflation, currency crises, stock-market collapses, austerity: all these are consistent with the new, lower, level of economic activity and are not unique to any one country or part of the world.
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All of which means that the aspiration for social justice will depend on the economy's ability deliver it.

Because 1848 delivered economic progress—almost independently of the actions of the main players—republican socialism died out, to be replaced by respectable trade unionism and social democracy. Marx went back to the library and stayed there for decades. Flaubert's Frédéric Moreau fled the barricades, travelled the world and, like many of the youth of 1848, ‘resigned himself to the stagnation of his mind and the apathy of his heart'.

Industrialization delivered a rising standard of life to the masses, and, if not the democracy they had fought for, at least an element of democratization from above. And it civilized the city, replacing slums with boulevards.

What becomes of the present wave of revolts—political, social, intellectual and moral—now depends completely on what the global economy delivers. If it is nothing but heartache and penury, we are in the middle of a perfect storm.

In these postmodern times we have Glenn Beck to warn us of the dangers of contagion; in 1848 they had Alexis de Tocqueville. The speech he made to the French Assembly, just days before the insurrection, has an eerie resonance today:

I believe right now that we are sleeping on a volcano. Can you not sense by a sort of instinctive intuition … that the earth is trembling again in Europe? Can you not feel the wind of revolution in the air?
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10

‘We Will Barricade': Slum Dwellers versus the Super-Rich

Gapan City, Philippines, 2011.
The bridge stretches a couple of hundred metres across a river and some rice fields. Water buffalo nuzzle the vegetation. The air hangs, stifling, somewhere between humidity and rain. Occasionally, from one of the battered jeeps crossing the bridge, somebody heaves a plastic rubbish sack over the rails without changing gear.

I stand on that bridge for half an hour, watching fishermen cast their nets and bee-eaters dipping between the reeds, before I notice the squatter camp below.

I can count more than fifty homes: some are shacks, some made of breeze blocks. They are wedged beneath the bridge, forming an unofficial street. Though the shacks are topped with corrugated iron, the most effective roof is the bridge, which provides shelter during the monsoon. What doesn't help them is the river, which, says Len-len, flash-floods twice a year. She points to a mark on her porch where the water reached last time. It is three metres high.

‘We bought this place for 50,000 pesos [$1,100],' Len-len tells me. ‘The family that sold it to us moved on to Manila.'

Len-len is thirty-one years old, gap-toothed and striking, in a moth-eaten pink t-shirt, faded grey track-pants and ancient flip-flops. In another world—if the gap tooth issue could be solved—Len-len would be one of those women they pick to be PA to the chief exec. The reason she's talking to me—while the others hide their faces behind their hands—is that she's gutsy:

My husband works as a farm hand. I don't have a job. We have four children. He earns 150 pesos [$3] a day, but that's on the days he gets work. We moved here because we had an argument with our relatives: my family has always worked the land but we never owned any. If we knew anybody in Manila, we would go there and look for work—but we don't.

These are the Philippines' rural poor. The kids are thin, their legs dotted with sores; the crowd that's formed around me has too many nut-brown oldsters with smiles crazed by whatever hooch they're on. And too many people snigger when Len-len tells me she has no job:

‘It's hard here, sir. The local government keeps threatening to move us on. But they do nothing for us. There's no work on the land, not regular work. We can only afford rice and, if we've anything left, a bit of meat.'

Her home is clean, but with few possessions. In the kitchen there is a five-litre water container, empty, on a stand: it costs 60 pesos ($1.35) for five litres, which last three days. Fresh water alone costs Len-len's family one-seventh of their daily income—but that still gives them less than two litres per day between six people. In this heat, an adult can sweat two litres in an hour.

Despite the temporary and ramshackle nature of the camp, someone has run bare electrical wires into the shack and Len-len pays a monthly bill for it: 700 pesos, or more than four days' wages. But not all days bring wages.

Beneath the cleanliness and the proud attitude, what lingers just under the surface is shame. This camp, a couple of miles outside a bus-tling rural town, has a biblical bleakness. Its inhabitants are surrounded by fields which, twice a year, produce the staple rice crop. But they don't own the fields. They own their bodies, a few tattered clothes and some irrational inner hope that maybe their kids can escape this life. It is like Steinbeck without heroes—unless you count Len-len: ‘I wanted to become a security guard, sir. Lady security guard. I went for one day's training. But then my money ran out so I can't complete the course.'

Do the kids eat every day? ‘It's no problem, sir,' she says with an awkward smile.

What's driving them from the land is a mixture of rural poverty plus climate change. Typhoons smash trees down with increasing frequency; the rice harvest—the crop needs 110 days of sunshine—is becoming volatile.

The farmers nearby tell me they could solve the problem by planting rain-resistant GM rice. But that costs money; and, says farming folk-lore, once you're borrowing from a bank you're a slave. At least with the traditional seed next year's crop comes free: they scrunch the seed, dry, a desiccated handful of hope for the next harvest.

But for financial whizz-kids in the global commodity markets, failing rice crops are good: they drive the world price higher. Hedge funds have built entire strategies on the wager that food and land prices will rise inexorably. And as investors piled into commodity indexes at the height of the credit bubble, say Princeton economists Tang and Xiong, wholesale prices started to fluctuate—in response not to the supply and demand of food itself, but to the supply and demand of speculative money.
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Right now the supply of speculative money is high, and so is the price of rice. The wholesale price is now 32 pesos per kilo—approaching once again its 2008 high of 35 pesos. Ten years ago it was half that. So, without a government subsidy to fix the retail price, Len-len would go hungry.

Soon, she will do what tens of millions of the rural poor have done already: leave the land and move to a mega-city to live in a slum and look for work. She will live in a shack just like this, but it will be more cramped, wedged in by others like it. Instead of the viridian and lime of the paddy fields, she will live in a landscape whose colours are predominantly rust and grey.

For, horrific as they are, the slums of Manila—as in all the mega-cities of the world—are a makeshift solution to rural poverty.

The tunnel dwellers of San Miguel

Estero de
San Miguel, Manila.
There is a long curve of grey water and, along both sides, as far as the eye can see, shacks, trash, washing and grey tin, bits of wood and scraps of cloth, rats and children. At the water's edge lies a flotsam of multicoloured plastic rubbish. This is the Estero de San Miguel, the front line in an undeclared war between Manila's rich and poor.

Seen from the bridge it shocks me, and everybody with me, into silence. When you enter a slum, no matter how many times you've done it, there is that doom-laden feeling of plummeting, helpless, such as you feel when somebody has just died: for what you are seeing in a slum is a form of death. Not the death of hope, but of possibility.

Mena Cinco, a community leader here, volunteers to take me in—but only about fifty yards. After that she cannot guarantee my safety. Mena is short and very determined; she wears some kind of organization logo on her polo-shirt that I am not really paying much attention to.

From the bridge there is a ladder into somewhere gloomy. At the bottom of it Mena reveals the central mystery of the Estero de San Miguel: a long tunnel four feet wide, dark except for the occasional naked bulb. It's like an old coal-mine, with rickety joists, shafts of light, puddles of water on the floor. The tunnel is lined by doorways: front doors of the homes of about 6,000 people.

We knock on the first door that's ajar. We step into a room about ten feet by six, laminated from floor to ceiling with blown-up photographs of a tulip field. There's a TV and a computer, a teddy bear hanging from the ceiling: a woman with a toddler, another woman with not many teeth, and a teenage girl whose homework we've interrupted. Off the main room, forming an L-shape, is a corridor with a one-ring gas stove and a toilet at the end. The teenager sleeps in the corridor and the toothless woman in a tiny loft above; husband, wife and toddler sleep in the tulip room. The husband, Mena explains, is a driver for a Chinese family and constantly at work. They've lived in these rooms for twenty years: ‘But you see we have solidarity, social capital. They are happy, the kid is in school.'

A few feet farther along the tunnel there's another door ajar. Oliver Baldera comes blinking to it, pulling on his shirt as he wakes up. On the floor behind him are his four kids, eating ice cream; his wife, also pulling on clothes, now joins us and they all stand at the door, very chirpy. They do not invite me into the room: about eight feet by eight, it is their entire living space and appears to contain everything they own: a television, four bowls of ice cream, a light bulb, a mattress and the clothes they are wearing. ‘We've been here more than ten years,' Baldera tells me:

There's no choice. I'm a carpenter in the construction industry. We came from Mindanao. We moved because of the poverty. It's easier to get a job here, and I can earn 400 pesos a day. I can send the kids to school and they eat three times a day—but it's not enough. I need more space.

‘But they're happy,' Mena chips in. ‘Notice the father has bought them ice cream.'

Farther along there's a shaft of daylight and a bunch of kids splashing about in an inflatable pool, wedged between crates of old bottles and a crumbling wall. Mena makes them sing. A kid comes up to me; he's called Paul. Me too, I say. What's it like living here? Mena mutters something to him in his own language: ‘Happy,' he says. And smiles.

This is a place where you cannot stride forward confidently for fear of hitting your head or bruising your elbow: people pick their way along, and creep, and shuffle. You cannot go to the toilet without standing in a queue; sex between man and wife has to take place within breathing distance of their kids, and earshot of twenty other families.