Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere (28 page)

‘Okay, if the total cost of rehousing slum dwellers in situ is 30 per cent of GDP, well, I calculate we lose about 30 per cent of the country's wealth through corruption: if we didn't have corruption, we wouldn't need to tolerate slums.'

He sees the Estero de San Miguel as a test case. If he can make his plans work there, the approach could be applied to every one of the city's riverine slums. So the stakes are huge.

Father Norberto Carcellar, who has worked his whole life with Manila's poor, thinks the elites are engaged in a monumental exercise of self-deception over slum clearance:

We have to recognize the value slum dwellers deliver to the city. These are the ones who drive your car, clean your house, run your store. If these people are cleared from the city, the city will die. The slum dwellers add social, political and economic value to the city.

That sentiment would have seemed alien to our grandparents' generation. I can still hear mine, brought up Edwardian poverty in a coal and cotton town in northern England, spitting out the word ‘slum' with disgust. For them, slums meant dog-eat-dog: the dirty world where solidarity could not flourish, where people lived like animals and brutalized their kids.

But thirty years of globalization have produced something in the slums of the global south that defies that stereotype. And with Mena Cinco at my side I'm about to witness it.

Facebook in the passageways

Estero de San
Miguel, dusk.
As it is Saturday night, there is a full complement of beefy guys with sticks, rice-flails and flashlights: the volunteer police force of the Estero de San Miguel. With Mena—her t-shirt I now realize identifies her as the ‘captain' of the slum—I re-enter the Estero down an alleyway opposite a McDonald's. From this entry point you would hardly know the slum was there. As the alley narrows and jinks around, suddenly I am in a novel by Charles Dickens.

On a narrow bridge, a man squats over a barbecue. Because of the smoke I don't see it is a bridge until I'm on it, or that below is a canal, about two metres wide. The dwellings are built so close that the mothers peering out of upstairs bedrooms, made of wooden boxes, could shake their neighbours' hands. If you decided to remake
Oliver
Twist
as an expressionist movie, and this was the set design, you would sack the designer for making it too grotesque.

We head down into the tunnel, stooping now: it's less than five feet high here. After passing a few guys playing poker, and a stray chicken, I come to a store run by Agnes Cabagauan. It sells the same things as every slum store in the world: sachets of Silvikrin and Head & Shoulders, the Filipino version of Marlboros, lighters; tiny plastic bags of oil, fish and salt—enough for one meal only.

‘My parents helped me set up the store to pay for my education,' Agnes tells me. What is she studying? ‘Business Admin. I have a degree. Actually I also have a day job in a large corporation, coding in a sales department.'

But you live here? ‘Yes. I was born here.' She is twenty-two years old.

Then we run into Mena's son: he's an engineering student. And as we cross over another bridge, the unmistakable whizz and pop of something digital comes blasting across the stagnant water: it's an Internet café.

Nine computers are crammed into a harshly lit plywood room. A dog yaps around, some kids are on Facebook, others are playing online poker. One young woman is doing her CV; another is engrossed in a multiplayer dancing game called ‘Audition'. She too is at college, she tells me, flipping nonchalantly between her BlackBerry and the game. ‘Business Admin?' Yup.

In the space of a hundred yards I've met three graduates, a DIY police force and the social media revolution. And as I become used to the smoke, the wailing and chatter of children, the chickens, the confined space, I've learned what one billion people around the world have had to learn: it is not so bad.

‘Other places have prostitution: we don't,' says Mena. ‘We get drunks and a bit of drug-taking, but it's under control. We look out for each other; we can see everything that happens; it's one big family. The main job for the volunteer police is to look out for arsonists.'

Settlements under threat of clearance have a habit of getting burned down, on the orders—the slum dwellers believe—of the authorities or the landlords.

In the five-foot high niche that is her living room and kitchen, Mena discourses on the finer details of social policy until at last I ask the question I should have asked when I first met her: how did she become so politically literate? ‘I majored in political science at the University of Manila.'

What slum dwellers have produced—not just here but in Cairo, Nairobi, Rio and La Paz—is something the slum-clearance Tsars of yesteryear would not recognize: the orderly, solidaristic slum. And the debate, at the global level, is no longer about how fast to tear these places down, but how to meet the rapidly developing aspirations of highly educated people living in shacks.

To those who dream that as capitalism develops it will eradicate slums, Cameron Sinclair says dream on:

You can't fight something that has a stronger model than yourself. It's never going to happen again. The fact of it is that if you tried to do it in some of these informal settlements they could take out the city. They could march on the central business district and it's game over.

Nevertheless it seems, amid the gloom and trash of the San Miguel slum, that to leave these places as they are is a gigantic cop-out. What the global authorities are really saying is not that they're impossible to clear but that they've become essential to a certain form of capitalism.

The cheap labour of the slum dweller undercuts the organized labour of the core workforce and—given two or three decades—shrinks it to a barely organizable minority. In the process the slum dwellers become the core workforce. Meanwhile, the functions of the state change: in the Keynesian era the state was supposed to care for all, but now, across much of the developing world, it leaves large parts of the urban community to their own devices.

Consequently, the city evolves into a nightmare organism of economic apartheid zones that can coexist quite easily, being economically co-dependent, but which you cannot move between. All you can do is educate yourself and wait for one life-changing bit of good luck. But the global system you are part of is out of your control.

In
The Road to Wigan Pier,
George Orwell describes a coal miner as ‘a sort of grimy caryatid upon whose shoulders nearly everything that is not grimy is supported'. Neoliberal capitalism has turned the slum dwellers into something similar. It is on their shoulders that the rich-world economy of ‘mass luxury' consumption is balanced; it is from the bottle shredders of Cairo that the Chinese sportswear sweatshops get their recycled raw materials; in Nairobi, it's the slum dwellers who troop in at 5 a.m. to pack green beans in factories right next to the airport, so that you'll be able to serve them up for dinner the next day.

And Mena Cinco is not kidding when she insists there is solidarity in the slum. Unlike the ‘dangerous classes' romanticized by the anarchists of the nineteenth century, slum dwellers are part of the modern work-force—albeit semi-submerged, hidden, operating off the books. They are a kind of shadow banking system for the mainstream working class, which nobody cares about until it blows up.

The crystal spirit

It was Friedrich Hayek who said social justice was unachievable and that the inequality and misery produced by capitalism were both moral and logical. What humanity should do, he said, is to ‘suppress the feeling that certain differences of reward are unjust. And we have to recognize that only a system where we tolerate grossly unjust differences of reward is capable of keeping the present population of the world in existence.'
³

What transpired in 2011 was, in this sense, a revolt against Hayek and the principles of selfishness and greed he espoused.

The present system cannot guarantee the existence of 7 billion people on this planet. It cannot even recognize their basic humanity. It can offer the poorest a brutal route out of poverty, but it is paid for by impoverishing the workforce of the west. And it is always conditional, always contingent on growth, which has faltered after 2008 and may not return for years.

Of all the people I met while writing this book, it was Len-len, the woman in the rural shanty town, whose situation seemed most hope-less. The disjunction between her temperament and her circumstance was so extreme that for me she personifies the overwhelming question facing the human race.

It's the same question Orwell asked in 1943, pondering his time in Spain during the Civil War. In the barracks of an anti-fascist militia in Barcelona, he had met a confused Italian volunteer, fascinated by the ability of his superior officers to read a map, and doggedly devoted to libertarian communism. The man's face, Orwell wrote, though shaped by poverty, radiated hope and solidarity: it embodied what he later called the ‘crystal spirit'.

The problem of social justice, Orwell insisted, revolves around a simple question:

Shall people like that Italian soldier be allowed to live the decent, fully human life which is now technically achievable, or shan't they? … I myself believe, perhaps on insufficient grounds, that the common man will win his fight sooner or later, but I want it to be sooner and not later—some time within the next hundred years, say, and not some time within the next ten thousand years. That was the real issue of the Spanish war, and of the last war, and perhaps of other wars yet to come.
⁴

That is the question that swims around my head in the heat of Gapan City. Will Len-len move off the land and find a job? Will she earn enough to feed her kids without having to leave them behind to go work as a housekeeper to some Gulf millionaire? Will the eradication of slum poverty be possible in her lifetime or do we have to wait a hundred years?

Using the methods favoured today, it will take at least a century to drag the rural poor out of their present situation. The process will be brutal, too: from the farm to the slum for one, two or maybe three billion people, and from the slum to where? As with the crimes of Stalinism, it will be rationalized: painful, but necessary, like childbirth.

The imperatives to find an alternative route are not just moral. The economic crisis has begun to collide with the long-term strategic problems we knew were going to come in the twenty-first century, but were not expecting to impact so soon: climate change, energy depletion, population stress.

The events of 2011 showed that ordinary people—the 99 per cent celebrated in the Occupy Wall Street protest—have the ability to reshape their circumstances—to achieve in a day what normal progress achieves in years. The plebeian groups that kicked things off—from Iran in 2009 to Egypt, Libya and Chile in 2011, possess, in fact, a surplus of the most valuable properties on earth: skill, ingenuity and intelligence. Info-capitalism has educated them; social media is allowing them to swap experiences beyond borders. But there is a dangerous dis-connect between the mass of people, especially the young, and the political structures and systems in place.

If we go on as we are, the route out of poverty for billions of people will take generations. Meanwhile, a small elite will go on getting richer. That is the picture that persists, despite the scenes of elation that gripped Cairo, Tunis and Tripoli, despite the occupations of public space from Santiago to Wall Street.

But the events of 2011 show simply this: that no situation is hopeless, and everything is susceptible to change. Against the life-destroying impacts of poverty, inequality and monopolized power, millions of people now realize the truth of what was chanted in Tahrir Square:

When the people decide to live,

Destiny will obey,

Darkness will disappear

And chains will be broken.

11

Spain Redux: Dispatches from Utopia
*

City of Valencia, September 2012.
Paula, the pharmacist, has a sharp diagonal fringe and a grin that suggests she not only understands English but could crack jokes in it if she chose to. But she chooses to speak in Spanish. Because what is happening in Valencia is no fun. The sign on the wall tells the story:

Important information. The government of Valencia owes this pharmacy for all the medicine we have dispensed to you in January, February, March, April and May.

And not just this pharmacy. The government of Valencia—which runs the health system—owes a grand total of half a billion euros to the region's pharmacies. Paula guides me into that back room that exists in all pharmacies, where the prescription drugs are kept. The problem is, now, that there are not many drugs left. ‘Look, this drawer is usually full,' she says, pointing to where the suppositories are kept. ‘Now there are only two packets.' She opens the fridge. ‘Look,' she says, ‘we're down to our last packs of insulin. We just have no money to buy the stock.'

I ask: ‘What happens if several people come in on the same day for insulin?' She makes two fingers walk along the back of her wrist. ‘They have to go around the neighbourhood to see if anybody else has it. It's the same with drugs for heart disease, stroke, anti-retrovirals.'

It is an ordinary pharmacy, clean and white, with the regulation green neon cross outside. Now quite a lot of the patients are having to do something that is, for them, extraordinary: they are having to pay for their medicines. There is a sign on the door explaining the new charges. It's all part of the great story of bankruptcy and disillusion that has swept Spain in the summer of 2012. The government, the regions and the banks are effectively bust.

For the regions the problem is particularly acute. They spend money, but have limited powers to raise it. During the property boom, which has now left Spain insolvent, regions like Valencia were collecting some taxes—but they came mainly from property, and have dried up. Now that source of revenue is gone, they are expecting the central government to provide them with the cash they need. But the central government is in trouble too: it cannot borrow—except at punitive rates. The regions cannot borrow, either. Valencia is in debt to the tune of €25 billion—21 billion to the financial markets, 4 billion in unpaid bills to traders like Paula. Who does she blame? She smiles bitterly from beneath the diagonal fringe: ‘That is a very hard question to answer.'