Dousing the reader with a firehose of facts and inconvenient truths, Davis quantifies a nightmare. His offering is in the context of poverty in what is usually called the “global south” … which I find to be an inaccurate term based on an outdated, Eurocentric view of the world. We have only to compare economic conditions in New Zealand + Australia, in South Africa, in Argentina and Chile, with those in the Congo, Laos, or Venezuela, to see the inadequacy of talking about “south” this way. We live on a globe. The conditions being referenced in the expression “the Global South” are those of what used to be called “the Third World” and is now called the “developing” world (though how it is developing or what it is developing into are never interrogated.) Those conditions are generally found nearer to the equator, so it is not precisely north or south but a more deeply insidious and historical geographic dynamic at work. [See Guns Germs and Steel.]
Mike Davis, once called a “maverick scholar”, died in October of 2022. He was an urban theorist, social justice activist, and historian whose brilliant focus was on cities. His subject here is urban slums, because the world population – having just officially reached eight billion – is increasingly packed into cities. Hundreds of them around the planet – Jakarta, Phnom Pen and Beijing, Mexico City, Santiago, Guadalajara, Sao Paolo and Buenos Aires, Beirut, Gaza, and Sadr City, Mumbai, Kolkata, and Dhaka, Lagos, Khartoum and Capetown, Ulaan Bataar, Timosoara … and yes, also places like Lisbon, Naples, -- are surrounded by this thing called “slums”, which contain the surplus population that society has no use for and cannot integrate. These are often unregulated collections of squatters pushed outside the normal economies of their countries and into a very precarious life in “informal” housing and work as well as:
— people displaced from agricultural areas that have been industrialized
— people escaping from places hit by the extreme effects of climate change
— people driven to flee their homes by war and violence.
As this book unfolds I experience, rather than a numbing, a growing outrage at how this surplus labor has been treated as “garbage” to be swept aside when it is inconvenient to development. The consequences of imperialism and colonialism are still operating in Africa, southeast Asia, Latin America and the fragments of the Soviet empire, the former “second world”. Davis illustrates how postcolonial states have failed on promises to the urban poor. He looks at the past 50 years in which global development goals – essentially neo-liberal economic dogma baked into the foreign policy of wealthy nations – forced a particular agenda onto this so-called “global south.” This agenda to make the world safe for business consisted of development loans which were massively skimmed by wealthy elites or benefitted primarily the middle classes. The countries were transformed into debtors with no way of paying their debt except by obeying mandates such as privatization and austerity, which primarily hurts the bottom sectors of a society. Enforcement of this agenda has been executed through the institutions of The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund via mechanisms like “structural adjustment programs”. It has been going on for decades, but we saw sudden outrage when the European Union some years ago imposed something similar on Greece, a country full of “white” people.
Davis details how the burden of all this falls most especially on women and children, the most vulnerable stratum of a society. What has developed through a combination of such policies and a struggle among the poorest, is a tiered system in which there are various levels of “landlords” and renters, layers of exploitation. Some of this sounds like a description of the circles of hell. The thing to remember before we despair is that this is a system built by humans, so it is possible for us to dismantle it. That of course will meet with fierce resistance from those who profit the most from it. But many more of us benefit somewhat indirectly (in the form of cheap consumer goods and resources to maintain our first world lifestyles) from such global conditions.
The recent dreadful example is the passing of a budget in the U.S. Congress in December 2022 giving $850 billion to the Defense Department, while at the same time Republicans stubbornly refused to authorize less than $ 20billion to renew the Child tax credit and related programs that had pulled millions of children out of poverty. What can one say to this kind of brutality? It will continue until we elect politicians who spend less time obsessing and scheming to stay in power and more time trying to improve the lives of the people of their own nation.
Worldwide populations are afflicted and die from preventable diseases due to polluted drinking water and poor sanitation which their governments have a responsibility to provide, but do not. Davis writes “the idea of an interventionist state strongly committed to social housing and job development seems either a hallucination or a bad joke, because governments long ago abdicated any serious effort.” Global rhetoric focuses on “development”, and mounts “wars” on drug trade and consumption, on crime, and on terrorism, without ever acknowledging the daily violence of the poverty, ignorance, and despair from which those things emerge.
Congo-Zaire where 65% of the population is malnourished … and 20% is HIV positive has, as Davis writes, “been wrecked by … kleptocracy, Cold War geopolitics, structural adjustment, and chronic civil war.” The Mobuto dictatorship was allowed, thanks to the USA, World Bank, IMF and some help from the French government, to plunder Zaire for 32 years -- Just as King Leopold of Belgium was allowed by the great powers to do the same for 35 years at the end of the 19th century and start of the 20th. (see my piece here on King Leopold’s Ghost.)
Like many powerful but fact-packed books, this one needs a wider audience. And I sympathize that people have so little capacity to read these days. They are stressed just coping and surviving, much competes for their attention, they can only read so much. There is a need for some kind of IBIS, an Important Book Index Summary. I hope this work of mine can fill part of that need.
I am adding this book because it is a perfect addition of a fiction work to the theme:
The Slum by Aluisio Azevedo. This powerful book, published in 1890, is an oratorio, with choruses and scattered solos, soliloquies and quiet fades as love and hate, greed and self-pity lead the cast of characters into actions whose consequences they can hardly anticipate– misery and joy, addiction, prostitution, murder, wealth and poverty, loyalty and complete betrayal. In a searing portrait of Brazil in the 1830s, the Slum illustrates the theme and embodies the very source of Planet of Slums.
A current of life energy flows through the narrative as people seek to survive or flourish in a tumultuous world barely beginning to untangle itself from the tentacles of colonialism and slavery, an environment ripe with the fervid hopes of people flocking to a new continent to seek their fortunes … or meet their own destruction.
A brilliant foreword by David H. Rosenthal situates this novel in the context of world literature, where it absolutely belongs. Azevedo deserves a place among the widely recognized 19th century novelists of Latin America, such as Machado de Assis; Rosenthal indicates how this is truly “American” literature, which should nudge us toward an understanding of how the history and the karma of the Americas – North and South -- are linked.
In 1895, Azevedo having given up on literature joined the diplomatic service, and wrote nothing more for the last 18 years of his life. But we have this work, his masterpiece; it’s a treasure chest opening to us the realm of real History as lived by those who people this work.