Untitled - Rebel Studies Library

I
8
A Surp! us Humanity?
A proletariat without factories, workshops, and work, and
without bosses, in the muddle of the odd jobs, drowning in
survival and leading an existence like a path through embers.
Patrick Chamoiseau1
The brutal tectonics of neoliberal globalization since 1978 are analogous
to the catastrophic processes that shaped a "Third World" in the
first place, during the era of late-Victorian imperialism (1870-1900). At
the end of the nineteenth century, the forcible incorporation into the
world market of the great subsistence peasantries of Asia and Africa
entailed the famine deaths of millions and the uprooting of tens of
millions more from traditional tenures. The end result (in Latin
America as well) was rural "semi-proletarianization," the creation of a
huge global class of immiserated semi-peasants and farm laborers
lacking existential security of subsistence. As a result, the twentieth
)century became an age not of urban revolutions, as classical Marxism
)had imagined, but of epochal rural uprisings and peasant-based wars of
,
national liberation.2
Structural adjustment, it would appear, has recently worked an
equally fundamental reshaping of human futures. As the authors of
1 Patrick Chamoiseau, Texaco, New York 1997, p. 314.
2 See my Late Victorian Holocausts: EI Nino Famines and the Making if the Third
World, London 2001, especially pp. 206-09.
A SURPLUS HUMANITY? 175
The Challenge of Slums conclude: "Instead of being a focus for growth
and prosperity, the cities have become a dumping ground for a surplus
p9pulation working"in uns-killed, unprotected and low-wage informal
sr;-Icmdustrlesand trade." "The rise of [ilils J informal sector," they
dcl; l}irgiY;- a A1l:;:.t !l(r=,::." Se Brazilin
sociologists call this process - analogous to the semi-proletarianization
of landless peasants -passive proletarianization, involving the "dissolving
of 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."3
This informal working class, without legal recognition or rights, has
important historical antecedents. In modern European history!l1?les,
even more than Dublin or London's East End, ",:, the eEl,ar oEan
urban informal econgmy. In this "most shocking city of the nineteenth
cenMY7''F;k--Sowden calls it in his brilliant studY,_ .. "chronic
super-abundance of labour" survived by miracles of economic
p C;--Jd; ;nd -the--c(;;; ;tant subdivision of subsistence niches. A
structural dearth of formal jobs - permanent unemployment was estimated
at 40 percent - was transformed into an overwhelming spectacle
of informal competition. The street scene in Risorgimiento Naples
(described below by Snowden) was a colorful but tragic anticipation of
contemporary Lima or Kinshasa.
It was characteristic of the ailing local economy that tens of thousands
of people subsisted by peddling their wares amidst the filth of the city
lanes and alleys. It was these impoverished entrepreneurs who gave
Naples its feverish activity as a great emporium. These men and women
were not workers, but "ragged-trousered capitalists" who filled a bewil­
dering variety of roles that baft1ed all efforts at quantification. A local
authority termed them "micro-industrialists." The elite of the streets
were newspaper vendors who practiced only one trade year-round and
enjoyed a stable renumeration. The other huxters were "gypsy mer­
chants," authentic nomads of the marketplace who moved from activity
to activity as opportunity dictated. There were sellers of vegetables,
3 Challenge, pp. 40, 46; Thomas Mitschein, Henrique Miranda, and Mariceli
Paraense, Urbanizarao Selva gem e Proletarizarao Passiva na AmazrYnia - 0 Caso de Belem,
Belem 1989 (quoted in Browder and Godfrey, Rainforest Cities, p. 132).