Untitled - Rebel Studies Library

184
PLANET OF SLUMS
organizer In Lima, has become something of an urban cargo cult
amongst well-meaning NGOs: "There has been much emphasis placed
on small or micro-enterprises as the magic solution in offering
economic development for the urban poor. Our work over the last 20
years with small businesses, which are multiplying in the mega city,
shows that most of them are simply survival tactics with little or no
chances for accumulation."35
Eighth, increasing competition within the j_ttfr!llal sector depletes
soci;J capitl and Clisso1Yfssl£:liIp:n:t;x.jUHlc! · s9lidiItI: iiEr
to the survival of the very,p(),9}: :::- agajn, (Cspecig!lywom? and children.
An NGO worke in Hti, Yolctt'Etienne, describes the ltiffiat'l;;g1c
of neoliberal individualism in a context of absolute immiseration:
Now everything is for sale. The woman used to receive you with hospi­
tality, give you coffee, share all that she had in her home. I could go get
a plate of food at a neighbor's house; a child could get a coconut at her
godmother's, two mangoes at another aunt's. But these acts of solidarity
are disappearing with the growth of poverty. Now when you arrive
somewhere, either the woman offers to sell you a cup of coffee or she
has no coffee at alL The tradition of mutual giving that allowed us to
help each other and survive - this is all being lost.36
Similarly, in Mexico, Mercedes de la Rocha "warns that persistent
poverty over two decades has effectively brought the poor to their
knees." Sylvia Chant continues: "While the mobilization of household,
family, and community solidarity served as vital resources in the
past, there is a limit to how many favors people can call on from one
another and how effective these exchanges are in the face of huge
structural impediments to well-being. In particular, there are worries
that the disproportionate burdens that have fallen on women have
stretched their personal reserves to capacity and there is no further
'slack' to be taken Up."37
35 Jaime Joseph, "Sustainable Development and Democracy in Megacities," in
Westendorff and Eade, Development and Cities, p. 115.
36 Quoted in Bell, Walking on Fire, p. 120.
37 Paraphrased in Sylvia Chant, "Urban Livelihoods, Employment and Gender,"
in Gwynne and Kay, pp. 212-14.
A SURPLUS HUMANITY? 185
Ninth, and ftnally, under such extreme conditions of competition,
the neoliberal prescription (as set out in the World Bank's 1995 World
Development Reporf) of making labor even more flexible is simply catastrophic.38
De Sotan slogans simply grease the skids to a Hobbesian
hell. Those engaged in informal-sector competition under conditions
of inftnite labor supply usually stop short of a total war of all against
all; conflict, instead, is usually transmuted into ethnoreligious or racial
violence. The godfathers and landlords of the informal sector (invisible
in most of the literature) intelligently use coercion, even chronic
violence to regulate competition and protect their investments. As
'hilip Amis emphasizes: "There are barriers to entry in terms of
capital, and often political terms, wEjch create __.!endency towards
monopoly in the successful areas of the informal sector; these are difftcult
to get into."39
Politically, the informal sector, in the absence of enforced labor ')
rights, is a semifeudal realm of kickbacks, bribes, tribal loyalties, and
ethnic exclusion. Urban space is never free. A place on the pavement,
the rental of a rickshaw, a day's labor on a construction site, or a
domestic's reference to a new employer: all of these require patronage
or membership in some closed network, often an ethnic militia or street
gang. Whereas traditional formal industries such as textiles in India or
oil in the Middle East tended to foster interethnic solidarity through
unions and radical political parties, the rise of the unprotected informal
sector has too frequently gone hand in hand with exacerbated ethnoregious
differentiation and sectarian violence.4o
38 Breman, The Labouring Poor, pp. 5, 201.
39 Philip Amis, "Making Sense of Urban Poverty," Environment and Urbanization
7:1 (April 1995), p. 151.
40 I think Manuel Castells and Alejandro Portes, however, went too far in a 1989
essay that suggests that the proletariat is "fading away" in the face of the "increasing
heterogeneity of work situations and, thus, of social conditions." (Castells and Portes,
"World Underneath: The Origins, Dynamics and Effects of the Informal Economy,"
in Portes, Castells, and Lauren Benton (eds), The Informal Economy: Studies in Advanced
ad Less Developed Counl1ies, Baltimore 1989, p. 31.) Informal workers, in fact, tend to be
massively crowded into a few major niches where effective organization and "class consciousness"
might become possible if authentic labor rights and regulations existed. It
is the lack of economic citizenship, rather than livelihood heterogeneity per se, that
makes informal labor so prone to clientalist subordination and ethnic fragmentation.
I thus echo Jan Breman when he says that main issue in the informal sector is the
lrmalization of the rights and protections of labor, not property (p. 201).
(