[Urbanstudy] slavoj zizek on slumdwellers

[anant m]

By Slavoj Zizek
  
There is a[n] example of today's "universal individual": the slum 
dwellers of the new megalopolises. The explosive growth of slums in the last 
decades, from Mexico City and other Latin American capitals through Africa to 
India, China and Indonesia, is perhaps the crucial geopolitical event of our 
time.
So we are in no way dealing with a marginal phenomenon, but rather the 
fast growth of a population outside state control, living in conditions half
outside the law. Slum dwellers—marginalized laborers, superfluous civil
servants and ex-peasants—are still incorporated into the global economy 
in numerous ways, many of them working as informal wage workers or
self-employed entrepreneurs, with no adequate health or social security
coverage. Slums have mushroomed because of the Third World's inclusion 
into the global economy. Cheap food imports from the First World have 
destroyed local agriculture forcing millions to flee the countryside. Their 
existence is the true "symptom" of slogans like "Development," "Modernization," 
and "World Market."
  While one should resist the temptation to elevate and idealize the slum
dwellers into a new revolutionary class, it is extremely surprising how 
many of their features fit the old Marxist definition of the proletarian
revolutionary class. Even more than the classic proletariat, they are 
"free" in the double meaning of the word—"freed" from all substantial ties and
dwelling in a free space outside state and police regulations. They are
large collectives, forcibly thrown into a situation where they must 
invent some mode of being-together, while simultaneously deprived of any 
inherited ethnic and religious traditions.
  Slum dwellers are the counter-class to the other newly emerging class, 
the so-called "symbolic class" (managers, journalists, academics, artists, 
etc.) that is also uprooted and nomadic and that perceives itself as directly
universal. (A New York academic has more in common with me, a Slovene
academic, than with the blacks in Harlem half a mile from his campus.) 
Is this the new axis of class struggle? Or is the "symbolic class" 
inherently split, enabling us to make an emancipatory wager on a coalition between 
the slum dwellers and the "progressives" of the symbolic class?
  Our  main hope for a truly "free world" lies in the desolate universe of 
the slums. We should be watching the slum collectives for signs of new 
forms of social awareness: They will be the seeds of the future.
By Slavoj Zizek


Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/urbanstudygroup/attachments/20060516/eddceffa/attachment.html