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Today, there are many candidates for the
position of “universal individual,” the particular group
whose fate stands for the injustice of today’s world:
Palestinians, Guantanamo prisoners . . . Palestine is the site of a
potential event precisely because all the standard
‘pragmatic’ solutions to the Middle East crisis
repeatedly fail, so that a utopian invention of a new space is the
only ‘realistic’ choice. Furthermore, Palestinians are a
good candidate on account of their paradoxical position of being the
victims of the Ultimate Victims themselves (Jews), which, of course,
puts them in an extremely difficult spot: when they resist, their
resistance can immediately be denounced as a prolongation of
anti-Semitism, as a secret solidarity with the Nazi Final
Solution.
Indeed, if – as Lacanian Zionists like to claim – Jews
are the objet petit a among nations, the troubling excess of Western
history, how can one resist them with impunity? Is it possible to be
the objet a of objet a itself? It is precisely this ethical blackmail
that one should reject.
However, there is a privileged site in this series: what if the new
proletarian position is that of the inhabitants of slums in the new
megalopolises? The explosive growth of slums in the last decades,
especially in the third world megalopolises from Mexico City and
other Latin American capitals through Africa (Lagos, Chad) to India,
China, Philippines and Indonesia, is perhaps the crucial geopolitical
event of our times. The case of Lagos, the biggest node in the
shanty-town corridor of 70 million people that stretches from Abidjan
to Ibadan, is exemplary here: according to the official sources
themselves, about two-thirds of Lagos’ total land mass of 3.6
square kilometers could be classified as shanties or slums; no one
even knows the size of its population – officially it is six
million, but most experts estimate it at 10 million. Since sometime
very soon (or maybe, given the imprecision of the third world
censuses, it has already happened), the urban population of the Earth
will outnumber the rural population, and since slum inhabitants will
compose the majority of the urban population, we are in no way
dealing with a marginal phenomenon.
We are thus witnessing the fast growth of the population outside
state control, living in conditions half outside the law, in terrible
need of the minimal forms of self-organization. Although their
population is composed of marginalized laborers, redundant civil
servants and ex-peasants, they are not simply a redundant surplus:
they are 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.
(The main source of their rise is the inclusion of the third world
countries in the global economy, with cheap food imports from the
first world countries ruining local agriculture.) They are the true
‘symptom’ of slogans like ‘Development,’
‘Modernization,’ and ‘World Market.’
No wonder that the hegemonic form of ideology in slums is Pentecostal
Christianity, with its mixture of
charismatic-miracles-and-spectacles-oriented fundamentalism, social
programs like community kitchens, and taking care of children and the
old. While, of course, one should resist the easy temptation to
elevate and idealize the slum dwellers into a new revolutionary
class, one should nonetheless, in Badiou’s terms, perceive
slums as one of the few authentic “evental sites” in
today’s society – the slum-dwellers are literally a
collection of those who are the “part of no part,” the
“surnumerary” element of society, excluded from the
benefits of citizenship, the uprooted and dispossessed, those who
effectively “have nothing to lose but their chains.” It
is effectively surprising how many features of slum dwellers fit the
good old Marxist determination of the proletarian revolutionary
subject: they are “free” in the double meaning of the
word even more than the classic proletariat (“freed” from
all substantial ties, dwelling in a free space, outside the police
regulations of the state); and they are a large collective, forcibly
thrown together, “thrown” into a situation where they
have to invent some mode of being-together, and simultaneously
deprived of any support in traditional ways of life, in inherited
religious or ethnic life-forms.
What one finds in the “really-existing slums” is, of
course, a mixture of improvised modes of social life, from religious
fundamentalist groups held together by a charismatic leader to
criminal gangs, up to germs of new ‘socialist’
solidarity. The slum dwellers are the counter-class to the other
newly emerging class, the so-called “symbolic class”
(managers, journalists and PR people, academics, artists, etc.) which
is also uprooted and perceives itself as directly universal (a New
York academic has more in common with a Slovene academic than with
blacks in Harlem half a mile from his campus). Is this the new axis
of class struggle, or is the “symbolic class” inherently
split, so that one can make the emancipatory wager on the coalition
between the slum-dwellers and the progressive part of the symbolic
class? What we should be looking for are the signs of the new forms
of social awareness that will emerge from the slum collectives: they
will be the germs of the future.
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