Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere

by Paul Mason

  The endgame is dictated by economics

  The revolutionary wave of 1848 ended in defeat: all the monarchies under threat survived, except the French, which upgraded to Empire status. But it nevertheless ushered in modernity. Napoleon III industrialized France; Prussia unified Germany. In Italy the republican radicals of 1848 would go on to refight the war of independence, unifying Italy as a kingdom by 1861. The age of Balzac gave way to the age of Zola, the age of secret societies to the age of trade unions.

  But it is not clear what, even if defeated, 2011 will leave behind. The masses in Tahrir chanted: ‘Bread, Freedom, Social Justice’—and the ‘social justice agenda’ seems pervasive. So too does democracy: it will be difficult in future for any Western policymaker to argue that a certain race, culture or religion makes authoritarianism ‘durable’.

  Everything depends on the outcome of the economic crisis. Before 2008, globalization ‘delivered’ in a rough-and-ready way to the poor of the developing world. It dragged one billion people out of rural poverty and into urban slums, and created an extra 1.5 billion waged workers. It provided access to life-changing technology. And it offset the decline in prosperity and status for the manual workers of the rich world with unlimited access to credit. At the same time it made the rich of every country richer, and inequality greater—even in the developing world, where real incomes rose.

  If the West’s economy now flatlines—suffering a decade of stagnation, as Japan did in the 1990s—the whole deal is off. As HSBC economist Stephen King put it:

  With the West now in economic permafrost, paper wealth is vulnerable to loss … Any plausible resolution to the current financial crisis must involve burden-sharing on a scale not seen since the 1930s. Unemployment, defaults, inflation, currency crises, stock-market collapses, austerity: all these are consistent with the new, lower, level of economic activity and are not unique to any one country or part of the world.15

  All of which means that the aspiration for social justice will depend on the economy’s ability deliver it.

  Because 1848 delivered economic progress—almost independently of the actions of the main players—republican socialism died out, to be replaced by respectable trade unionism and social democracy. Marx went back to the library and stayed there for decades. Flaubert’s Frédéric Moreau fled the barricades, travelled the world and, like many of the youth of 1848, ‘resigned himself to the stagnation of his mind and the apathy of his heart’.

  Industrialization delivered a rising standard of life to the masses, and, if not the democracy they had fought for, at least an element of democratization from above. And it civilized the city, replacing slums with boulevards.

  What becomes of the present wave of revolts—political, social, intellectual and moral—now depends completely on what the global economy delivers. If it is nothing but heartache and penury, we are in the middle of a perfect storm.

  In these postmodern times we have Glenn Beck to warn us of the dangers of contagion; in 1848 they had Alexis de Tocqueville. The speech he made to the French Assembly, just days before the insurrection, has an eerie resonance today:

  I believe right now that we are sleeping on a volcano. Can you not sense by a sort of instinctive intuition … that the earth is trembling again in Europe? Can you not feel the wind of revolution in the air?16

  10

  ‘We Will Barricade’: Slum Dwellers versus the Super-Rich

  Gapan City, Philippines, 2011. The bridge stretches a couple of hundred metres across a river and some rice fields. Water buffalo nuzzle the vegetation. The air hangs, stifling, somewhere between humidity and rain. Occasionally, from one of the battered jeeps crossing the bridge, somebody heaves a plastic rubbish sack over the rails without changing gear.

  I stand on that bridge for half an hour, watching fishermen cast their nets and bee-eaters dipping between the reeds, before I notice the squatter camp below.

  I can count more than fifty homes: some are shacks, some made of breeze blocks. They are wedged beneath the bridge, forming an unofficial street. Though the shacks are topped with corrugated iron, the most effective roof is the bridge, which provides shelter during the monsoon. What doesn’t help them is the river, which, says Len-len, flash-floods twice a year. She points to a mark on her porch where the water reached last time. It is three metres high.

  ‘We bought this place for 50,000 pesos [$1,100],’ Len-len tells me. ‘The family that sold it to us moved on to Manila.’

  Len-len is thirty-one years old, gap-toothed and striking, in a moth-eaten pink t-shirt, faded grey track-pants and ancient flip-flops. In another world—if the gap tooth issue could be solved—Len-len would be one of those women they pick to be PA to the chief exec. The reason she’s talking to me—while the others hide their faces behind their hands—is that she’s gutsy:

  My husband works as a farm hand. I don’t have a job. We have four children. He earns 150 pesos [$3] a day, but that’s on the days he gets work. We moved here because we had an argument with our relatives: my family has always worked the land but we never owned any. If we knew anybody in Manila, we would go there and look for work—but we don’t.

  These are the Philippines’ rural poor. The kids are thin, their legs dotted with sores; the crowd that’s formed around me has too many nut-brown oldsters with smiles crazed by whatever hooch they’re on. And too many people snigger when Len-len tells me she has no job:

  ‘It’s hard here, sir. The local government keeps threatening to move us on. But they do nothing for us. There’s no work on the land, not regular work. We can only afford rice and, if we’ve anything left, a bit of meat.’

  Her home is clean, but with few possessions. In the kitchen there is a five-litre water container, empty, on a stand: it costs 60 pesos ($1.35) for five litres, which last three days. Fresh water alone costs Len-len’s family one-seventh of their daily income—but that still gives them less than two litres per day between six people. In this heat, an adult can sweat two litres in an hour.

  Despite the temporary and ramshackle nature of the camp, someone has run bare electrical wires into the shack and Len-len pays a monthly bill for it: 700 pesos, or more than four days’ wages. But not all days bring wages.

  Beneath the cleanliness and the proud attitude, what lingers just under the surface is shame. This camp, a couple of miles outside a bus-tling rural town, has a biblical bleakness. Its inhabitants are surrounded by fields which, twice a year, produce the staple rice crop. But they don’t own the fields. They own their bodies, a few tattered clothes and some irrational inner hope that maybe their kids can escape this life. It is like Steinbeck without heroes—unless you count Len-len: ‘I wanted to become a security guard, sir. Lady security guard. I went for one day’s training. But then my money ran out so I can’t complete the course.’

  Do the kids eat every day? ‘It’s no problem, sir,’ she says with an awkward smile.

  What’s driving them from the land is a mixture of rural poverty plus climate change. Typhoons smash trees down with increasing frequency; the rice harvest—the crop needs 110 days of sunshine—is becoming volatile.

  The farmers nearby tell me they could solve the problem by planting rain-resistant GM rice. But that costs money; and, says farming folk-lore, once you’re borrowing from a bank you’re a slave. At least with the traditional seed next year’s crop comes free: they scrunch the seed, dry, a desiccated handful of hope for the next harvest.

  But for financial whizz-kids in the global commodity markets, failing rice crops are good: they drive the world price higher. Hedge funds have built entire strategies on the wager that food and land prices will rise inexorably. And as investors piled into commodity indexes at the height of the credit bubble, say Princeton economists Tang and Xiong, wholesale prices started to fluctuate—in response not to the supply and demand of food itself, but to the supply and demand of speculative money.1

  Right now the supply of speculative money is high, and so is the price of ric
e. The wholesale price is now 32 pesos per kilo—approaching once again its 2008 high of 35 pesos. Ten years ago it was half that. So, without a government subsidy to fix the retail price, Len-len would go hungry.

  Soon, she will do what tens of millions of the rural poor have done already: leave the land and move to a mega-city to live in a slum and look for work. She will live in a shack just like this, but it will be more cramped, wedged in by others like it. Instead of the viridian and lime of the paddy fields, she will live in a landscape whose colours are predominantly rust and grey.

  For, horrific as they are, the slums of Manila—as in all the mega-cities of the world—are a makeshift solution to rural poverty.

  The tunnel dwellers of San Miguel

  Estero de San Miguel, Manila. There is a long curve of grey water and, along both sides, as far as the eye can see, shacks, trash, washing and grey tin, bits of wood and scraps of cloth, rats and children. At the water’s edge lies a flotsam of multicoloured plastic rubbish. This is the Estero de San Miguel, the front line in an undeclared war between Manila’s rich and poor.

  Seen from the bridge it shocks me, and everybody with me, into silence. When you enter a slum, no matter how many times you’ve done it, there is that doom-laden feeling of plummeting, helpless, such as you feel when somebody has just died: for what you are seeing in a slum is a form of death. Not the death of hope, but of possibility.

  Mena Cinco, a community leader here, volunteers to take me in—but only about fifty yards. After that she cannot guarantee my safety. Mena is short and very determined; she wears some kind of organization logo on her polo-shirt that I am not really paying much attention to.

  From the bridge there is a ladder into somewhere gloomy. At the bottom of it Mena reveals the central mystery of the Estero de San Miguel: a long tunnel four feet wide, dark except for the occasional naked bulb. It’s like an old coal-mine, with rickety joists, shafts of light, puddles of water on the floor. The tunnel is lined by doorways: front doors of the homes of about 6,000 people.

  We knock on the first door that’s ajar. We step into a room about ten feet by six, laminated from floor to ceiling with blown-up photographs of a tulip field. There’s a TV and a computer, a teddy bear hanging from the ceiling: a woman with a toddler, another woman with not many teeth, and a teenage girl whose homework we’ve interrupted. Off the main room, forming an L-shape, is a corridor with a one-ring gas stove and a toilet at the end. The teenager sleeps in the corridor and the toothless woman in a tiny loft above; husband, wife and toddler sleep in the tulip room. The husband, Mena explains, is a driver for a Chinese family and constantly at work. They’ve lived in these rooms for twenty years: ‘But you see we have solidarity, social capital. They are happy, the kid is in school.’

  A few feet farther along the tunnel there’s another door ajar. Oliver Baldera comes blinking to it, pulling on his shirt as he wakes up. On the floor behind him are his four kids, eating ice cream; his wife, also pulling on clothes, now joins us and they all stand at the door, very chirpy. They do not invite me into the room: about eight feet by eight, it is their entire living space and appears to contain everything they own: a television, four bowls of ice cream, a light bulb, a mattress and the clothes they are wearing. ‘We’ve been here more than ten years,’ Baldera tells me:

  There’s no choice. I’m a carpenter in the construction industry. We came from Mindanao. We moved because of the poverty. It’s easier to get a job here, and I can earn 400 pesos a day. I can send the kids to school and they eat three times a day—but it’s not enough. I need more space.

  ‘But they’re happy,’ Mena chips in. ‘Notice the father has bought them ice cream.’

  Farther along there’s a shaft of daylight and a bunch of kids splashing about in an inflatable pool, wedged between crates of old bottles and a crumbling wall. Mena makes them sing. A kid comes up to me; he’s called Paul. Me too, I say. What’s it like living here? Mena mutters something to him in his own language: ‘Happy,’ he says. And smiles.

  This is a place where you cannot stride forward confidently for fear of hitting your head or bruising your elbow: people pick their way along, and creep, and shuffle. You cannot go to the toilet without standing in a queue; sex between man and wife has to take place within breathing distance of their kids, and earshot of twenty other families.

  This is the classic twenty-first-century slum. Across the globe, one billion people live in slums: that is, one in seven human beings. By the year 2050, for all the same reasons that are pushing people like Len-len off the land, that number is set to double. The slum is the filthy secret of the modern mega-city, the hidden consequence of twenty years of untrammelled market forces, greed, neglect and graft.

  Yet Mena, at my elbow, is feeding me this constant stream of verbal PR-copy: ‘We are happy; there is social cohesion here; only we can organize it like this.’

  She’s all too conscious that the Estero de San Miguel has been condemned. The left-liberal government of Benigno ‘NoyNoy’ Aquino has decided to forcibly relocate half a million slum dwellers back to the countryside, and the Estero is at the top of the list.

  ‘Many of our people are no longer interested in agriculture, so we need to give them the incentives to go back to the land,’ says Celia Alba, who heads the Philippines Housing Development Corporation. ‘If we had to rehouse the slum dwellers inside Manila, in medium-rise housing, it would cost one third of the national budget.’

  But the San Miguel will not go without a fight, says Mena: ‘We will barricade and we will revolt if we have to. We will resist slum clearance and we will fight to defend our community. We are happy here.’

  It’s not an idle threat. On 28 April 2011, residents of the Laperal slum, a few miles away across Manila, engaged demolition teams with Molotov cocktails and bricks in a riot that injured six policemen and numerous slum dwellers. An arson attack had wiped out most of their homes ten days before.

  Technically, global policy is on the side of the rioters. In 2003 an influential UN report, The Challenge of Slums, signalled a shift away from the old slum-clearance policies and recognized that slums make a positive contribution to economic development: they house new migrants; being dense, they use land efficiently; they’re culturally diverse and harbour numerous opportunities for ragged-trousered entrepreneurs.2

  ‘Even ten years ago we used to dream that cities would become slum-free,’ Mohammed Khadim of UN-Habitat had told me at the organization’s Cairo office. ‘Now the approach has changed; people see the positives. The approach now is not to clear them but improve them gradually; regularize land tenure.’

  Cameron Sinclair, who runs the non-profit design firm Architecture For Humanity, goes further:

  A slum is a resilient urban animal, you cannot pry it away. It’s like a good parasite—there are some parasites that attack the body and you have to get rid of them. But within the city, the informal settlement is a parasite that acts in harmony with the city; keeps it in check.

  Sinclair, whose organization has upgraded slums in Brazil, Kenya and South Africa, believes modern city design should not only tolerate slums but learn from them—and even emulate them. He’s building instant shanty towns in disaster zones from Sri Lanka to Japan. ‘To be honest,’ he says, ‘what we lack in a place like London is that the lower classes can’t live in central London and have to commute for two and a half hours to do the jobs that keep people going.’

  But what’s driven this new thinking is not so much vision as a set of ugly economic facts. After the 1970s there was a sharp slowdown in the provision of social housing across the globe. In cities, the move away from state provision of services fuelled the rise of the informal economy and a growing inequality between rich and poor. As a result, we’re having to ask ourselves a question that would have made the nineteenth-century fathers of city planning shudder: do we have to learn to live with slums forever?

  It’s a question to which the Filipino political elite has defiantly ans
wered ‘No.’

  A vision in vanilla

  Estero de Paco, Manila. ‘Should I buy them ice cream?’ Gina Lopez asks me, tilting back her white Stetson and peering over her sunglasses. We’re in a slum called Estero de Paco, or what’s left of it. The teenage boys are crowding shirtless around Gina, and it’s one of their birthdays, so should she buy them ice cream? After all, she is Gina Lopez.

  Gina herself is wearing a cool vanilla sleeveless number that reveals her to be lithe and youthful for her sixty-one years. She enters the slum accompanied by about thirty people, including two police officers, a media team of six, some local community guys, her bodyguards, several factotums and a man in dark glasses who is carrying her handbag.

  Gina is a TV star, a philanthropist, the boss of Manila’s River Renovation Authority and, most importantly, a member of the Lopez family. Lopez Inc. owns half of downtown Manila, an energy company, an entire TV network, a phone company, and has interests in many other kinds of infrastructure, including water. So who better than Gina—in a country apparently untroubled by issues of conflict of interest—to run a charity dedicated to the forcible removal of slum dwellers from Manila’s waterways?

  The word ‘estero’ means tributary, but it’s also morphed into the word for a riverine slum. The Estero de Paco used to have slums right down to the water’s edge, just like San Miguel. One hundred and fifty families lived in the five-foot-high space between the water and a concrete bridge, and several hundred more lived, strung out as in San Miguel, along the banks of the canal. But Gina has sorted this out.

  Now, instead of shacks, a neat border of agapanthus and rubber plants fringes the water’s edge. State-of-the art oxidation units are trying to turn the brown sludge into something chemically close to H2O. Into the cleared space, work gangs are laying a wide-bore sewage pipe.