Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere

by Paul Mason

  As Gina approaches, a group of middle-aged local women forms up into a line. They stand to attention in their shabby garb while Gina goes into a Prada-clad drill routine: ‘River Warriors, atten … shun!’ We are treated to some Filipino slogans about honour and playing for the team. Then comes some more drill, before they all fall about laughing: ‘I ordered them to dive into the water,’ Gina giggles.

  But the idea behind the River Warriors is deadly serious. The Estero de Paco clearance was, says Gina, ‘non-negotiable’. She set up the charity to train selected slum dwellers to form unofficial security groups, both of men and women. The River Warriors’ job is to make sure those who’ve been cleared don’t come back. Gina says: ‘They will poo here! They will throw garbage. They would come back if we didn’t guard the place. So we work with the ones who are compliant. To make a change like this you have to work with a chosen few, with vanguards.’

  The clearance programme works like a giant scalpel. All the engineers need is four metres’ width of riverbank to create the easement for the waste pipe, so a second, deeper layer of slums remains: you can see where the demolition crews have sheared through walls, windows, dirt, alleyways. This is social engineering on a vast scale—but it’s what the government has decided must happen to half a million people in Manila.

  Gina says that she had the idea for the River Warriors

  while I was at a meditation retreat in California. You know how things come to you? You will love this! I thought: I will create something like King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. They can kneel down and I will knight them, but with an arnis, which is a Filipino weapon.

  She is telling me all this without a trace of embarrassment or irony.

  The Lopez family is one often mega-powerful business families that run the country. If your vision of capitalism is one in which a genetically predestined elite runs everything, where democracy is a vibrant sham, where the minds of the poor are controlled by religion, TV and lotteries, and where patronage and graft is rife, then the Philippines is the ideal embodiment of it.

  But the longer I spend with Gina, the more I realize she does have a point. Manila can’t be a modern city if its waterways are clogged with excrement. Like the slum-clearers of nineteenth-century London and New York, she has a missionary zeal:

  You can’t live well if you are faced with the constant smell of faeces, right? You can’t live a decent life on top of a sewer. And even if those people want to stay there, it has a wider impact on the city, the environment: we can’t clean the water and bring the river back to life if they are there; and the crime and sickness has a big impact on the overall environment.

  But twenty-first-century capitalism has made the ideals of the nineteenth century almost impossible to deliver on. With Gina out of earshot, two River Warrior women tell me that they themselves are returnees from a place called Calauan, where they were moved to when Estero de Paco was cleared. I want to see Calauan, but it’s too far to get there and back by road in a single day.

  ‘Oh, but you have to see Calauan,’ Gina says. And she flips open her BlackBerry: ‘Get me aviation.’

  At the treeline

  Calauan, Laguna Province. The chopper skims low across Manila Bay; it’s fringed with slums and out in the bay itself there are homes on stilts. ‘Even the sea is squatted,’ Monchet Olives, Gina’s chief of staff, tells me.

  Soon the skyscrapers of downtown Manila disappear completely and the slums give way to rice paddies; in the distance are mountains. Now Calauan comes into view: neat rows of single-storey housing, the tin roofs glinting. The whole complex houses maybe 6,000 families, and there is room for many more. On the streets of Calauan, density is not a problem. The public space is deserted. There’s a playground and a school with the name Oscar Lopez painted on the roof. The problem is—as Monchet admits—there is no electricity or running water, and no prospect of ever getting any:

  When it comes to electricity we’re between a rock and a hard place. Many of the new residents have never been used to paying bills—and the electricity company, to make the investment, needs an income stream they just can’t provide.

  And there are no jobs.

  As we walk we’re being shadowed by two soldiers in full camouflage and with assault rifles, on a motorbike. Monchet explains that the soldiers’ presence is due to the New People’s Army, a Maoist guerrilla group going back to the 1950s with currently about 6,000 members nationwide: ‘Guerrilla activity is what made the authorities abandon this place for ten years.’

  Deep in the jungle? ‘No, just up there on the hill.’ Monchet waves his finger in the general direction of the landscape, which suddenly looks a lot like that treeline in the opening credits of ‘Apocalypse Now’.

  Ruben Petrache was one of those relocated to Calauan from the Estero de Paco. He’s in his fifties and has been seriously ill. His home now is a spacious terraced hut. It has a tin roof, with tinfoil insulation to keep the heat down, a pretty garden, and a ‘mezzanine’ arrangement to create two bedrooms, such as you would see in a loft. Ruben’s English is not so good, so Monchet translates:

  What he’s saying is that although the community [in Estero de Paco] is disrupted, he thinks it’s better here. At least for him. Once you get here, after a while, you realize you’ve become accustomed to conditions that are insanitary; you learn to move on, live in a new way.

  Ruben points to the solar panel that provides his electricity; to the barrel for collecting rainwater by the porch that supplements the water they pump from wells. Are there any downsides?

  ‘It would be better if there was a factory here, because we need more jobs,’ Monchet summarizes. Later, with a professional translator, I replay the tape and work out what Ruben—handpicked by the camp’s authorities—actually said:

  What the people need here is a job. We need a company nearby so that we don’t have to go to Manila. Also we need electricity. Many residents here know how to fix electric fans, radios. But the problem is that even if they have the skills, they can’t do it because there is no electricity here, so they are forced to go to Manila to find work and earn money to buy food. We are hard workers: and if we don’t do anything, we might die of hunger here. That’s why many go back to Manila: to look for work and earn money.

  In Calauan’s covered market the stalls are plentifully stocked with meat, rice and vegetables, but there are more stallholders than shoppers. Gloria Cruz, thirty-eight years old, is performing on the karaoke machine to three toddlers, two other mums, the Armalite-toting soldiers and me. After a couple of verses she hits the pause button and says:

  ‘My husband commutes to Manila to work. He comes back at weekends. It’s the same for everybody. There’s nothing here.’

  The tolerated slum

  Makati, Manila. I have an appointment to interview Jejomar Binay, the country’s vice president, who is responsible for slum clearance. But when I arrive in the vestibule of his office, he turns out to have a throat infection, which prevents his attendance.

  Felino Palafox is more accessible. Palafox is an architect who specializes in vast, space-age projects in the Middle East and Asia: mosques, Buddhist temples, futuristic towers on the Persian Gulf, always for people with money to burn. But now he’s come up with a private scheme to save the Estero de San Miguel: to rebuild it, in situ, with new materials.

  The plan is to clear it bit by bit and put in modular housing. Each plot will measure 10 m2, the ground floor reserved for retail, the floors above extending out over the walkway, just as slum dwellers build their homes—‘stealing the air from the planning authorities,’ Palafox calls it. ‘The slum-dwellers are experts at live-work space design, they spontaneously do mixed use. We just have to learn from them.’

  From the roof of the office block in Makati, Manila’s central business district, where his practice is headquartered, Palafox gives me a primer in what’s gone wrong. He indicates the nearby skyscrapers: ‘monuments to graft’. He points out the gated compou
nds where the rich live, downtown. To the government, which complains that his design is too expensive, he says:

  ‘Okay, if the total cost of rehousing slum dwellers in situ is 30 per cent of GDP, well, I calculate we lose about 30 per cent of the country’s wealth through corruption: if we didn’t have corruption, we wouldn’t need to tolerate slums.’

  He sees the Estero de San Miguel as a test case. If he can make his plans work there, the approach could be applied to every one of the city’s riverine slums. So the stakes are huge.

  Father Norberto Carcellar, who has worked his whole life with Manila’s poor, thinks the elites are engaged in a monumental exercise of self-deception over slum clearance:

  We have to recognize the value slum dwellers deliver to the city. These are the ones who drive your car, clean your house, run your store. If these people are cleared from the city, the city will die. The slum dwellers add social, political and economic value to the city.

  That sentiment would have seemed alien to our grandparents’ generation. I can still hear mine, brought up Edwardian poverty in a coal and cotton town in northern England, spitting out the word ‘slum’ with disgust. For them, slums meant dog-eat-dog: the dirty world where solidarity could not flourish, where people lived like animals and brutalized their kids.

  But thirty years of globalization have produced something in the slums of the global south that defies that stereotype. And with Mena Cinco at my side I’m about to witness it.

  Facebook in the passageways

  Estero de San Miguel, dusk. As it is Saturday night, there is a full complement of beefy guys with sticks, rice-flails and flashlights: the volunteer police force of the Estero de San Miguel. With Mena—her t-shirt I now realize identifies her as the ‘captain’ of the slum—I re-enter the Estero down an alleyway opposite a McDonald’s. From this entry point you would hardly know the slum was there. As the alley narrows and jinks around, suddenly I am in a novel by Charles Dickens.

  On a narrow bridge, a man squats over a barbecue. Because of the smoke I don’t see it is a bridge until I’m on it, or that below is a canal, about two metres wide. The dwellings are built so close that the mothers peering out of upstairs bedrooms, made of wooden boxes, could shake their neighbours’ hands. If you decided to remake Oliver Twist as an expressionist movie, and this was the set design, you would sack the designer for making it too grotesque.

  We head down into the tunnel, stooping now: it’s less than five feet high here. After passing a few guys playing poker, and a stray chicken, I come to a store run by Agnes Cabagauan. It sells the same things as every slum store in the world: sachets of Silvikrin and Head & Shoulders, the Filipino version of Marlboros, lighters; tiny plastic bags of oil, fish and salt—enough for one meal only.

  ‘My parents helped me set up the store to pay for my education,’ Agnes tells me. What is she studying? ‘Business Admin. I have a degree. Actually I also have a day job in a large corporation, coding in a sales department.’

  But you live here? ‘Yes. I was born here.’ She is twenty-two years old.

  Then we run into Mena’s son: he’s an engineering student. And as we cross over another bridge, the unmistakable whizz and pop of something digital comes blasting across the stagnant water: it’s an Internet café.

  Nine computers are crammed into a harshly lit plywood room. A dog yaps around, some kids are on Facebook, others are playing online poker. One young woman is doing her CV; another is engrossed in a multiplayer dancing game called ‘Audition’. She too is at college, she tells me, flipping nonchalantly between her BlackBerry and the game. ‘Business Admin?’ Yup.

  In the space of a hundred yards I’ve met three graduates, a DIY police force and the social media revolution. And as I become used to the smoke, the wailing and chatter of children, the chickens, the confined space, I’ve learned what one billion people around the world have had to learn: it is not so bad.

  ‘Other places have prostitution: we don’t,’ says Mena. ‘We get drunks and a bit of drug-taking, but it’s under control. We look out for each other; we can see everything that happens; it’s one big family. The main job for the volunteer police is to look out for arsonists.’

  Settlements under threat of clearance have a habit of getting burned down, on the orders—the slum dwellers believe—of the authorities or the landlords.

  In the five-foot high niche that is her living room and kitchen, Mena discourses on the finer details of social policy until at last I ask the question I should have asked when I first met her: how did she become so politically literate? ‘I majored in political science at the University of Manila.’

  What slum dwellers have produced—not just here but in Cairo, Nairobi, Rio and La Paz—is something the slum-clearance Tsars of yesteryear would not recognize: the orderly, solidaristic slum. And the debate, at the global level, is no longer about how fast to tear these places down, but how to meet the rapidly developing aspirations of highly educated people living in shacks.

  To those who dream that as capitalism develops it will eradicate slums, Cameron Sinclair says dream on:

  You can’t fight something that has a stronger model than yourself. It’s never going to happen again. The fact of it is that if you tried to do it in some of these informal settlements they could take out the city. They could march on the central business district and it’s game over.

  Nevertheless it seems, amid the gloom and trash of the San Miguel slum, that to leave these places as they are is a gigantic cop-out. What the global authorities are really saying is not that they’re impossible to clear but that they’ve become essential to a certain form of capitalism.

  The cheap labour of the slum dweller undercuts the organized labour of the core workforce and—given two or three decades—shrinks it to a barely organizable minority. In the process the slum dwellers become the core workforce. Meanwhile, the functions of the state change: in the Keynesian era the state was supposed to care for all, but now, across much of the developing world, it leaves large parts of the urban community to their own devices.

  Consequently, the city evolves into a nightmare organism of economic apartheid zones that can coexist quite easily, being economically co-dependent, but which you cannot move between. All you can do is educate yourself and wait for one life-changing bit of good luck. But the global system you are part of is out of your control.

  In The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell describes a coal miner as ‘a sort of grimy caryatid upon whose shoulders nearly everything that is not grimy is supported’. Neoliberal capitalism has turned the slum dwellers into something similar. It is on their shoulders that the rich-world economy of ‘mass luxury’ consumption is balanced; it is from the bottle shredders of Cairo that the Chinese sportswear sweatshops get their recycled raw materials; in Nairobi, it’s the slum dwellers who troop in at 5 a.m. to pack green beans in factories right next to the airport, so that you’ll be able to serve them up for dinner the next day.

  And Mena Cinco is not kidding when she insists there is solidarity in the slum. Unlike the ‘dangerous classes’ romanticized by the anarchists of the nineteenth century, slum dwellers are part of the modern work-force—albeit semi-submerged, hidden, operating off the books. They are a kind of shadow banking system for the mainstream working class, which nobody cares about until it blows up.

  The crystal spirit

  It was Friedrich Hayek who said social justice was unachievable and that the inequality and misery produced by capitalism were both moral and logical. What humanity should do, he said, is to ‘suppress the feeling that certain differences of reward are unjust. And we have to recognize that only a system where we tolerate grossly unjust differences of reward is capable of keeping the present population of the world in existence.’3

  What transpired in 2011 was, in this sense, a revolt against Hayek and the principles of selfishness and greed he espoused.

  The present system cannot guarantee the existence of 7 billion people on this planet. I
t cannot even recognize their basic humanity. It can offer the poorest a brutal route out of poverty, but it is paid for by impoverishing the workforce of the west. And it is always conditional, always contingent on growth, which has faltered after 2008 and may not return for years.

  Of all the people I met while writing this book, it was Len-len, the woman in the rural shanty town, whose situation seemed most hope-less. The disjunction between her temperament and her circumstance was so extreme that for me she personifies the overwhelming question facing the human race.

  It’s the same question Orwell asked in 1943, pondering his time in Spain during the Civil War. In the barracks of an anti-fascist militia in Barcelona, he had met a confused Italian volunteer, fascinated by the ability of his superior officers to read a map, and doggedly devoted to libertarian communism. The man’s face, Orwell wrote, though shaped by poverty, radiated hope and solidarity: it embodied what he later called the ‘crystal spirit’.

  The problem of social justice, Orwell insisted, revolves around a simple question:

  Shall people like that Italian soldier be allowed to live the decent, fully human life which is now technically achievable, or shan’t they? … I myself believe, perhaps on insufficient grounds, that the common man will win his fight sooner or later, but I want it to be sooner and not later—some time within the next hundred years, say, and not some time within the next ten thousand years. That was the real issue of the Spanish war, and of the last war, and perhaps of other wars yet to come.4

  That is the question that swims around my head in the heat of Gapan City. Will Len-len move off the land and find a job? Will she earn enough to feed her kids without having to leave them behind to go work as a housekeeper to some Gulf millionaire? Will the eradication of slum poverty be possible in her lifetime or do we have to wait a hundred years?

  Using the methods favoured today, it will take at least a century to drag the rural poor out of their present situation. The process will be brutal, too: from the farm to the slum for one, two or maybe three billion people, and from the slum to where? As with the crimes of Stalinism, it will be rationalized: painful, but necessary, like childbirth.