The Zizek thing borrows a lot of slum analysis from mike davis' new writings on them, I think? With a hardt and negri mystical view of the potential of the slums. I like the anlysis and attention to this new social development in the global south, but, the excitement about their rev potential has the air of some wishful thinking about it. As Davis takes pains to make clear, slum dwellers have been ideologically promiscuous around the world. Populism, clientellistic political machines, and ethno-religious fundamentalism have been the most common denominators. I'm all for populism myself and nobody can say chavez hasn't kicked ass and nasrullah gives every indication of running a very strategic program for his people. But slums are the social base of everyone from the shiv sena to the peronists.
And in the concrete short and middle term, which is the only one I myself am much able to think in, I just cannot for the life of me conceive a context in which the marginally employed and ill-housed of the informal third world across many nations, languages and religions unite together in a defined transnational political struggle against professors and PR agents. More likely that faveleros in the hills around rio will see the absence of the state in their slum occupied by an overlapping mixture of pentecostal storefronts, armed networks of roughnecks connected to the drug industry, and that wierd PSB party, with the brazilian state only intervening occasionally for violent police raids and occasional grocery bags from the PT program pretending to be a social safety net.
then again not much more hope to be found anywhere else tho, so, yeah, what the hell, lets say it'll be the slum-dwellers this time. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20070317/dbfa8ba8/attachment.htm>