. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
6. Marx and the Holy Ghost
[The Lord says:] The time will come when the poor man
will say that he has nothing to eat and work will be
shut down . . . That is going to cause the poor man to
go to these places and break in to get food. This will cause
the rich man to come out with his gun to make war with
the labouring man. . . . blood will be in the streets
like an outpouring rain from heaven.
A prophecy from the 1906 'Azusa Street Awakening'
The late capitalist triage of humanity, then, has already taken place.
The global growth of a vast informal proletariat, moreover, is a wholly original structural development unforeseen by either classical Marxism or modernization pundits. Slums indeed challenges social theory to grasp the novelty of a true global residuum lacking the strategic economic power of socialized labor, but massively concentrated in a shanty-town world encircling the fortified enclaves of the urban rich.
Tendencies toward urban involution, of course, existed during the nineteenth century. The European industrial revolutions were incapable of absorbing the entire supply of displaced rural labour, especially after continental agriculture was exposed to the devastating competition of the North American prairies from the 1870s.
But mass immigration to the settler societies of the Americas and Oceania, as well as Siberia, provided a dynamic safety-valve that prevented the rise of mega-Dublins as well as the spread of the kind of underclass anarchism that had taken root in the most immiserated parts of Southern Europe. Today surplus labour, by contrast, faces unprecedented barriers -- a literal 'great wall' of high-tech border enforcement -- blocking large-scale migration to the rich countries. Likewise, controversial population resettlement programmes in 'frontier' regions like Amazonia, Tibet, Kalimantan and Irian Jaya produce environmental devastation and ethnic conflict without substantially reducing urban poverty in Brazil, China and Indonesia.
Thus only the slum remains as a fully franchised solution to the problem of warehousing the twenty-first century's surplus humanity. But aren't the great slums, as a terrified Victorian bourgeoisie once imagined, volcanoes waiting to erupt? Or does ruthless Darwinian competition, as increasing numbers of poor people compete for the same informal scraps, ensure self-consuming communal violence as yet the highest form of urban involution? To what extent does an informal proletariat possess that most potent of Marxist talismans: 'historical agency'? Can disincorporated labour be reincorporated in a global emancipatory project? Or is the sociology of protest in the immiserated megacity a regression to the pre-industrial urban mob, episodically explosive during consumption crises, but otherwise easily managed by clientelism, populist spectacle and appeals to ethnic unity? Or is some new, unexpected historical subject, à la Hardt and Negri, slouching toward the supercity?
In truth, the current literature on poverty and urban protest offers few answers to such large-scale questions. Some researchers, for example, would question whether the ethnically diverse slum poor or economically heterogeneous informal workers even constitute a meaningful 'class in itself', much less a potentially activist 'class for itself'. Surely, the informal proletariat bears 'radical chains' in the Marxist sense of having little or no vested interest in the preservation of the existing mode of production. But because uprooted rural migrants and informal workers have been largely dispossessed of fungible labour-power, or reduced to domestic service in the houses of the rich, they have little access to the culture of collective labour or large-scale class struggle. Their social stage, necessarily, must be the slum street or marketplace, not the factory or international assembly line.
Struggles of informal workers, as John Walton emphasizes in a recent review of research on social movements in poor cities, have tended, above all, to be episodic and discontinuous. They are also usually focused on immediate consumption issues: land invasions in search of affordable housing and riots against rising food or utility prices. In the past, at least, 'urban problems in developing societies have been more typically mediated by patron-client relations than by popular activism.'91 Since the debt crisis of the 1980s, neopopulist leaders in Latin America have had dramatic success in exploiting the desperate desire of the urban poor for more stable, predictable structures of daily life. Although Walton doesn't make the point explicitly, the urban informal sector has been ideologically promiscuous in its endorsement of populist saviours: in Peru rallying to Fujimori, but in Venezuela embracing Chávez.92 In Africa and South Asia, on the other hand, urban clientelism too often equates with the dominance of ethno-religious bigots and their nightmare ambitions of ethnic cleansing. Notorious examples include the anti-Muslim militias of the Oodua People's Congress in Lagos and the semi-fascist Shiv Sena movement in Bombay.93
Will such 'eighteenth-century' sociologies of protest persist into the middle twenty-first century? The past is probably a poor guide to the future. History is not uniformitarian. The new urban world is evolving with extraordinary speed and often in unpredictable directions. Everywhere the continuous accumulation of poverty undermines existential security and poses even more extraordinary challenges to the economic ingenuity of the poor. Perhaps there is a tipping point at which the pollution, congestion, greed and violence of everyday urban life finally overwhelm the ad hoc civilities and survival networks of the slum. Certainly in the old rural world there were thresholds, often calibrated by famine, that passed directly to social eruption. But no one yet knows the social temperature at which the new cities of poverty spontaneously combust.
Indeed, for the moment at least, Marx has yielded the historical stage to Mohammed and the Holy Ghost. If God died in the cities of the industrial revolution, he has risen again in the postindustrial cities of the developing world. The contrast between the cultures of urban poverty in the two eras is extraordinary. As Hugh McLeod has shown in his magisterial study of Victorian working-class religion, Marx and Engels were largely accurate in their belief that urbanization was secularizing the working class. Although Glasgow and New York were partial exceptions, 'the line of interpretation that associates working-class detachment from the church with growing class consciousness is in a sense incontestable'. If small churches and dissenting sects thrived in the slums, the great current was active or passive disbelief. Already by the 1880s, Berlin was scandalizing foreigners as 'the most irreligious city in the world' and in London, median adult church attendance in the proletarian East End and Docklands by 1902 was barely 12 per cent (and that mostly Catholic).94
In Barcelona, of course, an anarchist working class sacked the churches during the Semana Trágica, while in the slums of St. Petersburg, Buenos Aires and even Tokyo, militant workers avidly embraced the new faiths of Darwin, Kropotkin and Marx.
Today, on the other hand, populist Islam and Pentecostal Christianity (and in Bombay, the cult of Shivaji) occupy a social space analogous to that of early twentieth-century socialism and anarchism. In Morocco, for instance, where half a million rural emigrants are absorbed into the teeming cities every year, and where half the population is under 25, Islamicist movements like 'Justice and Welfare', founded by Sheik Abdessalam Yassin, have become the real governments of the slums: organizing night schools, providing legal aid to victims of state abuse, buying medicine for the sick, subsidizing pilgrimages and paying for funerals. As Prime Minister Abderrahmane Youssoufi, the Socialist leader who was once exiled by the monarchy, recently admitted to Ignacio Ramonet, 'We [the Left] have become embourgeoisified. We have cut ourselves off from the people. We need to reconquer the popular quarters. The Islamicists have seduced our natural electorate. They promise them heaven on earth.' An Islamicist leader, on the other hand, told Ramonet: 'confronted with the neglect of the state, and faced with the brutality of daily life, people discover, thanks to us, solidarity, self-help, fraternity. They understand that Islam is humanism.'95
The counterpart of populist Islam in the slums of Latin America and much of sub-Saharan Africa is Pentecostalism. Christianity, of course, is now, in its majority, a non-Western religion (two-thirds of its adherents live outside Europe and North America), and Pentecostalism is its most dynamic missionary in cities of poverty. Indeed the historical specificity of Pentecostalism is that it is the first major world religion to have grown up almost entirely in the soil of the modern urban slum. With roots in early ecstatic Methodism and African-American spirituality, Pentecostalism 'awoke' when the Holy Ghost gave the gift of tongues to participants in an interracial prayer marathon in a poor neighbourhood of Los Angeles (Azusa Street) in 1906. Unified around spirit baptism, miracle healing, charismata and a premillennial belief in a coming world war of capital and labour, early American Pentecostalism -- as religious historians have repeatedly noted -- originated as a 'prophetic democracy' whose rural and urban constituencies overlapped, respectively, with those of Populism and the IWW.96 Indeed, like Wobbly organizers, its early missionaries to Latin America and Africa 'lived often in extreme poverty, going out with little or no money, seldom knowing where they would spend the night, or how they would get their next meal.'97 They also yielded nothing to the IWW in their vehement denunciations of the injustices of industrial capitalism and its inevitable destruction.
Symptomatically, the first Brazilian congregation, in an anarchist working-class district of São Paulo, was founded by an Italian artisan immigrant who had exchanged Malatesta for the Spirit in Chicago.98 In South Africa and Rhodesia, Pentecostalism established its early footholds in the mining compounds and shanty towns; where, according to Jean Comaroff, 'it seemed to accord with indigenous notions of pragmatic spirit forces and to redress the depersonalization and powerlessness of the urban labour experience.'99 Conceding a larger role to women than other Christian churches and immensely supportive of abstinence and frugality, Pentecostalism -- as R. Andrew Chesnut discovered in the baixadas of Belém -- has always had a particular attraction to 'the most immiserated stratum of the impoverished classes': abandoned wives, widows and single mothers.100 Since 1970, and largely because of its appeal to slum women and its reputation for being colour-blind, it has been growing into what is arguably the largest self-organized movement of urban poor people on the planet.101
Although recent claims of 'over 533 million Pentecostal/charismatics in the world in 2002' are probably hyperbole, there may well be half that number. It is generally agreed that 10 per cent of Latin America is Pentecostal (about 40 million people) and that the movement has been the single most important cultural response to explosive and traumatic urbanization.102 As Pentecostalism has globalized, of course, it has differentiated into distinct currents and sociologies. But if in Liberia, Mozambique and Guatemala, American-sponsored churches have been vectors of dictatorship and repression, and if some US congregations are now gentrified into the suburban mainstream of fundamentalism, the missionary tide of Pentecostalism in the Third World remains closer to the original millenarian spirit of Azusa Street.103 Above all, as Chesnut found in Brazil, 'Pentecostalism . . . remains a religion of the informal periphery' (and in Belém, in particular, 'the poorest of the poor'). In Peru, where Pentecostalism is growing almost exponentially in the vast barriadas of Lima, Jefrey Gamarra contends that the growth of the sects and of the informal economy 'are a consequence of and a response to each other'.104 Paul Freston adds that it 'is the first autonomous mass religion in Latin America . . . Leaders may not be democratic, but they come from the same social class'.105
In contrast to populist Islam, which emphasizes civilizational continuity and the trans-class solidarity of faith, Pentecostalism, in the tradition of its African-American origins, retains a fundamentally exilic identity. Although, like Islam in the slums, it efficiently correlates itself to the survival needs of the informal working class (organizing self-help networks for poor women; offering faith healing as para-medicine; providing recovery from alcoholism and addiction; insulating children from the temptations of the street; and so on), its ultimate premise is that the urban world is corrupt, injust and unreformable. Whether, as Jean Comaroff has argued in her book on African Zionist churches (many of which are now Pentecostal), this religion of 'the marginalized in the shantytowns of neocolonial modernity' is actually a 'more radical' resistance than 'participation in formal politics or labour unions', remains to be seen.106 But, with the Left still largely missing from the slum, the eschatology of Pentecostalism admirably refuses the inhuman destiny of the Third World city that Slums warns about. It also sanctifies those who, in every structural and existential sense, truly live in exile.
91 John Walton, 'Urban Conflict and Social Movements in Poor Countries: Theory and Evidence of Collective Action', paper to 'Cities in Transition Conference', Humboldt University, Berlin, July 1987. 92 Kurt Weyland, 'Neopopulism and Neoliberalism in Latin America: how much affinity?', Third World Quarterly, vol. 24, no. 6, 2003, pp. 1095–115. 93 For a fascinating if frightening account of Shiv Sena's ascendancy in Bombay at the expense of older Communist and trade-union politics, see Thomas Hansen, Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay, Princeton 2001. See also Veena Das, ed., Mirrors of Violence: Communities, Riots and Survivors in South Asia, New York 1990. 94 Hugh McLeod, Piety and Poverty: Working-Class Religion in Berlin, London and New York, 1870–1914, New York 1996, pp. xxv, 6, 32. 95 Ignacio Ramonet, 'Le Maroc indécis', Le Monde diplomatique, July 2000, pp. 12–13. Another former leftist told Ramonet: 'Nearly 65 per cent of the population lives under the poverty line. The people of the bidonvilles are entirely cut off from the elites. They see the elites the way they used to see the French.' 96 In his controversial sociological interpretation of Pentecostalism, Robert Mapes Anderson claimed that 'its unconscious intent', like other millenarian movements, was actually 'revolutionary'. (Vision of the Disinherited: The Making of American Pentecostalism, Oxford 1979, p. 222.) 97 Anderson, Vision of the Disinherited, p. 77. 98 R. Andrew Chesnut, Born Again in Brazil: The Pentecostal Boom and the Pathogens of Poverty, New Brunswick 1997, p. 29. On the historical associations of Pentecostalism with anarchism in Brazil, see Paul Freston, 'Pentecostalism in Latin America: Characteristics and Controversies', Social Compass, vol. 45, no. 3, 1998, p. 342. 99 David Maxwell, 'Historicizing Christian Independency: The Southern Africa Pentecostal Movement, c. 1908–60', Journal of African History 40, 1990, p. 249; and Jean Comaroff, Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance, Chicago 1985, p. 186. 100 Chesnut, Born Again, p. 61. Indeed, Chesnut found that the Holy Ghost not only moved tongues but improved family budgets. 'By eliminating expenditures associated with the male prestige complex, Assembelianos were able to climb from the lower and middle ranks of poverty to the upper echelons, and some Quandrangulares migrated from poverty . . . to the lower rungs of the middle class': p. 18. 101 'In all of human history, no other non-political, non-militaristic, voluntary human movement has grown as rapidly as the Pentecostal-Charismatic movement in the last twenty years': Peter Wagner, foreward to Vinson Synan, The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition, Grand Rapids 1997, p. xi. 102 The high estimate is from David Barret and Todd Johnson, 'Annual Statistical Table on Global Mission: 2001,' International Bulletin of Missionary Research, vol. 25, no. 1, January 2001, p. 25. Synan says there were 217 million denominated Pentecostals in 1997 (Holiness, p. ix). On Latin America, compare Freston, 'Pentecostalism', p. 337; Anderson, Vision of the Disinherited; and David Martin, 'Evangelical and Charismatic Christianity in Latin America', in Karla Poewe, ed., Charismatic Christianity as a Global Culture, Columbia 1994, pp. 74-5. 103 See Paul Gifford's brilliant Christianity and Politics in Doe's Liberia, Cambridge 1993. Also Peter Walshe, Prophetic Christianity and the Liberation Movement in South Africa, Pietermaritzburg 1995, especially pp. 110-1. 104 Jefrey Gamarra, 'Conflict, Post-Conflict and Religion: Andean Responses to New Religious Movements', Journal of Southern African Studies, vol. 26, no. 2, June 2000, p. 272. Andres Tapia quotes the Peruvian theologian Samuel Escobar who sees Sendero Luminoso and the Pentecostals as 'flip sides of the same coin' -- 'both were seeking a powerful break with injustices, only the means were different.' 'With Shining Path's decline, Pentecostalism has emerged as the winner for the souls of poor Peruvians.' ('In the Ashes of the Shining Path', Pacific News Service, 14 Feburary 1996). 105 Freston, 'Pentecostalism', p. 352. 106 Comaroff, Body of Power, pp. 259-63.
-- Yoshie