> Are the most oppressed and marginalized groups going to be a great
> source of political activism, really? Isn't part of being oppressed
> and marginalized being disengaged?
Zizek's answer to the first question is yes isn't it?
For example,
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/1090/
> in the reigning discourse of humanitarian intervention, the
> developed West is effectively getting back from the victimized Third
> World its own message in its true form. This is also where we should
> look for candidates to fill the position of “universal individual,”
> a particular group whose fate stands for the injustice of today’s
> world: Palestinians, Guantánamo prisoners, etc. Palestine today
> presents us with the “opportunity” of Ash’s subtitle because all of
> the standard “pragmatic” solutions to the “Middle East crisis” have
> repeatedly failed, which suggests that a utopian invention of a
> radical new space may be the only “realistic” choice.
>
> But there is a better example of today’s “universal individual”: the
> slum dwellers of the new megalopolises. The explosive growth of
> slums in the last decades, from Mexico City and other Latin American
> capitals through Africa to India, China and Indonesia, is perhaps
> the crucial geopolitical event of our time. Take the case of Lagos,
> Nigeria. According to Mike Davis, “No one even knows the size of its
> population—officially it is 6 million, but most experts estimate it
> at 10 million.” Very soon (or perhaps, given the imprecision of
> Third World censuses, already) the urban population of the earth
> will outnumber the rural population. And slum inhabitants will
> compose the majority of this urban population. So we are in no way
> dealing with a marginal phenomenon, but rather the fast growth of a
> population outside state control, living in conditions half outside
> the law, in terrible need of the minimal forms of self-organization.
> Slum dwellers—marginalized laborers, superfluous civil servants and
> ex-peasants—are still 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. Slums have mushroomed because of the Third World’s
> inclusion into the global economy. Cheap food imports from the First
> World have destroyed local agriculture forcing millions to flee the
> countryside. Their existence is the true “symptom” of slogans like
> “Development,” “Modernization,” and “World Market.”
>
> While one should resist the temptation to elevate and idealize the
> slum dwellers into a new revolutionary class, it is extremely
> surprising how many of their features fit the old Marxist definition
> of the proletarian revolutionary class. Even more than the classic
> proletariat, they are “free” in the double meaning of the word
> —“freed” from all substantial ties and dwelling in a free space
> outside state and police regulations. They are large collectives,
> forcibly thrown into a situation where they must invent some mode of
> being-together, while simultaneously deprived of any inherited
> ethnic and religious traditions.
>
> Slum dwellers are the counter-class to the other newly emerging
> class, the so-called “symbolic class” (managers, journalists,
> academics, artists, etc.) that is also uprooted and that perceives
> itself as directly universal. (A New York academic has more in
> common with me, a Slovene academic, than with the blacks in Harlem
> half a mile from his campus.) Is this the new axis of class
> struggle? Or is the “symbolic class” inherently split, enabling us
> to make an emancipatory wager on a coalition between the slum
> dwellers and the “progressives” of the symbolic class?
>
> This brings us back to the title—and underlying project—of Ash’s
> book: Our main hope for a truly “free world” lies in the desolate
> universe of the slums. We should be watching the slum collectives
> for signs of new forms of social awareness: They will be the seeds
> of the future.
>
Ted