New Left Review
September-October 2008

http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=2740

The Right to the City

Examining the link between urbanization and capitalism, David Harvey suggests we view Haussmann’s reshaping of Paris and today’s explosive growth of cities as responses to systemic crises of accumulation–and issues a call to democratize the power to shape the urban experience.

by David Harvey

We live in an era when ideals of human rights have moved centre stage both politically and ethically. A great deal of energy is expended in promoting their significance for the construction of a better world. But for the most part the concepts circulating do not fundamentally challenge hegemonic liberal and neoliberal market logics, or the dominant modes of legality and state action. We live, after all, in a world in which the rights of private property and the profit rate trump all other notions of rights. I here want to explore another type of human right, that of the right to the city.

Has the astonishing pace and scale of urbanization over the last hundred years contributed to human well-being? The city, in the words of urban sociologist Robert Park, is:

man’s most successful attempt to remake the world he lives in more after his heart’s desire. But, if the city is the world which man created, it is the world in which he is henceforth condemned to live.
Thus, indirectly, and without any clear sense of the nature of his task, in making the city man has remade himself. [1]

The question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from that of what kind of social ties, relationship to nature, lifestyles, technologies and aesthetic values we desire. The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization.
The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.

From their inception, cities have arisen through geographical and social concentrations of a surplus product. Urbanization has always been, therefore, a class phenomenon, since surpluses are extracted from somewhere and from somebody, while the control over their disbursement typically lies in a few hands. This general situation persists under capitalism, of course; but since urbanization depends on the mobilization of a surplus product, an intimate connection emerges between the development of capitalism and urbanization. Capitalists have to produce a surplus product in order to produce surplus value; this in turn must be reinvested in order to generate more surplus value. The result of continued reinvestment is the expansion of surplus production at a compound rate—hence the logistic curves (money, output and population) attached to the history of capital accumulation, paralleled by the growth path of urbanization under capitalism.

The perpetual need to find profitable terrains for capital-surplus production and absorption shapes the politics of capitalism. It also presents the capitalist with a number of barriers to continuous and trouble-free expansion. If labour is scarce and wages are high, either existing labour has to be disciplined—technologically induced unemployment or an assault on organized working-class power are two prime methods—or fresh labour forces must be found by immigration, export of capital or proletarianization of hitherto independent elements of the population.
Capitalists must also discover new means of production in general and natural resources in particular, which puts increasing pressure on the natural environment to yield up necessary raw materials and absorb the inevitable waste. They need to open up terrains for raw-material extraction—often the objective of imperialist and neo-colonial endeavours.

The coercive laws of competition also force the continuous implementation of new technologies and organizational forms, since these enable capitalists to out-compete those using inferior methods. Innovations define new wants and needs, reduce the turnover time of capital and lessen the friction of distance, which limits the geographical range within which the capitalist can search for expanded labour supplies, raw materials, and so on. If there is not enough purchasing power in the market, then new markets must be found by expanding foreign trade, promoting novel products and lifestyles, creating new credit instruments, and debt-financing state and private expenditures. If, finally, the profit rate is too low, then state regulation of ‘ruinous competition’, monopolization (mergers and
acquisitions) and capital exports provide ways out.

If any of the above barriers cannot be circumvented, capitalists are unable profitably to reinvest their surplus product. Capital accumulation is blocked, leaving them facing a crisis, in which their capital can be devalued and in some instances even physically wiped out. Surplus commodities can lose value or be destroyed, while productive capacity and assets can be written down and left unused; money itself can be devalued through inflation, and labour through massive unemployment. How, then, has the need to circumvent these barriers and to expand the terrain of profitable activity driven capitalist urbanization? I argue here that urbanization has played a particularly active role, alongside such phenomena as military expenditures, in absorbing the surplus product that capitalists perpetually produce in their search for profits.
Urban revolutions

Consider, first, the case of Second Empire Paris. The year 1848 brought one of the first clear, and European-wide, crises of both unemployed surplus capital and surplus labour. It struck Paris particularly hard, and issued in an abortive revolution by unemployed workers and those bourgeois utopians who saw a social republic as the antidote to the greed and inequality that had characterized the July Monarchy. The republican bourgeoisie violently repressed the revolutionaries but failed to resolve the crisis. The result was the ascent to power of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, who engineered a coup in 1851 and proclaimed himself Emperor the following year. To survive politically, he resorted to widespread repression of alternative political movements. The economic situation he dealt with by means of a vast programme of infrastructural investment both at home and abroad. In the latter case, this meant the construction of railroads throughout Europe and into the Orient, as well as support for grand works such as the Suez Canal. At home, it meant consolidating the railway network, building ports and harbours, and draining marshes. Above all, it entailed the reconfiguration of the urban infrastructure of Paris.
Bonaparte brought in Georges-Eugène Haussmann to take charge of the city’s public works in 1853.

Haussmann clearly understood that his mission was to help solve the surplus-capital and unemployment problem through urbanization. Rebuilding Paris absorbed huge quantities of labour and capital by the standards of the time and, coupled with suppressing the aspirations of the Parisian workforce, was a primary vehicle of social stabilization. He drew upon the utopian plans that Fourierists and Saint-Simonians had debated in the 1840s for reshaping Paris, but with one big difference: he transformed the scale at which the urban process was imagined. When the architect Jacques Ignace Hittorff showed Haussmann his plans for a new boulevard, Haussmann threw them back at him saying: ‘not wide enough . . . you have it 40 metres wide and I want it 120.’ He annexed the suburbs and redesigned whole neighbourhoods such as Les Halles. To do this Haussmann needed new financial institutions and debt instruments, the Crédit Mobilier and Crédit Immobilier, which were constructed on Saint-Simonian lines. In effect, he helped resolve the capital-surplus disposal problem by setting up a proto-Keynesian system of debt-financed infrastructural urban improvements.

The system worked very well for some fifteen years, and it involved not only a transformation of urban infrastructures but also the construction of a new way of life and urban persona. Paris became ‘the city of light’, the great centre of consumption, tourism and pleasure; the cafés, department stores, fashion industry and grand expositions all changed urban living so that it could absorb vast surpluses through consumerism.
But then the overextended and speculative financial system and credit structures crashed in 1868. Haussmann was dismissed; Napoleon III in desperation went to war against Bismarck’s Germany and lost. In the ensuing vacuum arose the Paris Commune, one of the greatest revolutionary episodes in capitalist urban history, wrought in part out of a nostalgia for the world that Haussmann had destroyed and the desire to take back the city on the part of those dispossessed by his works. [2]

Fast forward now to the 1940s in the United States. The huge mobilization for the war effort temporarily resolved the capital-surplus disposal problem that had seemed so intractable in the 1930s, and the unemployment that went with it. But everyone was fearful about what would happen after the war. Politically the situation was dangerous: the federal government was in effect running a nationalized economy, and was in alliance with the Communist Soviet Union, while strong social movements with socialist inclinations had emerged in the 1930s. As in Louis Bonaparte’s era, a hefty dose of political repression was evidently called for by the ruling classes of the time; the subsequent history of McCarthyism and Cold War politics, of which there were already abundant signs in the early 40s, is all too familiar. On the economic front, there remained the question of how surplus capital could be absorbed.

In 1942, a lengthy evaluation of Haussmann’s efforts appeared in Architectural Forum. It documented in detail what he had done, attempted an analysis of his mistakes but sought to recuperate his reputation as one of the greatest urbanists of all time. The article was by none other than Robert Moses, who after the Second World War did to New York what Haussmann had done to Paris. [3] That is, Moses changed the scale of thinking about the urban process. Through a system of highways and infrastructural transformations, suburbanization and the total re-engineering of not just the city but also the whole metropolitan region, he helped resolve the capital-surplus absorption problem. To do this, he tapped into new financial institutions and tax arrangements that liberated the credit to debt-finance urban expansion. When taken nationwide to all the major metropolitan centres of the us—yet another transformation of scale—this process played a crucial role in stabilizing global capitalism after 1945, a period in which the us could afford to power the whole global non-communist economy by running trade deficits.

The suburbanization of the United States was not merely a matter of new infrastructures. As in Second Empire Paris, it entailed a radical transformation in lifestyles, bringing new products from housing to refrigerators and air conditioners, as well as two cars in the driveway and an enormous increase in the consumption of oil. It also altered the political landscape, as subsidized home-ownership for the middle classes changed the focus of community action towards the defence of property values and individualized identities, turning the suburban vote towards conservative republicanism. Debt-encumbered homeowners, it was argued, were less likely to go on strike. This project successfully absorbed the surplus and assured social stability, albeit at the cost of hollowing out the inner cities and generating urban unrest amongst those, chiefly African-Americans, who were denied access to the new prosperity.

By the end of the 1960s, a different kind of crisis began to unfold; Moses, like Haussmann, fell from grace, and his solutions came to be seen as inappropriate and unacceptable. Traditionalists rallied around Jane Jacobs and sought to counter the brutal modernism of Moses’s projects with a localized neighbourhood aesthetic. But the suburbs had been built, and the radical change in lifestyle that this betokened had many social consequences, leading feminists, for example, to proclaim the suburb as the locus of all their primary discontents. If Haussmannization had a part in the dynamics of the Paris Commune, the soulless qualities of suburban living also played a critical role in the dramatic events of 1968 in the us. Discontented white middle-class students went into a phase of revolt, sought alliances with marginalized groups claiming civil rights and rallied against American imperialism to create a movement to build another kind of world—including a different kind of urban experience.

In Paris, the campaign to stop the Left Bank Expressway and the destruction of traditional neighbourhoods by the invading ‘high-rise giants’ such as the Place d’Italie and Tour Montparnasse helped animate the larger dynamics of the 68 uprising. It was in this context that Henri Lefebvre wrote The Urban Revolution, which predicted not only that urbanization was central to the survival of capitalism and therefore bound to become a crucial focus of political and class struggle, but that it was obliterating step by step the distinctions between town and country through the production of integrated spaces across national territory, if not beyond. [4] The right to the city had to mean the right to command the whole urban process, which was increasingly dominating the countryside through phenomena ranging from agribusiness to second homes and rural tourism.

Along with the 68 revolt came a financial crisis within the credit institutions that, through debt-financing, had powered the property boom in the preceding decades. The crisis gathered momentum at the end of the 1960s until the whole capitalist system crashed, starting with the bursting of the global property-market bubble in 1973, followed by the fiscal bankruptcy of New York City in 1975. As William Tabb argued, the response to the consequences of the latter effectively pioneered the construction of a neoliberal answer to the problems of perpetuating class power and of reviving the capacity to absorb the surpluses that capitalism must produce to survive. [5]

Girding the globe

Fast forward once again to our current conjuncture. International capitalism has been on a roller-coaster of regional crises and crashes—East and Southeast Asia in 1997–98; Russia in 1998; Argentina in 2001—but had until recently avoided a global crash even in the face of a chronic inability to dispose of capital surplus. What was the role of urbanization in stabilizing this situation? In the United States, it is accepted wisdom that the housing sector was an important stabilizer of the economy, particularly after the high-tech crash of the late 1990s, although it was an active component of expansion in the earlier part of that decade. The property market directly absorbed a great deal of surplus capital through the construction of city-centre and suburban homes and office spaces, while the rapid inflation of housing asset prices—backed by a profligate wave of mortgage refinancing at historically low rates of interest—boosted the us domestic market for consumer goods and services.
American urban expansion partially steadied the global economy, as the us ran huge trade deficits with the rest of the world, borrowing around $2 billion a day to fuel its insatiable consumerism and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But the urban process has undergone another transformation of scale. It has, in short, gone global. Property-market booms in Britain and Spain, as well as in many other countries, have helped power a capitalist dynamic in ways that broadly parallel what has happened in the United States. The urbanization of China over the last twenty years has been of a different character, with its heavy focus on infrastructural development, but it is even more important than that of the us. Its pace picked up enormously after a brief recession in 1997, to the extent that China has taken in nearly half the world’s cement supplies since 2000. More than a hundred cities have passed the one-million population mark in this period, and previously small villages, such as Shenzhen, have become huge metropolises of 6 to 10 million people. Vast infrastructural projects, including dams and highways—again, all debt-financed—are transforming the landscape. The consequences for the global economy and the absorption of surplus capital have been significant: Chile booms thanks to the high price of copper, Australia thrives and even Brazil and Argentina have recovered in part because of the strength of Chinese demand for raw materials.

Is the urbanization of China, then, the primary stabilizer of global capitalism today? The answer has to be a qualified yes. For China is only the epicentre of an urbanization process that has now become genuinely global, partly through the astonishing integration of financial markets that have used their flexibility to debt-finance urban development around the world. The Chinese central bank, for example, has been active in the secondary mortgage market in the us while Goldman Sachs was heavily involved in the surging property market in Mumbai, and Hong Kong capital has invested in Baltimore. In the midst of a flood of impoverished migrants, construction boomed in Johannesburg, Taipei, Moscow, as well as the cities in the core capitalist countries, such as London and Los Angeles. Astonishing if not criminally absurd mega-urbanization projects have emerged in the Middle East in places such as Dubai and Abu Dhabi, mopping up the surplus arising from oil wealth in the most conspicuous, socially unjust and environmentally wasteful ways possible.

This global scale makes it hard to grasp that what is happening is in principle similar to the transformations that Haussmann oversaw in Paris.
For the global urbanization boom has depended, as did all the others before it, on the construction of new financial institutions and arrangements to organize the credit required to sustain it. Financial innovations set in train in the 1980s—securitizing and packaging local mortgages for sale to investors worldwide, and setting up new vehicles to hold collateralized debt obligations—played a crucial role. Their many benefits included spreading risk and permitting surplus savings pools easier access to surplus housing demand; they also brought aggregate interest rates down, while generating immense fortunes for the financial intermediaries who worked these wonders. But spreading risk does not eliminate it. Furthermore, the fact that it can be distributed so widely encourages even riskier local behaviours, because liability can be transferred elsewhere. Without adequate risk-assessment controls, this wave of financialization has now turned into the so-called sub-prime mortgage and housing asset-value crisis. The fallout was concentrated in the first instance in and around us cities, with particularly serious implications for low-income, inner-city African-Americans and households headed by single women. It also has affected those who, unable to afford the skyrocketing house prices in urban centres, especially in the Southwest, were forced into the metropolitan semi-periphery; here they took up speculatively built tract housing at initially easy rates, but now face escalating commuting costs as oil prices rise, and soaring mortgage payments as market rates come into effect.

The current crisis, with vicious local repercussions on urban life and infrastructures, also threatens the whole architecture of the global financial system and may trigger a major recession to boot. The parallels with the 1970s are uncanny—including the immediate easy-money response of the Federal Reserve in 2007–08, which will almost certainly generate strong currents of uncontrollable inflation, if not stagflation, in the not too distant future. However, the situation is far more complex now, and it is an open question whether China can compensate for a serious crash in the United States; even in the prc the pace of urbanization seems to be slowing down. The financial system is also more tightly coupled than it ever was before. [6] Computer-driven split-second trading always threatens to create a great divergence in the market—it is already producing incredible volatility in stock trading—that will precipitate a massive crisis, requiring a total re-think of how finance capital and money markets work, including their relation to urbanization.
Property and pacification

As in all the preceding phases, this most recent radical expansion of the urban process has brought with it incredible transformations of lifestyle.
Quality of urban life has become a commodity, as has the city itself, in a world where consumerism, tourism, cultural and knowledge-based industries have become major aspects of the urban political economy. The postmodernist penchant for encouraging the formation of market niches—in both consumer habits and cultural forms—surrounds the contemporary urban experience with an aura of freedom of choice, provided you have the money.
Shopping malls, multiplexes and box stores proliferate, as do fast-food and artisanal market-places. We now have, as urban sociologist Sharon Zukin puts it, ‘pacification by cappuccino’. Even the incoherent, bland and monotonous suburban tract development that continues to dominate in many areas now gets its antidote in a ‘new urbanism’ movement that touts the sale of community and boutique lifestyles to fulfill urban dreams.
This is a world in which the neoliberal ethic of intense possessive individualism, and its cognate of political withdrawal from collective forms of action, becomes the template for human socialization. [7] The defence of property values becomes of such paramount political interest that, as Mike Davis points out, the home-owner associations in the state of California become bastions of political reaction, if not of fragmented neighbourhood fascisms. [8]

We increasingly live in divided and conflict-prone urban areas. In the past three decades, the neoliberal turn has restored class power to rich elites. Fourteen billionaires have emerged in Mexico since then, and in
2006 that country boasted the richest man on earth, Carlos Slim, at the same time as the incomes of the poor had either stagnated or diminished.
The results are indelibly etched on the spatial forms of our cities, which increasingly consist of fortified fragments, gated communities and privatized public spaces kept under constant surveillance. In the developing world in particular, the city

is splitting into different separated parts, with the apparent formation of many ‘microstates’. Wealthy neighbourhoods provided with all kinds of services, such as exclusive schools, golf courses, tennis courts and private police patrolling the area around the clock intertwine with illegal settlements where water is available only at public fountains, no sanitation system exists, electricity is pirated by a privileged few, the roads become mud streams whenever it rains, and where house-sharing is the norm. Each fragment appears to live and function autonomously, sticking firmly to what it has been able to grab in the daily fight for survival. [9]

Under these conditions, ideals of urban identity, citizenship and belonging—already threatened by the spreading malaise of a neoliberal ethic—become much harder to sustain. Privatized redistribution through criminal activity threatens individual security at every turn, prompting popular demands for police suppression. Even the idea that the city might function as a collective body politic, a site within and from which progressive social movements might emanate, appears implausible. There are, however, urban social movements seeking to overcome isolation and reshape the city in a different image from that put forward by the developers, who are backed by finance, corporate capital and an increasingly entrepreneurially minded local state apparatus.

Dispossessions

Surplus absorption through urban transformation has an even darker aspect.
It has entailed repeated bouts of urban restructuring through ‘creative destruction’, which nearly always has a class dimension since it is the poor, the underprivileged and those marginalized from political power that suffer first and foremost from this process. Violence is required to build the new urban world on the wreckage of the old. Haussmann tore through the old Parisian slums, using powers of expropriation in the name of civic improvement and renovation. He deliberately engineered the removal of much of the working class and other unruly elements from the city centre, where they constituted a threat to public order and political power. He created an urban form where it was believed—incorrectly, as it turned out in 1871—that sufficient levels of surveillance and military control could be attained to ensure that revolutionary movements would easily be brought to heel. Nevertheless, as Engels pointed out in 1872:

In reality, the bourgeoisie has only one method of solving the housing question after its fashion—that is to say, of solving it in such a way that the solution continually reproduces the question anew. This method is called ‘Haussmann’ . . . No matter how different the reasons may be, the result is always the same; the scandalous alleys and lanes disappear to the accompaniment of lavish self-praise from the bourgeoisie on account of this tremendous success, but they appear again immediately somewhere else . . . The same economic necessity which produced them in the first place, produces them in the next place. [10]

It took more than a hundred years to complete the embourgeoisement of central Paris, with the consequences seen in recent years of uprisings and mayhem in those isolated suburbs that trap marginalized immigrants, unemployed workers and youth. The sad point here, of course, is that what Engels described recurs throughout history. Robert Moses ‘took a meat axe to the Bronx’, in his infamous words, bringing forth long and loud laments from neighbourhood groups and movements. In the cases of Paris and New York, once the power of state expropriations had been successfully resisted and contained, a more insidious and cancerous progression took hold through municipal fiscal discipline, property speculation and the sorting of land-use according to the rate of return for its ‘highest and best use’. Engels understood this sequence all too well:

The growth of the big modern cities gives the land in certain areas, particularly in those areas which are centrally situated, an artificially and colossally increasing value; the buildings erected on these areas depress this value instead of increasing it, because they no longer belong to the changed circumstances. They are pulled down and replaced by others. This takes place above all with workers’
houses which are situated centrally and whose rents, even with the greatest overcrowding, can never, or only very slowly, increase above a certain maximum. They are pulled down and in their stead shops, warehouses and public buildings are erected. [11]

Though this description was written in 1872, it applies directly to contemporary urban development in much of Asia—Delhi, Seoul, Mumbai—as well as gentrification in New York. A process of displacement and what I call ‘accumulation by dispossession’ lie at the core of urbanization under capitalism. [12] It is the mirror-image of capital absorption through urban redevelopment, and is giving rise to numerous conflicts over the capture of valuable land from low-income populations that may have lived there for many years.

Consider the case of Seoul in the 1990s: construction companies and developers hired goon squads of sumo-wrestler types to invade neighbourhoods on the city’s hillsides. They sledgehammered down not only housing but also all the possessions of those who had built their own homes in the 1950s on what had become premium land. High-rise towers, which show no trace of the brutality that permitted their construction, now cover most of those hillsides. In Mumbai, meanwhile, 6 million people officially considered as slum dwellers are settled on land without legal title; all maps of the city leave these places blank. With the attempt to turn Mumbai into a global financial centre to rival Shanghai, the property-development boom has gathered pace, and the land that squatters occupy appears increasingly valuable. Dharavi, one of the most prominent slums in Mumbai, is estimated to be worth $2 billion. The pressure to clear it—for environmental and social reasons that mask the land grab—is mounting daily. Financial powers backed by the state push for forcible slum clearance, in some cases violently taking possession of terrain occupied for a whole generation. Capital accumulation through real-estate activity booms, since the land is acquired at almost no cost.

Will the people who are displaced get compensation? The lucky ones get a bit. But while the Indian Constitution specifies that the state has an obligation to protect the lives and well-being of the whole population, irrespective of caste or class, and to guarantee rights to housing and shelter, the Supreme Court has issued judgements that rewrite this constitutional requirement. Since slum dwellers are illegal occupants and many cannot definitively prove their long-term residence, they have no right to compensation. To concede that right, says the Supreme Court, would be tantamount to rewarding pickpockets for their actions. So the squatters either resist and fight, or move with their few belongings to camp out on the sides of highways or wherever they can find a tiny space.
[13] Examples of dispossession can also be found in the us, though these tend to be less brutal and more legalistic: the government’s right of eminent domain has been abused in order to displace established residents in reasonable housing in favour of higher-order land uses, such as condominiums and box stores. When this was challenged in the us Supreme Court, the justices ruled that it was constitutional for local jurisdictions to behave in this way in order to increase their property-tax base. [14]

In China millions are being dispossessed of the spaces they have long occupied—three million in Beijing alone. Since they lack private-property rights, the state can simply remove them by fiat, offering a minor cash payment to help them on their way before turning the land over to developers at a large profit. In some instances, people move willingly, but there are also reports of widespread resistance, the usual response to which is brutal repression by the Communist party. In the prc it is often populations on the rural margins who are displaced, illustrating the significance of Lefebvre’s argument, presciently laid out in the 1960s, that the clear distinction which once existed between the urban and the rural is gradually fading into a set of porous spaces of uneven geographical development, under the hegemonic command of capital and the state. This is also the case in India, where the central and state governments now favour the establishment of Special Economic Zones—ostensibly for industrial development, though most of the land is designated for urbanization. This policy has led to pitched battles against agricultural producers, the grossest of which was the massacre at Nandigram in West Bengal in March 2007, orchestrated by the state’s Marxist government. Intent on opening up terrain for the Salim Group, an Indonesian conglomerate, the ruling cpi(m) sent armed police to disperse protesting villagers; at least 14 were shot dead and dozens wounded.
Private property rights in this case provided no protection.

What of the seemingly progressive proposal to award private-property rights to squatter populations, providing them with assets that will permit them to leave poverty behind? [15] Such a scheme is now being mooted for Rio’s favelas, for example. The problem is that the poor, beset with income insecurity and frequent financial difficulties, can easily be persuaded to trade in that asset for a relatively low cash payment. The rich typically refuse to give up their valued assets at any price, which is why Moses could take a meat axe to the low-income Bronx but not to affluent Park Avenue. The lasting effect of Margaret Thatcher’s privatization of social housing in Britain has been to create a rent and price structure throughout metropolitan London that precludes lower-income and even middle-class people from access to accommodation anywhere near the urban centre. I wager that within fifteen years, if present trends continue, all those hillsides in Rio now occupied by favelas will be covered by high-rise condominiums with fabulous views over the idyllic bay, while the erstwhile favela dwellers will have been filtered off into some remote periphery.

Formulating demands

Urbanization, we may conclude, has played a crucial role in the absorption of capital surpluses, at ever increasing geographical scales, but at the price of burgeoning processes of creative destruction that have dispossessed the masses of any right to the city whatsoever. The planet as building site collides with the ‘planet of slums’. [16] Periodically this ends in revolt, as in Paris in 1871 or the us after the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968. If, as seems likely, fiscal difficulties mount and the hitherto successful neoliberal, postmodernist and consumerist phase of capitalist surplus-absorption through urbanization is at an end and a broader crisis ensues, then the question arises: where is our 68 or, even more dramatically, our version of the Commune? As with the financial system, the answer is bound to be much more complex precisely because the urban process is now global in scope. Signs of rebellion are everywhere:
the unrest in China and India is chronic, civil wars rage in Africa, Latin America is in ferment. Any of these revolts could become contagious.
Unlike the fiscal system, however, the urban and peri-urban social movements of opposition, of which there are many around the world, are not tightly coupled; indeed most have no connection to each other. If they somehow did come together, what should they demand?

The answer to the last question is simple enough in principle: greater democratic control over the production and utilization of the surplus.
Since the urban process is a major channel of surplus use, establishing democratic management over its urban deployment constitutes the right to the city. Throughout capitalist history, some of the surplus value has been taxed, and in social-democratic phases the proportion at the state’s disposal rose significantly. The neoliberal project over the last thirty years has been oriented towards privatizing that control. The data for all oecd countries show, however, that the state’s portion of gross output has been roughly constant since the 1970s. [17] The main achievement of the neoliberal assault, then, has been to prevent the public share from expanding as it did in the 1960s. Neoliberalism has also created new systems of governance that integrate state and corporate interests, and through the application of money power, it has ensured that the disbursement of the surplus through the state apparatus favours corporate capital and the upper classes in shaping the urban process. Raising the proportion of the surplus held by the state will only have a positive impact if the state itself is brought back under democratic control.

Increasingly, we see the right to the city falling into the hands of private or quasi-private interests. In New York City, for example, the billionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg, is reshaping the city along lines favourable to developers, Wall Street and transnational capitalist-class elements, and promoting the city as an optimal location for high-value businesses and a fantastic destination for tourists. He is, in effect, turning Manhattan into one vast gated community for the rich. In Mexico City, Carlos Slim had the downtown streets re-cobbled to suit the tourist gaze. Not only affluent individuals exercise direct power. In the town of New Haven, strapped for resources for urban reinvestment, it is Yale, one of the wealthiest universities in the world, that is redesigning much of the urban fabric to suit its needs. Johns Hopkins is doing the same for East Baltimore, and Columbia University plans to do so for areas of New York, sparking neighbourhood resistance movements in both cases. The right to the city, as it is now constituted, is too narrowly confined, restricted in most cases to a small political and economic elite who are in a position to shape cities more and more after their own desires.

Every January, the Office of the New York State Comptroller publishes an estimate of the total Wall Street bonuses for the previous twelve months.
In 2007, a disastrous year for financial markets by any measure, these added up to $33.2 billion, only 2 per cent less than the year before. In mid-summer of 2007, the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank poured billions of dollars’ worth of short-term credit into the financial system to ensure its stability, and thereafter the Fed dramatically lowered interest rates or pumped in vast amounts of liquidity every time the Dow threatened to fall precipitously. Meanwhile, some two million people have been or are about to be made homeless by foreclosures. Many city neighbourhoods and even whole peri-urban communities in the us have been boarded up and vandalized, wrecked by the predatory lending practices of the financial institutions. This population is due no bonuses. Indeed, since foreclosure means debt forgiveness, which is regarded as income in the United States, many of those evicted face a hefty income-tax bill for money they never had in their possession. This asymmetry cannot be construed as anything less than a massive form of class confrontation. A ‘Financial Katrina’ is unfolding, which conveniently (for the developers) threatens to wipe out low-income neighbourhoods on potentially high-value land in many inner-city areas far more effectively and speedily than could be achieved through eminent domain.

We have yet, however, to see a coherent opposition to these developments in the twenty-first century. There are, of course, already a great many diverse social movements focusing on the urban question—from India and Brazil to China, Spain, Argentina and the United States. In 2001, a City Statute was inserted into the Brazilian Constitution, after pressure from social movements, to recognize the collective right to the city. [18] In the us, there have been calls for much of the $700 billion bail-out for financial institutions to be diverted into a Reconstruction Bank, which would help prevent foreclosures and fund efforts at neighbourhood revitalization and infrastructural renewal at municipal level. The urban crisis that is affecting millions would then be prioritized over the needs of big investors and financiers. Unfortunately the social movements are not strong enough or sufficiently mobilized to force through this solution. Nor have these movements yet converged on the singular aim of gaining greater control over the uses of the surplus—let alone over the conditions of its production.

At this point in history, this has to be a global struggle, predominantly with finance capital, for that is the scale at which urbanization processes now work. To be sure, the political task of organizing such a confrontation is difficult if not daunting. However, the opportunities are multiple because, as this brief history shows, crises repeatedly erupt around urbanization both locally and globally, and because the metropolis is now the point of massive collision—dare we call it class struggle?—over the accumulation by dispossession visited upon the least well-off and the developmental drive that seeks to colonize space for the affluent.

One step towards unifying these struggles is to adopt the right to the city as both working slogan and political ideal, precisely because it focuses on the question of who commands the necessary connection between urbanization and surplus production and use. The democratization of that right, and the construction of a broad social movement to enforce its will is imperative if the dispossessed are to take back the control which they have for so long been denied, and if they are to institute new modes of urbanization. Lefebvre was right to insist that the revolution has to be urban, in the broadest sense of that term, or nothing at all.

[1] Robert Park, On Social Control and Collective Behavior, Chicago 1967, p. 3.

[2] For a fuller account, see David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity, New York 2003.

[3] Robert Moses, ‘What Happened to Haussmann?’, Architectural Forum, vol.
77 (July 1942), pp. 57–66.

[4] Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, Minneapolis 2003; and Writings on Cities, Oxford 1996.

[5] William Tabb, The Long Default: New York City and the Urban Fiscal Crisis, New York 1982.

[6] Richard Bookstaber, A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds and the Perils of Financial Innovation, Hoboken, nj 2007.

[7] Hilde Nafstad et al., ‘Ideology and Power: The Influence of Current Neoliberalism in Society’, Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology, vol. 17, no. 4 (July 2007), pp. 313–27.

[8] Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, London and New York 1990.

[9] Marcello Balbo, ‘Urban Planning and the Fragmented City of Developing Countries’, Third World Planning Review, vol. 15, no. 1 (1993), pp. 23–35.

[10] Friedrich Engels, The Housing Question, New York 1935, pp. 74–7.

[11] Engels, Housing Question, p. 23.

[12] Harvey, The New Imperialism, Oxford 2003, chapter 4.

[13] Usha Ramanathan, ‘Illegality and the Urban Poor’, Economic and Political Weekly, 22 July 2006; Rakesh Shukla, ‘Rights of the Poor: An Overview of Supreme Court’, Economic and Political Weekly, 2 September 2006.

[14] Kelo v. New London, ct, decided on 23 June 2005 in case 545 us 469 (2005).

[15] Much of this thinking follows the work of Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, New York 2000; see the critical examination by Timothy Mitchell, ‘The Work of Economics: How a Discipline Makes its World’, Archives Européennes de Sociologie, vol. 46, no. 2 (August 2005), pp.
297–320.

[16] Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, London and New York 2006.

[17] oecd Factbook 2008: Economic, Environmental and Social Statistics, Paris 2008, p. 225.

[18] Edésio Fernandes, ‘Constructing the “Right to the City” in Brazil’, Social and Legal Studies, vol. 16, no. 2 (June 2007), pp. 201–19.

The Right to the City is a necessary idea, particularly if you think that cities can harbour progressive and ecologically sustainable social change. Stewart Brand , in a Panglossian article seems to think that ’slums will save the planet’, but Mike Davis – an altogether more thoughtful scholar – does too. Sure, cities can be more ecologically and socially sustainable that rural communities, but that doesn’t happen by magic. Nor, as Brand seems to forget, is there anything terribly desirable about living in a slum. As he would discover were he ever to leave his houseboat visit one, most people would rather not live in one. And neither author spends as much time as he ought thinking about gender in the city. So where will the politics of sustainable urban change come from? The movements for the Right to the City can help answer that. More below the fold, and in the next two posts.

The Right to the City Alliance: Time to Democratize Urban Governance

Progressive Planning
Fall 2009

http://www.plannersnetwork.org/publications/2009_fall/leavitt_samara_brady.html

The Right to the City Alliance: Time to Democratize Urban Governance

by Jackie Leavitt, Tony Roshan Samara and Marnie Brady

In 2007, grassroots organizers in the United States formed the U.S. Right to the City (RTTC) Alliance as a means of taking their cities back from the coalitions of affluence that had formed during the 1980s and reframing the central scale of social struggle from the global to the urban. RTTC is one of the first mass formations to emerge from the previous era of sustained anti-globalization struggle stretching from the end of the Cold War through the election of George Bush, the attacks of 9/11 and the war on Iraq. Although it is a relatively new movement, RTTC holds much potential for re-centering and advancing the struggle for democratic urban governance. Planners Network has joined RTTC as a resource group.

RTTC developed out of dialogue and organizing between the Miami Workers Center, Strategic Actions for a Just Economy (Los Angeles) and Tenants and Workers United (Alexandria, VA). Today the alliance is composed of over forty core and allied members spanning seven states, nine major cities and eight metro regions: Boston, Los Angeles, Miami, New Orleans, New York, Providence, San Francisco/Oakland and Washington D.C. Since 2007, the alliance has developed a national governance structure, regional networks and thematic working groups that collaborate with allied researchers, lawyers, academics, movement strategists and funders. In its own words, Right to the City “is a national alliance of membership-based organizations and allies organizing to build a united response to gentrification and displacement in our cities. Our goal is to build a national urban movement for housing, education, health, racial justice and democracy. We are building our power through strengthening local organizing; cross-regional collaboration; developing a national platform; and supporting community reclamation in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.”

In RTTC’s first two years, the volunteer steering committee has hired two staff people and organizational development consultants. A representative from each region is on the steering committee and there is staggered replacement of members. Annual national meetings consist of workshops for members of participating organizations, subcommittee meetings, formal and informal networking activities and debate of organizational objectives, i.e., a campaign in which all members agree to participate. Other national events have included gatherings in Miami, Florida, and Providence, Rhode Island, both planned to take advantage of the U.S. Conference of Mayors meeting in these cities and for the Right to the City-U.S. to issue its own demands and support the regional alliances’ ongoing work. Critically, these meetings help regional and local groups press their campaigns as well. In late September of this year, the steering committee, staff and representatives from each region met in order to discuss the visions, goals and objectives of RTTC as an organization. The meeting of twenty people was modeled in such a way that everyone had a voice and time to reflect, learn to trust each other and reach consensus. Such a process is important to sustain as RTTC grows to ensure that it adheres to its ideals of creating a genuinely more democratic form of democracy.

The “right to the city” as a concept has captured the imagination of many involved with urban social struggles but it remains an underdeveloped social movement ideology. Below we provide an introduction to the alliance by briefly discussing some of the campaigns in which members in the Boston and New York City regions are engaged. We then attempt to draw out some of the key principles and issues which underpin these efforts and inform initiatives to develop national expressions and link these groups to others across the country and globe. Our data are drawn from interviews with RTTC members, participant observation and review of movement documents and campaigns.

The City as Battleground

What unites the various RTTC members can be traced to the conditions facing urban communities across the country. Recent decades have seen once abandoned or neglected central cities reemerge as central economic and political nodes in the global economy; as a result, struggles over urban space have intensified. Although member organizations were formed in response to highly specific local events, their struggles are defined by the need to defend urban neighborhoods from encroaching developers and gentrifiers, to confront apathetic, negligent or antagonistic officials and to grapple with the local, national and global forces that govern urban spaces in their interests. In doing so, RTTC organizations, as well as the broader communities from which they come, are engaged in an attempt to radically redefine and reclaim urban democracy. They are guided by a deeply held belief that they have a right to the spaces they call home.

City Life/Vida Urbana, based in the Jamaica Plains neighborhood of Boston, was founded in 1973 to fight disinvestment and over time it has expanded its tenant organizing to other parts of Boston. It pioneered the idea of an “Eviction Free Zone” and a “Community-Controlled Housing Zone” to resist evictions, make visible existing ownership patterns and identify where power was situated (see article in PN, pp. ). Other RTTC organizations were founded in response to more recent neoliberal policies, such as that established by the Los Angeles City Council when it approved “workforce” housing on an ad hoc basis but avoided investing major resources into housing for those of the lowest income. L.A. has exacerbated conditions for the poor by pursuing “glamorous” projects like entertainment complexes that ultimately demolished buildings, displaced tenants and reduced the housing supply for those most in need. In response, RTTC-LA has begun a campaign to develop a community-based housing plan. This involves tenant leaders surveying neighbors to document code enforcement violations based on their lived experiences; in the process, new leaders are emerging and survey findings are expanding the ways in which regulating code enforcement is tied to larger questions about power and the community.

New York City’s Right to the City regional formation emerged in 2007 from an existing coalition of anti-gentrification community-based organizing groups. The chapter’s membership-based groups are working on individual and interconnected campaigns, all of which share a strong focus on leadership development of their respective and collective membership base.
For example, Fabulous Independent Educated Radicals for Community Empowerment (FIERCE), an LGBTQ youth of color member-group, is organizing for the right to public space by opposing the privatization of NYC’s waterfront and campaigning for a youth-led community center on Pier 40 in the West Village. FIERCE has played a key role in organizing youth-led forums to promote and support youth leadership in RTTC at both the local and national levels.

Picture the Homeless is another one of RTTC-NYC’s nearly twenty base-building groups. It was founded by homeless people in 1999 in the midst of New York City’s war on poor and working-class people of color.
Seeking justice and respect, the organization is led by the homeless and intent on stopping the criminalization of homeless people. It organized a series of direct actions in 2009, including the occupation of a vacant building and the orchestration of a tent city on a vacant land parcel in East Harlem owned by JP Morgan Chase—a firm that received billions of dollars in public TARP funding. The organization’s “Housing, Not Warehousing” campaign calls for the conversion of vacant buildings to affordable housing for homeless and low-income NYC residents.

This year, RTTC-NYC issued a platform related to the upcoming citywide elections. Through a participatory and unifying process involving member organizations and allies, the local alliance identified key issue areas:
federal stimulus funds; community decision-making power; low-income housing; environmental justice & public health; jobs & workforce development; public space. The platform document not only articulates key policy opportunities, it also lays out an historical and political analysis questioning the commodification of basic human needs such as housing. The platform also grounds policy concerns within a set of principles for each issue area and maps out public space accessibility, stimulus funding sources, environmental health indicators and poverty statistics for the city.

Linking Theory and Practice

As a movement and a theory, right to the city remains a work in progress.
Within and beyond the RTTC, individuals and organizations are involved in the difficult political work of generating a theory that is both rooted in both the day-to-day struggles and realities of people’s lives and capable of creating opportunities for radical, long-lasting, social change. While the debate will continue, looking at RTTC campaigns allows us to begin to identify some emergent principles.

Right to the city at its most elementary concerns the relationship between people and place. It is from here, arguably, that all other rights are derived from and, in turn, grounded in. Drawing from Henri Lefebvre’s original work from 1968, Le Droit a La Ville (Right to the City), right to the city is a political feature of the urban inhabitant, a new form of political belonging not rooted in national citizenship but in urban residency, from which it draws its political power. Issues related to residency have surfaced recently in immigrant struggles to get the vote in local and municipal elections and there is a history of undocumented immigrants gaining voting rights in school elections.

From this central principle, we can see in the actions and analyses of RTTC members and the alliance as a whole a subset of rights that gives a more defined form to the rights to the city. These are neither written in stone nor apply universally to all communities in all places, but they do allow us to move the process of defining the right to the city forward as grounded in actual struggle. Engagement with an ever-widening circle of social movements committed to deep transformation will only strengthen the frame.

RTTC offers planners an opportunity to use their research skills in ways that support social movements. Campaigns about evictions, gentrification, public space and community and neighborhood planning can make use of planning in creative and innovative ways. Ava Bromberg, a UCLA doctoral student in urban planning, and Nicholas Brown, a doctoral student in landscape studies at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, assembled an exhibition and symposium series at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) in the fall of 2007. The work addressed spatial injustices and efforts to make just spaces. The entryway of the exhibition was framed by RTTC principles of unity and projects addressed economic and environmental justice practices, spatial segregation, prisons, borders and indigenous land claims. RTTC-LA held a meeting in the exhibition space, which was intended to be useful to organizers and to bring together geography-informed approaches.

Bromberg also put together a mobile planning lab for South Los Angeles, a project stemming from the exhibit contribution of four Baltimore-based artists who developed drawings. The lab is being activated in conjunction with a grassroots community planning and research project in the neighborhoods surrounding the University of Southern California (USC) being affected by USC’s expansion and the rapid transformation of affordable family housing to unaffordable student housing. The lab is modeling a community engagement and empowerment process for land use planning that can be implemented by other groups.

Planning students from UCLA and USC have served as scribes and translators for conferences on topics that help RTTC and member organizations. A two-quarter class at UCLA on Right to the City was offered where community organizers worked with students to explore the ways that the principles could further organizing in gentrified and gentrifying neighborhoods.

Planners should keep in mind the following principles that can guide their
work:

The right to participate. Within the context of a right to stay, perhaps the most important right is the right to participate in all levels of decision-making, including planning regarding the community. Right to the city is deeply implicated in the struggle over how cities will be governed and by whom. Scholars across a range of disciplines have begun to study changing notions of citizenship resulting from transnational migrations, a rescaling of politics and the work of social movements and activists.
While national citizenship remains the central frame for membership in a formal political community and rights’ claims, this dominance is being challenged by developments on the ground. As a result, we have an opportunity to redraw existing political maps and create new forms of citizenship and new scales of governance through social struggle. This opportunity is central to right to the city, as movement and theory. In this frame, democratic rights, rather than being based on formal political membership in a national community, are based on physical presence in the city and participation in its economic, social and political life.

The right to security. Insecurity marks the lives of many people living in urban areas across the world. Being present in a place and having a right to participate are only meaningful if people are secure. Human security refers to the full spectrum of security, addressing issues ranging from sexual assault and lack of food to armed conflict and environmental destruction. At the level of the city, human security issues are apparent in the terror sown by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids and racial profiling by police to the instability resulting from electricity cutoffs and evictions. The right to security, though its content will have to be determined by communities themselves, asserts that in principle people have the right to demand urban policies and practices which support, rather than undermine, the security of people.

The right to resist. Faced with the real threat of community breakdown and displacement—whether by gentrification, foreclosure, systematic discrimination from immigration or criminal justice authorities, malign neglect or any of the other myriad ways in which communities are broken—right to the city means a right to resist. Resistance here has to mean more than permitted marches and other overregulated forms of “free speech” like public hearings. It is a right that can be claimed by people marginalized from formal political processes, or for whom these processes have proven to be ineffective or, at times, weapons of the powerful. It is a right that questions the fundamental legality and morality of existing institutions and practices, and therefore takes as its primary goal their reform or abolition.

Linking Rights, Democracy and Planning

It is impossible to disentangle the discussion of rights from that of democracy, and perhaps right to the city is best understood as one of this generation’s attempts to breathe new life into government by the people, as the struggle for radical democracy and what some call deep democracy.
At the same time, the movement and theory must be grounded in the lives of real people and the concrete conditions of urban communities. Categories such as citizen and worker, while still relevant, are insufficient to contain and represent the multi-faceted struggles of urban inhabitants who are women, documented and undocumented immigrants, LGBTQ and people of color, many of whom may exist at the peripheries or even outside of the formal economy. New struggles for democracy, inside the city and beyond, will need to create political subjects and agendas that transcend these categories without losing sight of the particularities that shape their lives of urban inhabitants.

Central to RTTC campaigns and analyses is the idea that the struggle for democracy today requires a return to the concept of rights. Students may study ethics in some programs, but planners need to ask how prevalent this is in most planning programs and practice. What would planning look like if classes and practice began from the frame of rights? Along with academic, policy and other movement allies, RTTC is engaged in the process of revitalizing the rights struggle and re-raising unsettled questions in the context of new political challenges. Questions of inclusion, for example, are far from new, yet the attack on immigrant communities forces us to acknowledge that we still lack a powerful rights movement and institutions that can adequately protect them. Similarly, market-driven displacement, criminalization and unresponsive elected officials reveal the inability of even citizenship to safeguard peoples’ civil rights.
Finally, existing rights, those guaranteed to citizens and for which many documented and undocumented immigrants strive, fail to even address basic issues of human security, including housing, medical care and employment.
In all these instances, communities are once again coming up against the limits of the individualistic and formal political rights that mark the liberal democracies.

RTTC and other movements like it across the globe have their work cut out for them. But there are encouraging signs of momentum. In addition to ongoing regional and national work within the alliance, RTTC recently co-convened the Inter-Alliance Dialogue, a process of discussion and joint activity between Grassroots Global Justice, Jobs with Justice, National Day Laborer Organizing Network, National Domestic Workers Alliance and RTTC. Beyond the U.S. border, the 2010 World Urban Forum V, to be held this coming March in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, has taken as its theme Right to the City. This is certainly encouraging. While much remains to be done, much has also been accomplished. Planners should seize the moment.

[Jackie Leavitt (jleavitt@ucla.edu) is a professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles. Tony Roshan Samara
(tsamara@gmu.edu) is an assistant professor of sociology at George Mason University. Marnie Brady (mbrady1@gc.cuny.edu) is a Ph.D. student in sociology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. The authors each work with the Right to the City Alliance as resources allies.]

———-

Mr Chidambaram’s War
Arundhati Roy
Outlook India

The low, flat-topped hills of south Orissa have been home to the Dongria
Kondh long before there was a country called India or a state called
Orissa. The hills watched over the Kondh. The Kondh watched over the hills
and worshipped them as living deities. Now these hills have been sold for
the bauxite they contain. For the Kondh it’s as though god has been sold.
They ask how much god would go for if the god were Ram or Allah or Jesus
Christ?

Perhaps the Kondh are supposed to be grateful that their Niyamgiri hill,
home to their Niyam Raja, God of Universal Law, has been sold to a company
with a name like Vedanta (the branch of Hindu philosophy that teaches the
Ultimate Nature of Knowledge). It’s one of the biggest mining corporations
in the world and is owned by Anil Aggarwal, the Indian billionaire who
lives in London in a mansion that once belonged to the Shah of Iran.
Vedanta is only one of the many multinational corporations closing in on
Orissa.

If the flat-topped hills are destroyed, the forests that clothe them will
be destroyed too. So will the rivers and streams that flow out of them and
irrigate the plains below. So will the Dongria Kondh. So will the hundreds
of thousands of tribal people who live in the forested heart of India, and
whose homeland is similarly under attack.

In our smoky, crowded cities, some people say, “So what? Someone has to
pay the price of progress.” Some even say, “Let’s face it, these are
people whose time has come. Look at any developed country, Europe, the US,
Australia—they all have a ‘past’.” Indeed they do. So why shouldn’t “we”?

In keeping with this line of thought, the government has announced
Operation Green Hunt, a war purportedly against the “Maoist” rebels
headquartered in the jungles of central India. Of course, the Maoists are
by no means the only ones rebelling. There is a whole spectrum of
struggles all over the country that people are engaged in—the landless,
the Dalits, the homeless, workers, peasants, weavers. They’re pitted
against a juggernaut of injustices, including policies that allow a
wholesale corporate takeover of people’s land and resources. However, it
is the Maoists who the government has singled out as being the biggest
threat. Two years ago, when things were nowhere near as bad as they are
now, the prime minister described the Maoists as the “single-largest
internal security threat” to the country. This will probably go down as
the most popular and often-repeated thing he ever said. For some reason,
the comment he made on January 6, 2009, at a meeting of state chief
ministers, when he described the Maoists as having only “modest
capabilities” doesn’t seem to have had the same raw appeal. He revealed
his government’s real concern on June 18, 2009, when he told Parliament:
“If left-wing extremism continues to flourish in parts which have natural
resources of minerals, the climate for investment would certainly be
affected.”

Who are the Maoists? They are members of the banned Communist Party of
India (Maoist)—CPI (Maoist)—one of the several descendants of the
Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), which led the 1969 Naxalite
uprising and was subsequently liquidated by the Indian government. The
Maoists believe that the innate, structural inequality of Indian society
can only be redressed by the violent overthrow of the Indian State. In its
earlier avatars as the Maoist Communist Centre (MCC) in Jharkhand and
Bihar, and the People’s War Group (PWG) in Andhra Pradesh, the Maoists had
tremendous popular support. (When the ban on them was briefly lifted in
2004, one-and-a-half million people attended their rally in Warangal.) But
eventually their intercession in Andhra Pradesh ended badly. They left a
violent legacy that turned some of their staunchest supporters into harsh
critics. After a paroxysm of killing and counter-killing by the Andhra
police as well as the Maoists, the PWG was decimated.. Those who managed to
survive fled Andhra Pradesh into neighbouring Chhattisgarh. There, deep in
the heart of the forest, they joined colleagues who had already been
working there for decades.

Not many ‘outsiders’ have any first-hand experience of the real nature of
the Maoist movement in the forest. A recent interview with one of its top
leaders, Comrade Ganapathy, in Open magazine didn’t do much to change the
minds of those who view the Maoists as a party with an unforgiving,
totalitarian vision, which countenances no dissent whatsoever. Comrade
Ganapathy said nothing that would persuade people that, were the Maoists
ever to come to power, they would be equipped to properly address the
almost insane diversity of India’s caste-ridden society. His casual
approval of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) of Sri Lanka was
enough to send a shiver down even the most sympathetic of spines, not just
because of the brutal ways in which the LTTE chose to wage its war, but
also because of the cataclysmic tragedy that has befallen the Tamil people
of Sri Lanka, who it claimed to represent, and for whom it surely must
take some responsibility.

Right now in central India, the Maoists’ guerrilla army is made up almost
entirely of desperately poor tribal people living in conditions of such
chronic hunger that it verges on famine of the kind we only associate with
sub-Saharan Africa. They are people who, even after 60 years of India’s
so-called Independence, have not had access to education, healthcare or
legal redress. They are people who have been mercilessly exploited for
decades, consistently cheated by small businessmen and moneylenders, the
women raped as a matter of right by police and forest department
personnel. Their journey back to a semblance of dignity is due in large
part to the Maoist cadre who have lived and worked and fought by their
side for decades.

If the tribals have taken up arms, they have done so because a government
which has given them nothing but violence and neglect now wants to snatch
away the last thing they have—their land. Clearly, they do not believe the
government when it says it only wants to “develop” their region. Clearly,
they do not believe that the roads as wide and flat as aircraft runways
that are being built through their forests in Dantewada by the National
Mineral Development Corporation are being built for them to walk their
children to school on. They believe that if they do not fight for their
land, they will be annihilated. That is why they have taken up arms.

Even if the ideologues of the Maoist movement are fighting to eventually
overthrow the Indian State, right now even they know that their ragged,
malnutritioned army, the bulk of whose soldiers have never seen a train or
a bus or even a small town, are fighting only for survival.

In 2008, an expert group appointed by the Planning Commission submitted a
report called ‘Development Challenges in Extremist-Affected Areas’. It
said, “the Naxalite (Maoist) movement has to be recognised as a political
movement with a strong base among the landless and poor peasantry and
adivasis. Its emergence and growth need to be contextualised in the social
conditions and experience of people who form a part of it. The huge gap
between state policy and performance is a feature of these conditions..
Though its professed long-term ideology is capturing state power by force,
in its day-to-day manifestation, it is to be looked upon as basically a
fight for social justice, equality, protection, security and local
development.” A very far cry from the “single-largest internal security
threat”. Since the Maoist rebellion is the flavour of the week, everybody,
from the sleekest fat cat to the most cynical editor of the most sold-out
newspaper in this country, seems to be suddenly ready to concede that it
is decades of accumulated injustice that lies at the root of the problem.
But instead of addressing that problem, which would mean putting the
brakes on this 21st century gold rush, they are trying to head the debate
off in a completely different direction, with a noisy outburst of pious
outrage about Maoist “terrorism”. But they’re only speaking to themselves.

The people who have taken to arms are not spending all their time watching
(or performing for) TV, or reading the papers, or conducting SMS polls for
the Moral Science question of the day: Is Violence Good or Bad? SMS your
reply to…. They’re out there. They’re fighting. They believe they have
the right to defend their homes and their land. They believe that they
deserve justice.

In order to keep its better-off citizens absolutely safe from these
dangerous people, the government has declared war on them. A war, which it
tells us, may take between three and five years to win. Odd, isn’t it,
that even after the Mumbai attacks of 26/11, the government was prepared
to talk with Pakistan? It’s prepared to talk to China. But when it comes
to waging war against the poor, it’s playing hard. It’s not enough that
Special Police—with totemic names like Greyhounds, Cobras and
Scorpions—are scouring the forests with a licence to kill. It’s not enough
that the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), the Border Security Force
(BSF) and the notorious Naga Battalion have already wreaked havoc and
committed unconscionable atrocities in remote forest villages. It’s not
enough that the government supports and arms the Salwa Judum, the
“people’s militia” that has killed and raped and burned its way through
the forests of Dantewada leaving three hundred thousand people homeless,
or on the run. Now the government is going to deploy the Indo-Tibetan
Border Police and tens of thousands of paramilitary troops. It plans to
set up a brigade headquarters in Bilaspur (which will displace nine
villages) and an air base in Rajnandgaon (which will displace seven).
Obviously, these decisions were taken a while ago. Surveys have been done,
sites chosen. Interesting. War has been in the offing for a while. And now
the helicopters of the Indian air force have been given the right to fire
in “self-defence”, the very right that the government denies its poorest
citizens.

Fire at whom? How in god’s name will the security forces be able to
distinguish a Maoist from an ordinary person who is running terrified
through the jungle? Will adivasis carrying the bows and arrows they have
carried for centuries now count as Maoists too? Are non-combatant Maoist
sympathisers valid targets? When I was in Dantewada, the Superintendent of
Police showed me pictures of 19 “Maoists” who “his boys” had killed. I
asked him how I was supposed to tell they were Maoists. He said, “See
Ma’am, they have malaria medicines, Dettol bottles, all these things from
outside.”

What kind of war is Operation Green Hunt going to be? Will we ever know?
Not much news comes out of the forests. Lalgarh in West Bengal has been
cordoned off. Those who try to go in are being beaten and arrested. And
called Maoists of course. In Dantewada, the Vanvasi Chetana Ashram, a
Gandhian ashram run by Himanshu Kumar, was bulldozed in a few hours. It
was the last neutral outpost before the war zone begins, a place where
journalists, activists, researchers and fact-finding teams could stay
while they worked in the area.

Meanwhile, the Indian establishment has unleashed its most potent weapon.
Almost overnight, our embedded media has substituted its steady supply of
planted, unsubstantiated, hysterical stories about ‘Islamist Terrorism’
with planted, unsubstantiated, hysterical stories about ‘Red Terrorism’.
In the midst of this racket, at Ground Zero, the cordon of silence is
being inexorably tightened. The ‘Sri Lanka Solution’ could very well be on
the cards. It’s not for nothing that the Indian government blocked a
European move in the UN asking for an international probe into war crimes
committed by the government of Sri Lanka in its recent offensive against
the Tamil Tigers.

The first move in that direction is the concerted campaign that has been
orchestrated to shoehorn the myriad forms of resistance taking place in
this country into a simple George Bush binary: If you are not with us, you
are with the Maoists. The deliberate exaggeration of the Maoist ‘threat’
helps the State to justify militarisation. (And surely does no harm to the
Maoists. Which political party would be unhappy to be singled out for such
attention?) While all the oxygen is being used up by this new doppelganger
of the War on Terror, the State will use the opportunity to mop up the
hundreds of other resistance movements in the sweep of its military
operation, calling them all Maoist sympathisers. I use the future tense,
but this process is well under way. The West Bengal government tried to do
this in Nandigram and Singur but failed. Right now in Lalgarh, the Pulishi
Santrash Birodhi Janasadharaner Committee or the People’s Committee
Against Police Atrocities—which is a people’s movement that is separate
from, though sympathetic to, the Maoists—is routinely referred to as an
overground wing of the CPI (Maoist). Its leader, Chhatradhar Mahato, now
arrested and being held without bail, is always called a “Maoist leader”.
We all know the story of Dr Binayak Sen, a medical doctor and a civil
liberties activist, who spent two years in jail on the absolutely facile
charge of being a courier for the Maoists. While the light shines brightly
on Operation Green Hunt, in other parts of India, away from the theatre of
war, the assault on the rights of the poor, of workers, of the landless,
of those whose lands the government wishes to acquire for “public
purpose”, will pick up pace. Their suffering will deepen and it will be
that much harder for them to get a hearing. Once the war begins, like all
wars, it will develop a momentum, a logic and an economics of its own. It
will become a way of life, almost impossible to reverse. The police will
be expected to behave like an army, a ruthless killing machine. The
paramilitary will be expected to become like the police, a corrupt,
bloated administrative force. We’ve seen it happen in Nagaland, Manipur
and Kashmir. The only difference in the ‘heartland’ will be that it’ll
become obvious very quickly to the security forces that they’re only a
little less wretched than the people they’re fighting. In time, the divide
between the people and the law enforcers will become porous. Guns and
ammunition will be bought and sold. In fact, it’s already happening.
Whether it’s the security forces or the Maoists or non-combatant
civilians, the poorest people will die in this Rich People’s War. However,
if anybody believes that this war will leave them unaffected, they should
think again. The resources it’ll consume will cripple the economy of this
country.

Last week, civil liberties groups from all over the country organised a
series of meetings in Delhi to discuss what could be done to turn the tide
and stop the war. The absence of Dr Balagopal, one of the best-known civil
rights activists of Andhra Pradesh, who died two weeks ago, closed around
us like a physical pain. He was one of the bravest, wisest political
thinkers of our time and left us just when we needed him most. Still, I’m
sure he would have been reassured to hear speaker after speaker displaying
the vision, the depth, the experience, the wisdom, the political acuity
and, above all, the real humanity of the community of activists,
academics, lawyers, judges and a range of other people who make up the
civil liberties community in India. Their presence in the capital
signalled that outside the arclights of our TV studios and beyond the
drumbeat of media hysteria, even among India’s middle classes, a humane
heart still beats. Small wonder then that these are the people who the
Union home minister recently accused of creating an “intellectual climate”
that was conducive to “terrorism”. If that charge was meant to frighten
people, to cow them down, it had the opposite effect.

The speakers represented a range of opinion from the liberal to the
radical Left. Though none of those who spoke would describe themselves as
Maoist, few were opposed in principle to the idea that people have a right
to defend themselves against State violence. Many were uncomfortable about
Maoist violence, about the ‘people’s courts’ that delivered summary
justice, about the authoritarianism that was bound to permeate an armed
struggle and marginalise those who did not have arms. But even as they
expressed their discomfort, they knew that people’s courts only existed
because India’s courts are out of the reach of ordinary people and that
the armed struggle that has broken out in the heartland is not the first,
but the very last option of a desperate people pushed to the very brink of
existence. The speakers were aware of the dangers of trying to extract a
simple morality out of individual incidents of heinous violence, in a
situation that had already begun to look very much like war. Everybody had
graduated long ago from equating the structural violence of the State with
the violence of the armed resistance. In fact, retired Justice P.B. Sawant
went so far as to thank the Maoists for forcing the establishment of this
country to pay attention to the egregious injustice of the system.
Hargopal from Andhra Pradesh spoke of his experience as a civil rights
activist through the years of the Maoist interlude in his state. He
mentioned in passing the fact that in a few days in Gujarat in 2002, Hindu
mobs led by the Bajrang Dal and the VHP had killed more people than the
Maoists ever had even in their bloodiest days in Andhra Pradesh.

People who had come from the war zones, from Lalgarh, Jharkhand,
Chhattisgarh and Orissa, described the police repression, the arrests, the
torture, the killing, the corruption, and the fact that in places like
Orissa, they seemed to take orders directly from the officials who worked
for the mining companies.. People described the dubious, malign role being
played by certain NGOs funded by aid agencies wholly devoted to furthering
corporate prospects. Again and again they spoke of how in Jharkhand and
Chhattisgarh activists as well as ordinary people—anyone who was seen to
be a dissenter—were being branded Maoists and imprisoned. They said that
this, more than anything else, was pushing people to take up arms and join
the Maoists. They asked how a government that professed its inability to
resettle even a fraction of the fifty million people who had been
displaced by “development” projects was suddenly able to identify 1,40,000
hectares of prime land to give to industrialists for more than 300 Special
Economic Zones, India’s onshore tax havens for the rich. They asked what
brand of justice the Supreme Court was practising when it refused to
review the meaning of ‘public purpose’ in the Land Acquisition Act even
when it knew that the government was forcibly acquiring land in the name
of ‘public purpose’ to give to private corporations. They asked why when
the government says that “the Writ of the State must run”, it seems to
only mean that police stations must be put in place. Not schools or
clinics or housing, or clean water, or a fair price for forest produce, or
even being left alone and free from the fear of the police—anything that
would make people’s lives a little easier. They asked why the ‘Writ of the
State’ could never be taken to mean justice.

There was a time, perhaps 10 years ago, when in meetings like these,
people were still debating the model of “development” that was being
thrust on them by the New Economic Policy. Now the rejection of that model
is complete. It is absolute. Everyone from the Gandhians to the Maoists
agree on that. The only question now is, what is the most effective way to
dismantle it?

An old college friend of a friend, a big noise in the corporate world, had
come along for one of the meetings out of morbid curiosity about a world
he knew very little about. Even though he had disguised himself in a
Fabindia kurta, he couldn’t help looking (and smelling) expensive. At one
point, he leaned across to me and said, “Someone should tell them not to
bother. They won’t win this one. They have no idea what they’re up
against. With the kind of money that’s involved here, these companies can
buy ministers and media barons and policy wonks, they can run their own
NGOs, their own militias, they can buy whole governments. They’ll even buy
the Maoists. These good people here should save their breath and find
something better to do.”

When people are being brutalised, what ‘better’ thing is there for them to
do than to fight back? It’s not as though anyone’s offering them a choice,
unless it’s to commit suicide, like the 1,80,000 farmers caught in a
spiral of debt have done. (Am I the only one who gets the distinct feeling
that the Indian establishment and its representatives in the media are far
more comfortable with the idea of poor people killing themselves in
despair than with the idea of them fighting back?)

For several years, people in Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Jharkhand and West
Bengal—some of them Maoists, many not—have managed to hold off the big
corporations. The question now is—how will Operation Green Hunt change the
nature of their struggle? What exactly are the fighting people up against?
SEZ who: Is it development?

It’s true that, historically, mining companies have almost always won
their battles against local people. Of all corporations, leaving aside the
ones that make weapons, they
probably have the most merciless past. They are cynical, battle-hardened
campaigners and when people say ‘Jaan denge par jameen nahin denge (We’ll
give away our lives, but never our land)’, it probably bounces off them
like a light drizzle on a bomb shelter. They’ve heard it before, in a
thousand different languages, in a hundred different countries.

Right now in India, many of them are still in the First Class Arrivals
lounge, ordering cocktails, blinking slowly like lazy predators, waiting
for the Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs) they have signed—some as far
back as 2005—to materialise into real money. But four years in a First
Class lounge is enough to test the patience of even the truly tolerant.
There’s only that much space they’re willing to make for the elaborate, if
increasingly empty, rituals of democratic practice: the (rigged) public
hearings, the (fake) Environmental Impact Assessments, the (purchased)
clearances from various ministries, the long-drawn-out court cases. Even
phony democracy is time-consuming. And time, for industrialists, is money.

So what kind of money are we talking about? In their seminal,
soon-to-be-published work, Out of This Earth: East India Adivasis and the
Aluminum Cartel, Samarendra Das and Felix Padel say that the financial
value of the bauxite deposits of Orissa alone is 2.27 trillion dollars.
(More than twice India’s Gross Domestic Product). That was at 2004 prices.
At today’s prices it would be about 4 trillion dollars. A trillion has 12
zeroes.

Of this, officially the government gets a royalty of less than 7 per cent.
Quite often, if the mining company is a known and recognised one, the
chances are that, even though the ore is still in the mountain, it will
have already been traded on the futures market. So, while for the adivasis
the mountain is still a living deity, the fountainhead of life and faith,
the keystone of the ecological health of the region, for the corporation,
it’s just a cheap storage facility. Goods in storage have to be
accessible. From the corporation’s point of view, the bauxite will have to
come out of the mountain. If it can’t be done peacefully, then it will
have to be done violently. Such are the pressures and the exigencies of
the free market.

That’s just the story of the bauxite in Orissa. Expand the four trillion
dollars to include the value of the millions of tonnes of high-quality
iron ore in Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand and the 28 other precious mineral
resources, including uranium, limestone, dolomite, coal, tin, granite,
marble, copper, diamond, gold, quartzite, corundum, beryl, alexandrite,
silica, fluorite and garnet. Add to that the power plants, the dams, the
highways, the steel and cement factories, the aluminium smelters, and all
the other infrastructure projects that are part of the hundreds of MoUs
(more than 90 in Jharkhand alone) that have been signed. That gives us a
rough outline of the scale of the operation and the desperation of the
stakeholders. The forest once known as the Dandakaranya, which stretches
from West Bengal through Jharkhand, Orissa, Chhattisgarh, parts of Andhra
Pradesh and Maharashtra, is home to millions of India’s tribal people. The
media has taken to calling it the Red corridor or the Maoist corridor. It
could just as accurately be called the MoUist corridor. It doesn’t seem to
matter at all that the Fifth Schedule of the Constitution provides
protection to adivasi people and disallows the alienation of their land.
It looks as though the clause is there only to make the Constitution look
good—a bit of window-dressing, a slash of make-up. Scores of corporations,
from relatively unknown ones to the biggest mining companies and steel
manufacturers in the world, are in the fray to appropriate adivasi
homelands—the Mittals, Jindals, Tata, Essar, Posco, Rio Tinto, BHP
Billiton and, of course, Vedanta.

There’s an MoU on every mountain, river and forest glade. We’re talking
about social and environmental engineering on an unimaginable scale. And
most of this is secret. It’s not in the public domain. Somehow I don’t
think that the plans that are afoot to destroy one of the world’s most
pristine forests and ecosystems, as well as the people who live in it,
will be discussed at the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. Our
24-hour news channels that are so busy hunting for macabre stories of
Maoist violence—and making them up when they run out of the real
thing—seem to have no interest at all in this side of the story. I wonder
why?

Perhaps it’s because the development lobby to which they are so much in
thrall says the mining industry will ratchet up the rate of GDP growth
dramatically and provide employment to the people it displaces. This does
not take into account the catastrophic costs of environmental damage. But
even on its own narrow terms, it is simply untrue. Most of the money goes
into the bank accounts of the mining corporations. Less than 10 per cent
comes to the public exchequer. A very tiny percentage of the displaced
people get jobs, and those who do, earn slave-wages to do humiliating,
backbreaking work. By caving in to this paroxysm of greed, we are
bolstering other countries’ economies with our ecology.

When the scale of money involved is what it is, the stakeholders are not
always easy to identify. Between the CEOs in their private jets and the
wretched tribal Special Police Officers in the “people’s” militias—who for
a couple of thousand rupees a month fight their own people, rape, kill and
burn down whole villages in an effort to clear the ground for mining to
begin—there is an entire universe of primary, secondary and tertiary
stakeholders. These people don’t have to declare their interests, but
they’re allowed to use their positions and good offices to further them.
How will we ever know which political party, which ministers, which MPs,
which politicians, which judges, which NGOs, which expert consultants,
which police officers, have a direct or indirect stake in the booty? How
will we know which newspapers reporting the latest Maoist “atrocity”,
which TV channels “reporting directly from Ground Zero”—or, more
accurately, making it a point not to report from Ground Zero, or even more
accurately, lying blatantly from Ground Zero—are stakeholders?

What is the provenance of the billions of dollars (several times more than
India’s GDP) secretly stashed away by Indian citizens in Swiss bank
accounts? Where did the two billion dollars spent on the last general
elections come from? Where do the hundreds of millions of rupees that
political parties and politicians pay the media for the ‘high-end’,
‘low-end’ and ‘live’ pre-election ‘coverage packages’ that P. Sainath
recently wrote about come from? (The next time you see a TV anchor
haranguing a numb studio guest, shouting, “Why don’t the Maoists stand for
elections? Why don’t they come in to the mainstream?”, do SMS the channel
saying, “Because they can’t afford your rates.”)

What are we to make of the fact that the Union home minister, P.
Chidambaram, the CEO of Operation Green Hunt, has, in his career as a
corporate lawyer, represented several mining corporations? What are we to
make of the fact that he was a non-executive director of Vedanta—a
position from which he resigned the day he became finance minister in
2004? What are we to make of the fact that, when he became finance
minister, one of the first clearances he gave for FDI was to Twinstar
Holdings, a Mauritius-based company, to buy shares in Sterlite, a part of
the Vedanta group?

What are we to make of the fact that, when activists from Orissa filed a
case against Vedanta in the Supreme Court, citing its violations of
government guidelines and pointing out that the Norwegian Pension Fund had
withdrawn its investment from the company alleging gross environmental
damage and human rights violations committed by the company, Justice
Kapadia suggested that Vedanta be substituted with Sterlite, a sister
company of the same group? He then blithely announced in an open court
that he too had shares in Sterlite. He gave forest clearance to Sterlite
to go ahead with the mining despite the fact that the Supreme Court’s own
expert committee had explicitly said that permission should be denied and
that mining would ruin the forests, water sources, environment and the
lives and livelihoods of the thousands of tribals living there. Justice
Kapadia gave this clearance without rebutting the report of the Supreme
Court’s own committee.

What are we to make of the fact that the Salwa Judum, the brutal
ground-clearing operation disguised as a “spontaneous” people’s militia in
Dantewada, was formally inaugurated in 2005, just days after the MoU with
the Tatas was signed? And that the Jungle Warfare Training School in
Bastar was set up just around then?

What are we to make of the fact that two weeks ago, on October 12, the
mandatory public hearing for Tata Steel’s Rs 10,000-crore steel project in
Lohandiguda, Dantewada, was held in a small hall inside the collectorate,
cordoned off with massive security, with a hired audience of 50 tribal
people brought in from two Bastar villages in a convoy of government
jeeps? (The public hearing was declared a success and the district
collector congratulated the people of Bastar for their cooperation.)

What are we to make of the fact that just around the time the prime
minister began to call the Maoists the “single-largest internal security
threat” (which was a signal that the government was getting ready to go
after them), the share prices of many of the mining companies in the
region skyrocketed?

The mining companies desperately need this “war”. It’s an old technique.
They hope the impact of the violence will drive out the people who have so
far managed to resist the attempts that have been made to evict them.
Whether this will indeed be the outcome, or whether it’ll simply swell the
ranks of the Maoists remains to be seen.

Reversing this argument, Dr Ashok Mitra, former finance minister of West
Bengal, in an article called ‘The Phantom Enemy’, argues that the “grisly
serial murders” that the Maoists are committing are a classic tactic,
learned from guerrilla warfare textbooks. He suggests that they have built
and trained a guerrilla army that is now ready to take on the Indian
State, and that the Maoist ‘rampage’ is a deliberate attempt on their part
to invite the wrath of a blundering, angry Indian State which the Maoists
hope will commit acts of cruelty that will enrage the adivasis. That rage,
Dr Mitra says, is what the Maoists hope can be harvested and transformed
into an insurrection. This, of course, is the charge of ‘adventurism’ that
several currents of the Left have always levelled at the Maoists. It
suggests that Maoist ideologues are not above inviting destruction on the
very people they claim to represent in order to bring about a revolution
that will bring them to power. Ashok Mitra is an old Communist who had a
ringside seat during the Naxalite uprising of the ’60s and ’70s in West
Bengal. His views cannot be summarily dismissed. But it’s worth keeping in
mind that the adivasi people have a long and courageous history of
resistance that predates the birth of Maoism. To look upon them as
brainless puppets being manipulated by a few middle-class Maoist
ideologues is to do them something of a disservice.

Presumably Dr Mitra is talking about the situation in Lalgarh where, up to
now, there has been no talk of mineral wealth. (Lest we forget—the current
uprising in Lalgarh was sparked off over the chief minister’s visit to
inaugurate a Jindal Steel factory. And where there’s a steel factory, can
the iron ore be very far away?) The people’s anger has to do with their
desperate poverty, and the decades of suffering at the hands of the police
and the ‘Harmads’, the armed militia of the Communist Party of India
(Marxist) that has ruled West Bengal for more than 30 years.

Even if, for argument’s sake, we don’t ask what tens of thousands of
police and paramilitary troops are doing in Lalgarh, and we accept the
theory of Maoist ‘adventurism’, it would still be only a very small part
of the picture.

The real problem is that the flagship of India’s miraculous ‘growth’ story
has run aground. It came at a huge social and environmental cost. And now,
as the rivers dry up and forests disappear, as the water table recedes and
as people realise what is being done to them, the chickens are coming home
to roost. All over the country, there’s unrest, there are protests by
people refusing to give up their land and their access to resources,
refusing to believe false promises any more. Suddenly, it’s beginning to
look as though the 10 per cent growth rate and democracy are mutually
incompatible. To get the bauxite out of the flat-topped hills, to get iron
ore out from under the forest floor, to get 85 per cent of India’s people
off their land and into the cities (which is what Mr Chidambaram says he’d
like to see), India has to become a police state. The government has to
militarise. To justify that militarisation, it needs an enemy. The Maoists
are that enemy. They are to corporate fundamentalists what the Muslims are
to Hindu fundamentalists. (Is there a fraternity of fundamentalists? Is
that why the RSS has expressed open admiration for Mr Chidambaram?)

It would be a grave mistake to imagine that the paramilitary troops, the
Rajnandgaon air base, the Bilaspur brigade headquarters, the Unlawful
Activities Act, the Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act and Operation
Green Hunt are all being put in place just to flush out a few thousand
Maoists from the forests. In all the talk of Operation Green Hunt, whether
or not Mr Chidambaram goes ahead and “presses the button”, I detect the
kernel of a coming state of Emergency. (Here’s a math question: If it
takes 600,000 soldiers to hold down the tiny valley of Kashmir, how many
will it take to contain the mounting rage of hundreds of millions of
people?)

Instead of narco-analysing Kobad Ghandy, the recently arrested Maoist
leader, it might be a better idea to talk to him.

Update

Avatar in the Amazon too…

Soybeans? In my first book, Stuffed and Starved, I used soybeans as an example of how modern capitalist industrial farming could take a perfectly wonderful plant and turn it into a curse. Soy is a terrific plant – rich in protein and great for the soil as part of a polyculture. But when you plant millions of acres of it, things turn bad. Soybeans have been a central part of the narrative of Brazil’s agricultural success but that success, as this report shows, has been bought at a high ecological, social and indeed economic price. Although it looks like soyfarmers are the poster children of pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps New World entrepreneurialism, the industry was only able to grow behind high tariff barriers and loans from central government at negative interest rates – in other words, the government paid the farmers to take out loans to develop the industry. There are ways to grow this miracle crop that are part of a thriving environment. Brazil’s soy barons aren’t involved in any of those ways.

One of the parts of the soy miracle that I didn’t fully appreciate is the ‘virtual water‘ that soy uses. In 2004, China bought 18 million tons of Brazilian soybeans, which required 45 cubic km of water to produce. Global water consumption in the home is 65 cubic km. Find out more below the fold.

Brazil is naked! The advance of soybean monoculture, the grain that grew too much

Photo: JJ Tizou

Special to the Times
The gavel came down, the auction ended, and the winners carted their new purchases home. The bidders had walked the market, seen the wares, placed their offers and the highest bid won. It was a fair market price, struck 150 years ago outside Savannah, Ga., in a model of modern capitalism.

At one of the last slave auctions in America, this was how 429 men, women and children were dispatched, through a timeless dance of supply and demand. Efficient. Mathematical. Unjust. The price may have been fair, but the market wasn’t.

Little could be further from our minds when we go into a modern supermarket, yet that dark history is much closer than we’d like to think. The descendant of Atlantic slavery taints all too many tomatoes picked in Southern Florida today. Since 1997, well more than 1000 people have been freed from conditions of modern slavery in the tomato fields of Florida. In the latest of such cases to surface, workers were chained inside trucks, charged $5 for a shower, and made to work for pennies a day, suffering heinous physical abuse from their employers.

Their suffering is bought cheap, at $2 a pound in the supermarket. Yet for picking those tomatoes, the average worker earns about 45 cents for a 32 pound bucket. And far too many earn much less.
According to the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, an organization of tomato pickers fighting for justice in the fields of Immokalee, for every person freed by police, there are many more who remain in deplorable conditions. Those who perpetrate these crimes have been prosecuted under the federal laws guaranteeing the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, the very amendment that ended slavery in 1865.

The Coalition isn’t calling for radical change — they’re asking for just a penny more for every pound of tomatoes they pick for the tomato companies and that their employers be required to comply with a basic code of conduct, including zero tolerance for forced labor. Florida’s tomato growing conglomerates have shrugged off the suggestion that the average tomato picker’s wage should increase from its current level of $10,000 per year. The Coalition has responded by successfully petitioning the end-users of the tomatoes: from Taco Bell to Whole Foods, more and more American corporations agree that one ingredient that shouldn’t be in our food is slavery.

Tomato picking holds a credible claim to being the worst job in the United States. As Greg Asbed from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers puts it, “No one dreams of the day they can finally get that job picking tomatoes.” Yet many firms continue to ignore the call to improve farm labor conditions and end slavery in the fields. Among them is Publix, the largest publicly held corporation in Florida, with revenues of $24 billion in 2009.

One might have imagined Florida’s self-styled “neighborhood grocer” to be more sympathetic to calls to end slavery in its suppliers’ operations. At the end of the day, it seems, business is business. The argument that Publix offers is that the tomatoes it buys — including those it buys from Pacific and Six Ls, the two growers associated with the latest slavery prosecution — are bought at a fair market price. According to Publix spokesman Dwaine Stevens they’re unwilling to interfere in what they regard as a labor dispute. “That’s not our role: to come between our suppliers and their workers.”

This is disingenuous on many fronts. First, while supply and demand have indeed met without hindrance, there’s nothing fair about profiting from the federal crime of slavery, no matter how smoothly and efficiently supply and demand have intersected. Second, when change has been demanded in the past, Publix has felt very able to make its own decisions. In 2005, the company stopped buying grape tomatoes from Ag-Mart, a supplier alleged to have violated state and federal pesticide laws. Publix cared when methyl bromide might have tainted its tomatoes — but it seems the sweat of modern-day slaves can be rinsed off a little easier.

Consumer demand can change the way companies behave, and I don’t know anyone who wants their food grown by de facto slaves. Too few of us are given the chance to know the conditions in which our food is grown, though. Publix cannot claim such ignorance. While many other large corporations have adopted a code that raises farmworker wages and, for the first time, commits buyers to cut-off suppliers who are involved in slavery, Publix has no plans to meet with the Coalition. On their website can be found this line: “the Publix guarantee to never knowingly disappoint our customers is legendary in the industry.” Consumers have every reason to be disappointed with Publix’ attitude. And Publix needs to live up to their word.

References:

http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/news/?id=517f1da1-8900-40ee-b650-b3acd6ff8efe

http://staugustine.com/news/local-news/2009-11-24/farmworkers-protest-supermarket-tomatoes

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ag-Mart

http://www.ciw-online.org/

Two Million Angry Moms and One Sociologist

By Mark Winne

Early in Free for All: Fixing School Food in America (University of California Press, 2010) former Texas Agriculture Secretary Susan Coombs declares that, “it will take 2 million angry moms to change school food”. Based on what we now know of the dreary state of our children’s cafeteria fare, there must be at least that many mamas, as well as a good number of papas who are ready to storm the barricades. Fortunately for them and America’s 55 million students who gulp down something resembling a meal every school day, they’ve been joined by Hunter College sociologist Janet Poppendieck who gives us the best reasons yet for unconditional school food reform.

We are already indebted to Poppendieck for her earlier works Knee Deep in Breadlines and Sweet Charity where she employed her sleuthing skills to unravel the historical contradictions and compounding irrationalities associated with feeding our nation’s neediest citizens. As she did then, Poppendieck combines her talents as historian and sociologist with those of an institutional psychologist to help us get in touch with our nation’s school food neurosis.

Why, for instance, have we developed three different ways to pay the lunch lady – one for the poor students, one for the nearly poor, and one for those who supposedly drive BMWs to school? The logical answer might be because that’s fair; the rich kids should pay more and the government should subsidize the cost of feeding lower income children, as it does currently to the tune of $11 billion annually. But as Poppendieck peels back the layers of the onion, we find the issue has always been less about compassion for needy children and more about accommodating political and commercial interests. Harry Truman (school lunch is good for national security), Ronald Reagan (ketchup is a vegetable), nutritionists and nutritionism (its nutrients that count, not the quality and taste of food), and various agricultural lobbies wanting to unload their farm surpluses are just a sampling of what has driven the school food agenda. Somewhere low on the totem pole you’ll find concern for the health and well-being of boys and girls.

Like any parent, I love to regale my own children with tales of the good old days. I tell them about my high school cafeteria which had exactly one vending machine in the 1960s: a mechanically operated metal box that dispensed a red or golden, uncut, unpackaged and unadorned fresh apple for 25 cents. Far from feeling deprived (my children asked me if my school was the same one attended by Abe Lincoln), we were a healthy and reasonably bright group of young people. But today, vending machines (I once counted 51 in just one Albuquerque, New Mexico high school) are as ubiquitous as dog droppings in the melting snow. What has happened during the intervening decades?

Poppendieck’s jargon-free narrative takes us step-by-step through the deals, concessions, and compromises that have bureaucratized the school food process while simultaneously dumbing down the food. Why is so much processed food used to prepare school meals? Because it’s cheaper and “cooking from scratch” kitchens have been removed from the schools. Why does it have to be cheaper when we’re talking about feeding our children? Because the federal government (or anyone else for that matter) will not provide enough funding to enable schools to buy fresh, whole ingredients. (And by the way, taxpayers are spending billions of dollars to subsidize corn and soybeans, the prime ingredients in processed food.) Why do we have so many junk food items sold “a la carte” in our schools? Well, in addition to using a French culinary phrase to disguise what is otherwise crappy food, schools must sell these items to those with discretionary cash – supposedly the ones driving the BMWs – to compensate for the low reimbursements they receive for meals that meet mandated USDA standards. And on it goes.

Perhaps what I found most astonishing, and central to Poppendieck’s thesis, is the evolution of the three-tiered payment system. While the free, reduced-price, and full-pay categories are the “wins” secured by anti-hunger advocates over many years of legislative battles, Poppendieck argues that the cure may have been worse than the disease. The high cost of determining student eligibility, the administrative reporting burdens imposed by USDA, and of course, the stigma that falls on poor students exacts a high toll. On this last point, Poppendieck has this to say: “The biggest problem is the stigma that comes from being different, from being marked as poor, from being unable to pay in a culture that places excessive value on being able to pay.”

Poppendieck has a solution that is as elegant as it will be hard to achieve – universal free meals for all students K through 12. She acknowledges the cost, an additional $12 billion per year (our present wars, please note, are costing about the same amount each month) that would not only feed all students for free, but also improve the quality of the food.

If the arguments for universal school meals – efficiency, equity, no one excluded – sound eerily familiar, then you’ve probably been paying attention to the arguments for universal health care. If nothing else, it’s certainly ironic to consider the consequences of removing each system’s respective middlemen: processed food purveyors for school food, and private health insurers for health care. Might we all be healthier as a result?

In a long chapter called “Local Heroes” Poppendieck acknowledges the pioneering work of many innovative school food directors like Ann Cooper, as well as movements to connect schools to local farms and even create school gardens. These and others have made important contributions, she says, but they all need to be “scaled up” by becoming institutionalized (my word choice here would be “naturalized”) into the system. This by the way is the role of public policy, and it is why every one who cares about what our children eat should be in touch with their members of Congress. The future of school food will be decided in the 2010 Child Nutrition reauthorization now before Congress.

Free for All is well researched and written. While Poppendieck studies her subject with the thoroughness of a sociologist, fortunately she doesn’t sound like one. We are treated to a careful review of the facts that flow through a lively and personal narrative. The reader is kept closely by her side as Poppendieck travels through school cafeterias and pores over government reports. Along the way we observe, touch, and taste what 55 million American children consume each school day. Most importantly, she tells us why it’s the way it is, and how, if we could somehow put ourselves in the little shoes of people smaller than us, we would do everything we could to make it better.

Mark Winne is the author of “Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty” (Beacon Press, 2008). His second book “Food Rebels, Guerilla Gardeners, and Smart Cookin’ Mamas” will be released in October.

Update Many folk have asked for the original, and Laurence Becker was kind enough to send a link to the study, which I’ll write about when I’ve had a chance to digest it.

A worker in Cote d’Ivoire in West Africa harvests locally grown rice. (Photo courtesy of Oregon State University)

Free trade, loss of support systems crippling food production in Africa

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Despite good intentions, the push to privatize government functions and insistence upon “free trade” that is too often unfair has caused declining food production, increased poverty and a hunger crisis for millions of people in many African nations, researchers conclude in a new study.

Market reforms that began in the mid-1980s and were supposed to aid economic growth have actually backfired in some of the poorest nations in the world, and just in recent years led to multiple food riots, scientists report today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a professional journal.

“Many of these reforms were designed to make countries more efficient, and seen as a solution to failing schools, hospitals and other infrastructure,” said Laurence Becker, an associate professor of geosciences at Oregon State University. “But they sometimes eliminated critical support systems for poor farmers who had no car, no land security, made $1 a day and had their life savings of $600 hidden under a mattress.

“These people were then asked to compete with some of the most efficient agricultural systems in the world, and they simply couldn’t do it,” Becker said. “With tariff barriers removed, less expensive imported food flooded into countries, some of which at one point were nearly self-sufficient in agriculture. Many people quit farming and abandoned systems that had worked in their cultures for centuries.”

These forces have undercut food production for 25 years, the researchers concluded. They came to a head in early 2008 when the price of rice – a staple in several African nations – doubled in one year for consumers who spent much of their income solely on food. Food riots, political and economic disruption ensued.

The study was done by researchers from OSU, the University of California at Los Angeles and Macalester College. It was based on household and market surveys and national production data.

There are no simple or obvious solutions, Becker said, but developed nations and organizations such as the World Bank or International Monetary Fund need to better recognize that approaches which can be effective in more advanced economies don’t readily translate to less developed nations.

“We don’t suggest that all local producers, such as small farmers, live in some false economy that’s cut off from the rest of the world,” Becker said.

“But at the same time, we have to understand these are often people with little formal education, no extension systems or bank accounts, often no cars or roads,” he said. “They can farm land and provide both food and jobs in their countries, but sometimes they need a little help, in forms that will work for them. Some good seeds, good advice, a little fertilizer, a local market for their products.”

Many people in African nations, Becker said, farm local land communally, as they have been doing for generations, without title to it or expensive equipment – and have developed systems that may not be advanced, but are functional. They are often not prepared to compete with multinational corporations or sophisticated trade systems. The loss of local agricultural production puts them at the mercy of sudden spikes in food costs around the world. And some of the farmers they compete with in the U.S., East Asia and other nations receive crop supports or subsidies of various types, while they are told they must embrace completely free trade with no assistance.

“A truly free market does not exist in this world,” Becker said. “We don’t have one, but we tell hungry people in Africa that they are supposed to.”

This research examined problems in Gambia and Cote d’Ivoire in Western Africa, where problems of this nature have been severe in recent years. It also looked at conditions in Mali, which by contrast has been better able to sustain local food production – because of better roads, a location that makes imported rice more expensive, a cultural commitment to local products and other factors.

Historically corrupt governments continue to be a problem, the researchers said.

“In many African nations people think of the government as looters, not as helpers or protectors of rights,” Becker said. “But despite that, we have to achieve a better balance in governments providing some minimal supports to help local agriculture survive.”

An emphasis that began in the 1980s on wider responsibilities for the private sector, the report said, worked to an extent so long as prices for food imports, especially rice, remained cheap. But it steadily caused higher unemployment and an erosion in local food production, which in 2007-08 exploded in a global food crisis, street riots and violence. The sophisticated techniques and cash-crop emphasis of the “Green Revolution” may have caused more harm than help in many locations, the study concluded.

Another issue, they said, was an “urban bias” in government assistance programs, where the few support systems in place were far more oriented to the needs of city dwellers than their rural counterparts.

Potential solutions, the researchers concluded, include more diversity of local crops, appropriate tariff barriers to give local producers a reasonable chance, subsidies where appropriate, and the credit systems, road networks, and local mills necessary to process local crops and get them to local markets.

First, Avi Lewis and the team at Al Jazeera have produced a fantastic short documentary, impressive on so many levels. In less than half an hour, they overturn almost every reporting convention observed in the past month’s coverage, presenting Haiti as a country in which people are absolutely able to manage their affairs, proceeding in dignified emergency to help one another, and articulating clearly and unambiguously their visions for the future.

Those demands, as Arun Gupta notes in his wide-ranging analysis, are ones that cannot be accommodated under the US occupation. It may be glossed over as ‘emergency security support’, but a close look at the evidence suggests something far more sinister. There’s clearly a long-term economic agenda, for instance. Arun is quite right to bring attention to the document below, by Oxford economist, Paul Collier. Readers may remember my finding fault with Collier previously for living in a bygone century, insisting on a vision of agrarian change that has been thoroughly discredited. In this document, written a year ago for the United Nations, Collier goes one better. He ignores the past completely. The first few pages of his report turn euphemism into an art, as he struggles to describe Haiti’s past without making any mention of coups, political intervention or economic warfare.

Paul Collier on Haiti

As you can see, Collier doesn’t worry too much about the past that has been destroyed in Haiti, or the reasons why so many Haitians are prepared to work for so little. He’s a forward-looking man, and he has a solution for Haiti’s woes. The country’s sweatshops (‘the textile industries’) are a great start. The trouble is that they aren’t running to full capacity. The way to save Haiti, it seems, is just to get the sweatshops running twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty five days a year. Problem solved.

Naomi Klein’s latest piece is a helpful reminder that Haiti does indeed have a past, and one that makes it not a debtor, but a creditor nation. The rest of the world, Europe and the US in particular, owe Haiti, for the toxic debt and even toxic waste that has laid the country bare.

For a brief, happy, moment it looked as if the IMF saw the light, and was going to give Haiti an unconditional grant. Turns out, the IMF would like to impose conditions through debt after all, but just not while the world is watching. So they’ll bring the pain, and the repayments, in a few years’ time.

It’s through journalism events like these, networks such as Haiti Action, and the information at places like Haiti: Relief and Reconstruction Watch that we’ll be able to piece together exactly what’s going on.

Haiti Protest San Francisco 26 Jan 2010

The mainstream media isn’t getting the real story out – which is why events like this protest in San Francisco a couple of weeks back, part of dozens in North America, become so vital: one of the few ways that ordinary people can hear the truth about Haiti is through a megaphone, on the streets.