Wasting the Nation.indd - Groundwork

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Chapter 1: Dust and Asheshouseholds 5 produce over half the waste while the dumps are located in poor areas[Swilling 2006]. Dumps are expensive but this is an investment that destroys value.The object then, is to invest in removing the waste from wealthy areas and to invest ascheaply as possible in disposing of it at the ‘back of the shop’.Waste and war on the poorYet the relation between poverty and waste goes deeper than this. Development has,since the Second World War, been associated with geopolitical strategies. Thus, thegreen revolution promised a better life for the rural poor in Third World countrieswho might otherwise be inclined to revolt under the flag of the red revolution. Forthe most part, it delivered new markets for corporate agri-business in alliance withlocal elites while the dispossession of peasants and rural workers was naturalised inthe language of development as part of ‘the urban transition’. Policies that supportedthe accumulation of wealth in urban areas would, it was promised, create industrialjobs to absorb the flow of migrants. Nevertheless, permanent urban migration wasrestricted in many countries, including South Africa, in order to subsidise low wagesfor migrant workers with the shrinking product of peasant farming. Rural insurgenciesresisted dispossession across much of the Third World and were contained by thedeployment of counter-insurgency strategies framed in Cold War terms. The defeat ofthis strategy in Vietnam was central to the crisis of US power in the 1970s. The empirefought back. In the 1980s, the US used the economic instruments of neo-liberalism toreclaim power and reframe development as a function of ‘the market’.There are now more people in the cities than in the country and one third of them livein slums with little hope of secure work as economic growth yields fewer jobs at lowerwages. The urban poor are now at the centre of a development discourse which expectsthem to create their own jobs through entrepreneurial enterprise. This follows theWorld Bank’s prognosis that, throughout the ‘developing’ world, the informal sectorwill now provide the jobs that the formal sector no longer offers. In South Africa, ithas been formalised in the language of the ‘two economies’ adopted by the Acceleratedand Shared Growth Initiative (Asgisa). Even dump picking is now counted as a jobin employment statistics. 6 As urban scholar Mike Davis comments, “it makes moreobvious sense to consider most informal workers as the ‘active’ unemployed, who haveno choice but to subsist by some means or starve” [2004: 25].5 This represents a much smaller proportion of the population as fewer people live in wealthy households than inpoor households.6 A fuller critique of Asgisa is offered in The groundWork Report 2006.- 18 - groundWork - Wasting the Nation
Chapter 1: Dust and AshesThe poor have not gone quietly to the back of the shop. Across the world, localresistance has manifested in protest actions: against removals from homes or from streettrading sites, against restricted and unaffordable essential services, against pollution byindustries and waste dumps, against rising prices of energy and food, against exclusionfrom decisions concerning their own futures. Confronted by armed security deployedby the state, many protests turn into riots. They are not exclusively urban but it is theurban terrain that is now given strategic significance. At a global level, the ‘war onterror’ has replaced the Cold War as the organising principle of violence directed atmaintaining the conditions for capital accumulation. The US Pentagon now draws onthe theorists of ‘fourth generation war’ against ‘non-state enemies’. These enemies maybe international migrants or the urban poor who are held to threaten state order andincubate or shelter terrorists. US battle field training grounds are therefore being madeover, transformed from rural terrains for the tanks to roll across to replicas of ThirdWorld slums – with a little help from Hollywood set designers.The global sphere is not the sole reserve of the US or even of the Northern states ingeneral. Raúl Zibechi, a Latin American researcher, notes that the Brazilian army hasadmitted to using the same techniques in its occupation of Brazilian favelas as it usesin its peacekeeping mission in Haiti. Zibechi comments that the admission “largelyexplains the interest of Lula da Silva’s government in keeping that country’s troops onthe Caribbean island: to test, in the poor neighbourhoods of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, containment strategies designed for application in the slums of Rio de Janeiro,São Paulo, and other large cities” [2007].Force is not enough against ‘non-state enemies’. US commanders in Iraq see it as onedimension of ‘total war’ in which traditionally civilian functions of service delivery,political legitimacy and capitalist economic development are deployed. In this context,Zibechi observes, “Electoral democracy and development are necessary to preventterrorism, but they are not objectives in and of themselves.” They are rather the obverseof the walls built to contain those who refuse subordination. Gaza is the final image ofthe walled in slum, cut off from all development and made into a free fire zone for theIsraeli Army which has specifically targeted its capacity to deliver municipal services.Yet in much of the world, the walls are as often symbolic as made of concrete and razorwire.Control mechanisms – whether dressed in military garb, or as NGOs fordevelopment, or promoting market economy and electoral democracy – areWasting the Nation - groundWork - 19 -
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ReferencesDavis, D. 2002. When Smok
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ReferencesKemmer, F. 1971. Pollutio
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ReferenceseThekwini Municipality 20
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