revolutionary subject: they are “free” in the double meaning of the word even more than the classic proletariat (“freed” from all substantial ties, dwelling in a free space, outside the police regulations of the state); and they are a large collective, forcibly thrown together, “thrown” into a situation where they have to invent some mode of being together, and simultaneously deprived of any support in traditional ways of life, in inherited religious or ethnic life-forms.
26
Politicization of Favelas
Speaking of proletarian positions, added to the failure of multitude as an agent for change, it is not easy to capture the image of this term. An instant reactive image to this ambiguity might be slum-dwellers. How would you illustrate it? How do you think this abstract notion could involve the revolutionary potential? Or, as you once put it, was it a purely contingent drift, something which simply emerged “because, among all these possibilities, there was the possibility to emerge” (as Varela put it), or can we risk a more precise evolutionary account of its prehistory?
SŽ: My big hope is what happens in slums . I spoke with my Brazilian friends who told me how the government is playing dirty at this point. Of course what predominates in slums is an inner mafia – gangsters or religious sects, etc. But, from time to time, various kinds of new social rebel, less progressive, start to organize themselves. At least in Brazil, do you know what, as they told me, always happens at that point? All of a sudden drugs become available. The police consciously allow drug-related crime, and this criminal activity puts political awareness on the back burner. It’s a very dirty game. After every political mobilization in the slums, drugs are available. But it’s those in power who do it.
Do you remember the coup d’état against Solidarno´s´c in Poland? And again in Poland, after Wojciech Jaruzelski’s coup d’état in 1980? All of a sudden, drugs were readily available, together with pornography, alcohol, and Eastern Wisdom manuals, in order to ruin the self-organized civil society. My friends from Poland told me it wasn’t just communist repression. After the coup , communists allowed something very primitive but effective to happen. Of course they oppressed political activity, but at the same time it was very easy to get hold of drugs and pornography. They even supported Buddhist transcendental meditation. All this was just to distract younger generations from political activity. Religion, drugs, and sex are good just to depoliticize.
This is why Badiou is right in denying to the enthusiastic events of the collapse of the communist regimes the status of an Event. This way, one can continue to dream that revolution is round the corner: all we need is authentic leadership, which would be able to organize the workers’ revolutionary potentials. If one is to believe them, Solidarno´s´c was originally a worker’s democratic socialist movement, later “betrayed” by its leadership, which was corrupted by the Church and the CIA. There is, of course, an element of truth in this approach: the ultimate irony of the disintegration of communism was that the leaders revolt.
So maybe there is potential in the slums. Mike Davis may well be correct when he argues that “there’s a consensus, both on the left and the right, that it’s the slum peripheries of poor Third World cities that have become a decisive geopolitical space.” This would be, for me, a true miracle: politicization of the slums . You know why? Slums are interesting because people are thrown into them without any regard to ethnic division or given unity. People there are usually from mixed levels of life. Also the only way to unite them would have been a more political one and I think this is why I still have some sympathy for Hugo Chávez. In spite of all the stupid things he did, he was the first one who really included people from slums, like
26
Politicization of Favelas
Speaking of proletarian positions, added to the failure of multitude as an agent for change, it is not easy to capture the image of this term. An instant reactive image to this ambiguity might be slum-dwellers. How would you illustrate it? How do you think this abstract notion could involve the revolutionary potential? Or, as you once put it, was it a purely contingent drift, something which simply emerged “because, among all these possibilities, there was the possibility to emerge” (as Varela put it), or can we risk a more precise evolutionary account of its prehistory?
SŽ: My big hope is what happens in slums . I spoke with my Brazilian friends who told me how the government is playing dirty at this point. Of course what predominates in slums is an inner mafia – gangsters or religious sects, etc. But, from time to time, various kinds of new social rebel, less progressive, start to organize themselves. At least in Brazil, do you know what, as they told me, always happens at that point? All of a sudden drugs become available. The police consciously allow drug-related crime, and this criminal activity puts political awareness on the back burner. It’s a very dirty game. After every political mobilization in the slums, drugs are available. But it’s those in power who do it.
Do you remember the coup d’état against Solidarno´s´c in Poland? And again in Poland, after Wojciech Jaruzelski’s coup d’état in 1980? All of a sudden, drugs were readily available, together with pornography, alcohol, and Eastern Wisdom manuals, in order to ruin the self-organized civil society. My friends from Poland told me it wasn’t just communist repression. After the coup , communists allowed something very primitive but effective to happen. Of course they oppressed political activity, but at the same time it was very easy to get hold of drugs and pornography. They even supported Buddhist transcendental meditation. All this was just to distract younger generations from political activity. Religion, drugs, and sex are good just to depoliticize.
This is why Badiou is right in denying to the enthusiastic events of the collapse of the communist regimes the status of an Event. This way, one can continue to dream that revolution is round the corner: all we need is authentic leadership, which would be able to organize the workers’ revolutionary potentials. If one is to believe them, Solidarno´s´c was originally a worker’s democratic socialist movement, later “betrayed” by its leadership, which was corrupted by the Church and the CIA. There is, of course, an element of truth in this approach: the ultimate irony of the disintegration of communism was that the leaders revolt.
So maybe there is potential in the slums. Mike Davis may well be correct when he argues that “there’s a consensus, both on the left and the right, that it’s the slum peripheries of poor Third World cities that have become a decisive geopolitical space.” This would be, for me, a true miracle: politicization of the slums . You know why? Slums are interesting because people are thrown into them without any regard to ethnic division or given unity. People there are usually from mixed levels of life. Also the only way to unite them would have been a more political one and I think this is why I still have some sympathy for Hugo Chávez. In spite of all the stupid things he did, he was the first one who really included people from slums, like
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