Contents include: • Feminism and Postmodernism • Habermas and Socialism • Crisis of French Marxism • Myths of Market Ideology • Class struggle & intellectual reaction • Feminism & the theory of difference Single copies, send £3 (inc p&p) to Socialist Outlook, PO Box 1109, London N4 20U. Subscriptions (3 issues per year) €10. Make cheques out o 'Socialist Outlook'. Page 12 January 30, 1993 No. 36 manner, working together cooperatively and encouraging the same values in our campaiens as we would want to see in our policies.
Grassroots
And we must support the left MPs and ensure links between them and the grassroots of the Party. Parliament isdesigned to arenate us members trom their origins (if they are on the left, Socialists who work in the Party to ensure representation must not allow their representatives to vanish behind the veneer of Westminster. We should not leave our MPs to become isolated individuals but should enable them to be accountable to the rank and fille which supports them.
Most of all socialists in the Labour Party must never forget why we are campaigning. It is not just to fight against the Tories - though we must. It is also to transform the balance of wealth and power, to strive to eliminate disadvantage and to improve the institutions of society so as to work in favour of forces - in the community, the country and the world.
We must not be afraid to as. sert principles that have been submerged by the PLP's increasingly frequent claims that them first.
Public ownership and controi of the economy, restructuring wages and benefits, abolition of nuclear missiles and the consequent reliance on nuclear self-determination for reland as much as for South Africa, the freedom for women to control their reproduchve rights- all of these are campaig ning issues which will be sup. ported by large numbers of people. What is needed is a leadership to put them forThe Labour Party should be providing that leadership. The ob of the Socialist Campaign Jetwork is to make the Labour Party provide that leadershipand to make the Labour Party fit for socialists to be in.
John Nicholson, Chair LPS, 1990-2
RIDLEY SCOTT'S cult movie, now undergoing its second run as Blade Runner, the Director's Cut pictures Los Angeles 2019 as a multi-level mega-city, where high technology jostles with almost total inThe masses live at ground filth, among the most dire pol. lution. The city itself seems to go on forever -upwards and outwards.
Twenty years go thi improbable futuristic Not so economic and social developments in late capitalism have given a dramatic spurt to global urbanisation.
Mega-cities
In 1992 there are more than 20 cities worldwide with more than 10 million people. Tokyo has more than 24 million (depending where you draw the city boundary), Sao Paulo has nearly 20 million, Mexico City 15 million.
Thirty years ago the biggest cities, Tokyo, New York and London, had about 10 million cach. Now Djakarta with 10 milion is on v 1th in the size league-table. The era of the mega-ctv is a socal and environmental catastrophe.
Seventy per cent of the mega-cities are in the third world; but those like Los Angeles in the advanced world are undergoing a process of 'third-worldisation'. Public infrastructure collapses, the poor are forced down to third world levels of subsistence.
Mega-urbanisation is a rapidly accelerating process; Karachi, which now has 8 million people will reach between 11 and 12 million by the year 2000; in the same period Bombay will go from 13 to 18 million, Diakarta from 10 to 13 million.
The problem is not just that who imperialism and the imperialism and the local elite impose on the third world masses. the sheer size of impoverished mega-cities distorts the social fal oric of third world countries, and imposes housing, health, employment and environmental problems which even the most eh. lightened socialist regime would find it difficult to solve.
Mega-urbanisation is not a 'natural' process resulting from industrialisation and 'progress'. In the third world it nas two central causes. rooted in mass poverty. povershment, a product of Features Imperialism has imposed ultra-low prices on third world agricultural produce. Millions leave the land and drift towards that even a 'marginal' pedlars, beggars or even turning over rubbish tips, gives them a better a pitiful existence in the countryside. And in both third countries, even where farming is potentially profitable, debt and Repression is the inevitable result of poor facilities and overcrowding agri-business conspire to rive the small farmer off the land with rural poverty is the problem population growth. The probem here is not mainly i norance of birth control tech niques, but material pressures. On the land or in the cities, millions of poor people know their chances of survival depend on having enough children to support them in old age.
Violence
Violence, prostitution, Irugs and child labour are the inevitable consequences of the marginal existence of hundreds of millions in the third world mega-cities.
The typical form of expansion of such cities is the conNot barno shantytowns. definition the and electricity infrastructure of the city centres. Thus they are massive centres of environmental and health problems.
The cholera epidemic which hit Latin America in thel last two years was directly spurred by the lack of clean water and sewage facilities in the barrios.
mega-cities intom bot refuse disposal, lem refuse posal, generally without the quate public wansport means a glut of cars, adding to industrial atmospheric pollution.
Third-word mega-cities don't just damage their own environment, but also the surroundi countryside, which is pillaged for building wood, leading deforestisation and soil erosion. Endemic violence and crime and often political volatility, ead directly to repression. way to police the dispossessed masses is hrough i state be Los Angeles, Keeping the maslarge and brutalised police force like the LAPD with its constant helicopter patrols of Watts and South central, or more simply a murderous army.
But as well as having the multi-million poor who have to be policed, the mega-cities are the centres of economic and political world power. They are also centres of the urban super-rich and middleclasses, protected form the wrath of the poor.
The rich either live in guarded enclaves, or flee the city centre to the suburbs, leaving its heart to rot. That is the fate of Detroit, abandoned to the black poor. Economic collapse has followed, leading for example to the demolition of hospitals only 20 years old, for want of funds to keep them UNCL Political solution The way out of the megacity crisis is political. Spontaneously the situation will just get worse. Only by No. 36 popular administration of the cities can different social priorities be imposed.
But as the example of the administration of the big cities of Brazil by the Workers Party shows, control of the cities by popular or left-wing organisa rions can only be a palliative, alleviating some of the worst problems And as the local administration in Curitaba, Brazii, found, efficient transport, job-creation and housing projects can poor people from other parts of the country, gradually undermining gains already made.
Solutions at the level of one city can only have a limited effect, in the absence of a change in political regime and social priorities nation-wide.
Land reform
In the third world the first priority is land reform which can give a stable income to peasant farmers, stemming the flight from the cities. That would have to be backed-up by a social security system ensuring a decent living standard reversing the trend to large families for purely economic reasons.
Self-organisation often comes naturally to the barrio. dwellers; they have to try to organise things like electricity and water for themselves. This self-organisation is an immense reservoir of revolutionary potential, given socialist political leadership.
But everywhere, in advanced countries and third world countries, the rush to pathological urbanisation will only be stopped by different political priorities, and above all by a nationally-planned economy.
Transform
Socialism surely won't dismantle cities. But over time cities can be transtormed and made liveable.
Modern communications mean that it is no longer essenand living units to be piled upon one another. The Blade Runner syndrome is just one barbaric future that capitalism has in store for us, if it sur vives.
The clock is still ticking.
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