What is to be done about...
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 infrastructure collapse.
The masses live at ground level, with constant rain and filth, among the most dire pollution. The city itself seems to go on forever – upwards and outwards.
Twenty years ago this might have seemed the most improbable futuristic nightmare. Not so today; 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 each. Now Djakarta with 10 million is only 13th in the size league-table. The era of the mega-city is a social 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, Djakarta from 10 to 13 million.
The problem is not just that of poverty and inequality which imperialism and the local elite impose on the third world masses. the sheer size of impoverished mega-cities distorts the social fabric of third world countries, and imposes housing, health, employment and environmental problems which even the most enlightened 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 has two central causes, rooted in mass poverty.
The first is rural impoverishment, a product of the absence of land reform. Imperialism has imposed ultra-low prices on third world agricultural produce.
Millions leave the land and drift towards the cities; and they know that even a 'marginal' existence in the cities, as pedlars, beggars or even turning over rubbish tips, gives them a better chance of survivial than a pitiful existence in the countryside.
And in both third world and advanced countries, even where farming is potentially profitable, debt and agri-business conspire to drive the small farmer off the land
Combining with rural poverty is the problem of population growth. The problem here is not mainly ignorance of birth control techniques, 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, drugs 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 construction of *barrio* shanty-towns. By definition the barrios don't have the sewage 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 the last two years was directly spurred by the lack of clean water and sewage facilities in the barrios.
And the mega-cities inevitably develop a huge problem of refuse disposal, generally without the infrastructure to solve it. Inadequate public transport often means a glut of cars, adding to industrial atmospheric pollution.
Third-word mega-cities don't just damage their own environment, but also the surrounding countryside, which is pillaged for building wood, leading to deforestisation and soil erosion.
Endemic violence and crime and often political volatility, lead directly to repression. The only way to police the dispossessed masses is through state violence, whether it be Los Angeles, Karachi or Lima.
Keeping the masses down requires a large 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 middle-classes, who have to be 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 open.
Political solution
The way out of the mega-city crisis is political. Spontaneously the situation will just get worse. Only by 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 organisations can only be a palliative, alleviating some of the worst problems.
And as the local administration in Curitaba, Brazil, found, efficient transport, job-creation and housing projects can lead to an influx of 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 for the elderly, thus 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 transformed and made liveable.
Modern communications mean that it is no longer essential for humanity's production and 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 survives.
The clock is still ticking.