Far from the working class internationally contracting, it has continued to grow. And the distinctions between this enlarged working class and other oppressed groups, far from becoming marginal, are as central as when Lenin and Trotsky polemicised against the Narodniks.
(...) Filmer concluded that the overall number of employed people worldwide was about 880 million, compared with around 1,000 million people working mainly for their own account on the land (overwhelmingly peasants), and 480 million working for their own account in industry and services. The figure for 'employed people' includes some non-workers' groups as well as workers. There is a section of the bourgeoisie in receipt of enormous corporate salaries, and below that the new middle class who get paid more value than they create in return for helping to control the mass of workers. These groups probably amount to 10 percent of the population.¹⁴ That reduces the size of the employed world working class to around 700 million, with about a third in 'industry'and the rest in 'services'.
(...) But the total size of the working class is considerably greater than this. The class also includes those who are dependent on income that comes from the waged labour of relatives or savings and pensions resulting from past wage labour--that is, non-employed spouses, children and retired elderly people. If these categories are added in, the worldwide total figure for the working class comes to between 1.5 and 2 billion. Anyone who believes we have said 'farewell' to this class is not living in the real world.
(...) Add these 'semi-workers' or 'peasant workers' to the numbers of people completely dependent on wage labour, and you get a figure which must be somewhere between 40 and 50 percent of the world's population. In other words around the core of 1.5 to 2 million proletarians there are a similar number of semi-proletarians.
(...) Industrial employment has fallen sharply in a number of countries over the last three decades--in Britain and Belgium by a third, and in France by more than a quarter. But these do not represent a deindustrialisation of the whole of the advanced industrial world, but rather a restructuring of industry within it. The number of industrial jobs in the advanced industrial countries as a whole was 112 million in 1998--25 million more than in 1951 and only 7.4 million less than in 1971. There is a great danger of looking at the world through British or French glasses, and not seeing what is really happening on a global scale. So Toni Negri's Italy may not be in the same league as the US or Japan, but the industrial workers have certainly not disappeared. There were 6.5 million four years ago, down only one sixth since 1971.
(...) But that is not all. The usual distinction between 'industry' and 'services' obscures more than it reveals. The category 'services' includes things which are of no intrinsic importance to the capitalist production (for instance, the hordes of servants who provide individual capitalist parasites with their leisure). But it has always included things which are absolutely central to it (like the transportation of goods and the provision of computer software). What is more, some of the shift from 'industry' to the 'service sector' amounts to no more than a change in the name given to essentially similar jobs.
(...) But even Rowthorn's figures considerably underestimate the size of the working class--that class whose labour is essential for the accumulation of capital. Many of Rowthorn's 'free standing services' are essential to such accumulation in the modern world. Two in particular are absolutely indispensable for capitalist accumulation today--health provision and the education service.
(...)There is a widespread myth that the 'service' workforce consists of well paid people with control over their own working situation who never need to get their hands dirty. So Guardian columnist (and former SDP member) Polly Toynbee writes: 'We have seen the most rapid change in social class in recorded history: the 1977 mass working class, with two thirds of people in manual jobs, shrunk to one third, while the rest migrated upwards into a 70 percent home-owning, white collar middle class'.³⁷ So Hardt and Negri claim:

The jobs for the most part are highly mobile involving flexible skills. More important, they are characterised in general by the central role played by knowledge, information, affect, and communication. In this sense many call the post-industrial economy an informational economy... Through the process of post-modernisation all production tends toward the production of services, toward becoming informationalised.³⁸

In fact, however, any proper breakdown of the figures for 'service' employment provides a very different picture to this. Some of the most important 'services industries' employ overwhelmingly 'manual workers' of the 'traditional' sort.
(...) Altogether there are a minimum of 42 million 'service sector workers' in manual or routine white collar occupations in the US. These, it should be added, are the occupations that have been expanding most rapidly recently with the 'creation' of a mass of low wage jobs. On top of them, many workers in other occupational categories would have been doing work which was little different--for instance, many of the 3.2 million 'sales representatives' and the 4.3 million 'technicians and related support' workers. So would many of the 'health assessment and treating occupations' (83 percent female, unlike the 'health diagnostic' category above them which is 75 percent male), and many of the 5.3 million school teachers (75 percent female). Together these groups constitute well over half the 'service sector'. Add to them the 33 million workers in traditional manual industries, and you have some three quarters of the US population made up of workers. If the 'working class' has 'disappeared from view' for people like Hardt and Negri, it is because they have been looking in the wrong direction.
(...) A central theme of all those who see the working class as disappearing is that the jobs that remain are so precarious that little remains of the permanent working class organisations and communities that used to exist. The argument has been a continual feature of 'post-Marxist' arguments for the last 15 years both from 'Third Way' social democrats and those on the 'autonomist' left.
(...) But this does not mean that in reality capital has been able to destroy workers' resistance to such flexibility, or even that it itself can keep accumulating without continually reproducing relatively permanent labour forces within particular workplaces. One recent study for Britain shows:

Many of the commonly held assumptions about today's world of work need to be seriously questioned. A wide gulf exists between the over-familiar rhetoric and hyperbole we hear daily about our flexible and dynamic labour market and the realities of workplace life. The evidence simply does not sustain the view that we are witnessing the emergence of a 'new' kind of employment relations, seen in the 'end of the career' and the 'death of the permanent job for life'.⁴⁸

People often do not see the limits to what capital can achieve in terms of 'flexible labour markets' because they lump together quite different forms of employment: part time employment, temporary employment, employment on short term contracts, and self employment on behalf of firms. But part time employment can also be permanent employment--as it usually is among women in Britain. Similarly, those working on short term contracts can find them renewed month after month, or year after year. They lack long term rights and are the first to go when crises hit, but they do not move into and out of jobs all the time in between. Finally, those in genuinely temporary employment may be indispensable to production and be provided on a long term but intermittent basis by agencies which are themselves large firms and dependent on maintaining a permanent pool of labour to supply to other firms.
(...) Across Western Europe as a whole, 'one out of five jobs has been precarious during the last five years'--but that still leaves four out of five jobs as 'permanent'.
(...) The figures do, however, show that 'average job tenure has remained relatively stable since 1975'. The idea that the working class has been 'flexible-ised' out of existence is completely mistaken. Most people continue to work in the same place, and to be subject to exploitation by the same employers for quite long periods of time. By the same token, they have the time and opportunity to connect up with the people around them to fight back against that exploitation.
(...)

The claim that the 'permanent' worker is a thing of the past is often connected with the claim that employers can move production--and jobs--at a moment's notice.

So Hardt and Negri write:

The informatisation of production and the increasing importance of immaterial production have tended to free capital from the constraints of territory, and capital can withdraw from negotiation with a given local population by moving its site to another point in the global network... Entire labouring populations, which had enjoyed a certain stability and contractual power, have thus found themselves in increasingly precarious employment situations.⁵⁷

This vastly exaggerates the movement of capital, and the ease with which firms can move their operations from one place to another... As I have explained elsewhere,⁵⁸ capital as money (ie finance) can move at the touch of a computer key from one location to another (although determined governments can still impede its movement). But capital as means of production finds it much more difficult to do so. Physical equipment has to be uninstalled and reinstalled, transport has to be arranged for goods produced, a reliable workforce with the requisite skills found, and so on. It is a process that is usually expensive, taking years rather than seconds. What is more, physical production depends upon transporting goods to markets, and therefore closeness to markets is an advantage. The result is that most of the restructuring of industry over the last three decades has usually been within the world's existing industrial regions.
(...) There has, of course, been a shift in certain manufacturing industries to states which were not industrialised 40 years ago--otherwise the phenomenon of the Newly Industrialising Countries (NICs) and of certain expanding industries in 'underdeveloped' countries would be inexplicable. But there is little evidence to support the claim that 'advanced countries are abandoning the production of manufactured goods. Many labour-intensive manufacturing activities in the advanced economies, such as clothing or routine assembly, have been put out of business by rising imports from developing countries', but these imports have been financed 'not by the export of services' but 'by the export of other manufactures, especially capital goods and intermediate products such as chemicals'.
(...) Restructuring means that much of this production does not take place in the old industrial centres, such as those in and around Detroit, but in the 'sun belt' states of the west and south. So most US auto workers no longer work directly for the 'Big Three' of Ford, General Motors and Chrysler, but for 'trans-plant manufacturers' like Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Mitsubishi and Daimler Benz, or for new parts manufacturers spun off by GM so as to weaken the union.⁶³ This is a far cry from the picture sometimes presented of all US auto jobs disappearing over the border into Mexico.
(...) But it is not 'fluid' in being able to move effortlessly from one location to another. The general trend for capitalism today is still for production to be concentrated in the advanced countries. Some sorts of production have shifted to a few favoured areas of the Third World--the NICs of east and south east Asia, and eastern China. But capital still finds it more profitable, in general, to locate itself in the regions which had industrialised by the mid 20th century. Workers may usually be better paid there, but a combination of established skills levels and existing investments in plant and infrastructure mean they are also more productive, providing much more surplus value for the system than most of their poorer brothers and sisters in the Third World. This explains why the picture for most of Latin America has been one of very slow average growth or stagnation, and of most of Africa of absolute decline.
(...) Capitalism has created a world working class in the last century and a half. Industry and wage labour exist today in virtually every part of the globe. The industrial working class has a worldwide presence. But the combined and uneven development of the system means it is very unevenly distributed between regions. Rough calculations indicate that 40 percent of the world's 270 million or so industrial workers are in the OECD countries, around 15 percent each in China, Latin America and the former USSR, around 10 percent in the rest of Asia, and around 5 percent in Africa.
(...) Sub-Saharan Africa is the exception rather than the norm for the world system as a whole, or even for its vast, impoverished regions. In Asia and Latin America there has been a growth of wage labour. But it has often been outside what is usually called the 'modern' sector, and has often been accompanied by an equally rapid rise of self employment.
(...) Most of the self employed are by no means privileged. A survey of Ahmedabad shows only one tenth of the male self employed as having a 'separate business place'. A third worked on the streets, as vendors, rickshaw drivers, cart pullers and the like. There are 200,000 rickshaw men in Mumbai, 80,000 in Ahmedabad, and 30,000 in Bangalore, while Calcutta has around 250,000 street hawkers and Calcutta more than 100,000.
(...) In addition to--and often merging into--those in the informal sector, there are everywhere those denied any opportunities for employment by modern capitalism: the unemployed. Their numbers vary considerably from region to region and country to country--depending, in part, on the ease of people making some sort of livelihood in the informal sector.
(...) Capitalist accumulation is causing the rapid growth of cities across wide swathes of the globe, and of occupations involving production for the market. In most regions (although not in most of Africa) there is also a growth of the number involved in wage labour of a relatively productive sort in medium to large workplaces. But even more rapid is the expansion of the vast mass of people precariously trying to make a livelihood through casual labour, selling things in the streets, trying to survive through working on their own account. At one extreme this mass merges into the petty bourgeoisie proper of small employers, at the other into the desperate poverty of those who can hardly get a livelihood at all--48 percent of the urban population of Brazil live below the poverty line, and two out of five of these below the 'indigence' income needed to satisfy food needs but nothing else.
(...) There is one widespread, very simple, and very mistaken, answer. That is to see the workers with permanent jobs as 'privileged', as some sort of 'labour aristocracy'. This is certainly how it can seem to those driven into the informal sector. In the formal sector there are usually considerably higher wage rates and often sickness benefits, paid holidays, and pensions of sorts as well... Employers have not, however, provided such things out of the goodness of their heart. They need a certain stability to their labour force, particularly when it comes to skilled workers who they do not want to be poached by rivals during times of boom. States often want such stability as well, seeing welfare provision for a section of the urban workforce as a way of protecting themselves against sudden explosions of popular discontent.
(...) It often seems counterintuitive to argue that groups of workers who have better conditions than others do not benefit at their expense--whether the argument is used about Western workers and workers in the Third World, or formal sector Third World workers and informal sector workers. But in this case the 'counterintuitive' argument is correct. In many industries, the more stable and experienced a workforce, the more productive it is. Capital is prepared to concede higher wages to certain of the workers in those industries because by doing so it is able to make more profits out of them. Hence the apparent contradiction--some sections of the world's workers are both better paid than others, and more exploited. It is this alone which explains why capitalists, motivated only by the drive for profit, do not usually invest on any great scale in regions like Africa, where wages are lowest.
(...) That, of course, does not prevent capital from continually trying to hold down what it has to pay--and from seizing on new technologies and restructuring production to reduce its labour costs drastically. Hence the pattern in much of the world for the established 'formal' workforce to remain more or less intact, but for there to be some chipping away round the edges and for many new jobs to be in the 'informal' sector.
(...) [mike davis + a rejoinder to hardt/negri, more or less] The great mass of the informal workforce in 'developing' countries today are people who are new to the urban workforce--either from the countryside (as with the more than 100 million peasants seeking employment in China's cities) or women and young people seeking paid labour for the first time. But the pattern of capitalist accumulation over the last couple of decades means that the labour demands of modern, productive industry have not expanded on anything like the scale needed to absorb them into its workforce. Competition on a global scale has caused capitalists to turn to 'capital intensive' forms of production (with what Marx called a rising 'organic composition of capital') which do not require massive numbers of new workers. As a result, the only ways for most new entrants to the labour force to gain a livelihood are through the most meagre forms of self employment or through selling their labour power at such a low price and under such arduous conditions that small capitalists at the margins of the system can profit from exploiting it.
(...) That is not, however, the end of the matter. Capitalism has one important use for those it refuses to allow to make a proper livelihood. It uses them to put increased pressure on those it does exploit in the most productive areas of the economy. Far from the growth of the informal workforce benefiting the workforce in the formal sector, it has been accompanied by an increased exploitation of workers in this sector--and in many cases by a deterioration. [empirical proof follows]
(...) In both India and Latin America something else has been happening--the shifting of certain jobs in big industry from the formal to the informal sector. This allows management to cut some of their wage costs--and to put pressure on the remaining 'formal' sector of the workforce to accept worse conditions.
(...) It is wrong, as people like Paulo Singer do, to write of 'deproletarianisation'.119 Rather, what is happening is a restructuring of the workforce, with the hiving off by big firms of some tasks (usually relatively unskilled and therefore easily performed by a floating workforce) to small firms, labour-only contractors and the supposedly self employed. It should be added that this phenomenon is by no means new in the history of capitalism. Casual employment has often played an important role in certain industries--for instance, in the docks in Britain until the late 1960s. And forms of contract labour are very old--it was common in the textile factories of the industrial revolution. In the mines in both the US and Britain in the 19th century, overseers or foremen ('buttymen') would recruit workers and pay them out of a sum given to them by the mine owners. These casual groups of workers may not always have felt themselves to be part of the working class. They were often detached from the struggles of other sections of that class for years, even decades, at a time. Yet the potential for struggling with those sections was always there, and when it turned into reality the struggle could be very bitter, with an almost insurrectionary tinge.
(...) [citing engels on dock workers] The point is very important. Internationally we are just emerging from more than two decades of defeat and demoralisation for workers right across the world. This bred a fatalism about the possibility of fighting, which was reflected in a mass of studies which depicted the suffering of the poor and the oppressed, showing them always as victims, rarely as fighters. Thus there are tons of materials sponsored by the International Labour Organisation on 'social exclusion'--a theme which suits the bureaucrats who run such bodies. In these studies themes like the 'casualisation' and 'feminisation' of the workforce become stereotyped, academic ways of dismissing possibilities of struggle--even if some of those carrying through the studies try to escape from the paradigm in which they are trapped. The stereotypes then provide trade union officialdom with excuses for avoiding struggle on the grounds that it cannot work. What begins as a mistaken assessment of the possibility of struggle becomes a real obstacle to unleashing such struggle.
(...) [naomi klein on EPZs] Such accounts provide a brilliant exposure of the greed and inhumanity of those who run the multinationals. But like many orthodox academic studies on the informal workforce (especially those sponsored by the International Labour Organisation) they are too pessimistic when it comes to the possibilities of fighting back. First, the multinationals cannot afford simply to mistreat their workers. It is not as easy as the multinationals would like people to think for them to close down their facilities and move elsewhere if the workforce does explode in bitterness. Setting up the links in a global production chain takes a lot of effort by the multinational... When Henry Ford pioneered mass production, assembly line methods in the auto industry, he saw that the most effective form of exploitation lay in stabilising a handpicked workforce under tight managerial control. Thomas O'Brien has told how some of the first US multinationals to operate in Latin America took efforts to stabilise their workforces by providing minimal welfare facilities--providing accommodation in company towns, health clinics, schools, sports facilities, even paid holidays. The aim was to combine maintaining the workers at a minimal level of fitness with extending managerial discipline over workers to the home as well as the workplace...
(...) This element of stability in the workforce is important because it means such workers can fight back, and win. Conditions in many South Korean clothing and footwear plants in the 1960s were exactly as Naomi Klein describes them. George E Ogle has told of 'the sweat, blood and tears of young women who worked in the export industries during the 1960s and 1970s--textiles, garments, electronics, chemicals'
(...) [strategy matters, in other words] So, for instance, an account of the great Bombay textile strikes of 1982-1983 paints a different picture to that in Korea. The strike began as a semi-spontaneous upsurge from below (workers demonstrated outside the residence of Datta Samant, who was to become the strike figurehead, demanding that he 'lead' them) and developed into one of the biggest prolonged strikes in world history, lasting a year, involving hundreds of thousands of workers and dominating the political life of India's commercial and industrial capital. But it never spread from the 'organised' sector of the larger workplaces to the small workplaces and the impoverished self employed weavers--indeed, many strikers began working in the informal sector without anyone regarding them as scabs. This enabled the employers to hold out for a year and defeat the workers, since they were never short of finished cloth.
(...) [too easy? but important regardless] The victories in Korea show the possibility of organising informal and maquiladora workers, of pulling them behind struggles initiated by larger and more secure groups of workers. The defeat in Bombay showed the dangers for the more secure groups of not going out and bringing the informal workers into the struggle. The dangers are not simply a matter of wage cuts, job losses and deteriorating working conditions. Defeat can have a devastating impact on wider society. During the strike there was unity between the different religious and caste groups that make up the mass of Bombay's lower classes. The aftermath of defeat saw the rise to a dominating position in wide areas of the city of the Sriv Sena, a political organisation based upon turning Hindus against Muslms, culminating in murderous riots against the Muslim population in 1992. Unity in struggle had created a sense of solidarity which then exerted a pull on the vast mass of the informal workers, self employed, the unemployed poor and the impoverished sections of the petty bourgeoisie. The defeat led to the sectional attitudes and communal conflicts of the petty bourgeoisie influencing the self employed, the unemployed and wide layers of workers.

[CONCLUSION]
(...) The overall picture is not one of a disintegrating or declining working class. It is one of a working class that on a world scale has grown bigger than ever, even if the rate of growth has slowed down with the successive crises in the world economy and the tendency everywhere to 'capital intensive' forms of production that do not employ massively new numbers of people.
(...) Neither is the picture one in which working class employment is being transferred on a massive scale from the old industrial economies of the 'North' to the previously agrarian economies of the 'South'. The new international division of labour is developing mainly within the 'triad' of North America, Europe and Japan--with a lesser part being played by the NICs of East Asia and eastern China. There is also an expansion of industrial employment within some of the burgeoning cities of the 'South'--but the expansion is uneven, barely touching whole regions, and is not mainly through transfer of jobs from the North.
(...) A twofold change is taking place now. There is the growing importance of the production of certain 'immaterial' commodities which are often classified as part of the service sector, but involve forms of work very similar to those in industry. And there is the growing importance of forms of labour which do not themselves produce commodities, but which serve to maintain and increase the productivity of the direct producers.
(...) The working class is not disappearing. It is not becoming bourgoeisified. It is not turning into a privileged layer. It is not gaining somehow from the impoverishment of wide sections of the Third World, especially Africa. It is growing even while it is restructured globally.
(...) The anti-capitalist movement itself has some of the same characteristics. Its initial base, like that of the first movement of the late 1960s, has been among people not firmly rooted in the productive process--students, school students, young people not yet trapped into permanent jobs, workers who take part in its activities as individuals without any clear sense of class identity, lower professionals. As a descriptive term for such movements, 'multitude' is not completely misplaced. A disparate coalition of forces has come together to provide a new and massively important focus for the struggle against the system after two decades of defeat and demoralisation. But the glorification of disparateness embodied in the term prevents people seeing what needs to be done next to build the movement. It does not recognise that what was so important about Genoa and Barcelona was the beginning of the involvement of organised workers in the protests. It fails to locate the most important deficiency of the movement in Argentina to date--the ability of trade union bureaucracies to build a wall between employed workers on the one hand and the neighbourhood and unemployed workers' movements on the other.
(...) The mistake is to see movements of disparate social groups as 'social subjects' capable of bringing about a transformation of society. They are not. Because their base is not centred in collective organisation rooted in production, they cannot challenge the control over that production which is central to ruling class power. They can create problems for particular governments. But they cannot begin the process of rebuilding society from the bottom up. And in practice, the workers who could begin to do this only play a marginal role in them. Talk about 'rainbow coalitions' or 'multitudes' conceals that relative lack of involvement in the movement of those working long hours at manual or routine white collar jobs--and with extra hours of unpaid labour bringing up children. It underplays the degree to which the movements remain dominated by those whose occupations leave them most time and energy to be active. Fashionable theories about 'post-industrial society' then become an excuse for a narrowness of vision and action that ignores the great majority of the working class.

urban informality, ananya roy (2005)

(1): "My goal is not so much to evaluate these policies as it is to highlight some of the distinctive challenges and paradoxes that they present for planners. Three are of particular importance:

1. how planning modalities can produce the "unplannable"—informality as a state of exception from the formal order of urbanization;
2. how this state of exception can in turn be strategically used by planners to mitigate some of the vulnerabilities of the urban poor;
3. and how dealing with informality requires recognizing the "right to the city"—claims and appropriations that do not fit neatly into the ownership model of property."

(2): "Such frameworks yield many problematic corollary propositions. The first is the equation of informality with poverty. Neither frame recognizes how informality might be a differentiated process embodying varying degrees of power and exclusion. Second, both frames conceptualize
informality, and poverty more generally, as caused by isolation from global capitalism... Third, within such frames it becomes possible to devolve responsibility for poverty to the poor themselves." [whatever we might want to say about her larger arguments, this second point is particularly important. holism is quite critical.]

(2): "As Jessop (2002) argues, at a moment of neoliberalism, when states are pursuing austerity policies, such models of neocommunitarianism legitimate the agenda of privatization." [absolutely]

(3): "Both forms of housing are informal but embody very different concretizations of
legitimacy. The divide here is not between formality and informality but rather a differentiation within informality." [informality as something that can be used by the wealthy/elite, too]

(3): this, really, is the key point-- informality not something 'outside' the state, but something in which it is wholly complicit: "This in turn means that informality must be understood not as the object of state regulation but rather as produced by the state itself... The planning and legal apparatus of the state has the power to determine when to enact this suspension, to determine
what is informal and what is not, and to determine which forms of informality will thrive and which will disappear. State power is reproduced through the capacity to construct and reconstruct categories of legitimacy and illegitimacy— such as in the American welfare efforts to sort out the "deserving" from the "undeserving" poor." [recalls the left amendment to popular narratives about neoliberalism]

(4): critique of in-situ upgrading: "I have argued elsewhere that such an emphasis on the physical
environment is an "aestheticization of poverty" (Roy, 2004), one that equates upgrading with aesthetic upgrading rather than the upgrading of livelihoods, wages, political capacities."

(6): on principle, perhaps--but the example given is so obviously constrained by the geopolitical constraints in which it operates, that might as well, itself, be rhetorical: "The shift from aesthetic considerations to the politics of shit, I would argue, is a useful policy epistemology. It recognizes the importance of infrastructure but indicates that the provision and distribution of infrastructure is not a technical issue but rather a political process. The politics of shit also disrupts models of expertise, making it possible to generate knowledge about upgrading and infrastructure from a different set of experts: the residents of informal settlements."

(6): problematizing formalization: "The process of formalization is never as straightforward as simply converting informal documentation into formal titles. Usually there are numerous types of informal documentation, of varying legitimacy, and there are often multiple claims to a single plot of land."

(6): well-put--"But I will underscore Schaefer's blunt statement about the difference between wealth transfer and wealth legalization. De Soto's ideas are seductive precisely because they only guarantee the latter but in doing so promise the former."

(7): "Indeed, following Braudel (1982), it can be argued that capitalism itself is a system of monopolies rather than a free-flowing circulation of capital,'" a point that De Soto misses despite his declared affinity to Braudel."

(7): hmm--is it possible that this is more cute, than meaningful?--"I am now arguing that it
is possible to strategically use the state of exception to frame policy. There are two forms of exception that are worth noting: regulatory exceptions and regularity exceptions."

(8): important point to interrogate: arguing for 'scale-jumping', given that the local is intertwined with the global. but this is more bluster than substance -- it doesn't get to the core point, which is really the revival of radical political practice. "I would like to suggest that the issue of scale jumping is less about particular institutional actors like NGOs and more about a strategic engagement with multiple sovereignties.... Recently, Narmada dam activists have been pressing the World Bank, rather than simply the Indian government, for accountability." [she's aware of the pitfall, certainly. and i don't think she would go so far as to argue, at all, that these are anything more than auxiliary strategies. surely we are not abandoning the terrain of the nation for this petition-driven mishmash?]

(9): clear flaws: "They each require working through rather than against institutions of power—be it the market, or the state of exception, or supranational organizations that supersede national sovereignties. Is it possible to be subversive when there is such complicity with the system?"

(9): yes--"borrowing Krueckeberg's important insight, it can be argued that the more fundamental issue at stake in informality is that of wealth distribution and unequal property ownership, of what sorts of markets are at work in our cities and how they shape or limit affordability. In this sense, the study of informality provides an important lesson for planners in the tricky dilemmas of social justice.

the 21st century metropolis, ananya roy (2009)

(820): assimilating davis into those who see 'first world' cities as the model, and 'third world' cities as the error -- this is what she is inveighing against, but it's not clear, to me, that davis is doing anything wrong in outlining the gravity of the situation that confronts us. at the very least, this critique is way too easy, and meaningless: "Davis’s apocalyptic imagination of the Global
Slum is only the newest variant in the high-pitched narration of the crisis of mega-cities."

(820): a critique of neo-orientalism, she thinks (well, here we ought to bring in aijaz ahmed's splendid deconstruction of said): "As the parochial experience of EuroAmerican cities has been found to be a useful theoretical model for all cities, so perhaps the distinctive experiences of the cities of the global South can generate productive and provocative theoretical frameworks for all
cities."

(821): critique of sassen, though not particularly forceful or thoroughly convincing, i don't think...

(822): again--this is a 'sexy' suggestion, but it's unclear, to me, that this gives us very much, that is substantive. "It is not enough for one’s understanding of the 21st-century metropolis
simply to make visible the cities of the global South. It is not even enough to exceed the visibility of crisis and catastrophe. It is instead necessary to view all cities from this particular place on the map."

(822-824): trying to invert area studies, in a sense -- give it a different theoretical spin. but this is not an instructive technique. it is a mish-mash that threatens to eschew universalism, it seems. though it's worth noting she is aware of this danger: "How can regionally produced concepts be deployed as ‘strategic essentialisms’, simultaneously located and dislocated? How can the theories embedded in ‘area studies’ retain their geographic coordinates but also cross borders and travel as dynamic vectors of new theoretical conversations and exchanges?"

(824): important, critique of sassen--"Such forms of ‘worlding’ are crucial because they move urban theory from the mapping of ‘world cities’ to the historicized analysis of ‘world systems’. The global/world cities framework asserts a hierarchy of cities but is unable to account fully for the materialization of such a hierarchy, and even less so in relation tothe long histories of colonialism and imperialism. Space is a ‘container’ in these theoretical reports; its ‘production’ remains unexplained (SMITH, 2002). For example, TAYLOR (2000), following Braudel, rightly
notes that capitalism is a world of multiple monopolies and that global/world cities represent a ‘monopoly of place’. This is a refreshing recalibration of the rather
simplistic narrative of ‘agglomeration economies’."

(825): this, i'm sorry, is just jibberish, and theoretically (and especially politically) nonsensical: "Such forms of ‘worlding’ move one away from simple core–periphery models of globalized urbanization. Instead, one is left with what ONG (1999) terms ‘differentiated zones of sovereignty’. The 21stcentury metropolis arbitrates this geography of multiplicity and differentiation. And in doing so it is, as Abbas would have one imagine, a ‘para-site’. It is dependent on the circuits of global capital and yet it also produces and mediates these circuits."

(825): ok--"This is not to say that this analysis is not applicable to the cities of the global South. Indeed, it is highly relevant. The argument is less about transnational relevance and more about the scope and range of analysis."

(826): coming close to playing native informant--"By being embedded in the EuroAmerican urban experience, this theoretical work bypasses some of the key ways in which the production of space takes place in other urban and metropolitan contexts. Further, this ‘other’ experience has considerable relevance for EuroAmerican city-regions and can provide insights into hitherto unexplained processes in these cities. One such mode of the production of space is highlighted: informality. ‘First World’ urban and metropolitan theory is curiously silent on the issue of informality. Or there is a tendency to imagine the ‘informal’ as a sphere of unregulated, even illegal, activity, outside the scope of the state, a domain of survival by the poor and marginalized, often wiped out by gentrification and redevelopment. But a large body of ‘Third World’ literature provides a sophisticated and rather different understanding of informality."

(826): potentially interesting distinction, between political society and civil society -- "Similarly,
CHATTERJEE (2006), writing about Indian cities, makes a distinction between ‘civil’ and ‘political’ societies. For him, civil society groups make claims as fully enfranchised citizens, a ‘bourgeois governmentality’ if you will. Political society on the other hand are the claims of the disenfranchised and marginalized, what APPADURAI (2002) has termed ‘governmentality from below’."

(827): i really have trouble understanding what is gained by this amendment--"The Africanist debates about agency, subjectivity, and politics defy the easy categorizations of power and resistance. Under conditions of crisis, the subaltern subject is simultaneously strategic and self-exploitative, simultaneously a political agent and a subject of the neoliberal grand slam."

(827): the postborder city?

(828): how is it more than this? this is absurd! she is getting off playing the native informant game. "It is surely an ‘evil paradise’ of ‘fear and money’, a ‘dreamworld of neoliberalism’ (DAVIS, 2006; DAVIS and MORK, 2007), but it is also an articulation of an Arab modernity where more is at stake than what DAVIS (2006, p. 53) designates as the ‘monstrous caricature of futurism’. It is the place at which the distinctions between the black economy and global finance capital are erased, where city and nature are violently fused, and where the feudalism of an emirate meets up with an open cosmopolitanism."

In 1965, for instance, there were 53 million American hogs on more than 1 million farms; today, 65 million hogs are concentrated in 65,000 facilities, with half of the hogs kept in giant facilities with 5,000 animals or more.
(...) But what matters more (especially given the continued threat of H5N1) is the larger configuration: the WHO's failed pandemic strategy, the further decline of world public health, the stranglehold of Big Pharma over lifeline medicines, and the planetary catastrophe of industrialized and ecologically unhinged livestock production.

Under huge pressure from Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats alike to cut the budget and reduce the exponential increase in the national debt, what choices would President Obama be forced to make early in his administration? More than likely comprehensive health-care will be whittled down to a barebones plan, "alternative energy" will simply mean the fraud of "clean coal," and anything that remains in the Treasury, after Wall Street's finished its looting spree, will buy bombs to pulverize more Pashtun villages, ensuring yet more generations of embittered mujahideen and jihadis.

on drought becoming normal in the Southwest (davis):
Some climatologists have not hesitated to call this a "mega-drought," even the "worst in 500 years." Others have been more cautious, not yet sure whether the current aridity in the West has surpassed the notorious thresholds of the 1930s (the Dust Bowl in the southern Plains) or 1950s (devastating drought in the Southwest). But the debate is possibly beside the point: The most recent and authoritative research finds that the "evening redness in the West" (to invoke the portentous subtitle of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian) is not simply episodic drought but the region's new "normal weather."
(...) Yet mere scientific pronouncement, even to the thunder of nineteen unanimous climate models, is unlikely to cause much of a flutter in golf-course suburbs of Phoenix, where luxury lifestyles consume 400 gallons of water per capita each day. Nor will it stop the bulldozers shaping monstrous strip suburbs of Las Vegas (a projected 160,000 new homes) along US 93 all the way to Kingman, Arizona. Nor, despite possible pumping out of the vast Ogallala Aquifer, the underground water resource lying under eight states in the Great Plains, will it prevent Texas from doubling its population by 2040.
(...) [technology eating itself up] More futuristically, there is also the "Saudi" option. Steve Erie, a University of California, San Diego, professor who has written extensively about water politics in Southern California, told me that desert developers in the Southwest and Baja California are confident that they can keep the population boom well-watered through the conversion of seawater. "The new mantra of the water agencies, of course, is incentivizing conservation and reclamation, but rapacious developers are casting covetous eyes at the Pacific Ocean and the alchemy of desalination heedless of the pernicious environmental consequences."
(...) [and who´ll bear the burden] As water becomes more expensive, the burden of adjustment to the new climatic and hydrological regime will fall on subaltern groups like farmworkers (jobs threatened by water transfers), the urban poor (who could easily see water charges soar by $100 to $200 per month), hardscrabble ranchers (including many Native Americans) and, especially, the imperiled rural populations of Northern Mexico. Indeed, the ending of the age of cheap water in the Southwest--especially as it may coincide with the end of cheap energy--will accentuate the region's already high levels of class and racial inequality as well as drive more emigrants to gamble with death in dangerous crossings of the border deserts. (It takes little imagination, moreover, to guess the Minutemen's future slogan: "They are coming to steal our water!")
(...) [and the future?] Conservative politics in Arizona and Texas will become even more envenomed and ethnically charged, if that is possible. The Southwest is already sown everywhere with violent nativism and what can only be described as proto-fascism: In the droughts to come, they may be the only seeds to germinate. As Jared Diamond points out in his recent bestseller Collapse, the ancient Anasazi did not succumb simply to drought but rather to the impact of unexpected aridity upon an over-exploited landscape inhabited by people little prepared to make sacrifices in their "expensive lifestyle." In the last instance, they preferred to eat one another.

the democratic compromise on immigration (davis):
[the situation] ONE YEAR after the mass marches for immigrant rights that challenged repressive legislation proposed by congressional Republicans, the Bush administration is set to unveil harsh new proposals to supply Corporate America with cheap and vulnerable immigrant labor, ratchet up enforcement, and make it extremely difficult for undocumented workers to become U.S. citizens.
(...) Many in the immigrant rights movement have looked to the new Democratic Congress to provide an alternative to Bush and the hardliners. Instead, the Democrats are seeking a compromise palatable to the ultra-conservatives in the Republican Party. The result is a bill--co-authored by two House members, liberal Democrat Luis Gutiérrez and conservative Republican Jeff Flake--known as the Security Through Regularized Immigration and a Vibrant Economy, or STRIVE Act.
(...) [myth: amnesty --> reality:] First, the majority of the nation’s 11-13 million undocumented people (those between ages 21 to 65, and not in the military, disabled or a single head of household) will have to leave the country within 90 days of the application process. Second, they must pay a minimum $2,000 fine and back taxes, and show proof of presence and consistent employment before and since June 1, 2006. Current law makes those who use fraudulent documents for employment (roughly 75 percent of all current undocumented workers) inadmissible for legalization.
Those able to satisfy the bill’s requirements would not get a green card (permanent residence). Instead, they would receive “conditional non-immigrant status,” a six-year waiting period during which time they would have to maintain consistent employment, learn fluent English and be placed in “the back of the line” behind millions of existing backlogged petitions (Waiting lists today are estimated at 5 to 7 years, although the STRIVE Act does contain clauses to expedite the process. Current law requires at least a five-year residency before attaining citizenship). If an undocumented immigrant worker does manage to complete all steps in the STRIVE Act, she or he can become a citizen only after at least 15 years--a fact that bill co-sponsor Jeff Flake has used as a selling point to conservatives. While some of the undocumented could gain legal status over time, many--perhaps millions--would fall by the wayside. Moreover, “conditional non-immigrant” status will make workers dependent on their jobs--and thus more compliant with poor working conditions and lower wages, as employers could hold the threat of termination over their heads.
(...) [myth: more protection for guest-workers --> reality:] Guest workers would be bound to a single employer and required to work for the duration of the contract. Any cessation of employment could be determined a breach of contract, allowing the employer to have the worker ejected from the country. While workers would be able to leave an abusive employer, they could do so only if they can secure another job in advance with another employer, who must officially offer them work and be registered with the government to participate in the program. If a worker were to leave a worksite without notification, they would be deemed “illegal” and subject to deportation if they are not reintegrated into a registered worksite within 60 days. All temporary workers would be tracked through an “Alien Employment Management System,” so they will be identifiable if they leave a worksite. Furthermore, the proposal doesn’t expressly guarantee the right to join a union or engage in collective bargaining. This, too, would leave workers vulnerable to employers that violate the provisions of the agreement. It is this denial of the freedom of movement and assembly, and the right to engage in genuine collective bargaining by immigrant guest workers that make this proposal so appealing for employers. Unlike the old bracero system and current guest-worker programs, the STRIVE Act would deliver workers into virtually every sector of the economy. Employers hope to leverage their control over guest workers to lower wages across the economy--and to reduce the presence of unions in their worksites.
(...) (myth: more humane, less enforcement --> reality:] The plan for external militarization includes doubling the number of Border Patrol agents (to about 24,000) by 2012, emphasizing the recruitment of former military personnel with experience in border enforcement in Iraq and Afghanistan. The bill would further add 1,200 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to investigate “immigration crimes.” (...)The proposal includes the development of a national biometric database to track all immigrants, as well as an “Electronic Employment Verification System” to identify the undocumented. (...) Those who cross the border without papers will be criminalized and subject to six months in prison for a first offense; two years for a second offense, and five years for a third offense. The use of forged passports or false visas could result in 15 years in jail.
(...) [in sum:] The bipartisan support for the STRIVE Act reveals how central “comprehensive immigration reform” is to Corporate America’s goal of disempowering labor in the U.S. While the Republican Party was defeated by the mass immigrant rights movement last spring, the baton has since passed to a Democratic Congress to salvage Corporate America’s vision. For those committed to a different vision--one based on full legalization for all, democratization of society and the empowerment of working families--the struggle continues in the streets and workplaces across the U.S.