Class Warfare as a Requisite for Rule

The for-Western-eyes-only news out of Hong Kong gives a review of a book any oligarch would find bracing:

SAO PAULO - Pentagon planners must have loved what happened in South America's premier hypercity in the past few days; as urban warfare goes, it was more illuminating than Baghdad or Gaza. The leaders of the First Capital Command (PCC, for Primeiro Comando da Capital) - a super-gang involved in drug and arms trafficking, kidnappings, bank robberies and extortion and controlling most of Sao Paulo's overcrowded and notoriously corrupt prisons - declared war against Brazil's wealthiest state.

From inside their prison cells, using US$150 mobile phones, they ordered motorcyclist "bin Ladens" - warriors indebted to the PCC, heavily armed with guns, shotguns, hand grenades, machine-guns and Molotov cocktails - to conduct a violent orgy: spraying police cars with bullets, hurling grenades at police stations, attacking officers in their homes and after-hours hangouts, torching dozens of buses (after passengers had been ordered off), and robbing banks. Almost 100 people were killed in three days. On Monday, the PCC managed single-handedly virtually to paralyze Sao Paulo, the third-largest of the world's hypercities (those with more than 19 million people).

The PCC leaders were demanding better jail conditions; and crucially - as this is soccer-mad Brazil - a few dozen television sets so inmates can follow the World Cup in Germany next month. Sooner or later, with better coordination, demonstrations of force like this one will inevitably spread to Rio de Janeiro's slums, also a drug-dealing beehive. Brazil's mega-cities are used to urban civil war. And the war has been on since at least the late 1970s. "Baghdad is here" has become a common mantra...

I'm sure the Pentagon would be interested, since many right wing observers are taking pains to assert these are "leftist" gangs no doubt resulting from the 2002 election of a popular relative leftist president, Lula da Silva and the more recent election of an even more leftist Sao Paulo governor, Andre Franco Montoro.

But back to the review of "Planet of Slums" by Mike Davis:

...We're heading toward a world where "cities will account for virtually all future world population growth, which is expected to peak at about 10 billion in 2050".

Already the combined populations of China, India and Brazil roughly equal that of Western Europe and North America. By 2025, Asia will have at least 10 hypercities, including Jakarta (24.9 million people), Dhaka (25 million), Karachi (26.5 million), Shanghai (27 million) and Mumbai (with a staggering 33 million). Davis also refers to the coming leviathan of the Rio/Sao Paulo Extended Metropolitan Region, a 450-kilometer-long axis between the two Brazilian mega-cities already encompassing 37 million people, even more than the Tokyo-Yokohama conurbation (33 million)...

The review, not to mention the book itself, paints an accurate if unsettling picture of the gathering Malthusian tsunami of the urban poor, and if anything underestimates the fraction of the human race caught up in the wave.

The review, and the book itself, lay the blame for the mess at the feet of the World Bank. Reasonably so. Western oligarchs seem to have the imperial monomania, and are willing to use any means possible to extend their neo-feudal dominion.

One notes however the thread of despair that wends its way through the text. Obviously, the credulous reader is drawn to think, what's needed is intelligent rule of the unruly masses. The only difference from the Eastasian angle as opposed to the anti-leftist Oceanic view is the proper identity of the appropriate Dear Leader.

Nowhere is the need for education, employment, or economic justice addressed. Obviously all that is too much for the reader to expect. Obviously all the unrest must be due to simply the need for crimelords in prison to impress the street with their solidarity over the need to watch the World Cup.

The simple children. Big Brother knows what's best for them. All that remains is for the grown-ups to decide who the appropriate Big Brother will be.