Re: questions

Dear Ivan:

An excellent question.  The answer lies perhaps not in modernization per
se, but in the type of modernization.  Pancapitalist modernization (see my
book on GLOBAL COMMUNICATION AND WORLD POLITICS) tends to exacerbate the
gaps between centers and peripheries, including urban centers and
peripheries.  That is how the Bauhaus centers of Rio, Cairo, Mexico City,
etc. have produced modernized, atomized, and criminalized urban ghettoes.
The gated ghettos of the rich are thus matchematched by the gated gettos
of the poor. Both camps  are u under intense police, electronic
surveillance, and
generate accelerating human insecurity.  This is illustrated by Littletons
as well as Watts.

Hope this hypothesis generates a discussion.  Aloha, Majid 


On Mon, 24 May 1999, Fernando Ivan Petrella wrote:

> Can somebody please explain the following quotation to me:
> 
> "When we think of modernization and development, we tend to think of the
> International Style of the Bauhaus, hig steel buildings, quiet running
> engines and so on. We must recognize this image as self deception if we
> are truly to look at things scientifically and in a world systems
> perspective. If development is a world scale phenomena, then everything it
> has produced, and not just those parts that are pleasing to the eye or to
> the moral sense, must equally be called modern and developed. "Modern
> architecture" must be seen as precisely what every major city in the third
> world actually has today: steel and glass high rise buildings plus slums
> built by squatters. FOr the slums are just as new as the high rises or
> newer...From a world systems perspective we should never fall into the
> sentimental error of talking about "poverty versus modernization" or
> "slums versus development" because this langage takes our attention away
> from the very things that need to be studied, namely, the modernization of
> poverty and the development of slums."  from C. Douglas Lummis Radical
> democracy p.66-67
> 
> I don't get how the connection between development and poverty is made on
> this local scale. How is it exactly that the rise of modern cities in the
> third world is paralleled with the rise of slums (it can't just be through
> poor govt spending by which money is placed in grandiose projects rather
> than improving the living condition of the majority - world systems seeks,
> I think, a more systemic explanation).
> 
> How would you explain the idea of the modernization of poverty?
> 
> Finally, I understand, in theory, the claim that the affluence of the rich
> countries is based on the poverty of the rest. But there are several
> versions of this claim. I subscribe to a weak version: in that the
> consumption patterns of the rich nations is only ecologically sustainable
> by the lack of adequate patterns of consumption in the third world. What
> are the stronger versions of this claim (for example, that their is a
> direct appropriation of surplus value by the core from the periphery) and
> are they defensible?
> 
> Anyway, I know these questions betray my ignorance, but I hope someone can
> help.
> 
> Ivan
> 
>