rio wrote:
traptunderice wrote:
Just finished Planet of Slums. Written like a sociology text, it explained example after example about how SAPs have turned the third world into a land of slums and gated communities with no middle ground. Shit floats down stream contaminating and polluting people's drinking water as they live in shantytowns with little to subsist on. There is no majestic, romantic life for a bum; they are an exploited underclass of marginalized citizens, expendable to the system.
It describes "hot demolitions" which is where slumlords send flaming cats through shantytowns in order to set them ablaze so the slumlords can collect the insurance. And the "wage puzzle" of how Africans in some areas make so little money (legally, illegally, formally, informally) researchers simply do not understand how they can survive.
It's a brilliant book on land inequality. Mike Davis, the author, is a well known Marxist sociologist who is absolutely amazing when he kicks into theory mode as opposed to science mode. His ultimate thesis becomes in the epilogue when the U.S. military is practicing invading urban centers who are they planning on exterminating? Terrorists or the poor people pushed to the brink living in their own and others' shit, infected with cholera, AIDS, dysentery and in debt to the World Bank twice as much as it would take to treat these wide epidemics, raping their families.
Heh, sounds neat, I've been meaning to read some of his stuff.
I have City of Quartz and it's really dense right now cause I have no understanding of the geography of LA whatsoever. Once I get past the geography stuff it should be alright. My prof also recommended his book on empire and car bombs and Ecology of Fear, which is about natural disasters and California and how development of the area encourages it.
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Also, just reaching the fun part of Capital, where the chapters stop being called things like "Money, or the circulation of commodities" and start being called things like "Bloody legislation against the expropriated since the 15th century".
I've been looking for some Marx to read. I've only really read The Communist Manifesto and a bunch of excerpts for sociology courses. Any texts you'd recommend? I was thinking about starting the Eighteenth Brummaire.
