By the year 2000, or so the projection runs, 2.75 billion people, or half the world's entire population will be living, or rather existing, in urban centres. At present 250 cities around the world have populations exceeding one million and this figure is expected to double by the year 2015. Already, one billion people have no access to a sewerage system and clean water and over 600 million are homeless.
In the vast majority of these cities crime, drug abuse, alcoholism, terrorism, poverty, disease and malnutrition are reaching epidemic proportions. Such is the situation, in fact, that an international conference was called by the UN in June— the Habitat II Summit—to look at the problem.
Head of the conference, Wally N’Dow, said: “The overwhelming speed at which the world is urbanising leaves little time to adapt. We are witnessing daily urban catastrophes . . . We risk a complete breakdown in cities. People feel alienated" (Guardian, 1 June).
Said Franz Vanderschueren: "The process of urbanisation goes hand in hand with a growth of violence . . . the product of a society characterised by inequality and social exclusion.” He goes on to blame a “social environment dominated by consumerism, competition and by the mass media which propagate and legitimise violence" (Ibid.).
Before the conference had even begun it was forecast that only a few heads of state would show interest and attend—revealing, undoubtedly, ministerial awareness of the problem and acceptance of capitalism's inability to solve problems rooted in its own contradictions.
The UN are fond of holding such summits—arms summits, peace summits. Earth summits, in fact, summits on just about every problem facing humanity, and all, of course, proof that capitalism can’t be made to work in our interests. UN summits, though, are supposed to conclude with some joint plan of action to tackle the problem in question, and this is where they run into difficulty.
The problems such summits are set up to confront are social problems, not natural ones. They stem from the way our society is at present organised for production. We have no real problems, only those we create ourselves.
As far back as 1859 Karl Marx put it like this:
"Mankind always sets itself only such problems as it can solve; since looking at the matter more clearly, it will always be found that the task itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation” (Preface to Critique of Political Economy).
Hence, the millions who starve every year could be fed with the mountains of food that are destroyed or with the fruit and vegetables that landowners are paid vast sums for not producing. Tens of millions sleep rough on the streets of the world's cities, whilst there is no shortage of vacant buildings or stockpiled bricks and mortar and idle craftsmen. Factories remain closed and countless tons of machinery rusts, yet there is no shortage of people looking for the opportunity to utilise them.
In spite of the technological advances we have made in recent years, and the possibility to produce an abundance of the necessities of life, we find the UN Summit in Istanbul hinting at declining resources and food and water shortages. This, in spite of the fact that the surface of our planet is covered in water quite capable of being desalinised and cleansed, and the fact that 7.5 acres of arable land could be provided for every person in the world.
One thing is sure. No one at the Habitat II Summit will have suggested putting an end to the money and wages system and establishing a world where production is geared solely to meeting social needs, instead of providing a profit for a minority.
It is because of purely economic reasons—the drive to make profit—that production, employment and consequently housing is centralised in cities or constricted areas. And it is inevitable that people are compelled to live in concentrated commercial and industrial areas so that they can sell their physical and mental abilities in order to live. Inevitably, insecurity and competition for jobs will follow, resulting in crime and poverty, alienation, stress, frustration and tension. Is it any wonder that social conflict is always on the horizon? If the capitalist system treats people as brutes, seeing only in them a quick return on invested capital, is it any wonder they act as such?
Anyone hoping for a UN Summit on the feasibility of Socialism will have a long wait. If we want a qualitatively different society in which we can solve such social problems as overcrowding the moment they appear, then we have to organise to get it. The choice is simple—production for social use or profit? —the peace, stability and the potential to produce an abundance of the necessaries of life in Socialism, or the stark rat-race that is capitalism. The choice is stark, but simple.
John Bissett
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