Halo, Halo! (2025)

The Halo Halo Column from the February 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Camille Paglia is an American academic, brought up Catholic, later atheist. She described an early experience where she learnt the lesson which is one that all religions and cults teach – don’t ask questions, we know better, do as you’re told!

‘The Catholic Church in the Fifties was at its most dogmatic and censorious, and I struggled restlessly against its rules. As we were being drilled for Confirmation, I asked the nun in our catechism class, “If God is all-forgiving, will he ever forgive Satan?” This innocent and it seems to me, interesting question produced a violent response. The nun turned beet-red and began screaming at me – odd, I thought, since we were sitting in the pews of the church. My question, needless to say, was not answered. That was when I knew there was no place in the American Church of that time for an enquiring mind.’

The experience appears not to have dampened Paglia’s ardour for asking awkward questions. There are still no places within religion for enquiring minds.

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Creationism adherents are throwing their toys out of their prams. Wikipedia is biased against religion, they cry. Wikipedia states that there are over ten thousand distinct religions in the world. Those seeking elucidation from within its pages shouldn’t take everything found there to be gospel. Creationists have taken umbrage with Wiki because it lists ‘Creationism,’ aka ‘intelligent design,’ as a pseudoscience. They’ve resorted to ‘statistics’ which allegedly show how many Creationists there are in the world. We all know what is said about statistics. We think Wikipedia is being overly generous in using even that term (World Religious News).

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As if the inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas don’t have enough to contend with, the BBC reported that criminal gangs had taken ‘control of a group of five favelas in the north of the city – now known as the Israel Complex – after one of their leaders had what he believed was a revelation from God . . . gangsters see themselves as “soldiers of crime”, with Jesus as “the owner” of the territory they dominate’. The report says that ‘the gang selling these branded drugs is the Pure Third Command, one of Rio’s most powerful criminal groups, with a reputation both for making its opponents disappear, and for fanatical evangelical Christianity. Controversially, some have dubbed them “Narco-Pentecostals”’.

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What does a hundred thousand dollars buy you these days? Two tickets to the ‘One America, One Light Sunday Service’. This was an ‘interfaith prayer service’ which took place the day before Trump’s inauguration as US president. Seems like the only faith on display was that of devotion to the mighty buck rather than the Almighty. Whoever organised this is an amateur compared to the Evangelists who pull in millions of dollars yearly. Did the participants offer up prayers to the Omnipotent One? What are the chances He, or his team, answered them? A bargain though if they got to meet the Holy Trinity, Trump, Vance and Musk.

DC

Booms and Slums (2007)

From the December 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Anyone who has read Frederick Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England will long remember much of what it says. Page after page describes the lives of workers in the big cities in 1844. Two boys in London, for instance, were arrested for stealing a half-cooked calf’s foot from a shop: the magistrate discovered that their mother had sold or pawned all the family’s possessions in order to buy food. Many others had little or no furniture and slept on the floor, covered in rags.

The accounts of slum dwellings are sometimes hard to believe. Perhaps the worst was the Little Ireland area of Manchester, where four thousand people lived in overcrowded, unsanitary, decrepit cottages and the filth and stench were all but intolerable. Similar conditions were found in Liverpool, Leeds, Bradford, Glasgow, and so on. It is difficult to disagree with Engels’ statement that working people were enduring ‘a condition unworthy of human beings’.

In 1971 Robert Roberts published The Classic Slum, an account of his upbringing in Salford in the early twentieth century. In 1910, he records, his mother cajoled their landlord into installing a cast-iron bath (which meant an extra shilling a week in rent). Several neighbours came to look at the bath, its taps and so on: they had never used or even seen a bath before. Workers scrimped and saved to afford a rag rug and a couple of framed pictures, let alone ‘luxuries’ such as a watch or a bike. Getting by from week to week often relied on pawning their Sunday best clothes. In looking back at his childhood and the lives of his neighbours, Roberts refers to ‘the spoiled complexions, the mouths full of rotten teeth, the varicose veins, the ignorance of simple hygiene, the intelligence stifled and the endless battle merely to keep clean’. Such were the good old days amid the flourishing of the British Empire.

And is it all just in the Victorian and Edwardian past? While homelessness and bad housing still exist, can it be said that slums — crowded, filthy, nasty — are no longer the lot of most? Mike Davis’ book Planet of Slums describes a world where one in three of the urban population, mainly in the ‘Third World’, live in slums. It goes without saying that slum life is bad for your health and life expectancy. Landslides, floods and earthquakes threaten those who live in shoddy housing in marginal areas. Fires, whether accidental or deliberately set by property developers, can spread so fast that nobody can escape.

Sanitation is another disaster area, with the situation having changed little since Engels’ day. Sewage systems are virtually non-existent in many cities: Davis cites one slum area in Nairobi which had just ten working toilets for forty thousand people. But there is hope for the future, as in some places pay toilets have become a hugely profitable growth industry — though of course they’re not so convenient for the millions who cannot afford to use them.

Profiting from poverty is widespread. Such is the population density in slums that landlords make plenty of money from even the poorest neighbourhoods. Many cities in Asia and Africa are effectively owned by small numbers of landlords, and those who rent from them are the most powerless of all. Squatting becomes increasingly difficult as vacant land is developed and forcible evictions increase: over three-quarters of a million evicted in Harare in 2005, for instance. Slum-dwellers often have little choice but to fight back by building their own homes or resorting to food riots.

Cities like Manchester in Engels’ time were essentially the result of the Industrial Revolution. But in contrast, Davis argues, the growth of megacities and hence of megaslums over the last twenty years or so has been marked by deindustrialisation, as factories have closed in places such as Mumbai, Johannesburg and Sao Paulo. Like Mexico City and Jakarta, these have enormous populations but far smaller economies. The new slums are also mostly on the peripheries of the cities rather than in inner-city areas, and so usually lack any half-way decent transport infrastructure.

The financial institutions of global capitalism have played a major role in maintaining the regime of slum living. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have helped finance slum ‘improvement’ programmes in city after city, via privatisation of housing supply and the ending of food subsidies. The result has not been to eradicate slums, of course, but to spread ‘informal’ employment which lacks contracts and bargaining power. Along with this has come an expansion of child labour along the lines recorded by Engels and Dickens.

The development of capitalism, then, has not done away with the horrors of slums. Inadequate housing continues to exist in ‘advanced’ countries, with an estimated 100,000 homeless people in Los Angeles and one child in seven growing up in bad housing in the UK. Perhaps two million American families will lose their homes over the next couple of years, as the sub-prime crisis bites. Worldwide, as many as one billion people live — or do their best to create some kind of life — in slums. While the rich reside in their gated communities, the poor dwell in conditions of scarcely-imaginable squalor, marginalised in terms of work and family life. A Socialist society would face a tremendous task in replacing slums with decent housing, but that is a problem that capitalism can never tackle let alone solve.

Paul Bennett

Remember Soweto? (1976)

From the August 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

Now that the headlines have died down over the recent riots in Soweto, South Africa, and the press vultures are picking over some other gory carcass, it is worth a look at what the Johannesburg Star had to say before the outbreak of riots.

In an article on 14th June 1976 it described Soweto as ". . . just a huge agglomeration of people living without many of the accepted amenities of urban life. Physical security, schools, decent sanitation, and roads, electricity, proper shopping and recreational facilities . . ." In other words, a massive shanty town for “probably well over a million people” (i.e. black workers). Since last year, when the Johannesburg Star had another article on Soweto “matters have not improved”. The cauldron could well have boiled over earlier.

The real concern of the paper is revealed in the last paragraph of the later article:

Can any government in its right senses allow this drift towards disaster to continue? Even if you leave human compassion right out of it and simply consider the huge potential threat that is building up here to the security of everyone. White as well as Black?

The capitalist class are always willing to “leave human compassion right out of it”. What they are concerned with is “the security of everyone”, specially themselves. You can’t have the workers going round rioting, stealing and destroying property; they might start bringing these reactions into the factories and other places. Workers must respect property. The capitalists must keep the lid on and maintain law and order “at all costs” as Vorster emphatically pointed out.

The tragic lesson of Soweto is that the capitalists will unhesitatingly use the state power when they think their interests are threatened. While we abhor the conditions under which the South African workers are forced to live, the solution does not lie in abolishing apartheid but in the recognition by all workers that their common interest lies in the abolition of capitalism and its replacement by Socialism throughout the world.

T. K.

Barbarism stalks Brazilian youth (1993)

Artwork by George Meddemmen.

From the September 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Early on Friday 23 July gunmen opened fire on a group of street children sleeping near Canderlaria Church in the heart of Rio de Janeiro's financial district. The attack left seven dead and many wounded and was the latest stage in what has become known as Brazil’s "war on children". Human rights organizations estimate that there have been an average of two killings a day this year (Independent, 27 July). The latest killings horrified many Brazilians who until recently showed little sympathy for those children forced to beg and steal in order to survive. Few were surprised when a survivor of the attack identified three local policemen as participants in the massacre.

Renewed publicity about the plight of Brazil's street children shows that despite the outrage and concern voiced by many in recent years the problem will not go away until its root causes are understood and then removed. It is working-class poverty caused by the property relationships within capitalism which drives young Brazilian workers onto the streets, and reduces their lives to a desperate scramble for scraps of food and a little cash.

Mass inequality
The problems are particularly acute in Brazil as it is one of the world’s most unequal nations. The urban poverty seen today was created by the rapid industrialization and urbanization of the country during the last forty years. This crash programme of urbanization reached its peak during the twenty-one year military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985. The programme turned Brazil into a country of migrants as working-class and peasant families were uprooted in search of wage-labour, land, health or survival. Many were driven from their land by land-grabbers, cattle-ranchers, hydro-electric power projects, drought or environmental devastation. Brazil now has one of the most extreme concentrations of land ownership in the world, and the powerful landowner lobby has always managed to further its interests through the Brasilia government. A group of architects in Sao Paulo produced a report in which they astutely noted that:

   "the military wanted people to move to the cities where they were more easy to control and could provide the cheap labour needed for the Generals' industrialisation programme. The network of cities reflects the military government urban project. Its key concept is national integration to complete the occupation and unification of the country as a capitalist urban-industrial territory." (Sao Paulo: Crisis and Change, 1991).

Most of those who flocked to the cities made their homes in the burgeoning favelas (shanty-towns). They merely swapped rural poverty for its urban equivalent. Thirty years ago Carolina Maria de Jesus wrote a book titled Beyond All Pity (published in the UK by Earthscan, 1990) describing daily life in a favela:

   "More new people arrived in the favela. They are shabby and walk bent over with their eyes to the ground as if doing penance for their misfortune of living in an ugly place. A place where you can’t plant one flower to breathe its perfume . . . the only perfume that comes from the favela is from rotting mud, excrement and whisky".

Today seventy five percent of Brazil’s 150 million population live in cities and there are twenty cities with more than one million inhabitants. It is a commonplace to say these cities sprawl unplanned. The architects from Sao Paulo disagree:

  "Far from representing the absence planning the periphery model (of favelas) corresponds to a strategy of maximum capitalist accumulation. It enables the settlement of large contingents of people in areas that are bare of everything, reducing to a minimum the need for investment in housing and infrastructure either by the public or the private sector."

Poverty has worsened for Brazil’s working class in recent years as a rigid austerity programme imposed by the government, coupled with recession, has lead to drastic cuts in public spending, wage-cuts and redundancies. Things aren’t so bad for the capitalist class as the concentration of wealth has increased. The richest 10 percent own over half the national wealth, whilst the poorest 10 percent own less than one percent. An official survey in 1988 showed that 54 percent of Brazilian children and adolescents live in families earning less than US S35 per month. The lack of work and the social pressures of poverty such as overcrowding, domestic violence etc have forced literally millions of children onto the streets.

Survival first priority
It has been estimated that there are approximately seven to eight million street children in Brazil (Brazil: War on Children, 1991) though of these only a minority have no contact with their families. For those abandoned or orphaned, home is often a park bench, a shop doorway, a scrap of wasteland or a damp tunnel. Huddled in groups for safety their first priority is survival — finding food. They scavenge city waste dumps, shine shoes, mind parked cars or sell lottery tickets. Others steal from shops, mug tourists, commit burglaries in desperate efforts to make ends meet. A young boy interviewed by World In Action said "we steal watches, necklaces. We don’t have anything to eat. We don’t have anywhere to sleep — that’s why we steal".

Facing discrimination and outright hostility from much of society many street children turn to drugs in a bid to escape the nightmare that is their life on the streets. A survey of street children in Sao Paulo showed that out of 119 children aged between 6 and 17, 45 percent were classified as "heavy drug users" using up to three different drugs a day. Glue-sniffing is the most popular. A young prostitute in Salvador said, "I sniffed a lot yesterday and then I dreamt of a school where we could learn ballet, the capoeira dance, reading and writing. School is the best thing in the world. I’m always dreaming about it". Sadly she has little chance of such schooling in a country where most of the education budget is directed towards the universities where the students come from high-income families.

Fagin rides again

Many children work in gangs managed by modern-day Fagins who appropriate a share of the childrens’ spoils. Some offer the kids the only support and affection they receive. However, more usual are regular beatings and even murder if the children aren’t "productive" enough. The police too like to take a share in any money gained from muggings and often demand objects such as stolen watches.

Child prostitution is widespread and growing. A Brazilian Congressional Inquiry recently reported that there are about half-a-million child prostitutes in Brazil — more than in any other country except Thailand. According to Dulce Acioli from the Movement for the Promotion of Women, girls as young as seven and eight are working as prostitutes in Belem. Many other girls vanish without trace. Every month about 150 girls are registered as missing with the authorities in Rio Branco alone. It is believed that many of these girls end up working as prostitutes in mining areas (Guardian, 29 June).

The public response to the explosion in the numbers of street children has at times been savage and brutal. As Jan Rocha says in the introduction to Gilberto Dimenstein’s book Brazil: War on Children:

  "Brazilians are warm and hospitable and they love children, but most of them do not see street children as children. What they see in these ragged, dirty kids, drugged or lively, happy or sad, is a threat. A threat to their property, a threat to their lives. That is why a few years ago in the centre of Sao Paulo a lawyer savagely kicked and stamped a thirteen year old boy called Jesus to death when he grabbed a woman's gold necklace, a crowd stood round watching and egging him on. Only two young office girls protested at the brutal act."

The general feeling of economic insecurity among the population creates the perfect environment for the growth of groups claiming to dispense justice. For many years death squads have waged a silent war of extermination on the backstreets against petty criminals. Many death-squads are made up exclusively of police officers, such as the one implicated in the recent Rio de Janeiro atrocity. Others consist of hired gunmen paid for by local businessmen and shopkeepers. Sadistic torture is often a precursor to a bullet in the head. Bodies are often found with genitals severed, eyes poked out, burnt with cigarettes and slashed by knives. Many death-squad members have enjoyed considerable public support. Ivanildo Freitas one of the most famous "justiceiros” (avengers) is believed to have murdered seventy-two people. Following his arrest in 1984 people demonstrated on his behalf in the centre of Sao Paulo. Freitas said from prison: "An exterminator is not a criminal. A criminal rapes, steals, and even kills his own father. I think I am a kind of Representative of the people." Another "justiceiro" known as Esquerdinha even ran as a candidate for the Christian Democrat Party in local council elections saying: "I think it is my duty to help the community by providing greater security to a people who have been trodden on by these criminals" (Brazil: War on Children, 1991).

Thankfully recent events seem to show greater tolerance and more understanding of the plight of the street children. July’s shooting in Rio horrified many Brazilians and hundreds of protesters rallied in support of the murdered seven children (Independent, 28 July).

Psychological scars

This silent war against Brazil’s street children has left its psychological mark on the children too. Many expect to die violent deaths before they reach adulthood. A thirteen-year-old street girl from Recife said: "It is our destiny. Nothing can change this. We are on the street. We arc already dead." One boy, known as Rusty, tragically prophesied his own fate: "My life is like the wind. Nothing can stop it blowing away.” (Brazil: War on Children).

There are few opportunities to escape the poverty, homelessness, violence and drug-abuse of the streets. A few charities run hostels which offer temporary sanctuary to a few children, but they can do nothing to change the economic forces which push young people onto the streets in the first place.

Socialists welcome the recent protesters of Rio who marched with banners proclaiming "street kids are our kids" and hope that no more will some of capitalism's most desperate victims be scapegoated as the cause of the problems obvious to all. Capitalism will, however, continue to force new generations of children onto the streets until such a time as we take the appropriate political action to abolish it.

Peter Owen

At the mercy of global capitalism (1996)

From the January 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Workers in developing countries, even those with vast natural resources such as Brazil, face a future of insecurity, destitution and repression. There is simply no way out within the capitalist order. For them, the establishment of Socialism really is a matter of life and death.

Brazil originated as a slave society. The Portuguese who ruled it from the sixteenth century saw its natural resources—brazil wood, sugar and gold— as the basis for massive fortunes. But the native inhabitants, who mostly lived as hunter-gatherers, were unwilling to work for pitiful wages in appalling conditions. The solution was to enslave the native peoples, and slave-hunting itself became a profitable business. When even this failed to produce a large and reliable enough workforce, slaves were imported from Africa—they had the advantage of immunity to European diseases in addition to their working abilities. As many as three-and-a-half-million slaves were shipped from Africa to Brazil, making this an important, if often neglected, aspect of the slave trade.

By the time Brazil achieved independence from Portugal in 1822, coffee was becoming the biggest export. Independence served the interests of the Brazilian ruling class, who were no longer tied to trading through Portugal, but made little if any difference to the lives of ordinary people. As elsewhere, slavery ceased to be the best method for extracting surplus labour, and by 1888, when slavery was abolished in Brazil, Brazilian peasants and new immigrants from southern Europe were working as wage labourers. Besides coffee, there was a boom in rubber production in the north-cast of the country in the second half of the nineteenth century, but this ended when rubber plants were smuggled out to south-east Asia and vast rubber plantations set up there.

For the first few decades of the present century, Brazil continued to be run as an export economy, dependent on the lion's share of the world coffee market. Imports were mainly of consumer goods for the rich, and machines. Brazilian industry was inefficient, protected from competition behind high tariff barriers. But the slump of the 1930s drastically reduced the world demand for coffee, and produced a crisis in Brazil's economy. A series of dictatorships and military governments failed to make a success of the policy of import-substituting industrialisation introduced into Brazil, as into much of Latin America, after 1945.

In the 1960s and 1970s, however, Brazil experienced annual growth rates of 10 percent, making it now the world's eighth largest economy (in terms of GDP). Coffee remains the main export, but fruit and some industrial products are also important. For a handful of rich capitalists and land-owners, things have worked out very well, but for the mass of ordinary Brazilians all this economic “progress" is a myth.

The expansion of manufacturing has led to an enormous increase in urban population, and vast shanty towns (favelas) have grown up around the main Brazilian cities. These offer few facilities of any kind, and are massively overcrowded, with over a million people living in favelas in Sao Paulo alone. In the whole country, one-third of houses have no piped water, and according to one report 80 percent of those going to casualty departments in public hospitals are suffering from illnesses caused by poor sanitary conditions. Under-five mortality rates are getting worse, certainly in some areas. Over 30 million people (one-fifth of the population) suffer from chronic malnutrition, while the richest one percent get 14 percent of the national income.

Child labour

While the rich enjoy their exclusive beaches and Swiss bank accounts, the overwhelming majority of the population live in fear and squalor. Violence and terrorism abound, directed especially against street children in the big cities and favelas. Child labour is rife, and perhaps half-a-million girls and women are forced to work as prostitutes. And despite its formal abolition over a century ago, slavery still exists, with thousands of workers in debt to their bosses and unable to leave their jobs on pain of death. This is particularly common in the Amazon, where workers are transported to clear the forest and make way for multinational-owned plantations.

For centuries, in fact, Amazonia has been seen as ripe for exploitation, whether by the Portuguese colonists, the Brazilian rulers or capitalists from abroad. Earlier this century, Henry Ford spent millions in an unsuccessful attempt to start a giant rubber plantation there. Besides logging—thus helping to destroy the rainforest—one of the current preoccupations of the government is of the Amazon as a source of hydroelectric power, with vast dams under construction or on the drawing- board. This devastates the lives of those who dwell in the forest, including the few remaining Indian bands. Resistance is met by violence and repression—the murder of rubber-tapper Chico Mendes in 1988 is only the best-known example.

Brazil has always been at the mercy of global capitalism and the interests of those who run it, and no Brazilian government has been able to administer the system in the way that it wants. The foreign debt is now a staggering $150 billion; interest payments were suspended [in] 1982 when it was little more than half this amount. Attempts to gain some control over the country’s helter-skelter economy, with inflation sometimes beating 2,000 percent a year, have included two introductions of new currencies, the latest in 1994. But nothing helps. Earlier this year, import tariffs were hiked on a range of "luxury" goods, including cars and televisions, to try and reduce the trade deficit—not that this tariff increase affects the vast majority of the population, who are in no position to afford such items.

Of course such a system has not run without resistance. Many slaves escaped over the decades and created slave sanctuaries, while the great Cabanagem rebellion in the 1830s showed that the rulers could not have everything their own way. Exploitation of the Amazon has led to much resistance to loggers and dam-builders, while workers have struck in a number of industries after the latest currency reform led to lower wages. In May this year troops seized control of government oil refineries in a conflict with striking oil-workers. Cardoso, the new president, recently vetoed an increase in the minimum wage: at £58 a month, this remains well below what is needed to support a family. Cardoso tried to set a good example by taking a 25 percent wage cut himself, but then his own salary, at £7,000 a month, is a little higher than the minimum.

Paul Bennett