And now, this gigantic strike of the most demoralised elements of the lot, the dock labourers, not the regular strong, experienced, relatively well-paid men in steady employment, but those who have happened to land up in dockland, the Jonahs who have suffered shipwreck in all other spheres, starvelings by trade, a welter of broken lives heading straight for utter ruin . . . And this dully despairing mass of humanity who, every morning when the dock gates are opened, literally fight pitched battles to be first to reach the chap who signs them on, that mass haphazardly thrown together and changing every day, has successfully combined to form a band 40,000 strong, maintain discipline and inspire fear in the powerful dock companies . . . 49
Engels' point is very important in the 21st century. Internationally there have been three decades of defeat and demoralisation for workers right across the world. This bred a fatalism about the possibility of fighting, which was reflected in a mass of studies which depicted the suffering of the poor and the oppressed, showing them always as victims, rarely as fighters. Thus there are masses of materials sponsored by the International Labour Organisation on "social exclusion"-a theme which suits the bureaucrats who run such bodies. Themes like the "casualisation" and "feminisation" of the workforce become stereotyped, academic ways of dismissing possibilities of struggle-even if some of those carrying through the studies try to escape from the paradigm in which they are trapped. This tendency to see the urban poor and the permanent workers as two separate groups hermetically sealed off from each other is particularly prevalent among NGO activists.
The reality is more complex. Slum districts themselves are rarely homogenous in their social make up. Permanent workers live in them alongside casual workers, the poorest sectors of the self-employed, the unemployed and even some sections of the petty bourgeoisie. Mike Davis tells how:
The traditional stereotype of the Indian pavement-dweller is a destitute peasant, newly arrived from the countryside, who survives by parasitic begging, but as research in Mumbai has revealed, almost all (97 percent) have at least one breadwinner, 70 percent have been in the city at least six years . . . Indeed, many pavement-dwellers are simply workers-rickshaw men, construction labourers, and market porters-who are compelled by their jobs to live in the otherwise unaffordable heart of the metropolis.50
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The Runaway System