In Bolivia, El Alto was at the centre of the near uprisings that drew together miners, teachers, peasants and indigenous organisations to overthrow two governments in 18 months. In Egypt late in 2006 a strike of 24,000 workers in the Misr Spinning factory in Mahalia al-Kubra:
triggered a wave of workers' protests across Egypt, crossing different sectors of the economy and industries, from Mahalia to Kafr al-Dawwar to Shibin al-Kum, from spinning and weaving to cement to the railways and underground and public transport workers. The strike wave went from the public sector to the private, to the civil service, from the old industrial areas to the new towns, in all provinces. It went from the textile sector to engineering, to chemicals, to building and construction, to transport to services. The strikes had a wide impact also, reaching sectors which do not have a culture of protest, such as teachers, doctors, and civil servants, and even to slum-dwellers such as those from Qala'at al-Kabsh and the villagers from Al-Atsh.55
Such examples show that the working class in the Third World is not condemned to the divisions and passivity emphasised by social exclusion and NGO accounts. The incessant tearing apart of old patterns of economic and social by capitalism as it restructures itself on a world scale does not simply cause suffering. It also creates the potentiality for resistance that can find sudden expression when people least expect it.
There is, in fact, a pattern of such struggles going back to the first impact of capitalist industrialisation in such countries, recorded, for instance, in the collection Peasants and Proletarians edited by Cohen, Gutkind and Brazier 30 years ago.56 There are innumerable examples from recent decades to bear out that picture. We must expect many more as economic crisis interacts with climate change and crises of food security throughout the rest of this century.
Fragmentation, bitterness and revolt
But it is also important to recognise that people's bitterness against poverty and oppression can burst out in other ways. The fragmentation of people's life experiences in the world's slums all too often leads to different groups turning on each other, as Mike Davis says:
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