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Over the last thirty years, particularly over the last two decades, a revolution has taken place in most Third World countries,
both in those usually described as 'newly-industrialised' and in those where the economy has remained much more backward. It is
not a new industrial revolution similar to that of the 19th century in Europe. It is an urban revolution or rather, an urban
explosion. Over a period three times shorter than the duration of the industrial revolution the living conditions of masses ten,
if not a hundred times larger, have been transformed radically.
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Until recently it seemed that London and New York represented the peak of what the capitalist system would ever reach in terms
of urban gigantism and proletarian concentration.
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Today the populations of Cairo, Jakarta, Buenos Aires, Seoul and Calcutta have exceeded the ten million mark. Following close
behind are Manila, Tehran, Istanbul and even Bogota in Colombia. All of these are now approaching the same figure and are in the
same league as Moscow and Chicago, close behind Paris.
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Yet this is still nothing compared to the new urban galaxies such as Rio de Janeiro, Peking and Shangai which are now around
fifteen million. Nothing again compared to Sao Paulo and Mexico which have, in one stroke, reached the level of Tokyo-Yokohama
with over twenty million inhabitants to become the most polluted cities in the world.
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The whole face of the planet has been transformed by this revolution. A few landmarks can help in grasping the scale of this
transformation. In 1970, less than twenty years ago, the majority of the world urban population was in the industrialised
countries, although the margin was already very small. This period is now over. Since 1985 the balance has been reversed
dramatically. The urban population in the Third World is now three hundred million stronger than that of the industrialised
countries. According to United Nations statisticians, by the year 2000 the urban population in the Third World will be double
that of the industrialised countries, bearing in mind that during this period the urban population of the rich countries will
keep growing.
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In short, in a matter of fifty years, the predominantly rural character of the Third World will have disappeared for ever.
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The objective conditions for a proletarian revolution have not decayed, they have matured even more.
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Many Trotskyists have been torturing Trotsky's theory of Permanent Revolution for a long time. They took away its living sap to
substantiate the idea that the world's future was no longer in the hands of the proletariat, but rather in the hands of the
peasant masses of the poor countries. The whole point of this twisting and turning was to follow Third-Worldist theoreticians
and to provide a theoretical foundation for lining up behind nationalist leaders.
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Yet neither the colonial revolutions nor their nationalist leaderships have lived up to the promise or the expectations which
the left intelligentsia of the industrialised countries had held out for them. The new regimes have turned one by one into as
many new dictatorships. By winning their independence they won only their independence from the masses who had fought to
establish them. More than ever they had to comply with the political and economical diktat of the Western loan sharks.
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What was the best way to address the peasant masses? What miraculous formulae would enable the peasantry of the poor countries
and their nationalist leaders to achieve a proletarian revolution unconsciously, unwillingly and even while fighting against it?
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The strategists of the Left never gave the answer. It was given without warning by imperialism itself and was as brutal as it
was definitive. The laws of the world capitalist market and of unequal exchange which were forced willy nilly onto the Third
World regimes started emptying the mountains and the countryside of the poor countries. They drove the rural populations into
the towns where they joined the already huge urban proletariat as workers or as unemployed.
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In 1917, Lenin's Bolshevik revolution was victorious while using a historical short cut in the overwhelmingly peasant-dominated
Russia. Permanent Revolution meant that under the leadership of a young highly concentrated proletariat, it was possible to
bypass the stage of the bourgeois revolution. This was partially achieved in the USSR although it backtracked later on. But
almost ten years later in China it failed because of Stalinism. After World War II a European revolution could have been the
revolutionary engine for the transformation of what became to be known later as the Third World. It did not happen.
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Does it mean that today, after all these revolutions which were either betrayed or defeated or failed, it may be too late? Have
the objective conditions for a proletarian revolution decayed? No. Imperialism, using its own brutal methods and historical
twists, has eventually accomplished these bourgeois revolutions in its own ways: on one hand by adapting to decolonisation, on
the other by creating a massive rural exodus in the Third World.
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This urbanization has not created any real industrial economy, but it has helped to make the proletariat of these countries much
more powerful than their native capitalist class. Far from decaying, the objective conditions for a proletarian revolution have
matured even more.
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Today, it is not even necessary to bypass the stage of the bourgeois revolution. In the poor countries, as much as in the
industrialised countries, the proletariat is now in a position to take power and implement proletarian democracy within the huge
metropolitan centres in which it is concentrated.
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As their economic crisis developed from 1973, the imperialist strongholds started to export it towards the Third World and
Eastern Europe. At the same time a swift and massive proletarianisation was taking place in all the Third World countries.
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The results were soon visible. It was no coincidence that, in the Philippines in 1986, the US Army chose to drop their support
for the old dictator Marcos as a result of huge popular demonstrations with some 500,000 flooding the streets of Manila, whereas
18 years of communist guerilla warfare in the mountains had not moved the regime by one inch.
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It is not a coincidence either if, in the following year, a month-long wave of industrial strikes set South Korea alight. Yet
this half-country, which emerged from the Cold War and has currently one of the largest US military bases in the world, had been
seen for the previous 36 years as an unwavering outpost of the West against the so-called communist camp. The Western bosses
used to praise South Korean workers for their docility and their low wages. All of a sudden these same workers have come to the
forefront of the world class struggle. Their example could well become an inspiration for all of us, although not in the way our
bosses would have hoped.
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Over the last 20 years the urban population in that country - and within it the proletariat - has doubled. In 1985 it reached
60% of the overall total and the proportion has probably since increased even further. The recent events cannot be separated
from this growth.
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They can only remind us of the developments within Tsarist Russia 90 years ago. Then, the development of capitalism uprooted
hundreds of thousands of peasants who flocked towards the industrial centres. The 1905 revolution was the starting point of the
wave of spontaneous mass strikes which so impressed the vanguard of the European working class movement of the time.
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The only difference between then and now is that similar developments are bound to take place in a whole series of countries at
least as suddenly as it did in Russia but on a much wider scale.
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Beside Latin America, Africa and Asia, the USSR and Eastern Europe have also experienced an accelerated growth of their urban
population and proletariat.
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Such is the case in Romania for instance, where the urban population has doubled in 20 years. Despite Ceausescu's repressive
grip on the country, a series of strikes have taken place over the last years, forcing the regime to back down several times,
such as the 1987 strike in Random which came very near to insurrection.
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It is even more the case in Poland which, though industrialisation is less recent than in Romania, saw its urban population grow
from 50 to 60% over the last 20 years with well-known political and social consequences.
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Finally it is the case in the USSR itself, despite the seemingly stable appearance of the bureaucratic dictatorship. Over the
past 20 years more than a thousand industrial centres have mushroomed, not to mention the fast growth of the existing towns.
Today 70% of the population live in the towns as compared to 50% only in 1965.
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It is even the case in Armenia and in Azerbaidjan. The 'Karabakh national question' may be discussed today using the old
language which was commonplace 100 or 150 years ago when the Caucasus was split in as many different national guerillas as there
were different peoples in the mountains. Yet these areas are now totally industrialised with enormous productive units - to such
an extent that a 3,000-strong factory is considered small in Karabakh!
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What worries Gorbachev is probably much less the old nationalist wording of the democratic demands of the Armenian mass
movements as formulated by their present leadership than the fact that all over the USSR, workers facing the local bureaucratic
cliques could easily identify with these democratic demands. What worries Gorbachev much more is the specificly proletarian
weapon which is being used in support of these demands - strike action. It is the fact that the rest of the working class may
well feel that the Armenian strikes are not such a bad way to make oneself heard and to put Perestroika to task.
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Of course it can be argued that the overall urbanisation process which is taking place throughout the world does not necessarily
lead to a growth of the industrial proletariat as is the case in the USSR, in Eastern Europe, in Korea and in a few other
countries. And that in most cases the new proletariat of the shanty town dwellers, mostly unemployed, has more to do with an
under-proletariat.
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