The slum as an evental site

The slum as an evental site is a way of locating political possibility in populations that global capitalism produces and excludes at the same time. Slum dwellers are not presented as an already unified revolutionary class, nor as a marginal residue outside the world economy. They are people whose lives expose the contradictions of that economy and whose forced proximity may require new forms of collective life. The political wager lies in that possibility, not in any guarantee that exclusion will become emancipation.

From excess labor to a new political subject

The argument begins by reconsidering who is surplus in a society that increasingly needs fewer workers to reproduce itself. If, on some accounts, only 20 percent of the workforce is required, the surplus cannot simply be identified with unemployed workers; the analysis instead asks whether Capital itself has become excessive. The unemployed are one possible figure for a universal individual whose particular fate makes injustice visible, as are Palestinians and prisoners at Guantánamo. The repeated failure of pragmatic solutions to the Middle East crisis makes Palestine a possible site of an event: when established remedies fail, inventing a new political space becomes, paradoxically, the only realistic course.

The slum is proposed as a still more consequential site within this series. Its residents are described as a possible new proletarian position, not because their situation duplicates that of the classic industrial working class, but because their collective condition brings a different structural exclusion into view. The proposal shifts attention from the worker’s place in production alone to the people whom the organization of global life leaves outside secure citizenship and its rights.

Scale and geography

The expansion of slums in recent decades is presented as a central geopolitical development, especially across the megalopolises of the Global South. The account traces a broad geography from Mexico City and other Latin American capitals through Africa to India, China, the Philippines, and Indonesia. As urban populations overtake rural populations, and slum dwellers make up a majority of the urban population, the phenomenon cannot be treated as peripheral to contemporary social life.

Lagos makes the scale tangible. It lies within a shantytown corridor of about 70 million people stretching from Abidjan to Ibadan. Official sources classify roughly two-thirds of Lagos State’s 3,577 square kilometers as shantytowns or slums. Even the population is uncertain: official figures put it at six million, while many experts estimate ten million. The discrepancies are not incidental to the portrait. They point to a population whose size and situation are difficult for official systems to register reliably.

A product of global capitalism

The residents’ circumstances are varied: marginalized laborers, redundant civil servants, and former peasants live in conditions partly outside the law and in urgent need of minimal forms of self-organization. Many nevertheless participate in the global economy as informal wage workers or self-employed entrepreneurs, without adequate health or social-security coverage. Their position is therefore not simply one of being outside economic life. They are incorporated into it without receiving many of the protections associated with full social and political membership.

The account connects the growth of slums to the incorporation of Third World countries into the global economy, including the effect of cheap food imports from First World countries in ruining local agriculture. Slums are thus read as a symptom of Development, Modernization, and the World Market: not an unfortunate accident external to capitalist expansion, but a consequence of its operating logic. This connection makes the slum politically legible as more than a space of deprivation. Its residents’ condition reveals what the prevailing language of development leaves out.

Exclusion, difference, and social life

Slum dwellers are characterized as a Part of No-Part: a large population excluded from the benefits of citizenship, uprooted, and dispossessed. The comparison with the classic proletariat is important but limited. The industrial working class is defined by economic exploitation—the appropriation of surplus value from workers who must sell their labor power as a commodity. The defining feature assigned to slum dwellers is instead sociopolitical: their incomplete integration into the legal space of citizenship and its rights. In this account, they are a kind of Homo sacer, a systemically produced living dead of global capitalism, left in a twilight zone where power does not exert full disciplinary control.

That difference also prevents their romantic elevation into a ready-made revolutionary force. Slum life contains improvised and conflicting forms of association: religious fundamentalist groups organized around charismatic leaders, criminal gangs, and beginnings of socialist solidarity. Pentecostal Christianity is described as a hegemonic form of ideology there, combining charismatic miracles and spectacle with practical social programs, including community kitchens and care for children and the elderly. The mixture matters: collective life is already being organized, but it does not point in a single, predictable political direction.

The evental wager

The comparison with the symbolic class—managers, journalists, public-relations workers, academics, artists, and others—sharpens the political question. Both groups are described as uprooted, yet their social positions differ. The symbolic class can experience itself as directly universal, while slum dwellers are forcibly thrown together and deprived of support from traditional ways of life. They are free in a double sense: released from substantial ties and living in spaces beyond ordinary state policing, but also left without the protections and resources that might make such freedom secure. Their imposed proximity can compel them to invent a mode of being together.

The text does not resolve whether this produces a new axis of class struggle or whether the symbolic class is itself internally divided enough to permit an alliance between slum collectives and its progressive elements. Instead, it identifies the emergence of new forms of social awareness among slum dwellers as something to watch for: such forms may become seeds of the future. Calling the slum an evental site therefore marks an opening, not a prophecy. The slum’s significance lies in the tension between systemic abandonment and the collective necessity of self-organization—a tension from which a new political subject might emerge, without any assurance that it will.