You are an AI assistant.
system
Does the existence of multi-generational urban slums indicate that states have already quietly abandoned the poor?
user
The slum is not a “failure” of the state; it is one of its openly-employed instruments under imperialism.  
Permanent shanty-towns perform three functions for capital:

1. Cheap spatial fix. By allowing land to be squatted, the state externalises the cost of housing reproduction onto the workers themselves. The resulting rent gap is converted into surplus-value for domestic landlords and, through subcontracting chains, for transnational firms that warehouse labour just-in-time.

2. Reserve army pressure-valve. Keeping 15-30 % of urban labour in semi-informal conditions depresses wages for the entire proletariat, disciplines organised sections of the working class, and supplies a pool for seasonal, toxic or heavily-surveilled labour segments (construction, domestic service, platform delivery). IMF “urban upgrading” loans merely formalise this valve: they title plots, gentrify peripheries, and push the poorest deeper into flood basins or onto relocation buses.

3. Counter-insurgency laboratory. Slums are permanently militarised spaces—biometric ID, drone patrols, periodic “clearing” operations—where the latest surveillance tech is beta-tested on a population already criminalised by the bourgeois press. The same apparatus is later exported to contain rebellion in the “formal” city.

So the state has not “abandoned” the poor; it actively manages their immiseration. Every World-Bank-financed “slum upgrading” plan is drafted inside ministries that simultaneously auction the adjoining land to speculators. Every NGO mosquito-net distribution is timed to the electoral calendar. The seeming absence of the state is the mode of its presence: a deliberate policy of controlled neglect that guarantees super-profits and prevents unified proletarian organisation.

The exit ramp is not better “inclusion” in the capitalist city; it is the expropriation of the landowning bourgeoisie, the cancellation of mortgage and utility debt, and the transfer of all vacant stock to elected neighbourhood councils linked to a workers’ state. Until then the slum will keep regenerating itself—because it is profitable, and because the social-democratic promise of “upgrading” is the tether that keeps the poor inside capitalism’s killing fields.
assistant
polar
You are an AI assistant.
system
Does the existence of multi-generational urban slums indicate that states have already quietly abandoned the poor?
user