The new Majority

According to Alan, over at Mailstrom the majority of the world now live in cities.

This has an obvious impact on the prosects for socalism - the majority of the world are also workers, and are now living in the highly interdependent circumstances of a city. It's easy for peasants and rural folk to latch onto structures of feeling connected with independence, rugged individualism, and the like. In a city, though, life revolves around communal infrastryucture, socialised dependencies (whether that is a privately owned, i.e. capitalised social space, or a state owned or a genuinely common one). The cheek by jowl nature of uran life teaches collectivity.

In Britain, the drive to humanise the slums was one of the big advances in socialisation, the pressure, the drive to do the same the world over can only grow with the urban population.