Local and global struggles for the de-commodification of water
By Susan Spronk
In March 2006 global water barons will assemble in Monterrey, Mexico for their fourth international meeting to deliberate on how to make a profit from the world’s water. Sponsored by the World Water Council, an interest group formed by some of the world’s largest corporations, the World Water Forum (WWF) exposes the intimate links between neoliberal globalization, transnational corporations and privatization. Predictably, the Forum has also become a stage for a growing civil society resistance movement. Anti-privatization activists in Mexico and around the world are counter-organizing, hoping to interrupt the corporate agenda, if only for a brief moment, claiming to fight the growing “commodification” of water.
These struggles against the “commodification” of water provide the basis for a potentially radical agenda. Much depends, however, on what is meant by the term and what kinds of links are made between commodification and other oppressive social processes.
The Root of Water Privatization: Commodification
The recent drive to privatize water began in the early 1990s, when the World Bank decided to endorse the privatization of everything as the new dogma of public policy. Their decision was heavily influenced by transnational water companies. After the “success” of water privatization in England and Wales under Magaret Thatcher, these companies saw a brilliant opportunity to profit from what they saw as the ultimate commodity: water. In England and Wales, the private corporations made off with “windfall profits”, while consumers faced higher prices. The transnational water corporations were chomping at the bit to enter what one bank president called “the last infrastructure frontier for private investors.” Playing its role as global manager of capitalism, the World Bank started to force heavily indebted Third World countries to privatize public services in exchange for new loans.
The World Bank hoped that water privatization would work as well elsewhere as it had in Europe, insisting that governments everywhere introduce “full cost recovery” policies in the delivery of public services. Neoliberals argued that it was necessary to charge customers the “right” price for water. As the story goes, if people do not pay the true cost of water, they will waste it. Indeed, the poor must be disciplined by market imperatives to conserve what is portrayed as a precious resource. The World Bank has gone so far as to say that privatization is the quick-fix solution to prevent an impending ecological crisis. This argument found its most eloquent expression in the ominous words of a former World Bank Vice-President, who warned that the next century’s wars will not be about oil, but water.
This neoliberal discourse of water scarcity must be exposed as a myth. Notions of “scarcity” are used to justify privatization lest the poor die of thirst, while the rich fill their swimming pools. In most cases, it is not because there is not enough water that the poor do not have access to it. Rather, scarcity is socially produced by capitalist development. The precursor for privatization is commodification, the process by which all natural resources are fenced off, or “enclosed”, and assigned private property rights, so that workers are separated from the means of subsistence. This way, the compulsion of economic forces ensures that workers leave their houses everyday to sell the only commodity they have left – labour-power – so that they can pay for things they need to live, like water.
The water privatization project has not turned out as well as the World Bank hoped. After an initial boom in private investment in the water sector in the early 1990s, there was a steep decline. Some corporations started to lose interest after some bad experiences. Suez, for one, was burned by currency devaluations in Manila in 1997 and Argentina in 2001. Others have been thrown out by protests as in Tucumán and Santa Fe, Argentina, and Cochabamba, Bolivia. People across the globe are saying “NO!” to the privatization of water.
Organizations as diverse as the Anti-Privatization Forum in South Africa, which has a socialist orientation, and the Council of Canadians, which is thoroughly social democratic, have joined forces calling for the “de-commodification” of water. These organizations do not necessary mean the same thing by “de-commodification.” As David McDonald and Greg Ruiters argue in their book, Age of Commodity (2005), many of the activists that use this term do not refer to its more radical meaning – the transformation of capitalist relations – but simply that water should be provided for free. As they further note, however, “to call for the ‘decommodification’ of water … is to call for nothing less than the rupturing of the social relations that contributed to its commodification in the first place”. The call for the de-commodification of water can therefore be the beginning of a potentially more radical agenda.
Three recent examples of struggles over water privatization – in Bolivia, South Africa, and the United States – suggest that the struggle against the “commodification” of water is potentially part of an anti-capitalist politics, and clearly connected to struggles against imperialism and racism.
El Alto, Bolivia
The private contract held by Suez in La Paz-El Alto was formerly billed as a flagship of “pro-poor” water privatization. The company was financed by generous loans from development banks. The World Bank even owned a portion of its shares through its private sector lending arm, the International Financial Corporation. Despite its net profits of US$12 million over seven years, the company ironically complained that the residents of El Alto did not consume enough water so it couldn’t make all the new connections that it promised. There were rumors that the company wanted to leave. The government caved in, allowed the company to raise the fees, and said it did not have to bring water to the poor. These decisions left about 200,000 people, a fifth of the slum’s population, without access to clean water.
By the beginning of 2005, the people of El Alto, a predominantly indigenous city perched on the border of La Paz, had decided that they had had enough. Inspired by the struggle in Cochabamba, where a broad-based coalition threw out American construction giant Bechtel five years before, and building on the momentum from the valiant struggle to nationalize precious natural resources that peaked in the “Gas War” of 2003, thousands of people took to the streets in January demanding, “The water is ours, dammit!” The government promised to cancel the contract so that the protestors would go home. But, it has since changed its tune hoping that if it plays nice it can purchase the company’s shares. So far, Suez is clearly winning the game thanks to the help of its friends, including the development banks, which have made their position in the conflict clear. They do not want to see their privatization project sink in the mud and have threatened to withhold international aid if the utility returns to public control. The World Bank even told former Bolivian President Carlos Mesa in March that if he canceled the contract with Suez, it wanted its shares paid back immediately.
The thirst for justice runs deep in El Alto. Locals see their struggle for democratic control over water resources as linked to the broader struggle to re-assert national sovereignty. A succession of imperialist powers have benefited from Bolivia’s plentiful natural resources. In the sixteenth century, the Spanish forced indian slaves down the mines of Potosí to strip the silver. This century, the Americans and Brazilians have piped the natural gas from the eastern provinces to feed their industrial machines and have left Bolivians without gas for their homes. After centuries of looting by foreigners and complicit local elites, Bolivians are thus organizing to reclaim control over their natural resources. In repeated protests organized by the local association of neighborhood councils (FEJUVE-El Alto), the predominantly indigenous residents of El Alto have made it clear that no one should be able to profit from their water. Suez, the same company that built Britain’s canal between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea in the 1860s, is no longer welcome in Bolivia.
South Africa
Case studies from South Africa demonstrate how struggles for the de-commodification of water are also intertwined with the liberation struggle. Similar to Bolivia, there is no denying that there is a direct correlation between colour of skin and economic position in South Africa. What is lesser known, however, is that since the end of formal apartheid, this racial-class divide has actually deepened as South Africa goes through its difficult transition from apartheid to fully-fledged neoliberal capitalism. The liberation struggle has thus taken on new class dimensions.
When the African National Congress was first elected to government, it made the right to water a constitutional right. At the same time, however, it implemented neoliberal policies, including the privatization of public services and full cost recovery. This move has further entrenched the inequalities inherited from apartheid. Many of the formerly predominantly white municipalities doubled in size as the black townships were incorporated into their districts, many of which had bad or no water services. Facing budgetary crises, many municipal governments turned to the private sector. As noted by activist Richard Makolos of South Africa’s Crisis Water Committee, the ANC’s neoliberal policies have entrenched a new form of inequality: “Apartheid separated whites and Blacks. Privatization separates the rich from the poor.”
After the worst cholera outbreak in South Africa´s history, facing water cut-offs and skyrocketing service fees, people are frustrated with the ANC’s embrace of neoliberalism. In We are the Poors (2002), scholar-activist Ashwin Desai describes how a local movement for public services has linked up with community and labour struggles in other parts of the country, which came together in massive anti-government protests during the UN World Conference Against Racism in 2001.
Bolstered by their experience in collective struggle, many residents have taken matters into their own hands, making “self-reconnection” part of a broader political movement to reclaim the commons. As Desai describes, “In Cape Town, Durban, and Johannesburg, the reconnection of water and electricity by community movements has reached ‘epidemic’ proportions, reappropriating basic needs and creating no-go zones of decommodification.”
Detroit, Michigan, USA
Multi-dimensional struggles for water have also sprouted in the heart of the Empire. Detroit, like many cities in America, has crumbling infrastructure and enormous debts. In 2004, the municipal council decided to hire Thames Water to balance the utility’s budget by punishing the poor. In 2004, the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department shut off water service to 40,000 households in the middle of the winter. Unable to meet their basic water needs, the elderly and poor were also denied steam heat.
In this struggle, anti-poverty activists made links with local ecological organizations in their fight against the local water utility. Situated in the Great Lakes Basin, local residents had also been involved in a fight against global corporation, Nestlé, who owned a facility that was pumping enormous volumes of water out of the local aquifer for a bottling plant. To organize large-scale protests to take on the city, the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization joined forces with the Sweetwater Alliance, a coalition that aims to keep essential resources out of corporate control. These organizations were able to expose the perverse relationship between poverty and plenty. While Nestlé was shipping away Michigan’s water for enormous profits, poor community residents, primarily black women, were denied their basic human right to water. Thanks to the protests, thousands were reconnected.
A Socialist Agenda?
The privatization of water has met with fierce resistance at the local level. Indeed, the privatization of water has been more consistently controversial than the privatization of other natural resources, such as oil and gas, mainly because the issue strikes an emotional cord. Water has cultural and symbolic meaning because it is the essence of life. Also, it does not require complicated technology to bring it to users. Since water falls from the sky, we are much more inclined to argue that it is “ours.”
Few of today’s movements that call for de-commodification of water services, however, connect their struggle to a more radical project. While it is common to hear that it is “immoral” to make profits from water, it is difficult to imagine hearing the same passionate rhetoric about food. Promisingly, activists from the “Water for All Campaign” of Public Citizen have made a positive move in this direction. Recently, they formed a new autonomous organization called “Food and Water Watch”, which aims to fight the increasing corporate control not only over water but the production of food. Connections can and are being made.
In places like Bolivia, where ideas of socialism have dominated the imagination of the Left, the term de-commodification retains its more radical meaning. As Oscar Olivera, former trade union leader and anti-privatization activist, states in his book on the Cochabamba Water War, “The true opposite of privatization is the social re-appropriation of wealth by working-class society itself – self-organized in communal structures of management, in neighborhood associations, and in the rank and file”.
The global activists who will interrupt the water baron’s party in Mexico this spring may only being using the term “decommodification” to mean “water for all”. Nonetheless there are signs that the struggles against the privatization of the world’s water supplies can provide a common ground upon which to build an even more progressive and ambitious agenda.
