[Marxism] anti-commodification of water

[Patrick Bond]

Bill Quimby wrote:
> Would some comrade have the time to post some - possibly web -
> links to this struggle? Maybe I have just missed any mention of this
> on the two or three lists and news sources I check, but anyway...
> I'd like to know more.

An academic spin on the case (published a few weeks ago) is here: 
http://www.go.warwick.ac.uk/elj/lgd/2008_1/bond_dugard

At our Centre for Civil Society we cover this a fair bit at 
http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs (down now but check tomorrow)... and the court 
case - all 4000 pages - is at http://www.law.wits.ac.za/cals ...

and most importantly, check on the activists themselves, at 
http://www.apf.org (though their posting of info on the web is not as 
high a priority as getting the word out to the mass base)...

But I hope all the comrades are aware of fabulous work on global water 
linkages underway through WaterWarriors network. Some brief commentary 
from that paper (above) follows.

Cheers,
Patrick

***

So far, the highest profile citizens’ campaign against commodified water 
was in Bolivia in April 2000, when the people of the third-largest city, 
Cochabamba, fought the US firm Bechtel, backed by the World Bank. This 
struggle was one of the reasons Bolivia’s poor mobilised for a change of 
government in 2004. The first-ever water minister chosen by president 
Evo Morales was Abel Mamani, a neighbourhood activist veteran of another 
water war, in El Alto, who cut his teeth battling the French water 
company Suez. Mamani made five points in a speech just prior to the 
March 2006 World Water Forum:

    Water is a fundamental human right and a pre-requisite to the 
realisation of other human rights;

    Water belongs to the earth and all living beings including human 
beings and it is the duty of everyone to protect access to water for all 
forms of life and for the earth itself;

    Water is a public good and therefore its management needs to be in a 
sphere that is public, social, community-based, participative and not 
based on profit;

    Water should not be privatised and should be withdrawn from all free 
trade
    and investment agreements; and

    There should be profound change in the organisation of the World 
Water Forum to allow majority and decisive participation in the 
negotiations by the poorest and those who most need water.

Rights rhetorics have become important in Bolivia, as well as other 
sites where the balance of forces has shifted left. Other major battles 
– not always victorious - have been fought in Manila, Jakarta and 
Detroit. Biwater was kicked out of Dar es Salaam in mid-2005, to the 
regret of its advisor, the Adam Smith Institute, funded by British 
taxpayers through the Department for International Development. Civil 
society movements and governments forced Suez to retreat from major 
cities ranging from Atlanta to Buenos Aires to Montevideo to 
Johannesburg in the mid-2000s.

The goals of these progressive civil society activists – known as ‘water 
warriors’ - are the decommercialisation of water, improved access by 
poor people, better conditions for water workers, and more appropriate 
eco-management of water. The latter should include penalties for 
hedonistic consumption. Additional water campaigns are waged against 
megadams, inappropriate irrigation, fish destocking, water pollution, 
bulk water diversions, bottled water, abuse of water by golf courses and 
extractive firms like Coca Cola and Nestle, and looming water scarcity. 
On one crucial battleground, control of water by the World Trade 
Organisation (WTO), activists appear to have won in 2006, by exempting 
water from the WTO’s General Agreement on Trade in Services.

Who are the contemporary water warriors engaging in these struggles? 
Aside from community campaigns in cities of the Global South like 
Detroit’s Highland Park suburb (which faces a higher disconnection rate 
than Johannesburg) or Cochabamba, strong critics of neoliberal water 
policies can be found in radical citizens’/consumers’ organisations 
(especially the Council of Canadians in Ottawa and Public Citizen in 
Washington); trade unions (Public Services International and their 
affiliates); indigenous people’s movements; environmental groups (led by 
the International Rivers Network and Friends of the Earth); and 
think-tanks (e.g., the PSI Research Unit at Greenwich University, 
Polaris in Ottawa, the TransNational Institute in Amsterdam, the 
Agriculture and Trade Policy Center in Minneapolis, the Municipal 
Services Project in South African and Canadian universities, Parivartan 
and the Centre for Science and the Environment in New Delhi, Food and 
Water Watch in Washington, and the International Forum on Globalisation 
in San Francisco).57The World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, as well as 
regional Social Fora, have provided spaces for water activist assemblies 
during the early 2000s. Email listserves such as ‘water warriors’, 
‘reclaiming public water’ and ‘right to water’ permit information 
exchange and coordination. A People’s World Water Forum was held in 
Delhi in 2004, preceded by the 2001 ‘Blue Planet’ conference in 
Vancouver, as well as periodic European gatherings. In the three major 
South continents (Latin America, Africa and Asia), there are formidable 
networks of activists who work closely together in campaigns against 
common enemies such as regional development banks. Because the water 
movements have generated superb examples of cooperation across borders, 
campaigns against commodified services will continue to serve as a model 
for global civil society.

To illustrate in an event reminiscent of the Johannesburg World Summit 
on Sustainable Development protest, the March 2006 World Water Forum 
gathering in Mexico City was confronted by thousands of grassroots water 
warriors who marched against an equivalent number of establishment 
delegates from governments, corporations and international agencies. The 
activists were stopped a kilometre away from their establishment 
opponents. But as the Associated Press (AP) reported, ‘ Youths in ski 
masks attacked journalists and fought with police, smashing a patrol car 
and hurling rocks during largely peaceful Water Forum protests involving 
about 10,000 marchers.’58

As the Mexico confrontation shows, protesters are linking up with 
vigour. No one disputes that with at least 2.6 billion people lacking 
adequate sanitation and 1.1 billion lacking access to improved water 
sources, there is an urgent need for dramatic improvements in 
investment, management and affordability. In a setting as unequal as 
South Africa (with roughly 40 percent unemployment and amongst the 
world’s highest income disparities) , the neoliberal policies adopted 
during the 1990s pushed even essential state services such as water 
beyond many households’ ability to pay; municipal services now account 
for a third of average household expenditures.59Some of these policies 
were adopted before political liberation from apartheid in 1994, but 
many were the result of influence on Nelson Mandela’s government by the 
World Bank, United States Agency for International Development (USAID) 
and other global and local neoliberals during the late 1990s.

The first stage of resistance to the commercialisation of water and 
electricity often takes the form of a popular demand for a short-term, 
inexpensive flat rate applicable to all consumers. More compellingly, 
for medium-range policy a redistributive demand for decommercialisation 
is advanced by groups like the SA Municipal Workers Union, Rural 
Development Services Network, Johannesburg Anti-Privatisation Forum and 
Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee (SECC): a specific minimal daily 
amount of water (50 litres ) and electricity (one kilowatt hour) to be 
supplied to each person per day free. The free services should be 
financed not only by subsidies from central government, but also by a 
rising block tariff in which the water bills for high-volume consumers 
and corporations rise at a more rapid rate when their usage soars to 
hedonistic levels. When charged at ever-higher rates, the consumption of 
services by hedonistic users should decline, which would be a much 
better way to manage water demand than to depress the demand of the poor 
to below minimum levels through insufficient FBW and unaffordable 
tariffs beyond the FBW amount.

Can rights rhetorics support these struggles by becoming rights tactics, 
which can be deployed by activists alongside more direct methods of 
opposition? In 2006, a crucial case – the Phiri water rights case - was 
launched in Johannesburg’s High Court that will shed light on how far 
constitutional and legal strategies can advance the decommercialisation 
and water rights-as-justice cause. In their applicaton, Lindiwe Mazibuko 
and five other poverty-stricken applicants from Phiri, Soweto - who are 
supported by a social movment, the Coalition Against Water 
Privatisation, and whose legal team is a rights-based legal organisation 
at the University of the Witwatersrand (the Centre for Applied Legal 
Studies) - have asked the court to declare pre-paid water meters 
unlawful and to order Johannesburg Water to provide everyone in Phiri 
with a FBW supply of 50 lcd and the option of a conventional water meter 
at the cost of the City of Johannesburg. The case, likely to be heard in 
the High Court in late 2007, will test the limits of the enforcement of 
socio-economic rights through legal and judicial means as it is likely 
to finally end up in the Constitutional Court. It is hoped that, in the 
context of growing criticism of the Constitutional Court’s weak 
socio-economic rights jurisprudence, this case fare better than other 
socio-economic rights cases and that it will have important implications 
for the clarification of socio-economic rights and, most importantly, 
for their realisation. The case also provides an interesting model for 
combining social activism with human rights tactics, particularly 
constitutional litigation.

What are the challenges for those in South Africa arguing for 
justice-based traditions of human rights (both civil/political and 
socio-economic), and decommodification? In coming months and years, 
several tasks present themselves:

    * link up the currently diffuse demands, campaigns, strategies, 
tactics and alliances for free water/sanitation and electricity 
services, medicines and universal-entitlement income grants, including 
linking social movements with public interest litigation options;
    * translate these from the spheres of consumption to production, 
beginning with creative re-nationalisation of privatised services, 
restructured municipal delivery, expansion of the nascent cooperative 
sector and establishment of state-driven local generic drug 
manufacturing to handle essential medicines;
    * mobilise for local government to provide decommodified social 
services rather than commercialised services;
    * strengthen the basis for longer-term alliances between poor and 
working people that are in the first instance rooted in civil society 
and that probably within the next decade will also be taken up by a mass 
workers’ party; and
    * regionalise and internationalise these principles, strategies and 
tactics, just as Pretoria politicians and Johannesburg capital intensify 
their own expansive ambitions across Africa.

One very hopeful sign of the last point is the emergence of radical 
urban social movements in the largest South African cities. But linkage 
into related areas, such as the partially-successful campaign for access 
to AIDS medicines, remains of enormous importance. While these urban 
social movements are bound to have an increasing impact upon South 
African politics, a potential split between the trade unions and the 
ruling party in coming years is probably the most important objective 
precondition for the renewal of a bottom-up political programme that 
would offer genuine rights-based strategies as the basis for 
post-neoliberal public policy.