Is the Anthropocene Conniving with Capital (original) (raw)
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Privatizing Social Reproduction: The Primitive Accumulation of Water in an Era of Neoliberalism
2008
"Recent years have witnessed a resurgence of critical works seeking to extend Karl Marx’s radical understanding of “primitive accumulation” in order to describe the increasing penetration of capital into new spaces and social relations in the contemporary era of neoliberal globalization. This paper will argue that the intensification of the commodification of water may be understood as an ongoing mechanism of primitive accumulation and that this process generates contradictions and tensions not solely for capitalist relations of production, but more crucially, for relations of social reproduction. Further, while recent years have witnessed the emergence of a new discourse on water governance that advocates a more active role for governments in the water sector and for the incorporation of the “voices” of women and the poor in the development of sustainable and equitable water policies, this new discourse ultimately remains informed by neoliberalism’s individualist ontology and its material and discursive dedication to economic growth above broader social considerations."
Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy, 2005
Reading the recent memoirs of the former US Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, I found one of the most striking moments in the book is his realisation that providing clean drinking water in developing countries is a much more complex task than he anticipates. Applying his usual Occam's razor approach, he cannot conceive why simple solutions cannot be delivered through the USA's geopolitical might, but instead stumble against a seemingly trivial array of problems, hurdles, and barriers. Indeed, the domestic economic strength of the USA is part of the problem, with US consulting companies, nongovernmental organisations, and utilities firms all standing in the way of his simple solution. And if the world's most powerful minister of finance cannot solve the problems of access to water for the 1.2 billion who today lack access to that most vital of resources, potable water, then what hope is there for solving the problem without which other issues of development and social justice cannot adequately be addressed? It is the seeming complexity of the provision of water with which Erik Swyngedouw wrestles in his new monograph, Social Power and the Urbanisation of Water: Flows of Power. Although he uses water as a means of providing a more general exploration into power struggles and the changing social relations of production, the book does indeed provide a detailed analysis of how capital development can produce and deny access to drinking water. The book is focused around a case study of a single town in Ecuador, Guayaquil, and provides a detailed historical materialist analysis of the changing economic fortunes of the town and its capacity to provide access to drinking water. The book is situated within a conceptual framework of political ecology; the essence of that framework is as a critique of neo-Marxian analyses which assume and obscure the conversion of nature into commodity. Political ecological approaches begin by exploring the interdependence of economic activity on the capacity of societies to convert and commodify nature. In his own words, he is interested in bringing together:`T he tensions, conflicts and forces that flow with water through the body, the city, the region and the globe show the cracks in the lines, the meshes in the net, the spaces and plateaus of resistance and power'' (page 26). Just as studying the urban form provides insights into the power relations and struggles which dominate urban life, so studying how societies mobilise to`metabolise nature' (in the political-economic terminology) excavates the power relations and struggles more generally in society. And in that regard, the book performs impeccably, the detailed case study of water provision providing detailed insights into broader subjects such as the spatiopolitical organisation of Ecuadorian society as well as the relationship between the city, its residents, and the international product markets on which its commodities are sold. This is a long and arduous intellectual journey to make and the book is broadly sympathetic of its readers requirements in this regard. There is a strong and clear set of messages, and the structure of the book allows the readers gently to assimilate Swyngedouw's arguments over the course of its 180-odd pages. There is a general introduction which sets out a rationale for political ecology approaches, followed by a conceptual section in which he presents his dialectic method, which he terms``the production of socio-nature'' (page 22). There is then an introductory section to the city of Guayaquil, and a presentation of some of the issues concerning water shortage in that case study. The bulk of the analysis is provided in the five following chapters, five interrelated and overlapping stories about how economic development, political struggles, technical change, and urbanisation have all contributed to making the very complex and socially unjust picture which is visible today.
Water as Right, Water as Future
Public Books, 2020
What does it mean to declare water a human right? Or rather, what does it mean to do more than simply announce that this is so? Most often, these questions are answered with the broadest of brush strokes, as some say that governments should ensure water as a right through political means. Others insist that an excessive focus on human-rights discourse obscures water's actual value, and that its true price will thus not be recognized. For them, only the treatment of water as a commodity will do that. Through the thicket of this epochal debate, Andrea Ballestero's new book, A Future History of Water, treads a much more subtle path. Ballestero moves away from sweeping predictions of the coming global water crisis and the debate regarding "public" versus "private" water. Instead, she leads us toward the intricacies of what it actually takes to distinguish water as a human right from water as a commodity. Surprisingly, she argues that what it takes is achieved mostly through bureaucratic sleights of hand and the fine-grained labor of "bifurcation" on what is exceedingly slippery terrain.
Alongside the right to water, a posthumanist feminist imaginary
Journal of Human Rights and the Environment March 2014 (Issue 1)
Arguing that a discourse of human rights may not allow for a robust understanding of water, this paper aims to expand the imaginary of what water can be, of what water might need, and of our human implications and responsibilities within a more-than-human aqueous ecology. It does so by offering posthumanist feminist theory as a means of troubling the anthropocentrism, individualism and nature-culture binaries of which human rights may not be able to divest itself, even when acknowledging community, relationality, and the rights of nature. At the same time, this paper acknowledges that the human right to water can be necessary and valuable, as it responds to a particular kind of relation between human bodies and watery nature. The posthumanist feminist aqueous imaginary offered in this paper is thus not a means of thinking against the human right to water, as much as it is a necessary thinking *alongside* it.
Water is not (yet) a commodity: commodification and rationalization revisited
The article examines the process of water commodification as part of the long-term process of capitalist rationalisation. It explores these processes in the light of Norbert Elias' concept of the 'triad of basic controls', which casts light on the mechanisms developed by humans in the course of human history to establish controls over the non-human world as well as on inter-and intra-human relationships. The article discusses the commodification and valuation of freshwater exploring the internal tensions and contradictions of capitalist rationalisation and its interplay with alternative rationalities that characterise water-related human interactions. It argues that if a conceptually restricted concept of commodification is applied, then we can conclude that most water in the planet remains un-commodified owing to the slow and fragmentary character of the capitalist rationalization process in water-related human interactions.
Water Policy, 2000
This article invites policy makers to reframe some familiar policy debates on water through using history. While violence has and will continue around water, water is far more humanity's learning ground for building community than it is a cause of war. Increased interdependence through water sharing plans and infrastructure networks can be seen as increases of our¯exibility and capacity to respond to exigencies of nature and reduce our vulnerability to events such as droughts and¯oods and thereby increase security. The history of social organization around river basins and watersheds is humanity's richest records of our dialogue with nature. It is among the most fertile areas for learning about how the political and technical interact. The spatial and functional characteristics of the river basins in¯uenced human settlement and interaction long before the idea of the river basin started to be formalized into legal and administrative terms. The direction of¯ow of rivers in¯uenced the movement of civilization. Rivers have been crucial to means of communication leading to the formation of political units. The article concludes with calling for new ethics in water management. It calls for an ethic built on: a sense of purpose and on an active co-designing with nature and not solely on preservation; a balance between humans and technology and among structural and on-structural approaches; and a new balance of the sacred and utilitarian in water.
ANUAC , 2017
This article maps the confluence of biosocial relations through the agential networks of water. In the language of the environmental humanities and social sciences, such relations and networks are biosocial and sacralised (Meloni, Williams, Martin 2016; Mangiameli 2013). The self-organisation of aquatic environments in these relations towards humans is engaged in an ongoing process of entanglement and adaptation in parallel with human understandings and approaches to water. This article imagines new and conscientious behaviour that might treat the ubiquitous river more gently, against the tensions and provocations of the Anthropocene Epoch. It argues for the development of fresh sustainability logic; a hydro-logic that cultivates connectivity, adaptive capacity, and broader water values that exist beyond the containment of the commodification paradigm (that are particularly evident among First Nations peoples). This logic necessarily includes a reconsideration of economic, ecological, customary and recreational values in more balanced measure. By configuring water as a complex adaptive stream of intra, inter and extra-relationships, this research champions waters' multi-dimensional capacity and agency for the purpose of advancing more sustainable biosocial water futures within a geosocial matrix.
Fixing and Nixing: The Politics of Water
2016
Social uprisings in response to privatization dynamics in the water sector have triggered widespread debate on the social and ecological impact of neoliberal water policies. Much of this debate remains in the urban and domestic water sector, thereby disregarding the struggles of marginalized urban and rural producers who use water for multiple purposes. Furthermore, while private providers are blamed for prioritizing profit over people, it is increasingly clear that while water may be a valuable commodity, the sector as a whole inhibits long-term profitability. Instead, using the concept of “accumulation by dispossession, ” the current process of privatization is understood as a new round of enclosures of the commons, implemented by a neoliberal state to open up new territories to capitalist development and to capitalist forms of market behavior. The contraction of global markets and the reconfiguration of the public sector as notions of nation and citizenship take on new meanings a...
Water Flourishing in the Anthropocene
Cultural Studies Review, 2019
What does it entail to foreground water flourishing as a stance toward the Anthropocene? During an exercise at the Anthropocene Campus Melbourne, about twenty participants individually drew images of ‘water flourishing’ leading, with only one or two exceptions of Edenic representations, to a wall of images depicting no humans. That small experience reproduced a larger cultural and environmental management configuration: people-less water flourishing. If we face such constraints in imagining, representing, and enacting hydro- flourishing, we remain stuck in familiar loops either of: 1) elemental thinking that excludes the human; or 2) anthropocenic thinking that too often addresses the human primarily as destroyer. How do we imagine our being with water in different ways? How do we move away from pervasive narratives of water crisis without, at the same time, romancing water? Feminist, decolonial, and Indigenous approaches to water and its cultural politics ask us to consider the elemental not only in substance, but also in rights regimes and in the project of flourishing. In this paper, we present examples of water flourishing projects and impasses from three sites: Kathmandu, Nepal; Perth, Australia; and the Florida Everglades, United States. All show both the problems and the promise of co-centering the human and nonhuman in their interdependent relations when it comes to water flourishing.