550
Capitalist Expansion and Resistance: The Struggle over Water.
Abstract Submissions Closed
RC44 Labor Movements (host committee)
Language: English
Session Type: Oral
Capitalism is under constant, systemic pressure to expand into new areas of accumulation including towards appropriating ‘cheap nature’. Water has played a crucial role in these processes. First, it has increasingly been commodified in the form of bottled water and the privatisation of public water systems. Second, it has become an important input into key industries including mining, fracking and tar sands processing. No wonder that the financial investment house Goldman Sachs argued that ‘water is the petroleum for the next century’. The results of these processes are often devastating. Water privatisation has frequently led to lower quality and higher prices. The expansion of mining with the use of water has not only deprived people of their livelihood, but also resulted in high levels of environmental pollution.
Importantly, people have resisted the commodification of water. Whether it is the struggle against water privatisation in Cochabamba in 2000 or currently in Greece, or whether it is the introduction of water charges in Ireland in 2014, large alliances of trade unions, social movements and NGOs mobilised. Equally, resistance against fracking and the abuse of water resources in mining projects have been contested, often involving the participation of indigenous people, whose territory is directly affected.
In this session, we intend to bring together papers investigating the underlying dynamics of these moments of resistance against water commodification. Who has been participating in these struggles and why? How can we conceptualise their resistance? When is resistance successful and when is it likely to fail?