Water struggles as resistance to neoliberal capitalism: A time of reproductive unrest

By Madelaine Moore

This book provides an important intervention into social reproduction theory and the politics of water. Presenting an incorporated comparison, it analyses the conjuncture following the 2007 financial crisis through the lens of water expropriation and resistance. This brings into view the way that transnational capital has made use of and been facilitated by the strategic selectivities of both the Irish and the Australian state, as well as the particular class formations that emerged in resistance to such water grabs. What is revealed is a crisis-ridden system that is marked by increasing reproductive unrest – class understood through the lens of social reproduction theory. As an important analysis of two significant water struggles, the book makes a compelling argument for integrating the study of social movements within critical political economy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Mar 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9781526165978

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Water struggles as resistance to neoliberal capitalism

Series editors: Andreas Bieler (School of Politics and International Relations, University of Nottingham), Gareth Bryant (Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney), Mònica Clua-Losada (Department of Political Science, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley), Adam David Morton (Department of Political Economy, University of Sydney), and Angela Wigger (Department of Political Science, Radboud University, The Netherlands).

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Previously published titles

Keynes and Marx Bill Dunn

Imperialism and the development myth: How rich countries dominate in the twenty-first century Sam King

Water struggles as resistance to neoliberal capitalism

A time of reproductive unrest

Madelaine Moore

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © Madelaine Moore 2023

The right of Madelaine Moore to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

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ISBN 978 1 5261 6598 5 hardback

First published 2023

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Contents

Acknowledgements

List of abbreviations

Introduction: why water, why now?

1Theorising reproductive unrest

2Water grabbing as a form of capital accumulation

3The strategic selectivities of the state

4The contestation of water grabs in Australia

5The contestation of water grabs in the Republic of Ireland

Conclusion: a conjuncture of reproductive unrest

References

List of interviews

Index

Acknowledgements

Completing this book during a horrific bushfire season in Australia, the onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic, looming recessions, and then the Russian invasion of Ukraine made crisis feel omnipresent. Where once those fortunate enough were able to take a breath before the next started, now it is impossible to ignore crises’ interconnectedness. Times of crisis also prove our need for family, friends, and wider support networks. There have been many people across multiple continents and international moves that helped bring this book into being.

I want to thank all my interviewees, who gave up their time to talk to me about their experiences and reflections of the water struggles in which they were a part. Without their generosity this book would not have been possible. And without their courage to struggle against their world I would not have taken up this topic. In Ireland, Noreen Murphy and Laurence Cox were critical first contacts, and Cian, Branno, Dan, and Radie gave me a welcome home whenever I was in Dublin. In Australia, Dom O’Dwyer was a crucial link to people in South Gippsland and the Northern Rivers.

The Rosa Luxemburg Foundation provided me with much-needed funding for the project and without their support the process would have been much harder, and I imagine would have taken much longer.

Important interventions from multiple reviewers for both this book and related journal articles helped me hone my arguments. Without the support from Manchester University Press, especially Rob Byron and the editors of the Progress in Political Economy series, this book would not exist.

In supporting the development of this project, I owe a huge debt to multiple colleagues across The University of Kassel, The University of Manchester, The University of Nottingham, and now The University of Bielefeld. Christoph Scherrer enabled me to pursue this project at the International Centre for Development and Decent Work at Kassel University. Andreas Bieler provided critical guidance and reflection that pushed the project so that it could become what I wanted it to be. Ian Bruff gave me the opportunity to come to The University of Manchester as a research fellow and our discussions on social reproduction theory and relational comparisons shaped the book at a critical point. Alexandra Kaasch gave me much-needed time to finish the project once I moved to The University of Bielefeld.

Working in a foreign country and navigating life in a foreign language is not easy, and there were many people, especially in Kassel, who helped make Germany a second home. I owe a huge debt to everyone at The University of Kassel, in particular Alex Gallas, Christian Möllman, Ismail Karatepe, Anil Shah, and Simone Buckel. Starting from a shared goal – developing a materialist approach to social movements – Carolina Alves Vestena and Anne Engelhardt shaped me into the academic I am today. I also had the opportunity to write with Silke Trommer, who shared her well-honed skills at navigating these processes, which has been much appreciated. Laura Horn was also a much-valued source of wisdom. Tim Paulsen helped format and organise the manuscript in its final form. Networks such as the Critical Political Economy Research Network were often the first testing ground for these ideas, and spaces such as the Past and Present reading group facilitated my engagement with wider debates and forced me to sharpen my arguments in an always encouraging and constructive environment.

Numerous friends (including those mentioned above) made the process bearable, picked me up when things fell apart, offered critical insight when necessary, and knew when we needed to change the subject. Felix Nickel and Kardelen Gunaydin were some of the best (and honorary) housemates I could have asked for. My afternoon tea supports in Manchester with Caroline Metz, Christian Scholz, Aliki Koutlou, Esra Elif Nartok, and Andrew Eggleston-Essex made the city fun and our debates and future predictions were a necessary highlight. Spending much of 2019–21 in Australia, my oldest friends and family bore the brunt of my more recent stress and writing-related absence. I want to thank Felicia, Alice, Abbie, and Jasmine for their unwavering support. My mum Fiona, who was always encouraging and provided me with an early lens through which to make sense of this world, offered a critical grammatical eye that was also much appreciated. My sisters Tara and Hannah have also been amazing. One of the good things to come from the pandemic was the opportunity to live with Tara again, which was such a joy although it also meant she bore witness to much of the stress that accompanies this sort of project. So, a big thanks to Tara for her patience (and cooking skills). And the always dedicated Rusty was an essential soundboard, even if he never really spoke back.

There are some people who are sadly not around to see the end of this project. These include Colin Barker, whose research showed me that there was a way to study social movements within Marxism and whose early personal support gave me the confidence that my project was worth pursuing. Closer to home, both my dads, David and Paul, helped me navigate the world of politics, and much of this book would not have been possible without their early guidance.

Last but definitely not least, my collaborator in life and love, Christopher Wallace, gave me the confidence to start and the support to finish this book, which would have been much poorer without him.

Abbreviations

Introduction: why water, why now?

Water is a key input to energy and food production. It is essential to all forms of life. It is something we cannot do without. It is also increasingly financialised. In 2020, the World Economic Forum ranked the water crisis as the highest societal risk facing the global economy (World Economic Forum, 2020, p. 12). In 2018, fourteen of the world’s twenty megacities faced water scarcity (S. Leahy, 2018). In the same year, after year-on-year growth, water services company Veolia posted a profit of €25.9 billion (Business Wire, 2019). Over-extraction, pollution, and increasing demand have, as water activist Maude Barlow suggests (Barlow, 2013, p. 3), created a global water crisis. What I want to propose in the following pages is that the way water is managed, who has access, and for what purpose say a lot about what a society values. Which is to say that water is embedded in the global political economy, the values, and the crises it contains.

As water has increasingly come to be understood as an economic rather than public good,¹ the global water crisis is being framed as a problem of scarcity with solutions focussed on measurement, allocation, and technology. In drought-stricken areas, solutions can include water trading markets and water banks. For water services and infrastructures, solutions have typically centred around the commercialisation of public water services, transforming public utilities into for-profit entities (Swyngedouw, 2007, pp. 206–7). Such governance mechanisms have brought water further into the circuit of capital. As water is diverted from less to more economically productive activities, waterscapes,² and the social relations of production that they maintain, are transformed. Yet the transformation of waterscapes also impacts the ecology and capacity for social reproduction of nearby communities. There is, I argue, a dialectical interplay between production, social reproduction, and nature.

However, when waterscapes are threatened there is often fierce resistance. The threat of new dams in China and Ethiopia has resulted in border disputes, the privatisation of water services in Bolivia in 2000 resulted in mass upheaval, as did the use of metering technology in South Africa and the threat of water cutoffs in Greece following the 2007 financial crisis. The argument to be developed throughout this book is that water struggles reveal and sharpen the ecological and social contradictions that have accompanied the multiple crises between the global financial crisis (GFC) of 2007 and COVID-19 in 2020 and continue, sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly, to shape not only processes of accumulation, but the daily lives of various populations across the globe. A key point to be made is that struggles over water encapsulate points where accumulation strategies conflict with and destabilise the conditions of social reproduction and nature; conditions which conversely are necessary for accumulation to occur. Yet struggles over water also capture the potential for populations subject to processes of expropriation (often racialised and gendered) to be not simply the objects of accumulation (that is, subject to expropriation and exploitation), but an emergent class with world-making potential. As we will see, these struggles are over more than access to or the availability of water, zeroing in instead on the social relations and processes that reduce water to a commodity and potential site for accumulation. This emerging agency in resistance, I will maintain, suggests that it is not water that is in crisis, but rather the social relations and political institutions that render water a commodity.

The two cases explored in this book focus on these interrelated dynamics – the enclosure of water sources in Australia and threats to water services and infrastructure in Ireland. Each case occurred in a highly industrialised, capitalist economy, demonstrating that dynamics of expropriation are continuing rather than historical processes necessary for the extraction of surplus value in such economies. Moreover, these cases suggest that trends of water service commercialisation and water grabs that were trialled in majority world states throughout the 1990s and 2000s are now being replayed in the minority world along similar lines.³ However, as water is already commodified (to the extent that capitalist social relations of wage labour and private property are what mediates its production and services), the processes of enclosure in each case exemplify intensified forms of commodification rather than its original separation. As such, exploring the cases will highlight the co-constitutive relation between expropriation and exploitation and the continuous transformation occurring within capitalist economies. As my book will show, capitalism’s expansionary tendencies not only reconfigure boundaries at the periphery but tend to reimagine and intensify accumulation strategies in the core. By choosing two cases from the minority world, I show how water grabbing is a global process embedded in global class dynamics.

Furthermore, water grabbing is often approached through the rubric of energy production such as dams and biofuels, water source diversion for irrigation, extractive industries, or water mining for beverage production. In this book I also want to turn attention to the increasing instances of water service privatisation and urban water infrastructure as further forms of water grabbing. As financial and investment firms increasingly refer to all forms of water as the ‘new gold’, and water services as a guaranteed investment, the argument to be developed is that bringing into relation these different forms – the enclosure of water sources as nature and the enclosure of water services as public goods – may disclose the internal relation of these processes throughout the hydro-social cycle and how they shape this conjuncture, which further highlights the contradictions that such accumulation strategies bring with them.

In the Australian case study, what will be interrogated is the specific, alienated, socio/nature relation necessary for the continuous expropriation of water to feed extractive industries. Here, the rural waterscape was transformed to facilitate extractive industries such as unconventional gas drilling at the expense of agricultural fractions of capital and rural communities. This was a water grab facilitated by state regulation in partnership with the dominant accumulation regime. However, this transformation sharpened existing crisis tendencies within the dominant accumulation regime, one that remains centred on the expropriation of nature. What began as a conflict between unequal capital fractions over a scarce resource evolved into a struggle between a super-profits industry working through the state and rural communities. In the process of struggle certain logics underpinning the structuring conditions of global capital in Australia – particularly those behind the enclosure of water – no longer cohered, and a collective and subversive rationality emerged. Incompatible understandings of water began to unravel the intertwined logics of alienated socio/nature relations, private property relations, terra nullius,⁴ and the dominance of economic rationality. The situated knowledge of protesters produced through the collective experience of struggle revealed underlying contradictions inherent in the way that global capitalism reproduced within the Australian state. Through the defence of a waterscape and the social reproduction of the rural communities that depended upon it, capitalism’s ecological contradiction was both experienced and made explicit.

In the Republic of Ireland (Ireland, from now on), the water grab instead reveals capitalism’s social contradiction. Following the European debt crisis and the 2010 Troika bailout, Ireland was required to move towards full-cost recovery for water services, instal water meters, and consolidate local water services under one national, semi-autonomous, commercial utility – Irish Water. The enclosure of water services and creation of new revenue streams reflects processes of commodification and commercialisation mediated by the state. Social reproduction infrastructure, in the form of public services, was reimagined as a site of accumulation. However in this process the social reproductive capacity of working-class communities dependent on those services was undermined. In response, these communities organised one of the largest social movements in modern Irish history, which resulted in winding back water charges and metering. As will be shown in the following chapters, this case captures the growing crisis of social reproduction facing many working-class communities owing to decades of state austerity, while wages stagnated and jobs disappeared. As Nancy Fraser has argued, these processes have externalised care work ‘onto families and communities while diminishing their capacity to perform it’ (Fraser, 2016, p. 112). As happened in Australia, struggle sharpened the contradictions inherent in the dominant accumulation regime as it became increasingly clear that the conditions necessary for the reproduction of working-class communities – such as functioning and accessible public services – were incompatible with the logics of the Irish state and conditions necessary for attracting global financial capital. What also came into focus was the hollowness of individual rights without the social infrastructure and state – the material conditions – for those rights to be exercised.

Both of these cases are a form of water expropriation – a water grab – in which water was reimagined as an intensified site for accumulation by particular fractions of capital, often in partnership with the state. For capital, water grabbing is an accumulation strategy. For labour, it is often a process of dispossession, which transforms existing social and productive relations, impacting communities and their natural environments. In each case, the attempt to ‘resolve’ economic crises through expropriation instead moved the potential for crisis onto different populations; crisis qualitatively shifted from the economic to the domains of social reproduction and nature. Yet, by doing so, the social and ecological contradictions inherent in capital were sharpened. This movement of crisis is what I have come to term a spherical-temporal fix, a key category to be developed in the following chapters.

As Fraser argues (2016, pp. 103–4), capitalist accumulation is dependent upon certain conditions of possibility – social reproduction, nature, and political power – while disavowing this dependence. It is this disavowed dependence that renders accumulation regimes subject to populations and forms of labour that they nonetheless see as peripheral to their functioning. The global water crisis is a hallmark example. Water struggles illustrate moments where the boundaries between nature, social reproduction, and production systems were and are reconfigured, redefining who or what can survive, and in what form. Processes of water expropriation sharpen intertwined crisis tendencies that appear to mark our current moment. It is this movement and transformation of crisis within the totality of capitalist social relations of production that are the focus of this book.

What will come into view is a conjuncture marked by what I have called reproductive unrest. The term has two key foci: first, the critical role of expropriation for capitalist reproduction, and second, the emergent forms of agency in resistance to these dynamics. In shifting our lens to the conditions of social reproduction and nature, we see that these struggles are struggles in and against capitalism and the conditions necessary for profit-making that are prioritised over those necessary for life-making. Struggles over water are not simply a form of resistance but can be world making, which suggests that agency is also at play. As will be shown in Chapters Four and Five, rural and working-class communities developed an agency in resistance to their disposability. These struggles were not just over necessary infrastructure or access, but also the underlying value placed on water as nature and the form of state and democracy that would be necessary for a collective right to water to be realised. The argument to be made is that struggles over water politicise the process of expropriation, opening up what was taken as given, and thus bring to light the underlying contradictions that are inherent to global capitalism.

Water as a window onto a conjuncture

If water struggles appear to capture certain dynamics that mark the conjuncture, which is temporally defined as the time between the 2007 GFC and COVID-19, or what some might describe as late neoliberalism (della Porta et al., 2016), another underlying aim of this book is to give a concrete form to these dynamics. When talking about conjuncture, I use the definition developed by Koivisto and Lahtinen in their reading of Nikos Poulantzas and Stuart Hall. For these authors, a conjuncture is a way of looking at a specific historical moment. It is an analytical tool rather than a teleological premise that, in their wording:

… expand(s) the capacity to act politically by helping to examine the conditions of a political intervention in their complexity, that is, to trace the displacements and condensations of different sorts of contradictions, and thus open up possibilities for action. (Koivisto and Lahtinen, 2012, p. 267)

In this light, water struggles can be understood as nodal points where various determinations and contradictions converge and overlap and can be an entry point from which to not only interrogate what then comes to be understood as the present, but also locate its points of potential rupture.

Looking back in order to look forward, in many ways our relation to water has narrated society. A brief example: in the early twentieth century, as part of nation-building projects, minority world states began to provide large-scale public water services and irrigation systems within their home territories. This was facilitated through new technology that allowed for large-scale hydroelectricity and dam construction, teamed with a rapid urbanisation that followed industrialisation and necessitated improved urban sanitation systems (Loftus et al., 2019, pp. 3–4). The delivery of water as a public service and mastery of nature through dams and irrigation systems were forms of state-building exercises that reflected dominant socio/nature production relations (see Swyngedouw and Boelens, 2018).

However, as part of the neoliberal transformation, which was embedded in a growing discourse of state failure, the late 1970s ushered in a period of water and sanitation service privatisation. Through pressure from international financial institutions such as the World Bank Group, the majority world was the first guinea pig for this neoliberal experiment. The 1992 Dublin Statement on Water and Sustainable Development cemented this trend, declaring water an economic rather than public good (Dublin Statement, 1992). Privatisation of water services and infrastructures was pushed as an efficient and cost-effective policy option (Bayliss, 2014, pp. 292–5). With the global water crisis framed as a crisis of supply rather than the result of socio-political relations, water became a scarce good, both increasingly marketised and approached as a problem to be solved via technological fixes (Roberts, 2008, p. 538). The state, once the provider of public water, became the facilitator of private water-related investments. Water as public good was now reimagined as a site of accumulation, which reflected the broader transformation of state and market relations.

Yet, because essential services involve both high capital investment and risk, full privatisation of water and sanitation services proved less profitable than expected. As a result, from the 2000s onwards the investment trend moved away from full privatisation towards commercialisation of nominally public utilities and public–private partnerships (PPPs) (Loftus, 2009, p. 956). This occurred through the outsourcing of technical knowledge, consultation projects, water-based financial products, and targeted concessions (Hall and Lobina, 2012; Bayliss, 2014, p. 298). The result, according to Bakker (2013, p. 258), has been the creation of ‘uneven landscapes of water governance’, as investors have strategically cherry-picked those profitable parts of service provision – normally wealthier communities with a capacity to pay – leaving the least profitable parts and highest risks to the state. For water users, privatisations and commercialisation processes have largely resulted in higher bills, poor infrastructure investment, and lower water quality. For example, since privatisation water prices in the United Kingdom (UK) have risen dramatically even though operating costs have remained the same and there has been limited investment in infrastructure (Lobina and Corporate Accountability International, 2014, p. 4; Brignall, 2018). Water users have been transformed into customers, with access potentially determined by their capacity to pay, which points towards the tension between life-making and profit-making that water provision has come to encapsulate.

When turning to water resources, the global water crisis has led to an increased focus on sustainable management that aims to integrate environmental with economic and social concerns. The dominant approach, integrated water resource management (IWRM), aims to integrate governance scales, stakeholders, and uses of water by taking the whole river basin as the unit of management (Gallego-Ayala, 2013; Benson et al., 2015). Critically, this entails a move beyond territorial boundaries and better reflects the dynamism of the hydrological cycle. However, although IWRM has signalled a more integrated approach to water governance, its solution to environmental problems has reflected the tendencies present in water services by accounting for the environment in economic terms. While this has resulted in some improvements in water quality and addressed some issues of over-allocation, it has also facilitated further private sector involvement, pricing mechanisms such as full-cost recovery, metering, and ecosystem valuation through increased use of environmental economics (Gerlak and Ingram, 2018). The dominant narrative of environmental economics is that by giving water a price, water use will decrease as users come to understand its value. While this may be true in terms of the given measure, such valuation excludes other value systems – especially Indigenous understandings – by disavowing the complex social, political, and ecological relations through which water is produced. In short, in the end the move to an integrated understanding of water has reduced the entirety of a complex system to the economic. Water resource management is reaffirmed as a technical issue, where the complex social, political, and institutional causes of unsustainable water use can be addressed with adequate modelling and analytics. This in effect depoliticises water management while also excluding alternative understandings of water.

The results of both dynamics have been the transfer of costs from state budgets to the household, reversing the earlier rationale of socialising the cost of water via a state-building project. It has also externalised costs onto certain ecosystems as we continuously redefine what is productive and valuable and what is not. Water resources and services are a new and intensified commodity frontier. The shift towards the commercialisation of public services prioritises return on investments with the price of water set to guarantee returns. Water trading markets replicating those in Chile and Australia, and processes of financialising and securitising water services and infrastructure, are turning fixed and stable forms of water and water infrastructure into liquid assets (Loftus et al., 2019, pp. 1–4). This includes the trade in virtual water through the import and export of water-heavy products from often water-poor to water-rich states (Boelens et al., 2018, p. 7). Heightened by a falling confidence in tap water resulting from state failures, the global market for bottled water is now valued at $US250 billion (Pacheco-Vega, 2020, p. 113). Moreover, aquifers and rivers are prime targets for both beverage companies and hydroelectricity projects.⁵ As Andreas Bieler argues (Bieler, 2017, p. 300), the new ‘water barons’ are now Wall Street moguls and billionaire oligarchs.

As noted above, however, such accumulation strategies are not smooth processes but are and have been fiercely and frequently resisted. The United Nations Declaration of the Human Right to Water and Sanitation in 2010 was the result of a global push for water justice (Barlow, 2012; Sultana and Loftus, 2020a, p. 1), and it has since been constitutionally recognised in South