Say No to Water Privatization in the Infrastructure Bill

https://inthesetimes.com/article/open-letter-bipartisan-infrastructure-water-privatization

Water costs have soared in recent years as federal funding for water infrastructure has shrunk. Privatization is the last thing we need.

Editor’s Note: The following open letter has been signed by 218 organizations. To view a PDF of the letter and a list of the organizations that signed it, click here.

Dear Majority Leader Schumer, Minority Leader McConnell, Speaker Pelosi, Leader McCarthy, Senate Budget Committee Chairman Sanders, and House Budget Committee Chairman Yarmuth:

We, the undersigned 218 organizations, oppose the Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework that promotes privatization, and we urge you to reject it and water privatization in all its forms and fight for a bold, uncompromising infrastructure package that provides real federal funding at the level our communities urgently need.

The outline of the latest bipartisan infrastructure framework would promote a slew of privatization activities. The proposed financing sources for new investment include public-private partnerships, private activity bonds and asset recycling.

That provision promotes a Wall Street takeover of essential services like public water. It is dangerous for the public and undermines public access to essential water services.

Water privatization is an incredibly expensive financing option. Privatization through public-private partnerships, private investment schemes or asset recycling is not a source of new funding, but an expensive and high-risk way to finance water projects. The typical water public-private partnership carries a cost of capital that can be five times the cost of the low interest bonds available to municipal water systems.

Water privatization will lead to rate hikes on households already struggling to afford their water bills. Because the private entity recovers its financing costs and profit through user bills, privatizing water and sewer systems lead to considerable rate hikes for households and local businesses. Already, nearly one in three U.S. households struggles to afford their water and sewer bills, and households nationally have accrued billions of dollars of water debt during the pandemic. They cannot afford the price of privatization.

The problem at hand is that local government utilities rely almost exclusively on water bills to cover the cost of infrastructure projects because of the loss of federal support for water infrastructure. Federal funding has fallen by 77% in real terms since its peak in 1977. Local governments cannot continue to raise their water rates to levels that are increasingly unaffordable for households. Our public water utilities have a funding problem, not a financing problem. Privatization would only exacerbate the main problem facing our public water utilities.

Water privatization is not a viable or just solution for rural, small or disadvantaged communities. Private companies focus on profit maximization and avoid areas where per-household costs are high, the customer base has less wealth and bill collection problems can abound. A private company will acquire such a system if the system is contiguous to its existing network and if it can redistribute the costs across its other service areas. Because water rates are regressive, this type of subsidization is inequitable and disproportionately burdens working- and middle class families across communities.

Water privatization can trap communities in expensive deals. Public-private partnerships that involve private financing are usually 30 to 40 years long, and they are extremely difficult to exit early. After taking office, the new municipal services director in Bayonne, N.J., posed as his first question: how do we get out of the city’s water concession contract? He was told the city would have to repay the $150 million concession fee that it no longer has. Since entering into a decades-long concession deal in 2012, Bayonne has experienced rate hikes of 50% despite promises of rate stabilization. According to the Hudson Reporter, a board of education trustee recently told the new city council, ​“You didn’t sign the contract, and neither did the citizens of Bayonne, but everyone is suffering because of it.” Similarly, Middletown, Penn., was unable to exit its water concession deal, and attempted to stop surcharges in court and lost.

Water privatization is not a solution for our nation’s water needs. Water privatization can increase costs, worsen service quality and allow infrastructure assets to deteriorate. There is ample evidence that maintenance backlogs, wasted water, sewage spills and worse service often follow privatization. In fact, poor performance is the primary reason that local governments reverse the decision to privatize and resume public operation of previously contracted services.

Communities need real federal dollars spent on drinking water and wastewater infrastructure. The most comprehensive funding solution on the table is the WATER Act (H.R.1352, S.916). The WATER Act would provide $35 billion a year to fully fund our water infrastructure at the level that is needed according to EPA needs surveys.

We urge you to reject this proposed water privatization scam and fight for a bold package that provides the support our communities need. Do not compromise on water.

Afterword to Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program ~~ PETER LINEBAUGH

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/11/11/afterword-to-karl-marx-critique-of-the-gotha-program/

~~ posted for Collectivist ~~

To the memory of Noel Ignatiev.

Dixi et salvavi animam meam. With these Latin words Karl Marx concludes his Critique of the Gotha Program (1875) – “I have spoken and saved my soul.” One is unaccustomed to religious expression from the great communist, unless it be sarcastic, yet here he uses it to conclude a devastating analysis of the program of German workers party. What is Marx’s soul? How did he save it? And what about ours?^[1]

These Latin words from two and a half millennia previous were distilled from a ‘brazen and stubborn’ prophet, Ezekiel, who with bizarre, way-out visions of animals, jewels, and wheels within wheels heard these words whispered from the heavenly vault.^[2]

If I pronounce sentence of death on a wicked person and you have not warned him or spoken out to dissuade him from his wicked ways and so save his life, that person will die because of his sin, but I shall hold you answerable for his death. But if you have warned him and he persists in his wicked ways, he will die because of his sin, but you will have discharged your duty.

Perhaps Marx learned this in childhood. The oracular voice and the prophetic role came easily to him. Dixi et salvavi was used by Engels too writing thirty years earlier in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844) when it expressed bourgeois contempt. The phrase from Ezekiel became part of pompous boss-talk as the boss clears his conscience and walks away. And for a moment Marx and Engels considered walking away from the nascent German socialist party, but hung on in there, despite his criticisms. Marx, however, at this moment of obligation refers to capitalism and its wicked ways.

Salvation depends on speaking; it is the moral imperative. Black Lives Matter speaks truth to power; Extinction Rebellion’s slogan is “to tell the truth;” and women in north America form “speak outs” in recovering from male violence. Indispensable to the revolutionary project is calling out the wicked ways. Black Lives Matter (BLM) has pointed to the murderous effects of white supremacy. #MeToo has pointed to the violent degradations inherent to patriarchy. Extinction Rebellion (XR) has taken direct action against the political and economic causes of planetary warming. At Standing Rock indigenous people attempt to prevent pollution of the waters. Racism, patriarchy, settler colonialism, and destruction of the planetary earth system are the “wicked ways.” These are four destructive structures of capitalism. With them in mind we look back to select what is useful from Marx’s Critique bearing in mind, so to speak, that Marx also looks to us!

Engels published (and revealed) the Condition of the English Working Class in 1844. That year too found Marx publishing an earlier “critique,” not of a political program but of a political philosophy. A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, in which he described religion as “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.” “Criticism has plucked,” he writes, “the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.” To unmask self-estrangement he must turn to the criticism of actualities, and turn to history “to establish the truth of this world.” The two revolutionaries, Marx and Engels, one a critical philosopher and the other an empirical investigator, formed a partnership as revolutionary communists.

A year or so later they write, “Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.”^[3] And that real movement in dissolving the world market abolishes alien property relations and restores mutual human relations. It is for us to see that real movement.” He makes the point again in The Critique of the Gotha Program: “Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programs.”

The goal is the commons, the means is the proletariat. What did these words – commons, proletariat – actually mean to him or to us? How are they part of the “real movement which abolishes the present state of things”?

Instead of proletariat he will write of producers or labor power. He’ll refer to serfs, to slaves; he’ll include employed and unemployed (the active army, the reserve army); he’ll refer to peasants, to artisans, to small manufacturers. All people who have lost their organic connections to nature, that is, to land, its creatures, its grains; to the waters and pastures; as well as to the geological resources lying beneath the land. All people who have been expropriated from the means of life, the means of production, the means of subsistence, this is what he means. It only remains to organize! “It is altogether self-evident that to be able to fight at all the working class must organize itself at home as a class…,” he states in this Critique. Yet this ‘class’ is constantly changing in its composition.

By the 1860s as the worker’s movement revived after the defeats that followed 1848, socialist parties were formed in Germany, and Marx helped to organize in 1864 the International Workingman’s Association, or the First International. It culminates with the Paris Commune of 1871, two months of self-rule by the French working-class, the first proletarian revolution.

The Gotha program says that labor is the source of all wealth. No, it’s not, says Marx. Nature is just as much a source of material wealth as labor. The single negation, right at the beginning with the little word “no” is the key that opens the door, for us in the twenty-first century, to planetary warming and the sixth extinction. We walk right in with the eco-socialism of Joel Kovel, Michael Löwy, and John Bellamy Foster .^[4] We are present at the edge of the abyss staring into the “ecological rift.” Marx wrote of the “irreparable break” between nature and society. Or, he’d call the nature-humanity relation “metabolism.” The mass slaughter of the bison, the deforestation of the Great Lakes, the depletion of nutrients from the soil were some of the underlying phenomena of “the metabolic rift” in his day. The concept from Das Kapital of “the organic composition of capital” expresses in terms of economic quantities this rupture or rift.

Looking back to 1875 we see hints of Nature becoming self-conscious (as Elisée Reclus might say). About the time Marx was composing this critique the first “Arbor Day” (22 April 1875) celebrated by planting trees was announced in the USA and John Muir was walking in the Rockies and asking “How Shall We Preserve Our Trees.” While these were only “flea-hops” as Marx might say (see below) they were signs of what lay ahead.

Nature is the beginning both of life and of capitalism. “The bourgeois have very good grounds for falsely ascribing supernatural creative power to labor since it follows precisely from the fact that labor depends on nature that the human being who possesses no other property than his labor power must, in all conditions of society and culture, be the slave of other human beings who have made themselves the owners of the material conditions of labor. He can only work by their permission, hence live only with their permission.” In Das Kapital this will be called expropriation and exploitation. In the young Marx it will be called alienation. Marx lifts the veil. To our world, to nature, to the biosphere, to creation, to the commons. Only the working class, he writes in the Gotha critique, can “lift this historical curse.”

Between the two critiques, 1844-1875, lay thirty years of class struggle, revolution, war, empire, and massive constructions of iron and steel, and Marx indeed threw away the imaginary flower to pluck the living flower. After the failures of the revolutions of 1848 he turned his attention to the demolition of the bourgeois divisions of politics from economics in perhaps the greatest critique ever made in the Grundrisse (1857) and Das Kapital (1867). These outlined the “wicked ways” of capital and established “the truth of this world.” They provide the means of plucking the living flower.

Could this critique become the soul, the heart, the sigh of the oppressed? It is no longer a philosophical or spiritual question; it is a political question.

One of his principle forms of critique is to describe the arguments of his opponent as “words” or “phrases” denying to them any substance in reason or factual evidence. He does this repeatedly in the Critique of the Gotha Program.(a sentence “limps,” “hollow phrases,” “bungled in style,” “mere phrases,” “obsolete verbal rubbish,” “false Lassallean formulation,” “a newspaper scribbler’s phrase”). Yet the critique contains two signature phrases of the Marxist outlook. One of them is both a profound summary of the fundamental opposition to capitalism and a fighting slogan for the banners of revolution, “From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.”^[5] This is the seed of the living flower.

The physician, Luke, describes these early Christians who “had all things common” (Acts 4: 32) “and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need” (Acts 4:35). When threatened with famine during the reign of Claudius relief was obtained from “every man according to his ability.” (Acts 11:29).

What is it that abilities are creating? What is it that needs are accepting? Are we to interpret these two processes as production and consumption? In capitalist society production and consumption form a whole, the economy, regulated by the market, whose unit is the commodity, and whose lingo is money. This is “the historical curse.”

If you think about it, there seems to be some mysterious agent who measures out those abilities (senior management? HR?) or who doles out according to needs (Amazon? retail?). It is this mystery which can only be described in the future, “after the revolution.” Is it traditional institutions of civil society – family, work, government? Is it revolutionary assemblies – the congregation, the city the square, the soviet, some new version of the tribe? Is it some other social organization? Elinor Ostrom formulated it as ‘the governance of the commons.’^[6] Marx relies neither on Providence nor on Progress for the realization of the future. The mystical former relies on divine agency and the abstract latter depends on Victorian technological and utilitarian belief. It does not happen automatically or inevitably. Earlier in the Grundrisse (p. 325) he had written “of the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption, and whose labour also therefore appears no longer as labour, but as the full development of activity itself”.

He refers to the “the common satisfaction of needs such as schools, health services, &c.” He refers to “the common stock.” The French revolutionary socialist, Jean Jaurès, said “Just as all citizens exercise political power in a democratic manner in common, so they must exercise economic power in common as well.”^[7] Communist society, Marx writes, “emerges from capitalist society which is thus in every respect economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges.”

What is the relationship between the statement of principles and the enumerated points of the program? In The Communist Manifesto (1848) the relationship was mediated by the history of class struggle. In the Critique of the Gotha Program the relationship depends on that critique of political economy found in Capital (1867) and the Grundrisse (1857).

In analyzing Marx’s thought we remind ourselves that thought is in motion. His ideas at any one time are not fixed in an eternity of truth. On the contrary they are very much of his times. So in understanding the problems of 1875 in the Gotha program, we can both think back to earlier phases of his thinking and forward to their subsequent development. We go back to the ‘young Marx’ and forwards to the ‘old Marx.’^[8]

The ‘young Marx’ is all about alienation; he gives us both a spiritual and philosophical lens. The ‘old Marx’ is all about the commons; he gives us a lens in revolutionary anthropology and immersion in the so-called “backward” countries where indeed the air is better. Together the ideas of the young and the old Marx provide us with a way to read The Critique of the Gotha Program. We are no longer confined to the realm of political economy. We can approach both the meaning of communism and the anti-capitalist transition to it in ways that might be helpful in the twenty-first century.

The ‘mature Marx’ remains central which is to say that the critical analysis of the capitalist mode of production and the critique of political economy are what he is all about as he disentangles the hopeless web of error and bad politics found in the Gotha Program. Its guiding author, Ferdinand Lassalle, was formerly a follower of Marx who however allied with the Junkers, the German landlord class. Yet, the lords of the land turned nature into a commodity, a means of constant capital, and thus an instrument of extraction and exploitation. Such are the wicked ways.

The preface (1867) to Das Kapital, volume one, boldly proclaims, “Just as in the eighteenth century the American War of Independence sounded the tocsin for the European middle class, so in the nineteenth century the American Civil War did the same for the European working class.”^[9] The American Civil War sounded the death knell of slavery with the horn of the jubilee. That tocsin will ring to the European working class with the Paris Commune (1871) and reverberate with the working classes of the world on going.

In the Paris Commune the abolition of the death penalty and the burning of the guillotine, the destruction of the Vendôme column to the Napoleonic empire, and the formation of the Women’s Union provide during the seventy-two days of its life an idea of working-class self-government, or the political imaginary of commune.^[10] Said Marx, “The great social measure of the Commune was its own working existence.”^[11] As a result of the Commune Marx revised The Communist Manifesto to include the sentence, “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for their own purpose.”

In the summer of 1871 Peter Kropotkin (“mutual aid”) was in Finland, William Morris (“fellowship”) was in Iceland, and Karl Marx in London was studying the Russian language and reading Chernyshevsky’s Essays on the Communal Ownership of Land. His guide was the young Russian exile and Communard, Elisabeth Dmitrieff who besides leading Marx to the study of the peasant commune in Russia (the obshchina), was also the organizer of the seamstresses, laundresses, and dressmakers of Paris into the Women’s Union for the Defense of Paris and Aid to the Wounded. In Geneva discussions took place among veterans and exiles during the 1870s that produced the idea of “anarchist communism,” or the dissolution of State, Nation, and Capital.

The Commune was at the center of world-wide revolt. The writing of The Critique of the Gotha Program coincided with the hanging of nineteen coal miners (the “Molly Maguires”), with the police riot at Tompkins Square in New York, with the internment of the Navajo nation, the expropriation of the Comanches, the cultural war (‘kill the Indian, save the man’), Geronimo (“I was born where there were no enclosures”) escaping the San Carlos Reservation, and the African American military mobilization as ‘buffalo soldiers’ to annihilate the bison who had provided subsistence for the indigenous people of the plains. Thus did capital create and then utilize our divisions. The path was cleared for the global seizures and massacres in Africa, Asia, and Wounded Knee.^[12]

The Kabylie revolt in Algeria against French conquest and confiscation of the common lands occurred at the same time as the Paris Commune. 250 tribes rose up, village assemblies providing the base along the coast, up the mountains, to the desert. It was led by Cheikh Mokrani. The infamous law of 1873 expropriated communal lands in Algeria, “tearing away the Arabs from their nature bond to the soil….”^[13] At the end of his life in 1882 Marx spent two months in Algeria hoping that the commons of air in north Africa would heal the damage done to his lungs by capitalist externalities, i.e. London smog. Marx expressed his admiration of the Algerian Muslims for “the absolute equality of their social intercourse.”

Likewise, the defeat of the European working class (the two month Commune concluded with the bloody massacre of 20,000 – 30,000 communards) signaled the advent of Jim Crow, the end of Reconstruction, the KKK, the Colfax massacre, and the betrayals of 1875 Hayes-Tilden presidential election the year following. Virulent counter-revolution and violent suppression of textile workers of the north and railway workers of the west. “A new slavery arose,” wrote W.E.B. DuBois.^[14] “The system of wage labor is a system of slavery,” wrote Marx in his Gotha Critique.

In a letter to Bebel in March 1875 Engels proposed replacing “state” everywhere by “Gemeinwesen, a good old German word which can very well convey the meaning of the French word “commune.” The Paris Commune four years earlier was, they said, “the glorious harbinger of a new society.” The mixture of commune, commons, and communism was a heady semantic mix concealing a revolutionary riddle not yet solved.

“The question then arises, what transformation will the body politic undergo in communist society? In other words what social functions analogous to present state functions will remain at that juncture. The question can only be answered scientifically, and one does not get a flea-hop nearer to the problem by a thousand-fold combination of the word people with the word state [as Lassalle did in the Gotha program]. Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.” We can say that this is, at least, a flea-hop.

The second key phrase in The Critique of the Gotha Program is “the dictatorship of the proletariat.” In 2020 Mike Stout, the Pittsburgh steel-worker and singer-song writer, gave one explanation: “the only ‘dictatorship’ I envision is one that doesn’t let the greedy 1% and their class drive us into indebted servitude, while squandering and hoarding our wealth and natural resources, and stops them from destroying the whole planet.”^[15] Frederick Engels gave a similar explanation. In the same year that Engels published Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program (1891), he asked, “Do you want to know what the dictatorship of the proletariat looks like?” and answered, “Look at the Paris Commune. That was the dictatorship of the proletariat.”

Marx had used the phrase once before in a letter (5 March 1852) to Joseph Weydemeyer (1818-1866). “My own contribution,” wrote Marx, “was (1) to show that the existence of classes is merely bound up with certain historical phases in the development of production; (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat; [and] (3) that this dictatorship, itself, constitutes no more than a transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.”

Weydemeyer went to America and became a lieutenant colonel in the Union Army. He surveyed Central Park, and he designed the defenses of St. Louis while distributing copies of Marx’s Inaugural Address to the International. Marx’s address addressed the ditch diggers and hod carriers of these earthen works, pointing to the day “like slave labour, like serf labour, hired labour is but a transitory and inferior form, destined to disappear before associated labour plying its toil with a willing hand, a ready mind, and a joyous heart”!

“To conquer political power has therefore become the great duty of the working classes,” he wrote just as Black Reconstruction was beginning. Success depended not on numbers alone but upon knowledge particularly of solidarity, and that led to the formation in 1864 of the International. Emancipation of the working classes entailed “the abolition of all class rule.”^[16]

We are familiar with the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie: the democratic Levellers of the 1640s were followed by the dictator Cromwell, the insurgent Jacobins of the1790s were followed by the emperor Napoleon, the Russian Bolsheviks of the 1920s were followed by Stalin. Marx had learned from the Paris Commune that the proletariat cannot simply take over the state and use it for its own purposes. It must smash the state.

W.E.B. DuBois intended to call his chapter on Black reconstruction in South Carolina, “The Dictatorship of the Black Proletariat in South Carolina” but changed it simply to “The Black Proletariat in South Carolina.” He made this change after it was brought to his attention that “since universal suffrage does not lead to a real dictatorship until workers use their votes consciously to rid themselves of the dominion of private capital. There were signs of such an object among South Carolina Negroes, but it was always coupled with the idea of that day, that the only real escape for a laborer was himself to own capital.” Dictatorship is a “stopgap pending the work of universal education, equitable income, and strong character.” He writes of the “dictatorship of capital” in the North, a plutocracy. When DuBois chose not to use the phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat” it was because the suffrage was used to promote individual rather than collective ownership.

We now write ‘history from below.’ The expression includes histories of the oppressed whether that is labor history or women’s history or indigenous people’s history or African American history or even (to use an old term) natural history. In every example the ‘below’ implies an ‘above.’ It implies a contrast or an unspoken opposite, namely ruling class history which is reified as economic history, then history of the state, then history of war. These are aspects of what the Zapatistas call the war of oblivion. Indeed, deliberate forgetting is one of capital’s wicked ways.

The anarchist, Mikhail Bakunin, asked, “Will perhaps the proletariat as a whole head the government?” Marx answers, “There will in fact be no below then.” History from below comes to an end just as class rule comes to an end.^[17] Class rule over the resisting strata continues “until the economic basis that makes the existence of classes possible has been destroyed.”

The view that Marx and Engels “rigidly refused to paint pictures of future communist society,” as Eric Hobsbawm says, is only a half-truth. Marx did not paint pictures with brush and oil; he took photographs. That is to say, he sought the commune in the real movement. This is the significance of Chernyshevsky, of Henry Lewis Morgan, of his stay in Algeria, of his letters to Zasulich. Hobsbawm says that Marx was provoked “into a theoretical statement which, if probably not new, had at any rate not been publicly formulated by him before.”^[18] It wasn’t a question of “new” or not. To Marx theory generated the project of revolutionary investigation.

The Ethnological Notebooks are one of the major works of the ‘late Marx.’ They contain, among other things, close study from Lewis Henry Morgan of the five nations of the Iroquois, or the Haudenosaunee. The Notebooks delighted the Chicago surrealist, Franklin Rosemont, who took joy in Marx’s multiple references by the Iroquois and Muscokees to the species of ‘Turtle Island’ – elk, raccoon, buffalo, turtle, eagle, wolf. Marx insists on the importance of imagination to the elevation of human beings. It and the poetic spirit, the spiritual as such, lead us to the real movement.

Marx took note of the Iroquois whose “democratic assembly where every adult male and female member had a voice upon all questions brought before it.” “The women were the great power among the clans,” he copies into his notebook.^[19] The same text inspired Engels to refer in The Origin of the Family to “the world-historic defeat of the female sex.”

In February 1881 Vera Zasulich initiated a correspondence with Marx on whether the rural commune, the obshchina, could “develop in a socialist direction or whether it was destined to perish as an archaism. Marx wrote several draft replies including a lengthy consideration of common property in history, as a constitutive form (assembly, kinship, clan), and in various ecologies of forest, pasture, meadow. He concluded “that the commune is the fulcrum for social regeneration in Russia.”^[20]

“The rebuilding, whether it comes now or a century later, will and must go back to the basic principles of Reconstruction in the United States during 1867-1876 – Land, Light, and Leading for slaves black, brown, yellow and white, under a dictatorship of the proletariat”^[21] It is not quite synonymous with ‘proletarian hegemony.’ The values of the material institutions of society have to change to become the ground of government. Hence, the decisive importance of the northern “schoolmarms” or the women who went south during Reconstruction to arm former slaves with the tools of reading, writing, and criticism.

Marx did not publish his Critique of the Gotha Program. But five years after he wrote it the French socialist, Jules Guesde, visited him in London in May 1880 and asked him to write the preamble to the program of the French Parti Ouvrier or Worker’s Party. Marx did so in a dense sentence with many thoughts: the productive class will emancipate all human beings without distinction of sex or race. They can be free only by possessing the means of production collectively. This must be accomplished by revolutionary action which may include universal suffrage as an instrument of emancipation rather than deception. The aim is “the political and economic expropriation of the capitalist class and the return to community of all the means of production….”

Here is the commons, here is democracy and universal suffrage, here the phrase “return to the community” implies something lost or expropriated. The term community refers to the collective, cooperative social forms which Marx was studying at the time (the Iroquois, the obshchina, Algeria) or what we might call the commons. It is not the state, the market, or the nation. The door is always open for the “real movement.”

Labor is organized by capital to work. When labor, employed or unemployed, organizes for itself it becomes a class and thus able to save its soul. So, the four structures of capitalism and their wicked ways – white supremacy, patriarchy, settler colonialism, and privatization – have caused risings among black and brown people, women, indigenous peoples, and the rebels against extinctions. The immanent possibility arises of these insurgencies becoming components of “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things….” This is not just an electoral or economic process. We can pluck the living flower to recreate the commons.

Ann Arbor, Turtle Island 2020.

This essay forms the “afterword” to PM Press’s forthcoming edition and new translation of Marx’s “Critique of the Gotha Program.”

------

Notes in Link above

The United States is not a Democracy. ~~. Ben Hiller

https://mronline.org/2020/11/04/119166/

~~ posted for Collectivist ~~

The United States boasts one of the most farcical democratic systems to have been invented. The country’s constitution is an eighteenth-century relic penned by merchants and slave owners, amendments to which can be blocked by as few as 13 states representing less than 4 percent of the population. Its Supreme Court, conservative by nature and stacked with tenured-for-life justices, provides an institutional anti-majoritarian check on the popular will.

Its Senate, the more powerful of the two wings of the Congress, represents states, and thereby territory, rather than people. The weight of a vote in the least populous state is currently 68 times greater than one cast in the most populous. A minority of the population elect more than 80 percent of senators, thereby giving greater national influence to those living in rural areas. It is “the most powerful source of institutional racism in American life”, writes New York magazine columnist Jonathan Chait.

The roughly 2.7 million people living in Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, and North Dakota, who are overwhelmingly white, have the same number of Senators representing them as the 110 million or so people living in California, Texas, Florida, and New York, who are quite diverse.

Presidential elections are conducted through a state-based electoral college system that, again, gives disproportionate influence to smaller, more rural states at the expense of the urban working class. Even then, tens of millions of working-class people are disenfranchised in various ways. There’s weekday voting, which makes it harder to get to polling stations. There’s polling station removal to make queues longer, and polling station relocation to make them harder to reach—usually taking them from Black or Latino areas and putting them far away, in a place not serviced by public transport. There’s the scourge of systematic gerrymandering—the process through which politicians choose their own voters by drawing the district boundaries. (In 2018, for example, Republicans won nearly two-thirds of the seats in the Wisconsin state assembly, despite receiving a minority of the votes.)

There are voter purges—just wiping people from the electoral rolls—and measures to make it more difficult to register. There’s denial of citizenship and therefore voting rights for up to 10 million predominantly Latino workers and denial of statehood for Puerto Rico, which means people there don’t get representation in the Congress. And there’s the disenfranchisement of those with felony convictions—more than 6 million people, disproportionately Black.

To top it all off, the federal government, the state governments, the local governments, the governorships and the mayorships are tightly controlled by a 166-year-old capitalist party duopoly dominated by corporate finance. No third party in all that time has been able to loosen the grip of the capitalist class over the machinery of “democracy”—no socialist party, no social democratic party, no labour party, no communist party.

“The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy”, professors Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page concluded in a 2014 article published in Perspectives on politics, the journal of the American Political Science Association. “In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule … When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose.”

It’s no wonder that progressives in the United States talk about the need for a democratic revolution. Yet, while you have to scoff at the conceit of US politicians proclaiming their system the greatest democracy on earth, addressing the problems outlined above would not solve the underlying issue. Even countries whose electoral systems are less imperfect than the US model are beset by the same fundamental flaw: no matter who is elected to the parliament, congress or assembly— and no matter who becomes prime minister, chancellor or president—most of the consequential decisions about how society operates are made by the people who own or control the wealth. Those people are largely unaccountable and make up a small minority of the population.

For example, the top twelve U.S. billionaires have a combined wealth of more than US$1 trillion. While those people buy influence and bankroll the campaigns of politicians across the country, that’s actually not the main thing. When you look at the names on the list, you can start to see the tremendous social power they exert—not through having money, but through running companies.

There’s Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon and the Washington Post, Bill Gates of Microsoft, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Tesla’s Elon Musk, Steve Ballmer, owner of the National Basketball Association, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and the Walton family, owners of the world’s largest retailer, Walmart. And there are more than 600 other billionaires, not to mention the multimillionaires who sit on corporate boards or are the CEOs of the major corporations.

They control the media, the manufacturing businesses, the transport companies, the electricity supply and distribution, the telecommunications infrastructure, agriculture and horticulture—collectively, they own and control everything needed to keep society functioning. They, and their hundreds of thousands of managers, choose what gets produced and where it gets produced. They choose who gets hired and who gets fired. Through their investment decisions, they choose whether the electricity is generated from renewable sources or from fossil fuels. They choose what is printed in the newspapers and what gets broadcast on TV. They control the development of the cities, deciding what gets built there and who gets to live where.

No-one voted to give them all this control. And regardless of who wins the next election, they will remain in charge. Whether it’s Donald Trump or Joe Biden, Walmart workers will still go to work the next day for the same shitty pay and the same shitty health care. Workers at Amazon won’t get extra breaks. Cleaners won’t get holiday pay, or a wage high enough to take one. Homeless people won’t all of a sudden find themselves in accommodation. The richest 1 percent of the population will still control about 40 percent of the wealth.

And the state over which the politicians are said to rule will not change in the least. The heavily armed police will still roam the streets, protecting the property of the wealthy and targeting the poor and racial minorities. Blacks will still be locked in prison at alarming rates. The US military will still be stationed in dozens of countries, the Central Intelligence Agency will still destabilise democratically elected governments around the world if they don’t follow Washington’s line and the national security state will continue to spy on people everywhere.

In reality, the people who do all the work to make society function—garbage collectors, cooks and cleaners, nurses and bus drivers, shelf stackers and agricultural workers, factory hands and construction workers—have almost no say over the fundamentals. If that’s to change, the U.S., and the rest of the world, need, not just a democratic revolution, but a social revolution.

That will mean extending democracy into the economy, so those who do the work get a say over what is produced and for whom. After all, the resources of the planet—the land, the minerals, the waterways, the science and technology that are the result of centuries of collective human endeavour—should be there for the benefit of all, not a privileged few.

Are there going to be more penthouses and condos for the wealthy, or more public housing and hospitals? Will there be another golf course, or a public park? Should ever more tollways be built, or should there be a massive public transit system that everyone can use? Should we keep using coal for electricity, or should those workers be given different jobs as we make more solar cells? How should cities be built in the first place? Do we need all those McDonalds and other takeaway shops, or can we turn most of them into public childcare centres and community kitchens since they already have cooking facilities and playgrounds?

All these questions and many more should be answered by the people who do all the work, not by the minority who have accumulated or been born into wealth. Only then could we say that we live in a democratic society—one totally responsive to the needs of the majority of the population, because it is run by them.

PRIVATIZING THE COMMON GOOD: THE 21ST-CENTURY ENCLOSURES ARE HERE ~~ Ashley Dawson

https://www.hamptonthink.org/read/privatizing-the-common-good-the-21st-century-enclosures-are-here

~~ posted for Collectivist~~

Fossil capital has been granted immense power, producing life-giving heat and light but also plunging communities into darkness when they fail to return outsize profits. In 2011, DTE Energy, the investor-owned utility (IOU) that controls southeast Michigan’s energy infrastructure, repossessed one thousand streetlights from Highland Park, a city in the larger metropolis of Detroit. The city was left in the dark. Like many other Black-majority cities across Michigan, Highland Park was struggling at the time with capital flight and spiraling levels of austerity. Once home to Ford and Chrysler auto assembly plants and the well-paying jobs that they generated, Highland Park had seen its fortunes crash in the 1990s and the 2000s as the automakers shipped jobs abroad.

Now, half of the residents of Highland Park had trouble paying their monthly electric bills, and a quarter had experienced a shutoff of gas or electricity—often during Michigan’s cold winter months. When DTE took the lights, Highland Park owed $4 million in electricity bills, a situation likely to be aggravated by the rate hikes the utility wanted to impose to support its existing coal-fired power plants, to build new fossil fuel plants, and to pay the utility’s chief executive his $5.4-million annual salary. The repossession of Highland Park’s streetlights was part of a broader crisis of public assets: across Michigan, communities struggled as control of key public infrastructure like the water department and the school system was stripped from them by undemocratic emergency-management czars.

The taking of the light in Highland Park is part of a new, global round of enclosures in which common assets are stripped from the public. For radical critics of capitalism such as the historians Silvia Federici and Peter Linebaugh and the geographer David Harvey, enclosures are one of the dominant forms of contemporary capital accumulation. According to these activist scholars, critics of capitalism have mistakenly followed Marx’s analysis of what he famously termed “primitive accumulation,” which sees enclosure as a kind of original violence that kick-started the capitalist system. Enclosure, Marx argued, was foundational to capitalism since it allowed powerful landlords to accumulate wealth by dispossessing the peasantry of the land they farmed collectively, replacing such feudal social relations with more lucrative forms of enterprise such as the production of wool.

As the 16th-century English philosopher and statesman Sir Thomas Moore put it, “sheep, which are naturally mild, and easily kept in order, may be said now to devour men and unpeople, not only villages, but towns.” The accumulated capital produced by enclosure of common lands was used to support expansion of industrial production domestically and of the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism abroad. Enclosure thus refers to a global process of violent extraction. But the key thing is that enclosure did not cease once common lands in Britain had all been opened up and capitalism had been established as an economic and political system.

Contrary to what Marx argued, the predatory stripping of common assets around the world never stopped. In fact, it has intensified. The neoliberal era that began in the 1980s has seen a massive expansion of attacks on the commons, both in the form of the shifting of formerly public assets such as school systems into the private sphere in rich countries, and through extensive land grabs in areas hitherto relatively autonomous from the capitalist world system such as parts of sub-Saharan Africa.

Resistance to the new enclosures has become a central feature of social struggles over the last few decades. For instance, in 2000, the people of the city of Cochabamba in Bolivia rose up after the World Bank insisted that the government hand over control of municipal water supplies to Aguas del Tunari, a conglomerate controlled by the US-based multinational Bechtel Corporation. The new owner of Cochabamba’s water demanded steep and sudden rate increases of double or more for poor consumers in order to finance the double-digit profits demanded by the companies. The conglomerate even proposed to tax water that people caught in barrels as the rain flowed off their roofs.

A just transition to renewable energy will require a shift away from today’s energy-as-commodity regime.

The people of Cochabamba rose up in protest, occupying the center of the city and forming a grassroots participatory organization called the Coordinator for the Defense of Water and Life that shut the city down and demanded a rollback of the water privatization measures. Under pressure from the water conglomerate and international authorities, the Bolivian government declared martial law and tried to suppress the protests with riot troops, measures leading to mass arrests, hundreds of injuries, and the death of a teenage boy as conflicts erupted on the barricades the citizens had set up around the city. Protesters held fast in the face of state repression, however, and on April 10, 2000, the Bolivian government reached an agreement with the Coordinadora that ultimately not only reversed the privatization of the city’s water but also catapulted Evo Morales and his Movement for Socialism (MAS) into power in the country.

This victory for popular mobilization in Bolivia was a key moment in resistance to the new round of capitalist enclosures carried out during the age of neoliberal hyper-capitalism. The defense of the commons through new forms of participatory organizing resonated around the globe in the following years. In 2013, for instance, Turkish activists protesting government plans to pave over Istanbul’s Taksim Gezi Park described the park itself and various other urban spaces that the government’s neoliberal policies tried to confiscate for private profit as a “commons.” The Turkish activists called the form of self-government developed during their occupation of Gezi a “commune,” one that involved not just a sit-in but also food distribution, a medical center, and an autonomous media collective.

Grounded in a determination to defend common space from enclosure, the Gezi protest shared a commoning ethos not just with the Cochabamba Water Wars but also with similar movements around the world, from the resistance of the Zapatistas to the neoliberal tenets of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in Mexico beginning in 1994, to the Occupy movement that began in New York and spread across the United States, and to the Indignados movement in Madrid in 2011. In addition to resisting enclosure, these movements also experimented with new forms of popular sovereignty, animated by a fierce critique of the blindness to inequality that characterizes liberal democracy and the regime of private property rights on which it is founded. New structures of governance were developed in global movements founded on the idea of the people as an egalitarian collective with a mandate to rule in order to bring about social transformation.

These experiments reached their highest point with the emergence of what might be termed the social movement party in countries such as Bolivia and Brazil, but the effort to develop egalitarian, non-bureaucratic ways of organizing societies has been a key feature of the Left in recent decades. And, as feminist scholars such as Silvia Federici have documented, contemporary commoning movements crucially include the fight for communal, egalitarian control over material needs linked to social reproduction such as housing, food preparation, child rearing, sex and procreation, and even the reproduction of collective memories.

These radical experiments have exciting implications for the struggle for energy democracy. For example, when the power company came to strip them of their light, the residents of Highland Park took power into their own hands in ways that built on the logic of popular sovereignty developed in global commoning movements. DTE Energy had consistently used political donations (based on those elevated rates) and lobbying to stymie efforts to establish local ownership of clean energy in Michigan. Now it was taking away the power supplied by dirty coal plants.

Faced with this threat, citizens of Highland Park established Soulardarity, a community-based organization that fights for collectively owned streetlights, energy production, and equitable development. Soulardarity not only brings light back to Highland Park, it generates the power to run streetlights from the sun. Soulardarity produces what one observer calls “visionary infrastructure.” And it provides local folks with jobs building and maintaining this new solar infrastructure. Through the organization’s PowerUP program, the community is able to purchase solar power in bulk and at reasonable rates, and to deploy tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of solar infrastructure in the community. But this is not just about transformation of the community’s physical infrastructure: it is also about broader social transformation in Highland Park.

Soulardarity is a democratic, community-governed membership organization that aims to educate Highland Park residents about what autonomous control of power or energy democracy should look like, and to advocate for community ownership, transparency, and environmental sustainability across the region. Soulardarity advocates for a Community Ownership Power Administration (COPA) as a vital element of a Green New Deal in the United States. Like the Rural Electrification Administration that brought electricity to farms across the country during the New Deal in the 1930s, COPA would provide finance and technical capacity to help local communities across the country make the transition to renewable energy. As Jackson Koeppel of Soulardarity explains, COPA would give municipalities, counties, states, and tribal authorities the legal authority and the funding mechanisms that would allow them to “terminate their contacts with investor-owned utilities, buy back the energy grid to form a public or cooperative utility, and invest in a resilient, renewable system.”

In the introduction to their collection of essays on the US movement for energy democracy, Denise Fairchild and Al Weinrub contrast corporate models of decarbonization with the forms of renewable energy being fought for by organizations like Soulardarity. For Fairchild and Weinrub, the former are oriented around the growth imperative of capitalism and are characterized by “a transition to industrial-scale, carbon-free resources without challenging the growth of energy consumption, material consumption, rates of capital accumulation, and concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few.”

The centralized nature of power generation and distribution in the era of fossil capitalism has not only led to significant waste, with average losses of 8 to 15 percent of power generated as a result of far-flung transmission lines. It has also helped to make energy invisible and unconscious for many ratepayers, while subjecting others to heightened environmental and health damages, harms that track closely along lines of residential segregation and racialized inequality in the United States. Corporate-owned renewable energy is not likely to challenge this history.

By contrast, Fairchild and Weinrub argue, the decentralized renewable energy model fosters community-based renewable energy development that “allows for the new economic and ecologically sound relationships needed to address the current economic and climate crisis.” Such decentralization of power, they suggest, is facilitated by the distributed nature of renewable resources: “solar energy, wind, geothermal energy, energy conservation, energy efficiency, energy storage, and demand response systems are resources that can be found in all communities,” and consequently provide a foundation for “community-based development of energy resources at the local level through popular initiatives.”

Fairchild and Weinrub’s advocacy of decentralized renewable energy is thus predicated on both the material characteristics of renewable energies and the forms of radical democracy that they hope will facilitate and result from a just transition. For them, transition is about community empowerment rather than simply decarbonization of the grid, as important as the latter may be in the struggle to avoid climate meltdown.

The question of the energy commons is fundamental to the fight for a collective future.

Writing in Fairchild and Weinrub’s collection of essays, Cecilia Martinez, director of the Center for Earth, Energy, and Democracy, argues that a just transition to renewable energy will require a shift away from today’s energy-as-commodity regime. Martinez suggests that energy democracy requires the construction of an energy commons. What models exist to support the institution and collective governance of such an energy commons, one that diverges radically from today’s private property–based regimes of energy control and ownership? For Martinez, the first step is to recognize that energy is not so much a physical object, but rather a “vast array of natural interactions and phenomena for societal use.”

While energy might derive from natural phenomena all ultimately grounded in the harnessing of solar power, it is inescapably rooted in the social forms and infrastructures developed by humans to exploit solar energy. It is about forms of collective power that are active: in other words, about commoning rather than about some pre-given and static commons. How might energy be regulated in a more egalitarian manner? Martinez alludes briefly in her essay to the legal structures created over the last few decades to establish a global commons outside the control of any particular nation: founded on centuries-old legal paradigms governing the high seas, today’s global commons also includes the atmosphere, Antarctica, and outer space.

Martinez also draws on the pioneering economist Elinor Ostrom to argue that diverse cultures around the world and across history have established institutions resembling neither the bourgeois nation-state nor capitalist markets to govern resource systems. Martinez points to indigenous governance models of commoning founded on reciprocity, cooperation, and respect not only between humans but also among humans and the more-than-human world.

What are the conditions for the creation of a new world based on the energy commons? The egalitarian governance systems and legal paradigms discussed by Cecilia Martinez are helpful here. The particular material characteristics of modern renewables such as solar and wind power distinguish them from fossil fuels like coal and oil, but to what extent do these specific material forms, which derive directly from solar power and its effect on atmospheric systems, make for a new, commons-based energy regime that might be termed “Solarity”? What forms of collective, egalitarian governance can the movement for energy democracy draw on as it seeks to challenge the centralized paradigms of energy generation and ownership of the fossil capitalist regime? Do legal paradigms already exist to help community-based organizations like Soulardarity escape from the clutches of fossil capital and adopt solar power on a mass basis? What are the limits of these legal paradigms and what juridical innovations might address these limits?

These questions all relate to much broader struggles to establish new, revolutionary forms of popular sovereignty to defend and extend the commons, but they have a particular import for the fight for energy democracy. The struggle for a rapid and just energy transition is at the core of broader struggles for an exit from today’s trajectory toward social degradation and planetary ecocide. The question of the energy commons is therefore fundamental to the fight for a collective future.