A small farmer in western Colorado dusts off his cap after climbing out from beneath a 1937 Massey Ferguson tractor. It is broken down in the middle of the field where he is sowing winter wheat. He looks up to the mountain, now in early October, and he sees that the peaks are bald where the snowfields should be. Even in the shadow of the mountain, there are only the grey scree fields falling into dry runoff streams and tributaries to the reservoir that supplies the valley farms and ranches with water. He remembers his 98-year-old father saying, “Son, there’ll be brawls and tussles over whiskey, but there’ll be a war over water.”
The war has already been waged. Water is the essence of life, the most basic resource second only to the air we breathe. And as of November 2020, it is now a registered commodity of “world trade.” Brokers on the New York Stock Exchange sell shares of water to the highest bidder. The ruling class has grasped the new frontier of private property. In New York and throughout the eastern United States, water roars up from subway tunnels and floods city streets. It rushes in from the sea and from rivers. It bubbles up from the many underground aquifers. In the west, meanwhile, the rivers are gagged in canals, dammed up and piped to the cities of the southwestern states.
The cities’ appetites are insatiable. In the suburbs of Los Angeles, working-class women haul water in any container they can find. They are rationed to the point of reusing dishwater three times over, and once more to launder rags and clothes. In Navajo country, the grandmothers stand under the blazing desert sun by a hand well pump and fill sheepskin bladders, five-gallon buckets, clay pots and galvanized water troughs with mineralized tó for their flocks of sheep and goats. A migrant mother and her three children emerge from the palo verde thicket in Nogales, Arizona with their pallid lips muttering “agua, por favor.”
The Nestlé conglomerate owns the rights to southern California’s watershed. Halliburton and the Koch Brothers control the runoff of the Colorado River basin to its northwestern tributaries. The state of California pipes water from the north to the arid south. China is building aqueducts to supply the zinc mines of Africa. Everywhere we see the globalization of capital, water and its manufactured scarcity bow down to supply-and-demand economics. Our class thirsts in aridity. There is not any extra $30,000 in our pockets to spend on drilling a well another hundred feet deeper into the water table. Big agriculture is creating the world’s largest sinkhole in the Central Valley of California as well as throughout the Midwest where 80 percent of the Oglala aquifer is being pumped out.
Privatization of water by the ruling class affects housing, food, healthcare, jobs and education. They bottle it up and sell it to us at a 300 percent markup. What can be done to bring the capitalist class to a halt? The struggle continues on this frontier where our class must demand water as a human right.
But not only recognizing our obvious need for it to survive, it is useful to think of the water itself as many indigenous people long have, as a spiritual being, having its own rights It is not only our source of life, it is a life-giving source throughout the ecosystem and it can neither be owned, bought, nor sold like chattel. For these reasons and more, lakes, rivers, and aquifers must be granted their own rights. When the fascists claim that “corporations are people too,” they are making an argument for the rights of the ruling class benefited by corporate power. We cannot concede that point. But our class should certainly align with the indigenous perspective that rights be granted to our entire ecosystem’s fundamental life source, extending it to the trillions of life forms included in the ecological web.
This is not just a good idea; it has proven a useful strategy. In 2019, voters in Toledo, Ohio, approved the Lake Erie Bill of Rights (LEBOR), a citizen initiative to amend that city’s charter to stop the constant pollution of marshlands and tributaries in northern Ohio. It was the first law of its kind in the United States.
The use of Big Agriculture’s high-phosphate fertilizers, combined with the misuses of single-crop mega-farms, lack of crop rotation, and the high concentration of cattle waste caused an overly nutrient-rich seepage into the water cycle. It caused toxic algae blooms, which suffocated bodies of water. The result was a domino effect, a chain reaction of environmental havoc. The irreparable damage was bridled by declaring that Lake Erie and its subsequent ecosystems have rights too! (In 2020, a federal judge in Toledo sided with an agribusiness which sued the city after LEBOR’s approval and struck it down as unconstitutional.)
We need to examine the areas of tremendous water waste from the tourism industries (luxury hotels and golf courses) and mining/drilling operations down to landscapers, small farmers and gardeners. Investing in water desalinization technology, in reducing carbon footprints that affect weather patterns all over the world, in a complete and total overhaul of water usage for the survival of our class in these areas where the water now barely trickles. The west depends on the Colorado River as its primary source of fresh water. Before the river can even reach the ocean deltas, it is piped up and sent through aqueducts to supply unsustainably growing cities in the deserts of southern California and the southwest. The same is true for the Sacramento River Valley watershed, the San Joaquin River and their tributaries.
It cannot be understated that all areas of revolutionary struggle boil down to the issue of water. As a class, we are simultaneously fighting for housing for all, healthcare for all, education, employment, and economic security for all. None of these things is possible if we do not focus our revolutionary fervor on this, our most public and fundamental resource after oxygen. Water rights – that is, rights of bodies of water – versus its commodification, is the final and most serious battle to dismantle ruling class control of private property.
Our class’s fighters from the western states to Standing Rock to Flint, Michigan have learned through hard-won experience that we cannot wait for capitalism to collapse underneath its own weight. Demand water as a human right, de-privatize water as a commodity of the rich and powerful. It belongs to us all. RC
January/February 2022. Vol32.Ed1
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
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