Water Wars and the Fight for a New Society

Detroit resident Nicole Hill, a single mother, recently told the L.A. Times what it’s like to not have water in your home. “It’s frightening, because you think this is something that only happens somewhere like Africa,” she said. At the time, she had been without water for six weeks.
She is not alone. In April, Detroit set a target of cutting service to 3,000 customers a week who were more than $150 and two months delinquent on their payment, and began cutting people off in April. The city plans to cut off hundreds of thousands of people by the end of the summer. The elderly, children, disabled—it doesn’t matter. If you can’t pay, you get cut off. United Nations officials have pointed to Detroit’s water cut-offs as a violation of both international law and human rights. There is something fundamentally wrong with a system that cannot even guarantee people water in their homes in a modern society.
The truth is the economic system based on private ownership of the factories, offices, banks and other means to produce what we need is breaking down. Technology (the computer and the robot) is replacing labor, meaning the jobs are being wiped out, and the corporations and wealthy investors that own the economic system won’t pay to support labor they don’t need. And as the jobs disappear, markets and opportunities disappear too. The corporations and the elected officials have merged together to manage an economy that benefits these pirate corporations and to suppress any dissent. In Detroit, they want to sell off the Water Department to one of their corporate friends. If they privatize it, water stops being a human need that all have a right to, whether or not you can pay for it. It is another step toward the fascist agenda we see unfolding across the country today, including imposing an unelected and unwanted emergency manager system in Detroit and elsewhere in Michigan.
In Detroit alone, 400,000 manufacturing jobs have disappeared. Forty percent of the city’s people live in poverty. As jobs and businesses vanished, the tax base shrunk. City officials had to choose whether to provide services to the people or pay the Wall Street financiers who hold the city’s debt—and they chose to pay Wall Street. The corporations saw to it that the governor appointed an emergency manager for Detroit that would be friendly to their needs, corporate attorney, Kevyn Orr. He replaced the elected government and reigns over the city as a dictator. His job is to make the city profitable for the corporations again by cutting wages, pensions, services, whatever it takes. Water is on the chopping block too, and the unpaid water bills are seen as “bad debt” that the city needs to take care of to make the system more attractive to Wall Street financiers.
What is happening in Michigan, the heart of the “Rust Belt,” is a forewarning of what to expect in other cities. Human rights to food, water, housing or anything else are no longer important.
As Martin Luther King said, “Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that is two-thirds water?” Today we can produce an abundance of everything we need. The only thing standing in the way of us ending poverty forever is private ownership of the economy. Either we move to a system where we own the means of production and distribute everything according to need, or we starve (or die of thirst) under private property.
A good place to start is to demand that that Detroit turn the water on. Water must be publicly owned and never subjected to private ownership. There is no other way to provide for people.
This article will appear in the August, 2014 edition of the People’s Tribune.