In her Introduction, Muehlebach outlines how the financial frontier is a struggle over capitalist profit-making and the defence of public goods. In its attempts to maximise profits, the financial sector constantly attempts to destabilize and undermine the public provision of services and goods such as water. Here, as she correctly points out, the public-private partnership is a key strategy. ‘One dedicated to the maximization of profits, the other (at least nominally) to public service. Presented as a partnership, the public-private partnership is a classic frontier ruse where contracts mask expropriation’ (P.25). And yet, she insists that people are not powerless and that there is always space for water movements to contest expropriation in insurgencies. ‘At this frontier, the extraction of wealth from life is met with a resounding affirmation of life as the only form of wealth’ (P.12). This sets the stage for the reminder of the book, in which she traces several successful moments of resistance.
Chapter 1 focuses on the struggles of the Italian water movement around the successful referendum against water privatisation in June 2011 and the subsequent efforts to ensure that the outcomes of that referendum are actually implemented. The chapter explores how the state is crucial in its shift towards an authoritarian democracy to support capital at the financial frontier in general and the vital frontier of water in particular. In a shift to post-democracy, the Italian state has increasingly pushed through restructuring via passing laws by decrees. And yet, the water movement can and has responded to ‘the law of the few’ via ‘the law of the many’ through the referendum as well as its promotion of water as a commons.
In Chapter 2, Muehlebach turns to the struggles in Ireland against the introduction of water charges in addition to the payments for water via general taxation. It covers a struggle, whin which hundreds of thousands of people marched through Dublin in defiance, in which people in direct action physically blocked the installation of water meters and countless people refused to pay the additional water bills. ‘Everywhere the consensus seemed to reign that “when injustice becomes law, rebellion becomes duty”. This chapter is thus not only about violent clarity but about the profoundly generative challenge posed by the people and their barricades’ (P.70).
In turn, Muehlebach analyses in detail the struggles over the remunicipalization of water services in the German city Berlin in Chapter 3. In 1999, the city had part-privatized its water services in a secret deal with Veolia and RWE, guaranteeing a certain amount of profit in contravention of a decision by the Constitutional Court. In a successful referendum in February 2011, water activists of the Berlin Water Table forced authorities to reveal the contents of the secret agreement with the private water corporations. ‘The mere act of revelation represented a public event so humiliating that the ruling Leftist coalition agreed to buy Berlin’ water back’ (P.131). Importantly, in the process water activists ensured the primacy of public law over the secrecy of private corporate law in relation to the governance of collective goods.
What is the ‘just price’ for water? In Chapter 4, Muehlebach analyses how the sending of water bills in the region of Campania in Southern Italy, which charged people retroactively for water they apparently had underpaid over several years, reveals the predatory nature of the capitalist free market. The Mafia played a crucial part in these mechanisms, but as Muehlebach correctly points out, this is not only a specific Italian problem. Criminality always comes to the fore in the maximisation of profits. After all, ‘Berlin’s senate, recall, had – in a backdoor deal – contractually guaranteed private investors their return on investment even as Berlin’s Constitutional Court ruled against it’ (P.152). It is the fully re-municipalized water company Napoli ABC, which revealed the real price of water and thus of life, resulting in much lower bills than elsewhere.
The book concludes with a positive assessment of developments around Eau de Paris, the remunicipalized water services in Paris. However, remunicipalization is not automatically progressive, asserts Muehlebach. Hence, as she already pointed out in her chapter on Berlin, remunicipalization has to be followed by democratization.
This book is exemplary, closely researched and yet very accessible. It reveals the predatory nature of capitalism encroaching ever more on people’s daily life, but it also demonstrates people’s ability to fight back, to ensure priority of the public over the private, of life over profit maximisation. In short, it is also a message of hope. A must read, I most strongly recommend it.
An earlier version of this review was published by the Journal of Anthropological Research, Vol.80/2 (2024).
Andreas Bieler
1 July 2024
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