Water Struggles as Resistance to Neoliberal Capitalism: A Time of Reproductive Unrest

Water struggles as resistance to neoliberal capitalism is an important intervention into social reproduction theory and eco-socialist debates. It provides a timely analysis of the role of expropriation in the current global water crisis and makes a persuasive argument for understanding class as an emergent process constituted through struggle. This book places struggles over water within an account of capitalist expropriation. It examines the Irish water charges protests and resistance to unconventional gas in Australia, exploring the tension between life-making and profit-making on the new water commodity frontier. Struggles over water are about more than access or management of a resource. What is at stake are the social relations and institutions that allow water grabs to occur. Taking up David Harvey’s conception of a spatial fix, the book shows how crises move through the conditions that make capitalist accumulation possible. Working at the points of contradiction, struggles over water both interrupt processes of capitalist reproduction and open a space for subversive rationalities. In Australia and Ireland, what has emerged is a time of reproductive unrest. 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.

Pagina's: 234, Paperback, Manchester University Press