Wasting the Nation.indd - Groundwork

Chapter 7: The question of the futureof municipal revenues will also put pressure on planning. Councils are likelyto look for savage cuts in expenditure – even where those cuts result in higherfuture costs even in the short term. Those higher costs, however, may beavoided by simply neglecting services.What the market abandons will not just be about materials reclaimed from waste.It will include mines from which owners will abscond. It will include factories suchas those abandoned by owners – some of which were reclaimed by workers – whenArgentina went broke in 2005. It will include whole areas of towns and cities. Capitalwill defend the shrinking enclaves of value while abandoning whole districts, nationsand regions. In short, left to a declining market, what will appear will be a moreextreme version of what has been produced by the expansion of financialised capitalsince the late 1970s.Financialised capital has relied primarily on ‘accumulation by dispossession’ to managea vast redistribution of wealth from poor to rich – globally and in most countriesNorth and South. The groundWork Reports have identified three ways in which thisworks and environmental injustice is imposed on people:• By polluting them, degrading their environments and coercing labour to workfor less than it costs to live. This is called externalisation because corporationsget a free ride by off-loading costs onto communities, workers, the publicpurse and the environment.• By directly dispossessing them and by privatising common or public goods.This is called enclosure because it eliminates or subordinates non-capitalistsystems of production, so ensuring that all escape routes are closed and peoplecannot survive without capitalism.• By excluding them from the political and economic decisions that lead totheir being polluted or dispossessed.Geographer David Harvey [2005] argues that, during the ‘golden age’ of post warcapitalism up to the 1970s the exploitation of labour was the primary means ofaccumulation and this created a working class politics for ‘expanded reproduction’– for full employment and better paid jobs based on higher levels of growth sustainedthrough increased demand. These gains, however, were largely confined to the FirstWorld and were not shared by Third World workers. Now inequality is growing in allcountries and the promises of development ring hollow. Yet they retain great powerbecause there is no evident escape from dependence on capital: if there are no jobsWasting the Nation - groundWork - 181 -