Wasting the Nation.indd - Groundwork

Chapter 7: The question of the futurecan collapse overnight. Beyond that, people are trying to improve their position, andare constrained to do so, within the system that makes ever more people waste.The crisis of capital sharpens the question of politics. The articulation of the strugglesof waste pickers within broader movements of the urban poor gestures towards apolitics capable of responding to this moment. People’s struggles around waste are apart of what Harvey calls the struggle for ‘the right to the city’.To claim the right to the city in the sense I mean it here is to claim somekind of shaping power over the processes of urbanization, over the ways inwhich our cities are made and re-made and to do so in a fundamental andradical way. [Harvey 2008: 2]In the neo-liberal period since the late 1970s, the making, unmaking and remaking ofthe city, and of the hinterland it makes of the country, has been driven by global financecapital. It has impoverished people in the country as much as in the city while creatingglobally connected enclaves of ‘world class’ affluence. The battle for the city cannottherefore be a parochial affair but it is also always the struggle in each country district,town and city. It is in this context that the question of waste – who makes it, whoworks in it, where it goes and why it is produced in the first place – carries a politicalcharge that goes beyond access to markets as well as beyond narrowly technical ‘green’solutions. It challenges trade unions and social movements to join forces in struggleand to respond to the question of the future. If capital is terminated in the strugglesthat intensify over the next decades, what will be the base, to succeed the corporation,for organising production and doing so democratically and without waste?Finally, waste appears as capital’s unadvertised testimony. It is part of the ecologicaldebt owed by the twin powers of capitalism and imperialism to present and futuregenerations of people.Wasting the Nation - groundWork - 189 -