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Title: The Invasion of Waste
Author: Miguel Amorós
Date: May 6, 2015
Language: en
Topics: community, development, environment
Source: Retrieved on 11th May 2021 from https://libcom.org/library/invasion-waste-%E2%80%93-miguel-amor%C3%B3s
Notes: Transcript of a talk scheduled to be given at Otros (Valencia), in opposition to the planned construction of an animal waste treatment facility at Pobla del Duc, May 6, 2015. Translated in May 2015 from the Spanish translation of the original text, which was written in Valencian, provided by the author.

Miguel Amorós

The Invasion of Waste

Nothing might seem less natural, but the fact is that, now that the rule

of the economy is total and complete, what grows best in the countryside

is not vegetation, but waste treatment facilities. Nowadays, the main

purpose of the land is not to provide food to the nearby urban zones,

for, with massive industrialization of agriculture and the relocation of

agricultural production, the local farm has ceased to be a profitable

proposition and, consequently, the small farmer’s way of life has become

unviable. Instead, in view of the fact that the urban agglomerations are

incapable of entirely eliminating all their wastes, the countryside’s

potential to serve as a place to dump toxic substances has been noted

and exploited. The profits became very tempting, which drove a horde of

predatory businessmen and corrupt politicians to cash in on the

transport, burial and maintenance of all kinds of industrial wastes and

toxic by-products, stomping all over the territory like a bull in a

china shop. Whereas traditional economies recycled their leftovers, the

market economy endlessly accumulates wastes that have to be put

somewhere. It does not transform them into raw materials, but converts

them into immortal commodities.

In a super-urbanized society, rural space has lost all its autonomy. It

is not a world apart, with its own customs, traditions and norms. It is

an extension of the urban world, a reserve suitable for all kinds of

operations—all, that is, except precisely for small-scale agriculture.

Today, the uses of the countryside are dictated from the urban

agglomerations of the great cities—which are now often called

conurbations—places where investors, consultants, urban planners and

politicians jointly draft development plans that respond to interests

that are alien to the reality of the small-scale farmer. Danger always

comes from the urban jungle. It is the oligarchy of the city that is

planning the new function and the territory’s new fate, which

effectively has nothing to do with agriculture. The countryside is only

a periphery, an undeveloped void or a quaint landscape that passively

awaits its degrading exploitation. Thus, from the point of view of the

globalized economy, it is not infrastructure projects, real estate

speculation or the tourism or entertainment industries that are

superfluous, all of which are destructive of nature and cropland; it is

the cultivators themselves who are superfluous. This is not because

agriculture is no longer productive enough: in this respect the

territory is the same as it was before. It is just that its population,

its municipalities, its public services, its rural ways of life, and

even its vegetation, etc., are burdensome, and expensive to maintain. If

the territory is deprived of these elements, its fate is sealed.

The economic needs that rule society not only increase the

disequilibrium between the conurbation and the territory, lay waste to

the land and artificialize life, but also bring about circumstances

where this disequilibrium is the conditio sine qua non for meeting those

needs. The crisis of the territory is more than just a reflection of the

urban world, it is the other face of the urban crisis. In an

unprecedented manner, the race for productivity gains and profits have

entered into conflict with the territory, after having first ravaged the

city. We can thank the separation between real social needs and the

voracious hunger for profit for the acceleration of the greenhouse

effect, acid rain, forest fires, pollution, the destruction of flora and

fauna…. The typical aberrations of the urban lifestyle, such as

pathological individualism, absurd dietary fads, novel diseases, the

uncontrolled mechanization of life, etc., are now common in the rural

areas. The flight forward on the part of the statist civilization of the

market has entered into conflict with human health, imposing ever more

insane consumerist lifestyles on the population. At this time, the

capitalist solution for all problems passes through the transformation

of the territory into a market, or more precisely, into a market of

markets: a market that includes the market of the earth, the natural

environment, vacation resorts, second homes, pollution, logistics, the

“renewables” industry and … waste treatment and disposal. The frenetic

urban lifestyle constantly absorbs fuel, motor vehicles, plastics,

chemical products, cement and industrial food, all of which pose serious

problems with respect to the disposal of sewage and other waste. And at

the same time a prosperous market opportunity arises, that of the market

for waste treatment and disposal.

What they call “private initiative” is nothing but the battle tactic

used by the forces of the economy against the society that they

parasitize. In consideration of the havoc they have wreaked, we can

verify that this trend reflects a veritable war in which the territory

is getting the worst of it. If, by chance, the population does not

willingly consent to the immediate enrichment of a handful of

unscrupulous businessmen, the decision-makers accuse it of being against

“development”, the official alibi for the progress of disaster. The fact

that they are supported by finance, the communications media and the

political parties makes it clear that the enemy of the territory and of

its people is composed of not just a handful of savage entrepreneurs; it

is a whole system of domination, whose mainstays are Capital and the

State.

Faced with the most destructive consequences of the economics and

politics of the market, world leaders have proposed, at various summit

meetings, a pact between the economy and ecological concerns, expressed

in such formulas as “sustainable development” and a “new territorial

culture”. In view of the limited resources of the planet and the

unlimited requirements of economic growth—the two poles of an

irresolvable contradiction—they concluded that business must be “green”

or it will not exist, that is, business must deduct the environmental

cost of its production process from its profits. The corporations

affected by this development had to take this into account in their own

plans. This was how the environmental crises of the capitalist regime

were isolated, reducing the territorial question to an environmental, a

conservationist and, in the final analysis, a political problem, and, at

the same time, concealing its economic and social nature. What the

defenders of sustainability are really defending is development, which

they never question and, as a result, they also defend the political and

economic regime that promotes this same kind of development. If they

issue appeals to institutions, they do so not in order to abolish the

dictatorship of the economy, but to impose some minimal conditions on

its operations. Their realism does not aspire to liberate civil society

from the yoke of capital, but to make it more bearable: they want to

change some aspects of the system in order to save the system as a

whole. From their perspective, institutions—which, when all is said and

done, are nothing but the political-administrative form of the

market—acquire a neutral character that they have never actually

possessed. The decision-making power, that is, the general will, which

cannot possibly be exercised outside of counter-institutions of

self-government such as popular assemblies and neighborhood communities,

ends up being usurped by self-appointed representatives of ambiguous

platforms, which are neither fish nor fowl, or by politicians of one

party or another, whose mission is to drown the defense of the territory

in the legal and parliamentary swamp.

If we want a harmonious relation between the urban world and the

territory, we have to reconcile the two realities by reestablishing

their erstwhile complementary functions. In order to find the

equilibrium between the city and the rural world, we need to repopulate

the countryside, recover communal goods, restore customary rights and,

above all, dismantle the conurbations. The establishment of a

communitarian way of life that is protected from the imperatives of

industrialization must be born from the ruins of the stockyard-type

population centers that are still called cities, although they are not

real cities. The reign of freedom comes after a process of ruralization

and de-industrialization capable of restoring its lost autonomy to a

horizontally reorganized society. This means the end of the market and

the return to the domestic and uncommodified economy of needs and

desires. The libertarian utopia will not be built if its construction is

not informed by an anti-developmentalist perspective.

While principles and final goals are necessary to prevent struggles from

being recuperated by the dominant system and to prevent its defeats from

being transformed into victories for the greenwashed economy, tactics

will have to concretize the guidelines of everyday action in a practical

manner, confronting particular local conflicts with the means at their

disposal, which are often meager. While it is obvious that the defense

of territory has an unequivocally anti-capitalist aspect, since it

stands in the way, with greater or lesser effectiveness, of the

atrocities of economic development, it is also obvious that the forces

that are currently involved in this defense do not have a clear

understanding of this factor. The question of social conflict will not

be clearly perceived except at the end of a series of defensive battles.

It is necessary to mobilize the largest possible number of people—many

of whom are trapped in conurbations—against harmful or useless projects

if any attempt is to be made to cultivate a collective subject with

sufficient discernment and power, first, to bring a halt to destructive

plans, and then, going on the offensive by way of the desertion of the

urban centers, to occupy the rural zones and implement communitarian

projects.