What the Water Shutoffs Mean to the People in Detroit

August 4, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

In speaking to the situation facing Black and Latino people in the U.S.—mass incarceration and the school-to-prison pipeline, the criminalization and demonization of a whole generation of youth, the overt or just-below-the-surface racism prevalent in society, etc.—Carl Dix of the Revolutionary Communist Party has said what is taking place is a slow genocide that could easily become a fast genocide. This regular feature highlights aspects of this slow genocide.

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You probably have heard about the massive water shutoffs occurring in Detroit. We want to share just a little of what this means to the people of Detroit.

We talked with a friend who lives in the North End—an area that the authorities have announced in their “Detroit Future plan” they intend to “develop.” We will call our friend René. Her experience is far from exceptional—estimates are that more than 150,000 families, or 40 percent of Detroit’s 269,000 households, about 83 percent of whom are African-American—will lose their water.

Very early one morning, René heard noise in front of her house. She looked out her bedroom window and saw her water was about to be turned off. She rushed out of the house in her bare feet and stood over the shutoff valve and refused to move. She defiantly announced that they were not shutting off her water. They could call the police, arrest her, but she wasn’t moving. She had five children in the house and they couldn’t live without water. Her act of defiance earned her a reprieve. The water wasn’t shut off that day. But the truck moved on to the next house, and the house across the street, and the one next to that. René followed the truck down the street, pleading with them not to shut off her neighbors’ water and calling for the workers to defy their orders. But to no avail. Within 45 minutes, 70 percent of the occupied houses in a four-block stretch had their water shut off.

René admits she was behind on her water bill but that she and her husband have slowly been paying down the balance. But money is tight. Her husband was laid off from the auto plants several years ago. Since then he’s been in and out of work and now is working odd jobs. But that’s not true for all of her neighbors. The city claims that they are only shutting off water of people who were two months behind on their bill or owed $150 or more. But René spoke of several of her neighbors who owed $120 and weren’t two months behind. She also knew of people who had their water shut off who were current on their bills. One of these people is Ms. Jones. She is an 85-year-old retired schoolteacher who lives by herself in a house she has owned for decades. Ten days after her water was shut off, she still has no water. Ms. Jones is acutely embarrassed by her current situation. She cannot flush her toilet and the stench in her house is overwhelming. She has taken to wearing diapers because she can no longer use the toilet. Her health is deteriorating from the stress of living without water. She is overwhelmed by the bureaucracy involved in getting her water turned on and is afraid to make a fuss because she is afraid social services will use this as an excuse to remove her from her home and place her in a nursing home, something that terrifies her.

René spoke to her neighbors after their water was shut off. With tears in her eyes she described how people felt alone and isolated. She spoke of the despair people felt after waking up and discovering they were without water. Most people can’t afford to pay their back bills and have their water turned back on. Reconnection fees cost hundreds of dollars. Over the past 10 years, with income plummeting and unemployment skyrocketing, water bills have increased by 119 percent. René described people blaming themselves for being irresponsible because they had “mishandled” their finances; if only they’d been able to give up smoking or had spent less on groceries, or decided not to get their car repaired, they could have paid their water bill.

René told us of the horrible conditions her neighbors are living with. Without water, people are living in unsanitary conditions. They cannot flush their toilets, bathe, or clean their houses. Other than water, she said the biggest need of people is hand sanitizer, bleach, and baby wipes. She pointed out that without water people can’t cook or wash their dishes. People are living off sandwiches and fast food and are beginning to get sick.

René told us of one man who lives in another part of town, the Brightmoor area of Detroit. Even before the city announced the massive water shutoffs, people in this neighborhood had their water shut off. Like René’s neighborhood, in one fell swoop early in the morning almost the entire Brightmoor area was without water. Six weeks after people there lost their water, the man is the only person left on his street. All of his neighbors have moved away, abandoning their houses because they can’t afford to get their water turned back on and they can’t live without water.

René has established her house as a water distribution center. Volunteers from other parts of the city and from the suburbs drop off large containers of water and she and her children distribute it to her neighbors.

Detroit is essentially surrounded by the Great Lakes Basin, which holds one-fifth of the world’s fresh water supply. But once that water is cleaned, oxygenated, and purified, it becomes a commodity that is available only to those who can pay for it. As Bob Avakian has said:

One example that I’ve cited before...is the question of the “right to eat.” Or why, in reality, under this system, there is not a “right to eat.” Now, people can proclaim the “right to eat,” but there is no such right with the workings of this system. You cannot actually implement that as a right, given the dynamics of capitalism and the way in which, as we’ve seen illustrated very dramatically of late, it creates unemployment. It creates and maintains massive impoverishment. (To a certain extent, even while there is significant poverty in the imperialist countries, that is to some degree offset and masked by the extent of parasitism there; imperialism “feeds off” the extreme exploitation of people in the Third World in particular, and some of the “spoils” from this “filter down” in significant ways to the middle strata especially. But, if you look at the world as a whole, capitalism creates and maintains tremendous impoverishment.)

Many, many people cannot find enough to eat and cannot eat in a way that enables them to be healthy—and in general they cannot maintain conditions that enable them to be healthy. So even right down to something as basic as “the right to eat”—people don’t have that right under capitalism. If you were to declare it as a right, and people were to act on this and simply started going to where the food is sold as commodities and declaring “we have a more fundamental right than your right to distribute things as commodities and to accumulate capital—we have a right to eat”—and if they started taking the food, well then we know what would happen, and what has happened whenever people do this: “looters, shoot them down in the street.”

BAsics 1:20

 

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