----- Original Message -----
From: "Doug Henwood" <dhenwood at panix.com>
> Chuck0 wrote:
> >Let me add that one of the most important medical advances in the 20th
> >century was simply better sanitation.
> Made possible by public health specialists, civil engineers, and
> trash collectors. If they'd refused to work, would we be surrounded
> by garbage?
This is not a faraway anarchist utopia point, actually. South Africa's most compelling struggle is the attempt to unify well-organised, militant municipal workers (120,000 in the main union) and residents of Soweto and other townships, who are together exploring non-alienating ways of fixing the extraordinary leaks in the water and sewage pipes, in a way that does not involve a big French or British water company privatising the local water system, and that does reduce low-income people to pit-latrine sanitation in the neo-apartheid mode that the World Bank has been advising. We're regularly posting research on this kind of praxis, at http://www.queensu.ca/msp
Who's coming to visit us for the Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development in late August this year, by the way? The anti-capitalist convergence and our alternative petit-bourgeois-intellectual summit will be very hospitable, and you'll see lots of sites of struggle over municipal water/sewerage!