Conclusions

The concluding chapter vindicates the author’s outspoken position against water privatization as an ethical and political statement prompted by the outrageous deterioration of basic democratic rights caused by neoprivatist water politics worldwide. It emphasizes the fact that the neoprivatist political project is grounded on undemocratic, neoimperialist, and neocolonialist strategies often imposed on developing countries through authoritarian or subjugated democratically elected governments and infamous civil-military dictatorships, though its nefarious impacts have also been a major driver in the deterioration of democratic politics in the core capitalist democracies. It emphasizes that, despite prevailing myths, ideological claims, and fake truths, both historical privatist politics and their contemporary reincarnation in the neoprivatist political project are not a “private initiative” or a “free “choice”, they have always been sanctioned, implemented, or imposed by states. To a large extent, these politics represent, to put it bluntly, a radically dehumanizing project of the species that negates the most basic rights historically recognized and the civilized arrangements developed by humans. The chapter argues that key significant historical lessons on the matter continued to be ignored or negated by governments, international financial development organizations, and other relevant power holders, which constitutes a major obstacle to attempts oriented at the substantive democratization of water politics and management. The chapter stresses that the book rejects a teleological, deterministic understanding of the long-term processes discussed and takes distance from apocalyptic predictions about humanity’s future. Rather it takes a position in support of the complex, multidimensional, and multifarious global struggles for the substantive democratization of human societies, taking water struggles as a privileged empirical ground and viewpoint for studying the teleonomic processes characterizing the construction of substantively democratic socio-ecological orders for our common future.