Efficiency

Naomi Klein was on Democracy Now! awhile back deconstructing what happened in Texas during the ice storm when the power grid failed. Apparently Texas is one of the few states that separated its electrical system from the national one—you know, the Lone Star State—using the rationale that it was made more efficient by reducing regulation and redundancy. But as Klein pointed out, when reducing redundancy, if that system fails it means there is no backup system to fall back on.

Oh, that nasty word, efficiency. It’s been the bete noire of the acequia system as well, which I’ve written about many times in La Jicarita. In my first article I wrote: “Ditch banks are cleared of all vegetation and more and bigger culverts carry the water more ‘efficiently’ despite the loss of riparian habitat and groundwater recharge. Ditch fees rise every year due to increased payments for cleaning, maintenance, and improvements that are decided and implemented by the commissioners, often without the approval or oversight of the rest of the parciantes.” In another article “Machine Dug Acequias” I was in a tither about coming home to find my upper acequia had been machine dug, rather than human cleaned, to a width of six feet and argued, instead of using machines, “What if we spent that money to hire folks in the community who need work and can still use a shovel?”

How does this relate to Klein’s redundancy argument? It’s all about labor and demographics. Without maintaining a work force willing to clean the ditches we have no backup system when we don’t get the funding to buy the machines and the bigger culverts that parciantes can’t afford in the first place. We’ve already experienced our kids’ mass migration from our small villages throughout el norte to Albuquerque, Española, and out of state, to find better paying jobs than their parents had. Maybe more of them would have stayed if more of their parents had themselves committed to digging the ditches instead of hiring peones to do it for them, impressing upon them that without establishing the viability of small scale agriculture we may lose the water rights parciantes have put to beneficial use for generations. Now, with no kids around and years of machine dug acequias we don’t even have the redundancy of peones who were rounded up every year to fill in the gaps.

But as author Anna Wiener in her deconstruction of the tech industry in Uncanny Valley so succinctly puts it: “Efficiency, the central value of software, was the consumer innovation of a generation.” You can substitute any number of things for “software” here: houses, cars, washing machines, books (Amazon), music, computers, all of our consumer hardware that makes our lives more efficient so we can become even better consumers. Neoliberal Reaganomics was based on the idea that the market’s only allegiance is to the consumer, that every encounter is a market transaction that makes things cheaper and more accessible. Efficiency makes sure that neither regulation nor redundancy can interfere in those transactions (like getting your package from Amazon Prime the next day). The end result, as Tim Koechlin puts it in his article “ Neoliberalism doesn’t care: “Neoliberalism is the neglect of the commons. Neoliberalism is the denial of the commons. Neoliberalism is the insistence that protecting the commons is wasteful and inefficient. Neoliberalism is the sale of the commons to the highest bidder (my emphasis).”