People die in six ways and each is politics: Infrastructure and the possible

Abstract

Critical infrastructure services determine where people can survive and what they can do with their survival. This fact conditions political possibilities at a fundamental level but remains underexplored in the literature. Those who wish to extend the boundaries of political action, or to win protections and the possibility of a new political community for themselves and others, should focus a substantial part of their energies and attention on developing alternative infrastructure systems for supporting human life. Without such systems, political action – no matter how revolutionary or ingenious – will ultimately find itself constrained by its position within the zones of survivability established by existing forms of infrastructure and by the hierarchies and configurations of power linked with those forms of infrastructure. As a result, those who wish to change current political and economic conditions should think of the capacity to take care of everyone as a condition for such change rather than its result.