It is a curious fact that anarchist-communists have so far given merely scant attention to the issue of infrastructure in a free society. Kropotkin famously focused on fields, factories, and workshops but not on flyovers, canals, and water pipelines. Reclus gave passing remarks on the importance of modern transit systems to a cosmopolitan free world. Since then, activists and scholars of the workers’ control movement have focused on manufacturing and recently on services and logistics.
While 100% of the built environment that humans and many other species now inhabit is constructed by underpaid, unappreciated and forgotten workers on sites using largely tools and apparatus developed, improved, and perfected over millennia by the working intellectual-craftspeople.
While also, the infrastructure sector is one of the largest contributors of GHGs and at the same time one of the best tools for emission mitigation and social adaptation. Infrastructure reflects and perpetuates social inequalities. And at the time of terminal global economic downturn, it is the sector getting the most attention in corporate board rooms and parliaments. All this calls for more and serious attention to the engineered world around us and its future.