The tragedy of the private

Hilary Wainwright

19/08/2014

Opinión

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Throughout the world, public service workers, alongside their fellow community members, are not only defending public services but also struggling to make them democratic and responsive to people’s needs and desires.

This is the conclusion of “The tragedy of the private, the potential of the public”, a report published by PSI (Public Services International), which looks at how these alliances are working at different levels – local, national and international.

Such alliances are developing at a time when the privatisation of public services and utilities has been tried and failed. There is widespread criticism of privatisation. It is now leading to an increasing number of decisions, mainly at a local level, to bring services back under public control.

The failure of privatisation has led to notorious scandals. Since the days of Margaret Thatcher, Britain has been a laboratory for privatisation and has witnessed some of the worst cases. Most recently there was the case of multinational corporation G4S promising thousands of staff for the London 2012 Olympics who simply failed to show up.

Before that there was Serco, a company that has built itself on the back of privatisation, being caught leaving National Health Service out-of-hours emergency cover dangerously understaffed, and then admitting falsifying data to hide the failure.

An IT contractor, Atos, provides tick-box tests that are used to declare disabled people ‘fit for work’ and take away their benefits – and continues to do so even though some have subsequently died.

These and many, many more everyday calamities lie behind our reference in the title to the ‘tragedy of the private’. We use this phrase to highlight the fundamentally inappropriate application of the logic of private business, based on maximising profits, to the management of shared resources, natural and social, and the meeting of social needs.

The phrase turns on its head ‘the tragedy of the commons’, which was an attack on the idea that people can effectively manage common resources together for shared benefit, if they have suitable conditions.

The tragedy of the anti-commons, and in particular of the private, arises from the presumption that people act only in their immediate self-interest (rather than taking account of mutual benefit and interdependence) and do not communicate, let alone collaborate, over shared problems.

‘The potential of the public’, by contrast, starts from exactly that awareness of mutual dependence, and an ethics of stewardship, mutual care and collaboration that arises from it. All of these are evident in the struggles to defend public services reported in this booklet.

Within certain countries and services, this potential is evident given the high quality of the existing services, above all due to the awareness of front-line workers with respect to people’s needs.

But on occasions, public institutions have lost the capacity to respond to people’s changing needs, due to excessive bureaucracy or hierarchy or even corruption; so the struggle to defend public services also entails generating the necessary democratic pressure to improve and reform them.

The problem remains of how – through what forms of organisation – we can achieve this potential. The answer lies in experimentation and learning from practical attempts to create solutions.

- Hilary Wainwright is a researcher on new forms of democratic responsibility in political parties, movements and the State. She is co-editor of the Red Pepper magazine of the new British Left and research director of the New Politics Project of the Transnational Institute (TNI).

Read the full report: http://www.alainet.org/active/76168

https://www.alainet.org/en/articulo/102580