Privatization often appears in right wing thought as a panacea, a breaking up of the blockages and the restoration of flow and circulation for the market god. And then it appears in left wing thought as a snatch and grab by greedy rentiers, a conversion of public property into private property for profit, which is constantly shattering boundaries and encroaching onto new ground.
It is probably a little bit of both, minus the panacea part, but it is also something much more than an isolated political issue. It represents an ongoing reorientation of our public relations that's progressing at an ever-increasing scale, and this reorientation will determine what happens next. First, an anecdote.
About a year ago, I had a long conversation with a homeless man in Oakland, an activist who was going after the public sleeping laws. He was exhausted and frazzled, but talking excitedly at length, as he was on meth, which he took regularly because he was afraid of being caught out in the open sleeping.
What was so striking about our conversation had to do with the cause of his apprehensiveness. He repeatedly claimed that what terrified him the most was not the local police - which were bad enough - but the new emerging private governments littered throughout San Francisco.
He showed me a weathered brochure for one of them. There was a vigilante quality to the copy, which alluded to a frustration with crime and the inability of local governments to effectively respond. They had a new acronym; I forget what he called them.
Suburban housing associations, gated communities, and incorporated cities like Beverly Hills were early versions of this, but it sounds like these entities are steadily growing more sophisticated and integrated.
The activist's descriptions of these regions were quite chilling, as they had private surveillance and security forces which monitored the neighborhoods very closely. If he got anywhere close to these places he was instantly hassled, and who knows what was in store for him if he were to make trouble.
Because these entities are private, they're opaque in nature and completely unaccountable. And they're concentrating public wealth to create wholly new local governing bodies that are private and exclusive in nature. Which, it should be noted, is nothing new to developing countries.
We see a similar phenomenon at work in the greater economy, exemplified by the secretive private equity sector. Vigilante finance professionals break apart publicly traded companies, concentrating the cannibalized assets within portfolios limited to the control of a few people. The corporate raider phenomenon generalizes, and soon private equity takes over public infrastructure, water services, garbage services, fire services, and other essential public functions, which were initially protected from market forces. On its surface, this is change, a change that temporarily revives the dynamism of society, only to concentrate wealth even further, contributing to an overall stasis and stagnation.
The voracious appetite for public wealth is coupled with a striking social solipsism and self-interest. Many of these people are professed Randians, who believe they are the noble geniuses, and are busying themselves with grabbing the wealth they so rightfully deserve, the looting and parasitic lower class be damned. But perhaps ironically (or not), these are the true marauders, pillagers, and looters. Some of them are doing this quite flippantly, while others are simultaneously preparing very quietly for the social chaos they are helping bring about.
One must acknowledge the far-reaching effects of this general privatization. There is a pervasive sense that the center, or a central, cohesive, and binding power is losing its legitimacy, which is best represented by the federal U.S. government, but which is actually composed of a complex interconnection of global entities and interests.
So private money power is not the only interest breaking away, all interests are turning their attentions to local or tribal matters. Liberals once scoffed at the secessionist movements in Texas and the rest of the South, and now they pump their fists when local governments like the state of California openly defy the president-elect's stated intentions. And this shouldn't come as a huge surprise: one looks and sees the future leader as an embodiment of these voracious forces of privatization - the federal government as a force of public cohesion has been swept away. Though was it ever? Who's public did it cohere?
As is the case with many things, there is a continuum here. The process of privatization has been perpetual over the course of centuries. We could say that this process began with the "primitive accumulation" of capital, in which communal lands were appropriated to serve private interest, but then we would have to point back to the coalescing of feudal city states which went through periods of communal cohesion and disintegration into private interest.
As the falling fragments break off of a dying social order, they will in time coalesce and struggle to assert themselves as governing bodies, each with potentials, pitfalls, and promises of their own. Who will be the owners? Who will exercise the power?
Many of the alt-right factions, the Brexit interests, and the emerging private kingdoms share a similar drive, a desire for public wealth and power which is derived from a social order that is rapidly disintegrating. The same can be said of much of the left as well, for differing reasons. If this desire is to persist, then the objects of this desire will have to be acquired not through a global commerce based on the rule of law - though we can dig further into the nature of this "rule of law" and laugh a bit - but through a rule of plain force. More on this last paragraph later.
