What the faith in privatization does achieve is that it serves to break apart the body politic to feed the ever-ascendant god - or perhaps more appropriately a demon - of finance. So that anything that privatization is applied to necessarily breaks down, as finance is proportionally inflated further. Privatization is not just the selling off of state assets to private actors, though this activity is certainly a clear distillation of the principle.
Privatization often falls on the heels of serious political conflict or collective trauma, in which collective political solutions become exhausted and impassable, and there is a recourse to faith in some vague notion of the market, which in its present state, exists as a ravenous beast which devours value and destroys communication.
Needless to say, the ravenous market beast, upon tasting the meat of deconsolidated social wealth, is driven to a frenzy, always sniffing out and even provoking the conversion of social wealth into private wealth.
Let's put it another way. Underneath privatization is a symbiotic and perpetual process of destruction that begets itself. Over the course of history, as the body politic undergoes catastrophic levels of traumatic force, and subjects its surroundings to that same force, the private actor is generated and becomes ascendant. The private actor, upon breaking away from a vessel that only serves to smother it, seeks to localize power and take back some notion of control.
What this achieves is the formation of an alternate body of activity that takes on a life of its own. Social production and wealth, upon being separated from the context of its prior social situation, is reinserted into a financialized process of accumulation. This naturally weakens the public sphere further, throwing public institutions deeper into a paralysis that only serves to strengthen the argument of privatization, an argument that is ever more forcefully advanced as the financial sphere grows, fed by the detritus of the privatization that it encourages.
On the other hand, the financial reconsolidation destroys the existing communication within production and service by supplanting it with a command and control structure that favors wealth extraction and accumulation above all else, leaving other questions of quality and cooperation to languish. The once robust structures of production are cut to the bone to favor extraction, thus guaranteeing a decline in general quality of product and service, and driving increasing swathes of the population - which are increasingly taxed under both inflating finance and atrophying government - into further precarity.
And so! A self-reinforcing destruction, within which a growing misery proliferates among the vulnerable, and those lucky lottery winners on top further the destruction, dreaming of a glorious market savior.
Privatization often falls on the heels of serious political conflict or collective trauma, in which collective political solutions become exhausted and impassable, and there is a recourse to faith in some vague notion of the market, which in its present state, exists as a ravenous beast which devours value and destroys communication.
Needless to say, the ravenous market beast, upon tasting the meat of deconsolidated social wealth, is driven to a frenzy, always sniffing out and even provoking the conversion of social wealth into private wealth.
Let's put it another way. Underneath privatization is a symbiotic and perpetual process of destruction that begets itself. Over the course of history, as the body politic undergoes catastrophic levels of traumatic force, and subjects its surroundings to that same force, the private actor is generated and becomes ascendant. The private actor, upon breaking away from a vessel that only serves to smother it, seeks to localize power and take back some notion of control.
What this achieves is the formation of an alternate body of activity that takes on a life of its own. Social production and wealth, upon being separated from the context of its prior social situation, is reinserted into a financialized process of accumulation. This naturally weakens the public sphere further, throwing public institutions deeper into a paralysis that only serves to strengthen the argument of privatization, an argument that is ever more forcefully advanced as the financial sphere grows, fed by the detritus of the privatization that it encourages.
On the other hand, the financial reconsolidation destroys the existing communication within production and service by supplanting it with a command and control structure that favors wealth extraction and accumulation above all else, leaving other questions of quality and cooperation to languish. The once robust structures of production are cut to the bone to favor extraction, thus guaranteeing a decline in general quality of product and service, and driving increasing swathes of the population - which are increasingly taxed under both inflating finance and atrophying government - into further precarity.
And so! A self-reinforcing destruction, within which a growing misery proliferates among the vulnerable, and those lucky lottery winners on top further the destruction, dreaming of a glorious market savior.
