Going Beyond Private Versus Public

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/27838-going-beyond-private-versus-public

The new, more Republican Congress may "privatize" the United States Postal Service: dismantle the public enterprise and turn mail services over to private enterprises. Such a privatization would mimic what the US military has done with part of its activities and what many states and cities did with utilities, transport systems and schools. Privatizers always assert that private enterprises function more efficiently and will thus cost society less than public enterprises.

Evidence for such assertions ranges from slim to none. For example, the pendulum often swings the other way (for example, during the Great Depression of the 1930s, after World Wars I and II, and in the 2008 crisis). Then, private enterprises were transformed into public enterprises. Officials always assured us that those public enterprises would get us out of crisis sooner and better than private enterprises could or would; in short, the public enterprise was the more efficient way to go.

Recently, debates, conflicts and even street battles for and against privatization have revived. From the 1970s to 2008, neoliberal politicians, media and academics celebrated privatization with endless repetitions of the efficiency rationale. Many liberals, leftists and socialists responded by demonizing privatization as merely means to raise profits at workers' and citizens' expenses. Yet they discovered, especially after 2007, that government takeovers are often bailouts of capitalists also at workers' and citizens' expenses.

Battles over privatization should not distract anyone from the more basic and ultimately more socially consequential struggles emerging now. These turn on 1) democratic versus capitalistically organized enterprises; 2) egalitarian versus extremely unequal distributions of wealth and income; and 3) capitalism versus new socialist visions. Struggles over these issues should take precedence over battles for or against privatization.

<snip>

Critics of capitalism need to go beyond battles over public versus private enterprises, private versus state forms of capitalism. The point is to criticize both in the interest of moving beyond them. That is why we advocate (2) the internal transformation of enterprises so that neither private individuals nor state officials occupy the position of capitalist, of receiver of the surplus or profits produced by the workers. Workers self-directed enterprises are the institutional form - the social base - of movement beyond either private or state capitalism. Socialized ownership of means of production and socialized economic planning may be necessary, but they are certainly not sufficient conditions for a genuine transition beyond capitalism. Economic democracy inside all enterprises has been a key missing element in socialism's appeal as well as a missing component of the conditions for successful transition beyond capitalism. That is our era's issue, not secondary disputes over the division of production between private and state enterprises.