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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

privatize, privatize, and privatize some more « Previous | |Next »
January 1, 2011

In In Defense of the Public at In these Times Eve Ewing says:

In Another Kind of Public Education (Beacon Press, 2009), Patricia Hill Collins points out that Americans have come to associate anything “public” with a notion of inferiority. “Ideas about the benefits of privatization encourage the American public to assume that anything public is of lesser quality,” she writes. “The deteriorating schools, health care services, roads, bridges, and public transportation that result from the American public’s unwillingness to fund public institutions speak to the erosion and accompanying devaluation of anything deemed public. In this context, public becomes reconfigured as anything of poor quality, marked by a lack of control and privacy—all characteristics associated with poverty.”

Ewing comments that the schema of capitalism—where the pursuit of private profits is sanctified—has turned Americans shamefacedly away from the public life that is the birthright of all citizens in a democracy.

She adds:

The logic of this mode of thought has skewed roots in the principles of supply and demand, and it goes something like this: if something is scarce, it is desirable and valuable; conversely, if it is abundant and readily available it must be cheap or worthless. This calculus can reduce any and all things into commodities, the relative value of which can be determined by their level of unfettered availability to average people.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:47 PM | | Comments (1)
Comments

Comments

Yes private affluence (for some) and public squalor.