The Privatization of the World

The Privatization of the World

Must nature and elementary human needs be prohibited for want of profitability?

By Robert Kurz

[This article originally published in: Folha 6/2002 is translated from the German on the World Wide Web, http://www,krisis.org.]

Nature presumably existed before the modern economy. Therefore nature in itself is free of charge and without price. This distinguishes natural resources existing without human work from results of social production representing nature transformed by human activity and no longer nature “in itself”. These “products” were never freely accessible unlike pure natural resources but were always subject to socially organized distribution according to certain criteria. In the modern age, the form of goods production regulates this distribution through the mode of the market according to criteria of money, price and demand (solvency).

That the organization of society tends to bar free access to a growing number of pre-human resources of nature is an old problem. This occupation in its most different forms bears the same name of so-called “property” like the products of social activity. A “quid pro quo” takes place. Foirmerly free natural resources not engendered by people are treated as though they were results of social organization and therefore subject to the same restrictions.

The oldest occupation of this kind is the occupation of land. The earth in itself is not the result of human productive activity. Therefore the earth must also be freely accessible. The cultivated earth already transformed by people could also be subject to social mechanisms. Then the earth must become the property of those individuals who cultivate it. However as everybody knows this is not the case. The uncultivated earth is violently usurped. In the Bible, there was already a bloody conflict around the territory between farming and cattle breeding (Cain and Abel) and between the nomadic cattle breeders among one another over the “richest pasture”. The usurpation of “virgin” soil is the original- and hereditary sin of the “rule of people over people” (Marx). The aristocrats of all repressive agrarian cultures originally formed with clubs and spears out of this expropriation of the land.

Property in pre-modern agrarian cultures was not property in the modern sense. This property was not exclusive or total. The land could be used and cultivated by others who had to pay fees to the original violent owners (feudal rents in the form of natural produce or services). However there were also free possibilities of use. Farmers in many villages drove their pigs on the uncultivated land of the landowners, picked the freely growing fodder or collected other natural materials. Other possibilities of free use were controversial like the right of hunting and fishing. Where the feudal lords attempted to issue prohibitions, these were almost never observed. Thus the “poachers”, the illegal hunters and fishers, are among the heroes of the pre-modern popular culture.

Modern private property has enormously intensified the subjugation of “free” nature and blocked access to natural resources more rigorously than ever before. As an intensified usurpatorial tendency of this occupation, the modern economic imperative represents an “objectified “ force of the second order that is no longer the personal and direct act of force. The immediate armed authority still appears in the occupation of natural resources but is institutionally objectified in the form of the police and the military. The force or authority from the modern barrels no longer speaks for itself; it has become the mere slave of the economic end-in-itself. This secularized god of the modern age, the capital ceaselessly exploiting itself (Marx), does not only appear in the form of an irrational objectivization. This god is also far more jealous than all other gods before it. In other words, the modern economy is totalitarian. This god or capital makes a total claim on the natural and social world. Therefore everything not subject to its own logic and open to assimilation is in principle a thorn in the eye. Since its logic consists in the permanent exploitation of money, everything that doesn’t accept the form of a money price is hated. There should be nothing under heaven that is gratis and existing by nature.

Modern private property is only the secondary legal form of this totalitarian logic. Use must be exclusive. This is true particularly for the primary natural resource of land. Under the dictate of modern private property, no free use is endured any more for human needs. Resources must either serve exploitation or lie fallow. The part of the earth that capital cannot use itself should be excluded from any other use through the form of private property. This bold exaction has provoked social protest again and again. The conflict around the Prussian “wood theft law” before 1848 was a key experience for the young Marx. This law prevented the poor from gathering free wood in the forests. The conflict around the free use of natural goods, above all land, has never ceased in the whole history of capitalism. Today social movements of “land squatters” in many countries of the third world put in question the totalitarian dictate of modern private property over the use of the earth.

In the development of the modern goods-producing system, the primary problem of access to free natural resources shifted from the secondary problem of access to immediate “public” resources, the so-called infrastructures. Through capitalist industrialization and concentration of enormous human multitudes (urbanization), social needs arose and practical measures were necessary that could only be defined by direct social administration, not by the laws of the market. On one hand, completely new sectors were involved that resulted from processes of industrialization like the Public Health system, public institutions of education (schools, universities and so forth), public telecommunciation (postal service, telephone), energy supply and public transportation (trains, city streetcars and so forth). On the other hand, freely accessible natural resources previously available without social organization must now be socially organized and set under public administration. The public supply of drinking water, public waste removal, public sewage and public toilets in the large cities are included here.

Under the conditions of the modern goods-producing system, the common public “administration” can only assume the distorted form of a bureaucratic state machine. The modern state represents the reverse side, the framing condition and guarantee of capitalist privateness. The state by its nature cannot have the form of a “free association” of individuals. Public administration remains nationally narrow-minded, bureaucratically repressive, authoritarian and bound to the fetish laws of goods production. Therefore the public services must assume the same money form as goods production for the market. Some infrastructures are made available free of charge when only fees and not market prices are involved. The state finances these services only in small part through the fees levied on the citizens. They are essentially subsidized through taxation of capitalist income (wage3s and profits). Thus public administration is indirectly bound to the exploitative process of capital.

For more than a hundred years, the sectors of public service and the social infrastructure were generally recognized as the necessary flanking, cushioning and crisis management of market processes. However a policy has gained acceptance in the last two decades that amounts to an uninhibited privatization of all state managed resources and public services. This privatization policy is in no way only defended by explicitly neoliberal parties and governments but has long overarched the parties. This suggests that we face a real crisis problem, not merely an ideology.

State tax receipts rapidly decline through the globalization of capital. The worldwide heavily indebted states, provinces and communes have become economic crisis factors instead of being active as masters of crisis. Since they sell off cheaply the state “table silver” of the socially administered units to serve their ridiculous debts, the “authorities” fatally resemble that mass of victims of old age poverty who alienate their household effects and clothing to survive in the global crisis regions.

The problem goes even deeper. In its core, capital itself is in crisis when it strikes the absolute limits of the real exploitation process under the conditions of the third industrial revolution. Although it must expand eternally according to its logic, capital is less and less able to do this on its own soil. A double act of desperation results. Firstly, a dreadful pressure to occupy the last free resources of nature, to make even the “inner nature” of the person, his soul, sexuality and sleep into the immediate terrain of capital exploitation and thus private property. Secondly, state administered public infrastructures are also transformed come hell or high water into sectors of private capitalism.

The modern age carries out this total privatization ad absurdum. The capitalist society becomes cannibalistic. The natural base of society is destroyed with increasing speed. Cost-cutting policy and outsourcing at any price ruin the material base of infrastructures, organizational coherence and practical value. The disastrous example of the railroad has been known for some time. The more formerly public transportation becomes private, the more degenerate and dangerous to the public this transportation becomes. This is also true in telecommunications, the postal service and so forth. Whoever orders a new telephone in relocating today experiences broken deadlines, responsibility chaos or confusion of “outsourced” agencies and mechanics degraded to pseudo-independents. The German postal service transformed into a conglomerate awaiting its stock market capitalization and global player delivers letters to California or China. However the simplest delivery service hardly functions. Changing all activities to low-wages and doubling or tripling the delivery areas of the individual letter carrier takes some doing. The branch offices are extremely thinned out.

Post offices and railroad stations change into glittering shopping landmarks while real service suffers. The more designer-styled the offices, the more miserable the service. Despite all the promises, privatization means sooner or later deterioration and drastically higher prices. You must die earlier because you are poor. This old popular wisdom gains new honors with the increasing privatization of the public health system in the richest industrial countries. Privatization policy does not stop at the most elementary human needs. In Germany, the railroad station toilettes are operated by a transnational enterprise “McClean” so people pay to use a urinal as they pay for an hour of parking in the city. Now you must pee in your pants or relieve yourself illegally!

Privatization of the water supply in the Bolivian city Cochabamba occurred when it was sold on command of the World Bank to a US “water corporation”. Within a few weeks, the prices rose drastically. Many families must pay up to a third of their income for daily water. Collecting rain water as drinking water was declared illegal. The protest was answered with the deployment of the army. Soon the sun will also no longer shine free of charge. When will breathing air be privatized? The result is foreseeable. Nothing functions any more and no one can afford to pay. Capitalism must close nature and the human society on account of “deficient profitability” and open another.