Library:To kill a nation/Privatization as a global goal

Why would the forces of finance capital want to dismantle the public sector of Yugoslavia, and for that matter, the public sector of Bulgaria, Romania, and every other country including the United States? Leaders of capitalist nations are dedicated to extending the free-market prerogatives of giant multinational corporations into every corner of the world, a process euphemistically called globalization. The free market is established by eliminating public investments and ownership, rolling back public services, and cutting wage and employment guarantees, worker benefits, trade protections, and nonprofit development programs. The goal is to lay open all national economies and resources to international investors and creditors on terms that are entirely favorable to the investors and creditors. The objective is to demonstrate to the people of the world that, as Margaret Thatcher is quoted as saying, “There is no alternative” (TINA). Yugoslavia was targeted for being a country that still represented a viable deviation from TINA.

A key maxim of the free-market ideology is that government regulations and public spending are costly burdens detrimental to prosperity, an incubator for inefficiency and parasitism. The lean competitive system of private enterprise can always do things better for less cost than the bloated bureaucratic system of a meddling government. So goes the free-market catechism.

In reality, the investor class is not against all public spending. While representatives of big business preach the virtues of self-reliance to the general public, they themselves run to the government for a whole basketful of handouts. They receive from federal, state, and local governments billions of dollars in start-up capital, research and development funding, equity capital, bailout aid, debt financing, low-interest loans, loan guarantees, export subsidies, tax credits, and other special favors. Courtesy of the US taxpayer, government provides private industry with a publicly funded transportation infrastructure of airports, train depots, port facilities, canals, and harbors. And public capital is used to develop whole sectors of the economy, such as the airline industry, telecommunications, the nuclear industry, the Internet, and various medical and pharmaceutical products—which are then handed over to private corporations to market and reap the profits.

Corporate America relies on government for the ample applications of force and violence needed to keep restive populations in line at home and abroad. Various government agencies involved in surveillance, repression, incarceration, and overall social control are well funded and greatly encouraged by the same conservative lawmakers who otherwise advocate defunding public service agencies. Units of the national security state, the military, the CIA, FBI, DIA, and others, together devour the largest portion of the federal discretionary budget. Hundreds of state, county, and municipal police forces receive generous sums to hire additional officers and buy the latest state-of-the-art equipment, utilized less to fight crime—of which they usually do an indifferent job—and more to keep a tight lid on social unrest.

So it is not quite correct to say that big business is against big government. It depends on what part of government we are talking about, and whose interests are being served. Propagators of the business ideology tell us that government cannot do anything very well except tax and spend. In truth, corporations have great faith in the ability of government to get certain things done, and get them done right, at least when it comes to helping business stay solvent, aiding business in the creation, production, and distribution of certain commodities and services, and in the deliverance of force and violence against potentially anti-business interests.

However, business is ferociously opposed to those public services that compete with the private profit market, that serve consumers, generating income and consumer buying power by creating public-sector jobs, while taking care of public needs—all done without private industry making a penny of profit. Public housing, public utilities, public transportation, public communication, public health care, and public education—all come under the hungry and jealous eyes of private investors, who forever scan the horizon for new opportunities for capital accumulation, and new ways to siphon off the public treasure.

A growing public sector can diminish opportunities for private profit. It can demonstrate that vital services can be performed without the need for private corporations, and often at lower administrative costs than what the private market would tolerate. One need only consider the retirement fund, survivors subsidies, and disability insurance administered by Social Security, or the public medical care programs of some countries as compared to the costs of private medical insurance and profit-driven HMOs in the United States.

Furthermore, the social wage proffered by the welfare state—in the form of unemployment and disability insurance, pension funds, medical benefits, and income support supplements—provide the working population with alternative sources of income that leave them somewhat less vulnerable to the heartless exactions of the job market. Workers must be divested of any alternative means of subsistence that interferes with the systematic exploitation of wage labor. Income maintenance programs bolster the bargaining power of workers vis-à-vis employers and thereby cut into profits.¹ By rolling back the social wage and abolishing subsidies that come in the form of public education, public health services and the like, conservative ruling interests leave working people more impoverished than ever. Wages are more easily kept down by having a depressed working class, one that suffers from chronic under-employment, and enjoys no backup benefits or income subsidies.

And that is the goal. For the poorer you be, the harder will you toil for less and less. As a high-placed Tory economic advisor in Britain said, with refreshing candor: “Rising unemployment was a very desirable way of reducing the strength of the working classes. ... What was engineered—in Marxist terms—was a crisis in capitalism which recreated a reserve army of labor, and has allowed the capitalists to make high profits ever since.”²

That Americans would not think of toiling from dawn to dusk for pennies, as do less fortunate souls in many Third World countries, is not because they are so much more self-respecting. There was a time, at the end of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, when people in the United States worked for wages and under conditions that were akin to those found in the worst sweatshops of the Third World. It was only through generations of struggle over the last century that US workers have achieved a measure of economic democracy. The US corporate class grudgingly accedes to those gains, at least for the present, but it has never flagged in its desire to roll them back.

In fact, there already are places within the United States where sweatshop conditions, including longer work hours, subsistence wages, no benefits, no job security, and even child labor are the order of the day. According to the US Department of Labor, the number of minors illegally employed in sweatshops is on the increase. Some 800,000 children and teenagers work as migrant laborers. And the American Academy of Pediatrics estimates that 100,000 children are injured on the job in the United States each year.³

Conservative free-marketeers have also advocated privatizing Social Security (which means eliminating the public retirement, survivor insurance, and disability programs), reducing wages, abolishing the minimum wage, downgrading jobs, cutting back on public education and public health services, softening child labor restrictions, and rolling back health and safety standards, consumer protections, environmental safeguards, and any other benefits and regulations that might cut into profits or give some leverage to working people.

The goal is the Third Worldization of the United States and every other country. Why then should we think it surprising or improbable that international finance capital would not seek the same for Yugoslavia and all other socialistic countries whose continued existence would only set a ff bad example” to the common peoples of the world? The end purpose is to create a world in which there is no alternative to corporate capitalism, a world in which capitalism will be practiced everywhere in every way exactly as the most powerful elements of the capitalist class might desire.