For forty years we have been drunk on privatisation, we have dismantled public and common goods and entrusted them to the capitalist market. But the private sector is not the Promised Land...
By Luigino Bruni
published in Il Messaggero di Sant'Antonio on 01/07/2022
The pandemic, the climate crisis before that, the war in Ukraine and its implications on the costs and prices of almost everything should make us think much more about the relationship between the private and the public. For forty years we have been drunk with privatisation, we have dismantled public and common goods and entrusted them to the capitalist market, convinced that the motive of private profit was the only motivation for workers and entrepreneurs to engage. And so railways, energy, water, highways, and even more of health, schools and universities are run by private capital and capitalists, and the profits that arise from these common goods end up in a very few, already very rich hands.
The paradox of all this is that the first enthusiast of this religious dogma - more private equals more motivation and thus more efficiency - has been and continues to be the European left, which was born out of a critique of capitalism and profit. And so, faced with the rising cost of fuel, which, along with inflation, is starving low- and middle-income families day after day (we will take notice of this in a few months), the tolls on motorways could at least have been reduced if, as we were promised after the Morandi bridge collapsed, they had been returned to public hands. If there is a sure-fire profitable business, it is motorway management, even more so in a long and touristy country like Italy.
We have been convinced that the private sector is the paradise of the new economy, the public sector is hell, and the non-profit sector purgatory. As an economist and as a historian of economic thought, I still cannot understand how this unhealthy and wrong idea could be established. I know about ideologies and demagogues, but I am still waiting for someone to show me why the common goods are better managed by the private than the public. Italy invented the free communes, and already with the Romans and then in the Middle Ages it invented the common management of collective resources. We performed authentic economic, civil and artistic miracles in the past, because cities were forms of cooperatives, consortia of citizens who managed many political activities and also many businesses together.
Privatisation capitalism is an imported product, from countries (such as the USA and Holland) that are anti-liberal in key and important industries, as we all know. We need to rethink, immediately and profoundly, the relationship between the public and the private. Global environmental common goods managed with private logic are not only no longer efficient but they are being destroyed: one only has to read what ecologist Garrett Hardin wrote about the 'tragedy of the commons'. And we are seeing it, and seeing it more by the day.
Health and transport are other common goods where private profit is too little, there is a need for principles, norms and values that keep in mind the dimension of the Common Good: in some areas private interests, too, can generate the Common Good (shoes, clothes, perhaps also in fruit), but in other areas the values to be protected are so important and decisive that they must be managed without being driven by the incentives of private profits, which are too weak for the really crucial things. We knew these things in the past. Then the new consultants came along, children of the business schools, with little humanistic culture and a lot of English, and decided that the private sector was the Promised Land. They convinced us, they have also convinced the politicians, and now they are convincing practically everyone, even the churches. When will we see through this deception and call it bluff?
Photo credits: © Giuliano Dinon / MSA Archive
