Brief note on the culture of privatization

Op-Ed collumnist Roger Cohen has a nice piece in today’s New York Times about “The Narcissus Society,” in which he connects America’s staggering social fragmentation and anomie to our inability to wrap up the health care debate in a productive way. The piece, short and sweet as it is, connects many of the threads we try to weave together on this blog.

A new thread: health care reform

So far, most of our activity here at Enclosure has been devoted to thinking about ‘privatization,’ i.e. the removal of goods, money, people, services, ideas, etc. from public or common spaces, and their installation behind barriers to access, barriers which shore up our capitalist system of private property: hence the term ‘enclosure.’

But this year’s long and frustrating debate in the United States over health care reform provides an opportunity to look at the issue of privatization from another angle. In this debate, we are not witnessing practices of enclosure or privatization; health care is already privatized and heavily deregulated in this country. The real fight for reformers on America’s liberal left has been the ‘public option,’ the attempt to wrest away health care provision from private hands and put it back in public hands. In other words, health care reformers are looking for the opposite of privatization, call it what you will (public-ization, common-ization, dis-enclosure, de-privatization, and so on…). As critics of the logic and practice of privatization, both authors of this blog are, not surprisingly, strong supporters of the public option.

The fact that so many American citizens and politicians are opposed to a public option furnishes another important topic for discussion. Privatization is not only upheld by organizational and institutional powers (copyright law, property law, lawsuits, police protection, etc.); privatization is also normalized, set up as a cultural value, fought for as a cherished belief (especially on the political center and right). The social, political and economic forms that keep privatization in place are supported by a widespread set of beliefs and values. This is to say that we not only have a system of privatization in this country, we also have a culture of privatization (for more on this, see our earlier post about Kristin Ross and cultural theory). In this year’s health care debates, this culture has proven as big an obstacle to reform as has the weight of inherited structural or systemic forms. The right has flooded the public sphere and the mediascape with messages linking a government-run health care plan with Stalinists and Nazis, as if the right to hold a Medicare card would transport one immediately into Animal Farm or 1984. Meanwhile, they miss the point that our current privatized health care system is more like Lord of the Flies. While we’re no policy experts here at Enclosure, we can say that the same capitalist forces working to slap DRM on our mp3s and privatize local utility systems (e.g. water supply and sewage treatment) have their dirty hands all over our health care system.

The lesson to be learned here is that resisting enclosure and privatization from happening in the first place is just as important and just as difficult as it is to dismantle an already existing system and culture of privatization. Hence we always have to think about privatization ‘before the fact’ and ‘after the fact.’ We have to prevent privatization from taking hold, prevent it from expanding, and to prevent it from becoming totalized.