Privatisation

Privatisation, the political economic theme of the ’80s and ’90s, is often discussed in industrial terms. Coal, steel, automobiles, communications, water, and so on. But, I don’t hear the term applied to housing. There was a “sell-off” of public housing, but it wasn’t spoken of in terms like the sale of our national housing industry. Arguably, only one part of the “industry” was privatised. The individual dwelling unit: the private house or flat. Millions of small investors were sold a tiny share of the industry, each. And, it was only a small part of the industry as a whole that was sold. The larger part divides between builders and land owners, both of which have always been private.

There is another essay about finance, and others about food and services.

I am suggesting this “privatisation” embedded the household analogy into the beliefs and experiences of many people who were and are in a precarious pseudo-ownership relationship. There is unequal power between individual, atomised “heads of household” on the one hand, and on the other, the gatekeepers: land, law, banking, construction, and financial services. This privatisation was the most deeply ideological of all. The Prime Minister is not your dad at the dinner table or your mum at market.

I suggest the expansion of the field in which the household analogy might flourish was intended to shape and maybe “capture” our beliefs, and drive other more overt ideologies such as neoliberalism, monatarism, or even “anti-wokeism.”

Here, I want to reply to those who use the household analogy to discuss political economics: thinking of national- or common- wealth as being the same as household accounts. This does illustrate a “wicked” or “thousand-mile question” (link). We should, on the one hand, understand that the earth’s bounty is not infinite and we are clearly seeing the limits – the edge- now. Reining in unnecessary spending is essential. But big finance is different from pocketbooks – no matter how useful the metaphor may be.

The repeated use of the household analogy, since at least the days of Thatcher, Reagan, and Pinochet, has facilitated massive exploitation of the many by the few. It has not always been like this, everywhere and forever. It is not “human nature”.

I suggest that people carry with them different models of the world. All models are simplifications – of course – but one model of the basic unit of human life is the individual, private “person”, and another is the collective, public “community”. There are scales, of course. The “family” inclines toward the private end, while the “tribe” or “commune” inclines towards the public.