1- The context and the victories
In times of savage austerity, strategies to privatise public services are multiplying. In particular, countries dependent on EU 'aid' are forced by the Troika to sell off water and other fundamental public utilities, as conditions for receiving EU loan packages. No surprise at similar "shock therapy": neoliberalism uses the crisis to destroy social rights and to privatise commons, public goods and public services. In other words, austerity is a tool of neoliberalism and the objective of the decision to pursue austerity policies was made to exploit the opportunities opened up by the crisis, not to bring the crisis to an end. And so it is a question of continuing, or rather, of accelerating, the redistribution of income, of wealth and political power from the bottom towards the top that has been taking place since the 1980s: an “upside-down” redistribution threatened by the sudden crisis and by the failure of neoliberal policies. At the present time, in the midst of a crisis of overproduction, public services become another vital area for capital to colonise, in order to ensure it continues to be rewarded with ample profit margins. Now the fairy tale about how “efficient” and how “economical” private management of fundamental services are has proven just that, a fairy tale, as far as public opinion is concerned, since empirical experience of privatisation has been of an increase in rates and a decrease both in the quality and in the universality of the services. And with a change of tack, that which was previously marketed as “better” and “efficient” is now simply passed off as “compulsory”: they say that it is necessary to sell off and privatise in order to raise cash and thus decrease public debt, and they persist in describing a private debt crisis as a sovereign debts crisis.
