Dispose of the populations of their common goods that guarantee their subsistence and a certain independence is an inveterate liberal tradition
The weekend of the festivity of Kings, coinciding with the return of the Christmas holidays, we have been surprised by a strong snowfall, which has left thousands of citizens stranded on the AP-6.
This highway is being managed under the concession regime by a private company, Iberpistas, a subsidiary of Abertis. In short, there has been a privatization or outsourcing of a basic service.
It seems clear that the responsibility for security is the exclusive competence of such company. And as we have just noted, thousands of citizens have been left stranded and abandoned for many hours.
Here, the dominant discourse of the best efficiency, competition and saving of the private sector with respect to the public sector has come down a few decades ago.
Key discourse within neoliberalism.
Such advantages of the private sector have not been demonstrated empirically, it is a matter of belief, it is like a dogma of faith. It is repeated again and again and no one can question it.
To this process of privatization-sale of companies of the public sector- or outsourcing of basic public services, the British geographer David Harvey has called it "accumulation by dispossession".
Accumulation by dispossession is not something new. It is part of the original DNA of capitalism. This is how the famous "original accumulation" was made, to which Karl Marx devotes a large part of the pages of his work.
To dispossess the populations of their common goods that guaranteed their subsistence and a certain independence is an inveterate liberal tradition.
The example of enclosures in England is an example.
The novelty is that the energies of the mercantilists were also engaged, in the neoliberal drift of recent decades, to privatize and convert into surplus value deposits many of the services that had been part of the Keynesian Welfare State, which had founded social peace in the very center of the global system.
What happened explains it very well Fernando Álvarez Uría Privatization is a robbery.
In order to legitimize this plundering, either by selling public companies -from this circumstance we have a bitter experience the Spaniards and to which I will refer more explicitly- or outsourcing public services, it was and is necessary to disqualify public institutions, the public function , taxation on large fortunes, public services, denounce their inertias, bureaucracies and rigidities, at the same time proliferated laudatory chants to private initiative, the spirit of enterprise and business culture. And this discourse has been unconsciously assumed by Spanish society.
It was thus that in this economy without society the public land and subsoil passed into the hands of private speculators, that is how public or semi-public companies were handed over by the governments in turn to the old friends of the school, that is how the discretionary contracts and large doses of corruption in outsourcing processes came to acquire a kind of letter of nature in our political systems, while old and forgotten forms of savage capitalism broke into the social scene.
In Spain, the first stage of privatization-sale of public companies-began in the mid-1980s until 1996 with socialist governments. The main factor that drove them was not based on ideological or political motivations, but on strategic, budgetary and technological constraints.
Starting in 1996 with the Aznar government, privatizations were part of the electoral program, planning as a complete government program, the most profitable companies were sold and the political objectives were as important or more than the economic ones.
Thus the crown jewels of our public companies were sold as Seat, Repsol, Endesa, Telefónica, Gas Natural ...
The holding company of the public bank Argentaria, privatized between 1993 and 1998, merged in 1999 with the BBV.
What good would a public bank now have to finance our debt!
The citizenship remained impassive before the loss of all this collective patrimony. Today we have few attractive public companies for private capital. However, they are pending of this process The Lotteries and Bets of the State, the Paradores ....
More, according to Mariano Fernández Enguita , as capitalism is extraordinarily voracious, the current assault is directed, as we are already seeing, towards the public services of the Welfare State, among others in education, health, and dependency, with an ever increasing demand growing as society has become accustomed and could not renounce them, so much so that they have been considered as rights.
There are abundant capitals with captive and very promising markets. But still more. In addition to avid capitals, privatization or outsourcing policies also have eager willing consumers and willing contributors.
As the universalization of these services generates complaints as not all the demands can be met, such as waiting lists in the health sector or that Spaniards do not want their children to share a desk with immigrants, this causes a growing disposition toward private supply.
On the other hand, when a benefit that was previously a privilege is generalized, the previous privileged classes seek to differentiate themselves again by accessing higher levels (more education or more health) or different types (better or another education or health).
Differentiation is not only sought by those who want to preserve their privileges, but also those who try to access them for the first time. Private education and health can become a symbol of this differentiation.
For all these reasons, an immense market opens up for capital in the field of public services. The Community of Madrid could be a paradigm for this.
But in this process of privatization of collective property, an extraordinarily serious circumstance goes unnoticed. In this respect, Ugo Mattei's reflection in his article Limit to Privatizationsseems very timely . How to stop the looting of the common goods , appeared in Le Monde Diplomatique , in which it raises the need to protect collective property, and even more so now that governments get rid of public services and privatize the collective heritage to balance budgets; since all privatization decided by the public authority -represented by the government of the day- deprives each citizen of their share of the common good, just as in the case of an expropriation of a private good.
But with one substantial difference: the liberal constitutional tradition protects the private owner of the State, with the compensation for expropriation, while no legal provision, and even less constitutional, offers any protection when the neoliberal State transfers the assets of the community to the private sector. .
Due to the current evolution of the relationship of forces between states and large transnational corporations, this asymmetry represents a legal and political anachronism.
Return to the fact that this article propitiated, what happened in the AP-6.
It is obvious from the foregoing that when a private company assumes, under a concession, a public service, water supply, garbage collection, garden cleaning, public transportation, health, education or dependency, the fundamental objective within the stricter logic of its internal functioning in a capitalist system, is to achieve economic benefits, the desire for profit, for which reduce costs: either reducing benefits or the cost of the labor factor.
And we just noted with overwhelming force in the snow of the AP-6. The hundreds of affected people have criticized the shortage of snow plows and the lack of personnel and information on the part of the company.
But it is an extendable fact to many of the toll road concessionaires, since between 2011-2015 they have carried out severe and harsh policies of personnel cuts.
According to El Confidencial , the highway concessionaires went from 5,100 employees to 3,200.
Of course, tolls increased from 10.6 to 12.4 cents per kilometer in the case of state highways and from 15.6 to 17 cents in the case of regional concessions.
While in 2011 Iberpistas had 96 workers for maintenance and 107 for toll booths, in 2015 these figures fell to 79 and 73, respectively.
The AP-6 is the payment method where tariffs have increased the most in the 2011-2015 period, with an increase of 23% (the average increase was 17%).
The conclusion is clear. Here there is cheating. And if there is cheating, there are cheaters. Especially those responsible for the government.
As for the privatizations of the public sector, it was a real gift to certain elites and school friends, as well as a source of shameful corruption.
Regarding the concessions of the toll roads, the specifications are written with very clear objectives: if they are profitable, the companies do great business and if they are not, their rescue comes from the State. What shamelessness!
How much will the rescue of the bankruptcy of the radial highways of Madrid cost us? Will we know someday? According to the management of the large construction companies about 5,000 million.
The invoice that the bankrupt toll roads leave to the State has a striking departure: the one of the expropriations, that ascended, at the end of the 90, during the Government of Aznar, when they were considered, altogether, to 387 millions.
In the end they shot up to 2.217 million. A deviation of 1,830 million, almost six times more.
The prices for these expropriations grew exponentially by the judgments of the courts, as a result of the 1998 Land Law of Aznar, when assessing that the land should not be considered rustic since there were expectations of urbanization.
Within the strictest neoliberal ideology, it was the search for new surplus value in space within its different concretions, that is, the urban land, the construction of infrastructures, transport and related equipment, etc. Among the beneficiaries there were known families (Franco, Serrano Suñer or Abelló).
In a notice to navigators, Tony Judt in his book Something Goes Wrong tells us that Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the French Revolution has already warned us
"Every society that destroys the fabric of its State soon disintegrates into the dust and ashes of individuality.
By eviscerating public services and reducing them to a network of subcontracted providers, we have begun to dismantle the fabric of the State. As for the dust and ashes of individuality, what it most resembles is the war of all against all of which Hobbes spoke. "
