Surveying countries in all continents, a recent international report sponsored by The Club of Rome declared privatization to be “one of the defining features of our era.”Footnote ¹ Any major phenomenon of our time must have historical roots. The purpose of this volume is to address privatization as an issue of globalization, to give it a history apart from the totalizing notion of neoliberalism and the prescriptive models of economic theory. The consensus among social theorists and observers is that this global process of privatization is a result of neoliberalism, a practice and ideology whose central tenet is the primacy of markets. Certainly, the rhetoric and policies of neoliberalism have been spreading rapidly throughout the globe, but the blanket use of this concept has not enabled us to get inside the real social and political transformations that marked the last decades of the twentieth century. The writers in this volume introduce the particularities of social and labor histories and locate privatization in narratives of class politics and struggle. Bringing social and labor history into the analyses of privatization, at the same time, these essays put labor history, often monographically focused, into larger discussions of the state and capitalism. These essays make the class agenda of privatization explicit, viewing it not just as the “opening of markets,” but as clear assaults on the working classes and on the public claims that workers and citizens are able to make on the economy's resources and productivity.

Narratives of neoliberalism often present these models and imperatives as emanating from the United States and United Kingdom. For Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist at the World Bank, “any economic analysis of the world's current economic problems and of the decade that preceded, must begin with a discussion of America.” From his perspective, the story is one of how “Uncle Sam became Dr. Sam, dispensing prescriptions to the rest of the world.”Footnote ² But this is not a historically useful way of understanding the processes and conflicts at work. Whether presented in political or economic terms, it is often a top-down story: a story of governments, economic experts, and financial intermediaries. It cannot explain precisely why, when, and how privatization happens in any particular instance. Here we bring together scholars from history, labor studies, economics, and political science to connect the significance of local variation with the bigger picture.

A first round of discussion concerning privatization focused on the transfer or sale of state industries, particularly extractive industry, transportation, and ports, to private hands. These large-scale privatizations did not necessarily begin under conservative governments. Privatization of British Petroleum, for example, was begun under the Labour government in 1977. Once begun, however, conservative governments accelerated the process. When Margaret Thatcher came into office in 1978, her government set out rapidly to privatize gas, electricity, coal, airlines, rail, telecommunications, and water. According to Mattias Finger, the term “privatization” was popularized by the sale of British Telecom in 1984. Within twenty years, Britain had sold off 119 enterprises.Footnote ³ Argentina, Chile, and Mexico sold most of their state-owned enterprises. In Chile and Peru, the sale of public assets occurred in nearly all economic sectors.Footnote ⁴ In cases such as these, privatization has meant simply selling a public asset and transferring it to private ownership.

Yet privatization more generally entails a complex and far-reaching phenomenon in which a wide range of formerly public goods and services are transformed into commodities available on the market. Privatization was also taking place through the use of private contractors for the purchase, sale, and delivery of particular goods and services that had previously been provided by the state. By shifting our focus to service sectors—healthcare, welfare, parks and recreation, and urban services—the essays in this volume look at this more complicated process of privatization. It becomes clear, then, that privatization is not synonymous with the retreat of the state. Instead, as Beatrice Hibou writes, privatization entails the ongoing negotiation between public and private actors, “the constant redrawing of the frontiers between public and private.”Footnote ⁵ As Stiglitz points out, business and financial interests certainly expected government to play a role in helping them gain access to markets.Footnote ⁶ Rebecca Givan and Stephen Bach show us the privatization of the United Kingdom's National Health Service (NHS) has involved the growing outsourcing of support services, the rise of privately employed workers in the NHS, and major expansion of the private sector in the construction of hospitals, provision of clinical services, and the operation of all nonclinical services. In part, their study reveals how, in David Harvey's words, “the boundary between state and corporate power has become more and more porous.”Footnote ⁷ In this light, we might ask, when an inmate in an American prison owned by Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) stares up at a guard with a PCA uniform and badge, is he looking at state power or private corporate power?

One aim of this volume is to examine the response of the unions most closely bound up with the privatization of public-service/public-sector unions. Earlier studies have focused on male workers at the core of the traditional labor movement: miners, railroad workers, and longshoremen. Healthcare and other social services employ another part of the working class, heavily composed of women, immigrants or migrants, and racial or ethnic minorities. Often organized at a later phase, their union movements coincided with civil rights and other rights-based movements, community movements, and, speaking most broadly, movements for inclusion in the economic or political mainstream. Franco Barchiesi, in his essay on Johannesburg, shows how the South African Municipal Workers Union (SAMWU), one of the fastest growing unions in postapartheid South Africa, did not begin to organize the black urban working class until the 1970s and 80s. Characterized by rank-and-file militancy, SAMWU's membership and strength surged at the height of the antiapartheid struggle in the 1980s. While the new democratic regime enacted a Labor Relations Act giving municipal workers unprecedented rights to bargain collectively and strike, democratization was also accompanied by economic liberalization, austerity plans, and privatization. Barchiesi therefore situates SAMWU's activism and opposition to Johannesburg's municipal privatization within “the unique opportunities and challenges municipal workers derived from democratization.”

In their article on the Hospital Employees Union (HEU) and the privatization of Medicare in British Columbia, Canada, Benjamin Isitt and Melissa Moroz extend our historical vision by contextualizing a recent strike against health services privatization within British Columbia's century-long history of militant independent unionism. Steeped in a long tradition of syndicalism, BC had experienced significant waves of labor upheaval and general strikes throughout the twentieth century. Eventually, HEU followed in this tradition, breaking off from the Canadian Union of Public Employees in 1970, pursuing an independent course in the 1970s and early 80s as it organized women, immigrants, and people of color, and growing along with the public healthcare system. Women made up eighty-five percent of HEU members, immigrants thirty-one percent. As Isitt and Moroz also argue, HEU “represented an institutional barrier to the dismantling of universal Medicare,” an agenda of the BC Liberal government. When 40,000 HEU workers went on strike in 2004, they were joined by 30,000 other unionized workers. Still, the strike won only partial gains: restrictions on further contracting out, in exchange for wage rollbacks and existing service contracts remaining in corporate hands. Thus while placing the HEU strike within an historical “pattern of class solidarity,” Isitt and Moroz reconsider the general strike and whether it can be an effective tactic in the current era of neoliberalism.

Givan and Bach use extensive interviews to examine the role of trade unions as service privatization has spread through the NHS system. Unison is a broad public service union with about 1.3 million members, of whom 400,000 work in healthcare. Givan and Bach trace how the union stance toward privatization has generally been more reactive than proactive, shaped by relations between unions and the Labour party, especially as marketization escalated under the New Labour government of Tony Blair. Unable to stop privatization, unions shifted to what the authors call a “pragmatic and strategic” approach. This approach pursued three principal goals: protecting members; acting as intermediaries between public and private entities; and organizing the new private sector employees within the emerging two-tier workforce of NHS. The debate, as Givan and Bach describe it, revolves around poles of accommodation and resistance. Shifting from a broader ideological class strategy to one focused on the workplace, Unison representatives have tried to position themselves as intermediaries between the different accountability structures of Britain's new hybrid public-private health workplaces. Their article asks whether the union can still win workplace battles while, as they put it, “losing the ideological war.”

Privatization, of course, has been intended as a specific assault on the wages, benefits, and job security earned over a long struggle by public-sector workers. But it is also an assault on the gains in public goods and services made by citizens and consumers. To really consider the class struggle and political struggle surrounding privatization, we have to look beyond formal trade unions and the workers they contractually represent. What other types of class-based movements have emerged to contest privatization? How have various class alliances promoted, acquiesced in, or protested privatization? Looking closely at class formation and restructuring in Bolivia, Susan Spronk investigates the alternative vehicles for organizing workers, consumers, and the poor outside of trade unions. In this study of Bolivia over the past four decades, Spronk finds new political formations that arose in conjunction with urbanization and political-economic restructuring. Territorially-based organizations, rather than public-sector unions, have shaped the political struggle during the Cochabamba “Water Wars.” Spronk details the tensions within the Coordinadora de Defensa del Agua y de la Vida (Coalition for the Defense of Water and Life) between consumers and workers. She also looks at the emergence of a subsequent movement around water privatization, the FEJUVE of El Alto, a territorially-based organization that also has the more formal structure of elected representatives, as a model for enabling community participation in the management of a municipal water utility. Yet the FEJUVE too faced the same dilemmas of balancing consumers' and workers' interests.

Understanding the struggles around privatization, then, entails looking at the activities of consumers. Service-sector employment always involves a “third party”—the client or the consumer. Moreover, in social services, a fourth party, the state, perpetually creates, shapes, and reorders the service relationship.Footnote ⁸ As Franco Barchiesi writes in his essay on Johannesburg, municipal employment is “a point where workers and citizens, producers, and users of services intersect.” Hence, Barchiesi, Spronk, and other authors in this volume explore “the overlap of worker identities and community-based demands.” In some cases, the strategy of privatization as well as the responses to it, emerge from community groups and social movements previously organized around housing, sanitation, income support, or jobs. What these essays seek to show is how or whether responses to privatization become part of broader social movements, especially in the face of elite consolidation of power. In some cases, the overlap between workers and consumers is direct and specific, as Jane Berger finds in her study of antipoverty programs in Baltimore. African-American women both staffed these offices as low-level direct service providers and made up a large percentage of the clients. In other cases, as for instance in Johannesburg and British Columbia, the question is whether the consumer or social movements could build broader alliances to protect public services as well as public jobs, linking the quality of services with conditions of employment and widespread democratic participation.

Rhetoric and ideology play a substantial role in the politics of privatization. One of the most insistent discourses used by elite capitalists seeking new markets is the rhetoric of debt, fiscal crisis, and fiscal realism. Municipalities, states, and countries–both rich and poor–are told by bankers and economists they must accept the purported “discipline of the market.” Within this discourse, public budgets are cast as undisciplined, unruly, and out of control; private markets are claimed to be the opposite: disciplined and restrained. Bloated public budgets and municipal unions have been made the culprits for any crisis in capital accumulation. This rhetoric of fiscal crisis, as Jane Berger shows in her article on Baltimore, was not just a backdrop to the unfolding politics of the 1970s; it was an essential political tactic. Berger presents us with an interesting dialectic of crisis. She shows how urban austerity budgets, like those implemented in Baltimore in the mid-1970s, were linked to currency instability and the dollar crisis in the international financial system. Responding to the corporate crisis of profitability, Berger argues, US presidents in the 1970s and 1980s adopted urban policies shaped by macroeconomic agendas that prioritized capital's search for larger returns on investment. These macroeconomic and fiscal policies encouraged capital abandonment of American cities just at a time when their infrastructures were seriously aging. The changing federal response to poverty worsened the urban crisis. This kind of disinvestment gives us a broader sense of the economic and social hit that working-class residents—not just workers—faced, as well as its gendered dimension; it affected all the essential services on which families depended. Berger concludes that “privatization deepened an urban crisis that by the early 1980s had made Baltimore a city with one of the highest percentages of people living in poverty in the nation.”

While the rhetoric of fiscal crisis pressured public officials to carry out this agenda, the “restoration of class power,” as David Harvey puts it, still needed an ideological rationale that would garner widespread public support. Political leaders turned to the language of ownership and entrepreneurialism. According to Harvey, widespread privatization under the Thatcher government was legitimized by the extensive selling off of public housing to tenants, a policy presented as fulfilling a traditional ideal of individual property ownership.Footnote ⁹ President George W. Bush has consistently marketed the privatization of Social Security as a component of his “ownership society.” Jessica Allina- Pisano explores the deployment of this rhetoric most directly in her essay on the reorganization and privatization of collective and state farms in post-Soviet Russia. The reorganization of agricultural enterprises began in 1992, as a project of adaptation to a market society. Under the new land reform policy, land and other farm assets would allegedly be distributed to each “worker-shareholder.” Yet, as Allina-Pisano discovers, rather than relying on a purely contemporary language of neoliberalism, post-Soviet advocates of privatization reached back into Russia's own history and retrieved the language of entrepreneurial farming, peasant ownership, and efficiency from an earlier era of agricultural reform under Petr Arkad'evich Stolypin, Russia's reformist prime minister from 1906 to 1911. The acquisition of property rights, however, came at a high cost for many rural people. Far from leading to economic independence, “privatization of land in post-Soviet Russia,” Alina-Pisano suggests, “served as a mechanism for widespread dispossession and proletarianization.”

Oliver Cooke offers a unique contribution to this volume by tackling the theoretical approaches to privatization, especially in confronting public choice economists. Neoclassical economics, he argues, has focused so assuredly on the presumed efficiency outcome of privatization that it rarely looks at the actual process of commodification or the private entities that take over a public good or service. Developing a class theory of privatization, Cooke directs our attention to the fact that a public good or service is produced under starkly different social relations than is a private commodity. Beginning with Karl Marx's distinction between use value and exchange value, Cooke seeks to prove the inherently antidemocratic nature of privatizing a public good or service. Using the privatization of New York's Central Park as his case study, he establishes first that a public park is intended for use and possesses no exchange value. Once it was turned over to a private entity, it became a commodity, an investment that needed to be protected by its financial managers. As a result, decisions about the park's use were severed from democratic processes. The managers of Central Park could deny use of the park, as occurred during the 2004 Republican Convention, by claiming they were protecting the value of their investment. In this way, Cooke “underscores the contradictions inherent in attempts to square democratic principles with capitalist relations of production.”

Our final piece, by Colin Davis, is a response to a recent political imbroglio that exposed fault lines between the conservative promotion of privatization and the imperatives of nationalism. When a United Arab Emirates company, Dubai Ports World, won a contract to run major US ports, American lawmakers—most of them supporters of free trade and unregulated global capitalism—suddenly expressed outrage that such vital nodes of the American economy would be operated by an Arab company in a post-9/11 world. The concerned posturing resembled Captain Renault's expression of astonishment that gambling was taking place at Rick's casino in the film Casablanca. Wasn't the whole point of creating new markets opening up competitive opportunities for global corporations? Colin Davis again offers a longer historical perspective. The privatization of the world's ports, Davis shows, is not a new phenomenon. In this short, reflective piece, he gives us a transnational overview of the process and significance of privatizing ports.

Two areas in particular we were unable to address in this volume are privatization of prisons and military combat and support services. The privatization of the use of violence and coercion is clearly having tumultuous effects around the world. In addition to reflecting on the myriad uses of global private mercenary companies by state powers, we might also think about where the private contracting of force is linked to the dispossession of public assets by private corporations. In an era when the dominant political discourse conflates unrestrained capital prerogative and markets with democracy, new reflections on the mechanisms and contexts of privatization could produce fruitful new conversations about public rights, public goods, and democracy. This collection represents one opening in a critical, future discussion, and another chapter in a long history of the idea of “the commons.”