PUBLIC SERVICES IN EUROPE - CONCLUSIONS EL SEMINAR on PUBLIC SERVICES in BARCELONA 10 June 2011
Capitalism has been advancing for centuries, and the commodification of people and society and social disintegration are the result. Since the beginning of this economic system, the old ways of socialization were sacrificed to the self-regulating market. Territoriality and societies were swept away and stripped of their natural and human content. Prisoners of the "market" are given over to an economic liberalism that threatens the foundations of society itself. The subordination of the social to the economic generates misery and destroys the sense of community, while the market system (capitalism) distorts our view of people and society.
We live in a growing gap between the real and financial economy as it moves in its bubbles, monopolizes public spending, while capital seeks new avenues for expansion into public services, following a deregulatory path . Increasingly, the parasitic practices of financial capital and industrial capital pollute public services, so that it becomes difficult to distinguish between the three. The goods and services being cut, threatened, distorted, are the mortar that held our societies together. The economy also includes goods that everyone can eat, of which no one is excluded (although they may have some limitations). However, private goods correspond to the logic of private property and exclusion.
We are perfectly aware that these are public goods and services which are aimed at meeting the needs / rights of people and their basic needs for health and autonomy. They need regulating. Supplying and maintaining public services for food and water, shelter, safe, health care, child safety, meaningful relationships, physical and economic security and education.
- The survival and autonomy that public goods and services ensure are essential in any culture, and necessary for the exercise of solidarity and social participation:
- Enabling development in freedom is possible with certain forms of organization of production, reproduction, communication, etc.., It is incompatible with the neoliberal policies that led to the current frenzy, especially in times of crisis.
It is, in fact, human and moral rights transformed into social and civil rights through specific policies, which vary from culture to culture. If the needs covered by public goods and services - ensuring the satisfaction of basic needs health and autonomy - are not met due to a lack of political will, adequate funding, or incompetence of leaders, no society as a whole will have free access (only the privileged few who take advantage of inequality and reap its benefits), or see their rights recognized and satisfied in citizenship.
We must also denounce the fact that the cuts in public services have class and gender bias, and hit immigrants and the weakest and neediest in society harder.
Therefore, far from accepting blame for the deficits created by allocating our taxes to save criminal banks, or to finance wars of imperialism, or to pay for luxury far from the survival of so many people, we claim that public goods should be financed sufficiently with progressive taxes on income and wealth.
This is the fundamental difference between private goods, which are governed by price. We are opposed to the poisoning of values by pricing, and are therefore interested in the invisible social cost of meeting the costs that companies place on the people: quality of living, equity and the environment all for the possibility of generating profit.
From this fundamental consideration the Barcelona Seminar on Public Services have produced and presented a series of choral works on the three pillars of the welfare state: education, health, and social services. But a fourth urgent and increasingly indispensable workshop for strategic services of general interest: water, energy, transport, environment, housing, media, and postal services, cultural...
A very important conclusion is the confirmation that despite the current historical, cultural, economic and geopolitical context today in Europe and the EU, the origin, authorship and character of neo-liberal attacks, under the protection and monitoring of policies EU is obviously running parallel.
In each country or region, depending on your reality, but eventually everywhere, they are attacking the public core of services, in their financing as much as in their management. This is the privatization and systematic commodification at all levels and sectors possible.
For such a strategy different systems are sued from direct appropriation, or progressive outsourcing, “consorting”, the separation of purchase, provision and delivery of services, the introduction of managerial and legal "market" mechanisms under false ideas of effectiveness, efficiency, modernity, competition, sustainability and a string of pseudo-concepts coined or simply exploited by the upper neocon echelons of the impressive neoliberal and oligopolistic machine.
The great fallacy currently in full (and successful) expansion is the supposed advantages of "public-private partnership," complementarity, co-payment (or as we say, prepaid by taxpayers), "mixed"...
Beyond this discussion of great social penetration by a means with proven alienating effectiveness lays a systematic derivation - we've talked of parasitisation - of public resources to benefit private enterprise, with the consequent deterioration of the public and the enrichment of the private. This mechanism coming via the subversion of language with concepts such as "progressive" and "governance", co-management or social participation to undermine the public and subject it to the complex and sophisticated manipulation of the financial trickery we talked about. Hence the need for transparency, democratic control and a conceptual defence against alleged "modernisation".
When they talk of education, from nursery school to primary, secondary and university education, with all the controversies of the Bologna Process and its aftermath, they are intoxicated on the imperatives of collaboration between companies (the market) and universities.
When subjected to unhealthy citizenship, dependent on public systems that are deliberately weakened when personal and social care deteriorates and health and social services and personal autonomy and dignity are left stranded in the private market.
It has also been spelled out and documented - the systematic attack on public transport, on trains, on access to drinking water and water for other uses such as agriculture, the fierce privatization of energy and electricity in particular that affects all citizens in their own daily life and survival, environmental degradation unpunished, the large chemical, food and nuclear multinationals etc. the unbearable situation of control of major media and their subjection to the interests of ultra-liberal indoctrination, social surrender and economic profit, the situation of public housing and the right to a home today in a pandemic of evictions and social exclusion, and ultimately all those public service conditions that determine our daily lives privatized and commodified by law and the system.
In plain and simple words: every day the gap is wider and deeper - we either exercise our social, economic, democratic rights, or allow these public services to be treated and used as commodities. There is no possible compromise: fight for your rights or serve capital and the market.
Cutting government services as is being done now in Europe and Catalonia calls the nature democracy itself into question and prepares the way for a new fascism.
It's time to react on an urgent local and global scale. It is imperative to build partnerships, social mobilization and political commitment on behalf of Public Services under serious threat in a period of systematic destruction of the "welfare state", a real network of social benefit, the result of social, trade union and political struggle that is substantial and defining of European identity as a model.
This is a situation of imminent danger of falling to the insatiable greed of the markets.
For the EL, once again, "Europe will be social, or not be." That is now one of our most committed battles and we'll be there.