Privatisation increased costs and destroyed the public-service ethos it claimed to improve

Evidence

MF: There was a case for modernisation of those publicly owned industries — they were run at a massive inefficiency, but that was just a pretext of privatisation. They should have been improved while being publicly owned. It costs a lot more now it is privatised. It is some kind of ridiculous fee, how much more the tube costs the public purse since it was part privatised. It is a destruction of ethos with the workers themselves — the same with hospitals, why aren’t they cleaned properly? Because you bring in private contractors whose only incentive is to deliver it as cheaply as possible, to pay their cleaners as cheaply as possible. If you don’t have that public service ethos then everything of course will become shoddier. It’s glossy shoddiness, isn’t it. That is the reality. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 2272

Categorization

• XREF: Recalls the newer ‘glossy shoddiness’ framing as a specific form of the ‘capitalist realism is shit but you have to have it’ thesis central to Fisher. — connects to: Nationalization was inverted to socialize losses while privatizing remaining gains — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 947; Privatizing state services produces bifurcated access to social goods — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1742; Privatizing public goods shifts their cost disproportionately onto women — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 207 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Neoliberal marketisation imposed its own new bureaucracy #corroborates (0.82) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1724
• Privatization reforms branded as liberation become new oppression #corroborates (0.80) — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 944
• Privatizing state services produces bifurcated access to social goods #expands (0.78) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1742
• Privatizing public goods shifts their cost disproportionately onto women #expands (0.75) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 207
• Lost profits privatize while losses nationalize in statist capitalism. #complicates (0.75) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1153
• Government absorbed private charity and widened its public service scope over the past century #complicates (0.74) — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 87
• Voters blame governments for privatized failures rather than the companies responsible #qualifies (0.73) — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 128
• Nationalization was inverted to socialize losses while privatizing remaining gains #complicates (0.72) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 947
• Privatisation shrank government jobs that had served as caste equality channels #corroborates (0.72)
• Worker political gains came at the expense of client-oriented service #complicates (0.71)