Privatizing state services produces bifurcated access to social goods

Evidence

Neoliberalism, accordingly, seeks to elevate privatization of property, revenue generation, utilities, services, and social support systems, including health care, aid, and disaster response and relief. The privatizing of services is particularly revealing, shifting the traditional caretaking functions of the modern state – emergency relief most notably but far from only – increasingly to charitable institutions. This inevitably produces bifurcated experiences of social goods and access such as health care, education, even public highways. In turn, privatized property – equated with nationalist identification and supplementing state enforcement – has functioned to re-homogenize the body politic. Where the welfare state, with all its contradictions and failings, produced a modicum of social egalitarianism, the neoliberal state exacerbates inequality, further privileging the already privileged. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1742

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the general literature on privatization and welfare state retrenchment; resonances with the prior chapters’ framing of racial neoliberalism as a globalized restructuring project. — connects to: The new enclosures privatize access to identity, as the old ones privatized land; Privatizing public goods shifts their cost disproportionately onto women — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 207; Chilean privatization concentrated wealth in conglomerates while state kept strategic sectors — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1633 (+4 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1742