There’s a rather tedious old saying that the fog of war causes confusion and uncertainty on the battlefield, and within what American filmmaker Stanley Kubrick referred to as “war rooms”.
Particular wars involving large powers also tend to draw the world’s attention away from perceptibly more mundane issues. Among such mundanities are the “privatisation” and “monetisation” of everything and the proffering of private corporate solutions to the most awful human conditions and catastrophes.
While the death and destruction on the Levantine shores continue, a big proposal has been to reconstruct swathes of land as holiday resorts or high-end living spaces. This helps explain real estate developers Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff’s appointment as President Donald Trump’s envoys to western Asia.
This is consistent with the ideas and policies that have emanated from the echelons of global elites, who we can refer to as a transnational capitalist class. Let’s not get into a fight though.
For what it’s worth, I spent most of the first decade of this century studying the details of the extension of economics methodology to all human activities around the world under the rubric of global public goods.
Nonetheless, the ideas and proposals to privatise everything have found expression in UN policy proposals on global public goods formally since 1999. Hard as it may be to believe, the UN discussed things such as human dignity and moonlight (yes!) in the same frame as, say, lighthouses.
It remains baffling how moonlight ought to be considered in this way until we recall that the drive to privatise everything has been a consistent feature of global public policymaking and economic orthodoxy ― at least in the West.
More than a decade ago Barbara Baarsma, CEO of a Netherlands-based bank, suggested that access to clean air would benefit from privatisation. Former Nestlé CEO Peter Brabeck-Letmathe suggested, also more than a decade ago, that access to water was not a human or public right and that it should be provided “for profit”.
The economist John Nellis of the Peterson Institute for International Economics concluded that the world would be a better place if everything were privatised.
Predictably, each one of them rolled back what they had said and provided “clarity” and “context”. While it is incumbent on us to believe them when they said they were misunderstood, it’s not unfair to say that the seeds had been planted and the damage was done.
Take a moment to consider the example of stochastic terrorism (as an analogy). You make statements that incite hatred and violence then walk them back, citing misunderstanding or misinterpretation, and proclaim your innocence. The point is that the idea has been planted and the damage (probably) done.
Danger arises when your statement in effect reverses acceptable rules and standards of moral behaviour (beyond economics rationalism) to the extent that “we get used to the inhuman”, as the late great historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote in about 1994.
Put differently, since at least 1999, when the UN Development Programme began to formally publish its discussions and proposals on global public goods as a means to “manage international co-operation”, it further cleared a path to privatise everything humans held morally sacred.
Danger arises when your statement in effect reverses acceptable rules and standards of moral behaviour (beyond economics rationalism) to the extent that “we get used to the inhuman”, as the late great historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote in about 1994.
Over the next three decades things such as culture, education, human dignity, access to fresh air and water (I have never been able to avoid the horripilation when imaging moonlight in a liberal capitalist frame) have all become part of the intended consequences of global public policymaking and of human endeavour. If, that is, you believe that economics has to be the final arbiter of all social activity.
And so it makes sense when one considers the geopolitical forces that opened private corporate access to Venezuela’s oil reserves. It makes sense that Western interests in Iran’s oil have been a consistent feature since the early 1950s. It makes sense that razed landscapes in the Levant will be redeveloped into a “Mediterranean utopia” or a “Riviera” of luxury high-rises ”better than Monaco”, as Reuters reported earlier this year.
You don’t have to turn to radical political economy to understand the relentlessness of capitalism. Adam Smith properly explained “privatise everything” as a force that generates wealth for a few ― that transnational capitalist class I referred to above.
A great danger lies in the way “the few” tend to manipulate whatever passes for public policymaking or “international law” for the sake of personal pecuniary gain.
• Lagardien, an external examiner at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank as well as the secretariat of the National Planning Commission.
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