Peer2Politics

A discussion on the weaving of science and commons: what's public, what's private and the ways we understand, produce and socialize science.

A year ago last May, the Real World Economics Review blog published my post, “Why Aren’t We Talking About Public Goods?” In that article I argued that we need to revive and reframe the concept of public goods. A concept of public goods is immensely important because: 

1) People are fighting privatization by refusing to recognise the state as the owner of public services and resources, instead claiming that they belong to the people. 2) Where public services are gone, people are organising themselves, locally and democratically, to provide the services they need. This included the provision of healthcare in the Greek example and the provision of housing in the Spanish example, but there are millions of others. 3) But there are also forms which kind of bring together both elements of the first two. These are struggles which both defend or demand the public provision of services while at the same time vesting ownership of services in the people and getting people involved in the democratic control of services.

This is the third in a series of blog posts taken from our talk opening the Ciudad Furor film festival, organised by the Latin American Solidarity Centre in November 2014. In previous posts we examine the neoliberalisation of urban services as a process involving both the acceleration and expansion of the ‘market’ in controlling urban services as well as profound transformation of the state as it is penetrated by the market’s logic. In this post, we examine resistance to these processes, focusing on that resistance reshapes and re-imagines the very notion of ‘the public’.