Rationality of Privitatization

[Psy]

How do Capitalists rationalize privatizing of dead labor?

I got to think about it when someone told me that downloading old USSR animation was stealing because I am talking profits away from private Russian studios that held the rights. Instead of going into the debate of why do owners of production have the right to something artists created, I asked why art that was freely distributed before the privatization of the Russian studios all of a sudden people had to pay for.

It really got me thinking, how do capitalist justify privatizing already produced goods that are were produced on another model?

It seems even more baseless the idea of private ownership of production itself. The good already exists so what do capitalists claim the profit motive does for the already existing goods?

[RebelDog]

I live in the UK and over the last two decades there has been a huge ongoing process of privatisation of public owned industries and utilities. Its hugely unpopular so it must generally be accompanied with a with a propoganda campaign against public ownership as a concept and the specific company that is being appropriated in to the hands of the bourgeoise. Usually this takes the form of painting public ownership as an old unworkable economic 'dinosaur' and privatisation as the only alternative. Some politicians and bourgeoise have the contempt to call economic privatisation 'modernisation'. I laugh evertime I hear that. Its always funny how the 'only alternative' makes the bourgeoise richer.

The government who wants to privatise the public company also has control over that company so it can starve it of finance to decrease its proper capacity to function and it can also offer the company's senior bureaucrats a piece of the privatised pie in order to appease them. The UK government are clearly trying to jepordise the capacity of the UK post office to function properly at the moment. Parts of the post office have been lost to privatisation recently and I fear for its future and the tens of thousands of jobs. We have to remember that governments have to make things attractive for the private profiteers and if we look at the public investment in the UK railway network we find it is actually more than what it was when the public owned it. Public money is being used to pay the dividends of private shareholders to the tune of 4-5 billion pounds a year. Its simply theft.

Great areas of the UK NHS are under threat or have already fallen to privatisation. Politicians actually sit there and expect people to believe that these private companies are coming in as loving partners of the public utility and they are going to invest much needed cash in to the sector and help it. The reality is that they are coming in to make as much profit as possible and extract money from the NHS. Public/private partnership is utter bullshit but its a contridictory belief prevelent in the minds of New Labour politicians who expect everyone else to swallow it. Arseholes.

As far as the USSR is concerned the transition from public to private economy was probably actually easier than in the UK. Many CP members and bureaucrats went on to own their piece of the pie and the broken proletariat, who were not in power, gave no resistance. Its a bigger tragedy in Russia because the proletariat built its industry almost from scratch after the revolution and its control and ownership was respectively stolen from them under circumstances that supposedly should have empowered them and their resolve to fight.

When a ruling class embarks on something like privatisation they like to paint it as them acting in the interests of the population as a whole. We know this to be a very transparent lie. So the answer is that basically they can convince some people but the majority of the public will generally reject privatisation. Everything can be sold and everything will be sold, unless the national/global bourgeoise and the institutions that serve their interests are removed or at least challenged.

[Psy]

Ahh but when you are talking about privatizing the dead labor (buildings, equipment,ect) that results in lower output then the question how the hell does the owners justify their share? I know the junk about how the profit motive is suppose to bring higher quality at lower prices then other economic models but the privatization of the USSR seems to a bigger case against capitalism then the existence of the USSR was. While profits in what was the USSR went up, productivity dropped, this goes against capitalist theory of capitalism.