The private capture of common good

B. Herry-Priyono Driyarkara School of Philosophy Jakarta

The year 2002 began with torrential floods battering Jakarta and many other cities. Nature cares nothing for our logic; she has her own, which we do not acknowledge until we are crushed under her wheel. By the end of 2002, it is clear that the way we were crushed has less to do with nature than with our disregard for how nature needs nurture.

The attempt to conquer Mother Nature began long before 2002. How many parks, swamps and lakes have been completely wiped out?! In the past ten years, for example, 20,074 hectares of the great water conservation area in Bopunjur (Bogor, Puncak and Cianjur) have been turned into hotels, restaurants and villas. So are other support systems for the ecology of Jakarta, like areas now known as Sunter, Taman Anggrek Industrial Zone, Hotel Mulia in South Jakarta and the 831.6 hectares of the Pantai Indah Kapuk estate. Pantai Indah Kapuk used to be 1,144 hectares of virgin mangrove forest serving as a nine million cubic meter water reservoir.

No doubt, the list of the looted areas elsewhere is much longer, like environmental disasters in Timika, Minahasa, North Tapanuli, or Nusa Tenggara. The year 2002 has witnessed the intensification of such pillaging. The ongoing financial crisis that puts the government in a revenue quandary has pushed further the selling-out of many public areas into private hands. Documenting the disappearance of these ecological jewels, the Jakarta Social Institute concludes that most cases involve questionable transfers to business groups.

What concerns us is less about nature than about the way the prerequisite for our shared life is being squeezed out by the most unenlightened pursuits of short-term profit. This, in fact, is what happens to the other "material bases" for our Republic. The capture of the provision of public health, water or electricity by private businesses poses a crisis in the survival of public interest. The state of public transportation is a case in point. Of the total 3,870,758 units of vehicles in Jakarta in 2002, for example, 97.5 percent are private and only 2.5 percent for public transportation. There are 16 million daily trips within Jakarta, 42.8 percent of which are by private cars and 57.2 percent from public transportation; a very high level of consumerism of space.

Not so long ago there was an oft-repeated agreement that the provision of our daily necessities such as water, electricity, health, public transportation - as distinguished from perfume or diamonds - has to be safeguarded by the utmost concern for the general public. State-run enterprises, that dying economic species, was the incarnate form of public ownership in the ideological battle up until the second half of the 1970s. Gone was that era. The ensuing neo-liberal revolution has shattered the myth of the public-spirited state.

Enter the tidal wave of de-regulation and privatization. Indeed, privatization has its virtues. It has pumped up the moribund state enterprises with the ethos of productivity and efficiency. The daring new world now belongs to the entrepreneurs of private profit. Both efficiency and profit, however, are a means begging an end. It is this question of 'end' that gradually pushes the revolution to the other extreme.

In place of public goods, accumulation of private wealth is heralded as the term of celebration. In place of the patrician liberal virtue of Smith's The Wealth of Nations, we are advancing the neo-liberal vice of Friedman's The Wealth of Individuals. Indeed, we seem to have a penchant for the extreme, perhaps because balance is a virtue that exists only in sermons; it is the site of boredom.

In this ideological trap lies the banal argument about private versus state ownership, market versus command political-economy.

This is a thoughtless binary for understanding the issue that, alas, ultimately lies in neither one. The real issue is about public interest. Is the common good better served by state-run enterprises or by private ones?

Once the angle is shifted in this direction, the unfruitful binary loses its force. "Public interest" and "common good" should not be understood simply in terms of the availability of public services, but also the extent to which the wider public - as distinct from a coterie of shareholders - have a say over the way public services are being distributed.

After the fall of the State-led economies led us to a belief that the state is a nemesis to efficient economics, the derring- do of the 1980s onward has been the pursuit of homo privatus, or individual needs. Then, at the end of the 20th century, the rot at the heart of the homo privatus economy began to surface. Unfortunately, the ensuing battle remains couched in the binary language of privatization versus state ownership. The problem is, the neo-liberal apostles remain unenlightened. The year 2002 has been a continuation of their scheme. In Joseph Stiglitz's mocking phrase, it is the scheme of "privatization at all costs!"

Life in a Republic is a morass of competing interests and visions for a better society. The year 2002 has given the following testimony: as much as the predatory state is a menace to public interests, so is the parasitic private sector a nemesis to the common good.

2003 could and should be a time to conquer the predicament of our shared life. How? Bring back the true meaning and nobility of public policy. The bad news is, the neo-liberal cabals will launch a fierce resistance. The good news is, more people have been outraged by the neo-liberal credo which proclaims that a tree only counts for something once it has been chopped down and turned into pulp.