|
X Close Window |
PUBLIC SECTOR: HOLDING HEADS HIGH
Herschel Hardin Leadership Campaign
Policy Circular 13 • July 11, 1995 |
|
|
Collective action, and hence the public sector, are a natural, elemental part of a political economy. They stem from the nature of what people are: first of all, social beings and members of communities. The public sector is not just an economic add on, doing what market devices cannot manage. It is a primary form of economic activity which stands in its own right is more basic, in fact, than market exchange.
In the last 15 years, however, the public sector has been downgraded by ideological antagonism. American inspired market dogma has come into fashion, with its doctrine of the market über alles, imposing itself artificially on the whole of our political economy. It makes little difference to this dogma whether the public sector is efficient or not, or appropriate or not. The dogma still dismisses it.
Our public medical care, for example, as we all know, is much more efficient than the largely private American system. Publicly owned automobile insurance monopolies are one of the great consumer innovations, like supermarkets or on line credit unions and banking. Our public schools and hospitals are more important than most private sector activities. Even many ardent right wingers in Canada allow that government and the social safety net are a good thing that they would not like Canada to socially deteriorate like the United States. Yet they and their ideology nevertheless discount the public sector as something which, while perhaps being necessary, is somehow not economically legitimate, primarily a burden on taxpayers, and therefore to be reduced to a minimum.
One of our key tasks as a democratic socialist party is to relegitimize the public sector against this ideological distortion.
Other papers in this series have already touched on strategic possibilities. Policy Circular 11A talks about fighting against media structural bias, whereby regular "service" coverage is given to corporate business and finance the business sections in daily newspapers, for example but no equivalent coverage is given to the public sector. This inevitably downgrades the public sector in people's minds.
Corresponding coverage of the public sector would have a dramatic effect. People at large would become more familiar with public sector management, its personalities, and its technical achievements. Morale in the public sector would be raised. Creativity, efficiency and accountability would improve. The public sector would be seen as a leading part of our political economy.
Television's commercial propaganda, without right of reply for collective action or values and no equivalent media space for public sector activity, has the same distorting effect on our perceptions. This, too, we need to take on. See Policy Circular 10, "The Post Propaganda Society."
Demythologizing the private sector would have a powerful impact. The sacredness attached to the private sector by ideology, next to which the public sector is assumed to be inferior, would fall away. See Policy Circular 7, "Fighting waste and excess in the private sector."
Most of all, we have to reaffirm community and the naturalness of collective action which flows from community. Part and parcel of this is debunking the notion of the market as applicable to everything, rather than as one economic device among others, appropriate in some areas, inappropriate elsewhere.
The public sector does not exist by itself, in a vacuum. It is an economic expression of our living together and our social bond to one another as citizens. Make this case and we make the case for a dynamic public sector as well. It's a matter of rediscovering giving new life to our sense of collectivity. Public sector activity in turn reinforces this sense of collectivity. We can take pride for what we do together in this way and what it says about us as Canadians.
|
|
