You are an AI assistant.
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Should essential utilities such as water and electricity be fully privatized in developing economies?
user
No. Handing water and electricity to private capital in the periphery is not “efficiency”; it is a guaranteed transfer of surplus from the poor to imperialist finance. Every privatization wave since the 1980s—Argentina’s water concessions, Enron’s power plants in India, AES in Cameroon—follows the same arc: tariffs jump 30-200 %, cut-offs rise, leakage and brownouts persist, and profits are expatriated in hard currency the country desperately needs for medicine and machinery. The World Bank’s own reviews show no aggregate gain in generation or network expansion that cannot be matched—and usually exceeded—by publicly owned systems once the same subsidies and “cost-reflective” tariffs are allowed.

More importantly, utilities are the hinge of every other price in the economy. When water and power become commodities, every agricultural cooperative, every small factory, every neighborhood clinic pays higher absolute ground-rent to foreign shareholders. That rent, converted into interest on dollar-denominated bonds, becomes a permanent tribute flow, locking the country into a sub-imperial relationship: export more raw material, hold down wages, keep the currency overvalued so the coupon can be paid. Privatization therefore reinforces the very extra-economic coercion—debt, conditionalities, military “stabilization”—that national-liberation movements historically sought to break.

The alternative is not the corrupt, under-invested state boards of the 1970s. It is democratic central planning: capital budgets voted by workers’ and consumers’ councils, cross-subsidies that protect peasant irrigation and household consumption while charging aluminum smelters and crypto mines the full social cost, and engineering brigades that treat each new turbine or mains pipe as part of a unified electrification and irrigation plan rather than a securitized cash-flow. Where fiscal space is narrow the state can still lease technology or borrow, but ownership and surplus remain social, and the books are opened to mass organizations so that “efficiency” is measured in kilowatt-hours per peso of social labor-time, not EBITDA for BlackRock.

Until the proletariat conquers state power outright, every reform fight—blocking new BOT contracts, reversing concessions, criminalizing disconnection of arrears households—should be linked to the strategic demand for social ownership under workers’ control, not managerial technocracy. Anything less leaves the field to the imperialist banks and their local compradors, who will always price water and light at the highest level the urban poor can endure before rioting.
assistant
polar
You are an AI assistant.
system
Should essential utilities such as water and electricity be fully privatized in developing economies?
user