Rethinking Municipal Privatization

This book examines one of the most high-profile municipal privatizations the privatization of New York City s Central Park. This fascinating account highlights the immense theoretical and political issues involved in radically rethinking privatization in both the municipal and global contexts.

Contents List of Figures Acknowledgments 1. Municipal Privatization: An Introduction 1.1. Institutional Forms and Conceptions of Privatization 1.2. New York City's Privatization Experience During the 1990s 2. The Evolution of the Municipal Privatization Discourse 2.1. The Development of a Theory of Privatization 2.2. A Theory Comes of Age: The 1970s Watershed and Urban Fiscal Crisis 2.3. The Reagan Years 2.4. The 1990s: Reinventing Government 2.5. The Heterodox Terrain of the Privatization Discourse: the 1970s and Early 1980s 2.6. Retrenchment and the Heterodox Discourse of the 1980s 2.7. The Mid- to Late 1980s: Entrepreneurial Government 2.8. The 1990s: Neoliberalism and Globalization 2.9. Critiquing the Discourse: Assessing Methodology and Content 3. A Class Approach to Municipal Privatization 3.1. The Class Process, Classes, and the Subsumed Class Process 3.2. Overdetermination 3.3. The Implications of a Class Approach to Municipal Privatization Appendix: Post-Privatization Wage Outcomes 4. A Class Analysis of Central Park's Privatization 4.1. The Historical Backdrop to Central Park's Privatization 4.2. A Class Analytic Interpretation of Central Park's Privatization 4.3. Conceptualizing the Central Park Commodity 4.4. The Central Park Commodity's Production 4.5. A Class Analytic Model of the Central Park Conservancy Appendix: Estimating the Central Park Commodity's Cost Price 5. The Class Analytic Implications of Central Park's Privatization 5.1. Beyond Efficiency and Cost 5.2. The Central Park Conservancy's Fundraising and the Capitalist Sector 5.3. The Central Park Conservancy's Fundraising and the Non-profit Sector 5.4. Central Park's Privatization and Independent and Communist Producers 5.5. Municipal Privatizations as Ensembles 6. Rethinking Municipal Privatization 6.1. Non-Progressive Municipal Privatizations 6.2. Non-Capitalist Enterprises and their Viability in the Context of Municipal Privatization 6.3. Progressive Municipal Privatizations: Democratic Enterprise Formation 6.4. The Policy Merits of Progressive Municipal Privatizations 6.5. Rethinking Municipal Privatization on the Left 7. Rethinking the Privatization of State-Owned Enterprises 7.1. The Global Privatization Movement 7.2. The Motives for Privatizations 7.3. Methods of Divestiture 7.4. What Privatizations of State-Owned Enterprises have done and not done: a Class Analytic Interpretation 7.5. Theorizing Progressive Privatizations Involving State-Owned Enterprises 7.6. The Policy Implications of Progressive Privatizations Notes Bibliography Index