think-progress:

In other words: A complete disaster.

Who would have  thought the privatization of prisons wouldn’t prove to be a humanitarian home run? It’s almost as if there are aspects of political subjects’ self-administration that aren’t bettered by introducing profit motive as an organizing principle.  Is it archaic to suggest that? Wait, who’s the barbarian here? Oh, it’s the disproportionately male and African-American prison population who are barbarous. Criminals are the ones who “do” stuff and prisons help make them “responsible” for “what they did.”  I see… yes, maybe we do need more white women in prison, yes maybe the lack of divesity is the problem.  Never mind.

It musn’t be thought backwards to champion public services, even if nothing like a “public sphere” ever actually took hold of this bloody houseboat of a nation-state.  Salvaging not just the welfare state, but the image of the state and of government as a kinda “CEO of last resort” is part of what’s at stake in the struggle to unlink “capital” and “modernity” from one another.  Said struggle plays out mostly through ur-political cassette singles we call “culture wars” which prone like most cassingles to excessive compression (reduction of politics to culture) and shitty snare sounds (reduction of political identity to liberal subjectivity.)  Like a bad sequel staining the original flick, the atrocious, torrid, flabby interpenetration of capital and culture trumpets proof of postmodernism (“she is risen!”).  Happily, it suggests that we’re far enough from modernity maybe to yank it out of ideological bondage and swing it like a ship’s anchor in the faces of onrushing fucks who want to “monetize” empty space or sell you back your miscarried fetal matter.  Don’t you think they’re going to try that?  I do.