The Myth of the Public Good

Andy Hines in Protean:

The accumulative capacity of universities and hospitals is a New Deal-era political and economic solution that has been retooled to address contradictions with capital as industrial profits waned from the mid-century onwards. During this same period, carceral and policing institutions also swelled to enormous size. Viewed together, these shifts register the American notion of “the public good,” as purveyed by the state. This sheen of democratic and collective values burnishes the motives of profit and launders the racialized violence of accumulation. In truth, the state serves capital and its institutions, not the public. A key project of ideology is to invert this perception.

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