In this period of austerity, where everything that provides a safety net for the working classes—including public services—is being sacrificed in the name of budgetary discipline and the intransigence of the markets, it may seem paradoxical to criticize public services. And yet, the aim of this article is to show that public services belong to the very world we want to destroy.
Definition(s)
There are many definitions of public services. Here, I will use the one that limits them to services provided to the population of a country in the name of the general interest, managed by the State, theoretically without distinction or discrimination, and financed in part or in full by collective contributions (taxes, etc.). We readily think of schools, hospitals, transportation, energy, waste management, and mail, but also of a number of services provided by various public administrations (prefectures, courts, town halls, water distribution, employment, etc.), sometimes subcontracted to private or semi-public operators, but managed by the administration through calls for tenders, specifications, or by holding a majority stake in a privatized company.
The boundaries of what constitutes public services depend on political stances and the perceptions of the actors themselves (the "public police service"), the country in question (the United States is not renowned for the development of its public services), and the historical period (the public authorities of the Ancien Régime oversaw far fewer sectors). A certain ambiguity sometimes persists between these services and the traditional sovereign functions of the State (internal and external security, justice, currency, finance). The example we will primarily use here is that of "French-style public services."
The role of the public education service, detailed by one of its providers
A brief history of French-style public services
According to P. Sommermeyer (1), public service is inseparable from the Civil Service and its body of civil servants. After 1945, many civil servants, particularly at the highest levels, supported Vichy. The new government, headed by De Gaulle, wanted a loyal administration. High-level administrators, trained in the schools that would become Sciences Po and the École Nationale d'Administration (ENA), were recruited for this purpose. Independent of parliamentary maneuvering, they would be closely aligned with the State. The Civil Service would be jointly managed by unions in joint bodies. Following compromises with the very powerful Communist Party (PC), the civil servant status was created. Before the splits between Force Ouvrière and then the National Education Federation, Maurice Thorez, General Secretary of the Communist Party, devised a single statute that strengthened the control of a hegemonic CGT (General Confederation of Labour) subservient to the Communist Party over civil servants. The concept of public service was already present in this statute, because for Thorez, civil servants should be "servants of the Nation."
This statute, which at the time represented a considerable portion of the French workforce, contained various features that remain very much in place today: a hierarchy of categories (A, B, C), corps, ranks, pay grades, and joint management of the workforce by unions. In exchange for their recognition by the State, the unions collaborated with the employer.
Meanwhile, Marcel Paul, Minister of Industrial Production, secured the nationalization of the energy sector and the creation of a statute for electricians and gas workers. As with the SNCF (French National Railways), the statutes governing workers in these companies contained guarantees that aligned them with those of civil servants.
Finally, alongside these civil servants, there are the elite corps of graduates from engineering schools (Ponts et Chaussées, Mines, Institut National Agronomique, etc.) tasked with revitalizing production in a France in need of reconstruction. Internal solidarity among alumni, the meritocratic system of competitive examinations, and an undisputed technocratic role in regional planning decisions have made them a veritable caste within the state, dedicated to managing certain public services.
The Work of Public Services
The class interests of the rank-and-file public service workers (the postman, the electrician, the gas worker, or the schoolteacher) are diluted by the general interest they are supposed to represent, by union co-management, and by the ambiguous status of both managers and those they manage. These factors have nonetheless made it "an efficient machine, both in its service activities and in defending its employees."
But what exactly does this “efficient machine” do? While public services do indeed provide services to the working class (mail, energy, education, healthcare, etc.), “for hundreds of thousands of people in France today, public service also means teachers who humiliate and socially sort you, inquisitorial social services that cut off your benefits for the slightest incorrectly filled-out document, monthly checks at the employment office, fines on public transport, and police checks. (2)”
Furthermore, defending “our public services” implies that we have a say in how they are run. This demonstrates a lack of understanding of the history of their establishment, as described in the previous section, and of the technocratic implementation of nuclear power plants (3), highways designed for car dependency, or “the development of the TGV high-speed rail network, financed in part by the gradual closure of unprofitable lines (1)” and freight transport.
Therefore, at a global level for the State, it is a matter of entrusting these sectors with the task of managing everything that enables the training of workers, their healthcare, transportation, the circulation of goods and flows (internet, energy), etc., that is to say, what Marxists call the reproduction of labor power and the circulation of capital.
The public security and public order service intervening in Lille in 2023
General interest = interest of capital
“The general interest” is therefore nothing more than the normal functioning of capitalist society, its routine made up of exploitation, domination, hierarchies, and control. “For society as a whole is precisely subordinated to the demands of the reproduction of capital: it is according to these demands that it has been shaped; the maintenance of its order is precisely what the reproduction of capital dictates; by regulating social activity, it is the reproduction of capital that it regulates.” (4)
Historically, in the second half of the 20th century, we can better understand why the State agreed to co-manage with a group of workers who were well-represented in unions and potentially united and militant: “After the Second World War, it was necessary to rebuild and modernize, […] the national productive apparatus was the priority; the issues of housing, health, and education were necessary conditions for supplying capital with a mass of skilled and able-bodied labor. (2)”
Public services are thus a historical modality of French capitalism (and we find the same thing to varying degrees in other core capitalist countries during the same period), a compromise between capitalists, represented by the State, and workers, represented by the Communist Party/General Confederation of Labour apparatus, to keep the economy running. This was a stage in the relationship between capital and labor, known as the Trente Glorieuses (Thirty Glorious Years), during which growth and productivity gains for capitalists were linked to a (relative) improvement in the living conditions of the French working class (for in the colonies, it was a different, bloody story). This compromise is illustrated not only by co-management but also by the financing of these services, partly drawn from the profits of employers, who, through this choice, believe that the state is more efficient than the market for the reproduction of capital.
Public services: a class analysis
If defending public services ultimately means defending capitalism (or a past stage of it), then the militant ideology that overwhelmingly calls for their expansion within social movements may seem surprising. However, upon closer examination, the class composition of public service workers and the ideology associated with them provide part of the answer.
The dual role of public services, functioning, so to speak, for both capital and labor, makes their workers potential allies of the two social poles of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and therefore capable of representing a general, average interest. Furthermore, public services operate with a workforce that is (increasingly less) shielded from the market, and thus less likely to be suspected of defending its immediate self-interest, unlike private companies. Finally, many of these workers (and especially a dominant fraction within the public services, both in terms of numbers and ideology: teachers) are recruited through competitive examinations, often hold degrees (or are trained internally), and/or have access to union and political party representation. These are characteristics that Alain Bihr associates with a class playing an intermediary role in relations of exploitation: the capitalist managerial class (5), and with its “natural” political outcome: the seizure of state power through social democracy. Hence the historical flattery of the left towards civil servants…
The status, the social position attributed to those who perform a task deemed to be of general interest, creates a separate class whose own interests may conflict with those of the service recipients. Hence the corporatism in the struggles ("public-private"), even the more or less conscious authoritarian management (6), and the limited substantive criticism offered by unions in these sectors regarding the functioning of public services, except to deplore their shortcomings or underfunding…
Implementation of the public nuclear energy service dialogue at the Creys-Malville demonstration in 1977
Communists and anarchists, all behind public services?
The political perspective of the left, defending and expanding public services, stems from a social logic of interests. However, it is the product of a specific and bygone historical period, that of the Trente Glorieuses (Thirty Glorious Years) and its now obsolete capitalist principles (strong growth, full employment, a relatively favorable balance of power for workers, mass organizations, etc.). Each period of capitalism produces, among the exploited, its own forms of resistance associated with particular perspectives and utopias.
In the 20th century, in fact, the structures of worker representation—parties and unions—relied primarily on the “bastions” of large private companies (in the automotive industry, for example) and the civil service. The capitalist restructuring that began in the 1970s targeted large concentrations of workers, even before the civil service, leading to a sharp decline in the utopian vision of a working class empowered by production (rather than reproduction), its left-wing or far-left aspirations, and its utopia of generalized labor—Soviet-style for some, self-managed for others.
While it's easy to understand why authoritarian communists, worshippers of the state, embraced the uncritical defense of public services, the debate remains open among libertarians. The Paris Commune and the federation of communes remain the touchstones for anarchists, and many frown upon the inclination of some toward "libertarian public services," which they see as a covert revival of the state. Marianne Enckell recounts the debates within the Anti-Authoritarian International (7), following the Paris Commune. While all shared the desire to "restore to each member of the social body their effective sovereignty," the Belgian César De Paepe, a statist, proposed "a single and supreme direction of the public administration" and "the direct or indirect participation of all" in these services, whereas Adhémar Schwitzguébel countered with the continuity of the revolutionary association of "groups of workers" who "mutually secure the gains of the Revolution" by means of "federation pacts [...] for the organization of production, exchange, circulation, instruction and education, hygiene, and security." And James Guillaume sought to prevent the "special personnel" of these services from becoming a bureaucracy by recruiting them "freely from among the workers."
Public transport workers moving about on a regional train in Bourg-en-Bresse
“If you want to build ideal cities, first destroy the monstrosities (8)”
This debate continues today, as evidenced by the “already-there communist (9)” ideas for extending public services to all production through social security, proposed by the Wage-Workers Network. While these ideas are largely confined to reformist intellectual circles, they sometimes resonate with the ideology of waning social democracy found in social movements.
Criticism of public services is not currently popular. Sociologically speaking, this is understandable (see above). However, for those who genuinely wish to organize to put an end to capitalism and the state, and who place themselves within an anti-authoritarian revolutionary tradition, the debate must be raised.
The easy way out, as with any other constitutive concept of capitalist society, such as science, democracy, or law, is to consider public services as imperfectible, and thus to absolve current public services of their shortcomings by postponing their full realization. If one considers public services as a tool of state organization serving the reproduction of capital, this argument falls apart. Nevertheless, abandoning the cheap utopia of public services does not resolve the eternal question of how production will be organized in a communist or anarchist society, nor how current struggles might take this direction (10).
At a time when many legitimate struggles aim to defend public services, or those aspects within them that promote emancipation and oppose market expansion, let's try to see what a dissenting voice and a perspective of radical critique might look like within these struggles. First, workers in these services often fall into the trap of defending the means of production (SNCF) and "public service missions" (schools), which condemns them to inaction. Conversely, alliances between workers and users sometimes produce interesting prospects for transcending these limitations, as when EDF workers cut off power to the powerful and restored it to the excluded. Secondly, political currents critical of public services, advocating autonomy in the production and reproduction of human life (self-managed health centers, clandestine abortions of the Movement for the Freedom of Abortion and Contraception), free access (mutual aid societies for fraudsters), neighborhood solidarity in the face of the charity of social services (the Resistance in the Suburbs, then the Immigration and Suburbs Movement), and open, polytechnic, versatile, and popular education (libertarian athenaeums) are all sources of inspiration for moving from the state-run public sector to a revolutionary commons. Thirdly, the technocratic management of public services (particularly transportation and energy) is made necessary by the staggering growth of the techno-industrial complex at the foundation of modern economies. The desire to produce without a state, without bosses, without productivity, and without money implies dismantling this complex in order to regain control of production.
Marx said, regarding the Republic, in the French context of the Third Empire (11): “All political revolutions have only perfected this machine, instead of breaking it […], the parties [considering] the conquest of this immense edifice of the State as the principal prize of the victor.” Neither public services nor the State belong to the world we desire. Let us give the final word to Marianne Enckell. “The message is simple: the institutions of the new world are not created within the old.” (7) »
zyg, February 2026
Notes
(1) Civil Service, Public Services, a French Exception, Pierre Sommermeyer, in Refractions, Anarichist Research and Expressions No. 15, Winter 2005
(2) Spring 2018: On Social Movements and the Defense of Public Service, AC, carbureblog, April 2, 2018
(3) See the OCL brochure An Overview of the History of the Anti-Nuclear Movement in France, as well as the numerous articles on the subject in these pages
(4) “The First Age of Capitalism,” Interview with Alain Bihr, Ivan Segré - published in lundimatin#248, June 23, 2020
(5) Class Analysis. What to do with capitalist regulation?, Courant Alternatif no. 320, May 2022
(6) See the article The Debacle - Elements for a Materialist Analysis of the September 10 Movement, Sans Trêve, September 21, 2025 and its critique in Courant Alternatif no. 354, November 2025, September 10: Who and What? Reflections on the “managerial class”
(7) Here at the Congress of the Federalist International in Brussels in 1874. The question of public services before the International: federalism and autonomy, Marianne Enckell, in Refractions, research and anarchist expressions No. 15, Winter 2005]
(8) Taken from the song The Triumph of Anarchy, lyrics by Charles d’Avray
(9) The “already-there communist” of the Wage-Working Network, Courant Alternatif No. 349, April 2025
(10) Three recent works address this question: For a Revolutionary Anarchism – Wall by Wall; Utopia 2021 – Léon de Mattis; Uprising – Mirasol. See a review in Courant Alternatif No. 315, December 2021
(11) The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx, 1852
http://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article4660
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Link: (en) France, OCL CA #358 - Should Public Services Be Destroyed? (ca, de, it, pt, tr) [machine translation]
Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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