There are a thousand kinds of privatization. For example, you take Turkey's largest industrial enterprise Petkim, a series of refineries that used to belong entirely to the state, and turn it over to Turkey’s largest capitalist conglomerate and its comrade-in-arms the imperialist oil company Shell for peanuts, quite like a sacrificial lamb, and every year a huge profit that would have gone to the public sector flows flood-like to that capitalist company and its imperialist partner.
Or you follow a more covert method. You create models called "Build-Operate-Transfer" and transfer surplus value to capital from highways, bridges and hospitals that are the property of the state. Or, using the same logic, you can divide up the state-owned electricity distribution company into smaller ones and lease each to a different conglomerate for 49 years, leaving the guaranteed operating profit to them.
In industry, transport and energy, this is usually how it is done, but in health and education, privatization is sector-wide, not at the enterprise level. You don't privatize publicly owned health or education institutions. But you grant capitalists "freedom of enterprise" in the spheres of health and education, flood them with lavish incentives, and thus end up offering a great part of health care and education services in privatized manner. This has a further knock-on effect: the step-by-step commercialization of state-owned hospitals and schools is thus legitimized.
There are many, many more. From the subservience of municipal services to the demands of the market through "municipal partnerships" and the like, to the areas where the state supervises the implementation of the legislative provisions it has developed to protect the security and health of the people (e.g. the technical inspection of automobiles), everything is being abandoned to the despotism of the market and the logic of profit.
But the mind-boggling extreme example of privatization is the outsourcing of even the military, which is considered to be the most profoundly sacrosanct, or in a sense the honour, of nation states. From mercenary organizations known as "contractors" in the US to Wagner in Russia and Sadat in Turkey, such privatized military forces are astonishing examples.
Once you have privatized war, why not privatize the "humanitarian aid" activities necessitated by war?
As is well known, the United Nations (UN) has been entrusted with the task of providing what is known as "humanitarian aid" in situations such as natural disasters, famine and war, which expose the people of a country or region to the threat of starvation and widespread disease. The UN has too many bodies set up for this purpose to list in a short newspaper article. Wherever there is a need of this kind, these special-purpose organizations of the UN come to the rescue. The catastrophe that the Palestinian people have suffered for nearly 80 years is so extraordinary that a special organization, the UNRWA (UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees), has been created specifically for the needs of Palestinian refugees.
We do not have the slightest confidence in the UN. The UN is essentially an organization that protects the world order dominated by imperialism, although there are certain foci of opposition within it. But just as revolutionary Marxists use bourgeois parliaments to voice the interests of the working class, just as they defend state-owned enterprises (SOEs) against privatization because these offer advantages to the working class and the people compared to private capital, even though they are institutions of a certain type of state capitalism, a similar position should be taken here at the international level. Because privatization means the imposition of the private will, this will is free in principle to do whatever it wishes. Influencing the public will, on the other hand, is a matter of political struggle, albeit under certain constraints.
Now all of the UN organizations are being dislodged from Gaza. The US-Israeli criminal network is moving towards bringing humanitarian aid to the people of the strip under its own complete control.
Since the Al Aqsa Flood, Israel has been deliberately bombing the premises of UN aid organizations, shooting at vehicles clearly marked as belonging to UN agencies, killing their staff, banning and bombing their convoys. Why? "Collateral damage"? No, precisely to take over the function of providing what is loftily dubbed “humanitarian aid” to the population.
The New York Times has reported that Israel has had a former senior CIA agent set up a non-profit organization in the US to privatize humanitarian aid, that "a Western European country" has donated 100 million USD for this purpose, and that the source of the rest of the money is a mystery.
And why does Israel do this? First, the public assistance will be a public relations stunt by Israel disguised as assistance to the people of Gaza. In this way, Israel, not Hamas, will be responding to the needs of the people. Secondly, Israel will use this aid to move the people of Gaza step by step in the direction it wants them to go, that is, further and further south, out of the Gaza Strip - in short, in the service of displacement. This step will have a very specific function in terms of the ethnic cleansing of Gaza parallel to the genocide. Third, depending on the different degrees of insubordination with which the various territories of Gaza react to Israeli domination, Israel will play the "good cop" in some places and the "bad cop" in others, dividing the population.
Every privatization is different. But underlying every privatization are the interests of the ruling class of the capitalist society in question. And that is what is happening here. Even the public character of an international organization as docile, as meek, as obedient to imperialism as the United Nations can contradict the interests of the Israeli ruling class. So, privatize, loot, eviscerate, whether it is Petkim or the United Nations!
What to do? Protect the UN humanitarian organizations from Israel's evil by force of arms!