Popular Participation in the Public Services

Abstract

The providers of the public services habitually enjoy the privilege of being a monopoly. At the current moment in the socio-economic history of Latin America, the cycle of concessions and privatisations having concluded, the public services have returned to partial or total state ownership. From the perspective of popular participation (and from other perspectives too), as I have already outlined in other works, this changes nothing for the user. Regardless of whom the shareholder is, popular participation in the public services is nearly zero. In traditional Marxism there was no difference between public and state-owned, but where this model cannot be applied the differences are very great. In the case of Argentina, where this model is not applied, popular participation is very limited. It is more than sufficient to visit the web sites of the companies or see the “public meetings” with users to understand that the participation of millions of users in sporadic events or in websites without the necessary information to enable participation is insufficient. For this reason, six reasons or principles are presented which show why popular participation in the public services is necessary. Four general directives for its application and execution are also presented. With this as a basis I present a concrete proposal. It is a hypothesis of work presented in two dimensions or actions to promote said participation. Implemented in this way, popular participation will allow a significant improvement in the quality of the institutions and in consequence, democracy.