Socialization in theory and practice

Ownership is always a normative issue: to claim a right to property is to claim that such ownership is justified to others. The socialization of basic goods can thus only be legitimate if its grounds are normatively sound. This sub-project, led by Dr. Jacob Blumenfeld, examines how socialization has been justified in the past and is justified today, in the context of climate crisis, democratic deficits, and economic stagnation. The research traces the socialization debate beginning after the German Revolution of 1918, which attempted to distinguish socialization from other economic reform strategies such as nationalization, commoning, or cooperativization. What makes socialization distinctive is its focus on expanding democratic participation and collective control over key resources.

A central insight of the project is that different goods raise different normative problems. Socializing land is not the same as socializing energy, and each requires its own standards of evaluation. For this reason, the project resists one-size-fits-all solutions. Instead, it asks: What are the strongest reasons for socialization today? Are they economic (better coordination and provision), ecological (enabling a sustainable transition), justice-based (addressing historical wrongs), or political (deepening democracy)? How do past experiences with socialization shape what is possible and desirable today? And what legal, political, and economic conditions must be in place for socialization to succeed?

Answering these questions requires close engagement with concrete sectors. That is why the sub-project draws heavily on the empirical research on land and energy conducted within the broader project. At the same time, it aims to bring these sector-specific insights together into a shared theoretical framework with multiple criteria of democratization and social control. The goal is to develop a critical social theory of socialization, one that is empirically informed yet self-reflexive about its normative commitments.

Land is a water and CO₂ reservoir, important for biodiversity protection, key for climate policy, and essential for food production. Yet, it is also increasingly treated as a speculative asset facilitating the extraction of ground rent. A socio-ecological transformation requires a form of agriculture that works with ecosystems — that is regenerative, biodiversity-friendly, emphasises soil-health, seeks to minimise emissions — and supports rural everyday life, resilience and local consumption. This requires farmers to have a long-term and secure access to land, enabling them to align their farming practices with a climate mitigation outlook. However, rising agricultural land prices hinder access for small-scale and peasant farmers, putting pressure on non-industrialised modes of farming. Rising prices are also due to an increased financialised speculation in agricultural land.

This sub-project interrogates land use conflicts through the concept of socialization. The concept of socialization underlines that private ownership, regulated through private property and market-mediated access, clashes with a democratic control over this central and finite resource. Empirically, the focus is on land-use conflicts in Germany, particularly East Germany where land-grabbing through speculative investment has intensified and financially strong investors, including non-agricultural actors, are buying up many hectares of land altering the agricultural structure. The project maps the ownership structures of the agrarian land economy and analyze how it influences agricultural practice, economic value and ecological transitions. This is important in order to gain a more nuanced understanding of the conflicts and contradictions within agricultural practice and their relation to ownership structures in agrarian land as well as their embeddedness in market-mediated food production. 

To develop the contours of a democratic land economy, the project engages with historical and contemporary visions and models for a land economy beyond private control. It develops the contours of a more just and democratic allocation of agricultural land by analysing already existing alternatives of common land tenure in the German agriculture sectors. It discusses the organisational form of syndicates, cooperatives, foundations and farms that hold land in common. Drawing on research with these farms and organisations, it analyses their organisational and financial models, the relationship between agricultural practice and different forms of common land tenure, and their motivation for common land ownership. It discusses the potential and limits of these models to challenge the private property form and assetization of land, and to provide a blueprint for a socio-ecological land allocation.

Our societies are in the midst of a comprehensive energy transition that requires extensive planning measures. There has long been broad consensus on the most important goals of such a planned transition, i.e. the decarbonisation of energy production through the expansion of renewable energies, the adaptation and expansion of grids, the expansion of storage infrastructures and improved sector coupling. Nevertheless, the transition is not yet progressing at the speed and scale required to achieve a more social-ecologically just form of energy provision.

For this reason, the project addresses the question of why our dominant forms of social organisation – states, regions and municipalities – are struggling to effectively implement suitable plans to achieve these goals, despite the apparent consensus on the objectives. The focus is on examining state planning practices and logics in the energy sector, particularly in the processes of expanding and restructuring heating and electricity networks. From a state sociological perspective, the project analyses the logics, goals and structural hurdles that shape the chain of goal setting, planning and implementation in current energy planning practices of governments. Furthermore, it asks how states deal with different competing or contradictory objectives – such as securing economic growth, decarbonisation and affordability – in such planning practices. 

By analysing current capitalist planning processes and their obstacles, the project ultimately aims to better understand how a socialisation of energy systems could respond to current challenges. Moreover, the project assumes that a better understanding of current planning practices is also illustrative for better understanding the difficulties with planning processes that socialised systems would continue to face in the transition to a post-capitalist energy system.

In this way, the sub-project seeks to contribute to research on state sociology and theory, as well as to growing debates on state capitalism and economic planning. Furthermore, it contributes to developing socialisation as a socio-economic reform strategy with a focus on the heating and electricity sectors.