11 Theses on Socialisation

1. Socialisation socialises what already is social.

Socialisation concerns itself with things such as raw materials, tools, machines, or energy sources necessary for production. Yet, it also deals with entire key industries, utilities and infrastructure, inner-city housing, the care for fellow human beings, as well as generated surpluses which can be reinvested. All these “objects” of socialisation are part of an encompassing nexus of production and consumption. For humans to produce, sustain, and use these for themselves or for social reproduction, they have to engage in extensive relations of cooperation. In this sense, the “objects” of socialisation are always already social. Capitalism, however, brings about the illusion that individuals as such precede any social setting. Only through acts of individuals, i.e., by the virtue of their private decisions, preferences, and efforts wealth is created, which is to be—in a second step instructed by a mutual competition principle—distributed and can only then ascertain the attribute “social”. Hence, the aim of socialisation is to sublate the abstract opposition of individual and society. It aims to establish ways of production and consumption that do justice to the social character of what is going to be socialised.

The need for a socialisation of the social becomes especially apparent when the economic and political mediation of seemingly private decisions proves incapable to solve social and ecological problems. This incapacity finds more often than not its roots in the privatization and individualization of decisions. Not only does privatization allow the externalization of destructive consequences coming from these decisions, it generates competitive relations that rigorously call for this type of ‘cost reduction’. When such ‘burden shifting’ accumulates, the capitalist mode of socialisation tends to subvert itself. Still, socialisation is not just a way of reacting to crises. As a form of consciously shaping social forms of cooperation, socialisation is also a possibility that was and is pursued for its own sake.

2. Historically, the question of socialisation arises first with capitalist society.

The human is a zoon politikon—a social being. Socialisation as a topic, however, owes its conception to the success of bourgeois revolutions, that implemented a mode of society in which immediate bonds—whether those of kinship or those stemming from direct dominance—were dissolved and replaced by relations based on formal freedom and equality of all involved.

Thus, society is understood primarily as bourgeois society, characterized by contractual forms of cooperation. Only in this type of society these indirect dependent relationships emerge, which can’t be influenced by those affected since they themselves are bound by hidden economic ties. Socialisation alters these relations that are social but nevertheless do not appear to be so. It gives them a form that makes it possible to socially shape what are in fact social bonds through radically democratic institutions and processes of participation, identification of interests and their mediation. Hence, socialisation is not a topic in societies who have no bourgeois society, but it points beyond those to all forms of societies, which are based on free cooperation beyond the contractual form.

3. Socialisation is the abolition of property.

Socialisation is not the transfer of property (even if without compensation), but the abolition of property. In contrast to socialisation, expropriations are a transfer of property. They are non-contractual transfers of ownership, i.e. not based on mutual consent, in which ownership is transferred to the state or another entity. (In many cases, the original property owners receive a compensation that equates the sum they could have obtained if the transfer would have been consensual.) In contrast, what is socialized should not become state, public or cooperative property, but should be permanently withdrawn from the property regime. It should permanently no longer be a commodity that can be traded and valued on markets. And it should no longer be subject to the sole discretion of its owners who hold the right to exclude society in regard to questions of usage and co-determination. This still remains a concern for all hitherto known forms of state and public property. The grounds for socialisation, however, lie not in the fact that property is merely in the wrong hands, but that property as such is in itself not suitable for the use and management of particular goods, whole industries, or even the organization of social reproduction as a whole. Decisions regarding socialized goods and resources have to be made differently than those concerning property, even though the decision may entail to place the use, care and development under the stewardship of individuals or specific groups.

4. Socialisation is not communalism.

When overcoming the bourgeois model of contracting individuals, socialisation is in danger of falling back on an overly simple understanding of social relationships. The relevant relations are understood as analogous to the ones in families or smaller communities where all members can meet in person and belonging is simple to recognise. Socialisation is therefore not to be understood in the sense of communalism. It must possess the ability to encompass far-reaching networks of interdependence, that cannot be reduced to relations of personal dependence and hence cannot be transformed in personal acquaintance or direct interactions. Socialisation then is a realisation of relationships within societies based on the division of labour. Instead of falling for the fiction of being a social unity or even a community of fate—may that be due to real or fictional family ties, an historic or a shared cultural heritage—these societies are conscious of their own global integration. In contrast to models of communalism, socialisation does not aim at incorporating individuals into a real or fictional communal unity, in which they have to integrate or to which they even have to subordinate themselves.

5. Socialisation is not nationalisation.

In the historical debates on socialisation, nationalisation was the answer to the question of what exactly the socialisation of natural resources or industrial facilities could mean. If socialisation is more than the transfer of privately held powers of disposal to state institutions, then it necessarily implies more than an orientation towards the public good, e.g., a distribution of profits for social purposes. Socialisation includes the promise of taking control over the social conditions of life—a promise that is realisable only through collective decision-making processes where all implicated have the effective opportunity to represent their respective interests. Nationalisation does not fulfil this promise. Even when ends such as the preservation of nature or the reliable supply of essential goods and services are widely recognised, nationalisation leads to a centrally determined common good, bureaucratic regulations, control hierarchies and disciplinary measures by state authorities. Socialisation demands instead a democratisation that does not exhaust itself in the well-known forms of a representative democracy or employee participation.

6. Socialisation is not a planned economy.

Taking control of economic processes, which is one objective of socialisation, is often understood as the transition from the “anarchy of the market” to a form of planned economy. There is no doubt that complex economies need planning; as capitalist market societies do under the guise of industrial polies or the planning and controlling practices within major corporations. Socialisation demands on top of that a way of social participation that does not end with the retrieval of individual and collective demands or allocating means for the satisfaction of needs. The development, critique, and evaluation of needs but also the resolution of conflicting objectives and interests by the opposing parties themselves is an essential part of socialised relations. Planning which does not leave some kind of freedom to comprehensively participate nor the resources to do so is a technocratic nightmare.

7. Socialisation is a democratic appropriation of one’s own life conditions.

The concrete management of socialised goods and resources requires models which respectively enables their use, preservation and expansion in such a way that they are committed to democratically determined purposes. It is above all the democratic ways of determining these purposes that characterize socialisation. Contrary to models misrepresenting parts of society as closed off, an understanding of the heterogeneity within societies, the recognition of life in globalized migration societies and the struggles for social openness, all shape the model of society that is implicated by socialisation. The strategies of socialisation are bound to inclusive determinations of the collective, always dynamic and therefore always in the need for renegotiation. Socialisation does not lock away goods and resources but offers sanctuaries and enables belonging.

8. Socialisation demonstrates that the theoretical division of society into systems is wrong.

Economic, democratic, social, ecological, and legal claims and logics intersect under the conditions of socialisation. Social theories that—based on particular logics of social subsystems or spheres—too rigorously separate these spheres from one another reveal their limitations. Socialisation is a practice that has to take into account the interferences of such claims and logics without reducing the differentiation of social practices into a simplified model of social interaction. Actualizing socialisation is only possible via an institutional practice that is capable of incorporating particular system logics and relating them to one another without succumbing to either of them. This becomes particularly clear when compared to economism, i.e., the reduction of all social relations to an underlying economic logic. The complex claims and aims associated with political socialisation projects expose the inadequacy of these types of approaches. Socialisation is about breaking the dominance of economic logics and placing social, ecological and aspects of democratic participation alongside them even in spheres of activity that are generally considered to be purely economically determined. However, an extension towards social, ecological, and political aspects should not be understood in a purely additive sense. They also transform the understanding of what ‘economic’ means, when, for example, questions of sustainability with regard to social structures and natural resources or the democratic control of technologies gain immediate significance for economic activity in addition to the pure efficiency imperatives that demand the reduction of human labour costs.

9. Socialisation is a transitional step that needs to go beyond itself in order to be successful.

The question of socialisation usually arises in regard to specific problems which it should help to solve. This can involve social participation in the natural wealth of a nation, dismantling the economic-political power that accumulates in key industries, the need for an industrial-political or socio-ecological transformation, the empowerment of the workers to be able to take a stand against the owners of the means of production and the like. Socialisation then is concerned with the sector in which the problem arises, i.e., the extractive industries, specific branches of industry or the housing market. However, as long as socialisation remains limited to such specific sub-sectors of the economy, its effectiveness will also remain limited. The economic logic of capitalist markets will keep affecting these sub-sectors. Even if land or the housing stock is socialised, the economic logic determining services as well as the construction industry will continue to stand in the way of handling truly free the housing conditions. In this sense, socialisation always goes beyond itself, towards a complete transformation of social relations.

10. The history of socialisation is a collection of utopias that had failed due to their limitations.

In addition to attempts to solve problems, which had different, context-depended political, economic, legal, social, technical or ecological focuses and thus remained often limited to the corresponding aims, concepts for a comprehensive socialisation belong also to the diverse history of socialisation. The latter not only questioned whether something was private property, on whose expense something was produced or how it was distributed. Rather, they are characterised by the fact that socialisation ‘always goes all the way’ (Otto Neurath). However, these concepts also remained influenced by their origins. From a historical distance, their weaknesses can be seen above all where they reduced socialisation to economic or technical issues and did not include a political project of democratic self-determination. From today’s perspective, the history of socialisation is therefore primarily a repository of failed utopias. Any new socialisation movement should be wary of the reductionist shortcomings of these all the while drawing upon their concrete detailed knowledge.

11. Socialisation is the only way to transform economies with a high division of labour.

The socio-ecological transformation of the economy, which is driven by the use of fossil fuels and the destruction of the planetary foundations of life, not least faces the challenge that it has to replace deeply anchored evaluation practices as well as changing patterns of need and consumption that are closely linked to dominant ideas of individual freedom. The crisis reveals the illusory aspects of such an ideologically permeated understanding of freedom, which ignores the social preconditions of individual freedom and transforms freedom into a zero-sum game (as if freedom within society, transnationally and intergenerationally can only ever be obtained at the expense of others). But the crisis cannot be solved by replacing the illusory understanding of freedom with authoritarian forms of politics. The socio-ecological transformation cannot be achieved by authoritarian means. It is dependent on social engagement and participation in order to find new forms of shared resource use and to implement collective infrastructures that realise a new, radically democratic understanding of freedom. Socialisation promises to make such engagements and participation possible. Conversely, every successful implementation of social engagement with regard to socio-ecological transformation can be seen as a step towards socialisation.