Socialization in Theory and Practice: Democratizing Access to Land and Energy is an interdisciplinary research project based at the Centre for Social Critique at Humboldt University Berlin, led by Rabea Berfelde and Jacob Blumenfeld. Socialization names the transformative strategy of democratizing access to basic goods like land and energy through a variety of legal, political, technical and economic measures. The aim of this project is to elaborate the socio-theoretical understanding and normative principles that underlie the various concepts and strategies of socialization in the past and present. This requires bringing together various normative, legal, economic, and political aspects of socialization into a coherent social theory that can both illuminate social contradictions and indicate democratic solutions. As socialization names both a practical strategy and theoretical framework, it requires interdisciplinary research in order to clarify its meaning, relevance, and legitimacy.
To take socialization seriously as a transformative strategy requires going beyond abstract discussions of capitalism in general and focusing on key fields of conflict where difficult questions of ownership and democratic control arise. Two fields in particular that we see as key to this debate are land and energy, that is, the question of how and why (or why not) to socialize landed property and energy systems. The research project will thus take the socialization of agrarian land and the energy sector as case studies for testing out and working through the political-economic limitations and challenges of socialization as democratization. In addition to these case studies, we will also interrogate the normative foundations of socialization both in general and in regards to specific sectors, in order to bring out more explicitly the question of legitimacy.
The project is funded by the Gerda Henkel Stiftung, and consists of Dr. Jacob Blumenfeld (leading the sub-project on normative foundations of socialization), Dr. Rabea Berfelde (leading the sub-project on the socialization of agrarian land), Solveig Degen (pursuing a PhD on the socialization of energy), and Clara Weinmann (Student Assistant to the project). The project also partners with the junge Arbeitsgemeinschaft bäuerliche Landwirtschaft (jAbL), an established advocacy group working on agrarian land issues, and communia, a think tank which develops models for democratic ownership, especially in relation to the energy sector.
