It began at the opening event, where representatives of the three major initiatives Deutsche Wohnen & Co. Enteignen (hereafter DWe), Hamburg Enteignet, and RWE & Co. Enteignen were first given the opportunity to speak. DWe was presented as a complete success. Their initiative, it was argued, had put the issue of expropriation and socialization back on the agenda; 59 percent of Berlin’s residents support the expropriation of the major real estate corporations. What now mattered was to realize the political will of the people. And: “The actors of socialization are sitting here!” From that point on, hardly any contribution failed to point to the success of the initiative. It was the great ritual affirmation shared by all those who took part in the three-day conference entitled “Socialization – Strategies for a Democratic Economy,” held from October 7 to 9 at the Technical University (TU) Berlin. According to the organizers, around 1,400 people attended in total. These figures may indeed be impressive. That the issue of expropriation has been able to gain traction at all — especially in a country like Germany, where in the dominant political discourse expropriation, the GDR, and Satanism are treated as synonymous — is arguably the major achievement of the 2021 referendum and the mobilization surrounding it. But should the success of a political initiative not be measured against the goal it claims to pursue? Have Deutsche Wohnen and similar corporations actually been expropriated and transferred into municipal ownership, or, as demanded by the referendum, converted into an institution under public law? Such questions should have been discussed in much greater depth at a “strategy conference,” as the organizers themselves described it.

But activists and strategists think differently from the 59 percent who somehow thought the expropriation of Berlin’s major real estate corporations was a good idea—whether because they themselves are stressed by apartment hunting, rent increases, and evictions, or simply because the whole Airbnb crowd in the city gets on their nerves. One does not even know exactly why they voted in favor. This is the fundamental problem with anonymous votes in representative democracy. For activists and strategists, however, the success of an initiative or campaign is measured quite differently: namely by the number of people they were able to mobilize. In this sense, Isabella Rogner of DWe put it rather succinctly when she said that from the very beginning it had been clear that the Berlin Senate would not comply with the referendum and would attempt to bog everything down through legal procedures, but that they would continue to fight and that new campaigns were already in preparation. DWe’s strategy thus consists in continuing to mobilize and stir up trouble until pressure from the population has grown so strong that the Senate is forced to its knees. With that, the question was essentially settled before it could even be raised from the audience itself as a matter of critical concern.

But do not two fundamental strategic problems arise here with regard to a general “socialization”? First: Is this a strategy that can be generalized? Would this not mean that, in principle, one would have to launch an initiative for every single corporation—“Expropriate VW,” “Expropriate ALDI,” etc.—and each time mobilize the corresponding mass of people onto the streets? And second: in the case of a general socialization—which, as journalist Laura Meschede finally pointed out on the closing panel with regard to the question of ownership, can only be communist—would not ends and means be identical in the sense that such a socialization can only be carried out by society itself and not by the state?

Regarding the first point: The very founding of an initiative like RWE & Co. Enteignen seems to suggest that the “success model” DWe is simply being copied. Although contributions on the closing panel—for example, by Julia Dück—doubted whether the model could be transferred to other struggles, or whether the various social struggles could even be connected under the umbrella of socialization, too little attention was paid to the homogeneous form of this political-strategic thinking itself. It becomes all too visible that the entire political rhetoric is permeated by the jargon of event and campaign management, as if there were no distinctions left between election campaigns, marketing, and a genuine social movement. This shows itself in small details, such as the annual talk of a “hot autumn,” a catchy slogan whose only function is to keep one’s own clique entertained, as well as in the ever-present big question: “How do we reach the people?” This question always reveals that activists are among themselves, and that they primarily see themselves as activists—that is, as a group existing separately from society, or at least as a particular societal group, rather than what they actually are: an active part of existing society, students, working people, and employees, belonging to different social classes and generations (a point that played a central role, at least, in Fridays for Future). Yet as such—so it seems—activists can only rarely perceive themselves in this way. Particularly striking in this regard was the statement by economist Elena Hofferberth in the panel “Planning Against the Climate Crisis”: “After all, we are all consumers and political subjects.” Apparently, many find it difficult to see themselves still as productive workers. It was therefore not surprising that in Hofferberth’s proposed concept of macroeconomic coordination—where the allocation of resources and labor is to be organized in a comprehensive societal plan according to pre-negotiated ecological and social goals—the producers themselves did not appear at all. Instead, expert committees are supposed to collaboratively contribute to a somehow democratic planning process. But who are the experts for the production processes of various goods, if not the producers themselves? Only those working on-site in the factories can realistically and meaningfully determine their operation’s input and output quantities based on their experience, while also ensuring that the length of the working day is reasonable, labor protection and sustainability criteria are met, and thereby prevent the emergence of a new expertocratic regime of exploitation. Democracy must take place within the workplaces (councils), not above them—but of course it is always easy to talk about distribution when one is the very instance that distributes, rather than merely being allocated or receiving allocations.

Such statements clearly express the alienation between mental and physical labor, between experts and producers, and ultimately also the quasi-academic character of the conference. Many activists today are high school students and university students, meaning that they mostly come from middle-class backgrounds and primarily perform mental work—even if they generally feel uncomfortable with this, which is why the opening event could not avoid taking a jab at the “ivory tower.” Yet such polemic tends to deny one’s own position in the societal reproduction process rather than critically reflect on it. It is therefore hardly surprising that today’s activist will tomorrow—if an academic career does not pan out—be sitting in some party committee or working in a union or NGO office, contributing to the very world they once fought against. Which employers would they have otherwise? This precarious social position is likely responsible in many cases for why so many activists hardly integrate the experiences and skills they gain in other areas of their lives into their political activity. Where they are activists, they are not students, university students, or working people, and where they are students or workers, they are not political: this corresponds to the desire to turn one’s activism into a profession, thereby closing the circle and indeed living in a self-sufficient activist ivory tower—as is strikingly evident in the group photo in front of the TU at the end of the conference. At the heart of all this, however, lies a much more fundamental alienation, which in capitalist societies is inherent to political engagement itself.

This brings us to the second point, namely the question of the purpose and actors of socialization: The expropriation and socialization of the mass of people is the fundamental characteristic of capitalist relations of production. This was also emphasized by several speakers, such as Bini Adamczak and Alex Demirovic. It is capital that expropriates people from the conditions of their social (re-)production, from the means of production, reducing them to the status of wage-dependent workers and socializing them in an anonymous and abstract way through the form of money—a point that Adamczak should have made more clearly, as she emphasizes the separation in socialization without mentioning what unites this separation, namely the form of money. And it is the bourgeois-authoritarian state that expropriates people from the conditions for realizing their political goals, in the broad sense from the means of force, and monopolizes these. In this respect, people are primarily socialized through state coercion (family, school, police, and judiciary). They may, as long as bourgeois freedoms still hold any weight, express their criticism, but this usually has no consequences, since the only means to enforce their political will consist of demonstrations, petitions, and acclamation. In this way, people transform from the producers of a workplace—once they engage with the state—into an amorphous mass. Social conflicts are formalized and neutralized through legal procedures, while coercion and force by the state are always exerted where manifest capitalist interests prevail. Because people are deprived of all means of shaping their conditions, they have no choice but to express their political will instead of implementing it. This is the structural powerlessness that is inscribed in political engagement from the outset and that always casts its shadow over initiatives like DWe. We do not claim that this goes unrecognized by the actors of DWe, nor would we consider such powerlessness to be the fault of the actors. Yet it becomes problematic when self-criticism is lacking and one considers successful mobilization alone as an achievement. In doing so, one exposes oneself to the suspicion of having accepted the prevailing rules of the game, valuing majorities and media impact over the actual goal. Revolutions, by the way, are never carried out by majorities. In this sense, our critique is not directed against strategic thinking per se, but against the lack of theoretical depth in the strategy.

This became nowhere clearer at the conference than in the inadequate conceptions of socialization circulating there. Not a few insisted that socialization meant something entirely different from nationalization. Statements such as those by Jonna Klick in the panel “Current Approaches in Progressive Economics in Discussion on the Democratization of the Economy,” claiming that nothing could be gained from the state as an “ideal overall capitalist,” are certainly to be welcomed. But if—not as in Klick’s case—a rather unspecific commons approach did not underpin the critique of the state, it was hard to escape the suspicion that socialization was understood as nothing other than nationalization. Wordplay, such as that presented by Silke van Dyk and Robin Celikates, claiming that the public and the political should no longer be understood as the state, does little to clarify this. Similarly confusing was the Friday evening panel “Democratic Economy – An Alternative Political Economy after Socialization,” which argued that the concept of socialization should not be limited to the question of ownership. (That, for example, occupations of public spaces were thus casually reinterpreted as socializations was apparently seen as a promise rather than a problem.) With regard to a communist society, these distinctions between the political and the state may be formally correct (for instance, concerning the need for public, non-state accounting), yet the question of what socialization concretely entails remains unanswered. Apparently, the actors of socialization were not sitting in the lecture halls. Disappointing in this context was the fact that while the idea of council democracy was occasionally invoked, the idea of workers’ self-management played no role at all. A laudable exception was historian Gisela Notz, who, however, primarily drew on the anarchist tradition of “free association” (G. Landauer), which provides little satisfactory guidance as to how a supra-enterprise, economy-wide connection should be established—the same flaw that afflicts many approaches to “commonism.” Notz at least mentioned the actors of socialization, namely the workers who must organize their workplace labor themselves. In the same panel (“Old and New Forms of Collective Ownership”), a passionate comrade from the East German agricultural collective Ackersyndikat also spoke up. She not only recalled the abuses that followed the expropriation of the VEBs and LPGs by the Treuhandanstalt—which amounted to a sellout of the experience of an entire people and whose political consequences are still felt in the new federal states today—but also pointed out from the perspective of agricultural producers that without them, no socialization could take place. In this context, she rightly criticized the complete absence of the East German perspective at the conference—despite the fact that former citizens of the GDR had already gained very concrete experience with socialization. In our view, it would have been genuinely interesting not only to collect experiences from the day-to-day operations of GDR enterprises, but perhaps also to invite former employees of the GDR planning offices to discuss the shortcomings of a state-directed planned economy.

But this entire topic had to remain underexposed simply because the conference organizers primarily want to socialize housing and energy supply—that is, the area of consumers is to be socialized, while the entire sphere of production will likely be left to some expert committees. The vagueness of these ideas is not diminished by the desire to “democratize” all areas. This “democratization” was the second major buzzword of the conference, but unfortunately remained as contentless as the concept of socialization itself. One must fear that in such a fully democratized society, everyone will ultimately be allowed to “participate” everywhere, while experts will have the final say. Imagining a world different from the one one knows is indeed difficult. But that is precisely why theory is essential: only a concept of socialization guided by the idea of producers’ self-organization prevents socialization from becoming a marketing-strategic catchphrase behind which nationalization—and thus the continued expropriation of producers—always lurks. Only then are we more than “consumers and political subjects,” namely socially active, productive actors who directly shape economic activity. Only in this way does the economy lose the power of an external force.

With regard to a communist socialization, we emphasize above all the necessity of an economy-wide calculation of working time, as first developed by the Group of International Communists. This allows decentralized workplace planning autonomy and economy-wide regulation to be reconciled through labor-time-based accounting, beyond state paternalism and the unconsciously alienated form of socialization through money. Only in this way can resources (labor, raw materials, machinery) be allocated through inter-enterprise coordination, and labor and goods quantities be exchanged and related on a society-wide scale, while simultaneously preserving individual freedom in the choice of work and consumption behavior.

However, any kind of idea of working-time accounting was almost entirely absent from the conference. The topic was either mentioned only in passing, or it was asserted upon inquiry that there was certainly an openness to it, but that one was still in the early stages. In most cases, however, one was met with a helpless shrug. Even in promising concepts—such as Jakob Heyer’s idea of a “democratic planned economy,” who identifies as a Marxist, or the concept of a commons-based “contribution economy,” intended to be oriented toward the needs of the actors, as presented by Simon Sutterlütti—there was always a significant gap whenever it came to the internal organization and regulation of such economies. On the panel “Socialization and What Then? — Insights into a New Debate on the Possibilities of Democratic Planning,” Christoph Sorg and Heide Lutosch at least considered the necessity of a general measure even in a post-capitalist economy, but could say little more about it. To our great relief, a participant from the audience then shouted loudly and exasperatedly: “Working time… it’s so clear, it’s the working time!” Well, the unknown participant should come forward. We invite them, as well as everyone else, to develop with us a concrete concept of communist socialization and to build a self-organized network of producers.