Barbara Fried and Alex Wischnewski have recently published an article on socialization from a feminist perspective in the online part of the magazine “Luxemburg“, which is published by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.
Socialization has now become part of the strategic repertoire of left-wing politics and has given rise to a multitude of ideas and levers for socialist practice. The focus here is primarily on areas of social reproduction—that is, sectors beyond industrial production—such as housing, public transportation, and hospitals. Yet it is often overlooked that socialization is by no means merely a question of property titles, but rather requires a restructuring of socially necessary labor. It is therefore not only a matter of who owns which means of production, but also of who can appropriate whose labor. This aspect rarely plays a role in the debates. Yet Marx and Engels already pointed out in “The German Ideology” that property and the division of labor are “identical expressions”: one expresses appropriation in relation to the product, the other in relation to the activity. An analytical distinction that, in social reality, amounts to the same thing.