Rethinking Social Rights as Social Property: Alternatives to Private Property,and the Democratisation of Public Politics

Introduction

We are currently living in an age of multiple closely interconnected and intensifying crises. The financial and economic crisis, along with the climate and energy crisis and growing social inequality were suddenly amplified in 2020 by a pandemic that brutally exposed the fault lines in a commodified and underfunded system of welfare provision. The promise of achieving efficiency through privatisation and commodification has dominated public discourse for decades, but now the cracks can hardly be denied. Inflation and the energy crisis coupled with soaring housing costs are lending new urgency to issues of social justice, with policy minds focused especially on social infrastructures in the health and social care sectors, the education system and energy provision. The challenges this situation poses to present-day capitalism are not only economic and social but also political in nature: social movements are rallying against ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey, 2004) and are gaining influence while, after decades of privatisation and marketisation, new movements for public goods and infrastructures are emerging at the local and regional level in particular (Kishimoto et al., 2020; Thompson, 2021). This includes movements to tackle energy poverty and to lobby for public utilities, for water as a commons, for de-commodified public health infrastructures and public transport, and for social housing. The issue at stake is not just the distribution of resources, but also – as movements for remunicipalisation exemplify – property relations and the democratic right of participation in relevant decision making. This entails a new idea of ‘the public’ that challenges the dominance of private property owners and commodified public–private partnerships. While numerous empirical studies have analysed these new movements – largely from an Urban Studies and New Social Movements perspective (see, for example, Davies et al., 2022) – a conceptual blank remains about how to think together the struggle for social rights, democratisation and property relations within the context of established welfare states.

To date, the French sociologist Robert Castel is alone in having illuminated the connections between social rights, property and social policy. He understands social rights as social property and describes them as the ‘social rehabilitation of non-property-owners’ (Castel, 2002: 328) in capitalist societies. In our view, his concept of social property opens up fruitful analytical and normative perspectives that enable us to better understand ongoing struggles over what is deemed ‘public’ as opposed to ‘private’ (property). He raises the issue of functional equivalents to private property (underwritten by the welfare state) that guarantee social protection for the propertyless and discusses the limitations of these equivalents while simultaneously providing a lens through which changes to the welfare state and the dismantling of social rights can be addressed and conceptualised in terms of expropriation.

After briefly outlining the legacy of the Fordist class compromise and the disappearance of property relations from welfare state research, the first section below is dedicated to examining Castel’s concept of social property and its reception (section ‘Social Rights, Property and the Legacy of Robert Castel’). The aim of the paper is twofold, namely to stress the potential of the concept for a democratised social policy and to take Castel’s thinking further in order to remedy shortcomings of his analysis, which we see as follows. First, Castel ties social property closely to the standard employment model of Fordist growth economies, without rethinking it thoroughly against the backdrop of growing precarity. Second, although he differentiates usefully between two kinds of social property – transfer property (individual transfer payments) and collective property (public infrastructures and services) – he subordinates the latter analytically to the former. Finally, third, he leaves unanswered the question of the democratic and participatory rights of beneficiaries, that is, the power of disposal (the power to shape and not just use arrangements), which is inherent in the concept of property, in its broadest sense. This is where the potential lies for a democratisation of social policy, which currently is key for many municipal movements. Moving beyond these limitations, we propose that the concept can be analytically extended and radicalised (section ‘Thinking Further With Castel’s Concepts: Extending and Radicalising Social Property’). In the third section, we summarise the argument, reflect on the role of social property in the capitalist state, and discuss why a revised concept of social property is helpful for thinking about the democratisation of social politics in terms of socialisation and de-privatisation.

Social Rights, Property and the Legacy of Robert Castel

It is largely undisputed that the introduction of social rights from the end of the 19th century served to stabilise and pacify emerging industrial societies and that it resulted from class struggles initiated by the labour movement. The decisive factor was the recourse to non-market-based social rights, characterised particularly by the introduction of social insurance schemes as distinct from philanthropic and charitable (and generally paternalistic) programmes of poor relief (Ewald, 1986). Although initially rudimentary and exclusive in character, the institutionalisation of social rights generated a degree of material security, dependability, and autonomy in the face of local and family related constraints, and became more and more established in the second half of the 20th century, albeit with major country-specific differences (Esping-Andersen, 1990) as well as sexist and racist exclusivities. While social protection became standard in Western welfare states – at least for autochthonous men – the key component of the post-war ‘class compromise’ was to improve the social situation of the workers without challenging existing property relations. Furthermore, there has been a degree of spillover from politics to social scientific research in respect of the class compromise: quite apart from the growing marginalisation of Marxist research strands, the issue of private property has increasingly disappeared as a topic of research from the academic agenda. The ‘distributional justice’ (Cumbers, 2012: 146) pursued in the prospering growth society, which eased social conflicts by distributing surpluses, displaced the broader perspective of ‘class justice’ (Cumbers, 2012: 146). This raises not only the issue of ownership of the means of production but also that of the power of disposal in terms of people’s participation in decisions that affect their lives. Political theorist Danielle Allen rightly asserts that a reduction of economic justice to questions of distribution is inherent in the class compromise, while ‘economic empowerment’ (Allen, 2020: 28) by ‘co-ownership of the political institutions’ (Allen, 2020: 23) and workplace democracy are neglected. Analytically this still holds true even today, even though the class compromise was abolished from above by an alliance of political and economic actors, with varying degrees of radicalness depending on the country.

Robert Castel is acknowledged internationally as a key expert on the history of wage labour and social rights in Western industrial societies, most notably for his later research on precariousness (précarisation) and social vulnerability. ¹ There are few authors of comparable significance when it comes to historical analysis of the genesis and transformation of social rights and their systematic differentiation from charity, alms-giving and means-tested assistance programmes. In his chronicle of wage labour, Castel examines which societal institutions relativise the importance of private property in relation to social protection and a decent standard of living, thereby creating new prospects for the majority of the propertyless. He emphasises that modern welfare states have succeeded in ‘vanquishing (social) insecurity and guaranteeing (social) protection benefits for all or almost all members of a modern society’ by ‘justifying and realising social property as a new form of property in order to guarantee the rehabilitation of non-property-owners’ (Castel, 2005: 40, authors’ tr.). ² What this guarantees, he argues, is a life of social protection lived outside the sphere of private property ownership:

It is the construction of an analogon of private property – in other words, of making available to non-property-owners a type of asset that was not the direct possession of a private holding or patrimony, but a right of access to collective goods and services. (Castel, 2002: 319)

Here he draws conceptually on French social theorist Henri Hatzfeld, who elucidates the relation between ownership and collective status and emphasises that ever less important is ‘what each individual owns, and ever more [important] the rights successfully fought for by the groups to which they belong’ (cited after Castel, 2005: 51, authors’ tr.). In adopting this perspective, Castel is effectively distinguishing his own approach from three other types: from social-liberal theories concerned with the broad spreading of private property and universal access to productive resources, in the sense of a ‘property owning democracy’ (O’Neill and Williamson, 2012); from Marxist approaches that fundamentally dispute the private ownership of means of production; and finally, from socio-political approaches which, while concerned with philanthropic, charitable and often paternalistic programmes of care for the poor, remain uninterested in social rights.

Castel differentiates between two forms of social property: transfer property and collective property. Whereas transfer property relates to individual transfer payments, particularly through social insurance schemes, collective property comprises public infrastructures and social services. The focal point of his analysis is systems of social insurance, with a strong emphasis on France’s system of pension insurance. He uses this as an example to elaborate his concept of social property as a combination of status-based rights and social protection. He elucidates how the wage labourer’s status and their entitlement to social insurance schemes assume the function of private property in its absence:

Social security arises from a kind of transfer of property through the mediation of labor and under the aegis of the state. Security and labor will become substantively linked. For in a society that is reorganized on the basis of wage-labor, it is the status given by labor that yields the modern equivalent of protections formerly guaranteed by property. (Castel, 2003: 274)

It is crucial that the insurance is mandatory, he contends, because only an inescapable obligation corresponds to an ‘inalienable right’ (Castel, 2003: 285). At the same time, Castel acknowledges the limitations entailed by transfer property as compared with private property, since the entitlement to benefits is tied to specific circumstances such as illness, unemployment and old age and is not transferable to others. He concedes that, for this reason, it amounts to a form of state-guaranteed ‘property under tutelage’ (Castel, 2003: 285), but one that saves the working class from ‘social destitution’ (Castel, 2003: 286). While at times he goes so far as to describe social property as a wholly valid equivalent to private property (Castel, 2005: 42), elsewhere he is more precise and makes the function of guaranteeing protection and dependability central to his account, thereby excluding other functions and rights linked to property: ‘At the mechanism’s core, there is thus a form of property which differs from private property even as it plays one if its essential roles – that of promoting security’ (Castel, 2002: 325).

Although the institution of social insurance is key to his analytical development of social property, Castel identifies an additional form of social property, namely the above-mentioned collective property, which refers to public services and infrastructures ‘that [do] not obey market logic’ (Castel, 2002: 331). He keeps his characterisation of this domain very general, placing particular emphasis on the importance of public education and social housing (Castel, 2003: 280), but not otherwise distinguishing systematically between different infrastructure systems and services. Overall, his distinction between transfer property and collective property focuses our attention on two different alternatives to private property. One consists in individuals disposing over monetary resources that they obtain via the welfare state based on their social status, and the other in using services and infrastructures organised as public property. In conceptual terms, however, he connects social property with transfer property.

He identifies the linking of social rights and social status (as a wage labourer) – and thus the new relationship between labour and property – as a key component of social property. The questions that remain unaddressed here are, first, what status provides grounds for claiming a share of collective property and, second, what areas of social life entail claims beyond wage labour, such as having access to education (e.g. via citizenship status) or healthcare (via family membership). Castel’s analytical neglect of public services and infrastructures has mainly to do with his focus on individual rights which, in his opinion, are better guaranteed by transfer property than by collective property: the latter is not ‘appropriable by any particular individual’ (Castel, 2003: 281). Although he does not make this reference himself, classical property theories seem to influence Castel’s concept of social property: there are resonances both of a Hegelian understanding of property, where only individual access to an object of ownership (and not the use of goods and services) is subject-constituting and guarantees autonomy, and of the influence of Locke’s labour theory, in that access to property is tied to labour (Locke, 1974 § 27). Castel’s interest lies mainly in how assets that are not private can be appropriated by individuals (Castel, 2003: 272). This being the case, he hardly pays attention to the implications of collective property – and leaves unanswered the question of how the ‘collective’ of collective property exists in relation to the latter’s description as public property. In order to address this gap, we will discuss below whether, when taken seriously in analytic terms, collective property might in fact catalyse a more fundamental challenge to existing capitalist property relations than transfer property, which Castel prioritises.

Before extending Castel’s ideas further in this direction, it is worth taking a closer look at the relation between social property and private property and the class-related implications of this alternative form of property. The point of departure for Castel’s account is the fact that wage labourers are unpropertied, while in normative terms he problematises the arbitrariness of the private use of property that has led to the impoverishment of the workforce.

However, while he considers social property as the rehabilitation of the propertyless (essentially due to intense class struggles in the late-19th and early/mid-20th century), he also recognises that it is not a tool for overturning capitalist relations of private property – quite the opposite. It stabilises the wage labour society and its social structure, but adds status as a source of security alongside property: ‘The introduction of insurance therefore confirms the recognition of the irreversible character of social stratification in modern societies, and of the fact that it can be based on division of labour and no longer solely on property’ (Castel, 2003: 275). Castel (2005: 44) is intent on a ‘society of the similar’ with a legally guaranteed level of support that ensures social protection; his concern is not with a society of equals (in socio-economic terms). Neither the abolition of private property nor a substantial redistribution of it is therefore deemed necessary in order to overcome social insecurity. ³ At this juncture it becomes particularly clear that Castel elaborates his concept of social property against the backdrop of Fordist growth economies: it is born of the belief that social costs can be financed out of continually growing economic output and makes no attempt to situate this context within the global political economy (e.g. Eversberg, 2021). Castel considers it a strength of social property – fully in keeping with the historical class compromise – that it provides an answer to the vexing question of social justice without jeopardising the institution of private property. Social property as an alternative (or functional equivalent) to private property is thus envisioned strictly in relation to the protected individual; in relation to society, social property tends to stabilise capitalist property relations. At the same time Castel also describes social property as an institution that has the potential to strengthen the common good instead of prioritising ‘the arbitrariness of private usage’ (Castel, 2003: 280). Accordingly, social property performs the function not only of establishing individual protection but also of promoting institutionalised, social ties. Underlying this is his assumption that a mere aggregate of sovereign property owners does not make a society – which is why he rejects the idea of a society of (small) property owners.

Castel’s later work demonstrates that he was very conscious of the historical specificity of the Fordist class compromise, particularly in relation to the ‘integration machine’ of standard employment (Castel and Dörre, 2009). This makes it all the more astonishing that, as a scholar who contributed so greatly to research into the ‘top down’ abrogation of the class compromise and the précarisation of labour, he has only cursorily addressed the question of what consequences this development has for the concept of social property (Castel, 2005: 96–115), despite diagnosing ‘a sort of vengeance of private property on social property’ (Castel, 2002: 331). How does the character of social property change, though, when the nexus of wage labour status and social protection applies to fewer and fewer people due to the growing precarity of labour conditions? Are class relations transformed (and, if so, how) when access to social property comes to be a privilege in increasingly polarised labour markets? ⁴

What is striking about the reception of Castel is that while the concept of social property is taken up by many authors, it is generally understood as a synonym for social rights without due regard for its specific meaning in relation to property. ⁵ The tendency within the social sciences to neglect the issue of property in research – a tendency associated with the scientific focus on redistribution at the expense of class analysis – is also revealed in the reception of Castel’s work, and several important implications of Castel’s conceptualisation have been lost in this way. By choosing to use the terminology of property, Castel is explicitly establishing the latter as a benchmark for the institutionalisation of social rights: to generalise security and dependability also for non-property owners, a function that previously had only been attached to private property and thus had been limited to a few property owners (Castel, 2005: 46). At the same time, the potential to explore the property-character of social property has remained untapped in the reception of Castel’s work. This applies in part to the issue of whether social property needs to be recalibrated when collective property receives greater analytic attention; it also applies to the question of whether the function of social property ought to go beyond social protection and dependability to include democratic participation and the power of disposal as well.

Thinking Further With Castel’s Concepts: Extending and Radicalising Social Property

Our intention in the discussion that follows is not only to address the unresolved conceptual questions by actually analysing social property as property but also to argue that Castel’s rethinking of social rights as social property is instructive when it comes to designing democratised social policies for the present day. In addition, we argue that the concept offers analytical potential for doing justice to the many different processes of appropriation and dispossession in welfare-state transformation. Bearing all this in mind, we see three leverage points for rethinking social property and addressing the question of its transformative potential as an alternative to private property. This involves, first, updating the concept in a way that transcends the historically specific conditions of the Fordist growth economy with its standard employment relationship. Such an endeavour adds weight to the issue of redistribution under post-growth conditions and seeks to uncouple security from wage labour – for example, by means of a universal basic income (Ketterer, 2021) and a basic inheritance (Piketty, 2020: 981f.). Second, we are interested in extending the concept by looking at the collective property comprising infrastructures and social services – which Castel mentions but does not spell out analytically – as an essential pillar of social property with transformative potential. Third, our argumentation is geared towards radicalising the concept such that it takes the property character of social property seriously. This means not restricting the analysis to social protection but considering other functions of property in social property. Castel’s exclusive focus on social protection addresses material welfare provision (in the form of transfer payments, social services and infrastructures) without taking account of the key function of powers of disposal and decision-making (i.e. control) in relation to property. We radicalise his perspective in this way and argue that it is here where the potential lies to render welfare politics democratic and societally relevant. Since most scholarship on Castel’s work has focused on updating his concept of social property, ⁶ we devote our efforts here to extending and radicalising it.

Extending Social Property: Strengthening Collective Property as the Second Pillar of Social Property

The fact that Castel gives so much attention to social insurance as the core component of social property is, on one hand, justified: only this, in his view, gives the individual access to the monetary resources that essentially underpin social protection and dependability. What is surprising, on the other hand, is that despite setting this priority, he does not then reflect upon and apply the characteristics of social property developed with reference to transfer property to collective property. If we take this element more seriously than he does himself, it does indeed become necessary to readjust some of his basic assumptions about the character of social property. This applies particularly to its redistributive and equality-enhancing effect as well as its (transformative) potential to limit the realm and scope of private property and market relations. In adding analytical weight to collective property to bring it to the same level of salience as transfer property, we are taking Castel’s approach a decisive step further.

First, it is worth pausing to consider Castel’s initial assertion that there is no part of collective property that can be appropriated by the individual. This is inaccurate insofar as public services and infrastructures have considerable impacts on individuals’ disposable household income after expenditure on housing, energy, water and mobility. This correlation becomes all the more apparent if one considers further what proportion of net income has to be spent, for example, on healthcare, cultural activities and education. At the household level, then, individual monetary transfers and public infrastructures are inextricably linked when issues of social protection and participation are at stake. This becomes especially apparent in view of the far-reaching privatisation of social services and infrastructures in OECD countries since the 1980s, which have considerably limited what Castel defines as collective property. The result of this is that a household’s ability to pay – and thus its disposal over private resources – decides whether (additional) services can be purchased on the market or not.

Second, alongside the fact that public goods have an influence on the resources individuals have at their disposal, a further factor to highlight is their redistributive effect; after all, free (or low-cost) services make far more of a difference to low-income households than to those with abundant resources:

On average, in OECD countries, existing public services are worth the equivalent of a huge 76 per cent of the post-tax income of the poorest group compared with just 14 per cent of the richest. Public services reduce income inequality in OECD countries by an average of 20 per cent. (Gough, 2019: 539)

While the purpose of social insurance systems is explicitly not to achieve a society of equals but to protect the status of the wage labourer, this does not apply in the same way to the conception of public goods and services, be it access to mains drinking water, to education or to public transport. Of course, even access to these things is affected by existing relations of inequality; inherent within the idea and institutionalisation of (affordable) public goods, however, is the potential for making them universally accessible and breaching the hierarchies of class, gender and residency status.

Third, as well as having a substantially redistributive effect, historically the creation of publicly owned infrastructures has constituted an intervention in existing private property relations, namely by removing key areas of public service provision from the domain of profit-seeking (Hanna, 2018). The transformative potential of public services and infrastructures lies in the fact that, in these domains, the structural hierarchy of capitalism is inverted to the detriment of the logic of profit-seeking and to the benefit of care, needs and use value. In a sense, public infrastructures can be conceptualised as an institutionalised acknowledgement of the unsustainability and flawed reproductive capacity of the capitalist system, which is dependent for its reproduction on resources and regulation which it is incapable of generating itself within the logic of profit-seeking. Their ambiguous character shows in that public infrastructures have always been both the conditions of possibility for private capital accumulation as well as the result of social struggles to improve the living conditions of workers and those without property. More recently, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the energy crisis and a new geopolitical situation, the ‘systemic relevance’ of infrastructures has helped to put the significance of publicly owned ‘critical’ infrastructures (back) on the political agenda (e.g. Durand, 2021; Prausmüller, 2021). Even if political considerations of distributive justice are not the focus of such debates, the growing attention paid to the crucial role of infrastructures may make it easier to form new coalitions and alliances aimed at revitalising the public sector.

A further matter to consider is the place-based character of services and infrastructures, which creates a spatial and, to some extent, complementary counterpart to the insurance-based welfare state and tends to induce greater responsiveness in municipal actors (e.g. Davies et al., 2022: 91–93). At the local level, the everyday character of statehood becomes tangible and more directly available to political debate: ‘In local government, the micro-materiality of life: from food, housing, and streets, to refuse, drains and sewage comes constantly to the fore’ (Cooper, 2017: 345). Despite being often neglected in nation state-oriented welfare state research, the history of municipalist movements and struggles shows that there are leverage points – situated outside the well-researched transfer systems – for a local social policy which involves citizens as equals (e.g. Dogliani, 2002). The crisis affecting neoliberal privatisation and commodification has been identified for some time now (e.g. Cordelli, 2020), and becomes manifest especially at the urban level (Peck, 2012). Observable developments here include re-municipalisation on a global scale and growing counter-movements working towards a comeback of the public sphere (Candeias et al., 2020; Kishimoto et al., 2020), particularly with regard to water and energy supply (e.g. Della Porta, 2020: 97ff.). In addition to these movements, a lively debate has recently emerged around a new politics of infrastructure in the sense of universal basic services that are designed to be accessible to all citizens free of charge (or at low cost):

Services mean collectively generated activities that serve the public interest; basic means essential and sufficient rather than minimal, enabling people to flourish and participate in society; and universal means that everyone is entitled to services that meet their needs, regardless of ability to pay. (Gough, 2019: 534)

It is not wage-earning status or individual contributions that form the basis of entitlement here but (place-based) residency and needs.

While social movements and local initiatives are often focused on specific goods and services, an overarching approach has recently begun to attract attention and spark debate at the level of concepts and politics alike. The concept of the foundational economy recently proposed by the Foundational Economy Collective (2022) seeks to establish a new definition and an extension of (critical) infrastructures and basic goods, taking them beyond the bounds of the public sector established during the post-war decades. In addition to the ‘providential’ foundational economy, which mainly encompasses social services in the domains of education, health, culture, elderly care and childcare, the Collective introduces the notion of a ‘material’ foundational economy, consisting of all the essential pipes and cables, utility and local store networks that make it possible to provide facilities for (waste) water, energy, transport, banking services and food. The latter in particular are still private sector-dominated. In Germany and the United Kingdom, according to the Collective’s calculations, more than 40% of workers are employed in the foundational economy. The idea of the foundational economy is geared towards systematically placing these domains at the service of the public interest and regulating them accordingly. ⁷

State or municipal ownership is important, but it is not the only way to safeguard the foundational economy. Moreover, state ownership does not naturally protect society from processes of commodification and deregulation, as countless instances of neoliberal restructuring within public bodies have all too clearly demonstrated. Against this backdrop, the Foundational Economy Collective stresses that strict social regulation might, under certain circumstances, be even more important than formal ownership. Unlike public–private partnerships in the neoliberal sense, the latter’s logic is reversed: it is not private-sector priorities that enter the public sphere but private-sector actors that are committed to public standards: ‘Those engaged in the foundational economy, whether private contractors or not-for-profit operators under various cooperative ownership arrangements, should be given the status of public bodies and not simply treated as private associations’ (Foundational Economy Collective, 2022: 109). Arrangements of this kind are referred to as a state-regulated form of ‘social licensing’ (Froud and Williams, 2019: 5) and are credited with transformative potential when it comes to establishing a needs-based rather than profit-based economy, provided they are applied systematically to the foundational economy.

In addition to new forms of radical regulation of for-profit actors, the role of not-for-profit operators and civil society actors is also crucial for the reorganisation of public infrastructures. This leads to the question of how we can transcend the Fordist understanding that tends to address the state as the ‘monopolist of the public sphere’ (Schultheiß, 2012: 11, authors’ translation) and take civic actors into account. Castel himself designates public infrastructures as collective property without discussing the relationship between ‘public’ and ‘collective’. What he omits to address here – just as in the case of transfer property – is the crucial property-related issue of (the power of) disposal, which invokes the role of the ‘collective’ of welfare state citizens. The question of who participates in managing public property and public regulation leads to a radicalisation of Castel’s analysis of social property.

Radicalising Castel’s Thinking: Taking Social Property Seriously as Social Property and Emphasising the Power of Disposal

This raises the question of what functions would need to be ascribed to social rights before they can justifiably be discussed in terms of social property. Property essentially denotes the variously regulated power of disposal exercised by property-owning subjects over goods or objects of ownership, where the property-owning subject may be an individual, a legal entity, the state or a community. Thus, property structures govern the relationship prevailing between those with rights of disposal and other actors in relation to various goods. If we take this elementary definition as a starting point, the question of whether it is justified to conceive of social rights as social property can only be answered once the issue of the power of disposal has been addressed.

Over what do citizens exercise their power of disposal in the case of social property? For Castel, the answer is obvious, at least for social insurance systems: in social law, subjects have the power of disposal over their pensions and unemployment benefits, which are designed to offer them protection and dependability for the future (unlike means-tested benefits, which he problematises as alms-giving). Castel’s concept of social property thus implies rights of access and use. However, that only covers a subset of possible rights governing the social relationship between property owners and others in relation to an object of ownership. Alongside access to and use of a resource, these rights include the management and administration of the resource (including control over the conditions of its (re)production), the exclusion of others, and transfer to others by sale, donation, endowment or inheritance (e.g. Gamble and Kelly, 1996: 72ff.; Schlager and Ostrom, 1992). In this regard, Schlager and Ostrom (1992: 251) systematically differentiate between rights at the operational level (access and use) and rights at the collective-choice level (management, exclusion and transfer): ‘It is the difference between exercising a right and participating in the definition of future rights to be exercised. The authority to devise future operational-level rights is what makes collective-choice rights so powerful’.

In the case of social property, not only are rights of transfer suspended, but even control over the conditions of (re)production is given only in an ultra-mediated form via universal suffrage and – in Germany, for example – in the corporatist self-governance of the social insurance system which has severe limitations. ⁸ In the first place, however, welfare state citizens are largely ‘passive’ recipients of benefits, given the absence of collective rights of decision making that would enable appropriation of the relevant conditions, for example, in the case of public infrastructures. What we mean by ‘passivity’ here is not passivity on the part of benefit recipients, as in the supposed lack of initiative that tends to be berated in liberal activation programmes, but a passivity induced by the state when its citizens are prevented from determining their own living conditions.

With his concept of social property, Castel has identified a (partial) functional equivalent to private property, which entitles non-property owners to access resources by dint of social status. This nexus between status and social protection constitutes an alternative to private property insofar as the state acts as guarantor for those excluded from access to profit-generating resources (i.e. private property). Taking a different stance from the liberal understanding of a ‘property-owning democracy’ (Rawls), which seeks to enable as many people as possible to access private property as market participants, here the profit function of property is subordinated to the guarantee of social protection and participation. At the same time, despite his use of the term ‘social property’ in his writings, Castel remains undecided as to whether it amounts to a distinct, alternative form of property. The question, therefore, is this: what is a minimum criterion for conceiving of the status-security-nexus as being property-like at all? Our key argument is that this criterion is (low-threshold) access to participation in managing the (re)production of the resource – that is to say, genuinely exercising the power to determine how it is used and developed. In the absence of any decision-making rights of the kind described by Ostrom and Schlager, what we are dealing with is not a new form of property but rather a purely distributive institution with no power of disposal for users.

What would it mean if citizens were not merely users or recipients, but also had rights to participate in decision making and the active shaping of welfare arrangements? Such a radicalised form of social property, which takes the power of disposal seriously, prompts further questions about the co-governance and democratisation of welfare states. Taking the ‘property’ in social property seriously leads us to the question of socialisation of the public sector. In order to develop such a perspective, it is useful to explore possible links with the principle of cooperative ownership in terms of the unity of access, use and self-administration. Research on commons also offers important impulses, since here the right of disposal over use values has been taken further in the idea of claiming ownership: ‘A plurality that claims ownership [. . .] not only uses or accesses that use value, but also governs its production and reproduction, its sustainability and development’ (De Angelis, 2017: 29f.) As the example of the foundational economy shows, it is quite possible to conceive of a state-regulated heterogeneity of different forms of property (state, municipal, cooperative, private, etc.) as long as these are oriented towards use and needs and are organised in a way that facilitates participation, to echo the point made by Andrew Cumbers in his writings on the (re)appropriation of public property:

Whatever form of ownership is chosen – and it should be recognized that in practice there are a myriad of combinations rather than a simple dichotomy between public and private – the aspiration should be towards democratic decision-making in which employees and user groups have a voice. (Cumbers, 2012: 164)

Opportunities for participation are often situated at the local and neighbourhood level and are made more readily available by proximity and personal contacts. Good examples are approaches informed by New Municipalism (Thompson, 2021), in the context of which local actors are trying out different forms of public–commons partnerships and urban citizen participation (e.g. Bianchi, 2023; Milburn and Russell, 2021). For example, the Barcelona en Comu alliance, which emerged from various social movements and has led the city council from 2015 to 2023, has not only organised the development of its election manifesto via citizens’ assemblies and digital consultations using a specially developed platform called Decidim, ⁹ but also lets people use the platform to feed in suggestions and initiatives to the political process on an ongoing basis (Barandiaran et al., 2017), including the organisation of a participatory budget (Ajuntament de Barcelona, 2023). At the same time, the city council has initiated key political projects, such as an inclusion strategy to strengthen local social policy, with the involvement of numerous civil society actors and neighbourhood associations (Ajuntament de Barcelona, 2018). Also of interest in this context is the Berlin campaign, Deutsche Wohnen & Co. enteignen (Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen & Co.), ¹⁰ which instigated a successful referendum on its objective of socialising 240,000 flats owned by large private real estate corporations. The initiative is not just intent on transferring the flats to public property owned by the State of Berlin; it also wants to turn them into a form of (civil) society-administered common property. Decisions would then be made by an administrative board that includes representatives of the tenants and the Berlin Senate as well as directly elected representatives from the city’s community (Hoffrogge and Junker, 2021).

Alongside the democratisation of municipal structures through the inclusion of a variety of civil society actors, other modes of public–civil society cooperation are conceivable (Dellenbaugh et al., 2015). First, there is the public funding of cooperative projects and commons that perform key functions in areas of foundational infrastructure but are organised independently. Examples of this include subsidised cooperative housing projects and the promotion of alternative digital infrastructures. Second, the transfer of publicly owned real estate (especially land and buildings) to neighbourhood projects or civil society organisations which then manage it independently is being tested in various locations. In these cases, the city or municipality makes the material infrastructure available and covers the costs of maintenance and operation, while civil society actors contribute their commitment and time. Such projects operate autonomously and as part of the public infrastructure (e.g. by running educational, advisory and cultural programmes, sports facilities or libraries), and are bound by agreed standards, one in particular being to guarantee public access to the benefits and services on offer. An example here is the Patrimoni Ciutadà (‘civil heritage’) programme in Barcelona (La Hidra Cooperativa, 2019).

In social policy, however, participation and socialisation cannot remain limited to the local level; after all, when it comes to social insurance schemes or care of the elderly, it is not viable to finance and organise them at this level: ‘Each local organization cannot completely reinvent and govern its own “social common”, since most social insurance programs require large-scale participation’ (Dardot and Laval, 2019: 353). Instead, translocal administrative structures could conceivably be established by, for example, setting up citizens’ councils which represent the interests of socially insured individuals as social property owners. In addition or alternatively, local contact points could be established (in public libraries or neighbourhood centres) which could serve as places both to obtain information and to submit grievances, given that many will perceive an insurance system organised and structured in this way as somewhat abstract: ‘Democratizing the social relations that govern these organizations is thereby a means to transform state administration into the social institutions of the common’ (Dardot and Laval, 2019: 353).

Taking the property character of social property seriously, and radicalising it in the sense of socialising the power of disposal over it, requires a systematic dovetailing of the different levels in order to create the material conditions for participation. This is imperative, not only to prevent participation that is purely symbolic – a ‘local trap’ (Purcell, 2006) without any real decision-making power ¹¹ – but also to overcome the frequently attested class-specificity of political participation: opportunities for participation of this kind are often taken up specifically by the financially privileged and well-educated (e.g. Schäfer and Schoen, 2013). At this point, it becomes clear how the tasks of extending and radicalising Castel’s concept of social property are interdependent. Democratised social policy places a severe strain on the time of all those involved; it also depends on social infrastructures that create the preconditions for participation, especially in the education system, and by providing relief from care responsibilities. Other enabling measures include providing remuneration for time spent working on developing democratic community-based structures and a reduction in working hours along with unconditional income support and expense allowances.

Conclusion

Although social rights have historically been institutionalised as a form of social protection for the propertyless and although welfare states structure property relations, Robert Castel is unique in rethinking social rights as citizens’ social property and framing the right coupled to wage labour status as property. It is striking that Castel developed the concept of social property analytically with reference to social insurance schemes but without systematically including public infrastructures and social services, which he himself cites as a second strand of social property. However, collective property in particular harbours considerable redistributive and transformative potential, as our concept of an extended understanding of social property has shown. In radicalising the concept, finally, we have demonstrated that the property character of social property remains obscure in Castel’s work, since he attends only to questions of social protection and distribution but ignores the power of disposal. Yet as we have shown, it is here where the potential lies for a democratisation and socialisation of social policy, the aim being not to absolve the state of responsibility but to remove its monopoly on the public sector. In our view it is this emphasis on participatory decision making and the power of disposal which justifies speaking of social property: herein, we believe, lies the potential of a rigorous process of democratisation to supplant academic and political discourses that treat the issue of social justice as being solely one of redistribution. It is precisely this extended conceptualisation of the socialised and democratised public sector that concepts of public property (as state property or municipal property) are not capable of serving.

Yet the task of extending and radicalising Castel’s concept of social property cannot be undertaken in a vacuum; rather, it demands inquiry into the functional (pre-)conditions of social policy in the capitalist state. For the reproduction of labour and life, the capitalist system is fundamentally dependent on resources that it is itself incapable of producing within the logic of profit seeking (van Dyk and Haubner, 2021). The resources in question are not only provided, unpaid, in private households (predominantly by women) but also through the organisation of public healthcare, systems of education and professional training, professional nursing care and childcare, state benefits for those unable to work due to illness or old age, and infrastructures for transport, mobility and communication. Étienne Balibar levels his critique of Castel in this direction, reproaching him for his narrow emphasis on the function of social property to deliver individual autonomy and for disregarding the fact that its functional purpose is also to safeguard an individual’s livelihood in situations ‘wherein his economic function is suspended or even ceases to exist (as in unemployment or illness)’ (Balibar, 2014: 97). From this it follows that the function of social policy is essentially to safeguard the reproduction of labour power beyond the system of production – a point underscored by Marxist state theorists long before Balibar (e.g. Jessop, 2002). In this sense, social policy has always occupied a highly ambiguous position in society, stabilising the system and guaranteeing social reproduction on one hand while constituting a hard-won social right achieved by struggle from ‘below’ on the other. For the perspective developed here, it should therefore be borne in mind that restricting citizens’ power of disposal over social property also serves the purpose of keeping in check and channelling aspirations that go beyond the requirements of reproduction. For this reason, interventions aimed at securing participation (as defined above) must build up a substantial counterforce in order to shift the boundaries of institutionalised consultation and co-governance. A source of normative inspiration for a politics based on an extended and radicalised version of social property is the French tradition of solidarism (cf. overview in Kohn, 2016, for example) that Castel references in his historical analysis. Solidarism sought to heighten awareness of the hybrid nature of all forms of property. Alfred Fouillée coined the term social property in 1884 in order to emphasise the fact that it is grounded in the contributions of countless human beings over many generations. Fouillée wanted it to be understood as a collective inheritance that belongs to all members of society and, as he argued even at that time, one that could be used to finance a system of universal insurance. The immense significance of public infrastructures for private-sector accumulation that are financed by taxation – pointed out recently, for example, by economists Mariana Mazzucato (2018) and Thomas Piketty (2020) – vastly exceeds the magnitude and extent of anything Fouillée could have anticipated in the 1880s. Our argument hinges on what this negatively implies, namely the expropriation of the many through the privatisation of their collective share in the institution of private property. The goods, services, ideas and achievements produced in a society, for which the few generally claim all the credit, are inconceivable without public infrastructures, unpaid care work, advances made by previous generations and the everyday contributions made by the members of a society organised around the division of labour. From this perspective, a politics of radical redistribution and reallocation – an essential precondition for a new politics of social property – is not solely a matter of the ‘strong’ showing solidarity with the ‘weak’ but also a matter of the rightful restitution of the latter’s expropriated share. Raising awareness of this ongoing expropriation and making it visible in different spheres lays an essential normative foundation for a new politics of social property.

On this basis, social property is to be understood as a key concept of inclusive social policy. Rather than describing the situation as it is, this concept seeks to foster joined-up thinking that brings together hitherto disjointed approaches to the politics of social rights and the politics of democratisation. Social movements for municipalisation and socialisation at the local level, particularly relating to water, energy and housing, currently unite these approaches. To underscore this dual perspective of social rights and radical democratisation, it is discursively and analytically useful to talk about social property rather than social rights alone, because in the latter case, the power of disposal in the sense of collective rights of decision-making is (too) rarely considered. Social property in the sense developed here not only permits the processes that have played out in the welfare states of the Global North since the 1980s to be analysed as an expropriation of welfare state citizens; it also shifts the meaning, scope and boundaries of the power of disposal over private property, thereby boosting the power of non-(private) property owners – materially and in terms of disposal over their living and working conditions, including the capacity to resist processes of expropriation. Ultimately, taking social property seriously as property also means rethinking current concepts of property: ‘The idea of property is not some one thing, identical throughout history and incapable of alteration, but is variable like all other creations of the human mind’ (Mill, 1967 (1879) 753).