SOCIALIZATION. - A generic term used to designate the aims and method proper to socialist and communist economic schools, directed toward the practical abolition of private ownership of the means of production, and their attribution as the collective patrimony of society.
If the attribution takes place in favor of the workers employed in each firm, even in isolated cases, we have socialization in the narrow sense, which then approaches cooperativism. If, on the other hand, it is in favor of the State, as representative of all workers, we have statization or nationalization, applied in state monopolies and, in Italy, in the railways. In the case of partial statizations, consisting of the State's participation in the capital or in the direction or in the management of firms, or of other substantial interference, or else concerning specific public services or individual industries or branches of industry, carried out by nations that are not committed to a program of integral socialization or statization, one more commonly speaks of nationalizations. Akin to these are municipalizations, by which municipalities become owners of firms for public services of primary importance (water, gas, electricity, transport, etc.). The above terms, however, are often confused in practical usage, especially in journalism.
The socialization of a firm can also come about through the voluntary determination of an entrepreneur-capitalist, when the ownership passes in whole or in part, by onerous transfer, by agreement or by donation, to the body of workers employed in the firm itself. The first and notable example was that of the Zeiss firm of Jena, for the industry of lenses and optical instruments, which in 1880, by the free disposition of Prof. Ernst Abbe, heir of the founder Carl Zeiss, was transferred, through a Zeiss Foundation, to the personnel of the firm and to the city of Jena.
When socialization is imposed by a political regime and pushed to its extreme degree of realization, it inevitably fits into a planned economy (v. PIANIFICAZIONE): and its purpose is then not that of recognizing property, profits and freedom of initiative for the mass of workers, but rather the other one of obliging these, under the appearance of owners, to follow a production program fixed and controlled by the central power for its own ends. If these ends were exclusively economic, and if the workers were actually left the totality of the profits, the system could present at least the advantages consequent upon the centralization of the economy; against these, however, there would always be set the disadvantages of the bureaucratization of economic functions and of the disappearance of initiative and competition, besides the others tied to the planning system.
There has recently been talk (Canada, Germany) of a syndicalization of agricultural and industrial firms; according to it, the industries of each category should be managed by the labor unions of that same category: that is, the places assigned to workers on the boards of directors would be occupied by union representatives, to whom a new career, of a bourgeois-capitalist type, would thus be opened.
The Bonn Parliament discussed in July 1952 a bill to this effect: but, while approving that the workers should be represented on the boards of directors of their own firm in a ratio varying between 30 and 50 per cent, and only in large firms, it resolutely excluded the representatives of the union organizations.
Toward forms of spontaneous socialization, besides that of cooperation (v.), the wage system (v.) is evolving, in correlation with social progress and with the extension and democratization of capital: whereby capitalism will progressively lose its present overbearing power, due mainly to its scarcity, to its concentration in a few hands and to the deficient social morality of capitalists in general. The method and the gradualness of the transition are precisely what distinguish the various economic-social schools, and more particularly the socialist schools, from one another and from communism. The former realize that certain limits must not be overstepped and that it is well not to provoke harmful economic upheavals, but to give time for the formation of suitable mentalities and capacities among the workers: communism, on the other hand, holds that the capitalist classes will yield only to violence, and that therefore every change in the structure of firms requires those acts of force which, according to Marxist ideology, represent an inescapable necessity or indeed a scientific law.
The facts belie this necessity: and reckless and systematic violence constitutes perhaps today the primary cause both of the perplexity and delays on the part of entrepreneurs in taking the decisive step, and of the scant concern among the working masses about their own moral and specific preparation for the new tasks.
In practice, and apart from the rigid socialist and communist tracks, rather than of socialization one speaks more elastically of reforms of the structure of the firm: a term that leaves free the search for forms and gradations better adaptable to the innumerable variety of firms. Indeed, a reform of today's firm structure that would be the same for all firms, large and small, old and recent, is not possible, nor would it be advisable in any case. Any legislation on the matter could have no practical value except after a long experimentation with various forms of collaboration, born from the initiative of entrepreneurs.
Apart from spontaneous realizations, so far few in number but concrete in positive results, a first evolutionary step toward socialization may be considered to be works councils and internal commissions, of essentially technical-union and consultative value for now; as well as the project, with some rare and not happy application mostly in industries of the I.R.I. (Istituto Ricostruzione Industriale), of management councils. The trial made in Italy and abroad (in Russia they are excluded) is, however, so far not satisfactory: attempts of this kind, as also the admission of worker elements or union representatives to the boards of directors of industrial companies, cannot have real success if undertaken in overheated climates of struggle and dense with childish illusions.
As for the productivity of socialized firms, it has generally increased in all cases of spontaneous socialization: it has not increased, or has sometimes decreased appreciably, in all the other cases, except where socialization could be implemented in an atmosphere and under forms of convinced collaboration between entrepreneurs and workers, as in Holland.
Akin to socialization is worker shareholding, rejected by the communists who see in it an incentive to the embourgeoisement of the workers: with it the worker is gradually made a participant in the profits and in the control of the firm to which he gives his labor.
Bibliography8 works
Mario Baronci