Possessing, Owning, Belonging

The future of socialism, I am convinced, depends more on its ability to provide a new conception of ownership than on its ability to redistribute property or secure social benefits. Those traditional aims retain importance even in a technologically mature society, but now have less power to inspire than they did in the past. For once ownership is coupled with the awesome ability to bring large-scale, irreversible changes in our physical and social environment, the question, Who shall own the world? becomes distinctly secondary to the question, What shall it mean to own? The urgent task today is the humanization of ownership.

I like to believe that this indeed was the concern of the pioneers of socialism, and there is some evidence to that effect. But, as a matter of historical fact, socialist movements have seldom risen above a Robin Hood model of socialism, concerned more with the distribution of property than with its definition. With a few exceptions, socialists, like capi...