Beyond Private Property?

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the triumph of private property appeared to be unstoppable. Politicians and economists all over the world took the dynamic engine of private property and marketisation to be an adequate tool to deal with economic as well as ecological, cultural, and social problems.Four decades later, however, private property faces increasingly visible tensions, problems, and crises. Long contained beneath its seemingly solid surface, these tensions have now come to the fore, intersecting with new and unprecedented challenges that expose deep cracks in capitalism’s foundations without displacing its continued dominance. Private property is at the center of ever-growing socio-economic inequality, and hence the cause of social unrest as well as a driver of environmental destruction. Moreover, the advent of new digital technologies, infrastructures, and products, together with emerging alternative practices from sharing to access-based business models, has given rise to a new constellation of goods, infrastructures, products, services, and social practices. In sectors such as the information economy, private property is no longer questioned solely by its conventional critics but also by defenders of the free market.Taken together, these developments generate a profound crisis of private property that could fundamentally transform 21st century capitalism. The question of whether private property, as an institution, promotes or endangers widespread prosperity and a sustainable life on this planet is now an issue of public debate. This book systematically reconstructs this crisis and its causes, examining property relations with regard to goods, infrastructures and our relationship to the world.