The Limits to Working-Class Property Ownership: The Case of Spain’s ‘Society of Owners’

The promotion of property ownership has been a key legitimating mechanism for capitalist regimes, across their authoritarian, liberal and neoliberal variations. The 2007–2008 global financial crisis critically undermined this agenda, leading to political turmoil. This paper analyses the material conditions underpinning the ‘society of owners’ project in Spain, centred on making proletarians property-owners. Drawing from large-scale surveys, we look at the degree to which workers have become property-owners and the forms and functions of ownership taken on. We observe an initial expansion and dispersal of ownership, followed by a period of contraction and concentration. Through a political economy analysis of the ‘society of owners’, we argue that the processes driving its expanded reproduction have encountered their limits and contradictions.