In early March, King’s Review editors Sarah Stein Lubrano  and Johannes Lenhard sat down with Nancy Fraser to continue a discussion  begun over lunch the day before. Fraser was visiting Cambridge from the  New School of Social Research in New York, where she is Henry A. and  Louise Loeb Professor of Philosophy and Politics. Her earlier writings  are about feminist theory and contemporary social and political thought,  and she is currently working on three different volumes that address  the all-encompassing state of ‘crisis’ we seem to be living through  today. It is this topic that we particularly wanted to reflect on.

King’s Review:

Over the last couple of years,  many people have written about “the crisis”. They have come from the  perspectives of critical theory, Marxist thought and more technical  economic realms. The books you are currently working on engage with  these scholars in a way that seeks to go beyond a selective  understanding of the notion of “crisis”. Can you tell us more about what  you mean by this? What is missing in existing accounts?

Nancy Fraser:

The problem is that most of these writings  accept the standard view that the economy is a special, self-contained  system, which must be understood technically, in its own terms, without  reference to the surrounding institutions and social practices on which  it depends. They ignore some important presuppositions of capital  accumulation: for example, the unwaged carework without which waged  labor could not exist; also nature’s capacity to sustain life and supply  the energy and material inputs for commodity production; and the public  powers that capitalism needs to secure private property, enforce  contracts, and regulate economic interaction more generally. The  standard approaches obscure all these indispensable background  conditions of the economy. They treat the economy as a self-subsisting  system that obeys its own laws. As a result, they mistakenly think they  can analyse the crisis “economistically”, without reference to social  reproduction, ecology, or politics. It’s no surprise, I guess, that  mainstream economists take this view. But it is also assumed by the  lion’s share of those who claim to practise critical political economy,  including many Marxists and Keynesians. That’s more unexpected – and  more disturbing.

My approach is different. I start from the observation that the  current crisis is multidimensional: that it encompasses not just economy  and finance, but also social reproduction, ecology, and politics. Most  of us appreciate the ecological strand, which we know in the form, for  example, of global warming. Many of us also sense what feminists have a  called a crisis of “care”, as public welfare provision is curtailed and  women are increasingly recruited into wage labour, squeezing the  capacities available to maintain families and communities. Then too, few  would deny that we are facing a crisis of politics insofar as our  political institutions seem incapable – for non-accidental, systemic  reasons – of taking even the most elementary steps to solve those  problems – or indeed to prevent a new outbreak of financial crisis.

My hunch is that these are not separate crises, unfolding side by  side, but inter-imbricated aspects of a general crisis. If that is  right, we need a broader perspective for understanding it. A  technical-economic perspective will not suffice. So I am now trying to  develop a multidimensional conception of crisis, which relates the  foreground dynamics of the capitalist economy to their background  conditions in capitalist society.

KR:  

In a short article in the Guardian  in September last year, you describe a whole set of assumptions that –  for want of a better term – capitalism makes about social reproduction  and how these assumptions have been described differently by feminists.  You make the point that capitalism was over the years able to  appropriate this critique. Capitalism was able to turn it around in a  way so that it has become part of the capitalist endeavour. Is there a  way around this appropriation?

NF:

My Guardian essay concerns an important aspect of this  crisis complex. On the one hand, I am criticising mainstream economic  thinking for ignoring the economy’s non-economic background. And here I  am drawing in part, as you rightly noted, on the work of  socialist-feminist theorists, who developed the category of “social  reproduction” as the necessary counterpart to “economic production”. As I  understand it, this category includes housework, childcare, eldercare,  etc, but also a host of other “socio-symbolic” activities that maintain  social bonds and shared understandings. And I fully endorse the feminist  view that social reproduction constitutes a necessary background  condition for a capitalist economy, even as the latter systematically  devalues it. But then, too, I also endorse the eco-socialist claim that a  capitalist economy depends on inputs from nature, which it does not  adequately replenish. Finally, I think capitalism free-rides on public  powers, which it both needs and tend to degrade. My work on crisis  builds on (and indeed connects!) all three of these critical insights.  So yes, it is deeply indebted to feminist theory, even as it also  integrates gender dynamics with those of politics, ecology and economy.

Nevertheless, and here’s the other side, I have criticised the  current political orientation of mainstream feminism. As I see it,  dominant currents of the feminist movement have entered into a dangerous  liaison with neoliberal capitalism. They have adopted thin,  market-friendly ideas of gender equality, understood in terms of women’s  meritocratic advancement within the existing corporate structure, which  is defined by men’s life-patterns. A good example is Sheryl Sandberg’s  best-selling self-help book, Lean In, which advises women to  double-down in the workplace and play hardball. This feminism accepts  the mainstream view of economy and hopes to empower women to compete  effectively within it, while ignoring the background conditions that  enforce their disadvantage – above all, the unequal gender division of  carework. In fact, gender equality requires transforming the whole  relation between economic production and social reproduction. And that  in turn requires public recognition of the value of carework.

This dangerous liaison benefits neoliberalism far more than feminism.  Today, feminist ideas are being bent to capitalist purposes, made to  supply a good part of the legitimating rationale for the new regime of  accumulation that we call neoliberalism, which depends heavily on  women’s waged labour. Consider the ironic fate of the feminist critique  of the male breadwinner/female homemaker family model, which assumed  that the man would be paid a “family wage” (a wage sufficient to support  his entire household). When it was developed in the 1970s, this  critique was part of a political project aimed at validating the social  importance of unpaid carework. The idea was to overcome gender  domination by reorganising that work, sharing it equitably among women  and men, and ensuring its public support. Today, however, the feminist  critique of the family wage is serving quite different ends: it is used  to legitimate women’s participation in wage labour. Far from affirming  the value of carework, it validates wage labour. So an idea that once  criticised the constitutive androcentrism of capitalism now functions  precisely to ratify it!

The problem is partly that the critique emerged at a moment in  history when the family wage model was being superseded, like the Owl of  Minerva flying at dusk. We can see now, with the benefit of hindsight,  that the eruption of second-wave feminism coincided with the massive  global movement of women of every class and ethnicity into paid work.  That development is double-edged. On the one hand, it represents women’s  authentic striving for relative autonomy, more power in the household  and a desire to be free of personal subordination. On the other hand, it  represents a new capitalist strategy of accumulation, aimed at  restoring declining profit rates. It coincides, moreover, with a general  worsening of conditions for the working class as a whole. Households  today have to put in many more hours of wage labour in order to maintain  the same standard of living they enjoyed in previous decades; no single  member commands a family wage. The result is depressed wage levels,  precarious employment, a decline in the capacities available for  necessary carework, and terrible stress. But neoliberal ideologues  celebrate all this as a feminist achievement!

This is a case of a more widespread phenomenon in which what were  once critical streams of thought now take on a “market-friendly”  character. In our time, there has been a narrowing of the great ideals  of emancipation that social movements like feminism have fought for. The  market imaginary has colonised our thinking. Perhaps this process is  partly rooted in the collapse of socialism and the apparent absence of  an alternative. But there is no question in my mind that the feminism  that is hegemonic today is a shrunken version, a mere shell, of its  earlier, emancipatory self.

KR:

I wonder whether the process you are describing is not  what was to be expected all along from the highly creative and flexible  economic system we call capitalism. Isn’t it part of the logic of  capitalism that it works in exactly this way, appropriating even  critical ideas and repurposing them for its own ends? In which case,  isn’t it just logical that this should happen with movements like  feminism? The financial crisis has been described by some commentators  as a rather inconvenient but non-lethal obstacle for capitalism. What we  are seeing now is even a strengthened form, despite the critiques that  the financial crisis gave rise to. So can critical ideas that present  radical alternatives to capitalism ever really make a difference? Is  there a need for theoretical counter-forces against the status-quo even  though they might become watered down and even incorporated?

NF:

There are several points here, I think. First, the fate of  the feminist family-wage critique, which I just outlined, is quite  ironic. It is a case in which a critical idea is instrumentalised, used  to legitimate a transformation of the very capitalist system it  originally aimed to criticise and to create new profit opportunities.  Another example is microfinance. Microfinance is typically justified on  the ground that small scale lending to women in poor rural regions can  overcome poverty and gender hierarchy. The anti-poverty rationale is  quite specious, however. Keep in mind that the enthusiasm for  microfinance arose just as international agencies like the IMF were  pressuring postcolonial states to adopt neoliberal policies – to open  their markets, slash social spending, privatise their assets, and  generally retreat from developmental policies, including large-scale job  creation. At just that moment, these agencies begin to tout microcredit  as a way of circumventing red tape and “empowering” women. But this  sort of small-scale lending in the service of petty entrepreneurialism  cannot possibly substitute for macroeconomic policies aimed at  overcoming poverty. As an anti-poverty policy, it’s just not serious!  Which severely limits the benefits it provides to women. So here’s  another case of the instrumentalisation of feminist ideas to legitimate  policies that are antithetical to feminist values. And of course,  microcredit is also a profit opportunity. Hundreds of for-profit lenders  are now making a great deal of money out of it, just as for-profit  banking institutions are capitalising on “green finance”, conducting a  brisk and lucrative trade in strange new commodities, such as carbon  offsets and environmental derivatives. In general, these interests are  making lemonade out of the lemons of the various strands of crisis –  ecological, financial, social reproductive, and political.

What conclusion should we draw from this? I would not go as far as  you just did. The struggle is not inevitably doomed in advance. It’s  true that capitalism is a formidable system, highly inventive and  opportunistic. Yet there have been historical periods when opposition to  it became very widely and strongly held. In those moments, opponents  mobilised and forced major structural changes in the existing form of  capitalism. We are now at a moment, I think, when the need for such  structural transformation is palpable, keenly felt by many people. It is  well understood that a bit of tinkering here and there is not going to  solve the very deep structural crisis we find ourselves in. And so there  is a hunger right now for a kind of critique that clarifies the  situation, integrating the different aspects of the crisis – financial,  ecological, political, social – and pointing us in a direction where we  can think more fruitfully and more deeply about how to address them. So I  reject the idea that resistance can only necessarily strengthen the  system.

KR:

You argue for a dissemination of views  and the  reconstruction of a “new common sense”. When it comes to the financial  crisis you just mentioned, one might argue that these alternatives have  been explored at least in the practical sense. You were living in  downtown New York and I imagine you had at least some contact with the  Occupy protests. You have doubtless heard about the groups in Spain and  Greece doing very similar things. Do you think these new social  movements presented a viable alternative?

NF:

I actively participated in Occupy Wall Street in New York.  That movement, like its counterparts elsewhere, was a fantastic  eruption of radical desire and militant commitment of a sort we haven’t  seen in a long time. Nevertheless, I’ve been very struck by how quickly  the air went out of the balloon, by how fast these movements demobilised  and how little they left behind in their wake. There’s an interesting  lesson here: despite all of our talk about social media,  cybercommunication and the virtual, it was the ability to hold onto  public space that actually gave these movements traction, media  attention, and a palpable presence in society. Once the powers-that-be  reclaimed those spaces and evicted the Occupiers, the protests quickly  collapsed.

Why was that? It had a lot to do, I think, with the hold of  neo-anarchist ideas on an influential stratum of youthful activists.  Certainly, Occupy Wall Street – let me just stick to the New York case,  which I know the best – was a very complex movement, which won the  support and participation of a broad cross-section of society, including  unions, public sector workers, and progressive NGOs. But when push came  to shove, the ethos of the movement was shaped by the perspective of a  stratum of youthful activists, who were in a position to live fulltime  in Zuccotti Park. This group, which included a good number of my own  students, were among the most dedicated shock troops; they stayed until  the last minute, fought the police, and continued to attend the  shrinking “General Assemblies” long after they were evicted from the  Park. They were quite wonderful, really; yet it was thanks to the  influence of their neo-anarchist worldview, I think, that the movement  did not seriously confront the organisational question of how to  institutionalise itself as a presence in a relatively enduring and  ongoing way. They failed to appreciate that the moment of direct action  is by definition ephemeral. It’s heady, it’s exciting, it is the  greatest high in the world, but if you are serious about making change  you have to give some thought to the question of how – and it’s a word  that many of my students hate – to institutionalise these energies.

So, I think in the end, there are some negative lessons to be learned  from OWS. If you are suspicious of all institutions, if you try to work  entirely outside the circuits of public power, rather than trying to  change and use it, what you will do is strengthen private power, i.e.  corporations. I think there was a fundamental misunderstanding of power  among the neo-anarchists who dominated Occupy. That’s not to say that I  don’t appreciate experimental social projects, communes, cooperatives,  and other efforts to build a “social and solidary economy.” But these  are not a substitute for global financial controls, for instance. The  private powers that rule today are far too big and too deeply entrenched  to be overcome by local communal experiments. The belief that direct  action alone suffices is seriously deluded.

On the other hand, it’s easy to see why neo-anarchism appeals today.  It is a response – fully understandable, albeit inadequate – to  political frustration. Hit hard by the crisis, southern Europeans and  others are seeing that it doesn’t matter whom they elect: it’s the  bankers who run the show. So there’s a sense that the political system  itself is broken, that you can’t address the crisis by working inside  it. All you can do is go to the streets. This is completely  understandable and not off-base as a diagnosis of the colonisation of  the political system by the banks and corporations. But absent serious  consideration of how we might build an alternative, it becomes a  periodic blowing off of steam, an impotent expression of anger and  frustration.

KR:

To take what you said at face value, you’re arguing that  one can’t work without the state and without politics. You can’t just  set up something completely outside when it comes to making a difference  for society as such. Does that hold true in the economic arena? Should  it be our goal, at least at the moment, to push capitalism to the point  where it is much more considerate in how it treats people? If so, can  this goal only be reached by having the radical alternative of anarchism  in the political sphere and critical theory in the sphere of ideas?

NF:

My official position is agnostic: I am agnostic as to whether the  crisis can be adequately resolved by some very deep and robust  restructuring of capitalism, as opposed to a true no-capitalist  alternative, something that ends capitalism and replaces it with  something else. It’s very hard today to have any absolute clarity about  that. Earlier generations thought they had clarity about it, but it  turned out they were mistaken. So my strategy is to sidestep the  question, at least for the time being. I propose, in other words, to  organise around some fairly radical demands (such as the socialisation  of finance, the restructuring of the relation between economic  production and social reproduction, a global carbon tax, etc.) and then  see whether and to what degree capitalism – in some reformed version –  is capable of meeting them – hence whether and to what degree we must go  beyond it. I propose, in other word, an experimental approach.

But I, too, think that having a radical vision is important – whether  a vision of a restructured capitalist or of a non-capitalist or  socialist alternative. You are right: radical views do have an orienting  and motivating character. They play a major role in sustaining people  throughout the long and difficult process of social transformation.

Still, I have my doubts as to whether anarchism qualifies as a  radical political vision. Of course, it portrays itself as radical; and I  support many of the specific practices it tends to privilege:  especially practices that incorporate elements of direct democracy into  political institutions, such as participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre,  Brazil. But, as I said before, without robust large-scale public  powers, you cannot deal with problems such as global warming. I don’t  see how a complete dissolution of these powers could possible help  anyone except large capitalists and big corporations. Some things  require large-scale coordination, relative centralisation, even the use  of coercion. All of that needs to be democratically organised, made  accountable to those affected, and subject to public scrutiny. I would  be for electing people to be on the boards of central banks and  recalling them the second they do anything that betrays the public  trust. But that still leaves us in the realm of political institutions  and large-scale public powers.

KR:

Let’s briefly turn away from current events to  fundamentals of your intellectual work. You’ve talked about the  importance of having a single space where different kinds of  justice-related claims can come together, but of course there are  theorists who say this is impossible. Some people say, for example, that  women’s rights don’t fit in the arena of human rights, or that they  won’t fully be recognised as such, and so another category has to be  created, like “rights of women”. What makes you more optimistic about  intersecting claims?

NF:

This question makes me think of the Gramscian idea of hegemony and its Habermassian counterpart of the public sphere.  Seen from those perspectives, it not so important whether or not a  given phenomenon is seen as requiring a separate category. What’s more  important is that emancipatory ideas not be confined to separate  enclaved arenas where only those who already believe in them are exposed  to the arguments for them. What’s important is that they be widely  disseminated in the struggle to change hearts and minds across the  board. Democratic – even semi-democratic – change doesn’t happen without  that. Unless you’re prepared (as I am not) to countenance social  transformation by putsch, which is to say, a seizure of power by a few  enlightened souls while most people still believe all the garbage they  believed before, then there’s no alternative to contesting the official  common sense of the time in public spheres.

In the case of women’s rights, it’s not so important to me whether or  not we end up with an official codification of human rights that has a  special category of women’s rights as opposed to other rights. It’s more  important that everybody come to understand the limitations of the way  that human rights have been traditionally understood. That  interpretation privileges rights of private individuals against  tyrannical state power. As a result, it leaves out such quintessential  gender-specific violations as domestic violence, sexual assault, female  genital mutilation, acquaintance rape, systematic rape in warfare, etc.  What’s important, again, is to convince a broad swath of public opinion  that we have to think differently about human rights.

Beyond that, there’s also a need for some critical reflection about  the role that the idea of human rights is playing now. At one level, the  salience of this idea is a great achievement. At another level,  however, it goes along with some serious distortions. One problem is  that human rights are applied selectively, invoked to legitimise the  “military humanism” of (especially) the United States, which is driven  by other interests. Another is their moral and legal character: in  appealing to human rights, we effectively substitute a quasi-juridical  notion for a genuinely political vision of a good society.

KR:

It seems to me looking at your work, and also some of the  claims you’ve made, that you’re very interested in creating a synthesis  between ideas that other people have claimed are oppositional. The most  common example is postmodernism and critical theory. Do you think this  is a philosophical concern you have in and of itself, as a statement  about how things are framed as opposites when they are not, or do you  think it’s a side effect of some other philosophical concern?

NF:

That’s interesting. It stems in part, I think, from my  generational experience as a 1968er. People like me, who came out of the  New Left, inherited a certain kind of Marxism that we found too  restrictive, too orthodox, and we sought to develop alternative Marxisms  that could make visible forms of domination and social suffering which  orthodox paradigms occluded: issues of gender and sexuality; colonialism  and post-colonialism; ecology and political exclusion and  marginalisation. It seemed to me then, and still seems to me now, that  to take in these matters requires not the rejection, but the  reconstruction, of Marxism. What was needed, in my view, was (and is)  synthesis: a synthesis of Marxism, feminism, ecological critique,  postcolonial critique, etc. And I was never intellectually satisfied by  proposals for a simple division of labour: use Marxism to analyse the  economy, use feminism to analyse the family – that so-called  “dual-systems theory” was always wrong, in my view. Economy and family  (production and reproduction) are part and parcel of the same capitalist  social formation; they developed in tandem and can only be understood  jointly, in their mutual imbrication.

Then, too, I have had some more specific experiences of the need for  synthesis. My first intellectual home, so to speak, was Hegelian Marxism  and Frankfurt School critical theory, which I discovered as an  undergraduate philosophy student and intended to pursue in graduate  school. In the mid seventies, however, I kept hearing people talk about  Foucault. I started reading him and was absolutely riveted – such a  great writer, and such brilliance. So here I was again, faced with two  extraordinarily compelling paradigms. It was inconceivable to me that I  should reject one of them in the name of the other – especially since  each seemed to me to have its blind spots as well as its insights. So it  naturally occurred to me to integrate them, to use the insights of one  to correct the blind spots of the other.

I do realise it’s getting repetitive at this point, that I keep doing  this same little dance step, over and over and over again:  “redistribution and recognition, it’s not an either/or, but a both/and!”  I’m aware that I have this intellectual tic. But I’m not willing to  give up paradigms that I find valuable for social critique. I’d rather,  when necessary, reinterpret them, including in ways that go against  their own self-understanding.

A good example is deconstruction. I have no patience for deconstruction understood as a Weltanschauung that  claims to furnish an ethics, a politics, a philosophy, everything you  need. But as a neat little tool for doing ideology critique, it’s  absolutely brilliant. And so I have found ways to integrate it with  other things, including things (like Habermassian thought) to which it  was often seen as allergic. Making unauthorised use of deconstruction, I  have effectively challenged the official version of it.

KR:

Returning to politics, what can the role of universities  and academics be in providing the alternative views that we spoke about  before? As you describe there has to be this other space where people  can produce critiques. We were talking about practical level, but what  can academics do? This question is something that the King’s Review has  been thinking about recently and public engagement is also something we  are trying to do ourselves. In another recent interview with the KR,  Sidney Brenner described how self-absorbed academia has become. The  problem for many scientists in particular is that whole process of  constant publication and peer review. Constant academic pressure does  not leave much time for public engagement. What can be the role of  academics themselves and what can magazines such as N+1, Jacobin or the King’s Review do?

NF:

Well, here’s another example of that famous tic. I believe  that the answer must be “both/and”. Critique needs to find homes of  both sorts: both spaces within academia and spaces outside  of academia. It is important that some of these spaces are  self-financed and not dependent on tenure and peer review. The magazine n+1  is a good example. That “outside” strategy is especially attractive  now, given the increased corporatisation of the University, which  threatens its ability to provide spaces for public critique. But one  should also fight to create or defend critical spaces within the  university, as I suppose you are doing here with the King’s Review.

But again, history matters. In my generation, the humanities and  social sciences were significantly re-made by people coming out of the  New Left who entered the academy and became professors. They created  gender studies, “history from below”, “subaltern studies”, LGBT studies,  black liberation studies, new protocols for reading texts of all kinds  politically. In some cases, these scholars changed established  disciplines, by bringing in perspectives developed through social  struggles occurring outside the University. At that time, the boundaries  between “inside” and “outside” (universities and social movements) were  very permeable; ideas flowed back and forth with relative ease. Later,  however, that changed and the university became more self-absorbed,  disconnected from the surrounding society. Even those areas of study  born out of political ferment became increasingly specialised,  academicised and esoteric.  Of course, there was the odd individual here  and there, heroic figures like Noam Chomsky, and other lesser-known  people. Throughout much of this period, I had the good fortune to teach  at the New School for Social Research, which is a whole institution  dedicated to public engagement. And we struggled to keep alive the  critical tradition during unpropitious times. Fortunately, the situation  seems to be shifting again. It looks to me as though we are entering a  period in which there will again be an easier, more permeable relation  between the “inside” and the “outside.”

KR:

What do you tell your students – the kinds of students who  want to be on the street – do you think they’ll be best served by  trying to get tenure-track jobs, or do you sometimes aspire on their  behalf towards something else?

NF:

I have a broad range of students. Some are clearly highly  gifted and committed researchers, who are likely to become professors.  Others come from abroad intending to return to their home-country in  order to help build a new society there. Some of these want to work in  government – a few actually succeeded to the point of holding cabinet  level ministerial appointments in leftwing Latin American governments  which, truth be told, did not last long. Still others want to work in  public-interest journalism, development, human rights, and so on. So  there’s no advice I can give that would fit them all. In regard to those  students who were active in protests like Occupy, our faculty was quite  supportive. We didn’t penalise people for missing classes. I can  remember semesters myself where I never showed up in a classroom in  1968-69. I have to say that in retrospect I learned more on the street  and occupations than I learned in many of my classes. I experienced deep  ways of thinking that stayed with me. So I think it’s wonderful that  students have those opportunities.

KR:

It was cheaper in your time.

NF:

You’re absolutely right. The sixties were a time of  relative prosperity. None of us in the New Left ever worried “where’s  our next meal going to come from?”. We just took such things for  granted, living as we did in the richest country in the world, before  the oil crisis, before de-industrialisation, and so forth. We were part  of a counterculture that was criticising what we called the “achievement  ethic”, corporate culture and consumerism. We wanted to build a new  society on the basis of “post-materialist values”.

KR:

Sounds far away now, doesn’t it.

NF:

Right! Well, it was, as I say, the Owl of Minerva. The  postwar wave of prosperity was collapsing under our feet but we didn’t  know it. As I said, we thought we could build a post-materialist  society. That turned out to be a naïve (if beautiful) illusion, but it  gave us a great deal of confidence and entitlement. The fact that we  didn’t worry about the kinds of things that students must worry about  today was very freeing and very liberating, even if it soon proved  wrong.