December 9, 2011

I’d like to thank Nancy Fraser for sharing with us this provocative paper and for taking the time to join us today. I’m going to keep my comments brief, to allow for maximum time for discussion; I’ll start with commenting on a few of the contributions I see Professor Fraser making in her paper, and then follow up by raising some possible questions for discussion.

First – and I don’t actually need to summarize the argument of the paper because it was so lucidly laid out, but I’ll do this very quickly– one of Fraser’s main contributions here is to revisit the contribution of Karl Polanyi in his groundbreaking, but perhaps now little read work The Great Transformation (1944). Fraser observes that our crisis-ridden, neoliberal moment can be seen as a further, intensified stage of the 19th C’s profound shift to market rationality, that is, “a second great transformation” (5). As Fraser demonstrates, Polanyi’s great strength as an historian of this earlier shift is precisely his conjoined analyses of the effect of free-marketization on multiple spheres at once – that of social reproduction or labor, the ecological dimension or land, and financial systems, or money. While retrieving the potency of Polanyi’s broad and descriptive approach, Fraser also acutely points out the “blind spots” in his analysis, and where we must go beyond his positing of labor, land and money as simple, ontologically-a-priori objects that are outside the market. Fraser thus develops the critique from Polanyi’s category of “ficitious commodities” to what she terms a “structural interpretation”, concerning the sustainability of the socio-cultural processes that capitalism needs, of an environment that must continue to support production and consumption, and a money system that can store and transfer value. That is, she leads us to understanding of why society cannot be commodities all the way down, by laying out “the tendency of markets to destroy their own conditions of possibility” (11).

What the paper does carefully and thoughtfully, therefore, is to link the different spheres of current crises together under the fundamental question of capitalism’s own conditions of possibility. In this sense, I take one of Fraser’s primary interventions here as a disciplinary one – the call for us to take on “large scale social theorizing”, to ask us to think more capaciously about the interrelated processes and tendencies of the system; and in short, to return us to that now unpopular category of totality in order for us to grasp the system’s shortcomings in different domains as intimately related and not merely parallel.

The other welcome contribution of Fraser’s papers is to return us to a fresh thinking of emancipation. While we often hear the social good measured in terms of security, prosperity, employment, GDP, healthy finance markets, and even sustainability, I would argue that the concept of emancipation is one that has lost political currency today, at least in the global North. Her astute analysis of Polanyi shows us that because of his ontological presuppositions about “fictitious commodities”, he could only think of resistance to commodification in terms of the binary back and forth between destructive marketization and social protection or the maintenance of older communal lifeforms. By adding emancipation—those complex drives against traditional social relations of domination by women, slaves, and racial others— Fraser allows us to recognize the “triple movement” that is always at stake. Fraser thus pushes us to think through the contested nature of our own great transformation in terms beyond either more marketization or less marketization, and, the implication being, of more or less state-protection. As she notes, Marx indeed recognized the emancipatory effects of bourgeouis society; we need only recall his famous description in the Communist Manifesto of peasants trapped in the “idiocy of rural life”.

1. Moving now to my questions for discussion, my first question is precisely on this concept of emancipation and how we might understand it in relation to our moment of crisis. Fraser describes “wage labor everywhere [as being] in crisis” (15), where two-thirds of the world’s population are excluded from official labor markets, while reproductive or affective labor in the wealthy countries is becoming “outsourced” to immigrant women from poorer countries. The question here is the, admittedly very large one, of what an emancipatory version of wage labor might look like? How do we reckon the emancipatory against the dominating factors? How is it that, say, a Filipina domestic worker employed as an exploited Aya for a Singaporean or Middle Eastern family, may perceive this work as an advance from a position of underemployment in her home country? Moreover, how do we reconcile the differing positions of states—where some countries, such as the Philippines, rely enormously on remittances from such exploited overseas domestic workers, such that the emancipatory or non-emancipatory effects of wage labor can be almost impossible to untangle? Is the crisis of wage labor that there isn’t enough of it, or too much of it? Or do we want something else altogether?

In my graduate class this week I was teaching Ray Chow’s The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism, her iconoclastic reading of Weber, Foucault and current paradigms of ethnicity, and I was struck by her re-reading of Lukacs’ History and Class Consciousness. In her reading, she sees Lukacs’s understanding of the historical role of the proletariat to free themselves and all classes from reification as reliant on a prior investment in an idea of the un-commodified soul or self, that lies ontologically outsides the depredations of economic life (in this sense it actually reminds us of Polanyi’s assumptions re fictitious commodities). Chow identifies this as a “modernist captivity narrative” that, like Foucault’s repressive hypothesis in the History of Sexuality, actually creates the idea of an unrepressed substrate of subjective through its very discourse. So the question this helps me articulate with relation to Fraser’s paper, is, from where—or from what political or ethical basis—can we think the notion of emancipation? I’m thinking here of the way the notion of freedom can be taken up, through discourses of non-domination by the West, to legitimate China’s national development which, with its intense semi-proletarianization of its peasant workforce is one of the starkest examples of the destruction of social fabrics and environmental depredations today (reminded of the Asian values debate, the controversies of the question of human rights, whether there are Asian human rights that differ etc)

2. A related question here, in regard to the “triple movement” that must include emancipation along with marketization and social protection, is about what role does or should the state play? In our moment of thorough globalization, is the state the most useful instrument for social protection? Is it an arbiter between the market and society in a neo-Keynsian sense, or more problematically, in a communitarian sense? Or is it simply too beholden to global capital and the drive for profitable investment markets to do either of these? And what are the important differences and possibilities of different states, dictated by unequal international relations, which Fraser rightly points to toward the end of her paper?

3. My third question returns to the topic of the conditions of possibility of the capitalist market. Through a Marxist lens, these conditions would have to include primitive accumulation—the theft of lands, enclosures and the creation of a surplus labor force that can be proletarianized—as well as raced, gendered and territorial distinctions that produce unequal exchanges of value. My question is whether it is still these, or other conditions of possibility that the capitalist market today needs? On what basis do we believe that some spheres of life (for e.g., education, or endangered species) should remain outside market forces? Or, do we need some spheres to function somewhat autonomously simply to sustain capitalism?

4. Finally, an obvious question I have is to ask Professor Fraser to elaborate on the intriguing 4th point in her conclusions, which I think brings up the question of cultural value, or moral economies—also not very popular terms today. She concludes the paper by stating that

a critical theory of contemporary crisis needs a complex normative perspective that integrates the leading values of each pole of the triple movement. Such a perspective should integrate the legitimate interests in solidarity and social security that motivate social protectionists with the fundamental interest in non-domination that is paramount for emancipation movements, without neglecting the valid concern for negative liberty that inspires free-market liberals.

Again, this is a big question, but I wonder what models—cultural, moral or otherwise—for a system of value are available that might lead us to such a “normative perspective”?

—Jini Kim Watson, NYU (jkw1@nyu.edu)