Fortunes of Feminism (38 page)

For an
anti-neoliberal anti-étatism
: The crisis of neoliberalism also offers the chance to break the spurious link between our critique of étatism and marketization. Reclaiming the mantel of participatory democracy, feminists might militate now for a new organization of political power, one that subordinates bureaucratic managerialism to citizen empowerment. The point, however, is not to dissipate but to strengthen public power. Thus, the democracy we seek today is one that fosters equal participation, while using politics to tame markets and to steer society in the interest of justice.

For an
anti-neoliberal post-Westphalianism
: Finally, the crisis of neoliberalism offers the chance to resolve, in a productive way, our longstanding ambivalence about the Westphalian frame. Given capital's transnational reach, the public capacities needed today cannot be lodged solely in the territorial state. Here, accordingly, the task is to break the exclusive identification of democracy with the bounded political community. Joining other progressive forces, feminists might militate now for a new, post-Westphalian political order—a multi-scalar order, democratic at every level and dedicated to overcoming injustice in every dimension, along every axis and on every scale.
¹⁹

I am suggesting, then, that this is a moment in which feminists should think big. Having watched the neoliberal onslaught instrumentalize our best ideas, we have an opening now in which to reclaim them. In seizing this moment, we might just bend the arc of the impending great transformation in the direction of justice—and not only with respect to gender.

^*
This chapter originated as a keynote lecture presented at the Cortona Colloquium on “Gender and Citizenship: New and Old Dilemmas, Between Equality and Difference,” Cortona, Italy, November 7–9, 2008. Thanks to the Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Foundation and to the French State, the Île-de-France region, and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, which supported this work through the framework of the Blaise Pascal International Research Chairs. For helpful comments, I thank the Cortona participants, especially Bianca Beccalli, Jane Mansbridge, Ruth Milkman, and Eli Zaretsky, and the participants in an EHESS seminar at the Groupe de sociologie politique et morale, especially Luc Boltanski, Estelle Ferrarese, Sandra Laugier, Patricia Paperman, and Laurent Thévenot.

1
In this essay, I am drawing on, but also updating and complicating, my previous account of these matters in “Mapping the Feminist Imagination: From Redistribution to Recognition to Representation,”
Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory
13:3, September 2005, 295–307; reprinted in Nancy Fraser,
Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World
, New York: Columbia University Press and Polity Press, 2008.

2
For a discussion of this term, see Frederick Pollock, “State Capitalism: Its Possibilities and Limitations,” in
The Essential Frankfurt School Reader
, eds. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, London: Continuum, 1982/95, 71–94.

3
Then, too, economic life in the communist world was notoriously state-organized, and there are those who would still insist on calling it state-organized capitalism. Although there may well be some truth in that view, I will follow the more conventional path of excluding the communist world from this first moment of my story, in part because it was not until after 1989 that second-wave feminism emerged as political force in what were by then ex-communist countries.

4
For a fuller account of the “Westphalian political imaginary” and its effects in truncating the scope of justice, see Chapter 8 of this volume, “Reframing Justice in a Globalizing World.”

5
I borrow the term “resignification” from Judith Butler, “Contingent Foundations,” in Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, and Nancy Fraser,
Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange
, New York: Routledge, 1994.

6
For this shift in the grammar of political claims-making, see Nancy Fraser, “From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a ‘Postsocialist' Age,”
New Left Review
212, July/August 1995, 68–93; reprinted in Nancy Fraser,
Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition
, New York: Routledge, 1997.

7
For a fuller argument, see Fraser, “Mapping the Feminist Imagination.”

8
Hester Eisenstein, “A Dangerous Liaison? Feminism and Corporate Globalization,”
Science and Society
69:3, 2005, 487–518.

9
Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello,
The New Spirit of Capitalism
, trans. Geoffrey Elliott, London: Verso Books, 2005. For an interpretation of psychoanalysis as the spirit of “the second industrial revolution,” which concludes by positing feminism as the spirit of the “third,” see Eli Zaretsky's important essay, “Psychoanalysis and the Spirit of Capitalism,”
Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory
15:3, 2008, 366–81.

10
Nancy Fraser, “Clintonism, Welfare, and the Antisocial Wage: The Emergence of a Neoliberal Political Imaginary,”
Rethinking Marxism
6:1, 1993, 9–23; Nancy Fraser with Kate Bedford, “Social Rights and Gender Justice in the Neoliberal Moment: A Conversation about Gender, Welfare, and Transnational Politics. An Interview with Nancy Fraser,”
Feminist Theory
9:2, 2008, 225–46.

11
Sonia Alvarez, “Advocating Feminism: The Latin American Feminist NGO ‘Boom,'”
International Feminist Journal of Politics
, 1:2, 1999, 181–209; Carol Barton, “Global Women's Movements at a Crossroads: Seeking Definition, New Alliances and Greater Impact,”
Socialism and Democracy
18:1, 2009, 151–84.

12
Uma Narayan, “Informal Sector Work, Micro-credit, and Third World Women's ‘Empowerment': A Critical Perspective,” paper presented at the XXII World Congress of Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy, May 24–29, 2005, Granada, Spain. See also Carol Barton, “Global Women's Movements at a Crossroads,” and Hester Eisenstein, “A Dangerous Liaison? Feminism and Corporate Globalization.”

13
Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink,
Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics
, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998.

14
Carol Barton, “Global Women's Movements at a Crossroads.”

15
This formula of “feminism and its doubles” could be elaborated to good effect with respect to the 2008 US presidential election, where the uncanny doubles included both Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin.

16
I owe this point to Eli Zaretsky (personal communication). Cf. Hester Eisenstein, “A Dangerous Liaison? Feminism and Corporate Globalization.”

17
In some periods, but not always. In many contexts, capitalism is more apt to adapt than to challenge traditional authority. For the embedding of markets, see Karl Polanyi,
The Great Transformation
, 2
^nd
ed., Boston: Beacon, 1944 [2001]. For a feminist critique of Polanyi, see Chapter 10 of this volume, “Between Marketization and Social Protection.”

18
Susan Moller Okin,
Justice, Gender, and the Family
, New York: Basic Books, 138.

19
Fraser,
Scales of Justice
.

10

Between Marketization and Social Protection: Resolving the Feminist Ambivalence

The current crisis of neoliberal capitalism is altering the landscape of feminist theory. During the last two decades, most theorists kept their distance from the sort of large-scale social theorizing associated with Marxism. Apparently accepting the necessity of academic specialization, they settled on one or another branch of disciplinary inquiry, conceived as a freestanding enterprise. Whether the focus was jurisprudence or moral philosophy, democratic theory or cultural criticism, the work proceeded in relative disconnection from fundamental questions of social theory. The critique of capitalist society—pivotal for earlier generations—all but vanished from the agenda of feminist theory. Critique centered on capitalist crisis was pronounced reductive, deterministic, and dépassé.

Today, however, such verities lie in tatters. With the global financial system teetering, worldwide production and employment in freefall, and the looming prospect of a prolonged recession, capitalist crisis supplies the inescapable backdrop for every serious attempt at critical theory. Henceforth, feminist theorists cannot avoid the question of capitalist society. Large-scale social theory, aimed at clarifying the nature and roots of crisis, as well as the prospects for an emancipatory resolution, promises to regain its place in feminist thought.

Yet how exactly should feminist theorists approach these matters? How to overcome the deficits of discredited economistic approaches, which focus exclusively on the “systemic logic” of the capitalist economy? How to develop an expanded, non-economistic understanding of capitalist society, which incorporates the insights of feminism, ecology, multiculturalism, and postcolonialism? How to conceptualize crisis as a
social
process in which economics is mediated by history, culture, geography, politics, ecology, and law? How to comprehend the full range of social struggles in the current conjuncture, and how assess the potential for emancipatory social transformation?

The thought of Karl Polanyi affords a promising starting point for such theorizing. His 1944 classic
The Great Transformation
elaborates an account of capitalist crisis as a multifaceted historical process that began with the industrial revolution in Britain and proceeded, over the course of more than a century, to envelop the entire world, entraining imperial subjection, periodic depressions, and cataclysmic wars.
¹
For Polanyi, moreover, capitalist crisis was less about economic breakdown in the narrow sense than about disintegrated communities, ruptured solidarities, and despoiled nature. Its roots lay less in intra-economic contradictions, such as the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, than in a momentous shift in the place of economy vis-à-vis society. Overturning the heretofore universal relation, in which markets were embedded in social institutions and subject to moral and ethical norms, proponents of the “self-regulating market” sought to build a world in which society, morals, and ethics were subordinated to, indeed modeled on, markets. Conceiving labor, land, and money as “factors of production,” they treated those fundamental bases of social life as if they were ordinary commodities and subjected them to market exchange. The effects of this “fictitious commodification,” as Polanyi called it, were so destructive of habitats, livelihoods, and communities as to spark an ongoing counter-movement for the “protection of society.” The result was a distinctive pattern of social conflict, which he called “the double movement”: a spiraling conflict between free-marketeers, on the one hand, and social protectionists, on the other, which led to political stalemate and, ultimately, to fascism and World War II.

Here, then, is an account of capitalist crisis that transcends the cramped confines of economistic thinking. Masterful, capacious, and encompassing action at multiple scales,
The Great Transformation
weaves together local protest, national politics, international affairs, and global financial regimes in a powerful historical synthesis.

Of special interest to feminists, moreover, is the centrality of social reproduction in Polanyi's account. Granted, he does not himself use that expression. But the disintegration of social bonds is no less pivotal to his view of crisis than is the destruction of economic values—indeed those two manifestations are inextricably intertwined. And capitalist crisis is in large part a
social
crisis, as untrammeled marketization endangers the fund of human capacities available to create and maintain social bonds. Because it foregrounds this social reproductive strand of capitalist crisis, Polanyi's thought resonates with recent feminist work on “social depletion” and the “crisis of care.”
²
His framework is capable, at least in principle, of embracing many feminist concerns.

These points alone would qualify Polanyi as a promising resource for feminists seeking to understand the travails of twenty-first-century capitalist society. But there are other, more specific reasons for turning to him today. The story told in
The Great Transformation
has strong echoes in current developments. Certainly, there is a
prima facie
case for the view that the present crisis has its roots in recent efforts to disencumber markets from the regulatory regimes (both national and international) established in the aftermath of World War II. What we today call “neoliberalism” is nothing but the second coming of the very same nineteenth-century faith in the “self-regulating market” that unleashed the capitalist crisis Polanyi chronicled. Now, as then, attempts to implement that creed are spurring efforts to commodify nature, labor, and money: witness the burgeoning markets in carbon emissions and biotechnology; in child-care, schooling, and the care of the old; and in financial derivatives. Now, as then, the effect is to despoil nature, rupture communities, and destroy livelihoods. Today, moreover, as in Polanyi's time, counter-movements are mobilizing to protect society and nature from the ravages of the market. Now, as then, struggles over nature, social reproduction, and global finance constitute the central nodes and flashpoints of crisis. On its face, then, today's crisis is plausibly viewed as a second great transformation, a “great transformation” redux.

For many reasons, Polanyi's perspective holds considerable promise for theorizing today. Yet feminists should not rush to embrace it uncritically. Even as it overcomes economism,
The Great Transformation
turns out, on closer inspection, to be deeply flawed. Focused single-mindedly on harms emanating from disembedded markets, the book overlooks harms originating elsewhere, in the surrounding “society.” Occulting non-market-based forms of injustice, it also tends to whitewash forms of social protection that are at the same time vehicles of domination. Focused overwhelmingly on struggles against market-based depredations, the book neglects struggles against injustices rooted in “society” and encoded in social protections.

Thus, feminist theorists should not embrace Polanyi's framework in the form in which appears in
The Great Transformation
. What is needed, rather, is a revision of that framework. The goal should be a new, quasi-Polanyian conception of capitalist crisis that not only avoids reductive economism but also avoids romanticizing “society.”

That is my aim in the present chapter. Seeking to develop a critique that comprehends “society” as well as “economy,” I propose to broaden Polanyi's problematic to encompass a third historical project of social struggle that crosscuts his central conflict between marketization and social protection. This third project, which I shall call “emancipation,” aims to overcome forms of subjection rooted in “society.” Central to both iterations of the great transformation, the one analyzed by Polanyi and the one we are living through now, struggles for emancipation constitute the missing third that mediates every conflict between marketization and social protection. The effect of introducing this missing third will be to transform the double movement into a
triple movement
, encompassing marketization, social protection, and emancipation.

The triple movement will form the core of a new, quasi-Polanyian perspective that can clarify the stakes for feminists in the present capitalist crisis. After elaborating this new perspective in sections one through four of this chapter, I will use it in sections five through seven to analyze the
ambivalence
of feminist politics.

1. POLANYI'S KEY CONCEPTS: DISEMBEDDED MARKETS,

SOCIAL PROTECTION, AND THE DOUBLE MOVEMENT

I begin by recalling Polanyi's distinction between embedded and disembedded markets. Integral to
The Great Transformation
, this distinction carries strong evaluative connotations, which need to be subject to feminist scrutiny.

Famously, Polanyi distinguished two different relations in which markets can stand to society. On the one hand, markets can be “embedded,” enmeshed in non-economic institutions and subject to non-economic norms, such as “the just price” and “the fair wage.” On the other hand, markets can be “disembedded,” freed from extra-economic controls and governed immanently, by supply and demand. The first possibility, claims Polanyi, represents the historical norm; throughout most of history, in otherwise disparate civilizations and in widely separated locales, markets have been subject to non-economic controls, which limit what can be bought and sold, by whom, and on what terms. The second possibility is historically anomalous; a nineteenth-century British invention, the “self-regulating market” was an utterly novel idea whose deployment, Polanyi contends, threatens the very fabric of human society.

For Polanyi, markets can never in fact be fully disembedded from the larger society. The attempt to make them so must inexorably fail. For one thing, markets can function properly only against a non-economic background of cultural understandings and solidary relations; attempts to disembed them destroy that background. For another, the attempt to establish “self-regulating markets” proves destructive of the fabric of society, provoking widespread demands for their social regulation. Far from enhancing social cooperation, then, the project of disembedding markets inevitably triggers social crisis.

It is in these terms that
The Great Transformation
recounts a capitalist crisis that stretched from the industrial revolution to World War II. For Polanyi, moreover, the crisis encompassed not only the efforts of commercial interests to disembed markets, but also the combined counter-efforts of rural landowners, urban workers, and other strata to defend “society” against “economy.” For Polanyi, finally, it was the sharpening struggle between these two camps, the marketizers and the protectionists, that lent the distinctive shape of a “double movement” to the crisis. If the first prong of that movement took us from a mercantilist phase, in which markets were socially and politically embedded, to a laisser-faire phase, in which they became (relatively) disembedded, the second prong should carry us, so Polanyi hoped, to a new phase, in which markets would be re-embedded in democratic welfare states. The effect would be to return the economy to its proper place in society.

In general, then, the distinction between embedded and disembedded markets is integral to all of Polanyi's central concepts, including society, protection, crisis, and the double movement. Equally important, the distinction is strongly evaluative. Embedded markets are associated with social protection, figured as shelter from the harsh elements. Disembedded markets are associated with exposure, with being left to swim naked in “the icy waters of egotistical calculation.”
³
These inflections—embedded markets are good, disembedded markets bad—carry over to the double movement. The first, exposing movement, signifies danger; the second, protective movement, connotes safe haven.

What should feminists make of these ideas? On its face, the distinction between embedded and disembedded markets has much to offer to feminist theorizing. For one thing, it points beyond economism, to an expansive understanding of capitalist crisis as a multifaceted historical process, as much social, political, and ecological as economic. For another, it points beyond functionalism, grasping crisis, not as an objective “system breakdown,” but as an
intersubjective
process that includes the responses of social actors to perceived shifts in their situation and to one another. Then, too, Polanyi's distinction makes possible a crisis critique that does not reject markets as such, but only the dangerous, disembedded, variety. Consequently, the concept of an embedded market affords the prospect of a progressive alternative both to the wanton disembedding promoted by neoliberals and to the wholesale suppression of markets traditionally favored by communists.

Nevertheless, the evaluative subtext of Polanyi's categories is problematic. On the one hand, his account of embedded markets and social protections is far too rosy. Romanticizing “society,” it occults the fact that the communities in which markets have historically been embedded have also been the locus of domination. Conversely, Polanyi's account of disembedding is far too dark. Having idealized society, it occludes the fact that, whatever their other effects, processes that disembed markets from oppressive protections contain an emancipatory moment.

Thus, present-day feminist theorists must revise this framework. Avoiding both wholesale condemnation of disembedding and wholesale approbation of (re-)embedding, we must open
both
prongs of the double movement to critical scrutiny. Exposing the normative deficits of “society,” as well as those of “economy,” we must validate struggles against domination
wherever
it roots.

To this end, I propose to draw on a resource not utilized by Polanyi, namely, the insights of feminist movements. Unmasking power asymmetries occluded by him, these movements exposed the predatory underside of the embedded markets he tended to idealize. Protesting protections that were also oppressions, they raised claims for emancipation. Exploiting their insights, and drawing on the benefits of hindsight, I propose to rethink the double movement in relation to feminist struggles for
emancipation
.