Nancy Fraser: Benjamin Lecture 1 - Gender, Race, and Class through the Lens of Labor https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGXIZVI3PH8 Critical Theory in Berlin
Jul 12, 2022
June 14th – Gender, Race, and Class through the Lens of Labor: A Post-Intersectional Analysis of Capitalist Society
In these dark times, many who remain committed to social justice sense the need to think big. Dissatisfied with single-issue, identity-based campaigns, they seek larger political paradigms that connect the disparate concerns and dispersed struggles of multiple movements. The term “intersectionality,” hugely popular among feminists and anti-racists, is one important marker of this aspiration.
This lecture aims to advance that integrative project. Returning to large-scale social theorizing, I propose an account of capitalist society that discloses the hidden ties between gender, race, and class. These I trace through the lens of labor, broadly conceived. Departing from received understandings, I argue that capitalist society relies on three analytically distinct types of labor. The first and most familiar is exploited labor, performed by free workers in exchange for wages in for-profit enterprises. Often equated with labor as such and, thus, with “the working class,” exploited labor would not be possible, or profitable, absent the two other types: expropriated labor – unpaid or under-paid and coercively extracted from unfree or dependent subjects who are usually racialized; and the externalized labor of care or social reproduction – chronically undervalued, often invisible, and largely performed by women. By theorizing the entwinement in capitalist society of these “three faces of labor,” this lecture suggests a way of thinking gender, race, and class together, within a common frame.
Nancy Fraser: Benjamin Lecture 2 - Labor’s Twisted Histories https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqiVri8rStk
June 15th – Labor’s Twisted Histories: Practical Entanglements and Political Fault Lines
In this lecture, I turn from structure to history, examining laboring human beings, situated in space and time over the span of capitalist development. Periodizing that history, I identify four regimes in which the nexus of exploitation, expropriation and externalization is differently organized: mercantilist, liberal-colonial, state managed (or social-democratic), and neoliberal/financialized. For each phase, I map the historically specific relations among the three faces of labor, asking: Who performs each type of work and where? How sharp are the separations among those type of labors – and among those who perform them? What is the relative weight of each in the capitalist world system?
I look, too, at the forms of social struggle and political subjectivity in each phase. Here I ask: How do those who perform each type of labor identify themselves? Do they think of themselves as “workers”, and are they viewed as such by others? Under what banner, if any, do they engage in collective struggle? How, if at all, does each group relate to the others – with solidarity, antagonism, or indifference? My aim is to weave together in one story two different ideas: first, the inextricability of the three forms of labor in capitalism’s history; and second, the forms of misrecognition that have divided those who perform them.
Nancy Frase: Benjamin Lecture 3 - Class beyond Class https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf6laSf6Eko
June 16th – Class beyond Class: Toward a Counter-Hegemonic Politics
The previous lectures have left us with a political conundrum. On the one hand, the three faces of labor associated with exploitation, expropriation, and externalization are functionally integrated in capitalist society. On the other hand, only the first is (widely) recognized as labor; and only those directly engaged in it have organized politically as “workers”. Put differently, the functional integration of the three faces is not matched by any comparable political integration among the expropriated, the externalized, and the exploited. On the contrary, they appear divided in the classical triad: gender, race, and class.
This lecture examines some political strategies for addressing that conundrum. After assessing the merits of intersectionality and “allyship”, I consider two additional proposals, less widely discussed, but at least as promising: first, a proposal to develop an expanded, inclusive, and differentiated view of “the working class,” which includes the expropriated and the externalized as well as the exploited; and second, the related idea, inspired by W. E. B. Du Bois, of conceiving existing struggles against racial/imperial oppression, on the one hand, and against the undervaluation of carework, on the other, as unrecognized labor struggles. These last proposals invite us to see anti-racism and feminism as labor movements, whose claims deserve a central place in a counter-hegemonic bloc, on a par with those of traditional “workers”. And that in turn means rethinking the triad – by envisioning “class beyond class.”
Nancy Fraser - Against the environmentalism of the rich https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLSxwoNp79w Apr 18, 2021
Around the globe, politics is turning green. But according to political philosopher Nancy Fraser current efforts to fight global warming are insufficient. She suggests it’s time to agree on a common enemy: capitalism.
Climate politics has moved to centre stage. Worldwide, political actors from multiple hues are turning green. A new generation of young activists insists that we take all the necessary steps to save the planet, movements for degrowth are gaining strength, and indigenous communities have been winning wider support for struggles only lately recognised as ecological. But corporate and financial interests have skin in the game as well, as they try to make sure the new common sense remains market-centred and capital-friendly. So even though everyone more or less agrees on the science, they disagree – more than less – on the politics.
According to political philosopher Prof. Nancy Fraser (The New School, NYC), any serious attempt to overcome our current ecological crisis, should start with the dismantlement of capitalism. She will show how the tendency to ecological crisis is inscribed in capitalism’s DNA, and how its destruction of nature is intricately connected to class, gender and racial-imperial domination. What alternatives do we have? What does an anti-capitalist environmentalism entail?