Feminism, Ecology, and Capitalism: Nancy Fraser’s Contribution to a Radical Notion of Critique as Disclosure

Valdivielso’s work bears striking resemblances to the arguments about poverty and the common responsibility developed by Pogge (2008).

Fraser has further developed her notion of capitalism as an institutional order as “distinguished from other broad social formations by its specific institutional topography. What characterizes capitalism is a distinctive set of institutional separations: the institutionalized separation of economic production from social reproduction, of human society from non-human nature, and—most relevant here—of the economic from the political. This last division includes the differentiation of economy from polity, of private from public power, of economic from political coercion” (2015, p.162).

Fraser argues, “To show how emancipation extends critique, I propose to look more closely at … feminism and anti-imperialism … Consider first, that the social and political arrangements that are embedded in markets can be oppressive in virtue of being hierarchical. In such cases, they entrench status differentials that deny some who are included in principle as members of society the social preconditions for full participation. The classic example is gender hierarchy, which assigns women a lesser status, often akin to that of a male child, and thereby prevents them from participating fully, on a par with men, in social interaction. But one could also cite caste hierarchies, including those premised on racialist ideologies. In such cases, social protections work to the disadvantage of those at the top of the status hierarchy, affording lesser (if any) benefit at the bottom. What they protect, accordingly, is less society per se than social hierarchy” (2011, p.151).

Arendt argued that accountability for certain actions requires a consciousness about what has been done. If there is shame, then it is appropriate to speak of guilt.

In 1848, Marx and Engels (1964) stated, for example, that “the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of modern industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative state, exclusive political sway” (p. 61). For them this was just a particular case of a general historical fact: “Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another” (p. 95).

Between 1845 and 1846, Marx and Engels (1970) argued that “every class which is struggling for mastery, even when its domination, as is the case with the proletariat, postulates the abolition of the old form of society in its entirety and of domination itself, must first conquer for itself political power in order to represent its interest in turn as the general interest, which immediately it is forced to do” (p. 54).

In response to their “bourgeois” or liberal critics, Marx et al. (1964) argued, “Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into law for all, a will whose essential character and direction are determined by the economical conditions of existence of your class” (p. 87). They considered as a historical fact that “[t]he ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class” (p. 90). Marx and Engels (1970) wrote widely on the link, based on a theory of domination and social classes, between structural or material conditions and ideology.

In fact, the most interesting contribution feminists have made to Habermas’s work was pointing out that his category was static and that, owing to its bourgeois origin, women were excluded (Landes 1988; Fraser 1997, pp. 69–98).

Fraser was also thinking about Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983) and its relation to the nation-state.