Neoliberal Crisis and Capitalist Emancipation
Fraser’s articulation of social/political aspects of the contemporary neoliberal shift in capitalism seems to be an important intervention in discussions about overcoming crises of class, gender, and race. Alongside Zambrana, Fraser shows that capitalist crises are not external to capitalism, such as in the case of hurricanes or viruses (119). Though these events are external, the crises that follow thereafter are a result of a mode of production that does not strive towards the fulfillment of human needs, but the generation of surplus value by seizing every opportunity including environmental crises to privatize otherwise state-controlled sectors. Fraser questions why these crises are not plainly understood as demanding contestation to capitalism itself. For an answer, Fraser maps the contemporary terrain of action, developing Polanyi’s model (120–121, 127).
Polanyi saw a clear division between corporate free-market interests and a cross-class unity of those who recognized the dangers of a “free” market and sought to control it in some way (120). Such a clear division along economic lines no longer exists or is at least obscured by the contemporary triple movement. This triple movement consists of three groups: the promoters or marketization, social protectionists, and emancipators (129). Fraser characterizes these three groups as politically ambivalent, as each may come to be allied with any of the others (129). The implication here is that this allegiance is possible because the third emancipatory group has not organized economically, but only in terms of politics (120, 127, 129–131). In this sense, this third group has followed in the division of the political and the economic. What makes these three groups’ interests commensurate with one another, then, is that they are all at their foundations sympathetic to capitalism, and when a self-contradictory crisis of capitalism arises, all three will attempt to save it (119–120).
While commonly interested in abstract feminist and anti-racist aims, the third group may align with social protections, adopting a more Keynesian approach to capitalism, and formally codifying the inclusion of women and people of color as protected citizens. Fraser recognizes this as a strategic move that does not overcome the foundations of gender and racial oppression but works to “free” oppressed groups relative to other groups within capitalist exploitation (128, 130–131). On the other hand, this group may ally itself with marketization, as it promotes division and individuation within its own ranks to valorize difference, and is really subsumed by capitalist marketing efforts which further commodify emancipatory struggles as profitable, simultaneously motivating these struggles against a vague authority whose protection is also oppressive (121, 130). While Fraser does laud this rejection of oppressive protection, she also recognizes that this third movement is easily “twisted to other ends” in service of capitalism (128, 131). Here, Fraser has revealed the “emancipation” of this sort of movement as the freedom from responsibility for the means of production, and therefore the freedom to labor for a wage. In what follows, I will follow in Fraser’s use of the term “emancipation,” denoting the complex entanglement of possibilities and limitations of movements that she terms emancipatory.
We can now see that Fraser criticizes contemporary reformist feminist and anti-racist struggles for their inattention to economics and subsequent absorption by capitalism, in spite of their well-intentioned goals of overcoming oppressive protections which do not account for stratification within the working class, as well as realizing individual liberties. Without the economic condition of possibility to realize these goals, emancipatory movements become politically ambivalent, and so also relativist. Here, I appreciate Fraser’s broad framing of the solidarities of emancipatory movements, as this opens space for an expansion of her critique.
The very same strategies adopted by anti-racist emancipatory movements are also adopted by white supremacist movements, and these movements do not have the tools to adjudicate between competing claims except by reference back to the politics (not economics!) of their own standpoint. Both foundationally capitalist, both groups come to function in service of accumulation and are unable to realize their goals. Further, Fraser’s framing implies that the adoption of emancipatory strategies by the right-wing is not the same as the cooptation enacted by neoliberal marketization. Such an emancipatory framework has not been appropriated because it never posed a real challenge to the existing economic structure in the first place; as politically ambivalent, emancipatory struggles that do not organize around both politics and economics have always been an extension of capitalist exploitation in both its antifeminist racist and feminist antiracist manifestations. Nonetheless, such movements do confront capitalism with its own creations, forcing neoliberal capitalism to reveal itself as the creator of crises. Here, I read Fraser alongside Zambrana claiming that such movements, even when unsuccessful, do have the capacity to undo the capitalist foreclosure of the future. For this reason, close attention to the emancipatory movements will be necessary to understand the points of weakness they reveal in neoliberal capitalism.
