TIME TO THINK BIG, ONCE AGAIN

Interview with Professor Nancy Fraser, Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor of Political and Social Science at the New School for Social Research in New York

Nancy Fraser, Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor of Political and Social Science at the New School for Social Research in New York, gave her key note speech 'Crisis of Capitalism, Crisis of Governance: Re-reading Karl Polanyi in the 21st Century' at the University of Warwick's Critical Governance Conference. Her novel project looks to reconstruct Polanyi's theory about the origins of capitalist crises in order to better diagnose the problems our economies are facing today.

Some might argue that a crisis as catastrophic as the 2008 financial meltdown should have resulted in a resurgence of anti-capitalist movements. The supreme failure of banks to self-regulate calls into question the neoliberal ideal of unencumbered markets and provides evidence for the need for more regulation. Regulation which should, some argue, be structured and orientated towards protecting the moral good of social solidarity.

There has been much discussion over why this opposition has remained muted. Perhaps it should come as no surprise - the crisis was in part caused by the creation of monetary products that few people understood. The whole recovery effort is similarly mysterious to most of us without a PhD in economics. One aspect of the crisis is that it impacts on us all at an individual level. Job security, pension plans and welfare benefits are now vulnerable to more frequent fluctuations. At such times what we want most is answers and reassurance.

...the whole recovery effort is similarly mysterious to most of us without a PhD in economics.

One solution - slash public spending to eradicate our debt - has provided the answer for many. Its strength is in its simplicity: the economy-as-a-balance-sheet is an idea we can get our head around. Not being able to afford something is an experience most of us are familiar with. Yet we have to question whether this simplicity is actually a fundamental weakness - is it really that straightforward? Our economy is deeply integrated into our society. It is also intertwined with other economies; we live in an increasingly globalised world. Can we really believe that after five years of belt tightening our problems will be solved? It might be a bit more complicated than that.

There are opposing voices. People have protested against the cuts while marketeers looked on with varying degrees of scorn, pushing the point that regulation will only cause bankers to emigrate. The mainstream media diligently reports the ‘for and against’ and pits the two sides against each other, not managing to open up discussion of imaginative resolutions. For some critical thinkers this meltdown has inspired a return to theorising on a big scale. Professor Nancy Fraser is one of those thinkers. She recently delivered her keynote speech at the University of Warwick’s Critical Governance Conference, where she re-examined the work of Karl Polanyi, author of The Great Transformation.

In his 1944 classic work, Polanyi argued that whenever you try to deregulate markets there is an inevitable push back from society fighting for its own protection. He described this as the ‘double movement’. For him, the rise of the market economy was the catalyst for fascism and war in the 1930-40s. He used this idea of the ‘double movement’ to argue against self-regulating economic institutions. He thought that this arrangement was inefficient and crisis-inducing exactly because of the inevitable uprising - the fight back. Furthermore, he said there were three prerequisites for markets to be able to function: our ecology, our social solidarity and money. Trying to commodify these three things is self-undermining as without all three intact, production and exchange quickly becomes impossible.

You could interpret the current crisis as history repeating itself: we have made the same mistakes and are now faced with the Great Recession, instead of the Great Depression.

It is easy to see why Nancy Fraser chose this work as her starting point. The 2008 crisis, as previously mentioned, was partly caused by creating new commodities out of money - making products out of our means of exchange. Even before 2008 we were facing the ecological crisis of global warming, but carbon credit schemes failed to use the market to reduce emissions as they did not inspire any structural change to an economy reliant upon fossil fuel consumption. Capitalism has become not just an economic system but a form of life and the 2008 crisis stretched out way beyond our financial institutions. You could interpret the current crisis as history repeating itself: we have made the same mistakes and are now faced with the Great Recession, instead of the Great Depression.

So what is the solution? Nancy specifically chooses a non-Marxian starting point to her theorising. In her view, Polanyi’s more holistic view of capitalism as a form of life reintroduces the role of the political actor into the struggle for change. It is not up to the working class, as the universal class, to author the solution. She prefers the project of embedding the markets within social institutions - those that are orientated around moral goals of social protection and emancipation - rather than engaging with the movement to abolish them completely.

At the same time, she does not sign up wholesale to Polayni’s solution. In his ‘double movement’ set up Nancy believes he takes an innocent view of the ‘protective’ institutions that he considers to be society’s saviour. Nancy complicates this framework by introducing a third category. The additional category is emancipation and encapsulates the efforts of various social movements that have fought for an end to domination whether that be for women, for civil rights or for decolonisation. She argues that institutions for social protection have often previously been vehicles for oppression. Family law might have provided social protection but it also maintained hierarchies. Imperialism protected the West at the expense of the citizens of former colonies. The unforeseen consequence on this focus on opposing non-ideal institutional arrangements, according to Prof Fraser, is that it inadvertently allowed capitalism to thrive. Nancy Fraser develops this argument in detail in a recent article where she demonstrates how ‘feminism’s charisma’ was appropriated from the women’s movements’ efforts to serve neoliberal ends.

The solution, then, is to really explore this ideal of the triple movement. At the three poles there stands the liberal value of negative liberty, social regeneration and the freedom of non-domination. Each of these Prof Fraser considers to be real values and none of us would want to give up any one. She offers up this framework to people fighting for a more just world as a way of orientation, allowing them to ask themselves if they have got all three values in balance. Only those that have, in her view, are on the right track. If the triple movement idea validates certain social struggles, it can also be used to condemn those that are calling for injustice. The Tea Party in America, for example, should be understood as a movement fighting for negative liberty above all else. It is a distorted movement that can only result in a conflicted society.

Triple movements, necessarily, have to transform our institutions in order to ensure that the three vital goals are pursued in unison. This is a very complicated and difficult task, not least because of resistance to change within the institutions themselves, but also because of a lack of ideas for what we would replace them with. Nancy challenges theorists to think big once again.

The task at hand is hugely complicated. What should our institutions look like? How can we possibly secure international justice in a world dealing with so many conflicting interests? Is this complexity a weakness or is it strength? I see it as the latter. It seems reasonable to expect that the problems of global justice are going to be this difficult.

Amy McLeod, Deputy Editor of the Knowledge Centre, recently interviewed Nancy Fraser. You can watch the video below.

Professor Nancy Fraser is Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor of Political and Social Science and Department at the New School in New York. Professor Fraser is noted for her keynote speeches surrounding Critical Theory, details of her publications and other work can be found on the New School website. Her concentrations at the New School focus on Social and political theory; feminist theory and contemporary French and German thought.

By Amy McLeod