Abstract
The relation between different forms of oppressive structures has been an object of dispute throughout the history of feminism. One of the most influential debates devoted to this issue is the one between Judith Butler and Nancy Fraser during the 1990s. Although the debate attracted a great deal of attention, and both thinkers have subsequently developed their theories by introducing novel concepts to describe oppression as well as the conditions of contemporary emancipatory movements, they have not continued to engage in each other's work. This article offers a critical reading of the positions that Fraser and Butler took in the 1990s debate, as well as an identification of shifts in their thinking ensuing from the debate. A particular interest of the article is their conceptualisations of the grounds for political alliances among groups with distinct experiences of oppression. The article not only offers a critique of both Butler's and Fraser's positions in the 1990s debate but also argues that the way in which Fraser's trajectory has come to directly address the issue of the capitalist social order, and which can also be read as an implicit self-critique, is more satisfactory than Butler's later work on precarity.
Introduction
In the last couple of years, we have witnessed the emergence of feminist anti-capitalist mobilisations around the globe, expressed through protests and strikes gathering huge masses of people under banners such as ‘Ni una menos’, ‘Black Monday’, and ‘Feminism for the 99%’. Many of these movements are characterised by a challenge of the liberal notion of feminism, focused on the right to representation. As the authors of Feminism for the 99% state: ‘Inadequate healthcare, border policing, climate change – these are not what you ordinarily hear feminists talking about. But aren’t they the biggest issues for the vast majority around the globe? (Fraser et al., 2018a)’. Furthermore, whereas feminism is traditionally centred around women as a collective, contemporary movements encompass a diverse array of individuals and address experiences and challenges faced by various marginalised groups within the broader framework of feminism.
The revival of a broad anti-capitalist feminist movement comes as a relief to many, after decades of neoliberal feminist hegemony (Oksala, 2011; Rottenberg, 2014). However, this sense of relief is not only related to the fact that anti-capitalist feminist movements are getting stronger and have managed to destabilise the hegemony of neoliberal feminism. It is also to be understood in the wake of the rise of conservative and anti-feminist movements globally. While feminist movements tend to be depicted as torn apart by internal conflicts, the anti-feminist movement appears to be globally united and often successful in its political endeavours (Kuhar and Paternotte, 2017). Perhaps the strength and apparent unity of the enemy has called for feminists to unite to intervene in worrisome political developments. If our enemies manage to unite, we need to as well.
However, as intersectional feminists have aptly observed, rallying around the construct ‘woman’ often results in the erasure of significant differences among women (Crenshaw, 1995). As a result, there has been a tendency for feminism to offer remedies tailored to specific groups of women, while neglecting the nuanced contextual complexities that shape women's experiences and lives (Khader, 2019; Mohanty, 2003). Considering this critique and the conceptual and empirical broadening of feminism, the surge of feminist movements is only possible through the work of political alliances between groups with different experiences and somewhat shifting agendas. But on what grounds are these alliances to be built, if not on a common identity as women? And which foundations might be more stable than others? For an alliance to take form, some common goals need to be identified, and shared political strategies to achieve these goals must be chosen. Such work, in turn, calls for an analysis of how various forms of oppression are to be conceptualised and what points of communality are identifiable (Jaffe, 2020: 12).
The relation between different forms of oppressive structures has been an object of dispute throughout the history of feminism and still is. In addition to being a theoretical debate on whether various forms of oppression should be understood as distinct or interrelated, it also serves as a basis for elaborations of the goals and tools of various political struggles. Renowned feminist thinkers such as bell hooks (1984), Mohanty (2003), Mouffe (2005, 2019), Fraser (1998, 2000, 2005, 2008, 2014, 2019), Butler (1997, 2004, 2005, 2009, 2015, 2020), and Benhabib (1997) have all dedicated much of their work to analysing, conceptualising and finding possible solutions to political tensions that might arise when oppressed groups try to come together and create political alliances.
One of the most influential debates on this issue is the one between Butler and Fraser on status and class during the 1990s. Even though the debate received a great deal of attention, and although both Butler and Fraser are still engaged in questions on the conditions for contemporary emancipatory politics, they did not continue their discussion. That is, since the debate, both theorists have developed their work considerably by introducing new concepts to describe the possibilities and pitfalls of contemporary emancipatory political movements but have done so without actively relating to or debating each other's work. Moreover, despite the pivotal role that both scholars occupy in contemporary political theory, it is surprising to find a dearth of literature that explicitly compares their later theoretical work. This gap in scholarship is particularly noteworthy considering the substantial attention that both scholars devote in their recent writings to the examination of how to envisage political alliances within neoliberal capitalism and the impact that both have had on contemporary feminist movements.
This article aims to fill that gap through a critical comparison of the ways in which Fraser and Butler have advanced, qualified, and shifted their arguments on political alliances as compared with those they defended in the 1990s debate. To clarify, this article does not aim to undertake a comparison of their entire bodies of work. Instead, the focus is on specific texts where the central themes revolve around political movements, their goals, and their strategies. In the first part, the focus will be on their debate in New Left Review, partly in dialogue with previous comments on this debate. In the second part, I will mainly focus on Butler's work on vulnerability and precarity – particularly Precarious Life (2004), Giving an Account of Oneself (2005), and Frames of War (2009) – and Fraser's work on contemporary feminism and neoliberal capitalism, such as Fortunes of Feminism (2013), Capitalism: A conversation (2018), and Feminism for the 99% (2018a).
By identifying limitations in their earlier works and evaluating the evolution of their thinking in response to our current political landscape, this article should be viewed as a commentary that situates itself within a broader contemporary feminist theoretical and political discourse. In other words, the article aims to contribute to the ongoing discussions on contemporary political alliances and establish its own standpoint within the larger dialogue.
In line with Fraser's position in that debate, this article holds that Butler's insistence on not separating economy and culture ended up confusingly close to a reductionist Marxist position. However, while Butler tended to give capitalism too much attention and impact in the 1990s debate, Fraser actually – according to my reading – understated how status politics might be undermined within capitalism. Thus, she was overly optimistic about the possibilities of engaging successfully in struggles for status beyond the limiting conditions of capitalism.
In consideration of the arguments defended by Butler and Fraser in the 1990s, the article proceeds by identifying important shifts in both Butler's and Fraser's theorisation of the problem of alliances within social movements, assessing their theoretical and political potentials and limits. I argue that Fraser's foregrounding of the capitalist social order in later works is more satisfactory than Butler's work on precarity as a potential basis for alliances. While Fraser offers a framework for political alliances based on the sharing of mutual political conditions, Butler's later position is – I contend – too vague and detached from a concrete political analysis to be useful for contemporary political alliances of a transformative character. While Butler stays at a symptomatic level, looking at the effects of oppression rather than the roots of it, Fraser presents a more structuralist approach, which – in my view – offers tools to understand why various groups are oppressed and how we, based on this understanding, can resist this oppression by forming political anti-capitalist alliances.
The Butler–Fraser debate
When political movements and unequal conditions in late modern society are discussed, appeals to the Weberian distinction between status (cultural subjugation) and class (economically based subjugation) are often made (Weber, 1986 [1922]). Some of the central themes of the relationship between class and status are particularly visible in the exchange between Fraser and Butler. Fraser describes her own work on the relation between class and status as part of a project to develop ‘a critical theory of recognition, one which identifies and defends only those versions of the cultural politics of difference that can be coherently combined with the social politics of equality’ (1995: 69). Although possible to combine, strategies of recognition and redistribution can – according to her – end up in conflict (1995: 74). The potential conflict depends on the fact that while struggles for recognition demand acknowledgement, which ends up stabilising an identity or a specific group setting, struggles for redistribution are about abolishing the ‘class structure as such’ (1995: 76).
Problems may arise when confronted with collectives that are not easily defined as being victims either of a lack of cultural recognition or of economic maldistribution since these groups need both recognition and redistribution or as Fraser puts it: Bivalent collectivities, in sum, may suffer both socioeconomic maldistribution and cultural misrecognition in forms where neither of these injustices is an indirect effect of the other, but where both are primary and co-original. In that case, neither redistributive remedies alone nor recognition remedies alone will suffice. Bivalent collectivities need both. (1995: 78)
Fraser's way of conceptualising the relationship between recognition and redistribution has been criticised from various standpoints. Linda Martín Alcoff argues that Fraser's politics of redistribution needs identity politics and that Fraser's distinction between recognition and redistribution ‘obscures more than it clarify’ (2007: 256). In line with Alcoff, Iris Marion Young criticises Fraser's distinction between economy and culture, arguing that while the ‘essays call our attention to an important issue’, Fraser ‘exaggerates the degree to which a politics of recognition retreats from economic struggles’ (1997: 147–148) . Anne Phillips (1997) finds the distinction illuminating but argues that Fraser – contrary to her own claims – prioritises the economic before the cultural. However, among all the critics of Fraser, Butler is the most prominent.
Butler's critique is not based on a simple defence or embrace of a politics of recognition. As Kristina Lepold points out, Butler's conceptualisation of recognition should rather be understood as an ideology critique since to Butler, recognition is ‘undeniably ethically significant to those who receive it, [and that] recognition can simultaneously serve social functions behind the backs of the participants in relations of recognition and may be implicated in the reproduction of problematic social orders’ (2018: 475). As is well known, Butler's main critique of Fraser is targeted at the distinction that Fraser makes between material and cultural injustices (or what Fraser herself describes as culturally and economically based injustices). In opposition to Fraser, Butler questions if this distinction is possible to maintain. She points to the fact that, in addition to being subjected to cultural harm, culturally marginalised groups often suffer materially, making full participation in society difficult: [I]s it impossible to distinguish, even analytically, between a lack of cultural recognition and material oppression, when the very definition of legal ‘personhood’ is rigorously circumscribed by cultural norms that are indissociable from their material effects (Butler, 1997: 41)?
Butler also questions Fraser's conceptualisation of the injustices that, for example, homosexuals as a group are victims of as cultural, arguing – based on Friedrich Engels's analysis – that capitalism needs heterosexuality to reproduce itself (Engels, 1972 [1884]). According to Butler, capitalism partly functions through the continuous production and reproduction of labour power carried out by the heterosexual nuclear family, presupposing heterosexuality as a norm (1997: 42). In Fraser's response, she maintains the importance of making a distinction between status and class. While status-related injustices may imply economic effects, they are not indispensable for the survival of capitalism. Moreover, the preservation of class-related injustices is crucial to the functioning of capitalism. According to Fraser, the analytical separation of culture from economy does not mean that cultural subordination is less severe than economic subordination. Instead, this separation points out the possibility for improved life conditions within the prevailing order for groups in need of recognition, since they do not have to overturn the entire economic structure (1998: 144).
In my view, Fraser convincingly demonstrates how Butler – by not accepting a distinction between class and status – adheres to a strict Marxist logic which Butler started out accusing Fraser of representing. In Butler's position, queer struggles are mainly legitimated by being proven to be anti-capitalist to their core, as anti-capitalist struggles are seen to be the only social struggles worth defending. However, while I agree with Fraser in her critique of Butler, Fraser's position in the 1990s debate also raises some issues. Although the debate between Butler and Fraser largely came to focus on the political logic of capitalist oppression, Fraser was not mainly invested in discussing which forms of oppression are fundamental to capitalism and which are not. Central instead was how different movements can make political demands and advance their cause within a capitalist framework.
The advantage of introducing the concepts of affirmation and transformation was, Fraser contended, that cultural and economic struggles no longer must be conceptualised as being in inherent strategic conflict with each other, as cultural intervention according to the distinction between affirmation and transformation is no longer obviously linked to recognition, and economic intervention is no longer associated with the dissolution of identity. Instead, these are different strategical paths, through which culturally and economically oriented political movements can unite and enter alliance by choosing either a transformative or an affirmative logic of struggle. As Christopher Zurn asserts, Fraser's argument concerning bivalent groups (victims under more than one oppressive structure) and their political dilemmas is based on an ‘embrace of a deconstructive approach to identity’ (2003b: 535), according to which identity itself is seen as a problem. Fraser herself also describes her theoretical endeavour as a promotion of a ‘non-identarian politics of recognition, one that avoids reifying collective identities and synergizes with an egalitarian politics of redistribution’ (Fraser and Naples, 2014: 113; see also Fraser, 2000: 120).
To Fraser, the positive affirmation of identity is in strategic conflict with the negative deconstruction of class. However, for culturally constructed groups that are not bivalent in character, this potential conflict is not a problem: ‘Change the recognition relations and the unequal distribution would disappear’, as Fraser notes (1997: 144). Through this distinction between bivalent and non-bivalent groups, Fraser describes non-bivalent groups, whose subjugation is based on cultural oppression, as not needing economic struggle. Instead, they can, in many ways, thrive within the dominant order. But is this really the case?
In lieu of criticising Fraser's distinction between class and status/recognition and redistribution – as others have already done (Alcoff, 2007; Butler, 1997; Young, 1997) – I would rather argue that the main liability of her earlier work is that the shortcomings of a pure politics of recognition are not thoroughly discussed in her deliberations on the recognition/redistribution-dilemma. It is certainly true, as Phillips points out, that a cultural struggle can be ‘a way of transforming the political agenda so as to enable economic change’ (1997: 151). Yet, many of the struggles won within the logic of a politics of recognition are limited in a system based on unequal economic conditions, which in my view is not sufficiently acknowledged by early Fraser. As an example: although there is nothing inherent in capitalism that prohibits the recognition and cultural affirmation of trans people, the privatisation of health care will economically circumscribe their access to transition. Although there is nothing inherent in capitalism that calls for homophobia, pink-washing can easily be exchanged for homophobic politics if this enhances profit. In other words, what we are dealing with here are deeply unstable alliances. Instead of acknowledging this dependency and vulnerability, Fraser instead points out how it is ‘good news’ for certain groups that their oppression is not based on the economy, since this gives them the possibility to improve their situation without overthrowing capitalism as such (1995).
While Fraser, when studying capitalism as an abstract form, might be correct, I argue that she fails to acknowledge how it – in its contemporary form – does hinder cultural struggles severely. In her later work, which I read as an implicit critique of this earlier position, the ways in which capitalism limits cultural struggles are at the centre of the argument and become an important point in relation to questions of political alliances. However, Fraser herself neither acknowledges this shift nor addresses the weaknesses in her previous position.
In sum, although it might seem somewhat counterintuitive since Fraser is commonly read as defending the Marxist line while Butler is seen as defending cultural politics, the crux – in my reading – with Fraser in the 1990s debate is her giving unequal economic conditions and their effect on cultural struggles insufficient attention while Butler is overly keen to relate various forms of oppression to the capitalist order. In the following section of this article, I will identify important shifts in the work of Fraser and Butler and relate their more recent projects to each other. I will argue that Fraser in her later work manages to articulate a more refined understanding of the relation between class and status than in her earlier work, without blurring the initial distinction between the two altogether. In this formulation, capitalism becomes more prominent. Butler's later work, on the other hand, is characterised by an emphasis on precarity as a site of political alliances and, I contend, suffers from a neglect to provide clear definitions and a lack of discussion as to the relation between different oppressive structures that create what Butler designates as political precarity. The result is a theory on alliances that downplays differences between various forms of oppression as well as fails to acknowledge the social totality in which these differences take shape and – by extension – does not supply any analytical tools to address how to formulate a shared political project.
Alliances against capitalism or precarity?
Commonly, the shift from a two-dimensional model of injustice to a three-dimensional one – by which the concepts of redistribution (economic equality) and recognition (cultural equality) are complemented with a third axis, namely, representation (political equality) – is seen as the most significant shift in the work of Fraser. However, of interest to this article is another shift in Fraser's work: namely her increased interest in capitalism as such and how this turn affects her way of discussing political alliances. According to Fraser herself, rather than being a radical shift, it is more plausible to talk of a change of emphasis, although one of great importance. Whereas capitalism has always been the master frame for her theoretical deliberations, it has now – she states – been granted the status of an ‘explicit foreground’ (Fraser and Jaeggi, 2018: 9, 11). When defining capitalism, Fraser underlines that she advocates an expanded view of the concept. Rather than categorising capitalism as an economic system, Fraser defines it as an institutionalised social order (Fraser, 2014; Fraser and Jaeggi, 2018), implying that capitalism's economic features are related to the social, ecological, political, non-economic, and non-marketised conditions which make exploitation possible (Curty, 2020). More concretely, capitalist exploitation feeds on the expropriation of nature and social reproduction, as it needs a system that paves the way for capitalist interests. These spheres are part of what Fraser describes as the background conditions ‘for the possibility of foregrounding the capitalist economy’ (Fraser and Jaeggi, 2018; quote in Curty, 2020: 1330). Capitalism is constantly biting its own tail through its ongoing undermining of these spheres (Curty, 2020: 1334; Fraser, 2014). In her dialogue with Rahel Jaeggi, Fraser insists that the current crisis of capitalism therefore must not be understood as solely economic: ‘It also encompasses care deficits, climate change, and de-democratization’ (2018: 3). Moreover, in addition to its economic logic, capitalism also entails normative dimensions (Fraser and Jaeggi, 2018). But how does the expanded view of capitalism condition and connect to Fraser's later understanding of recognition and redistribution, and to the question of political alliances?
Whereas Fraser during the 1990s mainly focused on how redistribution and recognition might end up in conflict, from the early years of the 2000s, ‘at a time when an aggressively expanding capitalism is radically exacerbating economic inequality’, she started to identify how ‘questions of recognition are serving less to supplement, complement and enrich redistributive struggles than to marginalize, eclipse and displace them’ (2000:108). She particularly highlighted how ‘Western feminism – partly because of its turn to culture […] has tended to become neoliberalism's handmaiden’ (2013b; see also, 2013a: 218). The analysis of the connection between feminism and neoliberalism is partly connected to Fraser's focus on normative dimensions of capitalism. Despite the hopes that a culturally oriented feminism would deepen the struggle for gender equality, the politics of recognition was – because of its elective affinity with neoliberalism – subsumed by the zeitgeist. Through its ‘one-sided focus on “gender identity” at the expense of bread-and-butter issues and its critique of the paternal state’, Fraser argues that ‘feminism has dovetailed all too neatly with a rising neoliberalism that wanted nothing more than to repress all memory of social equality’ (2013b; see also, 2013a).
Furthermore, Fraser (2013b) argues that ‘we absolutized the critique of cultural sexism at precisely the moment when circumstances required redoubled attention to the critique of political economy’. This alliance ended up in what Fraser describes as a form of progressive neoliberalism (Fraser, 2017). Her argument is thoroughly presented in the article ‘Feminism, capitalism, and the cunning of history’ (2009) and has thereafter been a prominent and reoccurring theme. According to Fraser, the hegemonic status of neoliberal capitalism creates an inevitable framework that intensifies the problems of the developments within Western feminist theory and the dominant feminist movement, in which a certain form of politics of recognition can be in tune with neoliberalism, while demands of redistribution are pushed out.
Fraser's view of the developments within the feminist movement and her understanding of the elective affinity between feminism and neoliberalism have been criticised on many fronts. While some, such as Janet Newman, argue that the ‘strong thesis’ of neoliberalism does not acknowledge the landscape of antagonism ‘in which feminism and neoliberalism are entangled’ (2013: 200), others criticise what they interpret as the over-generalisation or provinciality of Fraser's – as well as of other theorists’, such as Hester Eisenstein's or Angela McRobbie's – account of contemporary feminism and its relation to neoliberalism (Aslan and Gambetti, 2011; Eisenstein, 2009; Funk, 2013; McRobbie, 2008). This debate evokes numerous questions about second-wave feminism, and about how neoliberalism and its various place-specific expressions and logics ought to be defined. However, these questions will not be addressed here. Instead, I will point to how Fraser's increased interest in neoliberal capitalism conditions her discussion of the relation between redistribution and recognition, and, in turn, political alliances.
In the debate with Butler, Fraser argued that we ought to supplant the concepts of redistribution and recognition and move towards the concepts of affirmation and transformation. By this change of conceptual framework, which is based on the question of strategy, Fraser argued that we can avoid the conflict between a dissolution of identity in the socialist project and the consolidation and recognition of identity in the recognition movements (1997). In her later texts, the tension between identity and the dissolution of identity – an issue deeply marked by the theoretical and political landscape of the 1990s – plays a less prominent role. Here, according to my reading, Fraser seems less involved in creating ways of strategically combining struggles of recognition with struggles of redistribution. Instead, she appears to be interested in showing why recognition, without reducing culture to economy, nevertheless needs redistribution in order not to become an elitist movement for the selected few. What is brought to the forefront here is how capitalist property relations impede cultural, political, and economic justice.
Already in the debate with Butler, Fraser points to a difference between struggles focused on economic redistribution and struggles that have actual property relations in focus. Later works by Fraser, however, describe the relationship between status- and class-oriented struggles from a slightly different perspective, where the focus is to a much lesser extent directed towards the function of different groups in capitalism, or the place of identity in the political movement, and more towards how justice for the many – whether the identified injustice is cultural or economic – requires a different economic order. Here, the emphasis on a needed change in property relations becomes increasingly clear. The manifesto Feminism for the 99%, which Fraser co-wrote with Marxist feminists Cinzia Arruzza and Tithi Bhattacharya, advocates a feminist movement that ‘champions the needs and the right of the many – poor women and working-class women, racialized and migrant women, of queer, trans, and disabled women, of women encouraged to see themselves as “middle class” even as capital exploits them’ (2018: 13ff). Although the quote may be interpreted as advocating an intersectional perspective, this is far from the whole truth since is not about equalising all power relations and thus giving them the same status (Ferguson, 2016). Instead, the perspective features – in my reading – an even stronger focus on capitalist exploitation and its central role in the maintenance of inequality. The underlying argument is that progressive movements fighting for individual groups’ access to various rights will be weak if the economic opportunities to take advantage of these rights are not expanded. To wage a ‘pure feminist struggle’ or a ‘pure queer struggle’ without connecting it to questions of distribution bears the risk that any rights gained may only exist on paper, or at least will not be functionally attainable for many people: By itself, legal abortion does little for poor and working-class women who have neither the means to pay for it nor access to clinics that provide it. Rather, reproductive justice requires free, universal, not-for-profit health care, as well as the end of racist, eugenicist practices in the medical profession. […] Finally, legal emancipation remains an empty shell if it does not include public services, social housing, and funding to ensure that women can leave domestic and workplace violence. (Fraser et al., 2018a: 14ff)
In this passage, they point out how positive rights become limited in a global capitalist order (Fraser et al., 2018b). They contend that liberal feminism (which is one pivotal example of a movement focused on status rather than class) does not take ‘the socio-economic constraints on choice and equality’ into account, thus arguing that this kind of feminism enables neoliberal meritocracy rather than true equality (Fraser et al., 2018b: 117). The politics of recognition that Fraser previously described as a possibility within a capitalist order thus turns out to be discursively accepted, but at the same time, deeply undermined in a capitalist context. In other words, oppressive schemes that affect the non-economic aspects of life, even if they do not emerge from the economy, are always economically situated and dependent on the economic order.
In addition to abandoning an earlier notion of status politics’ ability to thrive in capitalism, which means that status politics does not need to overthrow the capitalist system, Fraser's shifted focus also entails – I argue – that her earlier theoretical approach of replacing the concept of redistribution and recognition with transformation and affirmation becomes less pressing. By paying attention to individual groups’ different opportunities to exercise their rights rather than discussing how different groups relate to their own identity, the discussion on the relation between status- and class-related struggles moves away from the idea that cultural struggles must be transformative – that is, aimed at destabilising culturally created groups – to be able to merge with anti-capitalist struggle. Instead of focusing on the need for a unified strategy in relation to one's own identity to unite different political movements, which can force people to give up identity categories that might be important in political mobilisation, the focus is instead on how a politics of recognition needs to exceed its demands of recognition in order not to contribute to maintaining the status quo. Of course, this does not mean that the goals exceeding the politics of recognition are the only goals that status-oriented groups should have, but rather that cultural struggles, as the sociologist Hampus Andersson puts it in his reading of Fraser, need ‘traction from a broader project – the struggle for equality and socialism’ to be able to be realised as a struggle that protects the collective (Andersson, 2018). Hence, groups centred around recognition do not necessarily have to abolish their own group affiliation to be able to enter alliances with anti-capitalist movements, which might make the prospect of entering political alliances more attractive and less threatening.
Another benefit of the shift in focus in Fraser's thinking is – according to me – that it encourages a form of collective struggle, as the majority is in a similar position in society, in terms of not belonging to the ruling economic class. The ground for a common identity is not, as within the tradition of discourse analysis or post-structural feminism – represented by thinkers such as Mouffe (2005, 2019) among others – created through temporary discursive alliances. Instead, if we follow the argument in Fraser's later deliberations on the grounds for a broader political collective, we can contend that many groups share interests and need similar societal and economic changes. This concrete unity is, in my view, more stable – and probably makes more sense to subjugated groups – than temporary discursively articulated alliances coming from ‘movement thinkers’. This does not mean that Fraser's political projects consist of class reductionism, where only class affiliation is important. Instead, Fraser shows how status-related injustices, without being grounded in property relations, still need a change in these conditions in order not to enter an alliance with the one-sided equality of capitalism. In this sense, Fraser, like other thinkers within the tradition of social reproduction theory, offers a way of – as Aaron Jaffe puts it – ‘overcoming the social relations that exploit and oppress at the same time, and replacing them with an organization of social relations that is truly conducive to freely developing our needs and capacities’ (Jaffe, 2020: 3).
While Fraser's later work is marked by her foregrounding of capitalism, the main shift in Butler's thinking is her turn to ethics, most noticeably in the ethical trilogy Precarious Life (2004), Giving an Account of Oneself (2005), and Frames of War (2009). While the earlier writings of Butler focus on the subjection under and subversion of norms, the later texts – taking their theoretical inspiration from a Levinasian tradition – engage in the relational and ethical aspects implicated in our mutual interdependence on each other, or to use Butler's vocabulary, our fundamental precariousness and the responsibility it entails. As Ingrid Cyfer (2019) argues, Butler's turn can be understood partly as a reaction to the critique that her earlier work lacked normative groundings from which to criticise processes of exclusion, due to its Foucauldian foundations. Still, although engaging with ethics, Butler recurrently points to the political implications of her later work, stating that ‘anything that we could call morality today merges into the question of the organization of the world … we might even say that the quest for the good life is the quest for the right form of politics’ (Butler, 2015: 195). The aim is to show how certain political and economic circumstances create political asymmetries in how our existential vulnerability is exposed (Butler, 2016). While all lives are fundamentally marked by precariousness, some populations are precarious, which refers to ‘that politically indicted condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks more than others, and become differently exposed to injury, violence, and death’ (2015: 33).
Precarity is a relatively new concept in Butler's theoretical work and it is a concept that has inspired many contemporary feminists in their work on inequality. However, Butler argues that precarity as a state was addressed already in her early writings, since her work on gender and sexuality was engaged in opposing the unliveable conditions for those breaking with normative gender roles (2015: 33). Moreover, the question of power and resistance has also been a cornerstone in her work, although Butler's early writings focused on precarity as a direct result of exclusion while her later work deals with how the shared experience of precarity may lay the ground for political alliances. Or as Butler phrases it: Now I am working with the question of alliances among various minorities or populations deemed disposable; more specifically, I am concerned with how precarity – that middle term, and, in some ways, that mediating term – might operate, or is operating, as a site of alliance among groups of people who do not otherwise find much in common and between whom there is sometimes even suspicion and antagonism. (2015: 27)
Hence, precarity is not only a situation in which a fundamental precariousness is maximised, but also a mediating political term (see also Butler, 2016). Thus, precarious groups ‘are linked by their sudden or protracted subjection to precarity, even if they do not want to acknowledge this bond’ (2015: 34). What should link people together is, in other words, the fact that they are all precarious. However, the reasons for the precarity of these groups might – as Butler points out – vary and in this sense, the alliances that might be built are similar to those proposed by post-Marxist thinkers such as Mouffe. Like these thinkers, Butler fails to – as Moya Lloyd argues – ‘explore in detail the actual mechanisms that give rise to the concrete precarisation of a particular population’ and fails to demonstrate how various forms of precarity relate to each other (Lloyd, 2015: 176). In this sense, I would argue that the concept of precarity shares a weakness with the concept of oppression, as pointed out by Anna Jónasdóttir: it is too vague and does not indicate the sort of oppressive structures we are dealing with (Jónasdóttir, 1991)? In my view, strong political alliances are built not solely on sharing an experience of being oppressed but also on a common understanding of the nature of this situation. The process of formulating this common understanding requires an analysis of the various forms of oppression experienced by the groups that are entering into an alliance. Without a clear analysis of the structures of oppression, common political goals are difficult to formulate. In other words, what we risk ending up with is political alliances without a viable political analysis of what needs to be done, and how to do it. By using precarity as the common term, I would argue that the different logics of oppression become obscured and by extension the ways in which various situations of precarity might relate to each other or not. When defining where we come from – and how we understand this heritage – we also unlock the possibility of joining in a struggle by analysing in what ways our heritages might not be the same but might, all the same, be intertwined in politically fruitful ways.
In this respect, Fraser offers the example of the way in which contemporary capitalism needs the constant expropriation of nature, women's unpaid labour, and the exploitation of the working class (which is racially divided), hence tying various situations of oppression and political struggles together, illustrating how they make part of a greater political whole. In Butler, this totality is never established since the term precarity does not entail a political analysis of any specific form of oppression. Instead, it points to the result of oppression on a symptomatic level.
While this is not surprising due to the poststructuralist position that grounds Butler's thinking, it has some consequences that go against the poststructuralist imperative to acknowledge differences. And as the result of the oppression is in focus, the different social relations of power that engender oppression become homogenised. While critically discussing neoliberalism and its individualist logic, and the way vulnerable populations are made responsible for their own precarity within this neoliberal logic, we are never presented with a political remedy to counteract their precarity since the political and economic logic is never thoroughly scrutinised. Hence, Butler fails to give any satisfying answer as to why certain groups become precarious and what kind of society would be needed for these groups not to remain precarious.
In my view, although Butler goes a long way to prove her project to be politically engaged, a political analysis is never fixed, and the emphasis of her work is mainly on ethics. While arguing that political and economic frameworks condition the possibility of leading an ethical life, the way to change these frameworks turns out to be mostly ethical as well: Only as creatures who recognize the conditions of interdependency that ensure our persistence and flourishing can any of us struggle for the realization of any of those important political goals during times in which the very social conditions of existence have come under economic and political assault. (2015: 45).
But in what way have the social conditions come under economic and political assault, in what way has this effected different groups, and what kinds of political and cultural changes are needed for different groups to flourish? These questions remain unanswered. In The Force of Nonviolence (2021), we find a similarly ethically charged argument for how to understand political solidarity and collective action: We can always fall apart, which is why we struggle to stay together. Only then do we stand a chance of persisting in a critical common: when nonviolence becomes the desire for the other's desire to live, a way of saying, ‘You are grievable; the loss of you is intolerable; and I want you to live; I want you to want to live, so take my desire as your desire, for yours is already mine’. (Butler, 2020: 129ff)
Alliances, political solidarity, and collective action seem mainly to be built on our ethical capacities to acknowledge the other as precarious, as grievable, and as interdependent. That joint struggle could find force in a shared political analysis, or in the capacity to understand how our individual positions form a whole, remains largely unacknowledged. Moreover, it remains unclear what kind of concrete politics should emanate from the ethical acknowledgement of the precarity of the other. Political resistance demands not only that someone is acknowledged as a person who has the right to live a liveable life, but also that we attack those orders of oppression that profit from the uneven distribution of power. If Butler refrains from giving a fuller description of the features of the political and economic situation in resistance to which political alliances are to take form, precarity as a point of political critique will remain far too vague to take us any further politically.
Acknowledging differences as part of a whole
The work of Fraser can, in many regards, be understood as an attempt to create common ground where political alliances can take shape without creating insurmountable conflicts. These attempts have met their fair deal of scepticism, and some critics have depicted Fraser as a closeted class reductionist. Contrary to such interpretations, in this article, I contend – in line with Fraser – that it is Butler rather than Fraser who takes the position of class reductionism in the Butler/Fraser debate, thus rendering political alliances that acknowledge differences in oppression difficult to reach.
Fraser's previous analysis of the relation between recognition and redistribution does not suffer from a lack of acknowledgement of culturally oriented struggles. The contrary is closer to the truth. However, by depicting claims of recognition as relatively autonomous from struggles of redistribution, I argue that Fraser in her earlier work failed to fully acknowledge the ways in which claims of recognition can only blossom if made simultaneously with claims for redistributive justice. This interdependence, however, becomes clearer in Fraser's later writings where capitalism takes the role as the main element and where socioeconomic constraints hinder not only redistributive justice but also recognition.
This shift opens a new way of discussing political alliances. In the context of global capitalism, the most pressing question when forming political alliances is not how to combine claims of recognition with claims of redistribution, but rather how justice within capitalism – although the capitalist order at least on the surface seems to facilitate struggles for status — is not accessible to the many but to the few. However, the conclusion is not that the politics of status can be reduced to anti-capitalist struggles.
Although status struggles depend on anti-capitalist efforts to fulfil their goals, status oppression is not identical to class oppression, and status struggles cannot, as Anna Marie Smith puts it, ‘stop at the anti-capitalist struggle alone’ (Smith, 2001: 113). Nevertheless, a politics of status that does not form alliances with anti-capitalist struggles will, as Fraser argues in her later work, never succeed in being a struggle for the 99%. Through such an analysis, Fraser manages to acknowledge differences between distinct political groups while still highlighting the benefits of participating in an anti-capitalist collective struggle based on an analysis of the social totality in which different groups are oppressed. However, in my reading, Butler fails in this regard. This failure is, as I have argued in this article, related to the fact that Butler does not attempt to articulate the grounds for a shared political analysis or for common political goals based on an analysis of the concrete nature of various forms of oppression. Instead, what she offers is a description of the symptoms of oppression: that is precarity. Political alliances built on such vague and decontextualised concepts run – I believe – the risk of becoming politically impotent. While they grant us the possibility to identify as allies in precarity, they do not give us forceful conceptual tools to act in alliance for societal change.
Footnotes
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank colleagues who have read and commented on this article at different stages in the process, the editors of Acta Sociologica, and the three anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback and comments.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article
