Fortunes of Feminism (35 page)

25
Thomas W. Pogge,
World and Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms
, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002, especially the sections on “The Causal Role of Global Institutions in the Persistence of Severe Poverty,” 112–16, and “Explanatory Nationalism: The Deep Significance of National Borders,” 139–44.

26
Everything depends on finding a suitable interpretation of the all-affected principle. The key issue is how to narrow the idea of “affectedness” to the point that it becomes a viable operationalizable standard for assessing the justice of various frames. The problem is that, given the so-called butterfly effect, one can adduce evidence that just about everyone is affected by just about everything. What is needed, therefore, is a way of distinguishing those levels and kinds of effectivity that are sufficient to confer moral standing from those that are not. One proposal, suggested by Carol Gould, is to limit such standing to those whose human rights are violated by a given practice or institution. Another proposal, suggested by David Held, is to accord standing to those whose life expectancy and life chances are significantly affected. My own view is that the all-affected principle is open to a plurality of reasonable interpretations. As a result, its interpretation cannot be determined monologically, by philosophical fiat. Rather, philosophical analyses of affectedness should be understood as contributions to a broader public debate about the principle's meaning. (The same is true for empirical social-scientific accounts of who is affected by given institutions or policies.) In general, the all-affected principle must be interpreted dialogically, through the give-and-take of argument in democratic deliberation. That said, however, one thing is clear. Injustices of misframing can be avoided only if moral standing is not limited to those who are already accredited as official members of a given institution or as authorized participants in a given practice. To avoid such injustices, standing must also be accorded to those non-members and non-participants significantly affected by the institution or practice at issue. Thus, sub-Saharan Africans, who have been involuntarily disconnected from the global economy, count as subjects of justice in relation to it, even if they do not participate officially in it. For the human-rights interpretation, see Carol C. Gould,
Globalizing Democracy and Human Rights
, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. For the life expectancy and life-chances interpretation, see David Held,
Global Covenant: The Social Democratic Alternative to the Washington Consensus
, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004, 99ff. For the dialogical approach, see below, as well as Fraser, “Democratic Justice in a Globalizing Age” and “Abnormal Justice,”
Critical Inquiry
34:3, 2008, 393–422. For the involuntary disconnection of sub-Saharan Africa from the official global economy, see James Ferguson, “Global Disconnect: Abjection and the Aftermath of Modernism,” in Ferguson,
Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt
, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999, 234–54.

27
Manuel Castells,
The Power of Identity
, London: Blackwell Publishers, 1996. John A. Guidry, Michael D. Kennedy, and Mayer N. Zald,
Globalizations and Social Movements
, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Sanjeev Khagram, Kathryn Sikkink, and James V. Riker,
Restructuring World Politics: Transnational Social Movements, Networks, and Norms
, Minneapolis: Univeristy of Minnesota Press, 2002. Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink,
Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics
, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998. Jeffrey St. Clair, “Seattle Diary,” December 16, 1999, counterpunch.org.

28
For a useful account, albeit one that differs from the one presented here, see Christine Chin and James H. Mittelman, “Conceptualizing Resistance to Globalisation,”
New Political Economy
2:1, 1997, 25–37.

29
For further discussion of the “how” of justice, see Fraser, “Democratic Justice in a Globalizing Age” and “Abnormal Justice.”

30
James Bohman, “The Globalization of the Public Sphere: Cosmopolitanism, Publicity and Cultural Pluralism,”
Modern Schoolman
75:2, 1998, 101–17. John A. Guidry, Michael D. Kennedy, and Mayer N. Zald,
Globalizations and Social Movements
. Thomas Pomiah, “Democracy vs. Empire: Alternatives to Globalization Presented at the World Social Forum,”
Antipode
36:1, 2004, 130–33. Maria Pia Lara, “Globalizing Women's Rights: Building a Public Sphere,” in
Recognition, Responsibility, and Rights: Feminist Ethics and Social Theory. Feminist Reconstructions
, eds. Robin N. Fiore and Hilde Lindemann Nelson, Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003, 181–93. Nancy Fraser, “Transnationalizing the Public Sphere: On the Legitimacy and Efficacy of Public Opinion in a Postwestphalian World,”
Theory, Culture & Society
24:4, 2007, 7-30; reprinted in Fraser,
Scales of Justice
.

31
For the time being, efforts to democratize the process of frame-setting are confined to contestation in transnational civil society. Indispensable as this level is, it cannot succeed so long as there exist no formal institutions that can translate transnational public opinion into binding, enforceable decisions. In general, then, the civil-society track of transnational democratic politics needs to be complemented by a formal-institutional track. For further discussion of this problem, see Fraser, “Democratic Justice in a Globalizing Age” and “Abnormal Justice.” Also James Bohman, “International Regimes and Democratic Governance.”

32
The phrase comes from Ian Shapiro,
Democratic Justice
, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. But the idea can also be found in Jürgen Habermas,
Between Facts and Norms
; Seyla Benhabib,
The Rights of Others
; and Rainer Forst,
Contexts of Justice: Political Philosophy Beyond Liberalism and Communitarianism
, trans. J. M. M. Farrell, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

33
None of the theorists cited in the previous note has attempted to apply the “democratic justice” approach to the problem of the frame. The thinker who comes closest is Rainer Forst, as he appreciates the importance of framing. But even Forst does not envision democratic processes of frame-setting.

9

Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History
^*

I would like here to take a broad, sweeping look at second-wave feminism. Not at this or that activist current, nor at this or that strand of feminist theorizing; not at this or that geographical slice of the movement, nor at this or that sociological stratum of women. I want, rather, to try to see second-wave feminism whole, as an epochal social phenomenon. Looking back at nearly forty years of feminist activism, I want to venture an assessment of the movement's overall trajectory and historical significance. In looking back, however, I hope also to help us look forward. By reconstructing the path we have traveled, I hope to shed light on the challenges we face today—in a time of massive economic crisis, social uncertainty, and political realignment.

I am going to tell a story, then, about the broad contours and overall meaning of second-wave feminism. Equal parts historical narrative and social-theoretical analysis, my story is plotted around three points in time, each of which places second-wave feminism in relation to a specific moment in the history of capitalism. The first point refers to the movement's beginnings in the context of what I will call “state-organized capitalism.” Here I propose to chart the emergence of second-wave feminism from out of the anti-imperialist New Left as a radical challenge to the pervasive androcentrism of state-led capitalist societies in the postwar era. Conceptualizing this phase, I shall identify the movement's fundamental emancipatory promise with its expanded sense of injustice and its structural critique of society. The second point refers to the process of feminism's evolution in the dramatically changed social context of rising neoliberalism. Here, I propose to chart not only the movement's extraordinary successes but also the disturbing convergence of some of its ideals with the demands of an emerging new form of capitalism—post-Fordist, “disorganized,” transnational. Conceptualizing this phase, I shall ask whether second-wave feminism has unwittingly supplied a key ingredient of what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello call “the new spirit of capitalism.” The third point refers to a possible reorientation of feminism in the present context of capitalist crisis and political realignment, which could mark the beginnings of a shift from neoliberalism to a new form of social organization. Here, I propose to examine the prospects for reactivating feminism's emancipatory promise in a world that has been rocked by the twin crises of finance capital and US hegemony.

In general, then, I propose to situate the trajectory of second-wave feminism in relation to the recent history of capitalism. In this way, I hope to help revive the sort of socialist-feminist theorizing that first inspired me decades ago and that still seems to me to offer our best hope for clarifying the prospects for gender justice in the present period. My aim, however, is not to recycle outmoded dual-systems theories, but rather to integrate the best of recent feminist theorizing with the best of recent critical theorizing about capitalism.

To clarify the rationale behind my approach, let me explain my dissatisfaction with what is perhaps the most widely held view of second-wave feminism. It is often said that the movement's relative success in transforming culture stands in sharp contrast with its relative failure to transform institutions. This assessment is double-edged: on the one hand, feminist ideals of gender equality, so contentious in the preceding decades, now sit squarely in the social mainstream; on the other hand, they have yet to be realized in practice. Thus, feminist critiques of, for example, sexual harassment, sexual trafficking, and unequal pay, which appeared incendiary not so long ago, are widely espoused today; yet this sea-change at the level of attitudes has by no means eliminated those practices. And so, it is frequently said: second-wave feminism has wrought an epochal cultural revolution, but the vast change in
mentalitées
has not (yet) translated into structural, institutional change.

There is something to be said for this view, which rightly notes the widespread acceptance today of feminist ideas. But the thesis of cultural success-cum-institutional failure does not go very far in illuminating the historical significance and future prospects of second-wave feminism. Positing that institutions have lagged behind culture, as if one could change while the other did not, it suggests that we need only make the former catch up with the latter in order to realize feminist hopes. The effect is to obscure a more complex, disturbing possibility: that the diffusion of cultural attitudes born out of the second wave has been part and parcel of another social transformation, unanticipated and unintended by feminist activists—a transformation in the social organization of postwar capitalism. This possibility can be formulated more sharply: the cultural changes jump-started by the second wave, salutary in themselves, have served to legitimate a structural transformation of capitalist society that runs directly counter to feminist visions of a just society.

In this chapter, I aim to explore this disturbing possibility. My hypothesis can be stated thus: What was truly new about the second wave was the way it wove together in a critique of androcentric, state-organized capitalism what we can understand today as three analytically distinct dimensions of gender injustice: economic, cultural, and political. Subjecting state-organized capitalism to wide-ranging, multifaceted scrutiny, in which those three perspectives intermingled freely, feminists generated a critique that was simultaneously ramified and systematic. In the ensuing decades, however, the three dimensions of injustice became separated, both from one another and from the critique of capitalism. With the fragmentation of the feminist critique came the selective incorporation and partial recuperation of some of its strands. Split off from one another and from the societal critique that had integrated them, second-wave hopes were conscripted in the service of a project that was deeply at odds with our larger, holistic vision of a just society. In a fine instance of the cunning of history, utopian desires found a second life as feeling currents that legitimated the transition to a new form of capitalism: post-Fordist, transnational, neoliberal.
¹

In what follows, I propose to elaborate this hypothesis in three steps, which correspond to the three plot points mentioned earlier. In a first step, I shall reconstruct the second-wave feminist critique of androcentric, state-organized capitalism as integrating concerns we associate today with three perspectives on justice—redistribution, recognition, and representation. In a second step, I shall sketch the coming apart of that constellation and the selective enlistment of some of its strands to legitimate neoliberal capitalism. In a third step, I shall weigh the prospects for recovering feminism's emancipatory promise in the present moment of economic crisis and political opening.

1. FEMINISM AND STATE-ORGANIZED CAPITALISM

Let me begin by situating the emergence of second-wave feminism in the context of state-organized capitalism. By “state-organized capitalism,” I mean the hegemonic social formation in the postwar era, a social formation in which states played an active role in steering their national economies.
²
We are most familiar with the form taken by state-organized capitalism in the welfare states of what was then called the First World, which used Keynesian tools to soften the boom-bust cycles endemic to capitalism. Drawing on experiences of depression and war-time planning, these states implemented various forms of
dirigisme
, including infrastructural investment, industrial policy, redistributive taxation, social provision, business regulation, nationalization of some key industries, and decommodification of public goods. Certainly, it was the most wealthy and powerful OECD states that were able to “organize” capitalism most successfully in the decades following World War II. But a variant of state-organized capitalism could also be found in what was then called the Third World. In impoverished postcolonies, newly independent “developmental states” sought to use their more limited capacities to jump-start national economic development by means of import substitution policies, infrastructural investment, nationalization of key industries, and public spending on education.
³

In general, then, I use the expression “state-organized capitalism” to refer to the OECD welfare states and the postcolonial developmental states of the postwar period. It was in these countries, after all, that second-wave feminism first erupted in the early 1970s. To explain what exactly provoked the eruption, let me note four defining characteristics of the political culture of state-organized capitalism.

1)
Economism
: By definition, as I already noted, state-organized capitalism involved the use of public political power to regulate (and in some cases, to replace) economic markets. This was largely a matter of crisis management in the interest of capital. Nevertheless, the states in question derived much of their political legitimacy from their claims to promote inclusion, social equality, and cross-class solidarity. Yet these ideals were interpreted in an economistic and class-centric way. In the political culture of state-organized capitalism, social questions were framed chiefly in distributive terms, as matters concerning the equitable allocation of divisible goods, especially income and jobs, while social divisions were viewed primarily through the prism of class. Thus, the quintessential social injustice was unfair economic distribution, and its paradigm expression was class inequality. The effect of this class-centric, economistic imaginary was to marginalize, if not wholly to obscure, other dimensions, sites, and axes of injustice.

2)
Androcentrism
: It followed that the political culture of state-organized capitalism envisioned the ideal-typical citizen as an ethnic-majority male worker—a breadwinner and a family man. It was widely assumed, too, that this worker's wage should be the principal, if not the sole, economic support of his family, while any wages earned by his wife should be merely supplemental. Deeply gendered, this “family wage” construct served both as a social ideal, connoting modernity and upward mobility, and as the basis for state policy—in matters of employment, welfare, and development. Granted, the ideal eluded most families, as a man's wage was rarely by itself sufficient to support children and a non-employed wife. And granted, too, the Fordist industry to which the ideal was linked was soon to be dwarfed by a burgeoning low-wage service sector. But in the 1950s and 1960s, the family-wage ideal still served to define gender norms and to discipline those who would contravene them, reinforcing men's authority in households and channeling aspirations into privatized domestic consumption. Equally important, by valorizing waged work, the political culture of state-organized capitalism obscured the social importance of unwaged care work and reproductive labor. Institutionalizing androcentric understandings of family and work, it naturalized injustices of gender and removed them from political contestation.

3)
Étatism
: State-organized capitalism was étatist, suffused with a technocratic, managerial ethos. Relying on professional experts to design policies, and on bureaucratic organizations to implement them, welfare and developmental states treated those whom they ostensibly served more as clients, consumers, and taxpayers than as active citizens. The result was a depoliticized culture, which treated questions of justice as technical matters, to be settled by expert calculation or corporatist bargaining. Far from being empowered to interpret their needs democratically, via political deliberation and contestation, ordinary citizens were positioned (at best) as passive recipients of satisfactions defined and dispensed from on high.

4)
Westphalianism
: Finally, state-organized capitalism was, by definition, a national formation, aimed at mobilizing the capacities of national states to support national economic development in the name—if not always in the interest—of the national citizenry. Made possible by the Bretton Woods regulatory framework, this formation rested on a division of political space into territorially bounded polities. As a result, the political culture of state-organized capitalism institutionalized the “Westphalian” view that binding obligations of justice apply only among fellow citizens. Subtending the lion's share of social struggle in the postwar era, this view channeled claims for justice into the domestic political arenas of territorial states. The effect, notwithstanding lip-service to international human rights and to anti-imperialist solidarity, was to truncate the scope of justice, marginalizing, if not wholly obscuring, cross-border injustices.
⁴

In general, then, the political culture of state-organized capitalism was economistic, androcentric, étatist, and Westphalian—all characteristics that came under attack in the late 1960s and 1970s. In those years of explosive radicalism, second-wave feminists joined their New Left and anti-imperialist counterparts in challenging the economism, the étatism, and (to a lesser degree) the Westphalianism of state-organized capitalism, while also contesting the latter's androcentrism—and with it, the sexism of their comrades and allies. Let us consider these points one by one.

1)
Second-wave feminism contra economism
: Rejecting the exclusive identification of injustice with class maldistribution, second-wave feminists joined other emancipatory movements to burst open the restrictive, economistic imaginary of state-organized capitalism. Politicizing “the personal,” they expanded the meaning of justice, reinterpreting as injustices social inequalities that had been overlooked, tolerated, or rationalized since time immemorial. Rejecting both Marxism's exclusive focus on political economy and liberalism's exclusive focus on law, they unveiled injustices located elsewhere—in the family and in cultural traditions, in civil society and in everyday life. In addition, second-wave feminists expanded the number of axes that could harbor injustice. Rejecting the primacy of class, socialist-feminists, black-feminists, and anti-imperialist feminists also opposed radical-feminist efforts to install gender in that same position of categorial privilege. Focusing not only on gender, but also on class, “race,” sexuality, and nationality, they pioneered an “intersectionist” alternative that is widely accepted today. Finally, second-wave feminists extended the purview of justice to take in such previously private matters as sexuality, housework, reproduction, and violence against women. In so doing, they effectively broadened the concept of injustice to encompass not only economic inequalities but also hierarchies of status and asymmetries of political power. With the benefit of hindsight, we can say that they replaced a monistic economistic view of justice with a broader, three-dimensional understanding encompassing economy, culture, and politics.