Fortunes of Feminism (7 page)

Once the gender-blindness of Habermas's model is overcome, however, all these connections come into view. It then becomes clear that feminine and masculine gender identity run like pink and blue threads through the areas of paid work, state administration, and citizenship, as well as through the domain of familial and sexual relations. Lived out in all arenas of life, gender identity is one (if not the) “medium of exchange” among all of them, a basic element of the social glue that binds them to one another.

Moreover, a gender-sensitive reading of these connections has some important theoretical implications. It reveals that male dominance is intrinsic rather than accidental to classical capitalism. For the institutional structure of this social formation is actualized by means of gendered roles. It follows that the forms of male dominance at issue here are not properly understood as lingering forms of premodern status inequality. They are, rather, intrinsically modern in Habermas's sense, because they are premised on the separation of waged labor and the state from female childrearing and the household. It also follows that a critical social theory of capitalist societies needs gender-sensitive categories. The foregoing analysis shows that, contrary to the usual androcentric understanding, the relevant concepts of worker, consumer, and wage are not, in fact, strictly economic concepts. Rather, they have an implicit gender subtext and thus are “gender-economic” concepts. Likewise, the relevant concept of citizenship is not strictly a political concept; it has an implicit gender subtext and so, rather, is a “gender-political” concept. Thus, this analysis reveals the inadequacy of those critical theories that treat gender as incidental to politics and political economy. It highlights the need for a critical-theoretical categorial framework in which gender, politics, and political economy are internally integrated.
³⁰

In addition, a gender-sensitive reading of these arrangements reveals the thoroughly multidirectional character of social motion and causal influence in classical capitalism. It reveals, that is, the inadequacy of the orthodox Marxist assumption that all or most significant causal influence runs from the (official) economy to the family and not vice versa. It shows that gender identity structures paid work, state administration, and political participation. Thus, it vindicates Habermas's claim that in classical capitalism the (official) economy is not all-powerful but is, rather, in some significant measure inscribed within and subject to the norms and meanings of everyday life. Of course, Habermas assumed that in making this claim he was saying something more or less positive. The norms and meanings he had in mind were not the ones I have been discussing. Still, the point is a valid one. It remains to be seen, though, whether it holds also for late welfare-state capitalism, as I believe; or whether it ceases to hold, as Habermas claims.

Finally, this reconstruction of the gender subtext of Habermas's model has normative political implications. It suggests that an emancipatory transformation of male-dominated capitalist societies, early and late, requires a transformation of these gendered roles and of the institutions they mediate. As long as the worker and childrearer roles are such as to be fundamentally incompatible with one another, it will not be possible to universalize either of them to include both genders. Thus, some form of dedifferentiation of unpaid childrearing and other work is required. Similarly, as long as the citizen role is defined to encompass death-dealing soldiering but not life-fostering childrearing, as long as it is tied to male-dominated modes of dialogue, then it, too, will remain incapable of including women fully. Thus, changes in the very concepts of citizenship, childrearing, and paid work are necessary, as are changes in the relationships among the domestic, official economic, state, and political public spheres.

3. DYNAMICS OF WELFARE-STATE CAPITALISM:

A FEMINIST CRITIQUE

Let me turn, then, to Habermas's account of late welfare-state capitalism. Unlike his account of classical capitalism, its critical potential cannot be released simply by reconstructing the unthematized gender subtext. Here, the problematical features of his social-theoretical framework tend to inflect the analysis as a whole and diminish its capacity to illuminate the struggles and wishes of contemporary women. In order to show how this is the case, I shall present Habermas's view in the form of six theses.

1) Welfare-state capitalism emerges as a result of and in response to instabilities or crisis tendencies inherent in classical capitalism. It realigns the relations between the (official) economy and state, that is, between the private and public systems. These become more deeply intertwined with one another as the state actively assumes the task of crisis management. It tries to avert or manage economic crises by Keynesian market-replacing strategies which create a “public sector.” And it tries to avert or manage social and political crises by market-compensating measures, including welfare concessions to trade unions and social movements. Thus, welfare-state capitalism partially overcomes the separation of public and private at the level of systems.
³¹

2) The realignment of (official) economy-state relations is accompanied by a change in the relations of those systems to the private and public spheres of the lifeworld. First, with respect to the private sphere, there is a major increase in the importance of the consumer role as dissatisfactions related to paid work are compensated by enhanced commodity consumption. Second, with respect to the public sphere, there is a major decline in the importance of the citizen role as journalism becomes mass media, political parties are bureaucratized, and participation is reduced to occasional voting. Instead, the relation to the state is increasingly channeled through a new role: the social-welfare client.
³²

3) These developments are “ambivalent.” On the one hand, there are gains in freedom with the institution of new social rights limiting the heretofore unrestrained power of capital in the (paid) workplace and of the paterfamilias in the bourgeois family; and social insurance programs represent a clear advance over the paternalism of poor relief. On the other hand, the means employed to realize these new social rights tend perversely to endanger freedom. These means are bureaucratic procedure and the money form, which structure the entitlements, benefits, and social services of the welfare system. In the process, they disempower clients, rendering them dependent on bureaucracies and therapeutocracies, and preempting their capacities to interpret their own needs, experiences, and life-problems.
³³

4) The most ambivalent welfare measures are those concerned with things like health care, care of the elderly, education, and family law. For when bureaucratic and monetary media structure these things, they intrude upon “core domains” of the lifeworld. They turn over symbolic reproduction functions like socialization and solidarity formation to system-integration mechanisms that position people as strategically acting, self-interested monads. But given the inherently symbolic character of these functions, and given their internal relation to social integration, the results, necessarily, are “pathological.” Thus, these measures are more ambivalent than, say, reforms of the paid workplace. The latter bear on a domain that is already system integrated via money and power and which serves material as opposed to symbolic reproduction functions. So paid workplace reforms, unlike, say, family law reforms, do not necessarily generate “pathological” side-effects.
³⁴

5) Welfare-state capitalism thus gives rise to an “inner colonization of the lifeworld.” Money and power cease to be mere media of exchange between system and lifeworld. Instead, they tend increasingly to penetrate the lifeworld's internal dynamics. The private and public spheres cease to subordinate (official) economic and administrative systems to the norms, values, and interpretations of everyday life. Rather, the latter are increasingly subordinated to the imperatives of the (official) economy and administration. The roles of worker and citizen cease to channel the influence of the lifeworld to the systems. Instead, the newly inflated roles of consumer and client channel the influence of the system to the lifeworld. Moreover, the intrusion of system-integration mechanisms into domains inherently requiring social integration gives rise to “reification phenomena.” The affected domains are detached not merely from traditional, normatively secured consensus, but from “value-orientations per se.” The result is the “desiccation of communicative contexts” and the “depletion of the nonrenewable cultural resources” needed to maintain personal and collective identity. Thus, symbolic reproduction is destabilized, identities are threatened, and social crisis tendencies develop.
³⁵

6) The colonization of the lifeworld sparks new forms of social conflict specific to welfare-state capitalism. “New social movements” emerge in a “new conflict zone” at the “seam of system and lifeworld.” They respond to system-induced identity threats by contesting the roles that transmit these. They contest the instrumentalization of professional labor and the performatization of education transmitted via the worker role; the monetarization of relations and lifestyles transmitted by the inflated consumer role; the bureaucratization of services and life-problems transmitted via the client role; and the rules and routines of interest politics transmitted via the impoverished citizen role. Thus, the conflicts at the cutting edge of developments in welfare capitalism differ both from class struggles and from bourgeois liberation struggles. They respond to crisis tendencies in symbolic as opposed to material reproduction, and they contest reification and “the grammar of forms of life” as opposed to distributive injustice or status inequality.
³⁶

The various new social movements can be classified with respect to their emancipatory potential. The criterion is the extent to which they advance a genuinely emancipatory resolution of welfare capitalist crisis, namely, the “decolonization of the lifeworld.” Decolonization encompasses three things: first, the removal of system-integration mechanisms from symbolic reproduction spheres; second, the replacement of (some) normatively secured contexts by communicatively achieved ones; and third, the development of new, democratic institutions capable of asserting lifeworld control over state and (official) economic systems. Thus, those movements, like religious fundamentalism, which seek to defend traditional lifeworld norms against system intrusions are not genuinely emancipatory; they actively oppose the second element of decolonization and do not take up the third. Movements like peace and ecology are better; they aim both to resist system intrusions and also to instate new, reformed, communicatively achieved zones of interaction. But even these are “ambiguous” inasmuch as they tend to “retreat” into alternative communities and “particularistic” identities, thereby effectively renouncing the third element of decolonization and leaving the (official) economic and state systems unchecked. In this respect, they are more symptomatic than emancipatory, as they express the identity disturbances caused by colonization. The feminist movement, on the other hand, represents something of an anomaly. For it alone is “offensive,” aiming to “conquer new territory”; and it alone retains links to historic liberation movements. In principle, then, feminism remains rooted in “universalist morality.” Yet it is linked to resistance movements by an element of “particularism.” And it tends, at times, to “retreat” into identities and communities organized around the natural category of biological sex.
³⁷

What are the critical insights and blind spots of this account of the dynamics of welfare-state capitalism? To what extent does it serve the self-clarification of the struggles and wishes of contemporary women? I shall take up the six theses one by one.

1) Habermas's first thesis is straightforward and unobjectionable. Clearly, the welfare state does engage in crisis management and does partially overcome the separation of public and private at the level of systems.

2) Habermas's second thesis contains some important insights. Clearly, welfare-state capitalism does inflate the consumer role and deflate the citizen role, reducing the latter essentially to voting—and, we should add, to soldiering. Moreover, the welfare state does indeed increasingly position its subjects as clients. However, Habermas again fails to see the gender subtext of these developments. He fails to see that the new client role has a gender, that it is a paradigmatically feminine role. He overlooks the reality that it is overwhelmingly women who are the clients of the welfare state: especially older women, poor women, and single women with children. He overlooks, in addition, the fact that many welfare systems are internally dualized and gendered. They include two basic kinds of programs: “masculine” ones tied to primary labor-force participation and designed to benefit principal breadwinners; and “feminine” ones oriented to what are understood as domestic “failures,” that is, to families without a male breadwinner. Not surprisingly, these two welfare subsystems are separate and unequal. Clients of feminine programs—almost exclusively women and their children—are positioned in a distinctive, feminizing fashion as the “negatives of possessive individuals”: they are largely excluded from the market both as workers and as consumers and are familialized, that is, made to claim benefits not as individuals but as members of “defective” households. They are also stigmatized, denied rights, subjected to surveillance and administrative harassment, and generally made into abject dependents of state bureaucracies.
³⁸
But this means that the rise of the client role in welfare-state capitalism has a more complex meaning than Habermas allows. It is not only a change in the link between system and lifeworld institutions. It is also a change in the character of male dominance, a shift, in Carol Brown's phrase, “from private patriarchy to public patriarchy.”
³⁹