Notes on Fraser
I plan to do a more thorough review of my in-text notes but for now just hazarding some guesses.
Fraser’s work is welcome for many reasons. Among them is the account of capitalism as not just a type of economy but a type of society. Furthermore, there are within society tendencies and pressures - a kind of objectivity over and above persons, shaping their lives and actions - and those tendencies are not only economic. This means, among other things, that parts of life outside the economy are systemic, they are part of the machinery of society in motion.
Fraser’s work is under-specified on the concept of crisis. Crisis appears in her work entirely as systemic unraveling. In my view it is far from clear that crises are actually system disrupting. Clearly crises exist and create a great deal of human suffering, but do they disrupt capitalism? To put it another way, what does it mean to disrupt capitalism?
As Fraser details, at any given moment there exist historically specific ensembles of institutions that compose a particular version of capitalism. Crises can disrupt those ensembles, and those ensembles have often generated their own crises. Fraser argues, I think rightly, that any particular capitalism has a version of tendencies to break down. But what is it that is breaking down? Thus far in every crisis what has broken down has been one of those historically specific ensembles, not capitalism per se. That is to say, thus far in every crisis of capitalism, a specific version of capitalism has broken down, then either been restored, often through some modifications, or has been replaced by a new historically specific version of capitalism. This suggests that the resolution of crises in favor of capitalism’s existence is itself a systemic tendency. That is to say, capitalism systematically generate crises in which capitalism’s institutions break down or seize up and yet these crises simultaneously orient society toward some version of capitalist society as both the means and end for resolving the crisis.
Crisis, then, is a tendency within capitalist society toward dramatic institutional reconfiguration, with massive human consequences, with two phases, a phase of decay and a phase of resolution or renewal. None of this is to say that either crises or their resolution are inevitable. Crises are in effect the result of a kind of social inertia endemic to capitalism. It is possible for systemic inertia to be overcome (though very unlikely). My point is simply to say that the resolution of crisis has a similar degree of inevitability within the system-logic of capitalism as the outbreak of crisis.
Fraser does not theorize the former, crisis resolution, with anything like the level of attention with which she theorizes the potential for crisis to begin. Reading Fraser’s book, it would be easy to come away thinking that the tendency toward crisis indicates a kind of fragility of capitalism. One could understandably ask, ‘how is it that capitalism has continued for so long, given that it is riddled with so many kinds of crisis tendencies?’ I want to suggest that crisis tendencies should instead be understood as helping explain capitalism’s longevity. Crises do tend to encourage social unrest, but that unrest is much more often targeted against some component within the historically specific ensemble of institution that makes up the specific capitalism those people live under. They tend to amount to calls for a differently organized capitalism, which are part of conflicts over which version of capitalism will exist, conflicts that presume capitalism still will exist. Those conflicts provide resources for capitalism’s renewal, by helping force changes to the institutional ensemble. That is to say, those conflicts can help provide the resources, so to speak, necessary to create a transition from one historically specific version of capitalism to another. Conflict and crisis are part of capitalism, at least some of the time. This is not to say that we are doomed to capitalism, but it is to say that greater theoretical attention to the potential for crisis and struggle to renew capitalism is an important task. We must be able to sort out pro- and anti-systemic crises and movements if we are to have any hope for capitalism to end in an emancipatory way.
I do like the Fraser/Jaeggi book but I wanted more. I like the general picture and it summarizes a lot of material in clear prose, which is hard to do. A major issue I have with the book though is on crisis. One of the points of the book seems to be that capitalism threatens its own existence. I’m not sure that’s true. If ‘capitalism breaks itself’ is set aside, then what is a crisis in that case? I’m inclined to see it as a breakdown of a specific organization of capitalism, or of a part of a capitalist society. Even accepting for the sake of argument that capitalism does undermine itself, the book shows very little recognition of how crises can sometimes end up serving capitalism’s renewal. That’s something Poulantzas wrote about, that there is a kind of crisis which is a mechanism for the reproduction of capitalism. (‘One capitalist kills many,’ Marx put it - capitalists following their social roles end up pushing some people out of the social role of capitalist; that’s a kind of crisis for those people and it if happens enough it could be a crisis within capitalist society, but it’s not clear that it’s a crisis of capitalism, of society’s remaining capitalist.)
I'm unconvinced by her 'capitalism undermines itself by eroding its preconditions' argument (she makes this point in some of her recent articles, which I like very much). I don't think she's shown that self-undermining so much as she's shown systematic production of human misery and institutional instability.
she seems to me unclear on 'crisis for denizens of (some domain in) capitalist society, specifically a crisis generated structurally by capitalism' and 'crisis of capitalist social relations such that those social relations are vulnerable.' I think it's arguably the case that crisis is at least as much a way in which society remains capitalist as crisis is an opening toward an end to capitalism.
She says on 59 that "capitalism harbor[s] propensities for self-destabilization" I think she overstates the degree to which these structural imperatives she's mapping are actually sources of de-stabilization *of* capitalism rather than destabilization *within* capitalist societies.
how far is far enough for a problem to develop for it to count as crisis?
I think the stability-of-social-form is sometimes the result of crisis. It matters a great deal if we’re talking about a crisis in a capitalist society vs a crisis of the capitalists character of a capitalist society.
That Horkheimer quote they reference is great. "Economism, to which the critical theory is often reduced, does not consist in giving too much importance to the economy but in giving it too narrow a scope." (More Horkheimer, from the same essay as that quote: "The struggle against the illusory harmonies of liberalism and the broadcasting of the contradictions immanent in it and in the abstractness of its concept of freedom have been taken up verbally in very different parts of the world and turned into reactionary slogans."
"The economy must serve man, not man the economy: this is in the mouths of the very men who have always meant by the economy their own patrons. Society as a whole and the community are being glorified by people who cannot think of them in their simple and proper meaning but only in opposition to the individual. They are identified with the depraved order of things which these people themselves represent. In the concept of "holy egoism" and of the vital concerns of the imaginary "national community," the concern of real men for an uninhibited development and a happy existence is confused with the hunger of influential groups for power."
I do think they're worth reading still for laying out modes of systemic generation of misery, but I don't get why those are crises.
"the capitalist economy is not and cannot be self correcting" Once relatively autonomized, can the separation of the economy into its own domain of society (and a domain dominant over the rest of society) be maintain by the economy itself? I'm agnostic. I think definitely not without sacrificing things like standards of living and democracy, but both those kinds of sacrifices do happen in capitalist societies soemtimes.
This bit of the Horkheimer postscript reminded me of something I balked at in the Fraser/Jaeggi. "Whether a real socialization is going on, that is, whether a higher principle of economic life is actually being developed, does not depend simply on, for example, a change in certain property relations or on increased productivity in new forms of social collaboration. It depends just as much on the nature and development of the society in which all these particular developments are taking place."
My impression is that there's a species of social policy in the US that can look sort of like a Polanyi/Fraser 'protect society from the market' kind of thing. I know a fair amount about this regarding workers' comp laws, I have a curorsy sense of a few other laws from passed in the new deal about 20 years later. I'd eventually like to dig into this in some detail. My sense is that those laws attempted to reduce what Fraser might call crisis tendencies. IIRC the national labor relations act and fair labor standards act both mention something like this pretty explicitly in their prefaces, and they did so successfully. But they did so via organizing capitalism. That's stated relatively explicitly in their prefaces and also in the mechanisms of the law/the conceptual world of the law -- working class people as labor power commodified etc. It's a bit like how monopolies organize capitalism differently than competition, but are still capitalism. So in Horkheimer's terms they're not "a real socialization." And so the Polanyi 'protect society from the market' thing is true but misleadingly so because it leaves out that it's the protection of market-dominated-society from aspects of itself in a way that sustain it.
chapter 1. I find very unsatisfying the discussion of exploitation and expropriation. It seems to vastly overestimate the degree to which the working class was granted rights, and it misses out the insights of Clegg and others who have written against the old 'double freedom' myth. It's a bit funny given all the handwaving about avoiding orthodoxy, because this is a super orthodox take on Fraser's part.
They refer at one point to capital sometimes paying for the actual labor time socially necessary to reproduce labor power and sometimes not doing so. They make it sound like the latter is in some way atypical of exploitation. But it's historically been quite common. There's also a marxological point here which is that SNLT isn't stable. It's quite frequent that (and Marx builds this into his concept of capitalism) that there's a transition from what was once the SNLT required for production of the commodity to a new SNLT. This can happen with labor power as with any other commodity and has happened often. If that's the line between exploitation and expropriation then in practice the working class has far more often been expropriated than it has exploited.
"the commodity was not (and is not) the paradigmatic object form in “primitive accumulation.”" That seems to me true but misleading. I want to say that those bits of Capital are about the imposition of the commodity form, so the commodity is not the *unit* of analysis but the commodity, or the social pride of place of the commodity, remains the *object* of analysis.
Fraser refers to "contested processes" regarding 'boundary struggles' but doesn't specify what kind of contestation -- issue of social form again it seems to me. Like, there's contestation over which kind of capitalism, about institutional variation within some version of capitalism, who will have what role within a specific capitalism, and then there's contestation over the capitalist character of society. It's not at all clear what the relationship is between former and the latter. I like this quote a lot - "the institutional divisions established at any given time and place are best understood as provisional stabilizations of the outcome of previous struggles – as are the resulting regimes of accumulation." - but this implies more is often up for grabs than is actually the case, ie it leaves out that sometimes all that's on the table is which kind of capitalism will we have, even if that's the subject of lots of struggle.
I will say, I really really like the bit where she says something like 'lots of people on the left think they're appealing to some outside that's antithetical to capitalism but really they'e just standing in a subsystem speaking pro-systemic platitudes'
the boundary struggle thing seems to be about which kind of capitalism we'll have, not struggles over whether we'll have capitalism. In terms of feeling of political possibility (or lack thereof) I totally get that, but conceptually it's annoying.
I quite like the description of successive regimes of accumulation (it sounds a lot like SSAs). I like the points that each regime has its own crisis tendencies which form pressures/imperatives/problems that actors have to solve, how sometimes that all gives rise to transformations into new regimes of accumulation, and that the transition from one regime to another is underdetermined such that there are a (finite) range of possibilities for the next regime, and once the new regime is in place other possibilities collapse due to path dependency.
I think she equivocates in two places. She gestures toward an entirely subjective theory of crisis ('crisis doesn't exist until it's felt'), but then talks about objective crises without making clear where the line is between subjective and objective. She also talks about how all the different spheres are equally important but then says over and over again that the economy encroaches on other spheres, and other spheres don't so much act on the economy as react to its encroachment. That's not really a picture of equal importance, or rather 'equal importance' leaves out that there is, lurking in the background here conceptually, a real division between active and reactive spheres.
I also note that she continues to talk entirely about institutional re-organization in a way that is tacitly saying 'a different capitalism' and saying nothing about an actual end to capitalism, and doing so without owning up to it.
In the discussion of industrialization, Fraser seems to be saying 'capitalism's economy created an objective undermining of its own conditions of possibility, analogous to the way the lumber industry would wreck itself if it clearcut all the trees.' I think there are people who really did say that where was a threat of this kind of objective crisis but it's not at all clear to me that it actually happened - ie it's not at all clear to me that industrialization in fact really undermined the viability of capitalism. I’m unconvinced. Her main evidence seems to be 'there lots of social movements about this!' It is true that industrialization disrupted older patterns in a way that generated a lot of suffering, and a lot of concern on the part of various people. That amounts to saying 'for a mix of objective and subjective reasons it became a thing people made a big deal of and that subjective activity in turn created a crisis,' which seems true to me.
feel like she's both under and overestimating interpretation as a political activity. Like she's implicitly leaning heavily on the interpretations made by historical actors - she comes close to saying 'movements at the time thought it was a crisis, so it was' - but then she doesn't get into how there is at various moments a political conflict over interpretation - like, there's battles of ideas along the lines of 'is this a crisis? why? if so, what kind?', which in turn shape the transitions to different regimes of accumulation. The example I know best is workers comp law - regarding that, there's a battle of ideas over whether the problem at the time is dangerous work or lack of payment for injury, followed by a battle of ideas over whether nonpayment for injury is a problem of social justice, a problem of national/biopolitical/eugenic concerns, or a problem that threatens GDP. Each of these things was in effect a claim that there existed a different kind of crisis. So 'movements thought it was a crisis so it was a crisis' doens't get us very far because different movements and different people in a movement often disagree.
I think it's arguable that capitalism/the economy could be said to have over-reached and disrupted previously non-commodified spheres but I don't get why that's a crisis/in what way that's a crisis. IIRC there's a bit somewhere, maybe in the bits of v1 on the working day, where Marx is like 'capitalists are using up workers lives much faster now, causing death by exhaustion.' The british gov't got concerned because brit soldiers ended up shorter than the french as a result. That was a problem for the government to the degree public health was a real problem for the gov't, and it was a problem for the working class because misery, but it wasn't a problem for capitalists, which is why it happened in the first place And it's rhetorically useful to go 'look at those shortsighted capitalists, using up all the working class, if they keep at it they won't have any more employees and THEN they'll be in trouble!' but it's not clear that was actually a thing that could happen. Like it's not at all clear that there was an economically imposed crisis of social reproduction which was an objective threat to capitalists, but she talks like it was. People like to talk this way about climate change too, like 'heh stupid oil companies, what are they gonna do when the climate's five degrees warmer?' and the answer is 'continue to accumulate capital, the possibility of which will not be effected at all by the fact that life for workers will be a new hellscape of suffering.'
I hereby complain about the total lack of footnotes in her summary of like 400 years.
I also want to note that it's my understanding that in moments of crises there's a mix of using existing mechanisms resources normally (say, police keeping oder) and using them abnormally/repurposing them (say, nationalizing the auto industry, and maybe sometimes also just making shit up on the spot (erecting labor camps or something). That's compatible with her 'normal and abnormal periods' thing tbf, but she hasn't emphasized it at least not yet. The transformations from one regime to another draw on experiments conducted, so to speak, during the old regime in response to normal problems and abnormal ones that got solved without regime change.
I like the environment stuff, and when she gets into race and nuances the expropriation/exploitation distinction those concepts make more sense than previously. I still think it's a mistake or maybe is just weird when she says on p104 "in exploitation, capital assumes the costs of replenishing the labor it employs in production." It's not at all clear to me that this is the historical norm (her own concept of social reproduction crisis sort of implies that it's not the norm, as it's a theory of the systematic undermining of reproduction, which is what happens with workers a lot), so I don't get why this should be the conceptual norm. It's weirdly orthodox given the pain she takes to not be orthodox otherwise.
it's a speculation without a lot of evidence that environmental harm undermines capitalism. I just read a thing that mentioned finance companies going 'rising ocean levels mean sea wall construction is likely a profitable investment.' This is creating opportunities for capitalists. Climate change will likely cause political crises because it's gonna kill a lot of people but that's a different argument.
"capital is now routinely paying the vast majority of workers less than the socially necessary costs of their reproduction." I guess so, but another word for this=capital is now redefining what are socially necessary costs for reproduction. Like IMHO for Marx SNLT is less fixed and has a different sort of objectivity than how Fraser talks about it.
The race/gender stuff toward the end of chapter two is so bad. 'Other people think these are separate systems that mysteriously articulate within a social formation, but I think they're all structural logics that are integrated within the institutional social order!' as if that's different. Which is to say her view is not meaningfully different from a dual/triple systems view that sees those systems as woven together. This also makes me realize that I really do believe in the old marxist 'primary contradiction' idea. I think part of the problem here is in distinguishing what's a matter of social form and what's a matter of regimes institutionalizing a social form. It's hard to tell the difference between 'contingently present in all the regimes so far' and 'present in the social form.' I think she writes gender and race division into the social form in a way that's mistaken. Those do have a structural presence and so do have a kind systemic necessity but it's at the level of path dependent regimes, not at the level of social form.
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