Geoff Boucher 2004
The recognition debate is a debate on the future of emancipatory politics. From this perspective, the importance of Andy’s review of Nancy Fraser is that he foregrounds this, and makes criticisms and suggestions from this basis. Fraser’s aim, in developing a dual perspective theory of justice and in elaborating the ideal of participatory parity, is to contribute to a counter-hegemonic bloc of social movements a new historic bloc, within which a reconstituted Left might aim to be a leading force. Without neglecting the difficult conceptual work that this project involves, Fraser has produced an analysis of the present conjuncture that can empower both political activism and theoretical research. Andy’s review is animated by the same set of concerns. Very much in the style of Fraser herself, Andy makes criticisms and suggestions constructively, supporting conceptual distinctions with arguments as to their relevance. It is a welcome relief from academic textual analysis of Hegel. In the same spirit, rather than engage in point-by-point analysis of Andy’s commentary, I would like to make some preliminary suggestions that might (1) broaden the scope of the debate and (2) outline a research programme into contemporary political strategy. At this stage, I am only trying to sketch an orientation, not trying to elaborate and defend it in detail. My comments take as their basis Fraser’s articles and recent book. In this respect, and not diminishing the value of Andy’s lucid and comprehensive review, I can only underline Andy’s point that reading this work repays the effort.
The last twenty years have seen (as Fraser notes) a dissipation of utopian energies. It is not only that political and theoretical discourses claiming to be “beyond Left and Right” and “anti-Enlightenment” have gained legitimacy. It is also that the social movements and political forces from which the theoretical discourses of leftwing modernism drew their strength have suffered a series of historical defeats. These defeats have been of such severity that they have to be considered a historical setback. Beyond the new ascendancy of liberal-democratic regimes and globalising capitalism, we have also seen the rolling back of social rights, a significant backlash against feminism and anti-racism, “culture wars” and imperialist adventures. Let us call this constellation ascendant neo-liberalism, a renewed imperialism, social conservatism and the exhaustion of progressive socio-political alternatives “the New World Order”. And let us add to this constellation a new factor, increasingly prominent in the last decade, namely, the rise of rightwing religious and populist movements. Political Islam has claimed the leadership of anti-imperialist movements in much of the industrialising world, while rightwing populist “parties” (really, coalitions) are contesting for entry into the political mainstream in the metropolitan centres. This constellation the “New World Order and its populist discontents” is the dominant feature in the historical landscape at the start of the twenty-first century. The dominance of the political Right in both mainstream and populist forms entails that every discussion of an “emerging counter-hegemonic bloc of social movements” must begin from the premise of a defensive struggle. Any discussion of the future of emancipatory politics that neglects or downplays this constellation of historical forces is refusing to engage with the political limitations inherent in the current conjuncture. It mistakes an effort to revive utopian energies for a utopian construction of the present, collapsing the need to have social objectives beyond the present system into some supposed “need” to “motivate” people, by means of the illusory prospect of an emancipatory offensive leading to immediate realization of these objectives. Now as before, “optimism of the will, pessimism of the intellect” remains the only correct orientation to the current conjuncture.
My assessment of the “New World Order and its populist discontents” as a conjuncture of defensive struggle has nothing whatsoever to do with that alibi for surrender known as the “criticism of actually existing democracy”. I believe that Fraser is mistaken to employ this expression in her analysis, because the “critique of actually existing democracy,” by assuming that the critique of political economy is finished or historically irrelevant, risks the renaturalisation of capitalism. This naturalisation of capitalism as the fixed horizon within which all political action takes place comes in two forms: the resigned acceptance of the system (generally combined with entry into mainstream liberal politics); or, the declaration (generally supported by dense theoretical propositions drawn from post-structuralist philosophy) that social structure is unimportant what matters is an agonic democracy that values political conflict without supposing that movement struggles will actually lead to social progress. Marxism is finished, and in its place we are left with fragments, runs the narrative. Supposedly, these fragments foment in the vacuum left by the “death of the master narrative of progress” (i.e., Marxism), ensuring a minimum of political energy in what is essentially a steady-state universe. If you accept this story, it can be accepted as a deplorable reality (followed by resigned acceptance of the status quo) or celebrated as a “liberation from Emancipation” (followed by a valorisation of marginality reminiscent of the Romantics of the New Left). Yet, by regarding today’s situation as the “baseline” or “zero point” of social struggle, and supposing that nothing major is likely to change, these positions are overlooking the fact that a defensive conjuncture (for the Left) implies an offensive conjuncture (for the Right). Far from the collapse of Marxism leaving us in peace to get on with the “criticism of actually existing democracy,” limiting ourselves to marginal reforms to the structures of liberal democracy is likely to produce fresh defeats. By contrast with these social democratic and postmodern positions, the importance of Fraser’s contribution is that she aims at the renewal of Critical Theory (a euphemism for historical materialism and socialist strategy), but from a position that is recognisably post-Marxist. Combined with a realistic assessment of the conjuncture, the programme of radical reforms can be a practical strategy for conducting those defensive struggles that refuse to accept present political limits as eternally fixed or naturally valid.
To grasp why Fraser’s programme of “non-reformist reforms,” drawn from the existing spectrum of social movement demands, is not enough, however, it is useful to call these by their original name: “strategic reforms”. Pioneered by Eurocommunism in the late 1960s and the 1970s, the programme of strategic reforms aimed to employ parliamentary democracy to construct a broad anti-capitalist movement, by coalescing a popular front around a system of interlocking structural reforms. Similar in principle to a related concept, that of transitional demands, structural reforms aimed to provide achievable popular conquests whose accomplishment inherently pointed in the direction of deeper, broader and ever more radical transformations. Eurocommunism was an important contribution to democratic socialist politics and continues to represent a crucial resource for contemporary thinking about political strategy. Indeed, it can be demonstrated that fashionable postmodern and postmarxian concepts of “radical democracy” are based (without attribution) on Eurocommunism. (My conclusion is that the Communist parties failed in their strategic initiative, not because engagement with parliamentary democracy leads automatically to a mysterious moral disease that destroys revolutionary energies, but because of the bureaucratic legacy of Stalinism.) The relevance of all this for Fraser’s radical reforms lies in the substitution of “strategic” for “non-reformist” “strategy” implies a conception of social objectives, whereas “non-reformist” says that the only thing that unites us is what we oppose. Fraser’s norm of justice “participatory parity” supplies a renewed Critical Theory with a regulative ideal with which it can evaluate conflicts and formulate demands. But this is not the same as a strategic conception of the social objectives in a historical transformation of society. Important indeed, indispensable as it is, it is an ideal by which we can assess the justice of (real or proposed) social institutions, not a replacement for the project of revolutionary socialism, a set of guidelines for environmental policy alternatives or a concrete objective of the women’s liberation movement. A political strategy as opposed to a norm of justice requires a principled social theory and an accurate political sociology. My suggestion is that this will involve substantive distinctions and not merely analytical dualism, and a more detailed consideration of the political conjuncture than Fraser’s (as she herself acknowledges) summary survey. I want to motivate this alternative theoretical framework to Fraser’s by examining the two main strands of contemporary thinking about leftwing renewal.
(1) The Rainbow Coalition position. My suggestion, based on Honneth’s criticisms, is that Fraser positions herself in the “Rainbow Coalition” camp. Theoretically, this camp takes several forms, ranging from those proposing aggregations of pre-constituted political entities (“Greens,” “women,” “trade unions,” etc.) who “march separately” but “strike together,” through to those advocating coalition politics as a forum for the reconstitution of political identities. According to advocates of political identity-formation through coalition activities, the formation of links between different groups will enable a political convergence on the Left, because the process of joint struggle and ideological dialogue modifies the identity of participants. This modification through convergence can be maximal (a new unified identity of the Left) or minimal (the grand coalition formulates new master slogans and common demands, but groups retain rights of criticism and a degree of identity within the new assembly). Theorists of radical democracy, for instance, suggest that a leftwing coalition must seek to combine pluralism with unification, difference with equivalence, integrating “women’s emancipation,” “union rights,” “social justice,” and so forth under the umbrella of “radical democracy” without renouncing the specific situations and particular demands that brought these groups together in the first place: “march together,” but “strike separately”. The problems with both of these positions lie at the level of social theory and political sociology. Those proposing aggregations of pre-constituted entities face the problem that their theory validates the political reality of a multiplicity of competing perspectives. Lacking a social theory that would explain the relations between these constituencies, such thinkers have no effective reply when “march separately” but “strike together” becomes “march separately” and “strike one another”. By contrast, a theory that explained the structural and historical inter-relations between these only apparently pre-constituted entities would be able to identify shared goals (where common interests exist) or bases for negotiations (where common interests do not exist). That is to say, political conflicts between partners can only be effectively resolved through the disclosure of a shared social reality, not through merely rhetorical or conjunctural “alliances”. Likewise, advocates of identity-formation generally ignore or neglect the structural determinations that condition political identities, thus having no reply when “march together,” but “strike separately” becomes “because we strike separately, why march together?” By contrast, a theory that investigates social structures and political histories can identify the relations between socially dispersed struggles, tracing the complex effects and by-products of different conflicts and demands to explain how no “strike” is separate in any final sense but also how some socio-political locations are more effective points at which to “strike” than others. Such a theory provides reasons, grounded in empirical investigations, for coalition activities in the first place, reasons that are both structural and normative (without collapsing the two, as classical Marxism did).
(2) The Renewal of Critical Theory position. Somewhat counter-intuitively, perhaps, I have suggested that despite Fraser’s ambitions, her position lies in actuality in the Rainbow Coalition camp. As Honneth suggests, there are elements of Fraser’s analysis that imply the existence, somewhere in the background, of a substantive social theory (for instance, when she refers to “social integration” versus “system integration,” which are two different types of action, or when she discusses the conjuncture in terms that suggest the three fields of the economic, the political and the cultural, which are three different types of institution). But in general, by maintaining that social action is in reality a unity and that every institution is a combination of economic, political and cultural forms, Fraser’s “dual perspective” refuses an investigation of social structure for an analysis of current trends in political mobilisation. This is the reason for the uneasy combination of universal-formal norm and substantive conception of the good inherent in her presentation of “participatory parity”. For like most advocates of coalition politics, she makes significant assumptions concerning the structures of social domination, assumptions that lead her to combine different theoretical traditions (Marxism, Weber, feminism) in order to produce a multi-perspective analysis. The assumptions regarding social domination motivate the content of participatory parity it has to address economic exploitation, status hierarchies, asymmetries in the division of labour, and so forth. But the relations between these different sorts of domination are not sufficiently conceptualised. Instead, there is something merely additive about the analysis. What Fraser lacks, I propose, is a theory of articulation, that is, a theory that would explain how different sorts of domination derive from different sorts of social practice, and how these practices are connected into social formations as relatively autonomous structures. Such a theory might, by examining how semi-independent social structures relate, throw light onto the ways in which contemporary social transformations not only bring new injustice, but also open fresh possibilities for justice. The advantage of her discussion, however, is that in the tradition of Critical Theory she proposes to grasp these different arenas of social struggle by means of a universal norm. It is unfortunate that considerations of space, perhaps, prevent her from explaining in more detail how dialogical democracy and discourse ethics fit with participatory parity. It would also be interesting to know how the political strategy of a renewal of civil society might connect with participatory parity as a norm governing just institutions. These questions, I suggest the definition of the political conjuncture, the development of a substantive social theory directed to political strategy, the elaboration of a theory of articulation and the dialectical exploration of the possibilities and limitations arising from “globalisation” form the basis for urgent research.
Geoff Boucher