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IPPR Progressive Review 25(2)
IPPR Progressive Review 25(2)
by
multiple authors
by
multiple authors
IPPR Progressive Review 25(2)
by
multiple authors
by
multiple authors
[...] an intellectual circles that pays certain lip service to the ideals of Frankfurt School, interdisciplinary quasi-Marxian inquiry, that is actually more and more doing what I call 'freestanding moral and political and legal philosophy'. As if you could talk about morality, politics and law without talking about capitalism, without talking about the economy, without talking about the institutional structure of society, about the mechanisms through which relations of domination are entrenched.
[...] one side of the story is this creeping liberalism. The other reference was to postructuralist anti-normativism, and this is a reference to a French version of critical theory. It's a group of people who are also very brilliant and extremely interesting thinkers, but who have got the idea that the normative perspective of the moral critique of society was essentially useless. And so here you have two equal and opposite ideas. One is that morality is everything and ca be done frmo on high, and the other is that it's some kind of a ruse.
What is left out of this picture? Can I tell you in two words? Left Hegelianism, which is the idea that the people's moral indignation about living in the kind of world we live in actually comes out of a historically situated experience and, when developed, can point beyond it to a better world. [...]
[...] they tended to reduce capitalism to the narrow idea of an economic system [...] capitalism is not an economy. It is something much bigger.
Think of it as something that would be as big as, say, feudalism. It's not about one sector of society, it's about how all the different sectors fit together. And that means that if you want to talk about capitalism, you can't talk about production without talking about social reproduction [...] ca't talk about the economy without talking about the political order that shapes and channels and supports the economy. [...]
[...] it's not that production has disappeared, but the geography of financialised capitalism is very different from the geography of those previous capitalisms. A huge amount of manufacturing is now located in the global South, in the so-called BRICS.
Those parts of the world used to be the hunting grounds for exactly the sort of extractivism and expropriation that you're describing. They were just places to be looted for dependent coerced labour, for land, for mineral wealth. So the form that capitalism took there was not premised so much on the exploitation of free labour power as on the expropriation of unfree, independent populations, who lacked a state to protect them.
I would describe financialised capitalism today as scrambling what used to be a sharper distinction between exploitation and expropriation. It used to be that expropriation was over there, and that was something that you did to people of colour, basically. Exploitation of the free worker, who receives the socially necessary costs of his, and maybe even his family's, own reproduction, that's whites, those are Europeans, that's over here.
These two worlds are completely scrambled now. There is plenty of exploitation over there and there's plenty of expropriation over here, and even the colour line that used to divide these things is mixed up, as workers in the global North, supposedly free workers, are often not paid the full socially necessary costs of their reproduction. They are forced to go into debt in order to meet their present day living costs.
So we have student debt, we have pay day loans we have credit cards, we have mortgages, microcredit. That's not even talking about sovereign debt, which is part of that scrambling. You can be exploited and expropriated at the same time, and most of us actually are. That strikes me as historically new. It's not that production disappears, but it's done by others.
this is SO GOOD
I would want to separate the question of the technology itself from the question of its social organisation. Who controls it? Who profits from it? Who decides how to use it, and where? These are the important social and political questions. [...] the problem with capitalism as a form of social organisation is that it completely removes all those questions from the collective self-determination of the people who have to live with this system. It just hands them off to 'market forces'.
[...] Thinkers who identify with the Marxian tradition maintain that the category of distribution fails to capture the full depths of capitalist injustice because it neglects the relations of production and fails to problematize exploitation, domination, and commodification. [...]
not a bad point tbh (she seems to think recognition addresses this)
[...] The working class is the body of persons who must sell their labour power under arrangements that authorize the capitalist class to appropriate surplus productivity for its private benefit. The core injustice of these arrangements is exploitation, an especially deep form of maldistribution in which the proletariat's own energies are turned against it, usurped to sustain a system that benefits others. To be sure, proletarians also suffer serious cultural injustices the "hidden injuries of class." But far from being rooted directly in an autonomously unjust status order, these derive from the economic structure, as ideologies of class inferiority proliferate to justify exploitation. The remedy for the injustice, accordingly, is redistribution, not recognition. Overcoming class exploitation requires restructuring the political economy so as to alter the class distribution of benefits and burdens in the Marxian view, such restructuring takes the radical form of abolishing the class structure as such. The task of the proletariat, therefore, is not simply to cut itself a better deal, but "to abolish itself as a class." The last thing it needs is recognition of its difference. On the contrary, the only way to remedy the injustice is to put the proletariat out of business as a distinctive group.
[...] class misrecognition can impede the capacity to mobilize against maldistribution. [...] a politics of class recognition may be needed both in itself and to help get a politics of redistribution off the ground.
[...] when misrecognition is equated with prejudice in the minds of the oppressors, overcoming it seems to require policing their beliefs, an approach that is illiberal and authoritarian. For the status model, in contrast, misrecognition is a matter of externally manifest and publicly verifiable impediments to some people's standing as full members of society. To redress it, again, means to overcome subordination. This in turn means changing institutions and social practices--once again, by deinstitutionalizing patterns of cultural value that impede parity of participation and replacing them with patterns that foster it.
[...] Fair democratic deliberation concerning the merits of recognition claims requires parity of participation for all actual and possible deliberators. That in turn requires just distribution and reciprocal recognition. Thus, there is an unavoidable circularity in this account: claims for recognition can only be justified under conditions of participatory parity, which conditions include reciprocal recognition. [...]
The solution, accordingly, is not to abolish the circularity in theory. It is rather to work to abolish it in practice by changing social reality. [...]
it's an asymptote
[...] Unlike Marxist theory, likewise, I do not conceive class as a relation to the means of production. In my conception, rather, class is an order of objective subordination derived from economic arrangements that deny some actors the means and resources they need for participatory parity.