A CRITIQUE OF CAPITALIST DOMINATION

BY

Lillian Hall Cicerchia

BA, Loyola University Chicago, 2012

MA, Fordham University, 2015

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IE DISSERTATION

SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS

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FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

IN THE DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSPHY

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AT FORDHAM UNIVERSITY

NEW YORK

FEBRUARY, 2020
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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction 1

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Chapter 1: Critiquing Structural Practices 16
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Chapter 2: Structural Domination in the Labor Market 53

Chapter 3: Why Does Class Matter? 90

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Chapter 4: Is Capitalism Institutionally Racist? 122

Chapter 5: Capitalism Against Reproductive Freedom 157

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Conclusion 192

Bibliography 198

Abstract

Vita

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INTRODUCTION

This dissertation brings together two discussions that have been moving closer together but

have yet to fully connect. These are the neo-republican revival in theorizing domination and

critical theory’s revival of a critique of capitalism. Ultimately, I develop a critique of

capitalist domination by analyzing capitalism’s structural features and their consequences

for individuals and groups. I argue that capitalism has a deep tendency to inhibit social

solidarity and thus to undermine collective capacities for self-determination. My hope is that

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this critical project lays the groundwork for imagining an alternative to capitalism as well as
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a discussion of the kind of social struggles needed to bring it into existence.
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Liberalism is undergoing a crisis of credibility, and neo-republicanism has set itself the task

of proposing an alternative. Neo-republicanism retrieves elements of classical republicanism,

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which one might find in Machiavelli, Rousseau, and Montesquieu, to prioritize non-

domination over liberalism’s non-interference as a normative measure of freedom.

According to neo-republicans, one is dominated even if the person doing the dominating is

not actively interfering in one’s life. The relevant social fact is that they are in a position

where they could interfere in someone’s life arbitrarily. To a liberal, particularly on

liberalism’s right wing, such a definition is too permissive. In this view, freedom from

interference cannot mean freedom from all possible arbitrary interference; freedom is

basically a right to be left alone by others and the state. By contrast, neo-republicans tend to

support an interventionist state that makes social policies designed to reduce the capacity

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that some people have to interfere with others, like strong state regulations on the economy.

If successful, neo-republicanism is attractive because it apologizes for capitalist inequality

less and promotes democratic participation more.

Not all political philosophers are convinced that neo-republicans succeed in proposing a

genuine alternative to liberalism, myself included. The biggest problem with neo-

republicanism is that its principle of non-domination might leave out some of the most

important types of domination that social philosophers today are interested in; namely,

domination by social structures of individuals and groups based on class, race, and gender.

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However, many critics of neo-republicanism are just as much intrigued by the project. Non-
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domination does seem more robust than non-interference in its potential to address a wider

array of social problems. Many scholars think that there is room to find a better account of
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domination that does account for something like structural domination. The republican

framework may curb the influence of liberalism’s right wing right now, and, if developed
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further, eventually generate a genuine alternative.

There are republicans who have come closer to working out a critique of capitalism by

reviving parts of the republican tradition that address capitalism directly, including Marx

himself. William Clare Roberts has recently argued that the Marx of Capital is a republican

political theorist as well as the political economist that he is more well-known to be. Roberts

argues that Capital is a work of political economy in the sense that it explains how,

according to Marx, capitalism works, but it also does more than that by telling us what is

wrong with it. Capital puts forward a theory of domination, which Roberts explicates in line
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with a radical republican tradition that sees freedom as non-domination, not simply freedom

as autonomy as liberals might have it.

In Slavery and the Cooperative Commonwealth, Alex Gourevitch (2015) has also revived

elements of the radical republican tradition associated with the American labor movement to

develop a theory of structural domination that differs from the neo-republican view and the

classical republican tradition that inspires it. Labor historians had thus far documented how

the language of republican liberty articulated class grievances in a peculiarly American

vernacular, but Gourevitch sets upon the task of registering the significance of their ideas

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for political theory. Gourevitch’s project is compelling for the American radical who is keen
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to refute the American exceptionalist idea that Americans are uniquely conservative in their

class politics. More than that, the project is interesting because it lets scholars know how
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working-class people have explained the forms of structural domination that they

experience. The labor republican perspective focuses on the relationship that working
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people have to their land, their employers, and each other. This point of view is helpful

because it looks at domination from the bottom-up, so to speak, rather than from the more

abstract sociological perspective found in much academic writing.

Roberts and Gourevitch have set an agenda for thinking through the historical connections

between republicanism, capitalism, and domination. They have shown that there are

normative and explanatory resources within the republican tradition for making a critique

of capitalism that have been overlooked and that might help to revive such a critique today.

They do not, however, explain how a republican critique might overcome longstanding
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debates about the scope of capitalist domination, how it affects social groups, and what it

has to do with social institutions like the state or the family.

Critical theorists have also begun to revive a critique of capitalism. They, too, are trying to

posit an alternative, but not just to liberalism. One aspect of the renewed critical theory of

capitalism is to provide an alternative method of critique to poststructuralism, which has

been the official academic opposition to liberalism for several decades. Establishing a new

basis for systematic thinking against poststructuralism’s rejection of “grand theorizing” is

part and parcel of the new capitalism critique. The other focus of critical theorist is on an

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alternative to the Marxisms and socialisms of yore that saw capitalism in economistic terms.
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Critical theorists are now responding to as many decades of assertion that focusing on

capitalism is bound to generate a reductive mode of thinking that fails to account for
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oppressions that are rooted in race, gender, or abuse of the environment, as well as class.
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The focus of the new critique of capitalism is not on domination per se, but on

conceptualizing capitalism and on establishing a critical methodology. Nancy Fraser has

been the most influential contemporary grand theorist of capitalism. Fraser reconceptualizes

capitalism as an institutionalized social order rather than as an economy, which means that

she insists on seeing all of the institutions that enable capital accumulation, like the state

and the family, as constitutive of what capitalism is. According to Fraser (2014), the

economic foreground, or the realm of production and exploitation that we are most familiar

with, has non-economic background conditions that aid and abet it. Capitalism must

expropriate resources from nature, reproductive labor, political systems, and additional
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resources from the most vulnerable, racialized populations to accumulate capital

successfully. Fraser’s analytical description of capitalism reminds one of the Old Left

propaganda images of a many-tentacled octopus representing capital wrapped around the

institutions of civil society; a central brain controls the nervous system with a small brain in

each arm and several hearts pumping blood to the core.

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Udo J. Kepler, artist, first
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published on September 7, 1904
by J. Ottoman Lith Co.,
New York.
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Fraser also aims to reconstruct a crisis theory of capitalism. Marx argued that capitalism

generates cyclical crises of production. Capitalism incentivizes investing more and more into

fixed capital (machinery, technology, means of transport) to increase efficiency in

production, but cannot replace fixed capital quickly enough because this form of capital

investment takes time to depreciate in value. Sunk capital that does not produce enough

value to pay off the initial investment will cause the rate of profit for a firm to fall. According

to Marx, competition drives this outcome, which, once generalized, generates economic

crises on a large scale. In brief, capitalism undermines its own conditions of production and

destabilizes itself. Fraser thinks that crisis dynamics also exist between the economy and its
 6

tentacles. One can have social reproduction crises and environmental crises, for example, as

capitalist competition undermines the capacity that families and nature have to reproduce

the labor force and the conditions of production.

In a recent book, Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory, Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi (2018)

engage in a conversation with the aim of undergirding crisis theorizing with normative

critique. They articulate various routes that one might take toward asking what, if anything,

is wrong with capitalism. They identify existing types of critique – functionalist, moral, and

ethical – noting their advantages and disadvantages. They also focus on specific normative

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problems like freedom, alienation, and historicity that are often explored in combination
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with one or another mode of critique. One could add critiques of ideology and reification,

which are classical lines of Marxist criticism alongside the problems of domination and
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alienation. Fraser and Jaeggi agree that classical functionalist, moral, and ethical arguments

are too narrow in scope or not specific enough in analyzing capitalism’s structural features
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to be convincing.

Fraser and Jaeggi explain that functionalist arguments criticize capitalism for its

dysfunctional outcomes, similar to the way that Fraser describes capitalism as undermining

its own conditions of possibility. Unfortunately, however, functionalist critique presumes

too much about capitalism’s purpose to shed much light on how spheres of life that are not

strictly economic serve its ends. Moral critiques normally focus on capitalism’s effects, like

massive inequality, which leave its inner workings a black box so that one is left in the dark

about why capitalism, specifically, produces inequality in a manner that is problematic.

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Capitalism is not the only “mode of production” that produces massive inequality, so taking

up the issue of inequality in abstraction from the social processes that enable it is unlikely to

yield an historically specific account of domination. Ethical critiques tend to argue that

capitalism is a bad or distorted way of living. For instance, an ethical critique might claim

that is it perverse that capitalism causes people to obsess over their relationship to

commodities and distorts their relations with other people. But these critiques often

romanticize pre-capitalist life forms that have their own problematic forms of subordination

and domination.

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Fraser and Jaeggi think that some part of each such criticism is helpful, but not sufficient.
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They each propose a methodology that examines capitalism’s crisis tendencies as problems

with both a material and a normative dimension. Fraser focuses on how capitalism eats its
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own tail, so to speak, and disables the public’s capacity for democratic control of its

institutions. Jaeggi focuses on the idea that capitalism, like all forms of life, generates
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normative expectations that structure the interactions that people have of institutions and of

one another. The problem is that these norms can be misleading and can clash with the

objective, crisis-prone reality that Fraser describes, which means that people can fail to

become critical of the structural features of capitalism that produce the crises in the first

place. Capitalism’s normative resources are insufficient for resolving its contradictions.

Fraser does raise the problem of domination in connection with the notion of crisis. She

argues that capitalism entrenches domination in two ways: First, the divisions between

capitalism’s institutional spheres entrench social relations of domination between classes,

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genders, and races. For Fraser, there is a group-related domination dynamic. Second, the

same institutional divisions entrench domination in a generalized way for everyone because

they limit public autonomy—a collective state of freedom. Personal autonomy is only

possible under conditions of public autonomy in which individuals work collectively toward

self-determination, or in a democracy. Fraser’s critique of capitalist domination is that is

truncates democracy by balkanizing political, economic, and social life. Each of these realms

should be subject to democratic control in an integrated way, but systematic crises ensure

that they are not.

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Radical republican theorists are less quick than Fraser to jump to the idea that non-
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domination amounts to more democracy. Their theorizing about domination has less to do

with democracy and more to do with exploitation. Republican theorists have attempted to
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deepen our understanding of exploitation as a robust form of social domination to show

how it is a form of arbitrary power in workers’ lives. Rather than seeing exploitation as a
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narrow, economic extraction of a social surplus and the main normative problem as whether

this extraction is fair, republicans analyze the imperative to exploit itself and how it shapes

the lives of those who are subject to it. On the other hand, Fraser has focused on going

beyond exploitation. She purposefully emphasizes exploitation the least in her attempt to

avoid economism and to show how deep capitalism’s crises go in undermining democracy.

In this dissertation I bring these strands of radical republicanism and critical theory

together in order to develop a common perspective. I agree with critical theorists like Fraser

that a viable critique of capitalism must engage capitalism’s racialized and gendered effects
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in a systematic way, but I also agree with the new republican theorists that one must re-think

what is wrong with capitalism’s labor process and why it is a structure of domination in its

own right. I will argue throughout the dissertation that attempts to avoid economism more

often replicate economistic ways of thinking about the economy and fail to provide a

genuine alternative to liberal ways of understanding it. I aim to re-think capitalism’s core

and propose a methodology for analyzing social group oppressions on the basis of a theory

of structural domination. In addition, I am motivated by a belief that social theoretic

explanation does not differ in kind from other scientific explanations; the simpler, the

better—and simple is not the same as reductive. My intuition is that Fraser adds too many

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elements to her theory, resulting in an unnecessarily complicated methodology. There are so
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many structural dynamics involved in her account—exploitation, expropriation,

reproduction, to name a few—that something must have gone wrong to make it necessary to
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fit them all together in the abstract way that Fraser does.
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Jaeggi can help to simplify by developing a more pragmatic way of thinking about social

development. Jaeggi (2018) proposes that critical theorists revive immanent critique, which

means that they ought to look at the norms that are inherent to social practices and examine

their contradictory patterns in relation to the material conditions that they inhabit.

According to Jaeggi, this style of criticism examines how certain norms generate

expectations of social practices that must be met if a practice is to succeed in being the kind

of practice that it is. Practices and norms stand in necessary relation to one another and,

when combined, they set the terms upon which social problems arise and can be solved.

Jaeggi suggests that social problems, like crises of capitalism, have certain normative
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resources available for addressing them. The task of the immanent critic is to come to an

understanding of why these resources fall short, cannot resolve problems at all, or generate

new problems. This form of criticism calls attention to social learning processes: what is and

is not understood as a problem, how a society addresses the problem they recognize, and

what new material realities and normative resources emerge from both the understanding

and the attempt at problem-solving.

Jaeggi’s approach offers an opportunity to look inside capitalism’s structural features, open

them up to scrutiny, and reconceptualize some of the key practices and social relationships

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that make capitalism a distinct social system. Importantly, and like radical republicans,
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Jaeggi’s point of view resists looking at economic practices in an economistic way. Yet it

does not completely absorb social practices into the realm of culture and norms. It has a
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materialist core in which one analyzes concrete social relationships, their implicit norms,

and the problems that material conditions and norms create together. My view is that
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Jaeggi’s is a revival of a classical Marxian method without many of the commitments of

Marxian social theory built in. In re-thinking capitalism’s core structural features, I aim to

build in several of those commitments; for instance, that the labor market embodies a form

of structural domination and that there is a working class who is dominated as a group.

Unlike Jaeggi, then, I want to justify some of these commitments by drawing on a normative

foundation, non-domination, to raise the problem of domination in a systematic way. To

accomplish my task, immanent critique cannot be the only resource, but it is an important

one and a strategy that I use to clarify developmental patterns that are relevant to how

domination transpires.
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The normative, republican dimension to the project focuses on domination as arbitrary

power and freedom as collective self-determination. I argue that capitalism does indeed

dominate because it undermines the conditions, both material and normative, for public

autonomy. But I defend this idea by critiquing the structural features of capitalism

differently than has been done thus far. I argue that domination occurs when the material

reality that people face and the functional norms that they use to navigate that reality

contradict one another. Contradictions have a deep tendency to inhibit the kind of social

learning required for viable emancipatory projects and deep, structural transformations.

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“Deep tendencies” are developmental patterns that are neither contingent nor pre-
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determined outcomes of a structural practice. They are the outcomes of attempts to solve

problems within a social structure and reflect persistent features of that structure. In
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particular, capitalist contradictions inhibit solidarity among the dominated and obscure the

need for it. I will explain how I think this form of domination works on the basis of class,
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race, and gender.

Critical theorists are interested in republicanism, too, so this dissertation will not be the first

critical theory to draw on the resources of republican thought. Rainer Forst, for instance,

has generated a neo-Kantian republican theory in which he proposes that one analyze

justificatory norms and how they entrench and reflect arbitrary power. In a true Kantian

fashion, he argues that one ought to critique these norms based on whether they are

reciprocal and generalizable under current conditions. In some ways, my critique of

capitalist domination is complementary to this idea. I aim to illuminate which norms are
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implicit in the structural features of capitalism and how they come to justify domination in a

way that is specific to certain social groups. But my approach differs because I develop a

social theory to explain why some norms have justificatory power and what is wrong with

them. This dissertation will thus carry out a contemporary critique of capitalism based on a

normative theory that has republican roots.

Chapter 1 dives deeper into Fraser’s theory of capitalism. I engage Fraser specifically

because she has set the agenda for what a revived critique of capitalism should accomplish.

In this chapter, I compare Fraser’s theory of capitalism to Iris Marion Young’s theory of

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structural injustice while re-examining a methodological debate they had in the 1990s. I
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argue that each captures the other’s methodological weaknesses, but neither quite

overcomes their own. A critique of capitalist domination should adapt Young’s mature
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approach to understanding social structures and domination with Fraser’s emphasis on

structural features that are specific to capitalism. My approach – a “structural practice

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critique” that combines aspects of immanent critique with a republican focus on domination

– can capture the strengths of each. In my view, capitalism’s structural features are best

understood as structural practices and, with Jaeggi, I argue such practices have functional

and implicit norms that tend toward contradiction and crisis. My goal is to show how these

structural practices are a form of domination insofar as they undermine the material and

normative conditions for collective self-determination.

Chapter 2 develops a theory of structural domination in the capitalist labor market in

conversation with neo-republicans. Philip Pettit has been the most influential figure in
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developing the republican theory of domination and his view has been widely criticized for

failing to account for how social structures reproduce domination. He thinks that only

agents, not structures, can dominate. Critics of Pettit have emphasized that intentional

agents are not a necessary condition for domination to occur and have formulated various

ways to understand unintentional domination by structures. I argue that one can

conceptualize domination in both ways—both agential and structural—if one looks at the

labor market as a structural practice with functional norms, like having just desert of social

entitlements tied to the hard work done by individuals, with a deep tendency to undermine

the capacity for individual workers to organize themselves collectively, which is what they

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need to do to become political equals. Neo-republicans have maintained a liberal social
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theory when it comes to market competition, which partly explains why they overlook

structural domination.
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Chapter 3 develops a theory of class domination that relies on the preceding analysis of
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structural domination. I resolve a long-standing paradox, which is that markets seem

indifferent to group identities, but they still have racist and sexist outcomes. Well-known

feminist critics of Marxism like Heidi Hartmann and philosophers of race like Charles Mills

have used this point to argue against class reductionism. By conceiving of the economy as a

normatively structured social practice instead of simply as an economic system, I show how

functional norms of market competition like working hard to merit social entitlements make

labor market competition a source of social differentiation. Contrary to the common view

among these theorists of race and gender – that markets are indifferent to identity – I argue

that social differences are constitutive of who or what the working class is and that they are
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still dominated as a group. In fact, workers are dominated because they are subject to shared

constraints and norms that tend to inhibit a collective response to those constraints.

Workers live in a contradictory reality that tends to undermine the solidarity of the group

and thereby undermined its capacity for collective self-determination.

Chapter 4 analyzes how capitalism reproduces racism by analyzing the relationship between

class conflict, defined as a structural practice, and the state. I contrast my approach with

Tommie Shelby’s influential liberal way of understanding institutional racism. According to

Shelby (2016), institutions are extrinsically racist when an institution has race-neutral content

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and public rationale but perpetuates the negative effects of prior disadvantages or negative
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attitudes toward an unfairly disadvantaged racial group. Institutions are intrinsically racist

when their goal is to subordinate or exterminate a group, when the content of its rules or
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role criteria contain racial bias, or when prejudice distorts the application of procedures in a

pervasive way. I analyze the various ways in which scholars have tried to make sense of the
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relationship between race and class under capitalism to show that neither of Shelby’s

categories sheds light on the type of domination that is at issue. Instead, I explore the

normative expectations that people have of the state in a capitalist economy to explain how

domination in the economic sphere becomes political in the public sphere in a racialized

way. Capitalism has a deep tendency to reproduce racism when people’s expectations of the

state to protect them from markets are not met. I show that reactionary and racist nationalist

ideologies, which emphasize the state’s role in protecting society from market competition,

reflect the contradictory expectations that people have of the market and of the state. In

short, capitalism’s separation between economy and polity generates attempts to preserve
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hierarchies of political status within the state, which, I argue, is a form of political

domination because it undermines the conditions for democratic equality.

Chapter 5 extends my analysis of structural practices to the sphere of reproduction. I

combine socialist and Black feminist thought on reproduction to explain why capitalism

undermines capacities for reproductive self-determination. I compare the strengths of Black

feminist theorizing of reproductive justice with socialist feminist theorizing of social

reproduction under capitalism, arguing that each has normative strengths and weaknesses

when it comes to generating a normative critique of what is wrong with how capitalism

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organizing biological and social reproduction. The latter criticism is unsurprisingly given
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that the goal of neither framework is to give a philosophical analysis of domination.

Nonetheless I argue that such an analysis is needed to give an alternative to the liberal
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concept of reproductive freedom. I argue that the structural practice of market competition

generates expectations that discrete family units are responsible for social reproduction.
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These expectations have distinctly gendered contents in terms of the reproductive roles that

women and pregnant people are supposed to play. Further, failures to reproduce in

appropriate ways causes working-class families, particularly women, to look to the public

sphere for social protection. The functional norms of market competition are adapted to

determine which families deserve social protection, isolating family units from one another

and justifying arbitrary interference in reproductive life by the state.

CHAPTER 1: CRITIQUING STRUCTURAL PRACTICES

INTRODUCTION

Chapter 1 lays out my methodology for developing a critique of capitalism that focuses on

the problem of domination. I develop this methodology in conversation with Nancy Fraser’s

theory and critique of capitalism. The overall aim is to motivate the need for a different

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strategy for approaching domination than the one Fraser offers. I focus on Fraser because

her attempt to revive a systematic critique of capitalism has been singularly ambitious and
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influential. She has set the stage for a number of discussions about capitalism that have

either been long-neglected or underdeveloped, like its tendency toward economic, political,
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and social crises, abuses of the environment, and social group oppressions. Just as important

as her stage-setting, however, is Fraser’s normative emphasis on how capitalism undermines

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public autonomy and, thus, democracy. For my purposes, this normative aspect of Fraser’s

critique of capitalism is important because it links capitalism with domination. For Fraser,

capitalist domination is how capitalism’s structural features undermine democracy.

In brief, I agree with Fraser’s goals, but not her method. To put it simply, I think that

Fraser’s level of abstraction is a problem for understanding domination. It replicates some

of the most difficult aspects of earlier, structuralist critiques of capitalism by painting a

system-level picture of domination that is too vague and far removed from concrete

experiences of domination to yield an analysis of “who is doing what to whom”, to use

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Catharine MacKinnon’s turn of phrase.1 The second section of the chapter explains what I

take to be Fraser’s goals, method, and normative critique of capitalism as she has developed

it in recent years. I pull out the thread of Fraser’s theory that pertains specifically to the

problem of domination and its relationship to democratic justice.

The third section provides my criticism of Fraser’s approach. A defining characteristic of

Fraser’s approach is that she wants to avoid economic reductionism with an expanded

conception of capitalism to develop a critique goes beyond the more traditional question of

what is wrong with exploitation. I argue that Fraser’s expanded conception of capitalism

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leads to an overly abstract concept of domination. Fraser lacks a concrete analysis of how
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certain social relationships dominate people’s thinking and constrain their freedom. I do not

argue that a critique of capitalist domination should rely on a narrow, interpersonal

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definition of domination. Instead, I argue that it should focus more on the capacities that

some human agents have to interfere arbitrarily in the lives of others and, conversely, why
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some groups of people lack capacities for collective self-determination.

Finally, I outline a method that I call a “structural practice critique,” which adapts Iris

Marion Young’s theory of structural injustice. In the critical section of the chapter, I re-visit

criticisms that Iris Young makes of Fraser to draw out methodological problems with Fraser.

In the final section, I adapt Young’s theory, but this time I re-visit criticisms made of Young

by Fraser to clarify what is useful about Young’s approach to domination. I then develop

1
Catharine MacKinnon, Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 36.
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the idea of a structural practice, which combines Young’s description of a social structure

with Jaeggi’s notion of a social practice. This concept captures key structural features of

capitalism that are important for understanding its historically specific nature, which is a

goal that I share with Fraser. My strategy is to combine “immanent critique,” recently

revived by Jaeggi, with Young’s normative criteria for non-domination in order to examine

patterns of development within structural practices that undermine collective capacities for

self-determination. I claim that a structural practice critique can help to theorize domination

at the point of production as well as beyond it, more effectively linking the problem of

domination to democracy.

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1. FRASER’S THEORY OF CAPITALISM
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Fraser’s social theory has two parts; conceptualizing and historicizing capitalism, which

then facilitate a normative critique that focuses on freedom. For Fraser, individual freedom
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is only possible under conditions of collective freedom, or public autonomy, which

capitalism undermines. Fraser’s normative criteria for what constitutes public autonomy is

whether or not there is participatory parity among individuals, which means being able to

participate as a peer in democratic institutions. Participatory parity is a thick, liberal notion

that encompasses all social, political, and economic institutions.2 The link with domination

comes out in the story that Fraser tells about how capitalism undermines public autonomy

2
Nancy Fraser, “From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a ‘Postsocialist’ Age,” New Left
Review 212 (1995): 68-93.
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through systematic social divisions and crises. Capitalism tends to de-stabilize itself, which

weakens the public’s capacity for self-determination.

Before explaining Fraser’s view, however, it is important to understand her goals. Fraser

aims to develop a conception and critique of capitalism that systematically incorporates the

insights of feminism, postcolonialism, and ecological thought. She also wants to contest

poststructuralism’s dominance in the field of critique. As she observes, “thanks to social

amnesia, whole generations of younger activists and scholars have become sophisticated

practitioners of discourse analysis while remaining utterly innocent of the traditions of

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Kapitalkritik.”3 According to Fraser, discourse analysis has failed to engage the deep
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structural underpinnings of contemporary social crises. However, social amnesia and

theoretical trends are not the only reason capitalism has been under-criticized. Veterans of
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earlier, anti-capitalist ferment have largely failed to provide guidance to a new generation

because they tend to focus exclusively on capitalism’s economic aspects, which as Fraser
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notes “they isolate from, and privilege over, other factors.”4 Fraser wants to go beyond the

shortcomings of received theoretical models that have long been accused of economic

reductionism. Such received models focus exclusively on struggles over labor at the point of

production at the expense of oppressions that are due to race, gender, religion,

and sexuality.

3
Fraser, “Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode: For an Expanded Conception of Capitalism,” New Left Review 86 (2014):
55.
4
Ibid., 56.
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Fraser aims to avoid economistic thinking by conceiving of capitalism as an institutional

social order rather than as just an economy. This institutional social order has an economic

front-story that has background conditions of possibility. The front-story is the story of

exploitation that Marx so brilliantly describes—labor is free in the legal sense but torn from

the means of production and ultimately dependent on capital for access to the means of

subsistence. Fraser is inspired by Marx’s explanation of primitive accumulation in Capital

Volume I to explain the back-story. According to Marx, capitalist exploitation had to come

from somewhere. If one were to jump back in time to 15th century England, one would likely

find lots of peasants who were completely unwilling to give up their customary land rights

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to go to work for a wage under extremely precarious conditions. By the 16th century,
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however, one would arrive in the English countryside to find lots of former peasants

working for a wage in agricultural work. What happened, as Fraser puts it, is “a rather
EV
violent story of dispossession and expropriation.”5 The commons were enclosed, the land

was expropriated, and the labor was forced to work for a wage. Exploitation required
PR

expropriation, or violence and theft. Fraser is inspired by David Harvey to argue that

expropriation is an ongoing dynamic that happens alongside exploitation.6 Indeed,

expropriation is a background condition of exploitation, and expropriation takes many

forms.

Capitalism not only needs to steal land in order to exploit workers successfully. It must also

steal reproductive labor, natural resources, and political power. Capitalist economic

5
Ibid., 60.
6
David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

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