918506

research-article2020
CRS0010.1177/0896920520918506Critical SociologyCurty

Interview

Critical Sociology

Rethinking Capitalism, Crisis,

1–11
© The Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
and Critique: An Interview sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0896920520918506
https://doi.org/10.1177/0896920520918506
With Nancy Fraser journals.sagepub.com/home/crs

Gaël Curty
Université de Fribourg, Switzerland

Abstract
Nancy Fraser is internationally recognized as one of the most prominent critical theorists of our
time and is highly regarded for her work on feminism and capitalism. In this interview, she sets
out the new conceptions of capitalism, crisis, and critique that she has been developing since her
2014 article “Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode.” She begins by presenting an original conception of
capitalism as an “institutionalized social order,” which includes not only its economic features,
but also its social, ecological, and political background conditions of possibility. After defining
the normative foundations of capitalism and the corresponding boundary struggles to which it
gives rise, she then explores the multiple crises it is currently experiencing. Inspired by Marx’s
tripartite critique, she concludes by proposing a new multi-stranded critique of capitalism, which
combines a functionalist critique of capitalism’s tendencies to crisis with a normative critique of
domination and a political critique of unfreedom.

Keywords
capitalism, crisis, critique, ecology, domination, unfreedom

GC: Gaël Curty

NF: Nancy Fraser

For an Expanded Conception of Capitalism

GC: In your article “Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode,” you develop an expanded conception
of capitalism, crisis, and critique anchored in our present time.1 In your attempt to
renew the conception of capitalism, you define its economic features and its nonmar-
ketized conditions of possibility. What do you see as the main economic characteristics
of capitalism?

Corresponding author:
Gaël Curty, Université de Fribourg, Faculté des Lettres, Département des sciences sociales – Unité sociologie,
Boulevard de Pérolles 90, Fribourg CH-1700, Switzerland.
Email: gael.curty@unifr.ch
2 Critical Sociology 00(0)

NF: The strategy of argument was to begin in an almost traditional or “orthodox” way, that
is, to start with the assumption that capitalism is an economic system whose defining
features can be straightforwardly identified. This part of the argument is not terribly
original; the original part comes a little later, when I try to relate these economic features
of capitalism as an economic system to their background, nonmarketized conditions of
possibility. At the outset, I am really following Marx. I suggest that the defining features
of a capitalist economy, according to him, are, first of all, a class division between those
who own the means of production and those who have been separated from them, and
therefore have only their capacity to work, which they need to sell as a commodity on a
labor market in order to get the means of subsistence. This is the classic class division
between the property-less workers and the owners of the means of production. This in
turn implies a second key feature, the commodification of labor power: the existence of
a market in labor power as the nexus through which these two classes relate, each bring-
ing something that the other needs. The third defining characteristic is capitalism’s ori-
entation toward endless accumulation, what Marx called “capital as self-expanding
value”.2 This simply means plowing back every bit of profit or surplus into the engine to
produce more—not more wealth in the sense of usable consumable goods, but more
capital, more monetized value.3 It is a kind of “thrust” or directionality inherent to a capi-
talist economy which is not found in precapitalist economies. Precapitalist economies, of
course, had markets, some forms of wage labor, and even some people who were sepa-
rated from the means of production, but the drive to endless accumulation is quite spe-
cific to a capitalist economy.

The last point also relates to another specific role of markets in capitalist society: their function as
a means for social decision-making. In addition to creating a market in labor power, i.e., in this
peculiar commodity that people bring to the market in the form of their capacity to work, capital-
ism also marketizes all the major inputs to production: raw materials, energy, credit, or investment
capital. All of these are traded on markets, and each of these markets then becomes a very conse-
quential institution for determining the shape of society. Lots of hugely important decisions are
made through the market rather than through popular deliberation. To take one example, what
happens to the social surplus? Capitalism is a dynamic society, it is very productive, it certainly
expands value in the quantitative sense that is capital, it produces a surplus vis-à-vis where it
started. What happens to the surplus? A democratic society might be expected to use its political
institutions to figure out what to do with it. Do we want to cut back everybody’s work hours and
have a more relaxed pace of life? Do we want to use the surplus to transform the energy basis of
society away from fossil fuels, or do we want to use it to develop a different relation to nature?
There are so many potential uses for the surplus, yet none of those questions are actually on the
political agenda. Instead, they are all decided through market mechanisms, in the process of the
“Juggernaut” of capital expanding and multiplying itself.
So, as I said, those are four characteristics that could define something specific to a capitalist
society. It is when all four of them occur together that you have the main features of a capitalist
economy—at least as it has been understood in the Marxian model.

GC: In addition to these economic components, you stress the dependence of the foreground
economic features of capitalism on its background, nonmarketized social, political, and
ecological conditions of possibility. Could you describe the most important aspects of
the background conditions of possibility of capitalism and the structural divisions asso-
ciated with them?
Curty 3

NF: This is where my argument becomes a bit more original. Up to now, I have simply given
a certain summary of Marx. My next question is what must exist outside what we con-
ventionally think of as the capitalist economy for that economy to be possible? I should
say that in asking this question I was inspired by Marx himself, who raised a similar
question near the end of Volume One of Capital. He notes that he has thus far mapped
the processes and the dynamics of the capitalist economy but not asked where it came
from, where capital came from, how the workers became separated from the means of
production, etc. In other words, there is a whole prior story about what had to happen
in order for this economy to become possible. Marx calls it “primitive accumulation”
and David Harvey has more recently called it “accumulation by dispossession.”4 It is
the basically forcible, and in many cases violent, separation of peasants and others from
their land, tools, etc., which created both the fund of capital and the mass of property-
less people that allowed the whole system to get going. Inspired by Marx, I asked
myself what other background conditions of possibility have to be in place for this
foreground story about the economy to get going.

As you noted, I identified three such background conditions. I called the first, following feminist
theory, social reproduction as distinguished from economic production. The sphere of social repro-
duction includes the whole field of activities that forms human bonds and makes up society—and
more specifically produces new generations that are going to be “the labor power that capital
needs.” This leads to the well-known story about the absolutely indispensable necessity of house-
work, of child bearing and rearing, of cooking, of cleaning and caring for the members of the
household, both those who are in the labor force and the new generation that is eventually going to
take their place.
That is a familiar story. However, I wanted to expand this idea of social reproduction beyond
domestic labor alone because not all of these activities take place in the household: it also involves
the institutions of schooling and education, and, in some communities, churches, neighborhood
associations, and child-care facilities. Social reproduction activities go on well beyond the house-
hold. As should already be clear, however, a lot of it is performed by women so that is coded as
“feminine activity,” even though men do some of it. It therefore has a gendered subtext, a gendered
quality. This, then, is simply the first part of a restatement of a familiar feminist argument: com-
modity production in the official capitalist economy cannot occur without social reproduction,
much of it unwaged activity, much—if not all—of it performed by women, some of it in the house-
hold, some of it elsewhere.
That is the first condition, and it indeed implies an institutional division. In my view, it is a
structural feature of capitalist societies that they constitute a sphere of social reproduction as sepa-
rated and different from the sphere of economic production. This is an innovation of capitalism
because these spheres were much more merged or weakly differentiated in previous societies. In
capitalism, by contrast, there is an intense, sharp separation of the paid workplace from the home,
the factory from the living space. Of course, it is a gendered separation: one domain is associated
with men, the other with women. This is a sort of structural linchpin of gender dominance and
subordination. Seen this way, it now starts to emerge not as something accidental, but as a struc-
tural feature of capitalist society built into the categorical and institutional division between social
reproduction and economic commodity production.
The second condition is nature, what we call the environment or ecology. Commodity production
in a capitalist economy is unimaginable without natural inputs—without raw materials and without
energy inputs. At the other end of the economic process, conversely, the production or consumption
of commodities is unimaginable without nature at the output side as a sink to absorb the waste,
4 Critical Sociology 00(0)

whether in the form of carbon emissions or anything else. Capitalism therefore takes absolutely for
granted that there is a sustainable, self-reproducing natural ecosystem that the economy relies on for
inputs and outputs. It is another absolutely necessary background condition for it. Here again, I think
we have a very strong, intensified division and separation that capitalism introduces between nature,
which is understood as somehow inert and given, ahistorical and simply material, and the realm of
the human, which is conceived as historical, spiritual, and economic. The human versus nature divi-
sion is not new with capitalism but is intensified, sharpened, and strengthened. Again, I think it is
part of the structure of a capitalist social order to have sharply separated the human realm of value
and economic production from the natural background that makes it possible.
The third condition is public power. The foreground capitalist economy is inconceivable in the
absence of a public power that can provide the order that markets need and the background of trust
of a legal order that entrenches, guarantees, and protects property rights. This includes, of course,
the legal system but also the repressive apparatus—the police, military, etc. The history of primi-
tive accumulation, the constitution of capitalism, and the violent dispossession of people it
entailed—as well as their resistance to it—illustrate a coercive or oppressive dimension that is
quite fundamental to capitalism. You can think of this public power, first of all, at the level of the
territorial state, which is the most familiar form to most of us and the form in which it has most
commonly been organized in the history of capitalism. As we know, the history of capitalism and
the history of the constitution of the modern state are intertwined, because it is the modern state
that created through the legal system the economic space for market transactions to take place and
also created and guaranteed money, which is another absolutely crucial function. However, I am
very influenced by world-system theory and by the importance of the geopolitical or interstate
level. There are public or at least quasi-public powers at the geopolitical level as well that pacify
the international space and allow cross-border economic transactions and processes which have
been fundamental to capitalism from its very beginning. As world-systems theory emphasizes,
there is an additional institutional division and separation: that between the economy and polity. It
is, in a sense, another capitalist innovation to separate the two: they were not separated in feudal-
ism, for example. The separation between the domestic and the international, between the core and
the periphery are all different ways of imagining the larger space in which the modern territorial
state is embedded, and that permits it and capital to interact across borders.
All in all, then, there are three main background conditions for the possibility of the foreground
capitalist economy: social reproduction, ecology or nature, and public power. Each of the background
conditions gives rise to a form of institutional separation: “social reproduction versus economic pro-
duction,” “nature versus human,” and “polity versus economy.” In my article, I try to give a picture
of those conditions and the separations to which they lead, so as to resituate what we think of as a
capitalist economy in relation to these institutionalized background conditions of possibility.

GC: In contrast to theoretical perspectives, which conceive of capitalism as an economic

system or as a form of ethical life, you have developed an expanded conception of
capitalism as an “institutionalized social order” premised on the separation between
economy and social reproduction, between nature and the human, and between polity
and economy. Could you set out this expanded conception of capitalism as an institu-
tionalized social order in more detail and explain what was the main theoretical influ-
ence which led you to elaborate this conception?
NF: Let me first say something about how that idea differs from the other notions you
mentioned, “economic system” and “form of ethical life.” As I said, the argument
starts out with our defining capitalism as an economic system, but, recognizing that
this is not enough, moves to ask what makes that kind of system possible and what are