[Debate] Ecuador Yasuni ITT Trust Fund

Thu Aug 18 22:20:41 BST 2011

It seems to me that some people speak of "real democracy" because they
know enough to realize that the institutions of liberal democracy in
the West have more or less been captured by the forces that are
against them, they believe, rightly or wrongly, that they can never
capture them and make them work for them, and yet they do not know
what they want instead.  So, the term "real democracy" is a
placeholder name, whose content is yet to be discovered.

As for women, Nancy Fraser, et al. are correct to point out
"second-wave feminism has unwittingly supplied a key element of what
Boltanski and Chiapello call the New Spirit, 'Le Nouvel esprit du
capitalisme.'"  This is one of the missing lines of inquiry in a lot
of Marxists' work on "financialization."

<http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/fraser030310.html>
Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History
by Nancy Fraser

This is an exercise in historicization.  This lecture concerns the
relation between feminism, the movements of second-wave feminism, and
the recent history of capitalism.  My aim is to try to shed some light
on where the feminist movement stands today in the current crisis of
capitalism.

So, I want to tell a story that has essentially three parts, each of
which corresponds to a moment in a recent history of capitalism.  The
first moment concerns the beginnings of second-wave feminism in the
context of what I'm going to call "state-organized capitalism," and
here I want to chart the emergence of second-wave feminism out of the
anti-imperialist New Left, posing a radical challenge to the pervasive
androcentrism and sexism of state-organized capitalism.  That's the
first moment.

Second, I want to look at the process of feminism's subsequent
development in a dramatically changed social context of rising
neoliberalism.  Here, I want to look not only at the movement's
undeniable and extraordinary successes but also at the disturbing
convergence of some of its ideals with the demands of this new form of
capitalism, post-Fordist, disorganized, transnational.  Here, I want
to pose the question whether second-wave feminism has unwittingly
supplied a key element of what Boltanski and Chiapello call the New
Spirit, "Le Nouvel esprit du capitalisme."

Finally, in a third moment, I want to consider a possible
reorientation of feminism today in the present context of capitalist
crisis and political realignment at least in the United States, which
could -- let me emphasize could, it's not guaranteed, but could --
mark the beginnings of a shift away from neoliberalism to some new
form of social organization.  So, in this third moment, I want to
examine the prospects for reactivating feminism's emancipatory promise
in a world that is now being rocked by the twin crises.

OK, so, three moments in the history of capitalism -- state-organized
capitalism, neoliberalism, and the present crisis of capitalism.  How
can we understand the recent history of feminism in relation to each
of those three moments?  In a nutshell, I want to give you a sort of
summary of this argument, my hypothesis here.  I'm going to argue that
what was truly new about the second wave was the way in which it wove
together, in a critique of androcentric state-organized capitalism,
what we can today understand as three analytically distinct dimensions
of gender injustice: an economic dimension, a cultural dimension, and,
now I want to add, an additional third political dimension.
Second-wave feminism, in other words, subjected state-organized
capitalism to a wide-ranging, multi-faceted scrutiny in which those
three dimensions of critique intermingled freely.  In this way,
feminists generated a critique that was simultaneously ramified and
systematic.  In the ensuing decades, however -- this corresponds to my
second moment, the neoliberal moment -- the three dimensions of
critique became separated -- from one another and, equally
importantly, from the critique of capitalism.  With the fragmentation
of the feminist critique came the selective incorporation and partial
recuperation of some of its strands by neoliberalism.  Split off from
one another, in other words, and from the societal critique, the
anti-capitalist critique that had integrated them, second-wave hopes
were conscripted in the service of the project that was deeply at odds
with the larger, holistic feminist vision of a just society.  In a
fine instance of what I'm calling here the cunning of history, utopian
desires found a second life as currents that legitimated the
transition to a new form of capitalism.  This is the
Boltanski-Chiapello argument but now adapted to this feminist
argument.

So, I'm going to then elaborate this argument, as I said in three
steps -- first by reconstructing the second-wave feminist critique of
androcentric state-organized capitalism as integrating concerns that I
associate today with three perspectives of justice, which I have
called redistribution, recognition, and representation.  Secondly, I
want to sketch the coming apart of that constellation and the
selective enlistment of some of its strands to legitimate neoliberal
capitalism.  And, third, I want to try to weigh the prospects of
recovering feminism's emancipatory promise today, in this present
moment of economic crisis and possible political opening.

Nancy Fraser is Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor of Political and
Social Science at the New School for Social Research.  This lecture
was delivered at the conference of the French Association of Sociology
in Paris in April 2009.  The text above is an edited partial
transcript of the lecture.  See, also, Nancy Fraser, "Feminism,
Capitalism and the Cunning of History" (New Left Review 56,
March-April 2009).

On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 4:37 PM, Peter Waterman
<peterwaterman1936 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yoshie:
>
> Curious that women are dragged in at the end of your argument to justify
> your 'productive dialectic'.
>
> Curious because it was women's movements and (certain) feminisms that
> largely pioneered, from the 1970s, the notion that autonomous social
> movements have priority in the dialectic of social emancipation. And
> that the most productive dialectic was that between the various social
> movements.
>
> Previously, in the labour and socialist movements, there was, rather, a
> hierarchy in which movements were there but at the bottom, with the
> objective of capturing the commanding heights, led by the political
> parties. Or, rather, The Party. Which would then, from the centre
> exercise the dictatorship of the proletariat. Or, in the
> social-democratic version, implement the welfare state. Well, we all
> know what went wrong with these two or three (the third being the
> radical-nationalist/populist) models.
>
> Increasingly, now, the state and the party - the State and the Party -
> are seen less as solutions than as problems, with priority given to
> autonomous social movements negotiating amongst themselves and imposing
> themselves on parties and states. And, in the best case scenario,
> reducing the power of state (and inter-state bodies) and capital (which
> does not figure in your dialectic).
>
> This new dialectic is foreshadowed by what has been taking place in city
> squares, everywhere from Iceland to Israel, Argentina to India. In this
> new scenario, the party (if to be of any use to social emancipation)
> should be a rearguard supporting the withering away of the state, and
> the  power of capital.
>
> So it remains unclear to me, Yoshie, what you have learned from the new
> social movements of the 1970s and the 'real democracy' movements of the
> present day and especially from the women's movement and feminism.
>
> So far your women sound more like those leading liberal-feminist movements.
>
> PeterW
>
>
>
> On 18-8-2011 20:44, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>> I believe there should be a productive rather than counter-productive
>> dialectic among social movements, political parties, states, and
>> blocks of states.  Social movements are indispensable, but they alone
>> cannot provide what people, especially women, need.
>>
>> On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 2:30 PM, Peter Waterman
>> <peterwaterman1936 at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>> Yoshie:
>>>
>>> Oh! Do you say this because you believe states and blocs to be the
>>> subjects of history and the force for social emancipation?
>>>
>>> I have not been following the Ecuadorian process in detail but my
>>> impression is that the social movements in Ecuador are also learning new
>>> lessons and teaching new ideas that some of us in the Northern zone of
>>> the Marxist sphere could well learn from.
>>>
>>> Pw
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On 18-8-2011 20:24, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>>>> I doubt that
>>>> Yasuni could serve as more than an illustration that there is no
>>>> willingness on the part of the North to pay its climate debt to the
>>>> South.
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>>
>>
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-- 
Yoshie Furuhashi
<http://mrzine.org/>