The Fortunes of Feminism. Nancy Fraser

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ they tend to “retreat” into alternative communities and “particularistic” identities, thereby effectively renouncing the third element of decolonization and leaving the (official) economic and state systems unchecked. In this respect, they are more symptomatic than emancipatory, as they express the identity disturbances caused by colonization. The feminist movement, on the other hand, represents something of an anomaly. For it alone is “offensive,” aiming to “conquer new territory”; and it alone retains links to historic liberation movements. In principle, then, feminism remains rooted in “universalist morality.” Yet it is linked to resistance movements by an element of “particularism.” And it tends, at times, to “retreat” into identities and communities organized around the natural category of biological sex.³⁷

      What are the critical insights and blind spots of this account of the dynamics of welfare-state capitalism? To what extent does it serve the self-clarification of the struggles and wishes of contemporary women? I shall take up the six theses one by one.

      1) Habermas’s first thesis is straightforward and unobjectionable. Clearly, the welfare state does engage in crisis management and does partially overcome the separation of public and private at the level of systems.

      2) Habermas’s second thesis contains some important insights. Clearly, welfare-state capitalism does inflate the consumer role and deflate the citizen role, reducing the latter essentially to voting—and, we should add, to soldiering. Moreover, the welfare state does indeed increasingly position its subjects as clients. However, Habermas again fails to see the gender subtext of these developments. He fails to see that the new client role has a gender, that it is a paradigmatically feminine role. He overlooks the reality that it is overwhelmingly women who are the clients of the welfare state: especially older women, poor women, and single women with children. He overlooks, in addition, the fact that many welfare systems are internally dualized and gendered. They include two basic kinds of programs: “masculine” ones tied to primary labor-force participation and designed to benefit principal breadwinners; and “feminine” ones oriented to what are understood as domestic “failures,” that is, to families without a male breadwinner. Not surprisingly, these two welfare subsystems are separate and unequal. Clients of feminine programs—almost exclusively women and their children—are positioned in a distinctive, feminizing fashion as the “negatives of possessive individuals”: they are largely excluded from the market both as workers and as consumers and are familialized, that is, made to claim benefits not as individuals but as members of “defective” households. They are also stigmatized, denied rights, subjected to surveillance and administrative harassment, and generally made into abject dependents of state bureaucracies.³⁸ But this means that the rise of the client role in welfare-state capitalism has a more complex meaning than Habermas allows. It is not only a change in the link between system and lifeworld institutions. It is also a change in the character of male dominance, a shift, in Carol Brown’s phrase, “from private patriarchy to public patriarchy.”³⁹

      3) This gives a rather different twist to the meaning of Habermas’s third thesis. It suggests that he is right about the “ambivalence” of welfare-state capitalism, but not quite and not only in the way he thought. It suggests that welfare measures do have a positive side insofar as they reduce women’s dependence on an individual male breadwinner. But they also have a negative side insofar as they substitute dependence on a patriarchal and androcentric state bureaucracy. The benefits provided are, as Habermas says, “system-conforming” ones. But the system they conform to is not adequately characterized as the system of the official, state-regulated capitalist economy. It is also the system of male dominance that extends even to the sociocultural lifeworld. In other words, the ambivalence here does not only stem, as Habermas implies, from the fact that the role of client carries effects of “reification.” It stems also from the fact that this role, qua feminine role, perpetuates in a new, let us say modernized and rationalized form, women’s subordination. Or so Habermas’s third thesis might be rewritten in a feminist critical theory—without, of course, abandoning his insights into the ways in which welfare bureaucracies and therapeutocracies disempower clients by preempting their capacities to interpret their own needs, experiences, and life-problems.

      4) Habermas’s fourth thesis, by contrast, is not so easily rewritten. This thesis states that welfare reforms of, for example, the domestic sphere are more ambivalent than reforms of the paid workplace. This is true empirically in the sense I have just described. But it is due to the patriarchal character of welfare systems, not to the inherently symbolic character of lifeworld institutions, as Habermas claims. His claim depends on two assumptions I have already challenged. First, it depends on the natural kinds interpretation of the distinction between symbolic and material reproduction activities, i.e., on the false assumption that childrearing is inherently more symbolic and less material than other work. And second, it depends upon the absolute differences interpretation of the system vs. socially integrated contexts distinction, i.e., on the false assumption that money and power are not already entrenched in the internal dynamics of the family. But once we repudiate these assumptions, then there is no categorial, as opposed to empirical, basis for differentially evaluating the two kinds of reforms. If it is basically progressive that paid workers acquire the means to confront their employers strategically and match power against power, right against right, then it must be just as basically progressive in principle that women acquire similar means to similar ends in the politics of familial and personal life. And if it is “pathological” that, in the course of achieving a better balance of power in familial and personal life, women become clients of state bureaucracies, then it must be just as “pathological” in principle that, in the course of achieving a similar end at paid work, paid workers, too, become clients, which does not alter the fact that in actuality they become two different sorts of clients. But of course the real point is that the term “pathological” is misused here insofar as it supposes the untenable assumption that childrearing and other work are asymmetrical with respect to system integration.

      5) This also sheds new light on Habermas’s fifth thesis, which states that welfare-state capitalism inaugurates an inner colonization of the lifeworld by systems. This claim depends on three assumptions. The first two of these are the two just rejected, namely, the natural kinds interpretation of the distinction between symbolic and material reproduction activities and the assumed virginity of the domestic sphere with respect to money and power. The third assumption is that the basic vector of motion in late capitalist society is from state-regulated economy to lifeworld and not vice versa. But the feminine gender subtext of the client role contradicts this assumption. It suggests that even in late capitalism the norms and meanings of gender identity continue to channel the influence of the lifeworld onto systems. These norms continue to structure the state-regulated economy, as the persistence, indeed exacerbation, of labor-force segmentation according to sex shows.⁴⁰ And these norms also structure state administration, as the gender segmentation of US and European social-welfare systems shows.⁴¹ Thus, it is not the case that in late capitalism “system intrusions” detach life contexts from “value-orientations per se.” On the contrary, welfare capitalism simply uses other means to uphold the familiar “normatively secured consensus” concerning male dominance and female subordination. But Habermas’s theory overlooks this countermotion from lifeworld to system. Thus, it posits the evil of welfare-state capitalism as a general and indiscriminate reification. So it fails to account for the fact that it is disproportionately women who suffer the effects of bureaucratization and monetarization—and for the fact that, viewed structurally, bureaucratization and monetarization are, among other things, instruments of women’s subordination.

      6) This entails the revision, as well, of Habermas’s sixth thesis, concerning the causes, character, and emancipatory potential of social movements, including feminism, in late capitalist societies. Since these issues are so central to the concerns of this paper, they warrant a more extended discussion.

      Habermas explains the existence and character of new social movements, including feminism, in terms of colonization—that is, in terms of the intrusion of system-integration mechanisms into symbolic reproduction spheres and the consequent erosion and desiccation СКАЧАТЬ