Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory
by Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi
(Polity, £17.99)

OVERLY abstract and with few historical illustrations of its generalisations, Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi nevertheless raise points of interest as they debate the definition of capitalism.

Taking a page or so in turn, they accept the basic Marxist assumptions of private ownership of the means of production, a free labour market and capital accumulation premised on the expansion of capital, with the system geared towards making profit instead of satisfying needs.

They see maintenance of the flow of wage labour into the factory for profit-making in production of commodities as dependent on, and subsidised by, unwaged labour in the household — such unpaid labour is necessary for “productive” labour.

Both authors are socialist-feminist professors in social sciences and they point out that the distinction is strongly gendered, with social reproduction associated with women and production associated with men.

European “housewifeitis,” they maintain, is related to capitalism’s entwinement with colonialism and racism — expropriation is accumulation by other means. But, while exploitation transfers value to capital under the guise of free contractual exchange, expropriation does away with the niceties in favour of brutal confiscation of lands, animals, minerals, reproductive capacities and children.                                                                                                                

The book remains within the bounds of the academically based Critical Theory, concerned with the relation between a system of production and the system of beliefs that runs in parallel with it. It claims that ideology, which according to Marx was totally explicable through the underlying system of production, has to be analysed in its own respect and as a non-economically reducible form of expression of human rationality.

This confronts the Marxist tradition that class struggle is the most characteristic and potentially liberating form of conflict in, and deeply anchored to, capitalist society.

The authors conclude that the people without property who perform socially necessary work reproducing the labour power on which exploitation depends are “workers,” whose struggles should count as class struggles and the same applies to many other categories of workers.

That is true. But feminism today is orientated towards fighting for the same rights and opportunities as men rather than on the need for socialism.

The authors would have performed a more useful service if they had discussed, on the lines of Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State questions such as the monogamous family as an economic unit at the heart of class society and the need for the women’s movement to set its sights on the revolutionary reconstruction of society.