Rethinking Capitalism, Stabilizing the Critique

This paper offers a critique of Nancy Fraser’s expanded conception of capitalism as an institutional social order. Fraser builds a social-theoretical basis for thinking about “non-economic” struggles over social reproduction, the degradation of nature, and state power as central to a progressive, anti-capitalist political agenda. Rather than only challenging capital at the point of production, as the classical Marxist tradition was wont to do, Fraser wants anti-capitalism without economic reductionism. Fraser’s is also a crisis theory of capitalism, which generates a theory of social change as well as a normative critique. The main question is methodological and can be summed up as, “Is less perhaps more?” On this basis, it argues that stability may be a better starting point than crisis, which raises more fundamental normative problems with the system than the ones that Fraser captures.