Abstract
This chapter will deal with questions about responsibility, agency, and world-framing settings. First, it deals with Iris Young’s conception of collective responsibility with capitalism and ecology and critically explores her shortcomings. Second, Lara discusses Joaquín Valdivielso’s conception of collective responsibility toward ecology, and discusses the failure of this position as well. The chapter argues that Nancy Fraser’s approach represents a third model that helps overcome the shortcomings of the two previous ones and that she is able to articulate a paradigm of agency and collective responsibility with a feminist approach that is strongly articulated within her critique of capitalism. In this way, Lara argues that her project involves setting a new way to look at certain problems related to agency and responsibility.
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Notes
- 1.
Valdivielso’s work bears striking resemblances to the arguments about poverty and the common responsibility developed by Pogge (2008).
- 2.
Fraser has further developed her notion of capitalism as an institutional order as “distinguished from other broad social formations by its specific institutional topography. What characterizes capitalism is a distinctive set of institutional separations: the institutionalized separation of economic production from social reproduction, of human society from non-human nature, and—most relevant here—of the economic from the political. This last division includes the differentiation of economy from polity, of private from public power, of economic from political coercion” (2015, p.162).
- 3.
Fraser argues, “To show how emancipation extends critique, I propose to look more closely at … feminism and anti-imperialism … Consider first, that the social and political arrangements that are embedded in markets can be oppressive in virtue of being hierarchical. In such cases, they entrench status differentials that deny some who are included in principle as members of society the social preconditions for full participation. The classic example is gender hierarchy, which assigns women a lesser status, often akin to that of a male child, and thereby prevents them from participating fully, on a par with men, in social interaction. But one could also cite caste hierarchies, including those premised on racialist ideologies. In such cases, social protections work to the disadvantage of those at the top of the status hierarchy, affording lesser (if any) benefit at the bottom. What they protect, accordingly, is less society per se than social hierarchy” (2011, p.151).
- 4.
Arendt argued that accountability for certain actions requires a consciousness about what has been done. If there is shame, then it is appropriate to speak of guilt.
- 5.
In 1848, Marx and Engels (1964) stated, for example, that “the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of modern industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative state, exclusive political sway” (p. 61). For them this was just a particular case of a general historical fact: “Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another” (p. 95).
- 6.
Between 1845 and 1846, Marx and Engels (1970) argued that “every class which is struggling for mastery, even when its domination, as is the case with the proletariat, postulates the abolition of the old form of society in its entirety and of domination itself, must first conquer for itself political power in order to represent its interest in turn as the general interest, which immediately it is forced to do” (p. 54).
- 7.
In response to their “bourgeois” or liberal critics, Marx et al. (1964) argued, “Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into law for all, a will whose essential character and direction are determined by the economical conditions of existence of your class” (p. 87). They considered as a historical fact that “[t]he ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class” (p. 90). Marx and Engels (1970) wrote widely on the link, based on a theory of domination and social classes, between structural or material conditions and ideology.
- 8.
Sweetshops or the maquila refer to workers who are poorly paid and have no social rights because the countries in which they live do not enforce democratic regulations and laws.
- 9.
- 10.
Fraser was also thinking about Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983) and its relation to the nation-state.
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Lara, M.P. (2017). Feminism, Ecology, and Capitalism: Nancy Fraser’s Contribution to a Radical Notion of Critique as Disclosure. In: Bargu, B., Bottici, C. (eds) Feminism, Capitalism, and Critique. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52386-6_7
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