Outliving capital

Abstract

This text comments on Nancy Fraser’s most recent work, dedicated to the formulation of a new and promising form of critique of capitalism. Three potentially problematic aspects of this perspective are addressed. First, it seems to oscillate between two incompatible standpoints: either the totality of modern society’s political, social reproductive and natural contradictions is reduced to contradictions of capitalism, or an important part of such destabilizing tendencies is neglected. Second, in this framework the contradictions of capitalism appear as ills not only from the viewpoint of the reproduction of such institutional order, but also from the perspective of the reproduction of human society in general – which raises the question of which social ontology could substantiate this diagnosis. Third, opposing the view of capitalism as a reified form of ethical life, Fraser does not take into account the articulations between the normative and ontological differentiation of modern societies and pervasive processes of reification, the analysis of which is outlined at the end of this commentary.