Ten Years After 1989
Fraser, Nancy
IN 1990 I spoke at a Chicago teach-in about the possibility that something genuinely new and emancipatory might emerge from the wreck of Soviet communism. I explained that the democratic...
...Nor had I fully grasped the traumatizing effects of communism—in destroying civil society, deforming political culture, and discrediting the socialist project...
...Yet unexpectedly rid of the Soviet albatross, Western leftists might have found the moment propitious...
...NANCY FRASER is professor of politics and philosophy in the graduate faculty of the New School for Social Research...
...In civil society, meanwhile, an impressive array of progressive movements was expressing the diversity and complexity of life under postindustrial capitalism...
...Nevertheless, I reject the suggestion of some left colleagues that one should wash one's hands of "identity politics...
...For me, accordingly, the principal lesson of postcommunism is the need to retrieve and update what remains unsurpassable in the socialist vision...
...It would be also to ignore, and thus to reproduce, socialism's historic presumption of monoculturalism and hence its complicity with the communitarianism of the majority...
...Socialism, however, cannot be so easily repressed...
...Far from opening the way for innovative projects aimed at combining markets with egalitarian redistribution, social planning with democratic control, the Soviet collapse led at its best to the consolidation of liberal democracies in Central Europe...
...And I stressed that while East and Central Europeans would doubtless incorporate some Western legal and political forms as they reconstructed their societies, we in the capitalist world had much to learn from them as well...
...For me, accordingly, the greatest disappointment of the preceding decade was the fading away of an entire grammar of social conflict...
...What happened, alas, was nothing of the sort...
...In the early nineties, moreover, progressive postindustrial actors spoke increasingly of "coalition politics" and "radical democracy," as if hungry for some larger vision around which to coalesce...
...I suggested, in short, that the collapse of communism presented a historic opportunity to design a "third way...
...It had long been clear that socialism could only be conceived as a radicalization, not a repudiation, of liberal democracy, grounded on the priority of civil liberties, toleration, and democratic forms of public culture...
...On the contrary, the demise of communism seemed only to speed the process of neoliberal globalization, now operating largely under nominally social democratic auspices...
...Far from serving to reformulate the socialist idea, postindustrial movement politics effectively displaced it...
...12 DISSENT / Fall 1999...
...The subsequent hijacking of that phrase by Tony Blair sums up a decade's worth of unfulfilled expectations...
...Her Adding Insult to Injury: Social Justice and the Politics of Recognition is forthcoming from Verso...
...To be sure, that project needed a thorough reformulation...
...Given such historic burdens, it was naive to expect an easy transition out of communism, let alone one to democratic socialism...
...Finally, it would have been necessary to overcome socialism's historic fixation on the state, looking instead to non-state forms of collective ownership and to the associative capacities of civil society, while also responding to transnational processes that are currently destabilizing the framework of the nation-state...
...However initially disappointing, the outcomes in East-Central Europe seem understandable in hindsight...
...To jettison the politics of recognition tout court would be to resurrect the economism and narrow class-based vision of politics that postindustrial capitalism has itself rendered obsolete...
...A reformulated democratic socialism might have provided that vision...
...In its place appeared a "postsocialist" worldview, centered on claims for the recognition of difference...
...Having (belatedly) learned that liberalism was not really "presocialist," we need now to appreciate that multiculturalism is not really "postsocialist...
...The socialist worldview, centered on the reorganization of labor and the redistribution of wealth, ceased to supply the terms of political contestation—not only in East-Central Europe but throughout the world...
...To be sure, some proponents of "recognition" remain interested in economic organization...
...In 1990 I had not adequately reckoned with the authoritarian structures and ethnochauvinist traditions that have impeded liberal efforts to democratize the region at least since the French Revolution...
...For another, they respond to processes of cultural hybridization propelled by accelerated migration and global media flows...
...In addition, socialism would DISSENT / Fall 1999 11 have had to jettison longstanding habits of class essentialism and economism so as to encompass the breadth of postindustrial political life, accommodating the full panoply of collective subjects (not just "workers" but also women, gays and lesbians, indigenous peoples, and ethnic, linguistic, and religious minorities) and the rich plurality of political arenas (not just labor but also ecology, sexuality, media, violence, reproduction, multiculturalism...
...For one thing, recognition conflicts are proliferating at precisely the moment when an aggressively globalizing capitalism is increasingly marketizing social relations and exacerbating economic inequality...
...At its worst it brought casino capitalism and Mafia-style politics to Russia, and fascism and "ethnic cleansing" to the Balkans...
...What remains far less comprehensible, however, and therefore still bitterly disappointing, is the collapse of the socialist project in the West...
...After all, the demise of communism coincided with the beginnings of the breakdown of the conservative political hegemony that had gripped Western Europe and North America throughout the 1980s...
...REFORMULATING socialism was clearly no easy task...
...Only then will it be possible to learn from the past while also remaining open to the future...
...But the general tendency of the time is less to bring the two political currents together than to repress the socialist tradition altogether...
...In Western Europe and North America, meanwhile, no intimations of democratic socialism appeared...
...Rejecting economism and etatism, while seeking to democratize culture and everyday life, their projects could have been seen to dovetail with a reformulated democratic socialism...
...As I see it, the task is to integrate the emancipatory kernel of that vision with the historic advances of liberal democracy, on the one hand, and those of an emerging "politics of recognition," on the other...
...I explained that the democratic deficits and economic failures of that social system in no way discredited the idea of democratic socialism...
...Thus, recognition struggles can neither be understood nor resolved in isolation from political economy...
Vol. 46 • September 1999 • No. 4
