In the framework of the Benjamin Lectures – and the associated Benjamin Chair at the Humanities and Social Change Center Berlin – a distinguished philosopher is invited each year, to present the broader public with current debates on key social and political issues. In 2022, Nancy Fraser served as Benjamin Chair. The lectures took place on the 14th, 15th and 16th of June 2022 (6-8 p.m.) at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt.

June 14th – Gender, Race, and Class through the Lens of Labor: A Post-Intersectional Analysis of Capitalist Society

In these dark times, many who remain committed to social justice sense the need to think big. Dissatisfied with single-issue, identity-based campaigns, they seek larger political paradigms that connect the disparate concerns and dispersed struggles of multiple movements. The term “intersectionality,” hugely popular among feminists and anti-racists, is one important marker of this aspiration.

This lecture aims to advance that integrative project. Returning to large-scale social theorizing, I propose an account of capitalist society that discloses the hidden ties between gender, race, and class. These I trace through the lens of labor, broadly conceived. Departing from received understandings, I argue that capitalist society relies on three analytically distinct types of labor. The first and most familiar is exploited labor, performed by free workers in exchange for wages in for-profit enterprises. Often equated with labor as such and, thus, with “the working class,” exploited labor would not be possible, or profitable, absent the two other types: expropriated labor – unpaid or under-paid and coercively extracted from unfree or dependent subjects who are usually racialized; and the externalized labor of care or social reproduction – chronically undervalued, often invisible, and largely performed by women. By theorizing the entwinement in capitalist society of these “three faces of labor,” this lecture suggests a way of thinking gender, race, and class together, within a common frame.

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