Radical Offspring

1. Introduction

My definition of “radical” emerges from my own personal history. I cut my intellectual teeth on an essay that grew out of early debates within the Union for Radical Political Economics that Marlene Kim (2018) has beautifully recounted, Heidi Hartmann’s “Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union,” which has been cited more than 3,000 times since first published in 1979. One of my first published articles was a parallel essay entitled “The Unhappy Marriage of Capitalism and Patriarchy” (Ferguson and Folbre 1981). Marriage now seems an outdated metaphor, but the contentious pairings of Marxism and feminism, class and gender, and capitalism and patriarchy have generated radical offspring.

Some poetic justice has become apparent along the way. Socialist feminist economists who felt constricted by a narrow focus on the internal dynamics of the capitalist system were challenged in turn by those unhappy with a “dual-systems” approach. Constructs like “patriarchal capitalism” and “capitalist patriarchy” implied that gender and class cohabited the same level of analysis, while other inequalities took a less material, more ideological, even derivative form. The terminology itself derogated the economic significance of race, ethnicity, citizenship, sexuality, and a host of other dimensions of group identity that are more often associated with political or cultural oppression rather than economic exploitation.

It has taken me a long time to embrace and elaborate a broader approach, an intersectional political economy aligned with both stratification economics and the emerging field of conflict theory. In this brief essay, I describe the incubation of this approach in the pages of the Review of Radical Political Economics as an effort to develop what might be termed a class analysis of nonclass inequalities—extension of the concept of exploitation beyond the appropriation of surplus value. A radical critique of social institutions should be based on opposition to all forms of arbitrary power that allow unfair appropriation of resources, including human time and effort. It must also go beyond an idealistic stance to a realistic consideration of the potential to develop effective coalitions for progressive change.

2. Incubation

In her essay “What’s Radical about [Feminist] Radical Political Economy,” Jennifer Cohen highlights attention to processes of social reproduction and care provision that include unpaid work (2018). Her comprehensive account enables me to focus on another distinct, though related, issue: the conceptualization of collective identity and conflict—more pointedly, Whose identity? Which conflict? Here, I part ways with Marxist feminism.

Feminist scholars coming from the Marxian tradition tend to analyze processes of social reproduction in class-centric terms, describing employers as the primary beneficiaries of family commitments that lower the cost of producing labor power. This was built into the early Wages for Housework slogan and comes through very clearly in Sylvia Federici’s account of the transition to capitalism in Europe, depicting capitalists as inventors of patriarchal practices such as witch hunts (2004). Fast-forwarding to the US economy today, Katherine Moos provides detailed estimates of the changing distribution of the costs of social reproduction between employers and workers (2021). The riveting polemic titled The Care Manifesto points its most accusatory finger at capitalism, with little attention to the precapitalist antecedents of patriarchal institutions (Chatzidakis et al. 2020; Folbre 2021a).

None of these accounts ignore nondirectly-class-related issues: sexism, racism, colonialism, and homophobia often enter the narratives. Yet these phenomena are typically subsidiary to economic analysis of capitalist dynamics, and their relevance derives largely from the ways in which they impede the development of class consciousness. The common derogation of the term “identity politics” on the left implies that it is a form of false consciousness (for an inspired polemic on this topic, see Walters 2018). Marxist economists generally insist that the concept of exploitation should be reserved for class dynamics alone (Chibber and Veneziani 2021).

As I argue in my recent book, The Rise and Decline of Patriarchal Systems (2021b), a more nuanced picture of collective conflict has long been visible in the Marxian theory of collective conflict, deeply embedded in a term that Marx devised, and Lenin often deployed: the “aristocracy of labor.” Andre Gunder Frank (1967) elaborated in detail on the tensions between rich countries and poor ones overlaying the class divisions within them. As the Marxist sociologist Erik Olin Wright made plain in 1968, professional/managerial workers often find themselves in contradictory class locations. Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism, first published in 1983, argued that racial capitalism extracted economic value from the racial/ethnic identity of subordinated groups (2005).

The term “racial capitalism” obviously raises the same question as “patriarchal capitalism”; movement from a single-system to a dual-systems label implies a new ranking of priorities. It hardly seems incidental that African American and Latinx women were among the first to challenge such ranking, introducing the term “intersectionality” to picture the coexistence of many different dimensions of group-based inequality (Crenshaw 1990; Collins 1990, 2019; Romero 2017). This approach is closely linked to critical race theory, which explicitly analyzes race-based exploitation.

Yet it also invites consideration of a variety of forms of inequality. Kimberlé Crenshaw (2015) notes that intersectionality is an “analytic sensibility, a way of thinking about identity and its relationship to power.” It reaches beyond race/ethnicity, gender, and class to socially assigned identities based on categories such as sexual orientation and citizenship. Most radical economists have been slower than sociologists to move beyond a class-centric analysis, perhaps because the Marxian definition of exploitation focuses on the extraction of surplus value in wage employment (relative lack of diversity in the economics profession may also be relevant). However, critical race theory is deeply embedded in the stratification economics approach developed by William Darity (2022) and others.

Also, traces of intersectionality are evident in the pages of the Review of Radical Political Economics even before the year 2000. For instance, Evelyn Nakano Glynn (1985) explored “racial ethnic women’s labor,” and Randy Albelda (1985) described labor market segregation by both gender and race. Rhonda Williams (1987) explored dynamic interactions of class and race (1987). Robert Cherry (1991) examined tensions between corporate profitability created by “struggles against patriarchy and Jim Crow.” Rhonda Gottlieb (1984) and Julie Matthaei (1995) outlined radical analyses of sexuality. More recently, explicit critiques of heteronormativity have been published (Nguyen 2023). Articles like these set the stage for a major paradigm shift.

3. Cry, Baby, Cry

Most radical economists of my generation have a strong moral commitment to human rights and a visceral dislike of oppressive inequalities. They have welcomed research on gender, race/ethnicity, sexuality, citizenship, and other dimensions of socially assigned group membership as a vital descriptive enterprise, even when they were not, themselves, active participants in this enterprise. What have caught many of them by surprise are the theoretical and political implications of looking beyond class, narrowly defined as relationship to the means of capitalist production.

What about control over the means of reproduction, including women’s bodies and women’s time (Goldberg 2009)? Attention to determinants of fertility and mortality brings demography directly into political economy. Neoclassical economists still focus on models of individual utility maximization that largely ignore social and political constraints. Feminist political economy examines constellations of institutional power that limit reproductive choice—an issue that recently gained urgency as a result of the US Supreme Court’s nullification of a constitutional right to abortion.

The very cultural construction of gender seems designed to enforce a symbolic division of labor that many individuals find constrictive, leading them to reject traditional definitions of femininity and masculinity, or to insist on being treated as nonbinary. The normative pressures that enforce androcentric and heteronormative attitudes are economically as well as socially relevant. They affect opportunities for paid employment and the division of unpaid labor in the home. They also influence macroeconomic outcomes, such as below-replacement fertility rates.

Issues of control over bodies and sexualities cannot be reduced to economic costs and benefits. Yet many on the Left continue to ignore their economic dimensions. An otherwise compelling account of the huge protests in Iran against the murder of Mahsa Amini describes it as a movement of “liberation from gender, social, and economic oppression” (Ghandehari 2022). How exactly does economic oppression differ from gender and social oppression? Is gender oppression based in traditional attitudes that are economically irrational (false consciousness), or do the mullahs of Iran extract some specific benefits from patriarchal power? These possibilities are not mutually exclusive, but feminist theory insists on more explicit consideration of the latter.

Traditional Marxian theory makes a sharp distinction between oppression and exploitation. An intersectional perspective, by contrast, suggests that these two almost always go together. Economic benefits cannot be reduced to the extraction of surplus value—they also reside in exclusion from privileges that are harder to quantify in money terms, such as discrimination on the basis of gender, race/ethnicity, sexuality, and citizenship. Privileges also reside in the inheritance of tangible and intangible assets, in opportunities to offload private costs into the public environment and avoidance of responsibilities to help pay for the costs of developing human capabilities and caring for dependents.

Economic systems rely on systems of reproduction and production that require cooperation, but the gains from cooperation are seldom equally shared. Analysis of cooperative conflict and coerced cooperation invites consideration of complex forms of individual and collective bargaining in which social institutions play a central role as both cause and effect of collective conflict (Folbre 2021a, 2021b). The complexity of existing hierarchies helps explain their resistance to change: If economic privilege were entirely concentrated in the global 1 percent, it would be far easier to mobilize against it.

What we see in the real world are shifting coalitions based on intersections and overlaps of group-based advantage based on citizenship, race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and age, as well as class. These are not necessarily based on an accurate calculation of potential costs and benefits of competing alliances. False consciousness and more politically neutral information problems play a huge role. Institutional inertia and loss aversion also complicate the picture. Intersectional theory and stratification economics cry out in unison that exploitation cannot be reduced to class, and that ideologies will always influence economic outcomes.

4. Problem Child?

Once upon a time, radicalism implied rejection of capitalist institutions like wage employment; now it implies something even larger, a rejection of cultural values that capitalism reinforces and rewards. The pursuit of short-term self-interest, combined with disregard for the common good, undermines our ability to effectively manage public goods such as global climate. It has destabilized our social climate, threatening to neutralize the benefits of technological innovations that could, in principle, allow everyone to lead better, happier lives. To paraphrase Marx and Engels, the point is not merely to understand social divisions, but to overcome them.

Easier said than done. The broader definition of radicalism outlined here suffers from problems of its own; one might even worry that it suffers from the rebellious overconfidence of adolescence. Critics of identity politics have a point: acknowledgment of differences can have the effect of magnifying them. Concerns about unfair privilege can devolve into ever-smaller gradations of grievance. Emphasis on moral values can lead to righteous finger-pointing and lack of tolerance. Reckoning with the abuses of the past is only a first step toward envisioning a more cooperative future.

Radical political economy has never capitulated to fatalistic views of human nature, as in “that’s just the way people are” or “selfishness is in our genes.” It has always explored the potential for democratic redesign. Whatever the limitations of class analysis, it informed specific diagnoses of economic crisis and specific strategies of empowerment. Intersectionality has changed both the language people use and the habits they aspire to. It has also tilted feminists away from liberal “lean-in” career ambitions to more unified support for public investments in care provision. Yet intersectionality remains a largely diagnostic perspective without much political vision.

This absence is (as we radical economists like to say) partly structural. The venerable aristocracy-of-labor problem now looms large, with many working-class voters in the United States offering more support for anti-immigration and protectionist trade policies than increased social provision. Strong ideological links between nationalism, racism, and what we used to call sexism have become startingly apparent (I like the parallels implied by the suffix “ism”). They do not seem very functional for capitalism except insofar as they weaken opposition to it. The specter of Donald Trump warns us that populism can be worse than neoliberalism. States like Texas have proclaimed that they will not do business with corporations that express concerns about climate change. Wow, who is more despicable, Governor Greg Abbott of Texas or the CEO of Black Rock, Larry Fink, who insists on the need for environmentally sustainable profiteering?

This infighting highlights processes of collective conflict that we need to disentangle—the social hurricanes that we have never fully understood that seem to intensify with every passing year. At first glance, these may seem remote from the feminist problematic of social reproduction. But this problematic, with its emphasis on the ways in which we take care of ourselves and others, offers a unifying perspective (Folbre 2014). It could help us explain why our future as a species depends more on cooperation than competition, why an economy based on the pursuit of self-interest is a recipe for extinction. We all have a lot of explaining to do, along with some new recipes to develop as we try our best to grow up and, hopefully, grow old.