Populism,Neoliberalism and the Contemporary World: Reflections for an Alternative Politics with Nancy Fraser

Political Philosopher, Nancy Fraser was in India in March 2018 at the invitation of the Department of Sociology, South Asian University, New Delhi. The following conversation took place on 19 March 2018 at the South Asian University. The Department of Sociology, South Asian University is grateful to the Rosa Luxemburg South Asia Office for cosupporting her visit.

Ravi Kumar¹: Populism has become central to contemporary politics. It is not merely about Donald Trump. In South Asia, with recent examples from Sri Lanka, India and elsewhere, it was possible to see its own kind of populisms. It seems there is a general resurgence of populism across the globe. Latin America and South Asia have had their own kinds of populisms historically as well. Do you think there is any specific reason why at this particular moment in history of capitalism we can see this global resurgence of populism?

Nancy Fraser ²

: There is clearly a reason. The populism of our time is a protest against neoliberalism—in the first instance, against neoliberalism’s political economy. This populism is fuelled by demands for protection, social security, non-precarious and well-paid employment, all of which have been severely compromised by neoliberalism. It is true, of course, that populism can have a nasty side—it is all too often racist, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-whomever it constructs as ‘the other’. But not all populisms posit a stigmatised ‘other’. Contrary to the liberals, who tar all populist movements with a single brush, we need to distinguish objectionable right-wing populisms from relatively benign or promising left-wing populisms, which also exist. The latter also protest against neoliberal expropriation, but without scapegoating ‘others’. We can talk about them later. The key point I want to stress here is that all contemporary variants of populism, even the right-wing forms, are fuelled by legitimate anger over financialisation (including dispossession by debt) and by a form of globalisation that empowers capital to go wherever it wants, while trapping people in ever-worsening conditions of life. So we should not be surprised by the rise of virulent ethno-nationalisms, which oppose ‘globalisation’ and liberal cosmopolitanism. That’s point one.

The second point is the collapse of neoliberalism’s hegemony. In recent years, this form of capitalism has lost much of its credibility; it is no longer able to persuade broad masses of people that liberalisation of the economy is going to benefit everyone. Leftists have been making that case for years to little avail. But today it is the new common sense. People all over the world now see ‘free markets’ and ‘free trade’ as helping the rich and hurting them. The upshot is that even as neoliberal policy continues in force, neoliberal hegemony is in tatters. And that means people are searching for alternatives. So far, the most widely espoused alternatives are populist. Right-wing populisms predominate, but there are also some left-wing variants: Podemos in Spain, the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party in the United States, the Corbyn movement to remake the Labour Party in the United Kingdom, and Mélenchon in France, among others. These are all left-wing forms of populism, even though some of them hope to evolve in the direction of socialism. Sanders was (and still is!) exemplary in opposing the claims of ‘the 99%’ to those of ‘the 1%’—that is populist language par excellence. I will have to leave it to you to analyse the situation in South Asia, but I suspect that you too, are experiencing a surge of populist opposition to neoliberalism, mainly (but hopefully not only) from the Right.

In any case, I think it is important to resist liberal pressure to condemn all forms of populism. I myself support left-wing populism, not as an end in itself, but as the historical form that emancipatory energies assume now, in the current context of collapsing neoliberal hegemony. The current sort of populism may well turn out to be unstable, a way-station en route to something else. We will have to wait and see what happens if and when left-wing populist governments come to power—how much they can and will do, how far they are willing to go in order to fulfil the hopes they raise.

Ravi Kumar: So, one, needs to define the Left itself. Is it the social democratic Left one talks about when one is thinking about transition from the current state of being to something else. Because here is a Left, which will or may not, be positioning their argument in terms of a working class politics. Keeping in mind the 99 per cent, the other way of looking at it is whether they are really talking about the working class because they are talking about the 99 per cent. So, firstly, one really needs to look at and perhaps should clearly define the Left in this populism. And secondly, coming from South Asia, we did have these different forms of populism and, interestingly, Ashutosh Varshney, I would say, has a misplaced idea of left-wing populism when he talks of right-wing populism and left-wing populism. For him, left-wing populism is Jawaharlal Nehru and the right-wing populism is what we have today. But in India, we also had a history of a prolonged debate on what was called the new farmers movement. One of the leaders who went on to become the Prime Minister of the country for a very brief time, Chaudhary Charan Singh, was considered one of the first populist leaders in the country. He was a peasant leader. This was the 1970s. So you have that history of populism. The third issue that I think is, Mahinda Rajapaksa for me represents a parochial ethnocultural form of populism in Sri Lanka. But Sri Lanka is yet to go the neoliberal way that, for instance, India has already gone. For example, the state’s withdrawal from education is much newer in Sri Lanka than in India. So, how would then one explain this complex picture?

Nancy Fraser: I fully agree that we need to define what we mean by ‘the Left’. But let me first explain how I distinguish right-wing populism from left-wing populism. Both mobilise a mass against an elite stratum that is held responsible for oppressing ‘the people’ from above. But right-wing populists also mobilise simultaneously against a lower stratum that they claim thwarts ‘the people’ from below. The identity of this despised lower stratum varies with the context: it could be blacks or Latinos or immigrants or Muslims or Arabs or Jews—you name it. Whatever the case, right-wing populism places the beleaguered ‘people’ in the middle, caught between ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ enemies; it combines resentment of wealthy elites with scapegoating of disadvantaged minorities. That is a key difference from left-wing populism. Far from practicing such scapegoating, left populists invoke an enlarged understanding of the ‘people’, which includes both middle and lower strata, united (or so the hope goes) against a small upper class or elite. The Occupy Movement captured this perfectly when it targeted ‘the 1%’ in the name of ‘the 99%’. There is also another key difference. Right-wing populists tend to characterise the hated elites in substantive identitarian terms, while left-wing populists identify them by their functional role or structural position in society. So, where right-wing populists rail against ‘liberal secularists’ or ‘Jewish bankers’ or ‘homosexuals’, their counterparts on the Left target ‘Wall Street’ or ‘Big Data’ or ‘global finance’.

The last point brings me to your question about the Left. I would distinguish ‘the Left’ from left populism by the quality and depth of its structural understanding of our situation. Whatever we mean by ‘the Left’, and there are many variants and many obscurities, its critical perspective implicates the deep structure of capitalism. This is not always the case for left populism, although the latter movements might, under the right circumstances and in response to prodding from the Left, develop such a perspective. In any case, the key difference is whether or not the movement grasps the true nature of the underlying structures, hence, whether or not it is truly countersystemic.

One last point on social democracy. Of course, I must defer to you on India and Sri Lanka. But I can say with confidence that in Western Europe and North America, social democracy as a force distinct from neoliberalism does not exist anymore. Parties that historically claimed that mantle were thoroughly neoliberalised in the preceding era. Some of them, like the French Socialist Party and the German Social Democracy Party, are simply dead or dying. Others, like the British Labour Party and the US Democratic Party are sites of intense contestation, as figures like Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders campaign in left-populist accents against the neoliberal stranglehold of Blairism and Clintonism. It is fair to say, however, that neither Corbyn nor Sanders has a clear programmatic conception for the twenty-first century. Both are a bit anachronistic, with a whiff of the old Left about them. Sanders’ signature proposals are ‘Medicare for all’ and ‘free college for all’, which could be ‘merely’ social democratic, but are at the same time essential to any desirable society. Then, too, he’s for ‘breaking up the big banks’, but that’s hardly the same as expropriating the big banks or socialising finance. Equally important, neither Corbyn nor Sanders has an unequivocal position on immigration or borders; and both have so far ducked the question of whether their focus is fundamentally or exclusively ‘national-popular’, to use Gramsci’s term. That is a pressing question for all leftists today, whether socialist or left populist, Old Left or New Left. How do we propose to deal with transnational capital, regional inequality, neoimperialism, and the so-called legacies of colonialism? Even the best left-wing populists have failed to face the fact that internally pro-working class US or UK policies could come off the backs of the global south. Unlike their right-wing populist antagonists, they reject ethno-nationalism. But they tend to retain a civic-nationalist perspective. And that is a problem because national social democracy is not only unjust but probably also impossible in the current conjuncture. There has to be a way of dealing with global capital.

Ravi Kumar: Which they do not have?

Nancy Fraser: No, they do not.

Ravi Kumar: On the issue of Brexit, the argument that is made by the other side is that the world is globalised, capital is globalised, how does one expect Britain to fend for itself? And I think the Corbyn-led labour lacks that imagination. Therefore, that makes the task difficult in terms of resistance.

Nancy Fraser: Agreed. Brexit will likely go down as one of the biggest political debacles in British history. The Brits will be damned if they leave, damned if they stay, and damned if they do anything in between. There is no good option within the terms of capitalism. And all of us face the same dilemma. To the extent that left governments operating in capitalist contexts have ever managed to achieve a semblance of social equality or social security, it has been within wealthy countries or regions that were able to siphon value from outside their borders. And even that was only possible when an international regulatory financial regime allowed those states to control their currencies, impose capital controls, and use deficit spending without being punished by investors. It was, in a word, Bretton Woods that enabled social democracy in post-war Europe. If you do not have the right kind of international framework in place, you cannot even have a welfare state, let alone a socialist state. It is absolutely essential to get a handle on the global financial system, and that is not a problem for one country, no matter how powerful.

Ravi Kumar: Would you say it is some kind of a crisis that capitalism within a nation confronts? You said that it is a response to neoliberalism. But can it also be said that it is a response to some kind of probable crisis that capitalism may confront in these nations, which might pave the way for the emergence of what you call left-wing populism, which also gives rise to this right-wing populism?

Nancy Fraser: We are undoubtedly in a period of crisis. It is not just a sectoral crisis, but a general crisis of the whole social order—an epochal crisis of the sort that has arisen periodically in capitalism’s history at moments when the system’s inherent contradictions can no longer be managed or contained. In ‘normal’ times, capitalism’s crisis tendencies are tamed by the institutional arrangements that make up the specific regime of accumulation that is then in force. As time goes on, however, those arrangements unravel, and crisis phenomena erupt in plain sight. We then find ourselves in an interregnum, when, to quote Gramsci, ‘the old order is dying but the new cannot [yet] be born’. That is precisely the situation today. The existing regime has lost its legitimacy, and people have begun to search for alternatives. But the outcome remains obscure. It is a chaotic, confusing time, which could lead to fascism or socialism, to some new form of capitalism or to a decline into barbarianism. In the past, general crises have always been resolved through a reorganisation of capitalism. The crisis of mercantile capitalism was resolved in the nineteenth century by the shift to colonial industrial capitalism, which itself gave way in the twentieth century to state-managed capitalism. And it was the unravelling of that last configuration that prompted the shift to the current financialised regime, whose own increasingly unmanageable contradictions have brought us to the present impasse. Today’s crisis, as I said, is a general crisis, comprised of multiple strands: not ‘only’ economic and financial, but also ecological, social and political—all of which have converged in a multi-faceted ‘crisis complex’. Whether it can be resolved by means of a new form of capitalism remains to be seen. I am sceptical about that, but I would not rule it out a priori.

In any event, the current crisis complex can and should be understood from two perspectives, one structural, the other hegemonic. Viewed structurally, its roots lie in capitalism’s inherent tendency to destabilise its own background conditions of possibility. What I mean is that capital is primed by its very nature to free-ride on the ‘non-economic’ background conditions that enable accumulation. Left to its own devices, it helps itself freely to unwaged social-reproductive labour, to the earth’s capacity to absorb carbon emissions, and to public political power without bothering to replenish or replace those indispensable prerequisites for its own expansion. A self-destabilising tendency is built into every form of capitalist society, but it is especially pronounced today, in the current regime. Financialised capitalism has freed the accumulation imperative from everything that might have constrained it—from political and moral constraints, from the constraints of culture and kinship, from natural and ecological constraints. The result is to unleash a vast engine that is tearing through the world, leaving destruction in its wake, eating its own tail, consuming its own background conditions of possibility. That in a nutshell is the structural side of the present crisis.

But there is also a hegemonic side. Today, as I said before, nearly all of the established parties, leaders and perspectives have lost their credibility. Neoliberalism, whether reactionary or progressive, no longer persuades. No longer bound by hegemonic common sense, many people throughout the world have begun to think outside the box. Demagogues flourish, along with crackpot schemes. To continue the lines from Gramsci I quoted before, ‘in the interregnum appear all manner of morbid symptoms’. The question, of course, is whether and how the left can intervene in this hegemonic vacuum; whether and how it can identify and help to guide the most promising left-wing populist formations; whether and how it can fashion a credible emancipatory project as the basis for a new counter-hegemony.

Sasanka Perera ³

: There is something that is going on at another level. Your explanation for this kind of populism as a reaction, makes sense for the US as well as South Asia. But what I do not really understand immediately is that it is not only happening in US and South Asia but even in Russia. Look at what is happening right now, Putin has been elected with over 80 per cent of the vote, and he seems to be truly popular.

Nancy Fraser: Putin is indeed popular. Perhaps that’s partly because he projects the image of a strong leader who can protect the Russian people, lifting them up from the vast sea of dangers surrounding them. My sense is that there is today an immense desire for protection, which combines the Polyanian fear of exposure to the all-consuming market with unconscious desires for paternal authority and raised self-esteem. Putin somehow represents all these things. Although he is complicit with and reliant on neoliberal economic arrangements, he also incarnates the dream of protection from them—just think of his frequent displays of physical prowess, mental toughness, national pride and self-respect.

Sasanka Perera: You are right. This is partly what is happening in South Asia too. Narendra Modi in India persuades people with this kind of logic, Mahinda Rajapaksa in Sri Lanka also talks about protecting the people neocolonialism, the West and so on. Dignity and self-respect is expected and demanded from the known ‘others’—be they Indians in the case of Sri Lanka or the undifferentiated West in the case of India, Sri Lanka and many other places in South Asia. But the issue is that these populist leaders, often displaying clear autocratic tendencies are legitimately elected. Nobody tampers with the electoral process. When you talk to ordinary people, there is a perception that things might get ‘better’ with such seemingly ‘strong’ people in charge. But, historically, it shows that it does not get better when it comes to democratic practices and institutions. But still, there are people who are extremely supportive of President Rajapaksa in Sri Lanka or the Prime Minister of India, Putin in Russia and now Trump in the US. In all these cases, most people’s immediate lives have not improved under this kind of autocratic rule. But their support base has so far not gone down. How do we explain this? Is it still an anticipation protection as you have suggested earlier?

Nancy Fraser: This is not an easy question. I can best reply by returning to the case I know best: Donald Trump and the United States. I was struck by the fact that a majority of white women—more than 52 per cent—voted for Trump in the 2016 election. This was very soon after the public release of the notorious Hollywood Access videotapes in which he boasted of being able to assault women with impunity (‘I just grab them by the pussy’). Most pundits expected this to seal his defeat, but the tapes actually worked in his favour. Pro-Trump women took his boasting about sexual prowess as a sign of his strength, virility and fearlessness, his ability to protect them from a world experienced as out of control. In their minds, the predator morphed into the protector—of their material interests, to be sure, but also of their identity and dignity, their status and way of life. Trump impressed them as a fighter, a guy who is not afraid to take on anyone or anything. What attracted them was exactly what turned them off Barack Obama, whose aloofness and technocratic cool failed to convince large swaths of the American people that he had their backs. Of course, Trump does not actually have anyone’s back except his own, but he presents himself as a fighter for the people. And that’s a powerful lure, even though completely illusory.

To understand how this lure works, we need to grasp the entwinement of material interest and cultural identity or, as I have called them, redistribution and recognition. My view was developed for the US, but its outlines might also be useful for other contexts. The premise is that recent capitalist hegemonies have been constructed by combining distributive and recognition elements. In the pre-Trump US, the hegemonic bloc was progressive neoliberalism, which combined a regressive politics of distribution with a progressive politics of recognition. That combination allied the most dynamic, globalised ‘cognitive’ sectors of the US economy (Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood) with the dominant liberal-meritocratic currents of the new social movements (feminism, LGBTQ+ rights, environmentalism, multiculturalism, anti-racism). Progressive neoliberalism is what many working-class voters rejected in 2015–16. Some of them turned first to Sanders’ progressive populist alternative in the Democratic primary and then, when that option was no longer available, to Trump’s reactionary populism in the general election. Both challengers claimed to offer pro-working-class distributive policies; but Sanders linked that with progressive recognition, whereas Trump advanced a patently reactionary alternative: racist, anti-immigrant, Islamaphobic, misogynistic and homophobic. After Trump took office, of course, he dropped the progressive distributive component, while pursuing a neoliberal economic policy and doubling down on his reactionary politics of recognition. What we have gotten, in other words, is not reactionary populism, but hyperreactionary neoliberalism.

Beyond the specifics of the US case, there is a larger point. Hegemony is constructed by interweaving views along the two axes of distribution and recognition. To understand hegemonic struggle, we need to attend to both of those axes and see how various parties and movements seek to combine them.

Trump has lost a lot of support in the United States on both counts. Some people who voted for him because they liked his populism or disliked Clinton have since been turned off by his racism, his lying, his tweeting, his blatant self-dealing. Others feel he has not delivered on his promises to bring back manufacturing and to promote industry through big public infrastructure projects. They view his tax reform as a giveaway to the 1 percent. Not everyone has defected, of course, but some have and are looking around for other options. That is why the Democrats did so well in the 2018 midterm elections.

Dev Nath Pathak ⁴

: I wanted to return to this crisis of capitalism. In the history of capitalism, we have heard several times about the Marxian understanding of the internal contradictions, and there would be those changes happening. But did any change happen? Precisely because as you rightly pointed out, some demagogue would emerge. One also feels that the whole machinery of capitalism is equipped with so many safety valves. So, if there is some kind of pent up feelings, then some safety valve will open. Does change really happen even though there is some kind of metamorphosis from liberal capitalism to progressive neoliberalism? So these are some of those metamorphoses which are not really about the change, which is caused by this internal crisis.

Nancy Fraser: Capitalism’s history to date reveals at least four important regime changes, which I mentioned before. The primary beneficiary in every case was capital, or some fraction of capital—that goes without saying. But some regime changes have also benefited sections of the working classes. For example, the US New Deal conferred some real benefits on majority-ethnic industrial workers and their families. Their gains included job protections, labour rights, wage increases, retirement and unemployment insurance. These things were by no means negligible. But they were not made available to everyone. Social security excluded agricultural and domestic workers, who were overwhelmingly people of colour; and it institutionalised women’s dependency on men and heteronormative definitions of the family. In addition, the whole edifice rested on value siphoned from the global south through neo-imperial unequal exchange. But things did change for the better for some people.

The shift from laisser-faire to state-managed capitalism also bought important institutional changes, including in the relations between states and markets, production and reproduction, human society and nonhuman nature. Those key institutional relations changed again with the shift to neoliberal capitalism. What has not changed, of course, is the central capitalist dynamic of private appropriation of social surplus. But that constitutive capitalist constant has been differently ‘embedded’ in relation to various institutions, including family and community, on the one hand, and states and transnational organisations, on the other hand. And these changes matter, they are the heart and soul of capitalism’s history.

Ravi Kumar: Let me go back to the point Sasanka was trying to raise about how to understand the operation of populism. There is an expectation among many people that ‘something’ will happen with strong leaders. And in that expectation, voting a populist leader into power becomes possible. The main political symbolisms that are generally employed by populisms in right-wing political formations are also the same kind of political symbolisms employed by the Left as well. However, often, the Left does not employ these symbolisms as effectively as the right-wing. Because of this, it allows certain kind of consensus to be built among the masses towards the populists who would come to power at the cost of not getting what the people are expecting. In those terms, it also delays the delivery of whatever people anticipate. Why is it that the Left is so ineffective in employing these political symbolisms?

Nancy Fraser: That is a very interesting question. I am not sure if what I have to say would apply to South Asia. But in Europe, Latin America and North America, those who think of themselves as Left have not been very interested in appealing to what you call the masses or working classes. What has passed for the Left has been recuperated by liberalism. Instead of agitating for social equality, it has defended a class-specific form of meritocracy, aimed at removing ‘discriminatory barriers’ that prevent ‘talented’ individual members of ‘under-represented groups’ (blacks, women, gays) from attaining positions in the corporate hierarchy on par with the straight white men of their own class. I see this in my students all the time. They think of themselves as leftists, but they focus overwhelmingly on micro-aggressions, personal relations, who is dominating whom in a dyadic way. Far from thinking structurally, it is all about individuals. You have a stronger tradition of Marxism in India and South Asia than we do, and are perhaps less caught up in this.

Ravi Kumar: I think what you are saying resonates at least in my mind. The current backlash from the right wing, which is happening in the universities in India comes to mind in this context. As far as I can see, why universities even as radical as the Jawaharlal Nehru University are not able to respond to this situation the way they should have responded, is primarily because of what you are indicating.

Nancy Fraser: Is that because it is an elite institution, dedicated to training elites on a meritocratic basis?

Ravi Kumar: It is ‘seen’ as elite, and the left intellectuals who are within these universities today think that the former Congress regime in India is as revolutionary as any other regime and one should have an alliance with them to fight the right wing.

Nancy Fraser: What you are describing strikes me as an Indian variant of progressive neoliberalism.

Ravi Kumar: So it does resonate when you are talking of examples from other parts of globe. I am yet to understand how an intellectual cannot not comprehend these dynamics of capitalism, and historically these intellectuals, the left intellectuals, have made mistakes. South Asian left intellectuals are too fond of being part of the committees that governments form, often forgetting that those committees will ultimately recommend what the state wants them to recommend, and they will continue to be very obedient to what they have recommended. And obviously much of this will happen within a liberal bourgeois framework. So in 1992, a scientist called Yashpal headed a committee ⁵

that was constituted to look at governance of the higher education system. Though a pro-people person, his committee acknowledged that we cannot ignore private universities and they should not be shut down. It argued that there should be some stringent criteria to evaluate them, but they were not anti-private universities, not anti-market. And a lot of left-liberals (if one wants to use the term) were part of it, and they still stand by such a committee. So historically, these kinds of understandings have contributed to the phenomenon you are talking about, in South Asia as well. It should not surprise us that the Communist Party of Sri Lanka was part of Rajapaksa government. Can anything worse possibly happen? The Workers Party in Bangladesh is part of the current regime, which is as undemocratic as any other regime. So those problems are there. But coming back to the issue of political symbolisms, I think recognition is a political symbol. And as you said some time back, it is employed by the status quo in order to divert the attention of people from the real issues of redistribution et cetera. But unfortunately, the Left also falls into this trap. Now why would Left politics fall in the trap of recognition? Is recognition that relevant? You know the debate that people had with your work initially on redistribution recognition, calling you too economistic et cetera. Historically, if one analyses the politics of recognition vis-à-vis the caste question in India, there are intellectuals who have written manifestoes saying that the lower caste can be liberated by only one force which is neoliberal capital, and we have a Dalit Chamber of Commerce and Industry, which is devoted to only lower caste capitalists. Can one look at the trajectory of where recognition redistribution leads to? How do you look at this?

Nancy Fraser: What you are describing has an analogue in the history of African Americans: black enterprise, black nationalists, black capitalism. I am in full agreement with your critique of that. But I want to disagree with you on one point. I do not believe that redistribution is real and recognition is unreal. Both are quite real, in my view, and both have deep-structural bases in capitalist society. Let me illustrate by introducing a distinction that I will be talking about in the lecture. ⁶

It is the distinction between the free rights-bearing citizen-worker, who owns her or his labour power and can (indeed must!) sell it in exchange for wages. Having in the past been deprived of their access to means of subsistence and means of production, such persons are not subject to further expropriation but ‘merely’ to exploitation—the socially necessary costs of their reproduction must (in theory) be borne by capital. Now contrast this status with that of the unfree or dependent other—for example, the black slave or brown colonial who, lacking actionable rights and political protection, can be expropriated with impunity again and again—one can seize his lands and labour, her sexual and reproductive capacities, without bearing the costs of her or his reproduction. This contrast has distributive implications, to be sure; but it is at bottom a differential of political status. I mention it to illustrate that harms of misrecognition (or status) are as real and material as those that appear to be ‘economic’. The real question is how the two orders of domination (exploitation and expropriation; class and status) work together and intersect in any given form of capitalist society. It would be a big mistake, in my view, to try to understand either one of them in isolation or abstraction from the other. Capitalism is not simply a colour blind, gender blind economic system. It operates through the distinctions it creates, including the racialised distinction between exploitation and expropriation, on the one hand, and the gendered distinction between production and reproduction, on the other. It follows that misrecognition cannot be overcome by enacting legal reforms, promoting good attitudes, or eliminating prejudice.

Nevertheless, there do exist historically specific forms of capitalism that encourage social actors to imagine recognition and distribution as separate. In some eras, movements have focused almost exclusively on distributive issues (wages, hours, etc.) while ignoring (if not being complicit with) racism and sexism. We have recently had the opposite problem, as seemingly emancipatory movements descended from the New Left have focused one-sided on recognition, while dropping the ball on distribution. And the timing was very bad—they did so at just the moment when neoliberalism was supplanting social democracy.

I would say that, at present, the Right does better at using recognition to marginalise distributive questions in part because there is so much resentment among working people of progressive neoliberalism. Consider the hatred of Hillary Clinton, which was by no means due (only) to sexism. More important, I think, was her smugness and condescension, casting working class supporters of Trump as ‘deplorable’, while she was getting six hundred thousand dollars per one hour speech from Goldman Sachs. She was utterly certain that she represented enlightened cosmopolitanism while promoting policies that are destroying the life conditions of working class people. Is it any surprise that those on the short end of the stick would reject the whole package, not just Wall Street, but also progressive neoliberal moralising? Is it any wonder that they would prefer a guy who wants ‘to grab pussy’?

Ravi Kumar: I am in complete agreement with you. I have never believed that recognition is immaterial. You are right and that is what I was trying to put forth. That is, the idea of recognition is used by status quoists as a way of diversion. And unfortunately the Left falls in that trap. But moving on from there, and coming to this very recent act that shook the Indian academia when lists after lists came up of academicians who have in some way or other sexually harassed their students. Now how does one look at this list-based feminists politics which come from within the fold of a certain kind of Left. And in the Indian context, this compelled Left activists and intellectuals to go on the back foot. How would one analyse these politics of a certain kind of feminism within the framework that you have developed?

Nancy Fraser: Putting aside the matter of lists, rumour, and due process, it is a very good thing that women and others who have experienced work-related assault or harassment are speaking out. Please understand that this is a labour issue. We are not talking about rape in the family or on a date. We are talking about a professor with power over a student, a factory supervisor with power over a worker on the line, a studio head who decides which actor gets a part in a movie, et cetera. In all such cases, the issue is workers’ rights and protections. Seen that way, #MeToo represents a broadening of labour rights and thus an advance in labour struggles. This movement should be an important new front in class struggle.

In the US, however, and perhaps in India as well, the media focus on the upper reaches of the socio-economic spectrum, especially well-known and highly paid actresses in Hollywood. They command media attention because of their fame or other resources. What is much less talked about is the vulnerability of poor and working class women. I am talking about agricultural workers who can be called aside at any moment and told to submit or be fired; with no other way to feed their families, they feel bound to comply. Equally vulnerable are hotel cleaners, typically immigrants and women of colour—as we know from the case of Dominique Strauss-Kahn. In fact, there are important class differences between the two types of workplace assault. High-end workers are vulnerable because their professions work by reputation; they need good recommendations from powerful people to get jobs; by failing to comply with a boss’s demand, they risk the sort of retaliation that can derail a career. In low-wage agriculture work, factory work, and service work, the structure is different. Those workers have very few options and must somehow put food on the table. They are liable to be coerced by naked force.

I am saying that any credible left-wing movement should engage with workplace assault and harassment. But we must develop a left-wing response. The typical liberal-feminist response is wholly inadequate. They think the solution is to put more women at the heads of corporations, which is simply silly.

In US academia, incidentally, we do not have the sort of lists you described. We have had some notorious cases, in which everyone knew that a given professor was a serial predator—it was an open secret—but no one did anything. They got top jobs, ran big labs and brought in big research money. The universities were completely complicit; they hushed up complaints and took precautions against lawsuits. One thing I have learned is that it is extremely rare to find a credible case with only one or two complainants. It is much more common that publication of an initial complaint opens the floodgates to many more who have suffered in silence for many years.

You say that in India it is mainly being the left that is targeted. I do not know about here, but I can assure you that it is not the case in the US. It lands where it lands. But wherever it lands, it is absolutely crucial that the Left develops a response that combines several different points. One, sexual assault and harassment are not acceptable whoever does it, period. Number two, people accused have a right to due process, not trial by rumour and innuendo. And three, there must be no ideological tests about whom you can accuse and whom you cannot. I do not believe for a second that Hindu nationalists’ people do not do this. Find out who they are, and expose them.

Ravi Kumar: You are right and I think many of these lists faltered when it came to due process. Because the list first came from the American academia, because it started from there, it became very popular. Partha Chaterjee, for instance, wrote a rejoinder saying that please do let me know, when did I do it, how did I do it. The response to him was, I cannot say right now because my midterm exams are going on. And in many cases, faculty members have said that there is no proof with regard to many of these accusations, and if there is proof, a formal procedure should be set in motion, and due process should be followed. And that is where I think the list also started to get delegitimised. Otherwise, in India it was one after the other, lists were coming out almost every day.

Nancy Fraser: There have been virtually no cases in the US that were made up, where there was nothing real behind the complaint. Let me put it this way, whenever you have some kind of upsurge of social struggle, you always get cases of people who have a grudge against so and so, using it. Look at the Cultural Revolution in China. All sorts of people who were targeted as capitalists and so on, some neighbour had resentment. This happens, I do not defend this, but this is not unique. It is the sort of thing that happens. You have to try to fight against it.

Ravi Kumar: It also falters at the level you have pointed out. When sexual harassment is made into an issue in a university, we do not see much of it being addressed. Things are much worse when it comes to workers such as the cleaning staff and so on, where harassment of them is very rampant in universities. It again has a class politics of a certain kind which, I think this kind of feminist politics have failed to address to some extent.

Nancy Fraser: Well, you are probably thinking of liberal feminism. And I agree that their response is class-specific and wholly inadequate. But left-wing feminists are focused on the class dimension and on the expansion of labour rights. Your readers might like to see the discussion of this issue in Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto, which I co-authored with Cinzia Arruzza Tithi Bhattacharya (forthcoming from Verso in March). That is an example of a left-wing analysis of these issues—and many more.