Against economy–culture dualism: an argument from raced economies

Jessica Kaplan

doi:10.1177/1464700120975699

Abstract

In this article, I argue that a mistaken economy–culture dualism underlies the pitting of identity politics against class. I propose we be ‘non-dualists’ instead, viewing economic distributions and cultural representations as importantly co-constitutive, since this non-dualism lets us best theorise the intersections of injustices like class and race. I argue that the most sophisticated dualist attempt to transcend class versus identity debates – Nancy Fraser’s ‘perspectival dualism’ – inadvertently instantiates ‘methodological whiteness’ and struggles to illuminate the intersections of race and class, overlooking how culturally specific representations and understandings importantly constitute economic structures and distributions. Jodi Dean’s contemporary restaging of the class versus identity debate, I suggest, repeats some of Fraser’s dualist missteps. To end, I propose a non-dualist approach which understands the economy as an ideological objectification of certain practices – an objectification which naturalises relations of raced, classed and gendered domination. Building on social reproduction currents of thought, I suggest a counter-hegemonic understanding of the economy – one informed by anti-racist, feminist and socialist rethinkings of what constitutes labour and who constitutes the ‘public’ of the economy’s imaginaries of public value.

Highlights

A common explanation of recent political shocks holds that a ‘cultural politics of identity’ has long overshadowed ‘class’ and the economy, and, via Brexit and Trump, the working class wreaked revenge for being so ignored.1 Pitting class against identity is not new (e.g. Rorty, 1998)
These violent exclusions – done in the name of protecting a whitewashed ‘public’ – can be understood as, at least in part, a defensive shoring up of current class hierarchies, either by elites wanting to deflect working-class anger towards raced outsiders, or by those who feel it the only way to protect their limited access to the means of sustaining life. Both suggest the urgent necessity of a strong intersectional class politics, lest people of colour are left to bear the brunt of class pain mis-directed into ethno-nationalist anger. In his attempt to theorise gender, race and class together, Camfield rejects a focus on common-sense understandings of the economy in favour of a focus on ‘the social relations involved in processes of producing the means of human life’ (2016: 293; see : Bhattacharyya, 2018: 52)
We urgently need intersectional analyses that insist on the irreducible intermingling of race, class and gender; with inequality intensifying and fractures appearing along overtly raced lines, we lack the luxury of rehearsing another decade of identity versus class debates

Summary

Introduction

A common explanation of recent political shocks holds that a ‘cultural politics of identity’ has long overshadowed ‘class’ and the economy, and, via Brexit and Trump, the working class wreaked revenge for being so ignored.1 Pitting class against identity is not new (e.g. Rorty, 1998). Keywords Culture, economy, identity politics, Jodi Dean, Nancy Fraser, perspectival dualism, race, raced markets, racialised capitalism, social reproduction theory

Results

Conclusion