Nancy Fraser: Envisioning a path to a mature left that can meet the demands of the present crisis

Thank you very much, Andrea, Alina and all the organizers of this event. It's wonderful and very moving to hear words from Boris on this occasion and to feel a connection with him and with all of you. We’ve come together across many time zones and continents, across oceans and empires, in a display of international left solidarity. And that is a truly heartening and moving.

In fact, there are far too few events like this one. Boris Kagarlitsky is far from the only leftwing Russian anti-war activist who has suffered repression. And there are “Borises” everywhere — in Palestine and in Israel, in Iran and in China, in India and Brazil, in Germany and France, in the United States. Certainly, most repressed leftists are less well known to the international left intelligentsia than Boris is. But they are equally in need of our support. And this event, I hope, can serve as a model. In a moment of intense repression and acute crisis, we should be multiplying events like these again and again.

But of course, defending endangered comrades is the bare minimum when it comes to practicing international left solidarity. We should also take them seriously — by engaging deeply with their thinking and practice. And that means, as Kagarlitsky himself would remind us, that we must think with them and about them strategically. If they are truly our comrades, we must think about how to connect their struggles and predicaments with ours — and with the struggles and predicaments of comrades elsewhere.

Put differently, we need to pursue not simply resistance but emancipatory change. That’s precisely what Boris has asked us to do. Later in this conference we will be discussing his recent book, The Long Retreat, where this problem is front and center. There he writes of the need to go beyond “coalitions of resistance” to “coalitions of change.” I don’t want to steal the thunder of our distinguished panelists who will be talking about the book in a later session. But I want to note that it provides both a brilliant analysis of the current conjuncture and an impassioned plea for strategic thinking.

Kagarlitsky diagnoses an acute crisis of neoliberal capitalism. It is what some have called a “polycrisis,” a crisis that is multi-dimensional–at once economic, ecological, social reproductive, political, and geopolitical. For Boris, moreover, it’s a crisis that our global ruling classes cannot resolve. They cannot decarbonize the global economy in time to halt planetary conflagration. They cannot provide decent livelihoods and successfully manage global pandemics. They cannot protect us from the violence of armies, police, banks, landlords, and unhinged, infuriated mobs. They cannot defeat rising authoritarian movements even when the latter appear to threaten their rule. They cannot stop war. But Boris goes further still. It’s not just that our rulers cannot stop this nexus of horribles. It’s rather that they actually produce them, systemically and non-accidentally. Accordingly, and I fully agree, our polycrisis admits of no “enlightened capitalist solution”–if that phrase is not already a contradiction in terms.

For Boris, then, our crisis is systemic and objective — but not only. It is also subjective and hegemonic. Masses of people now intuit that that the predicaments they experience cannot be resolved by piecemeal reforms. Many of them want radical change. And so, they defect from politics as usual. Ditching established parties and worldviews, they think outside the box, looking for radical alternatives. But now, we have to ask: what do they find when they look for radical alternatives? According to Kagarlitsky, they find no credible socialist alternative, no confident bloc of leftwing social forces that conveys a programmatically serious and strategically sound commitment to deep structural change. On the contrary, the forces that might have coalesced in this sort of counter-hegemony were atrophied and disoriented over the course of a decades long retreat of the left. That’s Boris’s thesis.

What takes their place today? I see two main political formations, locked in mutual antagonism. There is first, the panoply of moralizing, identity-siloed groups that have lost whatever transformative emancipatory drive they once possessed and that function now as the junior partners of corporate capital, lending the latter a veneer of faux-emancipatory charisma. If you want to be nasty, you can call this formation “wokeism.” I prefer to call it “progressive neoliberalism.” There is also, second, a panoply of authoritarian populist countermovements, which, as Boris notes, mix legitimate economic grievances with ginned up regressive ethnocultural hatreds, blaming migrants and minorities instead of predatory capital. These two forces, progressive neoliberalism and reactionary populism, are locked in a series of sham battles which get nowhere near to the heart of things, and which leave the real culprits off the hook. The result is a morass of “morbid symptoms” that Antonio Gramsci would easily recognize.

Kagarlitsky’s diagnosis of this conjuncture is close to mine, I think. But what is to be done? Is there a possible path today that can rebuild the left in the near future? Not just any left, of course, but one that follows Boris in rejecting sectarianism and utopianism in favor of grounded strategic thinking and political imagination. Can we envision a path to a mature left that could meet the demands of the present crisis? Or must we content ourselves with a well-managed retreat that will allow us to live to fight another day? But of course, if you take that second line, then you have to ask yourself: will there really be another day before the planet is consumed in flames?

These are questions that I long to discuss with Boris Kagarlitsky. I’ve never met him, but I have carried on a dialogue with him about these matters in my head. Truth be told, I’m a bit more optimistic than he is, more inclined to opt for counterhegemony, as opposed to managed retreat. In the remainder of this talk, I want to explain why.

I’ll focus on two issues. The first is class: how should a serious 21st Left understand the global working class today, and what strategies might it pursue as it seeks to constitute (substantial fractions of) that class as a political force? And the second is geopolitics: faced with the possible expansion of actual wars and ongoing genocides, what should the “foreign policy” of a mature international left look like? Each of these questions is deep and difficult. Each requires a combination of analytic and strategic thinking. To date, they have eluded what passes today for “the international left.” Yet no one who is serious about (re)building such a left can afford to ignore them.

I begin with class. Boris rightly assumes, and I fully agree, that class remains the crucial societal differentiation — and the crucial rallying point for a Left. But he also stresses, rightly too, that today’s global working class is not the industrial working class of previous centuries. Our question, then, is how is to understand that class today. How can we avoid defaulting to the outdated industrialist model without succumbing to fashionable ideas like “the multitude,” in which all cows become grey? Above all, how can we develop a class-based strategy that competes effectively with progressive neoliberalism and reactionary populism?

The key, I think, is to provoke splits along class lines within each of those two political blocs. In the case of progressive neoliberalism, this means peeling off rank-and-file working-class women, people of color, and migrants from the reigning corporate forces that now hold them hostage. In the case of reactionary populism, it means winning “old” working-class strata away from strongmen who channel their anger but betray their interests. In both cases, the trick is to change people’s views about who their allies and their enemies really are.

Hence, the strategic problem in a nutshell is: how to convince “progressive” feminists and anti-racist strata, on the other hand, and the “old” working class populist strata, on the other, that they have more to gain by allying with one another than by sticking with their current pseudo-“allies”?

Certainly, it would take tremendous political savvy and imagination to accomplish that. But class analysis supports the underlying idea. In fact, it was always wrong to equate the working class with the doubly free industrial proletariat. Properly understood, that class also includes those unfree or semi-free racialized subworkers, whose labor is coerced, unwaged or under-waged, and often disavowed, even as it supplies capital with the below-cost inputs the latter craves, and thus, is deeply entrenched in the global economy. By the same token, the full working class also includes now, and always has, those gendered workers who perform social-reproductive “carework,” work which is feminized, sentimentalized, underpaid if not unpaid, and often cast as “non-work,” but which supplies capital with labor power (of all kinds) and is therefore indispensable to accumulation. In general, then, capitalism relies on three analytically distinct but functionally inter-imbricated forms of labor: exploited, expropriated, and domesticated. It therefore tends to constitute what appear to three kinds of persons (really, workers). Thus, the global working class is divided, for systemic reasons, by gender and by color. Gender and race, in sum, are not alternatives to class but structurally entrenched divisions within it.

A left that is adequate for our time should adopt an expanded view of the working-class. On that basis, it could make a case for cooperation among class fractions that are currently divided from, and hostile to, one another. Urging a coalition of the exploited, the expropriated and the domesticated, such a left could show that the fates of all three fractions are intertwined, that none can be emancipated without the others, that they must join together to abolish the system that generates their perverse symbiosis.

But what about geopolitics? The global working class is divided not only by gender and race but also by country. The left has long struggled with divisions of this last sort and must do so again today, in a new context marked by a declining and flailing US hegemon, blindly followed by passive, clientelized Europe; a rising China, still reluctant to assert itself forcefully and directly in geopolitics; and intensifying efforts, led by Russia, to constitute the BRICS into a counter- (if not anti-) US bloc. It’s an unstable scene that encourages all manner of testing and acting out, which can easily spin out of control — think Taiwan, for example. It’s a context, too, of intensified militarism, imperial rivalry, and hot war.

Those features suggest the need for a new kind of “proletarian internationalism”. This must include trans-border peace movements that forge solidarities among those who are now conscripted to kill one another. It must also include broad inter-linked anti-imperialist movements that disclose and oppose the big powers (state and corporate) that set up proxies to fight and die for them.

But other features of our conjuncture are equally pressing. “Climate change,” which is a euphemism for planetary heating, requires a genuinely global perspective, as do global pandemics and other threats to health that know no borders. Finally, there is no ignoring migration, which forms an explosive flashpoint, fueling hatreds throughout the world. That too urgently requires a left response.

Militarism, migration, war, ecosystemic collapse on a planetary scale: these represent the geopolitical face of the present crisis. What should a left for our time say about them?

The fact of the matter is, we do not have now, and have not had for a very long time, any real sense of what a left-wing foreign policy would be today. This is where the left is weakest, in my view. Here and there you find people who have some interesting ideas about how to reorganize production, reproduction, global finance, and our metabolic interaction with non-human nature. But foreign policy remains largely an uncharted space.

I don’t have a comprehensive proposal to offer. But I do want to insist on one small, but essential point. Leftists must figure how to keep two (or more) “no’s “in our heads at once and how to turn them into some new kind of “yes.” One example: No to Putin, No to NATO. Don’t say one without the other. That part is easy, I think. But what’s the “yes“ that those two “no’s” points to? That’s the hard part. In any case, another example: No to anti-Palestinian genocide, apartheid, occupation. But also: No to anti-Semitism. That one too should be easy for leftists, but although we don’t hear it nearly enough. But here again comes the hard part: how to put both those two “no’s” together and end up with a “yes” to something else?

The inability to deal with that last example is wreaking havoc and much repression in my part of the world — and in others. But the first one is of special interest here. An event dedicated to solidarity with Boris Kagarlitsky is a special opportunity for me, and one I don’t often have, to talk to fellow leftists from Russian and Ukraine. No to Putin, but also No to NATO. I really want to hear what you think about that. As an American leftist, who is also by definition anti-American, I can’t put all the blame for this war on Putin. But we may disagree about that. And I’m eager to discuss it with you.

I would have loved, of course, to discuss that, and all the other topics I’ve raised here, with Boris. What a shame that he’s not here! But how wonderful that all of you are!