Nancy Fraser: Benjamin Lecture 2 - Labor’s Twisted Histories

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 15th - Labor’s Twisted Histories: Practical Entanglements and Political Fault Lines
In this lecture, I turn from structure to history, examining laboring human beings, situated in space and time over the span of capitalist development. Periodizing that history, I identify four regimes in which the nexus of exploitation, expropriation and externalization is differently organized: mercantilist, liberal-colonial, state managed (or social-democratic), and neoliberal/financialized. For each phase, I map the historically specific relations among the three faces of labor, asking: Who performs each type of work and where? How sharp are the separations among those type of labors - and among those who perform them? What is the relative weight of each in the capitalist world system?
I look, too, at the forms of social struggle and political subjectivity in each phase. Here I ask: How do those who perform each type of labor identify themselves? Do they think of themselves as “workers”, and are they viewed as such by others? Under what banner, if any, do they engage in collective struggle? How, if at all, does each group relate to the others - with solidarity, antagonism, or indifference? My aim is to weave together in one story two different ideas: first, the inextricability of the three forms of labor in capitalism’s history; and second, the forms of misrecognition that have divided those who perform them.
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