Capitalism’s crisis of care: a conversation with Nancy Fraser

Abstract

This interview was published in Dissent magazine in 2016, when Nancy Fraser was becoming one of the most influential voices in Marxist-inspired feminism addressing the so-called “crisis of care.” For her, this crisis expresses the socio-reproductive contradictions of contemporary capitalism. This means that the increasing pressures on caregiving are not accidental, but have systemic roots, because they are based on the structure of a social order that Fraser characterized as financialized capitalism. Therefore, in her view, the crisis of social reproduction is neither in- dependent nor adequately understood on its own. But, if this crisis points to the contradictions in the financialized form of capitalism, it also signals the socio-reproductive limits of capitalist society itself. In the interview, Fraser also explores the profound diversities between strands of feminism and the notable heterogeneities among women, especially marked by racial inequalities in the division of care work. Her ideas contributed to bringing the theme of social reproduction to the center of the interpretations on capitalistic dynamics, and this interview captures the author at one of the moments when her ideas were most prominent in academic debate and in the political scene of feminism.