Women, the State, and Welfare

8. Struggle Over Needs: Outline of a Socialist-Feminist Critical Theory of Late-Capitalist Political Culture

CHAPTER 8 Struggle Over Needs: Outline of a Socialist...Feminist Critical Theory of Late...Capitalist Political Culture NANCY FRASER Need is also a political instrument, meticulously prepared, calculated and used. -Michel Foucault I In late-capitalist, welfare state societies, talk about people's needs is an important species of political discourse. We argue, in the United States, for example, about whether the government should provide for citizens' needs. Thus, feminists claim ~at there should be state provision of parents' day-care needs, while social conservatives insist on children's needs for their mothers' care, and economic conservatives claim that the market, not the government, is the best institution for meeting needs. Likewise, Americans also argue about whether existing social welfare programs really do meet the needs they purport to satisfy or whether, instead, they misconstrue the latter. For example, rightwing critics claim that Aid to Families with Dependent Children destroys the incentive to work and undermines the family. Left critics, in contrast, oppose workfare proposals as coercive and punitive, while many poor women with young children say they want to work at good-paying jobs. All these cases involve disputes about what exactly various groups of people really do need and about who should have the lastword in such matters. In all these cases, moreover, needs-talk is a medium for the making and contesting of political claims. It is an idiom in which political conflict is played out and through which inequalities are symbolically elaborated and challenged. Talk about needs has not always been central to western political culture; it has often been considered antithetical to politics and relegated to the margins of political life. However, in welfare state societies, needs-talk has been in199 200 NANCY FRASER stitutionalized as a major vocabulary of political discourse.2 1t coexists, albeit often uneasily, with talk about rights and interests at the very center of political life. Indeed, this peculiar juxtaposition of a discourse about needs with discourses about rights and interests is one of the distinctive marks of latecapitalist political culture. Feminists (and others) who aim to intervene in this culture could benefit from considering the following questions: Why has needs-talk become so prominent in the political culture of welfare state societies? What is the relation between this development and changes in late-capitalist social structure ? What does the emergence of the needs idiom imply about shifts in the boundaries between "political," "economic," and "domestic" spheres of life? Does it betoken an extension of the political sphere or, rather, a colonization of that domain by newer modes of power and social control? What are the major varieties of needs-talk and how do they interact polemically with one another? What opportunities and/or obstacles does the needs idiom pose for movements, like feminism, that seek far-reaching social transformation? In what follows, I outline an approach for thinking about such questions rather than proposing definitive answers to them. What I have to say falls into five parts. In the first section, I suggest a break with standard theoretical approaches by shifting the focus of inquiry from needs to discourses about needs, from the distribution of need satisfactions to "the politics of need interpretation ." And I propose a model of social discourse designed to bring into relief the contested character of needs-talk in welfare state societies. In the second section, I relate this discourse model to social-structural considerations , especially to shifts in the boundaries between "political," "economic," and "domestic" spheres of life. In the third section, I identify three major strands of needs-talk in late-capitalist political culture, and I map some of the ways in which they compete for potential adherents. In the fourth section, I apply the model to some concrete cases of contemporary needs politics in the United States. Finally, in a brief conclusion, I consider some moral and epistemological issues raised by the phenomenon of needs-talk. THE POLITICS OF NEED INTERPRETATION: A DISCOURSE MODEL Let me begin by explaining some of the peculiarities of the approach I am proposing. In my approach, the focus of inquiry is not needs but rather discourses about needs. The point is to shift our angle of vision on the politics of needs. Usually, the politics of needs is understood to concern the distribution of satisfactions. In my approach, by contrast, the focus is the politics of need interpretation. The reason for focusing on discourses and interpretation is to bring into view Struggle Over Needs 201 the...