Have theorists of justice forgotten about political economy?footnote^＊ Have we traced the most important injustices to cultural roots? Is it time for critical social theory to reassert a basic distinction between the material processes of political economy and the symbolic processes of culture? In two recent essays, Nancy Fraser answers these questions in the affirmative.footnote¹ She claims that some recent political theory and practice privilege the recognition of social groups, and that they tend to ignore the distribution of goods and the division of labour.

Demands for ‘recognition of difference’ fuel struggles of groups mobilized under the banners of nationality, ethnicity, ‘race’, gender, and sexuality. In these ‘post-socialist’ conflicts, group identity supplants class interest as the chief medium of political mobilization. Cultural domination supplants exploitation as the fundamental injustice. And cultural recognition displaces socioeconomic redistribution as the remedy for injustice and the goal of political strugglefootnote²

Fraser proposes to correct these problems by constructing an analytic framework that conceptually opposes culture and political economy, and then locates the oppressions of various groups on a continuum between them. With a clear distinction between those issues of justice that concern economic issues and those that concern cultural issues, she suggests, we can restore political economy to its rightful place in critical theory, and evaluate which politics of recognition are compatible with transformative responses to economically based injustice.

Fraser’s essays call our attention to an important issue. Certain recent political theories of multiculturalism and nationalism do indeed highlight respect for distinct cultural values as primary questions of justice, and many seem to ignore questions of the distribution of wealth and resources and the organization of labour. Fraser cites Charles Taylor’s much discussed work, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition,footnote³ as an example of this one-sided attention to recognition at the expense of redistribution, and I think she is right. Even the paradigmatic theorist of distributive justice, John Rawls, now emphasizes cultural and value differences and plays down conflict over scarce resources.footnote⁴ Some activist expressions of multiculturalism, moreover, especially in schools and universities, tend to focus on the representation of groups in books and curricula as an end in itself, losing sight of the issues of equality and disadvantage that have generated these movements.footnote⁵ Some recent theoretical writing by feminists or gay men and lesbians has pondered questions of group identity abstracted from social relations of economic privilege and oppression.

Nevertheless, I think that Fraser, like some other recent left critics of multiculturalism, exaggerates the degree to which a politics of recognition retreats from economic struggles. The so-called ‘culture wars’ have been fought on the primarily cultural turf of schools and universities. I see little evidence, however, that feminist or anti-racist activists, as a rule, ignore issues of economic disadvantage and control. Many who promote the cultivation of African-American identity, for example, do so on the grounds that self-organization and solidarity in predominantly African-American neighbourhoods will improve the material lives of those who live there by providing services and jobs.

To the degree they exist, Fraser is right to be critical of tendencies for a politics of recognition to supplant concerns for economic justice. But her proposed solution, namely to reassert a category of political economy entirely opposed to culture, is worse than the disease. Her dichotomy between political economy and culture leads her to misrepresent feminist, anti-racist and gay liberation movements as calling for recognition as an end in itself, when they are better understood as conceiving cultural recognition as a means to economic and political justice. She suggests that feminist and anti-racist movements in particular are caught in self-defeating dilemmas which I find to be a construction of her abstract framework rather than concrete problems of political strategies. The same framework makes working-class or queer politics appear more one-dimensional than they actually are.

Fraser’s opposition of redistribution and recognition, moreover, constitutes a retreat from the New Left theorizing which has insisted that the material effects of political economy are inextricably bound to culture. Some of Nancy Fraser’s own earlier essays stand as significant contributions to this insistence that Marxism is also cultural studies. Rather than oppose political economy to culture, I shall argue, it is both theoretically and politically more productive to pluralize categories and understand them as differently related to particular social groups and issues. Thus the purpose of this essay is primarily to raise questions about what theoretical strategies are most useful to politics, and to criticize Fraser for adopting a polarizing strategy. The goal of strong coalitions of resistance to dominant economic forces and political rhetoric, I suggest, is not well served by an analysis that opposes cultural politics to economic politics. Specifying political struggles and issues in more fine-tuned and potentially compatible terms better identifies issues of possible conflict and alliance.