Background check: Spatiality and relationality in Nancy Fraser's expanded conception of capitalism

Abstract

Nancy Fraser's recent work on the hidden abodes of capitalism has quickly become a critical point of reference for those concerned with the racialized, gendered, and ecological conditions of capitalist reproduction. With that in view, this article seeks to extend Fraser's conceptualization through a sympathetic critique of her approach to capitalism's foreground/background nexus. After situating Fraser's project in relation to Marx (and his own engagement with capitalism's background conditions of possibility), it argues that (1) Fraser fails to adequately theorize how capitalist crisis is produced and resolved in space and (2) that Fraser obscures the relational-dialectical constitution of her own hidden abodes. This article then develops an alternative theoretical approach to capitalism's foreground/background relationship, based on a synthetic reading of Fraser's framework and the work of geographer Jason W. Moore. Finally, it closes with some brief reflections on the implications of this theorization for contemporary socialist politics.

Constitutive outsides or hidden abodes? Totality and ideology in critical urban theory

“…And further still, in such moments of crisis -in which capital can no longer secure cheap work from its hidden abodes -capital often attempts to re-territorialise the geography of expropriation and exploitation, tout court. It attempts to redraw the lines between exploitable and expropriable work and to seek out new 'frontiers' for both the procurement of cheap inputs and surplus investment (see, for additional context, Conroy, 2023aConroy, , 2023bConroy, , 2023cConroy, , 2023d.…”

“…Rather, it simply entails a process of sociospatial reorganisation. In other words, urbanisation in this context names the politically mediated implosion of infrastructural networks and socio-spatial 'configurations that have been reflexively designed to accelerate and intensify the accumulation of capital on the world market' within and beyond the city (Brenner, 2017: 220); and the internally related explosion of new (often highly racialised and gendered) hidden abodes of expropriated work to support these capitalised investments, within a landscape already made in accordance with the imperatives of accumulation (see, for a more complete account, Conroy, 2023aConroy, , 2023c. The urban fabric is produced in response to crises, but our understanding of what propels those crises -and the role of ascriptive difference in relation to them -is fundamentally transformed.…”

Race, Capitalism, and the Necessity/Contingency Debate

“…Put otherwise, my contention is that race has historically been a critical means through which capital has identified and demarcated expropriable (as opposed to exploitable) work; it has long been -and continues to be -central to capital's efforts to stave off crises, and to ensure that the zone of expropriated work continues to outpace the zone of commodification and exploitation (Conroy, 2022a(Conroy, , 2022bMoore, 2015). (As Moore (2015) notes, without a vast reserve of expropriable work, capital invariably faces a crisis of overaccumulation, which can only be resolved by spatially reorganizing capitalist production and reproduction.)…”

Fanon's Mobilities: Race, Space, Recognition

“…And yet, more important for our purposes, is the fact that racialisation is at the centre of Moore's account—with critical implications for the Fanonian theorisation pursued here. As noted, Moore maintains that capital's historical strategy for guaranteeing its necessary “world‐ecological surplus”—and thus of staving off crises of overaccumulation in the longue durée —has been the devaluation (and expropriation) of racialised, gendered, and ecological work (see Conroy 2022a, 2022b). Capital (with the backing of the state) has consistently worked to produce, codify, and police the bounds of race (and gender), relegating much of the work done by women and non‐white people to the zone of appropriation , and outside of the wage nexus (Mies 1986; von Werlhof 1988).…”