Work · Socialism, Anarchism, Marxism & Critical Theory
Justice Interruptus
From redistribution to recognition – and why a just politics needs both.
Introduction
This collection of essays from 1997 describes what Fraser calls the “postsocialist condition”: after 1989, struggles for the recognition of group identities – around gender, ethnicity, “race” and sexuality – had pushed aside struggles for the redistribution of wealth. Fraser argues that both are needed, because many injustices have an economic and a cultural side at once; she calls gender and “race” bivalent collectivities. She distinguishes affirmative remedies, which correct unjust outcomes, from transformative ones, which change the underlying structures, and favours socialism in the economy combined with deconstruction in culture. The debate continued with Axel Honneth in Redistribution or Recognition? (2003).
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