Rethinking gender,race,and class from the concept of Labor– Interview with Nancy Fraser

Good afternoon, dear Nancy. Many thanks for accepting this interview for a special issue in Capital and Class. The special issue is on the 13 Marxist feminist theses we discussed in the IV international Marxist feminist conference. In your new book, Three Faces of Labor: Uncovering the Hidden Ties among Gender, Race, and Class, you speak about labor, class struggle, production and reproduction, intersectionality, climate change, empire, democracy, feminism, and anti-racism. All those issues were some of the main topics of the IV international MarxFem conference as well.

Okay. Nice to see you.

Nice to see you again.

This many years? Yeah.

All those authors who will appear in the special Issue attended the conference so the articles of the monograph will delve into how we understand labor and class, sex, gender and race, in order to expand inclusive emancipatory processes, so, I will ask you some questions on the themes of the conference, and then we go deeper into the content of your new book.

Yeah. Well, the idea is to just sort of broaden our understanding of what capitalism is, to look at not just the contradictions and forms of oppression that arise from the economic dimension of society, but to look at the relationship between the economy and the rest of society. So, for my feminist point of view, this is very familiar. When you look at the relation between paid work and unpaid or underpaid care work, we can also look at the relationship between the economy and nature and ecological dimension. We can look at the relation between the economy and the political system, the severe limits placed on democracy, for example, and all the various political pathologies you could say associated with capitalism. And you mentioned race and empire. Also, the relationship between the economy and the whole larger geographic organization of the world around the global color line. All of these come into view if you think of capitalism as something larger than an economy that includes all of these, you could call them supporting arenas that make the economy possible. But the problem is that the relationship established is a very contradictory, a very perverse, and a very destabilizing relation. The economy, debt, the whole organization of capitalism is set up to, let’s say, encourage, incentivize, almost put enormous pressure on the powerful economic actors, the large investors, the large corporations and so on and so forth, puts great pressure on them to essentially cannibalize these background or to say that the system invites them to grab what they want from nature to freeride on their work to steal the lands and labor of indigenous, racialized conquered populations to hollow out democracy. These are the things the system needs to function, but the system is also primed to devour them, to deplete them, to damage them without any obligation to repair them. This is what I mean by cannibalization. It’s a dynamic in which the system devours its own conditions of possibility, which of course, unfortunately, are also the conditions of our lives where we have a stake in this and an end to it. So, it’s non-accidental, this deeply entrenched tendency to self-destabilization.

Now, as regards your new book, Three Faces of Capitalist Labor: Uncovering the Hidden Ties among Gender, Race, and Class, the content is based on the Benjamin Lectures, (a temporary chair) at the Center for Humanities and Social Change at Humboldt University in Berlin. Your aim in these lectures was to develop the concept of labor. You said: ‘perhaps you are wondering why Labor, why make that old fashioned concept the starting point for rethinking gender, race and class? Isn’t it tied to a perspective that prioritizes class over gender and race? And why does the Triad need rethinking in the first place?’

Well, you know, earlier you mentioned the concept of intersectionality. And I, I mean, I think that what we’re seeing today is a lot of signs that people are looking for integrative frameworks. They want to figure out how to promote greater cooperation or integration between struggles for reproductive justice, struggles against gender violence, struggles against racist racial violence, struggles against the burning of the planet, and so on and so forth. We have a huge amount of emancipatory energy, but it’s very dispersed and fragmented. And after some decades in which people felt a strong need to sort of articulate their own perspective without interference from more powerful actors. And so we’ve been through that. It gave us a lot of insights, but it has also left us in a situation of fragmentation. I see the rise or the reemergence of social reproductive feminism and Marxist feminism of racial capitalism, theory of eco socialism, eco feminism, or intersectionality. These are all paradigms that are interested in integration. Now, I don’t think any of them is exactly perfect as it is, but I do validate the impulse to integration and what I am doing with the category of labor in these lectures and in the new book that develops that problematic is to explore the possibility that a deep understanding of the way in which capitalist society relies on three different types of labor. Namely exploited labor, which is what we Marxists usually thought of as the working-class free factory workers in for profit commodity production. That’s certainly one essential face of capitalist labor. The second is expropriated labor that’s unfree or semi-free labor for which capital does not pay. Reproduction costs, which it supposedly does with exploitive labor and the labor on that sort of quote unquote the wrong side of the color line. Right. That it’s the global color line that we’re talking about to fund of a racialized semi-free world that capital essentially steals or coerces and gets on cheaper than the normative exploitive labor. And then there’s finally what I call domesticated labor. Feminists have historically called care work for social reproductive labor. There are at least these three fundamental forms of labor, and capitalism doesn’t work without all of them. It’s not true that it’s based exclusively on exploitive labor. Feminism understood the relation between domesticated and exploited labor. We’ve tried to theorize that for a long time, and anti-racists have thought about the relation between free and unfree labor for a long time. I’m trying to put these three things together in one framework, the hypothesis being that if we saw how the system needed all of these forms of labor, how they were functionally intertwined, how they work together, even though the populations who perform them are divided from one another along the lines of race and gender and so on. Nevertheless, if we could see that the system integrates all of this, we could understand that we have got it’s one single social system that generates all of the injustices, forms of oppression, and irrationalities that pertain to care work on one hand, to racialized labor on the other and to normal, quote, exploitive labor on the other. This is an integrative perspective. The idea is that capitalism understood this way, uncovers some hidden ties of gender, race, and class. My hypothesis is that this organization of social labor and the divisions it entrenches within the working-class emissions of race, gender, and so on that form a unitary theory, unlike multiple systems. It shows us how gender, race, and class are generated. Not accidentally. By capitalism, by this form of social organization. So that’s the general idea.

According to Marx, the value of the whole social product corresponds to simple labor time socially necessary to produce it, regardless of whether the sale price of the commodities for each sector is above or below the exchange value. However, the problem is that the simple labor time socially needed to produce workers is hardly measured or formalized because it is considered to have no ‘productive value’. You say the division between productive labor and reproductive labor reproduces the idea that only some type of labor produces value in capitalism. Could you develop this idea? And why, despite this critique you still call reproductive labor to all those labor done by racialized and sexualized bodies?

So why I do or why I don’t?

Why, on one hand, you criticize this division between reproductive and productive, and yet you call Social Reproductive labor to all the unpaid labor, on one hand, which is mainly done by women and racialized people and which is precisely why is called Reproductive labor, since, according to you, there is also paid labor which is reproductive. So, why do you call it reproductive if it also produces surplus value when it is paid?

Okay. I understand. I mean, the problem is that this distinction between productive and reproductive labor is generated by capitalism. I don’t think it existed in any strong sense prior to capitalism. And I think that a genuinely emancipatory post-capitalist society would need to, if not completely abolish it, at least radically reimagine it. So now we are living in a society that entrenches this distinction. And it’s not just an ideology. It’s an institutionalized separation. So we have that in order to understand the society, in order to map what its structure is, what its dynamics are, how it works, we have to use that distinction. At the same time that we believe that this is like the distinction between those who own the means of production and those who don’t. This is not a distinction that we approve of. On the contrary, we think it’s the root of oppression. But the society is organized that way and so we have to talk about that. So, I try maybe I don’t always succeed, but I try to be careful in keeping both sides of that picture in view at the same time that I’m using it when I’m describing the society. I’m also trying to show how the value theory associated with the distinction is very perverse and problematic, and I try to be very careful in distinguishing between wealth and value. This is actually Marx’s language. You know, he says that wealth comes from labor and nature. Wealth is a general term for Marx. It’s not a specific term to capitalism. Value is a capitalist term. Right. This is about the sort of monetized, you know, abstraction that is the sort of lifeblood of the system and of the capital accumulation process. So, what I’m trying to talk about is how does capital or actors who are capitalist in their acting, how do they essentially get a hold of wealth and transfer and siphon it into and transform it into value? In so far as that is labor whose reproduction costs they do not pay for. Unless in some social democratic regimes they are, they’re forced to accept. Those are complicated exceptions. We leave that alone. For the most part, they find ways to evade paying for that, even a social collapse. So, what I’m accepting is one other point here, and that’s the distinction between surplus value and profit. I accept the same orthodox Marxian view, which stipulates almost as a definition that surplus value means those extra hours of value produced in that extra labor time that capital does not pay for it. We’re talking about exploitive labor pays for the unnecessary labor hours, leaving the living costs of the worker. But the capitalist appropriates the surplus. That’s surplus value. By definition, if we’re talking about unpaid labor, we’re not talking about surplus value. Nevertheless, a surplus value is not the whole story. I think Orthodox Marxists have focused too much on surplus value and not enough on profit. Profit involves more than surplus value. It involves all those cheap inputs. Reasonable costs are not paid for. It includes ecological reproduction costs. Capital class virtually never pays the real costs of the energy supplies of the raw materials. It never replenishes or repairs or pays for the reproduction of that. It virtually never pays for the full reproduction costs of the energies that we devote to caring for people to keep up, keeping social connections and social bonds alive, and so on and so forth. It hardly ever pays for the true cost of the government on which it relies for its law and its police and its crisis management and so on. It’s always offloading that on to the working class who are paying the taxes and so on. These are all components of profit. You know, not just surplus value. So I think that the perspectives that I am developing puts more focus on profit, and on these other components over and above surplus value. Surplus value is important. I don’t deny that for a second, but I think it has so fascinated orthodox Marxism that they have not seen the bigger picture. And of course, most capitalists have never even heard of surplus value. They wouldn’t have the foggiest idea. But you talk about profits. They know what you’re talking about. So that’s in a way, what motivates them.

So that leads to the other question which you talk about in the second Benjamin lecture: the three movements of labor. Could you delve into this?

Yeah. I think I should have said earlier that I was inspired to develop this approach by W.E.B. Dubois. I’ve been teaching Black Reconstruction, which I think is his masterpiece from 1935. I put it up there with Trotsky’s history of the Russian Revolution as one of the great masterpieces of Marxian historiography. And I wish it were more widely read and discussed. It is in the United States, but because it deals with American events, it may not have the global attention it deserves. In any case, Dubois had the startling idea. This is, by the way, a history of the 19th-century American Civil War. It’s about the whole trajectory from civil war and formal abolition of slavery, the attempt through radical reconstruction to transform the whole social and political, economic and property and social relations in the South so that emancipation of the slaves would be a reality and not just a formal thing. And that goes on for a couple of decades. And then it’s about what he calls the counterrevolution of property in which the essentially northern capital bails out of the alliance and refuses to support it anymore. There’s a political crisis and power is returned to the planter classes in the South. So, their white supremacy is reestablished. This is a great story. Now, lots of people have told the story, but what Dubois does is truly extraordinary. He says in the 19th century, the United States had two labor movements. It had the trade union movement, which was to soon give rise to a young socialist movement. That’s the movement to emancipate free workers, white workers. And then it had abolition, the anti-slavery struggle. And that, too, is a labor movement. And then Dubois develops this idea I was speaking about earlier, that these are two essential forms of labor in capitalism, and they are important in the set. They’re very different. The populations are divided, but what they produce is all entwined together in the accumulation of capital because you don’t have Manchester without Mississippi. Manchester, Northern England, where Engels famously wrote about the satanic textile mills. What are they doing? They’re spinning cloth out of that raw cotton that is produced on the cheap on the slave plantations in Mississippi. So that’s a beautiful, neat kind of way of looking how you know that the world system is right. Locating free industrial production here and unfree raw materials extractivism there. But these are actually both parts of one dynamic economic engine, and the effect is to separate. But to labor movements, who don’t see that they are in this relationship, that it’s one system that in a sense is establishing both forms of oppression, not that they are equal. Of course, one small privilege than the other. But the idea is that if the two labor movements, trade unionism and anti-slavery, have recognized each other and have understood that neither of them could really emancipate itself on its own, that they were both part of one system. If they had joined forces, the whole history of the United States and possibly of the capitalist world more broadly. Could have been different. That’s a brilliant idea to label moments that don’t recognize each other and so on. And okay, from what I said before, you can see my little feminist head is checking, you know, and saying, Yeah, true. Okay, but really, only two. Why not three? Because, you know, all these decades of great work that feminists have done on care work and reproductive labor and of course, two boys have a blind spot even about enslaved reproductive labor. So doesn’t theorize that there are various passages here and there that refer to it, but it’s not part of the conceptualization. So why not three labor movements? And then could we think of feminism as an unrecognized labor movement, unrecognized not only by the others, but perhaps even by itself or by large parts of itself? And if so, what are the prospects today for a perspective? That encourages anti-Racist activism, feminist activism, trade unionist activism, and so on, to think of themselves as fellow labor movements. Each of which is as an engine, so to speak, a piston in the one engine that is capitalism and this, you know, speaks to what we were talking about earlier, the possibility of a more integrated way of thinking. So, this is what I tried to argue in these lectures, what if we feminists were to think of a lot of what we are doing as a form of labor struggle? And what if anti-racists could understand? You know, prison abolition and anti-riot police violence and various other things as a form of labor struggle. And what about the trade union movement? What about all three of these movements understood themselves and each other as fellow labor members? Would we then be in a position to think about some kind of an expanded idea of what the working class is? It’s not just the exploited segment, but it’s these other segments, too. And think about how to overcome the internal political divisions. And that’s the hypothesis.

That’s very interesting, and the emancipation process has to be, again, as broad as we can. But again, problems arise here as regards family, for instance. Because according to the latest figures provided by the United Nations, 85% of non-paid labor is done by women worldwide and within the family, understood as a social institution, an institution where more than 78% of violence against women is carried out, by their family men, men of the working class. So this makes the family the main site of direct violence against women and the main site of expropriation of women though non-paid domesticated labor. So what would be your proposal as regards modern heteronuclear family?

Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s the question. I certainly agree that the family is in many parts of the world the main site of care work or reproductive labor. What I’m calling domesticated labor. That’s right. And I think it’s certainly true that gender violence is very prevalent there as well. A couple of things, though, is the labor side of this is exactly my point, that there’s a huge body in the world of labor that is done overwhelmingly by women in domestic settings, or if for pay for very, very low pay with zero labor rights. A lot of vulnerability to violence. Even if it’s not your own family member, it could be the home of your employer where you are cleaning or providing childcare or whatever. So I think that’s all true. And to me, this is all an argument in favor, I think. I don’t know if you make it as an objection, but I think it’s an argument in favor of this idea of thinking of about feminism, at least one way of thinking about. I’m not saying to me is to think of it as a movement for the rights of these ‘workers’ that you just described, including their right to be free from violence and to have a workplace that is safe or to have other forms of remunerative work available to them. Right. To not be forcibly segregated in private homes. To have access to the world. To be free from violence. This is all. This is exactly what I mean by thinking of feminism as a labor movement. And I also think that we should look at reproductive rights, including the right to abortion as labor rights pertaining to the capacity to control your body, to control the capacity for reproductive labor. And I think that #MeToo is about labor rights. It’s about the right to a workplace free from sexual assault and harassment and violence. The fact that some of these issues have not been seen as labor issues is interesting and puzzling, because the second you think about them in these terms, it’s clear that they can be seen that way and that that’s a good way to look at them. But the association of care work as non-work in capitalism is so powerful, that this ideological association that gets in the way of our looking at these things. Do you know what a huge struggle it took for even, you know, normative, exploitive free trade unionists to be free of violence? They fought like, you know, devils for centuries to win, that women are in need to make that fight. Also, our workplaces are saturated with violence and should not be. The last point I want to make is the question that if someone might conclude from what you said, that there’s a real hard and powerful conflict of interest. Between women subject to those terrible conditions in the family and their husbands or fathers and so on. And what I want to say is those are the folks, those men are often perpetrators of violence, and that’s for sure. And we need to, you know, stop that. But I don’t think they are the principal beneficiaries. And I think the question is, I would say the same thing about black and white workers. Some white workers are racist and engage in racist attacks on members of the black working class. But those workers have a lot more to gain than to lose if they could rethink their situation and understand that those people are their potential allies. And I think the same is true with working-class men and women. However ever patriarchal and oppressive the patterns are. I think that the principal beneficiary is capital and that heads of households are sort of lorded over, in some cases, their wives, their children, their daughters. They are, you know, people who often have been, I use this word advisedly, emasculated in the larger world, that they’re relatively powerless in the larger world and they, you know, act like the king in the castle. We shouldn’t be without any way of, you know, wanting to excuse any of that, I don’t. Nevertheless, if we cannot find a way of understanding how the overwhelming majority of people, including those who do bad things, are also victims of the system with something to gain from its transformation, we will not be able to change the world.

I share the idea that the benefits would be universal in that sense, if we all understand that. But again, there is always this confrontation and that’s why we have different feminists currents, on one hand, decolonial and communitarian theories which are closer to the ‘imbrication’ theory, from which materialist feminism has also developed, and on the other, there is a more deeper division amongst currents between those who think that men and women are made and can be unmade, and those theories, such as the unitary theory, which thinks of an emancipated world where there will not be capitalists and proletarians, but there will be women and men. In these unitary Marxist theories, women and men are not made, but get born and thus cannot disappear. According to this last frame, the only beneficiaries of women unpaid labor are capitalists, not working men. But then, why do working men have more time, more salaries, more space, more prestige, more power and higher education than working women wide world?

We agree about that. But the question is, how do you respond politically to that?

We try to do this by producing a frame in which not all oppression and exploitation is reducible to one evil, capitalism, since we do not think capitalism invents women, and so, women will not disappear when capitalism falls. Accordingly, we try to organize autonomous movements, such as the feminist movement, which are coordinated with youth movements, along with classical trade unions, climate change organizations, domestic labor unions, pensioners’ movements, and so on. I think that maybe the problem of fragmentation is constitutive of this unitary theory since it reduces all the complexities of our world to one cause, a cause which is not able to unify other fights. The question is why. On the other hand, complexity does not mean fragmentation. We can politicize and act strategically within this complexity which does not reduce all the evil to one cause, since reduction means exclusion. In any case, which kind of institutional structure should these movements have to build in order to put in place a continuous emancipation process? In other words, which kind of institutional organization would you propose, considering the crisis of union trades, political parties, and liberal political architecture, and taking also into account obviously the feeling of impotence and irritation, which is very spread?

I have a very clear idea about that. I mean, I’m starting from the fact that there is a great deal of emancipatory or potentially emancipatory activism and energy. And my initial thought is how can we imagine more cooperation and integration of that, more shared goals? By which I don’t mean, you know, some sort of complete merger or anything. So that’s like my first thought. I’m also very influenced by the Gramscian idea of a counter hegemonic bloc. And so, you know, this is historically in all of Marxian socialist thinking, you know, Lenin had a problem with how to have a worker peasant alliance. Gramsci has a southern question: How do you put the Sardinian peasants and the Turin Fiat workers together, you know, I think we have a similar kind of problem of, you know, there are many civil terms, so to speak, and they’re all victims of one and the same social system, in my opinion: you’re not trying to say that there is no difference between workers and peasants. But that they have enough of common interests to align together and challenge the usual political alignments which, you know, keep them divided out. That’s what I think. That’s my model of how would we form a counter bloc. And the strategic idea there is that I’m really interested in counter power, not in withdrawal or dealmaking or going off into a corner and building a common subsistence perspective or something like that. To me, that’s romantic. It’s nice if it prefigures, you know, maybe some good, good things that socialist societies might want to incorporate. But I don’t think there’s any alternative to confronting the IMF. You can’t escape these. They’re just too big. Their tentacles are everywhere. And you are very cramped when you try to withdraw. They don’t give you much space to really transform the society. We have to dismantle the IMF. We have to dismantle Royal Shell, and ExxonMobil, and Google, and Amazon. You know, we have to really. So the question then is putting to them counter power. In theory, the overwhelming majority of the human race should have an interest in being on the other side of that power. They’re not getting much out of it. Even if they get to beat up their wives every once in a while, I mean, they would still have a much better lives if we can make this change. So I want to see lots of different kinds of organizations. I think that political parties are important. And even though things went badly in the end, I was very impressed at the outset with Podemos for trying to take a radical direct-action movement and give it a some scope of a more permanent institutionalized force, because the alternative which we had in the United States was in the second Zuccotti Park and the other places were cleared. That was the end. You know, we don’t have an organization. So Davos ended up disappointing in many ways, but still. So I’m interested in party formation. I’m interested in trade unions. I’m very heartened by the new unionization efforts in the United States, in sectors that have never before been organized, like distribution, retail, and so on. And this is quite exciting. And these efforts are often led by young people, people of color and women. So it’s a different face of unionism. Now, I don’t know what is going on elsewhere. But look, we have very impressive indigenous movements in many parts of the world. And they are allying with sort of urban, modernist, ecological currents. And that’s very interesting kind of alliance. There’s a lot going on. And I want to sort of leave it quite open as to how in what form these various forces cooperate. Um, I’m certainly not in favor of a Leninist party or anything like that, but there could be a moment where it would be appropriate to form some, uh, hopefully very democratic, grassroots-driven political party. I don’t know. All this is further complicated by the fact that it’s not going to happen in one country. We need an international bloc and so on and so forth, which makes things very, very complicated. So that’s why I say I don’t have a clear idea, but I have some instincts.

We are also witnessing the emergence of housing unions because of evictions and there are also smaller things, those new movements that Harvey says are occurring in the sphere of the realization of value which has increased in our current service and financial capitalism. To this Cannibal capitalism, we have to add the digital dimension: how everything is changing in value extraction where these big corporations such as Google, Amazon, Meta, take from us something called data which is not a scarce resource, which never ends unlike petrol, and therefore, how are we going to create a counter power to this digital power. How would digital barricades look like?

Yeah, well, so I’m very impressed with all those very good work that’s being done on this. I would love, for example, Shoshana Zuboff’s book on Surveillance Capitalism. It is a very good account of this. And I think there are some more recent things that are also interesting. So and it’s true, I haven’t worked on this directly. I don’t think that the technology itself is one dimensionally dangerous as bad. I think that some of this technology can be, you know, mobilized differently for different purposes, disconnected from profit accumulation and so on and so forth. But that requires, again, another kind of social transformation to take this technology and see what, if anything, good can be made of it. Right now, it’s under the control of those corporate forces associated with their new forms of extractivism and so on. Value extraction. The United States right now is in a truly bizarre political crisis moment. We just had the arraignment of Trump yesterday (June 2023) on these charges to do with the classified documents and so on. And we have a very significant 37% of people who believe that that’s a political witch hunt, and what he did was just fine and we should be locking up Hillary Clinton, etc. So people in this country, it’s like they live in two different universes with alternate facts. And so there’s I think several things are implicated here. One is the long-standing deterioration of living standards and quality of life, which goes back to 4 years of neo liberalization, of relocation, of manufacturing, of the creation of the low wage service economy in place of the higher family wage and, you know, manufacturing economy and so on and so forth, all of this deterioration. And then the role of the digital is very important to share that there’s a structural transformation of the public sphere, and it began with right wing talk radio, and then we got Fox News and ITV, and then we got Facebook at all. And this is the algorithm that feeds everybody exactly the kind of information that they have already engaged with. So that reinforces all the while, of course, mining the data, as you were saying earlier. So if you put together just this very structural deformation of the public sphere, along with deteriorating living conditions, and then you throw in some kind of an evil genius like Trump. And you know, you’ve got a perfect storm. So that’s the whole problem of political communication which is essential. It’s so fractured and so problematic. Somehow it’s true that emancipatory ideas do circulate, but they immediately ignite an hysterical backlash. And not just hysterical, but unhinged, paranoid backlash. You know. ‘People who work with sexuality are grooming our children or people who work on racism or’, you know, ‘it’s infiltrating our schools with ideas that were designed to make white children feel guilty’ on all of this kind of stuff. It feels like a moment living in an insane asylum. Anyway, these are some of my random thoughts about the digital. But again, you’re right that I haven’t directly done much about this.

You can’t do everything (smiles). My last question is about socialism. How would a socialist democracy be different from liberal democracy, as regards economy or production or ecology or race or family or sex, whatever you have imagined.

First of all, for me, socialism and democracy actually go together. People used to argue that capitalism and democracy went together, but that was never very persuasive. No, I mean, socialism, in my view, is precisely about dismantling the outright democratic control that a small stratum of entrepreneurs, investors, corporate actors, financial actors exert on the basic direction of societal development. They control the social surplus. They decide they appropriate this privately, and they allocate according to their calculations of what will generate future profits. In other words, their sole concern is low return on investment. And the sums of money that we’re talking about are so huge, what they represent in terms of human energy, human labor, human capacity is so enormous that we have essentially licensed them. To decide the whole future if there is a future, because frankly, they’re leaving us into the planetary in solar incineration. But if I have to give one point about what I think the heart and soul of socialism is I would say democratic control over social surplus. That’s the heart of it. I’m also for very generous provision in the form of public goods to satisfy basic needs. But, you know, that’s familiar from social democracy already. What is specific to socialism, I think, is this question about surplus reproduction, about our collective property and we need to decide democratically through some mechanisms, don’t ask me how. We have to organize some process of deliberation and representation and so on through which we decide what to do with it or even whether we really want to have so much surplus. Maybe we just want to work a lot less. And we’re content. I don’t think that’s an option at the outset, given the massive quantities of unmet human needs across the globe. I do think we need to look at the massive damages to nature that capitalism has left us. Despite all the brouhaha about how productive it is. It’s actually a machine for destruction, and it’s left us with, you know, horrific destruction in various forms. So maybe this idea of lots of free time, which has always been a socialist ideal. it’s not in our immediate horizon, but in the end, why shouldn’t it be at a certain point? And so right away, I think we’re talking about vastly expanding the scope. What sorts of issues are issues for democratic political right direction as opposed to essentially market driven processes? So to me, socialism and democracy go together. It’s not just about making more democratic, more inclusive, more egalitarian pathetically small arenas that are already counted as the space of democracy. It’s about vastly expanding this space as well.

Great end. Many thanks, Nancy. I am very grateful for your time, once again.

Thank you so much for doing that. I know there’s a lot of work here that is very much appreciated, very grateful.

Many thanks.

All the best.