Not Making A Virtue Of A Necessity: Nancy Fraser On 'PostSocialist' Politics

Abstract

A new politics is growing in influence and power across the industrialised world. Active but decentred, rebellious but non-programmatic, influential but not state-centred, this new politics is redefining radicalism. Raising issues around sexuality, gender, drugs, transport, the environment, ethnicity, computers and communication, democracy, music and the future of socialism, the new politics ventures into areas the timid political establishment does its best to avoid. Activists are beginning to reflect on their struggles, as journalists and intellectuals are recognising the importance of new politics. Storming the Millennium is the first book to bring a range of activists and intellectuals together in one volume. It provides first histories of new movements that are at the core of new politics and grapples with the important political and theoretical issues raised by new politics through interviews and analyses. Bringing together new and established writers, it discusses crime and justice, disabilities, bisexual, gay, lesbian and transgender politics, race issues in 1990s Britain, activism on the Internet, gender politics and the relationship between new politics, the New Left and socialism.

Nancy Fraser, one of the most influential voices of contemporary Anglo-American feminist theory, has worked in the encounters between socialism and postmodernism and between feminism and postmodernism. Her work has been key in the development of feminist theoretical perspectives that are not immobilized by critiques of 'big sister' feminism or 'big brother' socialism. Rather, she has articulated a feminist position that remains productive for political critique, retains some kind of feminist or critical project and finds a way beyond the impasse. Here she is interviewed about her critique of old-style socialist politics for their lack of feminist and ecological analyses, and on her views of new forms of activism.