Feminism and the politicization of needs

Markus’s ‘Civil Society and the Politicization of Needs’ registers its indebtedness to Nancy Fraser's earlier paper (Fraser, 1989) for its key concept. Nevertheless, Markus has important reservations about Fraser’s version of ‘the politicization of needs’ as a reflection upon the tasks and potentials of contemporary critical politics. After some general reflections upon key differences between Heller’s theory of radical needs and Markus’s account of the politicization of needs, the next section will attempt to illuminate the critical power of Markus’s paradigm by contrasting it with Fraser’s normatively weaker version of the ‘politicization of needs’.

Published in the mid-1990s, after she had become well versed in developments in the embattled reformism of social democratic Australia, Markus’s ‘Civil Society and the Politicization of Needs’ reflects upon the critical potentials of the politics of need interpretation that has accompanied the ‘crisis of the welfare state in its Western and Eastern varieties’. In the West, the addition of claims about needs and their interpretation into a political discourse that had been dominated by issues of ‘rights and obligations’ amounted to a change in ‘the very meaning of the political’ (Markus, 1995, p. 161). Markus goes on to observe that the introduction of claims about needs into political discourse ‘poses a serious problem for the welfare state’ which is called upon to respond to a ‘multitude of claims’ and to the ‘socially stratified distribution of the competencies and means necessary for bringing the needs into the arena of public debate in a given political field’ (Markus, 1995, p. 161). The introduction of the relevance of the experiential and subjective questions about needs into contemporary political life invades it with democratic potentials and expectations. The ‘politicization of needs’ refers to processes that seek to wrest these potentials away from prescriptive deformations that are supplied by traditional determinations and by the bureaucratic imperatives of the welfare state. The new social movements occupy a new political space in which the interpretation of needs had become a ‘main object of social contestation' (p. 162).

Fraser makes the point that this social contestation encompasses a political dispute over who gets to ‘establish authoritative, thick definitions of people’s needs’ (Fraser, 2013, p. 56). For Markus though, this account of the democratization of need interpretation does not adequately represent the critical potentials of the new social movements and she reflects upon the ‘politicization of needs’ as a discursive process that exponentially expands into the rationalization of ever-wider fields of action. On this account, the ‘politicization of needs' initiates reflections upon the

Learning from the Budapest School women 147 social conditions that produce, and inhibit the realization of, socially conditioned needs as they begin to articulate themselves as demands. To explicate her account of the ability of the feminist issue to launch new needs with a radical, society-wide reach, we return to Markus’s example about activism around childcare.

Markus observes that, when different groups of women take up the issue of social provision of childcare,

this is not simply asking society to help in the fulfillment of their parental functions. It also thematises such issues as: What is the equitable distribution of responsibilities in this respect? Ar e there any particular social limitations of life aspirations connected with motherhood? What modes of life should an appropriate childcare accommodate? And so on. This of course opens a whole new discourse (or even series of discourses) between women (or parents) and the representatives of childcare agencies, and the more general public forum. After all the answers to these questions have more or less direct implications for all the members of society as well.

(Markus, 1995, pp. 168-9)

This account of the rationalization processes that can be set in motion as a particular need begins to explore the conditions and wider implications of their demands suggests key differences, as well as shared ground, between the theory of radical needs and the ‘politicization of needs’. We noted that the theory of radical needs delineates those needs that cannot be met by satisfiers that reduce all needs to quantifiable terms. These recalcitrant needs can only be satisfied by arrangements that transform existing alienated ways of interacting that inhibit the development of the personality. Applied to Markus’s example of the politicization of needs for childcare, Heller’s theory of radical needs betrays an authoritarian dimension that is absent from democratizing reflections upon the ‘politicization of needs’. After all, if we look childcare as a ‘type’ of need that defies quantifiable solutions, it seems that we recover the terms of a critique of paid care that reproduces the moralistic burdens placed upon mothers as the ‘appropriate’ carers by a neoconservative discourse. By contrast, Markus’s account of the ‘politicization of needs' does not prejudge types of needs; it reflects, rather, upon the processes thr ough which their radical dimensions and wider significance might be unfolded.

However, according to Axel Honneth, the ‘politicization of needs' thesis, at least on Fraser’s account of it, does not fully address key limitations that have already been noted with respect to the theory of radical needs. He is wary of Fraser’s inclination to derive the normative contents of critical theory ‘directly from an orientation to new social movements’ (Honneth, 2003, p. 117). As we noted earlier, this is meant as a criticism because if critical theory is seen to only occupy an expressive relationship to an already formed self-conscious activism, then it can only wane into an accommodating inertia as the emancipatory radicalism of these political solidarities subside. Markus confirms Honneth’s caution about Fraser’s account of the ‘politicization of needs’ thesis. Fraser’s version is finally only interested in ‘the question of the possibility for the normative

grounding of a plurality offorms of life and the systems of values and needs representing them’ (Markus, 1995, p. 175).

However, on Markus’s reading, the problem is not, as Honneth suggests, that Fraser’s account of critical theory’s role in the ‘politicization of needs’ only allows it an expressive relationship to new social movements. Fraser’s version of the role of critical theory is limited because it gives expression to a narrowly partial understanding of the significance of new social movements. Fraser restricts the ‘crucial specificity of the contemporary social movements’ to ‘the centrality of ‘identity formation' (Fraser, 1995, p. 175). She concentrates on the shaping of internal group solidarities via processes of interpretation and reinterpretation of needs and these new identities seem in her account to be established in an exclusively ‘oppositional’ manner (in an opposition to all others ‘outside’ the given group)’ (Markus, 1995, p. 175). This version forfeits insight into the vital rationalizing processes that are, according to Markus, also set in motion by the politicization of needs. Fraser’s concept of the principle of ‘participatory parity’, which was explicated in the previous chapter, fails to reflect upon the widening orbit of critique that unfolds as efforts made to justify claims about needs build dialogue partners that must be persuaded about their reasonableness and elaborates new understandings about wider social conditions that must also be changed. Markus is convinced that this creative dimension of the politicization of needs ‘offers us some hope’ that (in Habermas’s language) a ‘radically democratic formation of public will’ might be in a position to require state and economic power to become sensitive to goals forged in a democratized civil societies (Markus, 1995, p. 176). Markus agrees with Andrew Arato and Jean Cohen that this attempt to ‘push back’ against the steering resources of money and administrative power will require the establishing of ‘some channels through which the new concerns can find their place in the states policies and the new forms of activity can acquire appropriate legal guarantees, without incorporating the movement into the establishment’ (Arato and Cohen, 1984, cited by Markus, 1995, p. 177). Accordingly, the democratizing agenda must extend upwards to encompass the formal political structures of the liberal democratic state.

The absence in Fraser’s account of the democratic rationalization of need claims that is scoped into Markus’s reading has permitted the former to gravitate in recent times to calls for a ‘progressive populism'. Fraser’s version never invested normativity in the processes through which need claims became rationally justified as they seek political recognition. In the end, the moralizing justification that satisfies a progressive populism finds no obstacles in her account of the democratic imperatives of the politicization of needs.

Brown also can see no grounds for a sacrificed ‘utopian imaginary’ in the rationalization of needs that underpinned a social democratic project. In contrast to both, Markus thinks our best option is to continue to work to realize the potentials of the ‘politicization of needs’ which demands that the logics and imperatives of capitalism negotiate weak, but persistent and far-reaching, democratic expectations. While Brown is committed to searching an ‘unrevolutionary present' for traces of a feminist utopian imaginaiy, her hopes that we might continue to ‘parse the promise’ and ‘let our objects fly’ offer no sociological grounds for these longings (2005, p. 115).

The circumspection of the social democratic ‘politicization of needs’ does not appeal to the younger Heller. She approaches the ‘woman problem’ as a matter of a particularity that must not be permitted to act as a limit in the pursuit of our freedoms. Early on, she gives some extreme formulations of what this construction entails for a democratized everyday life. Overcoming alienation in everyday life will see a self who is freed from the weight of unchosen particularities and is capable of ‘making value-oriented decisions as a result of its own endowments’ (1976b, p. 38). In an idealized future, people ‘will choose the types and the content of their relationships on an individual basis’ (Heller, 1976b, p. 40). In the post-bourgeois commune,

the adult members are not necessarily more attracted to “their own” children, and therefore they can choose those children whose temperament, character and intellect are closest or most attractive to them. Neither adults nor children have to love anyone, nor do they have to love anyone “the most”: like every other emotion, love too depends upon choice.

(Heller, 1976b, pp. 23-4)

Later writings substantially moderate this radical voluntarism. Heller’s mature theory of modernity reflects upon self-determined autonomy as a challenge that requires the individual to identify and make the best of the potentials in the unchosen, particular contingencies of her social contexts.

Heller and Markus agree with Hannah Arendt that ‘to be really emancipated, women have to be emancipated as women, that is not to accept the existing structures but to pluralize them and to change them to the degree that suits their own identities’ (Markus, 1989, p. 127). However, there are vital differences in the meaning that Heller and Markus give to this proposition. Heller does not find anything particular in the contingencies of feminine contexts that might be brought to the vitalization and enrichment of an emancipatory project. For such insights, we turn to Markus’s discussion of ‘women and success’. Companion to her article on the limitations, as well as strengths, of Arendt’s ‘anti feminism’, Markus’s ‘Success’ paper reformulates the ‘women problem’ in terms that allow certain ‘neglected life practices’ which ‘continuously, throughout the whole life span of an individual, create or reinforce certain ways of seeing, thinking and acting’ to be explored not simply as the mechanism of oppression, ‘in virtue of being ascribed exclusively to women’. These distinctive ways of doing things are also to be opened to exploration as the ground of capacities and potentials that ‘ought not to be lost’ but might be re-evaluated ‘as possible components not only of women’s liberation but also of the restructuration of the dominant culture’ (Markus, 1987, p. 97).