Recognition and redistribution: balancing identities and economic disparity

• The political predicament following the collapse of the USSR posed a unique challenge to political philosophers around the world.
• The last decade of the 20th century also witnessed the end of apartheid in South Africa and the crucial and continuing unfolding of the neoliberal economic ordering of the Global South.

Developments during the last decade of the 20th century

• End-point of mankind's ideological evolution: and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.
• Underlining of political significance of various ‘cultural’ identities: like race, sexuality, gender and ethnicity making claims to recognition of their political space.

Identity and economy

• Theory of justice: balancing both the issues of cultural identity, along with that of widening economic inequalities.
• Nancy Fraser’s dual perspective of ‘Recognition and Redistribution’: entails correcting the history of misrecognition and suffering caused to multitudes of people due to their cultural devaluation.
• Culture: covers varied social identities on the margins of a society.
• Redistributive aspect of Fraser’s dual perspective: aims at removing injustices rooted in the economic structure of the society.

Attempts to theorize socioeconomic inequalities

• Iris Marion Young (1990): wrote ‘Politics of Difference’ arguing for a “non-redistributive” theory of justice.
• Fraser: conceived and incorporated the two political faultlines emerging from the misrecognition of people based on ethnicity, sex, gender, race or religion and that of maldistribution resulting in widening economic inequalities.
• Fraser’s deliberations with philosopher Axel Honneth (2003): emphasised that claims of identity and class are not the case of either/or choice, but that they both form a single continuum for a justice theory of our time.
• Decentering ‘essentialism’ inherent within claims of cultural identity: and to link it up with the subject of economic hierarchy.

Caste system in India

• Fraser’s dual perspective on India’s social reality: presents itself as a singular political puzzle which could be addressed through the politics of social justice.
• India’s caste hierarchy: singularly unique when it comes to understanding social exploitation and economic marginalization.
• Social prejudices against cultural claims of oppressed people: caste is more foundational to Indian society as it is normalized & accepted into prevalent socio-religious norms k/a Brahmanism.
• Political organizations marshaling politics of social justice: primarily led by Dalits, illustrates how caste affects different people differently.
• Lag in affirmative and transformative legal actions: couldn’t arrest the issue of caste apartheid in India completely.

The need for representation

• Recent political struggles in India: salience of recognition seen unequivocally, which tends to obfuscate the politics of redistribution.
• Chances of cultural hegemony into the political lexicon: if the politics of recognition is accommodated without associated redistributive aspect.
• Role of caste in making & disseminating economic hierarchies: has presented a real problem for critical theorists in India.

Conclusion

• Perhaps anticipating similar predicaments, Fraser did add the third aspect of representation to her dual model (2004).
• This idea of representation has been a quintessential axis of Ambedkar’s philosophy of annihilating caste which is foundational to Indian politics.