Kapitalismus und umkämpfte Öffentlichkeit. Ein Gespräch mit Nancy Fraser

Following a workshop on “The struggle over the public sphere” with Nancy Fraser at the Berlin Centre for Social Critique in June 2022, the opportunity arose to continue the discussion with her in November of the same year. The conversation documented below sheds light on the relationship between “subaltern counter-publics” and the public sphere in general, the rise of right-wing counter-publics and the impact of so-called “social media” on the public sphere. That leads to the question of how publics are situated in capitalism and how they are able to politicise issues that are traditionally considered private in capitalist societies. In the interview, Fraser combines her earlier public sphere theory with her current theory of capitalism. This is particularly interesting in light of the urgent political task of forming an expanded and non-essentialist working class identity capable of mediating different “faces of labour”, as she puts it in her Benjamin lectures.