 Oh, I'm exploited as a worker, but I'm a citizen of the richest country in the world. Or I'm disadvantaged as a woman, but I'm white. And that gives me access to some opportunities that other people don't have. So what that means is that when people are thinking about different political strategies, it's a very complicated picture. Oh, maybe I have something to gain from more reproductive rights. But oh, maybe I have something to lose from the destabilization of the status quo. My name is Nancy Fulbury, and I am a professor emerita of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and director of the program on gender and care work at the Political Economy Research Institute. I think the meaning of class is kind of changing in some ways. It's evolving. I think originally it was defined as a relationship to the means of production, like owners versus workers. But there's kind of an analogy between that definition of class and some definitions of other socially assigned groups that have experienced pretty hierarchical inequalities. Like you could think of women and men as groups defined by a different relationship to the means of reproduction. Or you could think of racial ethnic differences as a relationship to a means of kind of cultural identity and distribution of resources outside the market and inside the market. So what I try to do in my work is think about both the parallels between different forms of group inequality and also the overlaps and the intersections. And the end result is a picture of inequality that's more complex and I think we're more resilient, but perhaps in some ways also a little bit more vulnerable to critique. You're asking me how economic oppression differs from social and other. Well, sometimes people put it this way, there's a difference between economic exploitation and social or political oppression. And I think that is kind of a false binary and that the relationship between these different forms of inequality is somewhat different. That almost all forms of inequality have an element of exploitation and almost all forms of inequality have a form of oppression. And it's usually related to differences in bargaining power based on group membership. So if you're a worker versus being an employer, if you're a woman versus being a man, if you're white versus a person of color, if you're a citizen of the most affluent country in the world or you're a citizen of a really poor country that's experiencing terrible drought and famine. So in every case, it's not a characteristic of you as an individual, it's something about your place and the structure of society and of the distribution of wealth and power. And it has ongoing consequences for your access to resources like education, income, social safety net, employment opportunities, so forth and so on. So how has feminist economics morphed into kind of a bigger picture of differences in political economy? I think the story kind of has political origins, which is that feminism went through a period of being very vulnerable to criticism for being very inattentive to racial-ethnic differences. And that forced kind of a rethinking of the way in which we've implicitly kind of ranked different forms of inequality. So the paradox, I think, for a lot of feminist theorists was for years we objected to being placed on sort of a lower level of importance than class inequality. And then suddenly we realized we were doing the same thing to people who were concerned about racial-ethnic inequality. Like, oh, yes, that's important. But really, we're centering this. Anyway, I think that sometimes a lot of changes in political theory are an outgrowth of kind of political practice and practice. And I think that's an example. And really the word intersectionality and the kind of intersectional vision was really kind of the outgrowth of black feminism and feminism from the global south kind of grappling with this contradiction. And I think it's proved to be a very fertile, very generative kind of evolution of thinking. Classical political economy, it's so fascinating, whether you're looking at Marx or antecedents like Ricardo, they just take labor as for granted. Labor exists. Labor is produced kind of by the natural world. And then labor is a key input into everything else. And so in the classical political economy world, everything is produced by labor, except labor. The time, effort, the money, the emotional energy that goes into creating and developing and producing human capabilities is just given like a natural asset or something. So I think economists are just beginning to come to grips with what is clearly not a very holistic analysis. I try to frame my ideas without a whole lot of regard for their possible strategic viability. Because if I start thinking too hard about costs and benefits, I feel like I get kind of derailed. I do think that there is a momentum to ideas. And I do believe in the momentum behind this idea of social reproduction and this idea that we need to think more about how labor is produced and also about how society and our potential to cooperate with other members of society is produced. And the reason I think that is because I think we're facing several related crises that are kind of result from our failure to think about that bigger picture. And one of those is global climate change. And I think many people are now very aware of the fact that our economic system literally created incentives to over exploit natural resources and to over-pollute the natural environment in ways that actually may well be leading to long-term economic crisis. And you can think about social inequality, I think, in very similar terms. That is, there are a lot of things with the social environment that seem very toxic. We have very high levels of crime. We have very high levels of inequality, of poverty, of deaths of despair, things that are very costly. We don't really keep account of them. We don't subtract them from our gross domestic product. But I think people are generally aware of the costs that they impose and are concerned about what it takes to have, to maintain, to reproduce a society in a sustainable way for very good reasons, because I think we feel the threat. The single-minded pursuit of self-interest is pretty much a recipe for extinction. I like describing it as a recipe for obvious reasons. And I think it's because self-interest really works well or can work pretty good in some forms of exchange between equals where each has something to gain and they're each just kind of in a position to ensure that they can demand something resembling a fair price for what they're buying or selling. But exchange doesn't really work for things that are not easily exchanged on a per-unit basis, like public goods of the environment. There's no price put on wild fish. There's no price put on trees in the Amazon. There's no price put on clean air. There's no price. You're not paying a per-unit basis. And likewise, if you think about intergenerational relations, we don't exchange with future generations because they're not born yet. I mean, exchange is just not a feasible model for thinking about our relationship to future generations. So these are examples of what economists and social scientists in general call coordination problems. And coordination problems require cooperation. If you don't cooperate, basically you, everybody ends up being worse off. And don't get me wrong, it's always been true. There's always been coordination problems. This isn't like a new phenomenon, but it's become a much more serious problem because we've been, you know, a lot of our success, measurable success in the market economy has come at the expense of unpriced natural assets and unpriced natural processes and social processes. And so, you know, it's kind of a paradox that our abundance has been purchased at a pretty high price. And now, in order to kind of pay that price and move on, we need to get together and agree on what to do about it on a global level. I think that comes through very, very clearly in discussions of climate change, but it's also very, very, very true about the social climate as well. If the 1% were all we needed to worry about, if that was the source of all inequality in the world, it would be really easy to organize against them and to establish a more egalitarian and more cooperative system. But that's not the world we live in. We live in this world of very complicated overlapping hierarchies in which almost everybody is in a somewhat contradictory position. You know, like, oh, I'm exploited as a worker, but I'm a citizen of the richest country in the world. Or, you know, I'm disadvantaged as a woman, but I'm white and that gives me access to some opportunities that other people don't have. So what that means is that kind of, when people are thinking about different political strategies, it's a very complicated picture. You know, like, oh, maybe I have something to gain from more reproductive rights, but oh, maybe I have something to lose from the destabilization of the status quo because it might diminish other privileges that I enjoy. And so I think it has an immobilizing, I mean, you could argue that it has a stabilizing effect. And I do think it helps explain why hierarchies tend to persist, is that everybody is kind of, not everybody, but a lot of people are locked into a system where they're really afraid of losing something as the price of gaining something. And, you know, one of the really important points of economic psychology is that we all are very loss averse. It's more painful to us to have something taken away from us than not to get something that we don't yet have. And so I think intersectionality helps explain a lot of status quo, a lot of status quo inertia. And a lot of status quo complacency because you think, well, you know, the world is a little unfair, but in some ways I would benefit if it were not so unfair, but in some ways I might actually be kind of hurt. So, oh, what do I do? And so what I think that means is that to build a coalition for political change, you need to bring people together around a vision of changes that would make them very significantly better off along a very significant dimension of their identity, and that may differ according to circumstances. So sometimes in the past, class identity, workers versus employers, sometimes that has been sufficiently powerful and momentous to overcome other divisions. Sometimes it hasn't. And likewise gender, you could think, you know, sometimes, you know, women are very different, pool income with men, women live in different communities, that, you know, gender is not the only defining characteristic of women's relative position, right? But around some issues, they have a lot in common. Reproductive rights is a really good example. That's a cross-class, cross-race thing. Not completely because obviously you have better access to reproductive rights if you're in a privileged economic position, but you're still very much affected by restrictive rules and legislation, you know, both on a practical level and on a kind of cultural level. Or I don't know, look at Iran, you know, for years, there was just no movement in what seemed like a kind of impenetrable patriarchal society. And then suddenly that society took things too far in terms of violence and repression. And you see gender becomes this very significant mobilizing force with a lot of men in the streets, young men and young women in the streets together really challenging these really repressive patriarchal rules. So that's, you know, I feel like our job as social scientists is to try to better understand why coalitions coalesce in certain ways and how we can use that strategically to move towards a better set of rules for the global economy as a whole. That's a lot bigger than say just end capitalism or end class conflict. It's gotta be something like we want fair play, we want sustainable relationships, we want an ability to solve collective coordination problems. We want a larger set of ideals about how we manage our relationship with the natural world. And I think that's what's evolving. I think that's what activists, a lot of activists want and what a lot of activist slogans represent. But I think political economy needs to catch up, theory needs to catch up to that kind of more de-centered vision of a good society. And I think that's what intersectionality helps us do.