Doesn’t assume the alt’s conceptual expansion, which unites a diversity of struggles.

Equally important, the precise configuration of the capitalist order at any place and time depends on contestation--on the balance of social power and on the outcome of political struggles. Far from simply being given, capitalism's institutional divisions often become foci of conflict as actors mobilize to challenge or defend the established boundaries separating economy from polity, production from reproduction, human from nonhuman nature, and exploitation from expropriation. Insofar as they aim to relocate contested processes on the system's institutional map, capitalism's subjects draw on the normative perspectives associated with the various zones that we have identified.

We can see this happening today. For example, some opponents of neoliberalism draw on ideals of care and responsibility, associated with reproduction, in order to oppose efforts to commodify education. Others summon notions of stewardship of nature and justice between generations, associated with ecology, to militate for a shift to renewable energy. Still others invoke ideals of public autonomy, associated with polity, to advocate international capital controls and to extend democratic accountability beyond the state. Yet others cite norms of integration and community autonomy, associated with resistance to expropriation, to advocate prison abolition and police defunding. Such claims, along with the counterclaims they inevitably incite, are the very stuff of social struggle in capitalist societies--as fundamental as the class struggles over control of commodity production and distribution of surplus value that Marx privileged. These boundary struggles, as I shall call them, decisively shape the structure of capitalist societies.14 They play a constitutive role in the view of capitalism as an institutionalized societal order.

The focus on boundary struggles should forestall any mis impression that the view I have been sketching is functionalist -focused, that is, on demonstrating how every instance serves to buttress the system. Granted, I began by characterizing social reproduction, ecology, political power, and expropriation as necessary background conditions for capitalism's economic front story, stressing their functionality for commodity pro duction, labor exploitation, and capital accumulation. But this moment does not capture the full story of capitalism's fore ground/background relations. It coexists, rather, with another moment, already hinted at, that is equally central and that emerges from the characterization of social, political, ecologi cal, and peripheralized/expropriable zones as reservoirs of "non-economic" normativity. This implies that, even as these "non-economic" orders make commodity production possible, they are not reducible to that enabling function. Far from being wholly exhausted by, or entirely subservient to, the dynamics of accumulation, each of these hidden abodes harbors distinctive ontologies of social practice and normative ideals.

Moreover, these "non-economic" ideals are pregnant with critical-political possibility. Especially in times of crisis, they can be turned against core economic practices associated with capital accumulation. In such times, the structural divisions that normally serve to segregate the various normativities within their own institutional spheres tend to weaken. When the separations fail to hold, capitalism's subjects--who live, after all, in more than one sphere--experience normative conflict. Far from bringing in ideas from the "outside," they draw on capitalism's own complex normativity to criticize it, mobilizing against the grain the multiplicity of ideals that coexist, at times uneasily, in an institutionalized societal order premised on foreground/background divisions. Thus, the view of capitalism as an institutionalized societal order helps us under stand how a critique of capitalism is possible from within it.