Cannibal Capitalism: How our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet – and What We Can Do About It

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In a world in which everyone is Exploited and Expropriated, where is the guilty party to be found? Fraser's text almost makes us forget we once heard, " Wrong life cannot be lived rightly," and that, " There is no ethical consumption under capitalism." When these phrases had not yet lost their salt, they recalled that every Exploited-Expropriated person is responsible, more or less, for the Exploitation-Expropriation of another. This Differance between "more" and "less" is precisely the space of action of a tenuous Resistance which must be won in each moment. To pave over the fact that everyone possesses, to varying degrees, "Guilt of Socialist Impiety," is to have these lapses and spaces continue to undermine collective action (is it possible to recall a Leftist movement which has not been destroyed by infighting?), whereas these faults and inadequacies could have been put to use as a tactical and strategic resource. These phrases, of course, have since been dis-armed, and now give permission for those with bad conscience to behave badly. Meanwhile we have "sent off our sins into the wilderness" where they now dwell with the Truly Responsible (The 1% AKA The Billionaire Class AKA The Megacorporations AKA The He-Goat), and the current "Socialist" task is to capture and destroy them. (This reaches a ridiculous apogee in certain sections of left-wing Climate Discourse, 'did you know that 10 corporations produce 90% of all emissions!?') The Left, says Fraser, is starting to recover a sense of unified power after decades obsessed with breaking itself into smaller, inward-looking subunits. But there’s still a lot of work ahead. To build collective power, we need to better understand how all the parts of modern capitalist society fit together. We need, Fraser insists, to embrace a populist-style political movement where everyone’s different grievances can find expression but remain unified by a socialist agenda that gives us a common vision of where we’re headed. My assessment is that all this is rather at odds with Marx’s dialectics, especially on primitive accumulation that avoids binate separations in its method of abstraction. After all, ‘Liverpool grew fat on the basis of the slave trade. This was its method of primitive accumulation’, to the extent that generally, ‘the veiled slavery of the wage-labourers in Europe needed the unqualified slavery of the New World as its pedestal’. Is there not here already an expanded and relational conception of the hidden abode of production? Politically, Fraser’s framework developed in Cannibal Capitalism (Chapter 1) then aims to take us through the ‘boundary struggles’ that lie across the exploitation/expropriation division, or class struggles at the point of production and its bonds with racism (Chapter 2), social reproduction (Chapter 3), ecology (Chapter 4), and democracy (Chapter 5). A final main chapter on socialism in the twenty-first century reinforces the dual-systems thinking on production as distinct from social reproduction, economy distinct from polity, exploitation distinct from expropriation, and society distinct from nature (p. 145). The final call is for a radical reimagining of these boundaries and an expanded conception of socialism. Living and dying through an era of generalized crisis that scholars have called the anthropocene, plantationocene, or capitalocene can feel like a draining of resolve, of hope, of imagination. Parts of the planet are burning; the rest of it, in general, is heating up. And amid the unthinkable loss of species, lifeways, livelihoods, it is also becoming ever more difficult to buy groceries, pay for childcare, find housing, or save for retirement. What can resistance to impossibly large, entangled structures even look like when, for most people, daily life is a hustle? In Cannibal Capitalism, social theorist Nancy Fraser argues that the feeling of “being sapped” on personal and planetary levels is not a coincidence but rather a baked-in consequence of twenty-first century global capitalist society. This multiplicity of crises adds up to a general crisis of capitalist society, the effects of which manifest like a metastasising cancer. Every effort to patch up one outbreak only leads to others, afflicting other sectors, regions, populations, until the whole social body is overwhelmed.

Nancy Fraser is Professor of Politics and Philosophy at the New School for Social Research and a member of editorial committee of New Left Review. She has received numerous honours and her works have been translated into 24 languages. Her latest books are Feminism for the 99% (co-authored); The Old is Dying; and her forthcoming Cannibal Capitalism.

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crunch. One important factor here is that we’re living in a kind of capitalism—a historically specific form of First, and as a multitude of feminist economists have noted over decades, is care work. ‘Who cooked Adam Smith’s dinner?’ as the adage goes. Capitalism relies on the unpaid labour of predominantly women to nurture, sustain, replenish and create the workers of tomorrow. Modern forms of ‘lean-in’ feminism have encouraged women to buy into the capitalist illusion, casting off their motherly chains and passing them down the social hierarchy. But this does nothing about the devaluing of care work and merely relocates exploitation further down the income distribution.

The world is a mess. In her latest book, Cannibal Capitalism, feminist philosopher and professor Nancy Fraser examines the multiple, complex sources of this mess. None of this accumulation can proceed without legal systems to guarantee private property and contractual exchange, nor repressive forces to manage dissent and enforce the hierarchies that enable corporations to expropriate populations at home and abroad. State power If so, then there are several possible scenarios. These include some desirable ones, like global democratic ecosocialism. Of course, it’s hard to say exactly what that would look like, but let’s assume it would dismantle the “law of value,” abolish exploitation and expropriation, and reinvent the relations between human society and nonhuman nature, between goods production and caregiving, between “the political” and “the economic,” democratic planning and markets. That’s the “good” end of our spectrum of possibilities. At the other end lie some noncapitalist outcomes that are truly terrible: massive societal regression under warring strongmen or a global authoritarian regime. There is also, of course, a third possibility, which is that the crisis doesn’t get resolved at all, but simply continues to grind away in an orgy of societal self-cannibalization until there’s little left that’s recognizably human. It's really interesting and I admire how Fraser articulates her arguments. With that said, it is frustratingly academic to read, which isn't a crime, but I've seen this book promoted a fair bit in standard bookshops, and I can only imagine how many people who have just started wanting to learn about political theory will be running for the hills within the first few paragraphs. I like wordy writing and I know at least a little socialist theory and I still had to stop and reread bits frequently because of all the -isations and -isms being thrown around. So much thought was put into breaking down all of these complex interactions and intersections and yet the writing itself only obscures them again! It's a shame. the political, ecological, and social-reproductive strands of crisis are inseparable from racialized expropriation in both periphery and core … In short, economic, ecological, social, and political crises are inextricably entangled with imperialism and oppression – and with the escalating antagonisms associated with them. (p. 16)Fraser captures how gender oppression, racial domination, and ecological destruction are not incidental to capitalism, but structurally embedded in it.” This book covers far more than is suggested by the sub-title, which is no surprise given that Nancy Fraser has written widely on the philosophical conceptions of justice and injustice; and is a long-standing critic of liberal feminism, and of how identity politics displace a structural critique of capitalism. So, this short book may be a kind of distillation of her life’s work. Fraser captures how gender oppression, racial domination, and ecological destruction are not incidental to capitalism, but structurally embedded in it. There is an overwhelming tendency to identify the core injustice of capitalist society with the exploitation of waged workers at the point of commodity production. The recent wave of strike action in the UK is a timely reminder of this and, of course, the history of capitalism cannot be told without the history of the waged worker. But capitalism’s exploitative reach extends far beyond the worker and ‘the economy’ and to truly envision a world beyond capitalism, we must first understand those wider spheres upon which it feeds.

Should serve to remind … that capitalism remains a guzzler of care, and this is an unsustainable position” An explicit plea for a political project. The parallels between care and ecology are instructive. James Butler, London Review of Books A trenchant look at contemporary capitalism’s insatiable appetite - and a rallying cry for everyone who wants to stop it from devouring our worldIt’s got a post modernist academic, Marxist (dis-mat) queer theory (Frankfort school) linguistic flare. But it’s TOTALLY doable. Capitalism’s voracious appetite is devouring democracy, care, and the planet. In the wake of the perfect storm that is COVID, how can we stop it from cannibalizing our whole world? A second precondition for a capitalist economy is ecology. Capital relies on nature in a very literal sense for the raw materials necessary for production and environmental conditions conducive to habitable life. Yet decades of ‘externalising’ so-called ecological assets has brought the climate to the brink of breakdown with huge inequalities along the lines of class and race in terms of who is most vulnerable.

Was den Planeten zu verbrennen droht, ist nämlich nicht "die Menschheit", sondern der Kapitalismus. Their effect … is to incite a broad range of social struggles, narrowly defined, at the point of production, political power and expropriation [and] boundary struggles over ecology, social reproduction, political power and expropriation.” essential work” trailed off. A majority of Americans now believe our democracy is in “crisis,” and a This brings us to the next precondition: state power (or its absence). Think of the legal frameworks that allow multinational corporations to sequester billions in offshore accounts. These intricate legal frameworks are not acts of nature but concoctions of the state. Should serve to remind ... that capitalism remains a guzzler of care, and this is an unsustainable position Rachel Andrews, White Review, Best Books 2022So can the rich now feed themselves – detached from the preconditions of previous capitalist eras? The evidence would suggest not. Cryptocurrencies are extremely harmful for the environment, with Bitcoin mining resulting in more carbon emissions than some countries. Financial capitalism has also brought us austerity alongside a much wider assault on the institutions of social reproduction – the social safety net, childcare, education and housing. The nature of the crisis She counters the idea that the fate of all and everything under capitalism is to be transformed into a commodity, each occupying a space as allocated by the market. Capitalism cannot do this without undermining an essential condition of its own existence – namely the capacity to plunder other systems of life which have been constituted by non-market means. Semi-proletarianisation is not a transitional phase to full-prolerianisation but rather a reversion to a mode in which workers are unable to sustain themselves on the basis of a wage and come to subsist on a variety of strategies which involves some waged work supplemented by petty trading and gift-giving exchanges. This trend has been under-scored by neoliberalism which has an accumulation strategy based on “expelling billions of people from the official economy into informal grey zones, from which capital syphons off wealth.” Her crucial point is that “marketised aspects of capitalist society coexist with non-marketised aspects.” In fact capitalism would not be able to live without the sustinance it draws from its parasitic dependence on the non-market world - a relationship which she likens to cannibalism, and hence the title of the book. Hens the addition CANNIBAL to CAPITALISM and the image or the OUROBOROS, the oft recycled archetypal image of the SANKE EATING IT OWN TAIL.