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

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At a compact 165 pages, Cannibal Capitalism pulls together and synthesizes a breath-taking amount of material. It is largely through debt that capital now cannibalizes labor, disciplines states, transfers value from periphery to core, and sucks wealth from society and nature’ (p. 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.

At the same time, ‘capitalist production is not self-sustaining, but free rides on social reproduction, nature, political power, and expropriation; yet its orientation to endless accumulation threatens to destabilize these very conditions of its possibility’ (p. Nancy Fraser has produced the most elegant theory yet of capitalism in our age - capitalism not in the narrow economic sense, but capitalism in the sense of a total omnivore, a system that cannot stop devouring everything around it, destroying the lives of people and nature. In disavowing responsibility, capitalism invites the destabilization of these latter spheres and, in doing so, jeopardizes essential facets of society and life on which it itself is dependent. The intriguing cover depicts the ‘self-cannibalizing serpent that eats its own tail’, which captures the author’s essential argument: that capitalism devours everything on which its existence depends – social, economic, political, natural – as well human life and ways of life, and thus everything from which we draw meaning and cultural values.

Despite the essential character of reproductive work to maintain an exploitable workforce, it is made subordinate and subjugated to production, considered non-valuable. In the postwar era, this ‘separate spheres’ arrangement was modified into that of the ‘family wage,’ wherein welfare protections secure an ideal of cisheteronormative (and white) nuclear families sustained by a single male breadwinner.

Fraser identifies four core contradictions within capitalism; (1) exploitation and expropriation, (2) production and reproduction, (3) society and nature, and (4) economy and polity. With this gripping first sentence, Nancy Fraser sets the scene for the exploration of the malady that is capitalism in her newest book, Cannibal Capitalism – How Our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet- and What We Can Do about It. Chapter 3, ‘Care Guzzler: Why Social Reproduction is a Major Site of Capitalist Crisis’, is perhaps of most immediate interest to readers of this journal.Capital is currently cannibalizing every sphere of life-guzzling wealth from nature and racialized populations, sucking up our ability to care for each other, and gutting the practice of politics. Ultimately, it has revealed what eventuates when vital public infrastructures are abandoned for the benefit of capital. Those familiar with Nancy Fraser’s work know her fondness for Marx’s 1843 definition of critical theory as ‘the self-clarification of the struggles and wishes of the age’ (Marx, 1975 [1843], p. Long insistent that social justice demands attention to both redistribution and recognition, she shows why any notion that progressive politics must choose between class or identity rests on a false dichotomy.

In fact, a key aspect of what makes capitalism capitalism is the way it establishes institutionalized ‘divisions’ between the economic front-story and these various non-economic back-stories, while concealing the ways the former is dependent on the latter.For example, the history of the division between economic production and social reproduction (Chapter 3) is that of a gendered division of labor. Aimed at activists and scholars alike, Cannibal Capitalism shows how an array of pressing social problems—struggles over racism and (neo)colonialism, time-poverty and crises of care, the looming climate crisis, and the hollowing out of democratic institutions—all trace back to a more general crisis of capitalism. I invite everyone to read this book, to sit down and process and produce strategies on how we can redeem these wrongs. And we see why the future of the planet and humanity depend upon the socialist left building anti-capitalist struggles that reach across workplaces, streets, forests and oceans. Cannibal Capitalism conjures up a monster that voraciously consumes the very land, labor and natural world upon which it thrives.

Governments are reluctant to rein them in, for fear that they will pack up and go to a more lenient jurisdiction. growth of [ Democratic Socialists of America] , the uptake that [Bernie] Sanders got in his two presidential campaigns. Hence an image Fraser often raises, and that graces the cover of the book, is the ouroboros: a snake eating its own tail. In each of these binaries, the former sphere distinguishes itself from the latter even as it draws resources from the latter, all the while disavowing any responsibility for the resources it draws.What we need, she argues, is a wide-ranging socialist movement that can recognize the rapaciousness of capital - and starve it to death. At one level, Fraser’s message is that various left movements have more basis for common cause than they sometimes think.