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

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I invite everyone to read this book, to sit down and process and produce strategies on how we can redeem these wrongs. At one level, Fraser’s message is that various left movements have more basis for common cause than they sometimes think. 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 reality, though, the main decisions are made not by individual states, but by the international financial institutions and central or regional banks, which make ‘many of the most consequential rules that govern the central relations of capitalist society’, in particular ‘financialized capitalism’.

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. Fraser identifies four core contradictions within capitalism; (1) exploitation and expropriation, (2) production and reproduction, (3) society and nature, and (4) economy and polity. In her telling, the history of capitalism consists of four distinguishable phases, each of which involves a particular way of setting up these divisions. Of course, migrant care work is also commonplace across the global South, especially in countries characterised by vast inequality, from Brazil to Guatemala, from India to South Africa.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.

These origins might also explain, to my ears, the occasional clash between Fraser’s profoundly serious intent and compassionate vision, set out in demanding arguments, and the popular tone as if to leaven the text: ‘Capitalism is back! The answer does not lie in trading in a gas-guzzling private vehicle for an e-vehicle, nor in treating aspects of environmental issues in isolation, nor indeed in ‘degrowth’ – all of which look for workarounds to avoid confronting capitalist power. However, in this instance, the tables are turned, it is the colonialist, the capitalist class, that shows cannibalistic tendencies as it feeds off the rest to survive. 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. Even so, it is hard to get away from the impression that her divisions are defined more via a retrospective understanding of capitalism’s systemic needs and their normative stakes than via the perspectives of historical struggles’ actual participants.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. At first glance, they appear determined by some sort of functionalist logic; however, Fraser insists they are maintained institutionally, as the outcomes of boundary struggles (pp. Obviously, capitalism is fundamentally – not residually – dependent on public powers: from legal frameworks to protect property and wealth, to health and education systems, telecommunications, utilities, roads and transport systems, international trade regimes, and much besides. Her point is not to reduce these conflicts to questions of capitalist economics, in the way some orthodox Marxists in the past sought to reduce all other social struggles to matters of class conflict; rather, she seeks to promote an expanded conception of capitalism that encompasses not just the economy, but an array of social domains, each of which is the site of social struggles concurrent with and co-equal to the class struggle that has been the traditional focus of anti-capitalist critique. Nor is the gendered division of every labour market, and the gender pay gap, which consign most women to lower-status and often part-time work and, hence, to economic dependence on men.

What follows is the ‘desperate scramble to transfer carework to others’, frequently migrant workers (p. Nature´s supply is necessary for capitalist production, however, it is used and misused, exhausted and depleted, drained and emptied. The scars of every colonised country, and enslaved peoples – and, in a different way, of the former colonial powers – still shape contemporary economies, politics, societies, and lives. There is no anti-capitalist class struggle without co-equal struggles for racial, gender, ecological, and democratic justice, and no struggle for racial, gender, ecological, and democratic justice can afford to ignore the root culpability of capitalism. Fraser captures how gender oppression, racial domination, and ecological destruction are not incidental to capitalism, but structurally embedded in it.In Glutton for Punishment: Why Capitalism is Structurally racist, Fraser explores capitalism´s entanglement with racial oppression. The idea that a coal-belching factory here can be “offset” by a tree plantation there assumes a nature composed of fungible, commensurable units whose place-specificity, qualitative traits, and experienced meanings can be disregarded’ (p.