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

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Using the classical Marxian conception of the capitalist economy as a foil, Fraser argues that the economy and the various features we associate with it, including markets, capital accumulation, worker exploitation, and class conflict, are but the ‘front-story’ of capitalism. This helps explain the many erudite references – from Rosa Luxemburg, Marx, Engels, and Polanyi, to William Morris, and exponents of Black Marxism such as W. Workers of both sexes double up as consumers; the household ‘a private space for the domestic consumption of mass-produced objects of daily use’ (p.

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. indeed, in the post-war period, the UK government invited British subjects from Commonwealth countries to work in public transport and in the new National Health Service (NHS), with little care for the widespread racism they would encounter then, and still do now. The second chapter, ‘Glutton for Punishment’, focuses on the structural racism that is inherent in capitalism.

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. Omnivore’ sets the analytical scene by arguing that understanding capitalism as an economic system based on the extraction and accumulation of profit is itself part of its ideological underpinning, which externalises (that is, erases) the vast nexus of resources on which it both depends, and yet destroys.

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. Each arrangement represents an attempt to acclimate the needs of social reproduction to the needs of capitalism, but each ends up proving itself unsustainable because capitalism, in the long run, is inherently parasitic on social reproduction.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. 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. 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. and promising developments on the left like the rise of Jacobin magazine and the whole media ecosystem around it.

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! Nancy Fraser is a legendary radical philosopher grounded in the best of the Marxist and feminist traditions yet whose genuine embrace and profound understanding of Black, ecological, immigrant and sexual freedom movements make her a unique figure on the contemporary scene!In this tightly argued and urgent volume, leading Marxist feminist theorist Nancy Fraser charts the voracious appetite of capital, tracking it from crisis point to crisis point, from ecological devastation to the collapse of democracy, from racial violence to the devaluing of care work. million Africans to work in plantations across the Caribbean (and north-east Brazil), but predominantly the US South.

Indeed, all six chapters in Cannibal Capitalism (apart from the Epilogue on COVID as ‘a cannibal capitalist orgy’) were originally delivered as university lectures and subsequently published in scholarly journals.Cannibal Capitalism conjures up a monster that voraciously consumes the very land, labor and natural world upon which it thrives. My sense is that such grand-theoretic lens-building is less her main interest than a new way of making sense of present-day conflicts.