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

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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. 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. 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! million Africans to work in plantations across the Caribbean (and north-east Brazil), but predominantly the US South.The ravaging of nature to flourish capital accumulation, capitalism´s third contradiction, is tackled in Nature in the Maw: Why Ecopolitics Must Be Trans-environmental and Anti-capitalist. 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. While Nancy Fraser acknowledges that she has presented essential principles rather than a detailed manifesto, she persuasively shows how these principles would expand the conception of socialism and demonstrate its relevance to a host of contemporary concerns, encompassing all the issues raised in the book: imperialism, structural racism, social reproduction, global heating and climate breakdown, and de-democratization. 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. One can even add a third axis distinguishing ‘core’ and ‘periphery,’ as Fraser continuously stresses how the iterations of each division play out differently for (neo)colonial regions and among racialized minorities than for ethnic majority members of North Atlantic powers.

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 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. Capitalism is cannibalistic, not just in the way it devours other areas of social life, but in ultimately devouring itself.Cannibal Capitalism conjures up a monster that voraciously consumes the very land, labor and natural world upon which it thrives. From the Spanish Conquest of Latin America from the 15th century, the genocide and enslavement of its indigenous peoples, and the expropriation and extraction of its natural resources (the silver extracted from mines in Potosí in present-day Bolivia could have paved an 8,000 km bridge to Madrid), and similar processes taking place across the world, culminating in the abhorrent enslavement of some 12.