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

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This deadly crisis was caused by a zoonotic leap, the transmission of pathogens from wild animals to humans, most likely due to climate change and deforestation, due to the ravaging of nature.

The reliance of capitalism on social-reproductive activity constitutes the second contradiction as it is detailed in Care Guzzler: Why Social Reproduction Is a Major Site of Capitalist Crisis. 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. 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. Nature´s supply is necessary for capitalist production, however, it is used and misused, exhausted and depleted, drained and emptied. Every historical iteration is punctuated by outbreaks of crisis and conflict, as all turn out to be ridden with tension and contradiction.Chapter 4, ‘Nature in the Maw’, focuses on the devastation of eco-systems caused by unfettered capitalism, past and present. To begin, Fraser denotes the colonial legacy of the term cannibal, a word replete with racist imagery applied traditionally to the other, the colonised. 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.

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. 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. Climate breakdown and the loss of animal and plant species are a manifestation of ‘a nature that “bites back”’ (p. 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.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. Fraser uses the term ‘boundary struggles’ to describe these expanded realms of conflict that occur around these front-story/back-story divisions, and a further feature of her approach is to show that these divisions have never been static. Fraser envisages any ‘social surplus’ at the top as the collective wealth of society, not of markets; while at the other end of the spectrum the basic human rights of all (to food, clean water, shelter, clothing, leisure, etc. Capitalism relies on exploitation (waged labour) and expropriation (enslavement, territorial conquest, annexation, etc. Capitalism´s tendency to destroy and feed off its own conditions of possibility is emphasised here, highlighting its propensity for crises and self-destabilization caused by its internal contradictions.

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.

It looks past the traditional class struggle argument and takes Black Marxism, decolonial perspectives, and feminist and gender theory into consideration, combining them all to create a complete analysis of our current predatory system. Cannibal capitalism: how our system is devouring democracy, care, and the planet—and what we can do about it. 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. Capitalism is cannibalistic, not just in the way it devours other areas of social life, but in ultimately devouring itself.