Rundale

By Louise Fitzgerald and Maedhbh Nic Lochlainn

Capitalism’s insatiable appetite

Nancy Fraser is the Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor of Philosophy and Politics at the New School for Social Research in New York City, and a member of the Editorial Committee of the New Left Review. Fraser is widely respected as a key critical thinker of our times, and has produced ground-breaking philosophical work on justice, gender, and difference over the course of the last three decades. Cannibal Capitalism: How our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet – and What We Can Do About It is Fraser’s most recent book, which was published by Verso in September 2022. The book is Fraser’s seventh release with Verso, who have previously published Fraser’s work, sometimes with others, on feminism, capitalism, and political philosophy. Fraser’s partnership with Verso is in keeping with the company’s wider legacy of “independent, radical publishing”, and the sharing of intellectually rigorous books on left politics.

Cannibal Capitalism was shortlisted for the 2023 Deutscher Memorial Prize and is a self-described “trenchant look at contemporary capitalism’s insatiable appetite – and a rallying cry for everyone who wants to stop it from devouring our world”. Notably, this “rallying cry” offers an accessible synopsis of Fraser’s long and incisive career, and ties together her thoughts on critical political economy for a twenty-first century audience. The book is a slim volume, running to just over 200 pages, and the cover depicts an interconnected slither of serpents devouring each other. This cover art resonates with the image of an ouroboros, an ancient symbol that typically depicts a snake or dragon that is eating its own tail, and this sense of cyclical self-destruction or self-cannibalism is returned to throughout the book.

Capitalism, per Fraser, can be understood as cannibalistic on a number of levels, with the ouroboros being “a fitting image… for a system that’s wired to devour the social, political, and natural bases of its own existence — which are also the bases of ours”. Fraser’s account of capitalism goes beyond understanding it as an economic system, and she highlights that capitalism must be understood more encompassingly as “a type of society: one that authorizes an officially designated economy to pile up monetized value for investors and owners, while devouring the non-economized wealth of everyone else”. This social order, Fraser contends, is both contradictory and crisis-prone, and cannibalises the necessary bases of its own existence, with Fraser memorably describing capitalism’s rapacious drive “to guzzle carework and scarf up nature, to eviscerate public power and devour the wealth of racialized populations”.

The book

The book is divided into six chapters, in which Fraser sets out what she sees as a conception of capitalism and capitalist crisis that is worthy of our time of polycrisis. For Fraser, this is unfolding not just as a crisis of inequality, precarity, care, social reproduction, migration, racialised violence, ecology, militarism, and strongmen, but more generally as a “crisis of the entire societal order in which all those calamities converge, exacerbating one another and threatening to swallow us whole”.

Fraser sets a high bar for a short work of political philosophy to clear, and managing to bind together a number of what lesser social theorists might describe as “disparate strands”, reconstructing Marx’s theories for twenty-first century struggles and capitalism’s structural racism, before dealing in turn with capitalism’s tortured relations with care, nature, and democracy. The book concludes by asking what socialism should mean in the twenty-first century, with Fraser suggesting that “a socialism for our time must overcome not only capital’s exploitation of wage labor, but also its free riding on unwaged care work, public powers, and wealth expropriated from racialized subjects and nonhuman nature”.

Cannibal Capitalism’s key contribution is to look behind the “hidden abode” of capitalist production explored by Marx to realms “more hidden still”, examining not only the exploitation but also the expropriation of wealth – its forcible seizure through overt violence and outright theft. In doing so, the book explores both the broader spheres and wider processes by which capitalism eats the very basis of its own existence, resulting in the damage and multi-faceted crises which we now see and feel. Fraser offers “cannibal capitalism” as an extension of Marx’s political economy and, more specifically, its focus on economic crises, its dynamics of in-built class domination, and its privileging of class struggle. “Cannibal capitalism”, in contrast, offers a system-crisis critique, attunes to non-production-based forms of domination, and explicitly prioritises multiple and different actors, vectors, and types of struggle. Fraser describes her overall project as one of “analogous interweaving of critical strands, but the weave is more complex, as each strand is internally multiple”.

If this all seems like a lot to cover in just over 200 pages, that is probably because it is. Cannibal Capitalism brings together a series of Fraser’s interventions that had previously taken form as lectures and papers for the New Left Review, the Socialist Register, and the American Philosophical Association. However, the book does feel, on the whole, like more than the sum of its parts, and it offers an expansive and incisive critique of capitalism that feels both sharp and timely.

Lines of inquiry

Cannibal Capitalism accomplishes what Fraser set out to achieve, and the book is “a complex weave” that is attentive to capitalism’s contradictory, crisis-prone, and cannibalistic relations to its “hidden abodes”. The range and breadth of the book and the work that it encompasses is impressive, to be sure. It offers a historical and contemporary account of capitalism’s cannibalisation of social reproduction, nature, politics, and how this is all woven together. However, like any good book, we felt that there were a number of lines of inquiry which could be expanded upon.

At times, Cannibal Capitalism’s focus feels more extensive than intensive, and in this breadth the depth of discussion of the emancipatory alternatives that are alluded to is limited. There is also a sense of a disconnect between Fraser’s intellectual project and real-world struggles as they are happening on the ground and in emplaced or specific contexts, where capitalism and its “hidden abodes” are sometimes in particularly acute crises. Fraser’s analysis is, at times, lacking a sense of how to triage capitalism’s ills or how to build transversal struggles that can be expanded in lockstep to the treat the “morbid symptoms” that Fraser has elsewhere identified as symptomatic of a larger crisis of hegemony for neoliberalism.

Relatedly, in the book Fraser finds issues with narratives of degrowth as well as what she characterises as romantic visions of anti-capitalist thinkers and left-wing activists who consider care, direct action, commoning, and communalism to be intrinsically anti-capitalist. In the case of the latter, Fraser contends that such practices are wrapped up as “integral parts of the capitalist order” and therefore too marked by this symbiosis to offer actually existing alternatives to capitalism. The reader is left wondering, if not such practices, then what realistically could form a possible alternative or ways out of the current capitalist order?

In this way, Cannibal Capitalism is perhaps complemented by parallel engagement with writing attending to diverse economies thinking à la Gibson-Graham, as well contentions such as those of Peter Gelderloos’ that The Solutions are Already Here (his book with such title may be another Rundale book review soon…).

Perhaps even more important here is deeper engagements with real-world environmental struggles. For instance, those for indigenous sovereignty and articulations of alternative regenerative economic systems, seen within A People’s Orientation to a Regenerative Economy, as well as the environmental struggles explored in Rundale to date, against mining and extractivism, for care for people and place, which do seem to offer real potential alternatives to capitalism. Though, perhaps such real-world empirical-based engagements are an unfair ask of a small book with a hefty theoretical goal.

At times, there is also the sense of repetition. For such a short book, Fraser re-states and re-caps the book’s central premises more than is perhaps necessary. Indeed, the final chapter, dedicated to a discussion of socialism, spends almost half of its pages returning to a discussion of “what is capitalism” and “what is wrong with capitalism”. This uses up much of the space that the reader is left feeling could have been spent illuminating and developing its contention that socialism offers an alternative, for instance, discussing perhaps rather what is socialism, and what is right about it.  This is, in part, what detracts space from engagement and elaboration of the possible, and possibly already existing, emancipatory alternatives, which, though sketched out, could do with further detail and development.

Overall

Cannibal Capitalism achieves its aims to make up for the shortcomings of previous eras of anti-capitalist thinking to, “incorporate the insights of feminist, ecological, postcolonial and Black liberation thought into their understandings of capitalism in a meaningful way” and to familiarise younger generations with the traditions of Kapitalkritik, updating and expanding classical thinking for 21st century crises. The book serves as an important joining-of-dots and expanding-of-lenses for those who have been solely focused on economic critique or single-issues, and is a solid primer in capitalistic critique for those who have not yet had a chance to think about it much at all.

Additionally, the final chapter on socialism does give some space to what socialism needs to do to respond to the ills of and fallout from cannibalistic capitalism. Based on Fraser’s contribution, it is left for activists and theorists to take up the mantle to explore further whether and how we can “envision an emancipatory, counterhegemonic project of eco-societal transformation of sufficient breadth and vision to coordinate the struggles of multiple social movements, political parties, labour unions, and other collective actors – a project aimed at laying the cannibal to rest once and for all”.

Overall, Fraser expands our understandings of capitalism by bringing into view within a single frame “all the oppressions, contradictions and conflicts of the present conjuncture”. Cannibal Capitalism is accordingly a useful entry point to identifying what sort of alliances for alternatives may be possible, and are needed, to address our current crises if movements unite through identifying, as Fraser offers, capitalism as their shared cause of harm and a shared site of struggle.