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

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One could easily envision a table of all these historical iterations, with one axis representing Fraser’s four divisions and a second axis the historical phases. Cannibal Capitalism conjures up a monster that voraciously consumes the very land, labor and natural world upon which it thrives.

To date, resistance is piecemeal, and moreover has lent itself to co-option: social movements from feminism to LGBTQ+ rights have been ‘casting a veneer of emancipatory charisma over the predatory political economy of neoliberalism’ (p. Each of the subsequent chapters delves into one of these front-story/back-story divisions and how it has evolved over capitalism’s history. Fraser N (2022) The three faces of capitalist labor, Walter Benjamin Lectures, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin (14-16 June) https://youtu. As a final use of the term, Fraser envisions capitalism as an ouroboros, a self-cannibalising serpent that eats its own tail. 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.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. Further, it has disclosed which exploited and expropriated peoples were mostly infected by the crisis as they lacked access to resources such as vaccinations and medicine.

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. 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. Chapter 4, ‘Nature in the Maw’, focuses on the devastation of eco-systems caused by unfettered capitalism, past and present.Further, Fraser uses the definition of cannibalising, depriving one aspect of a machination for the purpose of sustaining another, to describe all that is sacrificed in the name of capital (families, communities, nations, habitats, ecosystems, etc.

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. Every historical iteration is punctuated by outbreaks of crisis and conflict, as all turn out to be ridden with tension and contradiction. At the same time, ‘capitalist production is not self-sustaining, but free rides on social reproduction, nature, political power, and expropriation; yet its orientation to endless accumulation threatens to destabilize these very conditions of its possibility’ (p. Ultimately, it has revealed what eventuates when vital public infrastructures are abandoned for the benefit of capital.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. A brilliant synthesis of Fraser's many pathbreaking contributions to a Marxian theory of capitalism for the twenty-first century, beautifully written.