In other words: capitalism needs stolen/colonized land, and subjugated/enslaved or otherwise disempowered people (BIPOC and poor whites) for free or cheep labor. Understanding this ecological crisis means we need to have a laser-like focus on capitalists as the problematic actors destroying our planet. These individuals have built-in incentives to steal as much as possible from nature and to continue extracting, including drilling for oil, even in the face of imminent environmental trauma. The negative outcomes of this trauma on human health, like everything else that is awful, are absorbed disproportionately throughout the world by racialized peoples in the forms of illnesses and early deaths. In explaining boundary struggles, I sometimes introduce the perspective of Karl Polanyi. Without using the term, Polanyi was really focused on boundary struggles between what he called the self-regulating market — we might just say the economy — and society. What is intriguing and fruitful about that approach is the idea that the fight is not just over how surplus value is going to be distributed. It’s over what is going to determine the grammar of life. Over whether, in a given community, capital is going to have a free hand or not.

A brilliant synthesis of Fraser's many pathbreaking contributions to a Marxian theory of capitalism for the twenty-first century, beautifully written."Hence, following Arruzza’s insight, social phenomena such as racial capitalism or the system of patriarchy can be necessary consequences of the logic of capitalist accumulation, even if they are not logical preconditions for it. Capitalism was born into a prior system-of-states to produce the modern capitalist state. Patriarchy predates capitalism but is reproduced anew through violence against women within a capitalist-patriarchy nexus. Racism historically antecedes the origin of capitalism but is dependent on dehumanising others through a global colour line to constitute racial capitalism. These have become necessary consequences rather than logical preconditions of capitalism’s emergence. Agreed. I’m happy to think through possible scenarios, while stressing that I am not making predictions. I would start by considering whether the current crisis is “developmental” or “epochal.” That’s a distinction we owe to the Binghamton school. An epochal crisis is a crisis of capitalism as such; its resolution requires the overcoming of that system, its replacement by some new non- or postcapitalist form of society. By contrast, a developmental crisis is specific to a given “regime of accumulation” or phase within capitalism’s history and can be resolved, at least temporarily, by its replacement by a new regime — different and yet still capitalist. In that case, the system’s constitutive divisions between commodity production and social reproduction, “the economic” and “the political,” human society and nonhuman nature, exploitation and expropriation would not be eliminated but “only” redrawn. The book is great (and an amazing intro or 101 for those less familiar with the genesis and specific nature of 21st century financialized capitalism) but I guess there’s only so much one can say about capitalism and the, indeed cannibalizing, state of today’s capitalism. As such, the book walks the (already depressed, I guess) reader through kind of four areas devoured by capital: racial/imperial dynamics of capitalism’s expropriation/exploitation division which feed the glutton’s hunger for populations it can punish with impunity (chapter 2); the gendered dynamics of its reproduction/production couple, which stamp the system as a guzzler of care (chapter 3); the eco-predatory dynamics of its nature/humanity antithesis, which puts our planetary home in capital’s maw (chapter 4); and the drive to devour public power and butcher democracy, which is built into the system’s signature division between economy and the political.

Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System Is Devouring Democracy, Care and the Planet – And What We Can Do About It It is precisely because “the economy” has become so interwoven with all aspects of our lives – and, thereby, rendering its operations upon us effectively invisible – that we so often fail to “put the pieces together.” This is a hard-hitting, non-nonsense overview of how capitalism continues to ravage not only the lives of multiple millions of people, but also is a primary contributor to ecological plunder and global warming. In this book, Fraser thinks capitalism forms now gone too far. The primitive accumulation became a more universal circuit that seems so legit, they not only exploitative but also make everything appropriate. This worthy idea brings causality of how this system involves women, families, former colonial countries, the environment, and even the political superstructure purposely.

In the meantime the ENTIRE GLOBE dries, warms and BURNS. As all of the earths resources (including HUMAN) are CONSUMED and CONVERTED to WEATLH of a FEW. In other words: capitalism also needs caretakers (mostly women) to make babies, raise children, and take care of men… for free or for cheep if you hire “help”. That image of class struggle has led many people to argue against what Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau call “class essentialism.” In those debates, people argue that class struggle is not the only kind of struggle in capitalist societies, and that it doesn’t have a monopoly over what constitutes a just vision of society. Those who decry class essentialism say that socialists and Marxists don’t have a monopoly on naming all forms of oppression and injustice. And, in fact, capitalist societies have historically been spaces where there have been tremendous struggles over unfree and dependent labor and various other forms of oppression or domination that do not fit within the conventionally defined parameters of class struggle. In other words, one position is to say: “Class struggles have this one very specific meaning, and, therefore, we need to validate non-class struggles, which mean something else.” Should serve to remind … that capitalism remains a guzzler of care, and this is an unsustainable position”

Despite the huge increase in wealth disparity between the 1% and “the rest of us” – not just in the US but around the world – real wages for the majority have largely stalled for the past 30 years in terms of purchasing power She divides the history of capitalism into four periods, and in each of her domains, she lays out how and why capitalism is essentially bound to be a destructive force. She draws heavily on Marx and Engels, as well as more contemporary thinkers, and she has acerbically little patience with liberal or progressive band-aid solutions. The world is a mess. In her latest book, Cannibal Capitalism, feminist philosopher and professor Nancy Fraser examines the multiple, complex sources of this mess. Aaron shall take the two he-goats and let them stand before the LORD [...] He shall then slaughter the people’s goat of sin offering, [...] [He] shall [then] lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat and confess over it all the iniquities and transgressions of the Israelites, whatever their sins; and it shall be sent off to the wilderness. Since the “new economics” embraced by figures such as Reagan and Thatcher, government policies throughout most of the West have moved toward supporting the unrestricted operation of “the economy” while dropping the post-war focus on building and maintaining a solid and growing middle classThis event forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series imagining what the world could look like after the crisis, and how we get there.

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. So, this short book may be a kind of distillation of her life’s work.and promising developments on the left like the rise of Jacobin magazine and the whole media ecosystem around it. The In other words: capitalism needs police and prisons, a military industrial complex, big banks and fat bailouts for when they tank. If so, then there are several possible scenarios. These include some desirable ones, like global democratic ecosocialism. Of course, it’s hard to say exactly what that would look like, but let’s assume it would dismantle the “law of value,” abolish exploitation and expropriation, and reinvent the relations between human society and nonhuman nature, between goods production and caregiving, between “the political” and “the economic,” democratic planning and markets. That’s the “good” end of our spectrum of possibilities. At the other end lie some noncapitalist outcomes that are truly terrible: massive societal regression under warring strongmen or a global authoritarian regime. There is also, of course, a third possibility, which is that the crisis doesn’t get resolved at all, but simply continues to grind away in an orgy of societal self-cannibalization until there’s little left that’s recognizably human.