This can risk grouping under one ‘boundary struggle’ movements that were quite disparate or even at odds. In each of these binaries, the former sphere distinguishes itself from the latter even as it draws resources from the latter, all the while disavowing any responsibility for the resources it draws.

Nature´s supply is necessary for capitalist production, however, it is used and misused, exhausted and depleted, drained and emptied. 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.Yet, there is a tension between public policy and capital accumulation – as witnessed today by consumers having to choose between ‘eating and heating’ in the face of soaring inflation; while the oil companies have hauled in unprecedented profits, which they are busy distributing among shareholders and bonuses for already spectacularly overpaid CEOs. In disavowing responsibility, capitalism invites the destabilization of these latter spheres and, in doing so, jeopardizes essential facets of society and life on which it itself is dependent.

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. Having argued throughout that ‘capitalism is not an economy, but a type of society – one on which an arena of economized activities and relations is marked out and set apart from other, non-economized zones, on which the former depend, but which they disavow’ (p. 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.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. A brilliant synthesis of Fraser's many pathbreaking contributions to a Marxian theory of capitalism for the twenty-first century, beautifully written. Climate breakdown and the loss of animal and plant species are a manifestation of ‘a nature that “bites back”’ (p.

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 reality, though, the main decisions are made not by individual states, but by the international financial institutions and central or regional banks, which make ‘many of the most consequential rules that govern the central relations of capitalist society’, in particular ‘financialized capitalism’. 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. Nor is the gendered division of every labour market, and the gender pay gap, which consign most women to lower-status and often part-time work and, hence, to economic dependence on men. 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.Cannibal Capitalism conjures up a monster that voraciously consumes the very land, labor and natural world upon which it thrives. 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. 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.