[If we are serious about saving democracy, care and the planet we
need to address the root of the crisis, which is capital’s
insatiable need to devour them.]
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RESISTING CANNIBAL CAPITALISM  
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Nancy Fraser
May 3, 2023
Red Pepper
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_ If we are serious about saving democracy, care and the planet we
need to address the root of the crisis, which is capital’s
insatiable need to devour them. _

‘Finding the Right Balance for Crypto’ session at the 2023 World
Economic Forum, (Credit: Valeriano Di Domenico)

 

It is increasingly common to hear of crises – economic,
environmental and/or racial – in which the vast majority of the
global population are confined to substandard living conditions while
a global elite accrues wealth at a horrifying pace. There is a
widespread sense that something has to give, that the world cannot
continue on its current path. Of course, this is often the cry
emanating from movements on the streets and detailed in the pages of
Intergovernmental Panels on Climate Change (IPCC) reports but these
often fall on the deaf ears of those in power. So what exactly has to
change and how do we untangle this big, hot mess?

To understand where we are and to figure out a strategy for radical
change, we need to recognise that capitalism as an economic system
depends on several non-capitalist systems of social and natural
reproduction. Most fundamentally, and perhaps most timely, is nature
and the planet. Then the family, education and health, the polity and
political order and the possibility of plunder from populations
outside the system. The term ‘polycrisis
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that is now bandied about in the seminar rooms of Davos implies that
each of these crises, afflicting a variety of these systems, are
separate from another – as if it were just bad luck that they were
occurring at the same time. We must understand that this is a fallacy
and capitalism is the crisis. As Farwa Sial recently wrote
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the _Developing Economics_ blog, ‘Pandemics, climate breakdown,
wars and global deflationary pressures are not mere externalities of
the capitalist system but intrinsic to its operations – long
predicted by a diverse group of thinkers.’

Widening our lens

There is an overwhelming tendency to identify the core injustice of
capitalist society with the exploitation of waged workers at the point
of commodity production. The recent wave of strike action in the UK is
a timely reminder of this and, of course, the history of capitalism
cannot be told without the history of the waged worker. But
capitalism’s exploitative reach extends far beyond the worker and
‘the economy’ and to truly envision a world beyond capitalism, we
must first understand those wider spheres upon which it feeds.

First, and as a multitude of feminist economists have noted over
decades, is care work. ‘Who cooked Adam Smith’s dinner?’ as the
adage goes. Capitalism relies on the unpaid labour of predominantly
women to nurture, sustain, replenish and create the workers of
tomorrow. Modern forms of ‘lean-in’ feminism have encouraged
women to buy into the capitalist illusion
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casting off their motherly chains and passing them down the social
hierarchy. But this does nothing about the devaluing of care work and
merely relocates exploitation further down the income distribution.

A second precondition for a capitalist economy is ecology. Capital
relies on nature in a very literal sense for the raw materials
necessary for production and environmental conditions conducive to
habitable life. Yet decades of ‘externalising’
so-called ecological assets
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the climate to the brink of breakdown with huge inequalities along the
lines of class and race in terms of who is most vulnerable.

None of this accumulation can proceed without legal systems to
guarantee private property and contractual exchange, nor repressive
forces to manage dissent and enforce the hierarchies that enable
corporations to expropriate populations at home and abroad.

State power

This brings us to the next precondition: state power (or its absence).
Think of the legal frameworks that allow multinational corporations to
sequester billions in offshore accounts. These intricate legal
frameworks are not acts of nature but concoctions of the state.

Capital needs the power of the state but its actions also undermine
state capacity. The result is a set of tensions between the
‘economic’ and ‘political’ and a deep-seated tendency towards
political crisis. On one hand these are crises of governance, in which
the system destroys its own capacity to manage the problems it
generates. On the other, they are crises of hegemony, in which people
become disillusioned with flagrant inequality and a political system
that enables it.

Finally, any analysis of capitalism must look at how these conditions
intersect with questions of place and race. Capitalist production
would not be profitable without an ongoing stream of cheap inputs,
including natural resources and unfree or dependent labour. The
statement ‘Behind Manchester stood Mississippi’ illustrates the
fact that the wealth from the iconic textile mills of early
industrialisation depended on the cheap raw cotton supplied by slave
labour in the US.

The same is true today. Behind Cupertino stands Kinshasa, where
lithium for batteries and coltan for iPhones are mined on the cheap,
at the expense of black lives. In truth, capitalist society is
necessarily imperialist, continuously creating defenceless populations
for expropriation. Its economy would not work if everyone was paid
wages that cover their true reproduction costs. By institutionalising
that division, capitalism entrenches imperialism and racial
oppression.

In sum, each condition is indispensable for a capitalist economy’s
functioning. Behind capitalism’s official institutions – wage
labour, production, exchange and finance – stand their necessary
supports and enabling conditions: families, communities, nature;
territorial states, political institutions and civil societies; and
not least, massive amounts and multiple forms of unwaged and
expropriated labour. Fundamentally integral to capitalist society,
they too are constitutive elements of it. Capitalism, in other words,
is no mere economy, but something larger: an institutionalised social
order that includes the non-economised zones on which the economy
relies.

The hunger of capital

The concept of ‘cannibal capitalism’ allows us to scrutinise
something crucial – the relation established in capitalist society
between the system’s economy and these background conditions.
Capitalism in essence is a cannibal, primed to guzzle its own
conditions of possibility. This is obvious to anyone who adopts a
wider view of the systems capital implicates (nature, care work,
labour) but is conveniently sidelined by those who fixate on economic
growth through the lens of GDP.

Looking across the history of capitalism (mercantile,
liberal-colonial, state-organised), this structural distinction
between production and social reproduction has always been a defining
feature. Regardless of the form, as long as the system incentivises
limitless accumulation, it is bound to put tremendous destabilising
pressure on families, nature, subjugated populations and on the public
powers that are supposed to be regulating it.

Today’s financialised capitalism, though, leads us to a more
problematic question. Can the beast feed itself? The increasing
prominence of FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) industries that
invest in themselves at the expense of the wider economy poses
important questions for cannibal capitalism. In the UK, for instance,
only £1 in every £10
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by British banks goes to non-financial firms. Most credit flows into
existing property and supports some kind of financial trading.

The rise (and fall?) of cryptocurrency has highlighted how certain
financial assets have become completely detached from any true sense
of value creation [[link removed]].
Many crypto trading platforms are notoriously defined by ‘pump and
dump
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schemes that see investors plot runs on certain currencies – quickly
inflating their value – before selling them off for a profit.

So can the rich now feed themselves – detached from the
preconditions of previous capitalist eras? The evidence would suggest
not. Cryptocurrencies are extremely harmful for the environment, with
Bitcoin mining resulting in more carbon emissions than some countries
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Financial capitalism has also brought us austerity alongside a much
wider assault on the institutions of social reproduction – the
social safety net, childcare, education and housing.

The nature of the crisis

We have seen severe forms of economic crisis, as in 2007-8. And
although it may have looked as if our rulers found a way to patch it
up, that crisis is not really solved. Financialisation remains a
ticking time bomb. And our economic woes have converged with another
very severe, even catastrophic, crisis in the form of global warming.
This ecological crisis has been brewing for a long time and is now
becoming palpable.

The crisis of social reproduction is stressing our capacities for
creating, caring for and sustaining human beings: childcare,
eldercare, education and healthcare. As states disinvest from public
provision, and depressed wage levels force us to devote more hours to
paid work, the system gobbles up the time and energy needed for care
work. So that sector too is in crisis, especially in pandemic
conditions. One could say that COVID has greatly exacerbated the
pre-existing crisis of social reproduction. But it would be just as
true to say that the pre-existing crisis of social reproduction
(including disinvestment from public health and social provision)
has greatly exacerbated the effects of COVID
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Gridlock

Finally, we also face a major political crisis. At one level, this is
a crisis of governance, so that even powerful states lack the capacity
to solve the problems the system generates. They are depleted,
gridlocked and outgunned by mega-corporations, which have captured
virtually all regulatory agencies and engineered huge tax cuts for
themselves and the rich.

Deprived of revenue for decades, states have allowed their
infrastructures to crumble and have depleted their stockpiles of
essential public goods. They are, by definition, unable to deal with
issues like climate change, which are not containable within any
jurisdictional borders. The upshot is an acute crisis of governance at
the structural level.

But there is also a political crisis at another level, a crisis of
hegemony in the Gramscian sense: the widespread defection from
‘politics as usual’, from the established political parties and
elites who have been tarnished by association with neoliberalism, and
the appearance of previously unthinkable populisms.

This multiplicity of crises adds up to a general crisis of capitalist
society, the effects of which manifest like a metastasising cancer.
Every effort to patch up one outbreak only leads to others, afflicting
other sectors, regions, populations, until the whole social body is
overwhelmed.

The experience of general crisis has become palpable for many, but
that doesn’t mean that it will produce a total breakdown or
revolutionary climax any time soon. Capitalist crises can go on for
decades, unfortunately. One could say that the whole first half of the
20th century was just one long, rolling general crisis of
liberal-colonial capitalism. We might be in for a long slog.

Strategic implications

This analysis offers some insights for the political strategy we need
to ensure this slog has direction and reaches its goal. The first, and
most important, is that we need to think big. This crisis can’t be
resolved in an emancipatory way by small-bore reforms that merely
tinker at the edges of the system. If we are serious about saving
democracy, care and the planet, we need to address the root cause,
which is capital’s insatiable need to devour them. We need, in other
words, to dismantle a social system that empowers the cannibal to
treat us as fodder.

To do that, however, we need to scale up the current level of
emancipatory engagement. Certainly, there’s lots of activist energy
now but it’s fragmented and uncoordinated. It hasn’t (yet)
coalesced into a broad anti-capitalist front with the vision and heft
to embody a genuine alternative. It’s not (yet) a counter-hegemonic
bloc that could go toe to toe against the powers-that-be – against
corporate neoliberalism, on the one hand, and reactionary populism, on
the other. And that’s what the times demand.

How might we get to that place? There’s no magic bullet but it would
surely help if we had a map of the system that connected the dots: a
picture that revealed some links among apparently disconnected
sufferings and struggles – showing, for example, that racist police
violence, lethal floods, unsafe housing, forced childbearing, imperial
wars and unliveable wages all have roots in one and the same social
system, which must be abolished to end them.

Cannibal capitalism, as outlined here, is a rough draft of such a
picture. It offers activists a map on which to situate themselves –
and to grasp the relations to others, identifying potential allies and
actual enemies. Like intersectionality, it invites us to overcome
silos in favour of integrative thinking and political action. But it
goes deeper in clarifying the structural dynamics that are reducing
all of us, albeit in different ways, to food for the beast. It can
help inspire us to join together in a powerful anti-capitalist bloc.

_NANCY FRASER IS A PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY AT THE NEW SCHOOL, NEW YORK
AND THE AUTHOR OF CANNIBAL CAPITALISM
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_THIS ARTICLE FIRST APPEARED IN ISSUE #239, SPRING 2023, FLIGHT,
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* capitalism
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* Financialization
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* Climate Change
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