Cannibal Capitalism

In relation to capitalism Fraser states that capitalism is not merely as an economic system but something larger: ‘a societal order that empowers a profit-economy to prey on the extra-economic supports it needs to function—wealth expropriated from nature and subject peoples; multiple forms of carework, chronically undervalued when not wolly disavowed; public goods and pubic powers, which capital both requires and tries to curtail; the energy and creativity of working people’ (Fraser 2022).

Then Fraser unpacks the definition of cannibal capitalism as a system that brings to the world ‘all the oppressions, contradicitons, and conflicts of the present conjuncture. [This means] class exploitation, […] but also gender domination and racial/imperial oppression—both non-accidental by-products of a societal order that subordinates social reproduction to commodity production and that demands racialized expropriation to underwrite profitable exploitation. […] As I conceive it, […] cannibal capitalism precipitates a broad array and complex mix of social struggles: not just class struggles […] but also boundary struggles at the system’s constitutive joints. Where production butts up against social reproduction, the system incites conflicts over care, both public and private, paid and unpaid. Where exploitation crosses expropriation, it foments struggles over “race,” migration, and empire. Then too, where accumulation hits natural bedrock, cannibal capitalism sparks conflicts over land and energy, flora and fauna, the fate of the earth. Finally, where global markets and megacorporations meet national states and institutions of transnational governance, it provokes struggles over the shape, control, and reach of public power. All these strands of our present predicament find their place in an expanded conception of capitalism that is simultaneously unitary and differentiated’ (Fraser 2022).

Finally, Fraser invite us to use cannibal capitalism’s conceptualisation to analyse capitalist society, ‘[…] in which the main course is us’ (Fraser 2022).