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

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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.

The cost of running for, and staying in, public office has allowed those with the greatest monetary resources the ability to control not just who runs for office in the first place, but also over the kinds of policies allowed to be considered after they are elected. This is why so many governments at all levels in the US have frustrated efforts to protect and improve their environmental systems, including the purity of land, water, and air. In other words: capitalism needs stolen/colonized land, and subjugated/enslaved or otherwise disempowered people (BIPOC and poor whites) for free or cheep labor. 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. 23). Getting beyond the ‘structural divisions that have historically constituted capitalist societies’ to develop a vision of emancipation is what Fraser sets out to articulate. crunch. One important factor here is that we’re living in a kind of capitalism—a historically specific form oflet BIPOC and LGBTQ have live action role play (LARP) with MAGA whites on CNN and FOX while the rich get richer. Fraser begins with two core capitalist dynamics: exploitation, through waged labour, and expropriation—the confiscation of natural resources and human capabilities, conscripted into the circuits of capitalist expansion. In the mercantile era, European expropriations proceeded both in the conquered and colonized lands of the New World, Africa and southern Asia, and—with the English enclosures and Scottish clearances—at home. Under the liberal-colonial regime, the growth of capitalist industry produced an exploited proletariat in the metropolitan centres, which gradually won the right to citizenship, suffrage and legal protections; this sharpened—and decisively racialized—the distinctions between exploitation and expropriation, which now mapped onto different world regions. Under the imperialist-capitalist world system, the two became mutually constitutive and tightly entwined: the exploited us citizen-worker acquired an aura of freedom by comparison to expropriated indigenous groups or chattel slaves. Globally, too, the distinction correlated ‘roughly but unmistakably’ with what DuBois called ‘the colour line’. footnote 14 The stark opposition between exploitation and expropriation began to weaken in the post-war period, under the impact of decolonization and civil rights. With the advent of financialized capitalism, Fraser argues, it underwent new shifts. Forms of debt-based expropriation expanded across the world, while manufacturing shifted to the South and East; former industrial workers in the advanced-capitalist countries were stripped of their relative privilege, amid falling real wages and rising household debt. The relation now was more of a continuum—a racialized spectrum of exploited-expropriated citizen-workers. footnote 15 On the binary dualisms, I have a wider set of ontological concerns about the separations induced in differentiating production and social reproduction, exploitation and expropriation, society and nature, or the political and the economic. To cite Fraser: 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

PDF / EPUB File Name: Cannibal_Capitalism_-_Nancy_Fraser.pdf, Cannibal_Capitalism_-_Nancy_Fraser.epub Fraser captures how gender oppression, racial domination, and ecological destruction are not incidental to capitalism, but structurally embedded in it.” Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System Is Devouring Democracy, Care and the Planet – And What We Can Do About It Fraser identifies four core contradictions within capitalism; (1) exploitation and expropriation, (2) production and reproduction, (3) society and nature, and (4) economy and polity. Four non-economic pre-conditions on which capitalism relies, and simultaneously demolishes. These contradictions are explored in four separate chapters, all inspiring and disturbing in equal parts. Cannibal Capitalism: How our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planetand What We Can Do About ItFraser is the first to admit, that there probably isn’t one. But if there was. Then it would probably look an awful lot like SOCIALISM. Not many historical ideologies are being argued here. Fraser focused on her premised by actualizing, redefining, and giving short explanations and examples. So, for those who crave a theoretical debate, this book is not the place. But very worth reading for early Marxism, Feminism, and those who would learn more about socio-reproduction. In other words: capitalism needs police and prisons, a military industrial complex, big banks and fat bailouts for when they tank. There is also, as I said before, a crisis of social reproduction, which is stressing or depleting our capacities for creating, caring for, and sustaining human beings: childcare and eldercare, education and health care. As states disinvest from public provision, and as 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 preexisting crisis of social reproduction. But it would be just as true to say that the preexisting crisis of social reproduction (including disinvestment from public health infrastructure and social provision) has greatly exacerbated the effects of COVID. Read together, Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory—an extended dialogue between Fraser and the Frankfurt-trained social philosopher Rahel Jaeggi—and the more popular Cannibal Capitalism in turn expound and systematize Fraser’s argument for an expanded concept of capitalism. Fraser’s premise is that an understanding of the present crisis cannot be restricted to economic questions alone. She sets out to reveal the imbrication—a crucial term for her work—of the economic and the political, social and environmental dimensions of the crisis, writing for younger generations who had grown up without access to earlier critiques of capitalism, and for older readers who had never really integrated issues of gender, ‘race’ and ecology into their analysis.

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