Book Review: Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System Is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet — and What We Can Do About It

Abstract

The subtitle of Nancy Fraser’s latest work asserts that it’s a ‘System’, not an ‘economic system’ that is doing the devouring. Many of us have perhaps argued that capital is everywhere all at once, all things undergoing commodification. Maybe we’ve even gone as far as to say that capitalism’s devouring of social life is a matter of our global eschatological final course. Fraser’s Cannibal Capitalism says not so fast. Georg Lukács says that the commodity form colonizes all of life, and Fraser argues against Lukács, insisting that capitalism relies on ‘the very existence of zones of non-commodification’ (p. 18). The cornerstone argument of this book is that capitalism relies on these zones marked as non-economic and is cannibalizing them: an ‘ouroboros’ that eats its own tail. As Fraser takes readers through the backrooms of capitalism’s ‘five crises of gluttony’, it becomes progressively clear that it is her analysis – of this historical moment’s severe subjugation of social reproduction to commodity production – which can generate a lucid, anti-oppressive politics. The book proceeds in six chapters, plus a preface and an epilogue. Each features a corny yet instructive title, all extremely on-theme. Omnivore argues that capitalism is not an economic system and is better described as a bundle of relations between different facets of life. Fraser goes on to explain in the next four chapters what these relations are. Glutton for Punishment details the relationship between racism and capitalism, or more specifically, racism and what she calls the ‘two exes’, expropriation and exploitation. I expect many readers seek an analysis of race and capitalism, so it makes sense that Fraser starts here. Fraser explains that race has often been the fulcrum around which facially economic choices about exploitation and expropriation take place. Capitalism is a system by which racial logics help determine who is to be expropriated and who is ‘lucky’ enough for the ‘doubly-free’ system of wage labour. Next, Care Guzzler elucidates that capitalism at once relies on unwaged care work while subverting care work’s life sustaining capacities. Sharing resonances, Nature in the Maw details capitalism’s reliance on nature as a free or cheap resource-for-the-taking. This chapter is classic Fraser, a strong reprisal of her theory on nature (as conceived under capitalism) as a ‘tap’ to draw upon 1151781 CNC0010.1177/03098168231151781Capital & ClassBook Reviews book-review2023