Nancy Fraser: “Cannibal Capitalism” Is on Our Horizon
Political theorist Nancy Fraser tells Jacobin that we face several crises at once: in the economy, in social reproduction, in the environment, and in politics. Without dramatic intervention, we may end up with “cannibal capitalism.”
The Apple Fire burns north of Beaumont, California on July 31, 2020. (Brody Hessin / Wikimedia Commons)
For the last three decades, American political theorist Nancy Fraser has been providing the Left with some of its most compelling ideas.
At times, these ideas are pointedly political, as when Fraser calls for feminism to cut its ties with the economic elite and embrace a working-class politics that can attack the root causes of oppression. At other times, they are powerfully theoretical, as when Fraser analyzes the interaction between capitalism and the “background conditions” on which capitalism depends and that it can’t completely subordinate.
Fraser’s recent work finds her pushing for a synthesis of the practical and theoretical, in the interest of avoiding the onrushing disaster of what she, in her forthcoming book, calls “cannibal capitalism”: the prospect that capitalism, by invading all spheres of life, might destroy its — and, more important, our own — conditions for survival.
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