Fraser has laid out her theory of capitalism systematically in her 2022 book, Cannibal Capitalism, but to fully appreciate the depth of her perspective, one should also consult the earlier works upon which her mature theory builds. The cornerstone of Fraser’s social theory is a form of analytical “dualism.”

On the one hand, in opposition to the economic reductionism characteristic of orthodox Marxism, she stresses that material and symbolic reproduction in capitalism are mutually irreducible. Rejecting the schema of base and superstructure, she argues that capitalism is both an economic and a cultural order, a system of economic exploitation and one of status hierarchies, a configuration of material and symbolic forms of domination alike.

For Fraser, class is one fundamental mode of social differentiation, rooted in the political-economic structure of society, while status group is another such mode, rooted in the cultural (symbolic) order. Every social actor in capitalism has a particular location along both axes, so that her overall standing within the social hierarchy is the composite of the two positions. Social groups are often subjected to both economic and cultural injustices simultaneously.

We can already find this argument about the two dimensions of capitalist society, systemic and cultural, in Fraser’s earliest works — for example, in her critique of Jürgen Habermas, “What’s Critical about Critical Theory? Habermas and the Case of Gender.” In this essay, Fraser argues that the capitalist ideal of the “family wage” was historically conceived as a payment to a man supporting his family rather than a payment to a “genderless individual.”

According to Fraser, this “gender-sensitive reading” of the institutional relations in capi­talism between family, economy, public sphere, and bureaucratic state shows us that male dominance is “intrinsic rather than accidental to classical capitalism.” A reading of this kind also reveals the multidirec­tional nature of causality in capitalism. Going against the economic determinism of orthodox Marxism, Fraser demonstrates that culturally elaborated gender norms condition the key political-economic trait of capital­ism: the gender division of labor — or rather, the division between paid work and unpaid reproductive labor.

Fraser’s analytical dualism helps us iden­tify what she calls the “subtexts” of societal phenomena in capitalism that have traditionally been considered purely (or overwhelmingly) “economic” or “cultural.” Her critique of Habermas conveys a key political message for anti-capitalist movements: “cultural” orders of domination such as patriarchy are not “secondary” or “residual.” They are intrinsic to capitalism, and anti-capitalist politics must endorse struggles against such injustices as indispensable.

In the works written over the last decade and a half, Fraser has elaborated upon this key insight. Building on classical Marxist feminism, she argues that capitalism is a social order that institutes a historically arbitrary divi­sion between paid labor and unpaid social-reproductive activities (such as childrearing and caregiving), with the latter being inherently gendered and assigned to women.

The capitalist economy depends on the free reproduction of labor power. At the symbolic level, however, such dependence cannot be acknowledged because it would mean admitting that reproductive labor is a highly valuable form of work and should be compensated. The capi­talist economy therefore has a systemic need to disavow its depend­ence on the sphere of social reproduction.

How is this disavowal achieved? Precisely through the culturally elaborated gender subtexts of key economic phenomena such as the “family wage” that rein­force and naturalize the gender division of labor, obscuring its arbi­trary character.

In addition to theorizing the role of unpaid care work as a condition of possibility for capitalism, Fraser has relied on Karl Polanyi’s work to conceptualize other noneconomic aspects of capitalist social reality that add up to form the “extended” struc­ture of capitalism. These aspects include human relations with nature, the realm of liberal-democratic institutional politics, and global imperial domination based on racial hierarchies.

This extended concept of capitalism offers a powerful antidote to bourgeois ideology that treats capitalism as a purely economic order compatible with the political ideal of liberal meritocracy. It is a crucial tool for ideological critiques and emancipatory social struggles, exposing the structural role that forms of domination other than clas­sical exploitation, such as patriarchy and racism, perform in capitalism.

It is against the backdrop of Fraser’s appropriation of Polanyi that we should consider her well-known argument about the “dangerous liaison” of liberal emancipatory politics with neoliberal economics. She argues that the current multidimensional crisis of capitalism has been triggered by another major Polanyian “move­ment” toward commodification that is analogous to nineteenth-century economic liberalism.

However, while Polanyi could clearly identify a unifying logic of a protectionist “countermovement” to free-market liberalism that ran through such disparate political projects as New Deal America, the Soviet Union, fascist Europe, and postwar European social democracy, Fraser observes that no such clear alternative exists today to the neoliberal project.

She explains this lack of a countermovement by expanding Polanyi’s conception that defines the basic political dynamic of capitalism as a “double movement” of “marketization” and “protection” to include the third pole of “emancipation.” She argues that each pole of this “triple movement” derives its concrete politi­cal shape not only from its own internal logic but also from its relations with the other two poles, resulting in the internal ambivalence of all three poles.

In the case of the emancipation pole, this ambivalence means that postwar emancipatory movements (New Left, feminist, environmentalist) were internally splin­tered. On the one hand, there were factions that fought against culturally based forms of domination (the protection pole) while giving little consideration to processes of marketization or even endorsing them. On the other, there were factions that simultane­ously fought oppressive forms of protection and marketiza­tion alike, which in effect meant that they were fighting to transform what Fraser terms the “ethical substance” of protection.

As she notes, the liberal currents became hegemonic over time and formed an alliance with the neoliberal agents of marketization. In the framework of this alliance, Fraser argues, an “emancipatory critique” of protection in oppressive forms “converged with the neoliberal critique of protection per se.”

This is where we can find the key to understanding the present peculiarity of the missing countermovement. Fraser develops Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony along Polanyian lines, arguing that a particular historical (hegemonic) bloc is a specific configuration of two given poles within the triple movement.

Our current hegemonic bloc, which is now disintegrating, is an amalgam of marketization and emancipation that Fraser terms “progressive neoliberalism.” What anti-capitalist politics needs to forge if it is to build a counterhegemonic bloc is a combination of protection and emancipation.

But even more fundamental than Polanyi’s work for Fraser’s theorization of capitalism is what she considers to be Karl Marx’s basic method, that of “epistemic shifts.” What Marx essentially did was dig beneath the bourgeois political economy that focuses on markets — the exchange of com­modities of equivalent value — as the central element of capitalism.

Beneath this “front story,” Marx identified the “dirty secret” of how production itself is organized in capitalism: through exploitation, that is, the extraction of surplus value from labor. Here we find the first “hidden abode” of capitalism, as Fraser calls it: the nonequivalent relation of exploitation beneath the equivalence of market exchange. But Marx’s method doesn’t stop there, as Fraser stresses.

In the chapter on “primitive accumulation” in Volume 1 of Capital, he shifts the perspective once more, uncovering an “abode behind the abode.” Marx identifies at the historical outset of capitalism the brutal process of dispossession (what Fraser calls “expropriation”) that separated people from their means of subsistence through enclosures, theft, and colonial conquest. The method of epistemic shifts, which allows us to identify ever deeper layers of dom­ination in capitalism, constitutes for Fraser the very essence of critical theory.

Relations between capitalist economy and all of its background conditions of possibility — nature, politics, and social reproduction — follow the Marxian logic of primitive accu­mulation, which involves taking whatever one can without any compensation while denying and covering up the whole process. Fraser sums this logic up with the term “freeriding.”

To reproduce itself and thrive, capitalist economy must freeride on the unpaid reproductive labor of women, on nature as a free “tap” of resources, and on political (or public, as Fraser prefers) power as a guarantor of the legal frame­work of economic coercion. To enable such freeriding, capitalist society institutionalizes the historically unique boundaries that define its basic structure.

The first such boundary is that between the economy as a sphere of paid work and social reproduction as the sphere of unpaid reproductive labor. The second is the boundary separating nature and the human world. The dividing line between polity and economy (or to put it more bluntly, between the overt coercion of armed force and the covert coercion of the labor market) makes it possible to remove all “economic” matters from the sphere of political decision-mak­ing.

Finally, there is the distinction between “exploitable” and “expropriable” labor. For Fraser, this boundary largely follows the “color line,” one that has been historically constituted in imperialist terms as a divide between exploited workers (who are considered to be white) and expropriable subjects (who are not).

The last boundary is the most complex one. “When properly understood,” Fraser argues in her 2018 debate with Rahel Jaeggi, “it clarifies the structural place of imperial and racial oppression in capitalist society.” She applies her analytical dualism to this institutionalized division of capitalism, defining it as simultaneously economic and political.

Viewed economically, exploitation and expropriation are two mechanisms of capital accumulation, with the former structurally dependent on the latter, not just in the early days of capitalism but throughout its history up to the present. Expropriation helps sustain the official capitalist economy of exploitation by lowering the costs of production and reproduction of labor.

Viewed politically, on the other hand, the exploitation/expro­priation boundary is a status boundary that is institutionalized through the actions of states. If we combine the two vantage points, we may reasonably conclude, as Fraser does, that what we call “race” is simply “the mark that distinguishes free subjects of exploitation from dependent subjects of expropriation.”

Since capitalism is built around constitutive boundaries, Fraser argues, it inevitably gives rise to bound­ary struggles. These are multisided historical conflicts around the exact location of the boundary line, in which actors mobilize various “moral grammars” of capitalist society against the logic of capital and its own moral grammar of efficiency and meritocracy.

In the sphere of social reproduction, the norms of reciprocity, care, and solidarity challenge the capitalist grammar. In noncapitalist human interactions with nature, the norms of stewardship, sustainability, and justice between generations are operative. Finally, in the sphere of democratic politics, norms of democracy, equal citizenship, and the public interest take precedence.

According to Fraser, boundary struggles over the demarcation lines between economy and polity, production and reproduction, society and nature, and exploitation and expropriation are just as fundamental to capitalism as class struggles within the field of capitalist economy.

Fraser’s mature works thus reiterate the key political insight of her earliest ones in a more elaborate form: capitalism is a social order built on multidimensional forms of structural domination, and anti-capitalist politics must endorse and incorporate all struggles that challenge the various dimensions of this domination without discriminating between them. This includes environmentalist, feminist, and anti-racist movements as well as struggles to deepen and radicalize liberal democracy.