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

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Capitalism relies on exploitation (waged labour) and expropriation (enslavement, territorial conquest, annexation, etc.

Cannibal Capitalism conjures up a monster that voraciously consumes the very land, labor and natural world upon which it thrives. To begin, Fraser denotes the colonial legacy of the term cannibal, a word replete with racist imagery applied traditionally to the other, the colonised.Having argued throughout that ‘capitalism is not an economy, but a type of society – one on which an arena of economized activities and relations is marked out and set apart from other, non-economized zones, on which the former depend, but which they disavow’ (p.

In the postwar era, this ‘separate spheres’ arrangement was modified into that of the ‘family wage,’ wherein welfare protections secure an ideal of cisheteronormative (and white) nuclear families sustained by a single male breadwinner. These crisis points all come to a head in Covid-19, which Fraser argues can help us envision the resistance we need to end the feeding frenzy.Capital is currently cannibalizing every sphere of life-guzzling wealth from nature and racialized populations, sucking up our ability to care for each other, and gutting the practice of politics. And to what extent this kind of methodological question poses a problem may depend on how far an investigator wants to go in applying her framework to the hermeneutic understanding of how these various historical struggles played out. the political, ecological, and social-reproductive strands of crisis are inseparable from racialized expropriation in both periphery and core … In short, economic, ecological, social, and political crises are inextricably entangled with imperialism and oppression – and with the escalating antagonisms associated with them. indeed, in the post-war period, the UK government invited British subjects from Commonwealth countries to work in public transport and in the new National Health Service (NHS), with little care for the widespread racism they would encounter then, and still do now.