Were Nancy Fraser an anthropologist, she might have titled her most recent book Endo-Cannibal Capitalism or Auto-Cannibal Capitalism since the main idea of this succinct, thoughtful and eminently readable analysis of late capitalism is that the system we live under is devouring the very conditions of its own existence, rather than consuming some unidentified other. Aside from this admittedly puerile distinction and the fact that her intentions are poetic, not ethnological, it is clear from the outset that Fraser’s aim is to extend Marx’s critique of commodity production and the exploitation of labor into four areas that are purportedly external to (or insufficiently treated) in his work: 1) the increasingly destructive expropriation of nature, 2) the uncompensated or undercompensated labor of social reproduction, what Fraser refers to as ‘care work’, 3) the refashioning of the polity, specifically the main legal, political and intellectual institutions to serve the needs of capital, and, finally, 4) the hyper-exploitation or expropriation of marginalized communities, namely people of color. As Fraser remarks, ‘capitalism is not an economic system but something bigger […] it is also a way of organizing the relations of production and exchange to their non-economic conditions of possibility’ (80).
Underlying this four-part schema is an even more fundamental distinction between ‘exploitation’ and ‘expropriation’. While the former refers to market relations, including the extraction of surplus value, the latter, purportedly undervalued by Marx, refers to extra-market or extra-legal forms of wealth creation such as theft, forced labor and enslavement. While the distinction, in Fraser’s view, originally corresponded to the opposition between core and periphery, colonizer and colonized, the ‘two exes’ as she describes them, are now increasingly seen as overlapping or indistinct phenomena. By way of example, Fraser brings up the concept of ‘primitive accumulation’, which Marx viewed as a series of limited, albeit lengthy, episodes of conquest, pillage and expropriation which helped birth modern capitalism: the African slave trade, the eighteenth-century English Enclosure Movement and the colonization of the New World. In short, while Marx, like Weber, distinguished between the world that wrought capitalism from capitalist life itself, Fraser dissents arguing that the brutal expropriation of nature, domestic labor and racialized labor are the sine qua non of capitalism, not simply a feature of its bloody past.
In any event, it is this four-part schema, the four ‘externalities’, to borrow a phrase from neo-classical economics, that structures Cannibal Capitalism, as chapters two through five treat structural racism, social reproduction, the expropriation of nature and the death of democracy in detail. Each chapter, in turn, is subdivided into four historical periods – mercantile capitalism (1500-1700), liberal colonialism (1800-1900), state managed capitalism (1945-1980) and neo-liberal or finance capitalism (1980 to present) – to illustrate how capitalism has evolved and refined its methods of exploitation/extraction over time.
Here, one example will serve for many. In discussing ‘care work’, Fraser argues that social reproduction in early or ‘mercantile’ capitalism was left ‘pretty much as it had been before – sited in villages, households and extended kin networks […] and relatively untouched by the law of value’ (59). This changes abruptly with the rise of the factory system where women are dragooned into wage labor, a period amply described by Engels’ The Condition of the English Working Class (1845). However, instability and scandal (for example, the de-sexing of women) wrought by wage work in extremis, combined with the emergence of trade unionism, the birth of the public health movement and first wave feminism, not only led to legislation aimed at ameliorating the plight of women and children, but to the reconstitution of the family in its modern restricted form. Period three, Fordism or state-managed reproduction, represents an equally fundamental shift. Whether motivated by an enlightened elite that saw the wisdom of subordinating short-term profit to long-term stability, or a fearful bourgeoisie confronting the specter of a mobilized working class, trade unions were recognized as part of a grand class compromise, and families, for the first time, benefited from meaningful public investment in health care and other provisions of the modern welfare state. Finally, with the onset of neo-liberal governance in the 1980s, much of these benefits are withdrawn, two-income families become the norm, and childcare becomes a serious drain on social reproduction.
None of this is particularly new. Liberal and radical feminists, including Fraser herself, have written on the dependence of capitalism on unpaid domestic labor (Bhattacharya 2017; Delphy 1992; Federici 1975 and 2004; Ferguson 2020; Fraser 1996; Palmer 1991; Zaretsky 1986). Nonetheless, this section provides a succinct yet wide-ranging and readable summary of domestic exploitation that will benefit students and other non-specialists. Yet the chapter’s eurocentrism cannot be ignored. While the treatment of feminist struggle and legislative reform in the West is detailed and well-referenced, the periphery appears as a place without history. It is simply the ‘extractive’ foil to the ‘exploitative’ core.
Another, perhaps more incisive question is whether Marx actually undervalued or ignored the ‘conditions of production’, as Fraser claims. Climate science and environmental destruction have certainly progressed greatly in the last 150 years in ways Marx could not have envisioned. Still, for a mid-nineteenth century thinker, Marx’s writing about the impact of capital on nature, ‘the metabolic rift’, was quite prescient. For example, in his discussion of the division of town and country in chapter fifteen of Capital, Marx describes how nutrients taken from rural lands are never returned to their source, but end up as excrement in the Thames, thus the exhaustion of farmland and urban contamination are merely two sides of the same capitalist coin. Nor was the problem resolved by the large-scale importation of guano or the use of chemical fertilizers. As Marx writes: ‘all progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress […] of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time, is progress towards ruining the lasting sources of that fertility’ (Marx 1992: 638). Similar statements can be found in Engels’ Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State and other works.
The point here is not to lionize Marx and Engels. On the contrary, since one of Fraser’s oft stated goals is to overcome a reductive or single-issue environmentalism typical of state managed capitalism, it is essential to address environmentalists who view Marxism, or socialism more generally, as ‘Promethean’ or ‘productivist’, based on a particular reading of Marx or, more likely, on the bad environmental stewardship of the Soviet Union and other self-declared socialist states (Williams 2021). Similarly, as John Bellamy Foster notes in The Ecological Rift (2017: 61-63), eco-socialists and green critics with only the dimmest ‘knowledge of classical political economy’ see the labor theory of value as evidence that Marx, like neo-classical economists, viewed nature as a ‘free gift’ to be used and abandoned. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Sociologists and anthropologists will also find the author’s structural treatment of racism wanting. For Fraser, far from being simply the lingering stench of colonialism, racism in the modern era is a product of the ongoing expropriation of marginal groups and the need, or at least the desire, to lower the production cost of capital with cheap natural resources, and the reproduction cost of labor with cheap food. ‘Behind Manchester’, Fraser notes, ‘stands Mississippi’ (35). This, the author notes, requires the complicity of a state that maintains strong borders, distinguishes citizens and non-citizens and categorizes people into mutually exclusive racial taxa. The argument, however, is made on historical grounds rather than logical grounds and ignores valuable work from other fields. There is no consideration of the social, psychological or religious roots of racism, nor the relationship between racial ideation, nationalism, fascism or antisemitism.
It is common for academic studies of late capitalism to be long on criticism of the system and short on ideas or strategies for changing it, and Cannibal Capitalism is no exception. Indeed, readers are more likely to come away with examples of organizations or ideologies not to support than organizations they should support. Fraser clearly eschews identity politics, green capitalism, corporate social responsibility initiatives – what she calls progressive neo-liberalism – and movements which don’t address the deeper, systemic issues of capitalism, but what she supports is much less clear. Cannibal Capitalism is clearly not a program or a manifesto.
In the end, though, Fraser achieves her major objectives. She not only illustrates the fragmentation of contemporary politics into reductive, single-issue movements – feminism, environmentalism, trade unionism and voting rights – which often compete with one another, but points to ways in which socialism can be rejuvenated in the twenty-first century. This involves not merely demonstrating how the capitalist ouroboros depends on non-market conditions of production and reproduction, but how these supposedly external relations relate to one another, that is, how environmental policies not only reveal systemic racism, but undermine the possibility of care and even democratic governance. Indeed, without specifically mentioning it, Fraser’s work clearly echoes and updates Marx’s philosophical concern with ‘totality’ – discussed in The German Ideology and other works – in a clear and thoughtful way. It will make a nice addition to an undergraduate theory course.
Reviewed by Ronald Loewe