The intriguing cover depicts the ‘self-cannibalizing serpent that eats its own tail’, which captures the author’s essential argument: that capitalism devours everything on which its existence depends – social, economic, political, natural – as well human life and ways of life, and thus everything from which we draw meaning and cultural values. This deadly crisis was caused by a zoonotic leap, the transmission of pathogens from wild animals to humans, most likely due to climate change and deforestation, due to the ravaging of nature.

Every historical iteration is punctuated by outbreaks of crisis and conflict, as all turn out to be ridden with tension and contradiction. Fraser envisages any ‘social surplus’ at the top as the collective wealth of society, not of markets; while at the other end of the spectrum the basic human rights of all (to food, clean water, shelter, clothing, leisure, etc.

At a compact 165 pages, Cannibal Capitalism pulls together and synthesizes a breath-taking amount of material. Her point is not to reduce these conflicts to questions of capitalist economics, in the way some orthodox Marxists in the past sought to reduce all other social struggles to matters of class conflict; rather, she seeks to promote an expanded conception of capitalism that encompasses not just the economy, but an array of social domains, each of which is the site of social struggles concurrent with and co-equal to the class struggle that has been the traditional focus of anti-capitalist critique.

Cannibal capitalism: how our system is devouring democracy, care, and the planet—and what we can do about it. 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. growth of [ Democratic Socialists of America] , the uptake that [Bernie] Sanders got in his two presidential campaigns. In each of these binaries, the former sphere distinguishes itself from the latter even as it draws resources from the latter, all the while disavowing any responsibility for the resources it draws. It is largely through debt that capital now cannibalizes labor, disciplines states, transfers value from periphery to core, and sucks wealth from society and nature’ (p.Capitalism is cannibalistic, not just in the way it devours other areas of social life, but in ultimately devouring itself. In fact, a key aspect of what makes capitalism capitalism is the way it establishes institutionalized ‘divisions’ between the economic front-story and these various non-economic back-stories, while concealing the ways the former is dependent on the latter. For example, the history of the division between economic production and social reproduction (Chapter 3) is that of a gendered division of labor. Long insistent that social justice demands attention to both redistribution and recognition, she shows why any notion that progressive politics must choose between class or identity rests on a false dichotomy.