Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016
Sketching a possible response to the crisis, Fraser thinks not in terms of a new regime of capital accumulation, but a new conception of socialism. If such a possibility seems far off, Cannibal Capitalism insists that it is still worth discussing the real emergent possibilities—‘the potentials for human freedom, well-being and happiness’—that capitalism has brought within reach but cannot actualize. Such a conception would need to re-think the socialized economy’s relation to its background conditions, ‘to reimagine their interrelations’, reversing the current priorities: not growth for the sake of private accumulation but the nurturing of people, safe-guarding of nature and democratic self-rule. It would make the growth question a political one, offering a rule of thumb for markets under socialism: no markets ‘at the bottom’—basic needs (food, shelter, clothing, healthcare, clean water, etc) would be subject to democratic discussion, but provided as a right—and no markets ‘at the top’, for the surplus would be seen as the collective wealth of society as a whole, and allocated by a collective planning process. In between, there could be space for experimentation, a mix of possibilities: commons, co-operatives, self-organizing associations—rendering the boundaries between background conditions more porous and more responsive.footnote27
Questions
The richness and originality of Fraser’s construction speaks for itself. It’s hard to think of a single contemporary writer who has attempted a conceptual synthesis on this scale and of this complexity—a model resolutely radical in intent. Attempts to enlarge our understanding of capitalism have generally examined it in relation to one extra domain at a time. There is a rich literature on imperialism, slavery and racialization, examining the American experience in particular——and an impressive body of work on social reproduction.footnote28 Eco-Marxists such as James O’Connor, John Bellamy Foster, Mike Davis, Andreas Malm and Jason Moore have produced powerful analyses historicizing the relation of capitalism to the environment. Many thinkers have tried to probe the connections between economic and political malaise in recent years, among them Peter Mair, Colin Crouch, Wendy Brown and John Judis, with Wolfgang Streeck’s Buying Time a standout explanation.footnote29 But Fraser’s is surely the first attempt to date to map all these dimensions as an interrelated and determinate whole—and not just for the neoliberal era or the advanced-capitalist North, but on a world scale and across a span of centuries.
Designedly schematic, Fraser’s model provides a valuable heuristic for empirical testing and conceptual investigation. Thematically, the connections with her earlier thinking will be apparent. As in ‘From Redistribution to Recognition?’, she argues for a transformative politics, tackling deep structures, against the affirmative ameliorations of neoliberal progressivism; the 21st century has vindicated her insistence on capitalist inequity, so out of fashion in the 1990s. Methodologically, too, there are many continuities—above all, in the patterning of social relations by boldly abstract categories, augmented by occasional deep dives into empirical exemplum, usually cultural in form (it is very rare to find facts and figures in her writing, which operates in the realm of social theory, not social science). Fraser’s writing has always prized clarity and accessibility, but the style here is avowedly more popular (sometimes at a cost: chapter titles punning on the ‘cannibal’ metaphor). Conceptually, a selection of Marxian categories have come to the fore—production and reproduction, expropriation and exploitation, core and periphery—and Rawlsian ‘justice’ is now more of a social metric than an endpoint. The categories here are also distinctively spatial, in a manner reminiscent of Habermas—foreground and backgrounds, shifts in perspective, a ‘topography’ of capitalist society—but also discursive, in more deconstructionist spirit: a front story and back story, each abode governed by a unique ontological ‘grammar’.
It is not always easy to know how to fill in or re-people these abstract categories with living realities—to assess their accuracy as conceptual tools, or judge their usefulness as guides to action, in the light of other knowledge. In interviews, Fraser has clarified that she sees the root of the general crisis in the drive for profits of a small group of powerful actors—Wall Street, Big Oil, Big Pharma, Silicon Valley; Walmart, ge, Cargill and the like—ravaging the ‘non-economic’ realms.footnote30 An empirical road-test might ask how far her model serves to illuminate contemporary struggles. If we take, for example, the conflict over resource extraction in Ecuador, Fraser’s heuristic would compel us to take into account not only the operations of the giant Northern mining companies and the habitats of the local communities, but also the politics of the Quito government, the strength of the Ecuadorian fiscal state and the social-reproductive implications for both the indigenous groups involved and the wider population, in the context of a broader conjunctural crisis. Or take the overlapping domains revealed by the long struggle of the Gilets Jaunes against Macron’s petrol tax: a ‘progressive neoliberal’ environmental measure rejected on economic and social-reproductive (fin du mois) grounds by struggling formal-sector workers, their protests brutally suppressed by the state, in an eu that is sucking democratic decision-making into an unaccountable void.
The notion of boundary struggles helps to open up a wider understanding of recent battles in the us. Abortion rights, for example, pit women’s reproductive autonomy against political and juridical opponents—not just the conservative Supreme Court but the Democratic congressional majorities that have refused to legislate for women’s control over their own bodies. Or take Black Lives Matter: through Fraser’s heuristic, not only a resistance movement against racialized state violence, but an expression of the harm caused by material inequality in an America struggling at once to re-gear and to decarbonize its financialized, de-industrialized economy against overseas rivals.
On a preliminary test, then, Fraser’s construction seems genuinely useful. Does it also serve as a dynamic explanatory model for capitalist society, proposing laws of motion and theories of causality as, say, the concept of the mode of production aspired to do? This raises a conceptual question: the nature of the ‘background zones’, and their relations to the economic ‘foreground’ and to each other. It is an issue explored at length in Fraser’s illuminating dialogue with Rahel Jaeggi, Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory, which forms an intriguing critical-theoretical pendant to Cannibal Capitalism. Here, Jaeggi poses a series of probing questions. Are the background zones ‘inside’ the capitalist system, à la Lukács, or outside it, à la Polanyi? What are the relations between foreground and backgrounds—determinism, functional necessity, dependencies in several directions? What changes the dynamics within each field and the equilibria between them? Fraser explains that she sees the backgrounds on which the capitalist economy depends as non- or, perhaps, semi-commodified, by analogy with Wallerstein’s concept of semi-proletarianized households, which derive a good part of their subsistence from non-wage sources, including state transfers, informal reciprocity and self-provisioning. There is an objective structural argument here, she argues, invoked by Hegel in the Philosophy of Right—where the sphere of contractual relations is possible only on the basis of background non-contractual social relations—as well as by Polanyi in The Great Transformation, where markets depend for their existence on non-marketized society.
Yet isn’t Fraser’s division between ‘capitalist economy’ and ‘non-economic zones’ haunted by the ghost of Habermas’s ‘economic system’ versus pristine ‘lifeworld’? Jaeggi presses her on this question. Is Fraser repeating the same move that she once criticized in Habermas, seeing the economy preying on these ‘innocent’ domains?footnote31 Fraser denies this. She doesn’t see the economy ‘colonizing’ these zones, in Habermas’s terms, but rather a process of contestation, as capital attempts to ‘devour’ them. The resulting configuration is the outcome of struggle, based on the balance of social forces. While non-commodified and outside the economy, the zones are inside capitalist society as a whole. To see social reproduction or nature as ‘outside’ capitalist society and inherently opposed to it would be a romantic view, she argues—imagining that they could be sites for counter-hegemony, when they are in fact symbiotic with capital. At the same time, they are sites of internal contradiction for capitalism, generating their own non-economic values—for social reproduction, ideals of love and solidarity; for nature, ecological values of planetary stewardship; for politics, principles of democracy and self-determination. Fraser’s both-and form of argumentation—so illuminating when applied to the problem of mediating between economic and cultural claims for justice—begins to confound when deployed to insist on the irrevocable entanglement of the economic and its non-economic others.
In any case, is it not worse to be ‘devoured’ than to be colonized? This raises the further question of how seriously Fraser’s ‘cannibal’ metaphor should be taken. Her initial note on this is playful, suggesting that the term’s different meanings offer various avenues for analysis.footnote32 Its origin lies in a corruption of the Spanish term for the natives of the Caribbean, alleged by the conquistadors to be eaters of human flesh. As a verb, it may also refer to dismemberment—dismantling the component parts of a machine in order to put them to use them for something else; in biology, analogously, autophagy is the recycling of parts of cells. In astronomy, ‘cannibalization’ indicates a body that exerts a gravitational pull on another, incorporating its mass. And finally, there is the ouroboros, the mythical serpent or dragon that eats its own tail—an Ancient Egyptian symbol of eternal renewal, through the cycle of life, death and rebirth. In Cannibal Capitalism, it is not always clear which meaning we should have mind. Is capitalism an ouroborous—the Lukácsian, internalist view—devouring its own body? Or is it a cannibal—the Polanyian, externalist one—consuming its like (the extra-economic) but not its very self?
The distinction may seem pedantic, but followed to its logical conclusion it has ramifications for Fraser’s assessment of capitalism’s tendency towards crisis and its capacity to survive. Put bluntly: a cannibal, if voracious enough, may one day run out of food; the symbolic serpent will not. Certainly, an account like Fraser’s or Wallerstein’s that locates capitalism’s origins in sixteenth-century Spain is more likely to depict it as a form subject to continual self-renewal than one that begins with the growth of industrial capitalism in Britain in the early 1800s or its generalization across the advanced powers in the 1870s, with a third of the world under avowedly communist regimes for a good part of the twentieth century. The analysis of the changing regimes of accumulation from the 1500s onwards, at once Schumpeterian in its focus on the creative destruction powering the system and Kuhnian in its use of paradigm shifts, reveals an underlying functionalist logic: capitalism is because capitalism does. A new structure—for example, the two-wage household—emerges as the old one enters crisis and acts to restore homeostasis to the system; an explanatory model which, as Arthur Stinchcombe demonstrated in Constructing Social Theories, tends to see a conservative tendency in the existing social order.footnote33 The desire to counter this may lead to an added emphasis on self-inflicted catastrophe as a way to break the chain.
The cannibal metaphor is perhaps best read as a rhetorical device, a flash of hyperbole for consciousness-raising purposes. Fraser’s non-metaphorical formulation—that capital’s drive for endless accumulation threatens to ‘destabilize’ or ‘imperil’ its conditions of possibility—is more compelling. Yet this raises the question of the commensurability of the ‘background zones’. Destabilization seems an entirely plausible fate—or actuality—for the environment. Concretizing analysis might identify geophysical limits to capitalist growth in the form of climate destabilization, resource exhaustion or a social-system collapse outpacing green capital’s ability to achieve any real impact.footnote34 Fraser hints at such a conclusion, giving her programme the provisional title of ‘ecosocialism’, but holds back from elevating the ecological to the role of primary political concern. It remains an equal among other abodes. Yet it is hard to see the crisis of care posing quite the same existential threat as global warming. This is not to deny the tragic social fallout that has followed the twentieth-century’s historic working-class defeats, of which Middle America’s opioid epidemic and deaths of despair are emblematic. Not only for feminist reasons but morally, too, Fraser has good reason to foreground the strains placed on social reproduction. But with China’s entry into the world market, global capital has benefited from a glut of cheap labour; young workers from Central America and elsewhere are banging on America’s doors. In an instrumental sense, capital has no need to fret about labour’s perpetuation.
The position of the political as a background zone is based on Meiksins Wood’s theorization of its separation from the economic—but this can be misleading. It is true that economic compulsion in a cash economy supplies the whip for labour. But within the ruling bloc, wealth and power are joined by a dense connective tissue of professional, social, institutional, educational and familial bonds. Here the historical view might have an advantage over philosophical analysis, pointing to the role of the ruling class. Fraser puts this nicely when she speaks of the hollow Wizard of Oz quality of today’s politicians, who strut and preen before a curtain that conceals the real powers. Her judgements on Trump, Biden and the rest are admirably sober.footnote35 Yet it would be useful to have a fuller sense of political power—the vast institutional complex of the state, its immense powers of coercion and surveillance, its tireless machinery of ideological self-justification—to complement the analysis of the multinationals and the banks.
Politics in Cannibal Capitalism is mainly treated in terms of democracy, or as non-agonistic public authority. But public authority is only non-agonistic when it is entirely sure of its command. Fraser argues persuasively that the solution to a crisis in one background realm must simultaneously address those in the others; a total critique yields a total programme of action. But where to start? Calls to change everything, to listen to everyone, to acknowledge that everything is capitalism, can be alternately inspiring or demotivating. New kinds of transitional strategy will need to be elaborated to get us from here to there and they will require an understanding of state power to inform them, as also of elite dissensus.footnote36 Fraser is surely right to stress that connections must be made across the boundaries; but decisions about action require a principle of priority, a model of politically targeted alliances.
None of this is to detract from the immense achievement of Fraser’s synthesis. Her lucid re-politicization of critical theory constitutes a real advance for radical thought. For her, the work of social philosophy involves conceiving the living links between Kapitalkritik and anti-capitalist action. For decades, Fraser has defied intellectual trends in defence of a truly socialist feminism, often provoking scrutiny and critique, as we have seen, from theorist colleagues. Poststructuralist linguistic feminism was at its high-tide when she first asserted the importance of an emancipatory political philosophy that paid attention to redistribution—and to the material impacts of Clinton-era social policy on the marginalized—as well as to recognition. Later, at the peak of neoliberal feminism, she sought to defend the project of the second wave from its ‘uncanny double’, represented in the corporate-friendly forms of diversity and inclusion for a privileged minority of women, at the expense of the rest. Instead of focusing solely on the single issue of gendered experience, she has pursued a research agenda so wide, ambitious and rigorous as to arrive at a unique description of the entire capitalist system, historic and contemporary. Current left intellectual life owes an incalculable debt to her for keeping such questions alive during periods in which they were overlooked or dismissed in political and academic life alike—as well as for revivifying the debate at a time when the critical mapping of capitalism’s complexities is a task as urgent as it is daunting.
The last working-class hero in England.
Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018
Jasper the Ruffian cat ? ? ? - 4 November 2021
Responses « Back to index | View thread »