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. 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. At a compact 165 pages, Cannibal Capitalism pulls together and synthesizes a breath-taking amount of material. In Glutton for Punishment: Why Capitalism is Structurally racist, Fraser explores capitalism´s entanglement with racial oppression.

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. Fraser uses the term ‘boundary struggles’ to describe these expanded realms of conflict that occur around these front-story/back-story divisions, and a further feature of her approach is to show that these divisions have never been static.

Climate breakdown and the loss of animal and plant species are a manifestation of ‘a nature that “bites back”’ (p. Chapter 3, ‘Care Guzzler: Why Social Reproduction is a Major Site of Capitalist Crisis’, is perhaps of most immediate interest to readers of this journal. Hence an image Fraser often raises, and that graces the cover of the book, is the ouroboros: a snake eating its own tail.

As a final use of the term, Fraser envisions capitalism as an ouroboros, a self-cannibalising serpent that eats its own tail. Further, Fraser uses the definition of cannibalising, depriving one aspect of a machination for the purpose of sustaining another, to describe all that is sacrificed in the name of capital (families, communities, nations, habitats, ecosystems, etc. At the same time, ‘capitalist production is not self-sustaining, but free rides on social reproduction, nature, political power, and expropriation; yet its orientation to endless accumulation threatens to destabilize these very conditions of its possibility’ (p. Each arrangement represents an attempt to acclimate the needs of social reproduction to the needs of capitalism, but each ends up proving itself unsustainable because capitalism, in the long run, is inherently parasitic on social reproduction. 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.

These origins might also explain, to my ears, the occasional clash between Fraser’s profoundly serious intent and compassionate vision, set out in demanding arguments, and the popular tone as if to leaven the text: ‘Capitalism is back! 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. At one level, Fraser’s message is that various left movements have more basis for common cause than they sometimes think.

The scars of every colonised country, and enslaved peoples – and, in a different way, of the former colonial powers – still shape contemporary economies, politics, societies, and lives. What follows is the ‘desperate scramble to transfer carework to others’, frequently migrant workers (p. Every historical iteration is punctuated by outbreaks of crisis and conflict, as all turn out to be ridden with tension and contradiction.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. 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. The reliance of capitalism on social-reproductive activity constitutes the second contradiction as it is detailed in Care Guzzler: Why Social Reproduction Is a Major Site of Capitalist Crisis. To begin, Fraser denotes the colonial legacy of the term cannibal, a word replete with racist imagery applied traditionally to the other, the colonised.