Descriptive sensitivity formed the heart of Fraser’s critique of Jürgen Habermas in a germinal 1985 essay, ‘What’s Critical About Critical Theory?’. footnote 5 Her starting point was the young Marx’s definition of critical theory as the ‘self-clarification of the struggles of the age’: if those struggles included women’s fight for liberation, then a critical theory worthy of the name should shed light on the structures of oppressive gender relations and the prospects of the feminist movement. Examined in that light, Habermas’s construction fell short. Fraser was entirely at home amid the sometimes bafflingly technical terminology of the three-volume Theory of Communicative Action, handling its models with confidence. As a young feminist philosopher, she found much that was helpful in Habermas’s critique of the advanced-capitalist welfare-state societies of the ‘long upturn’. But where Habermas drew a sharp, though layered, distinction between an exploitative system and an innocent lifeworld, Fraser used the gendering of domestic labour, waged work and political participation to demonstrate the complex inter-relations of domination and family life. Habermas’s androcentric view of the nuclear family and failure to theorize the gendered dimension of social power risked eclipsing the positive and useful aspects of his thought, Fraser argued: his interpretive view of human needs, his distinction between ‘normatively secured’ and ‘communicatively achieved’ action contexts, his four-term model of public/private relations. footnote 6 Aaron shall take the two he-goats and let them stand before the LORD [...] He shall then slaughter the people’s goat of sin offering, [...] [He] shall [then] lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat and confess over it all the iniquities and transgressions of the Israelites, whatever their sins; and it shall be sent off to the wilderness. So can the rich now feed themselves – detached from the preconditions of previous capitalist eras? The evidence would suggest not. Cryptocurrencies are extremely harmful for the environment, with Bitcoin mining resulting in more carbon emissions than some countries. Financial capitalism has also brought us austerity alongside a much wider assault on the institutions of social reproduction – the social safety net, childcare, education and housing. The nature of the crisis Fraser captures how gender oppression, racial domination, and ecological destruction are not incidental to capitalism, but structurally embedded in it. In a world in which everyone is Exploited and Expropriated, where is the guilty party to be found? Fraser's text almost makes us forget we once heard, " Wrong life cannot be lived rightly," and that, " There is no ethical consumption under capitalism." When these phrases had not yet lost their salt, they recalled that every Exploited-Expropriated person is responsible, more or less, for the Exploitation-Expropriation of another. This Differance between "more" and "less" is precisely the space of action of a tenuous Resistance which must be won in each moment. To pave over the fact that everyone possesses, to varying degrees, "Guilt of Socialist Impiety," is to have these lapses and spaces continue to undermine collective action (is it possible to recall a Leftist movement which has not been destroyed by infighting?), whereas these faults and inadequacies could have been put to use as a tactical and strategic resource. These phrases, of course, have since been dis-armed, and now give permission for those with bad conscience to behave badly. Meanwhile we have "sent off our sins into the wilderness" where they now dwell with the Truly Responsible (The 1% AKA The Billionaire Class AKA The Megacorporations AKA The He-Goat), and the current "Socialist" task is to capture and destroy them. (This reaches a ridiculous apogee in certain sections of left-wing Climate Discourse, 'did you know that 10 corporations produce 90% of all emissions!?')

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. 23). Getting beyond the ‘structural divisions that have historically constituted capitalist societies’ to develop a vision of emancipation is what Fraser sets out to articulate.The logic of economic production overrides that of social reproduction, destabilizing the very processes on which capital depends—compromising the social capacities, both domestic and public, that are needed to sustain accumulation over the long term. Destroying its own conditions of possibility, capital’s accumulation dynamic mimics the ouroboros and eats its own tail. footnote 19

To do that, however, we need to scale up the current level of emancipatory engagement. Certainly, there’s lots of activist energy now but it’s fragmented and uncoordinated. It hasn’t (yet) coalesced into a broad anti-capitalist front with the vision and heft to embody a genuine alternative. It’s not (yet) a counter-hegemonic bloc that could go toe to toe against the powers-that-be – against corporate neoliberalism, on the one hand, and reactionary populism, on the other. And that’s what the times demand. The book is great (and an amazing intro or 101 for those less familiar with the genesis and specific nature of 21st century financialized capitalism) but I guess there’s only so much one can say about capitalism and the, indeed cannibalizing, state of today’s capitalism. As such, the book walks the (already depressed, I guess) reader through kind of four areas devoured by capital: racial/imperial dynamics of capitalism’s expropriation/exploitation division which feed the glutton’s hunger for populations it can punish with impunity (chapter 2); the gendered dynamics of its reproduction/production couple, which stamp the system as a guzzler of care (chapter 3); the eco-predatory dynamics of its nature/humanity antithesis, which puts our planetary home in capital’s maw (chapter 4); and the drive to devour public power and butcher democracy, which is built into the system’s signature division between economy and the political. If so, then there are several possible scenarios. These include some desirable ones, like global democratic ecosocialism. Of course, it’s hard to say exactly what that would look like, but let’s assume it would dismantle the “law of value,” abolish exploitation and expropriation, and reinvent the relations between human society and nonhuman nature, between goods production and caregiving, between “the political” and “the economic,” democratic planning and markets. That’s the “good” end of our spectrum of possibilities. At the other end lie some noncapitalist outcomes that are truly terrible: massive societal regression under warring strongmen or a global authoritarian regime. There is also, of course, a third possibility, which is that the crisis doesn’t get resolved at all, but simply continues to grind away in an orgy of societal self-cannibalization until there’s little left that’s recognizably human. She views the latter as its 'most perverse characteristic' in that it hands over crucial decisions about the development of society to ther expansion of monetrised value. But in putting it in this way she also challenges the idea that markets in and of themselves lead towards the total commodification of society. What is central to her argument is her insistence on the tendency within capitalism to create 'semi-proletarianised' arrangements which preserve non-capitalist features, though always requiring them to function as adjuncts to capitalist accumulation. The most striking example here is the form of the private household, which utilises labour and allocates inputs into its reproduction in ways which are not analogous to profit-seeking. A brilliant synthesis of Fraser’s many pathbreaking contributions to a Marxian theory of capitalism for the twenty-first century, beautifully written.”

Nancy Fraser is Professor of Politics and Philosophy at the New School for Social Research and a member of editorial committee of New Left Review. She has received numerous honours and her works have been translated into 24 languages. Her latest books are Feminism for the 99% (co-authored); The Old is Dying; and her forthcoming Cannibal Capitalism. In this book, Fraser thinks capitalism forms now gone too far. The primitive accumulation became a more universal circuit that seems so legit, they not only exploitative but also make everything appropriate. This worthy idea brings causality of how this system involves women, families, former colonial countries, the environment, and even the political superstructure purposely. Understanding this ecological crisis means we need to have a laser-like focus on capitalists as the problematic actors destroying our planet. These individuals have built-in incentives to steal as much as possible from nature and to continue extracting, including drilling for oil, even in the face of imminent environmental trauma. The negative outcomes of this trauma on human health, like everything else that is awful, are absorbed disproportionately throughout the world by racialized peoples in the forms of illnesses and early deaths.

Fraser examines multiple socioeconomic divisions, especially divisions by class, race, gender, and nation (rich vs. poor). We could add to her list divisions by age (old vs. young), education (postsecondary credentials vs. a high school diploma or less), and location (urban vs. rural). This means that in any analysis of our current crisis and its effects on various groups, we must simultaneously juggle a lot of concepts in our heads. It is difficult to undertake this juggling, but it is important to do so if we are to come to terms with the length and breadth of the “entangled struggles” we face. Still, the complexity of it all can be overwhelming, not just intellectually or “in theory,” in trying to understand what is happening before our eyes, but also when it comes to figuring out how we can get to a place that isn’t mired in a series of rapid-fire disasters, a place where the cannibals themselves have been included on our ever-growing list of extinct mammals. The book gave me a couple of real insights. I had a general understanding of her distinction between exploited workers, who can theoretically expect to be paid a living wage and receive some benefits from the system, and expropriated workers--everyone from care workers to colonialized people to prisoners--who are not even given cosmetic choices, and whose work and lives are the property of the owning class, but I didn't have such clear language. And I had never given thought to the invention of the steam engine as specifically a transfer of work from "animal muscle" (humans and farm/labor animals) to fossil power, and exactly how that changes not only what can be done, but who can be forced to do it. The power of those outside the executive suits and boardrooms has been greatly diminished, in large measure because of the decades-long war being waged against unions by corporations and their well-funded, non-neutral “think tanks”

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At least within traditional Marxism and mainstream socialist and labor movements, there has historically been a tendency to think of class struggles in a narrow sense, i.e., as struggles at the point of production over the rate and distribution of surplus value as extracted through exploitation of wage laborers in factories. And then, of course, those struggles are supposed to expand beyond the factory gates, develop a political dimension, and take on other causes further afield. But I still think that, by and large, this image of class struggle, as essentially concerned with wage labor in industrial settings, remains a very powerful image. Despite the huge increase in wealth disparity between the 1% and “the rest of us” – not just in the US but around the world – real wages for the majority have largely stalled for the past 30 years in terms of purchasing power essential work” trailed off. A majority of Americans now believe our democracy is in “crisis,” and a