Nancy Fraser. Cannibal capitalism

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Nancy Fraser (New School for Social Research)

Cannibal capitalism: How our system is devouring democracy, care, and the planet and what we can do about it

A trenchant look at contemporary capitalism’s insatiable appetite—and a rallying cry for everyone who wants to stop it from devouring our world

Capital is currently cannibalizing every sphere of life–guzzling wealth from nature and racialized populations, sucking up our ability to care for each other, and gutting the practice of politics. In this tightly argued and urgent volume, leading Marxist feminist theorist Nancy Fraser charts the voracious appetite of capital, tracking it from crisis point to crisis point, from ecological devastation to the collapse of democracy, from racial violence to the devaluing of care work. These crisis points all come to a head in Covid-19, which Fraser argues can help us envision the resistance we need to end the feeding frenzy. What we need, she argues, is a wide-ranging socialist movement that can recognize the rapaciousness of capital—and starve it to death. Editorial Reviews Review “Nancy Fraser is a legendary radical philosopher grounded in the best of the Marxist and feminist traditions yet whose genuine embrace and profound understanding of Black, ecological, immigrant and sexual freedom movements make her a unique figure on the contemporary scene! Cannibal Capitalism is not only a singular gem—it is an instant classic for our bleak times!” —Cornel West, author of Race Matters “A brilliant synthesis of Fraser’s many pathbreaking contributions to a Marxian theory of capitalism for the twenty-first century, beautifully written.” —Wolfgang Streeck, author of How Will Capitalism End? “Cannibal Capitalism conjures up a monster that voraciously consumes the very land, labor and natural world upon which it thrives. With characteristically clear and inventive prose, Nancy Fraser unpacks capitalism’s historically shifting, interlaced dynamics, revealing the interrelations between seemingly disparate crises and social violences. Throughout, we see the powerful potential of an anti-racist, eco-social reproduction critique. And we see why the future of the planet and humanity depend upon the socialist left building anti-capitalist struggles that reach across workplaces, streets, forests and oceans.” —Sue Ferguson, author of Women and Work “Cannibal Capitalism conjures up a monster that voraciously consumes the very land, labor and natural world upon which it thrives. With characteristically clear and inventive prose, Nancy Fraser unpacks capitalism’s historically shifting, interlaced dynamics, revealing the interrelations between seemingly disparate crises and social violences. Throughout, we see the powerful potential of an anti-racist, eco-social reproduction critique. And we see why the future of the planet and humanity depend upon the socialist left building anti-capitalist struggles that reach across workplaces, streets, forests and oceans.” —Sue Ferguson, author of Women and Work “Nancy Fraser has produced the most elegant theory yet of capitalism in our age—capitalism not in the narrow economic sense, but capitalism in the sense of a total omnivore, a system that cannot stop devouring everything around it, destroying the lives of people and nature. This is Marxist theory for our age of crisis—and, we shall hope, of reckoning.” —Andreas Malm, author of How to Blow Up a Pipeline About the Author

Nancy Fraser is Henry and Louise A. Loeb Professor of Philosophy and Politics at the New School for Social Research. She is the author of Fortunes of Feminism and The Old is Dying and the New Cannot be Born, and co-author of Capitalism: A Conversation and Feminism for the 99%.

August Baker: Welcome to Philosophy Podcasts where we interview leading philosophers about their recent books. I'm August Baker. Today, I'm speaking with Professor Nancy Fraser about her new book, Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet and What We Can Do About It. Some of the endorsements, Wolfgang Streeck says, "A brilliant synthesis of Fraser's many pathbreaking contributions to Marxian theory of capitalism for the 21st century, beautifully written." The second one, Cornel West, "Nancy Fraser is a legendary radical philosopher grounded in the best of Marxist and feminist traditions yet whose genuine embrace and profound understanding of Black, ecological, immigrant and sexual freedom movements make her unique in the contemporary scene. Cannibal Capitalism is not only a singular gem, it is an instant classic for our bleak times!" She is the Henry and Louise A. Loeb Professor of Philosophy and Politics at the New School for Social Research. Welcome, Professor Fraser. Nancy Fraser: Thank you so much. I'm happy to be here. August Baker: As I see it, your starting point is that there are many different crisis points that we're facing at this time, yet there's no theory which integrates them. Nancy Fraser: That's correct. Absolutely. The Marxist theories that we've inherited focused almost exclusively on the economic crisis and the dynamics within capitalism that incline it to periodic economic crises. But in our time, it's very clear that we have a major and very urgent ecological crisis on the agenda as well as what many people would call a crisis of care or social reproduction, political crisis, crisis of democracy, racial justice, or I should say injustice crisis. There's a lot going on and I think the idea of a theory that focuses on only one dimension will not really clarify our situation and help us figure out what we can do about it. August Baker: Right. I like the way you said there were these different crisis points. I think of them as flash points, gender, race, ecology, and then for politics, you say that's kind of all of the other crisis points are overarched by the political dysfunction, you say the political dysfunctions that block our ability to envision and implement solutions. Nancy Fraser: Right. Because politics is what we look to to solve crises, to figure out how to unblock the blockage and transform whatever needs to be transformed and move on. But when the political system is itself in crisis, then we have to ask, well then where is the medium that we can use to correct the situation to resolve it? That does in a way give a political dimension, a special importance, but I would not on that account say that it is the fundamental deepest, like the old idea of the economic base of society, politics is the base. I wouldn't say that, but I do think from a practical standpoint, it creates a huge dilemma for us. August Baker: Right, and kind of a feeling of being in a dream where you want to do something but you just can't do it. Nancy Fraser: Good analogy. Absolutely. August Baker: Let's talk about that crisis of care, crisis of social reproduction. It's a resting phrase. Can you explain some more of that? Nancy Fraser: In every society has to, in addition to producing food and shelter and tools and other useful objects, every society also has to devote a certain amount of time and energy and creativity, giving birth to children, to raising them, to caring for adults, to socializing new generations, all of that stuff that is devoted not to making things, but essentially to sustaining people, and that's been called the work of social reproduction. It's about reproducing human beings and the social bonds that connect us. Now, in most societies, that social reproductive activity has been more or less integrated with the making of things. These have not been too sharply separated domains. Capitalist societies are quite unique in making them sharply separated domains. For us, work means employment and that usually, at least pre-COVID, meant leaving the house, going somewhere else, doing something and getting a paycheck while reproduction, making and sustaining and nurturing of people was supposed to happen in the household as a private matter. Even in terms of space, home versus workplace, there's a sharp separation. And then when you add historically in one case there's cash remuneration through wages or salaries and the others, not so much. It's either not paid at all or in some cases when it is, it's severely and chronically underpaid. This is a fundamental structural division of capitalist societies, every bit as structural as the one that people usually talk about, the structural division between the owners and those who have nothing to sell, but their labor power. This is also structural and the problem is that capital societies incentivize the business owners, the investors and other powerful economic actors to free ride on care work, to not pay for it if they can get away with it, or to pay as little as possible. It's like something to which they help themselves and depend on because where would they get their workers if somebody else weren't back there in the shadows, feeding and bathing and clothing and educating and raising those workers. August Baker: And caring for the elderly as well. Nancy Fraser: Exactly. All of that. Capital depends on this care work, the social reproductive activity, but also disclaims any obligation to replenish it, to repair any damage that's done to the family or communities that do it. It basically takes what it needs and it sort of in a way, assuming or it's built in a kind of assumption even when it's not made explicit that this work is just somehow there infinitely available. You can keep taking whatever you want, you don't have to worry about replenishing. This is the way we used to think about natural resources. August Baker: Sure. Nancy Fraser: Now, we learned in the environmental and ecological movements that that's false about natural resources, that we do have to worry about replenishing what we take and repairing what we damage. The same is true with care work or social reproduction. When you get a phase of capitalist development that is just using that up and doing nothing to assure that it will be there, then you get an acute care crunch. That's what I think is happening today because this form of capitalism relies very heavily on women's waged work. This system depends on women leaving the home, going into often service work, often low paid service work, but also in some cases, professional work that's well paid. It depends on that. At the same time, it's also insisting on austerity, we have big deficits, we have to cut social spending, we have to cut social programs. It's like a pincer motion, you are taking the time of those who used to devote a fair amount of their time to care work in the home, in the community. You are taking away the public programs and public supports for it. Is it any wonder that we have latchkey kids running around and elderly people being warehoused in or with for-profit nursing homes? So, yes, there is a crisis of social reproduction or care that is very acute at the moment. August Baker: Right. No, that's fascinating. That has so many different aspects to it. You think about the caregiver, a well-off family hires a nanny or a caregiver, but that caregiver is often a young woman who has kids of her own, but she's caring for some kids, not her kids. It also seems like what's really valuable, I don't know if this fits into the same framework, but what's really valuable in capitalism or what gets paid a lot is the opposite of care. It's sort of the ability to ride your employees really hard to get a lot out of them, to get a lot out of people. Narcissism is highly valued, being able to lie is highly valued, and that is to say something like care is not highly valued. Nancy Fraser: I think you're absolutely right on both points. This issue that you raised first about hiring the solution for those families who have the sufficient income to purchase care work that it's purchased from people who are often migrants or racial or ethnic or religious minorities who have very few opportunities to earn real decent wages, and as you say, who have to skimp, if not totally leave the place where they would normally be performing these functions in their own family for their own children and relatives. In fact, feminists have theorized what we call global care chains in the same way that economists have talked about- August Baker: Interesting. Nancy Fraser: ... global value chain, because in some cases, we are talking about migrants who leave their families halfway around the world to come to wealthy regions and they don't see their families and their children for many, many years. They try to FaceTime them. Sometimes their kids are pretty angry about being left and refuse to even talk to their mothers, and then you get this sort of outpouring of love. It's a diversion of care from a poor part of the world and poorer populations to wealthier and more privileged populations, which is in a way, the formula for imperialism to extract precious metals from one place and divert the wealth elsewhere. Now, we're extracting care. August Baker: Very interesting. They're literally in their new country performing the same work, caring for kids, caring for the elderly often, that they would've been where they came from. Nancy Fraser: Or adult partners and other adult relatives. Absolutely. That point is quite right and it does raise this question that you noted about what is valued in capitalism. Anything, in this case, I would completely agree with your idea that part of what's valued is the capacity to be an egotist, to be instrumental, to be almost predatory. That's rewarded in the society. Even if we might raise an eyebrow now and then, that's where the money goes, that's what's rewarded. You're absolutely right that those qualities are the inverse of what we expect in the way of care, what we expect mothers to do, what we expect grandmothers to do, and so on. We expect selflessness, we expect exquisite attention to the needs of others and all of that altruism. In a sense, I would say that that capitalism has a built-in tendency to turn the world upside down, to take the things that we should value and treat them as if they're dirt, they're worth nothing, that if they're going to be paid at all, they're going to be paid very little and the work is going to be organized in a way that is degraded so that the caregiver who performs that work be subject often to abuse, to violation, sexual assault, will have no labor rights, no capacity to complain and better the situation. The things we should be valuing, we are degrading, and the things that arguably at least we should not be valuing, we're elevating. It's very perverse. August Baker: Right. Even on a more, this happens by what you might call osmosis, that there's the typical story that the children in a family, they understand on some level that the person who's going to work and then coming back home is the powerful one, the one to be respected. The one who is staying home is the one who is lower level, who is the maid or whatever. I mean, that's just kind of picked up, that's just assumed by the... which makes the care work even harder. Nancy Fraser: I think you're right. That's a really deep and very sad observation you've just made because it means that children internalize a value system that is, as I said, perverse, but in many cases it's going to cripple them. Those among them, roughly half, are themselves going to be people who essentially assigned a heavier share than their fair share of that work. It's pretty consequential from a psychosocial point of view, pretty consequential thing. The one thing I would add though is that today, in the United States, many, many women do go out to work. They figure out the best they can, who's going to be there when their kids come home from school, what kind of after school programs there are, what kind of daycare there is that they can afford, what kinds of bartering, childcare relations they can make within the community and so on. They figure that out, and yet, when they come home, they still have all kinds of housework and domestic- August Baker: Well, that's true. Nancy Fraser: ... abilities and kids see that as well. August Baker: That's a very good point. Nancy Fraser: They see what the division of labor is like in the home even when both parents, assuming we are talking about two parent families, even when both are doing wage work outside the home. August Baker: Absolutely. I noticed many times in the book this inversion. One of the ones, I was going to talk about this later, but to talk about it right now, which I thought was fascinating. You talk about the word cannibal, you say cannibal, you talking about the history of the word, it was applied by an inverted logic to Black Africans on the receiving end of European predation are fascinating. Nancy Fraser: Right. Who's eating who, right? August Baker: Right. Nancy Fraser: And then I'm trying to turn the tables yet again- August Baker: Exactly. Nancy Fraser: ... by speaking of capitalism as a cannibal and of the capitalist class as those who, in effect, whether they intend it or not, are making a meal of the rest of us. August Baker: We've got these multiple areas of crisis. Then as I understand it, there are also multiple theories each focusing on one particular scene, but they're lacking integration perhaps, or you're trying to provide some integration and you're looking back to Marx, but you're saying Marxist theory doesn't do the job, we need to go deeper than that. As I see it, you make three moves. One is to add in this concept of expropriation in addition to exploitation. We can come back to each of these two. I think to me, what was interesting was then capitalism understand as having a broader domain, you might say, than production and exchange. Then third, this notion of cannibal capitalism and what that means. Does that seem like an overview that captures essential pieces? Nancy Fraser: Absolutely. That's a very good overview. I would say that you're right that as I see it, we've got feminists, philosophers and others working on the question of care and social reproduction. We've got eco-philosophers working on our problem of nature and climate catastrophe and so on. The point is that from my perspective, all of these crisis points, as you call them, are located in one and the same social system, and all of them arise by a certain logic, which I'm calling the cannibalizing logic. In every case, you have a system that licenses, authorizes and incentivizes the managers and owners of profit-making firms and investors to, like I said before, help themselves to care work, to public goods and political regulatory capacities that they need to help themselves to natural inputs, to energy sources, to so-called raw materials and all of that, and to the free or very cheap labor of people who have been colonized or enslaved or subjugated or dispossessed from their land and so on, and who are not really exploited so much as expropriated. These are all, let's say, forms of social wealth, that labor, that natural wealth, that caring activity, those public goods, these are all forms of social wealth that capital helps itself to, does not pay for, or to the extent that it's forced to pay, is always chiseling, paying as little as possible, trying to get out of it, right? August Baker: Tax dodges. Nancy Fraser: Tax offshoring, all of it. Therefore, over time, the result is a depletion or destabilization or really messing up these essential forms of social wealth. They're not, as I said before, infinitely self-regenerating. If you take them long enough, you will destroy them. I think that's in a sense what has happened today. We have lived through now 40 years of an unusually predatory form of capitalism, which has been called neoliberalism or financialized capitalism. That has been like a green light, permission, just go devour whatever you want. We are reaping that multiple crisis that we started out by talking about on all of those fronts because of that cannibalizing logic. Expropriation, exploitation, you mentioned to me, that's a distinction that corresponds to the global color line. It's a distinction between those who are free, they have the status of citizens, they have papers, they have labor rights, they have at least in theory, the ability to call on the state or whatever powers are around to protect them from violation. Therefore, they're in a position to insist maybe there are minimum wage laws or they have unions or whatever, they're in a position to insist that they be paid, if not profit, at least for their living costs, but that's exploitation. But capitalism also has historically depended and still depends also on labor that is expropriated, that is labor that is not fully free. This can range from chattel slaves at one stage, to colonized subjects, to dispossessed indigenous peoples, to racialized minorities under Jim Crow or mass incarceration, subprime capitalism today. These are all cases where people are not, even if they are formally citizens, they don't have rights that are actionable that they can vindicate, they can't call on state protection, or maybe they're migrants and they're deportable, may have no papers, or even if they have some papers, they don't really guarantee a secure right to stay and to claim other rights. These people are often not paid for their full living costs. They are severely under-waged. August Baker: If you could also extend that to someone who is Black, who is working in a professional job and making a lot of money, but not making as much as the other person, as a colleague, and who is kind of harassed in certain ways, having to justify himself or herself more. This would apply along gender lines too. There's that no matter where you are, you might think of that gap as a expropriation gap. I'm not sure if that- Nancy Fraser: I do. I think that historically, to the degree that racialized people have or some portion of them have been able to advance and to move into professions or other reasonably well paid jobs, you're right, there remains a sort of subtext of expropriation. I think of this as a hybrid situation where they are both exploited and expropriated. August Baker: Right. No, I agree with that. That's what I was thinking when I was reading that. Nancy Fraser: The interesting thing is that nowadays, that hybrid situation has become quite normal. It's not so exceptional because now we have lots of white or majority ethnic workers, working class people who used to be paid for their full living costs and were merely exploited. August Baker: Interesting. Nancy Fraser: But now with deindustrialization, with the crushing of many labor unions, with the rise of a low wage service work economy, displacing better paying... now those people are also being paid less than the full cost of their living. And so, they have a mix of exploitation and expropriation as well. This form of capitalism, this neoliberal capitalism is scrambling, I would say, that what used to be a sharp division between exploitation and expropriation, it's now becoming a bit more blurred, and partly because some people are doing better than they did before and also because lots of people are doing worse than they did before. August Baker: Right. It's interesting, as you broaden the concept of what the capitalist economy is, you also broaden the domain of economics as a field. Often, economists would think, racial discrimination, that's just this strange unfortunate taste that people have, but that's outside of our realm. Our realm is the market and then markets work against that. This is a broad book and there's a lot of places to backfill, I think, and that would be one in my opinion. Nancy Fraser: Yes. There are two things going on here. One is that I'm trying to expand our conception of what capitalism is. I'm suggesting that it's a mistake to think that capitalism is an economic system, one that's based on market exchange, private property in the means of production, wage labor, and so on and so forth. That's all true. That's what the capitalist economy is like, but the economy sits, let's say, in a relation of dependence on a whole range of other spheres of social activity and social life. Capitalism is not just about the economy, it's about the relation between the economy and nature. It's about the relation between production and reproduction or paid work and care work. It's about the relation between exploitation and expropriation. It's about the relation between the market and the state between commodities and public goods. Right there, we get access to a potential critical scrutiny of those relationships instead of just talking about the internal dynamics about the economy. There, you can have more or less rosy views of how well markets work, do they really clear, et cetera, et cetera. But now, we get a whole new set of questions within capitalism. What's the relation like between economy and nature and so on and so forth? This is where we get access to those forms of cannibalization and to those other crisis tendencies, those other contradictory dynamics. Then as you said, if you take that expanded view, then we should very well be looking at the racialized character of the economy itself. The labor system is racialized, it is gendered, it is crosscut by issues about citizens versus migrants and so on. You can't understand that as just supply and demand. We have a demand for this kind of person as opposed to that kind of person. August Baker: It occurs to me that in neoliberalism, I would like it actually if you could say a bit about what neoliberalism is for our listeners, but I also think that there's a sense in, as I understand it in neoliberalism, that the attitude is kind of a surface level and it's at for every single person, it's kind of, "Oh, I'm not racist." It takes neoclassical economics and says, I'm going to fit neoclassical economics, which means I'm not going to. It's almost part of the whole ethos is to deny these things that's an essential part of the way one fits in in a neoliberal economy. Does that make sense? Nancy Fraser: Yeah, that's a very interesting way to think about it. I think that has a lot of merit. To me, the most important starting point is to say that capitalism has a history and that history is well understood as a succession of different forms of capitalism punctuated by moments of crisis, by interregna, where something has stopped working very well, and then there's a rush to figure out how to reform it. In that history, we've had mercantile capitalism in the 16th through 18th centuries. We had industrial/colonial capitalism or liberal colonial capitalism in the 19th and early 20th. We had social democratic or state managed or New Deal capitalism in the interwar and postwar period, depending on which country, but war anyway from the '30s to '70s in the US, and then we got something else, this new animal, this the liberal thing. Basically, each one of these forms responds to the previous crisis. Each one is an attempt to solve a problem that was generated in the previous era. But in each case, the problem arise from that same dynamic of cannibalization one way or another. A famous example, probably the most familiar example would be the way in which New Deal capitalism tried to solve the problem of the previous era, which was this kind of crisis of social reproduction. The previous form of capitalism was making it very, very difficult for people to raise families and to have a home life and a community life. Women and children were being dragooned to work in mines and factory, and so on and so forth. Protective legislation didn't really work as a solution. It turned out that what you really needed was states to tax and invest public funds into supports for family life. We got social security, pension assistance, we got unemployment insurance, we got all sorts of ways to make it possible for families to live with all- August Baker: This insane asylums. Nancy Fraser: Right. Now, what we can see in retrospect, and this is really interesting, I think, that seemed to solve one problem, at least for a while and at least for people in the wealthy countries of Europe and North America. This didn't do much for anybody else. In fact, a lot of it was funded through the continued siphoning of wealth from what was then called the Third World. But it worked for a while for some. Now what we see in retrospect was another way in which this was all financed. It was the age of the automobile. It was the internal combustion industry. It was refined oil. It was the steel and cement industries. It's like the Dutch Boy. We put the finger in one hole in the social [inaudible 00:33:38], but the other hole opened up and that's the ecological hole. August Baker: That was fascinating. Nancy Fraser: We're constantly doing this. We're trying to solve one problem and creating another. In the neoliberal, you asked, what is neoliberal. August Baker: Yes, please. Nancy Fraser: In a way, it's the idea that what caused profit rates to drop in the '70s and caused problems for firms was too much state regulation, too much taxation, too much labor rights, the beginnings of environmental concerns with Rachel Carson, the Silent Spring, and the creation of the Superfund and the EPA in 1970. And so, you just got capital flight. Let's go someplace where they don't have unions, where they don't have these pesky environmental regulations, where we can just be as rapacious as we want and people are going to be thrilled to have us there. They need us and we'll escape all of that. Basically, it was that sort of evasion of the New Deal regulatory apparatus, including the relatively high rate of corporate taxation, which was to pay for all of this. We got a race to the bottom, then everybody's trying to get foreign direct investment and is going to give away the store. You get that. You get unions reeling and making all kinds of devil's bargains. Just keep the insurance for the current workers. You can hire new ones, that kind of situation. It's every man for himself, basically. Then you get overlaid on that financialization. You get a huge ballooning of economic sectors where people make nothing except securities, new derivatives, new kinds of investment vehicles, which is paper being traded back and forth until 2007, '08 when we get the New York meltdown of all of this in the beginning of [inaudible 00:36:00] securities. August Baker: Right. Oh yeah. Nancy Fraser: In other words, it's financialization, it's offshoring, it's evasion of regulation and of taxes. Then the last piece, well, I already mentioned, then we're going to bring women into the paid workforce in a massive way that changes the relation between production and reproduction. It changes the relation between society and nature, vastly exacerbates that aspect. It changes the relation between manufacturing and banking or other forms of finance between states and the market because states are now with each other. It's a race to the bottom. They dismantle Brett Woods, the international financial system that permitted deficit financing and capital controls. Now, you have periodic attacks from the investors on different currencies. The question of who's going to get bailed out and so on and so forth. Debt is a huge part of this. There's a lot going on here, but all of that is neoliberalism, including what you mentioned, the sort of ideological veil that we should think of everything as, in economic terms, as capital. We should all be investing in our own human capital, treat our children like capital, and just figure out how to get them into expensive nursery schools that will set them on the road to Harvard. August Baker: I guess you didn't really go into this in the book as I recall, but just as a layman, you said 40 years. Do you think that the fall of the Soviet Union was used ideologically to say, this is all by the way natural, this is all by the way the only way to do things is to be rapacious and greedy? Nancy Fraser: Absolutely. I mean, it was clear that really existing communism on the Soviet model, the Eastern European model was hollowed out on a non-viable society. It was really, who knew exactly when and how it would crumble, but it was crumbling internally already. And so, naturally, the collapse, the fall of the Berlin Wall and all of that was this moment of capitalist triumphalism. Famously, Francis Fukuyama writes the book, it's The End of History. Margaret Thatcher says, "There is no alternative." This is the sort of idea that yeah, you're right, what we have, warts and all, is the only game in town. That was a very paralyzing and to many people persuasive moment. We are still, I would say, struggling to convince ourselves and to convince others that there are alternatives. They're not going to look like socialism was historically imagined or built before. We have to invent something new. It's got to be logical, it's got to be feminist, it's got to be anti-racist, it's got to be democratic, but we're up against the wall. If anything bespeaks the urgency and severity, it is the looming climate catastrophe, which is already catastrophic evidence. We're up against it and we have to find alternatives. Capitalism cannot fix this, in my opinion. Now, maybe that's a controversial statement and not everyone will agree. I'm saying, fine, let's focus on de-fossilizing the world economy and stopping greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. If what we end up with, you want to still call capitalism, that's fine with me. I don't care about the word. I care about the problem. Maybe we don't have to exactly agree on what we're going to call it. We have to get serious about imagining and implementing alternatives that involve deep restructuring of what we have. August Baker: I think from my reading of your book, props to you, admiration and respect for going into these areas. You're adding some thoughts about what the future would look like. From my reading, it seems like you are including some sort of democracy in these plan, which is of course so difficult as we see people have this great ability to ignore things that they want to ignore. And so, I give props to you for being positive and coming up with ideas. It's very easy to cut them down. But that was one that just looms for me. But there would be a lot of work involved in what this democracy would look like. Nancy Fraser: You're absolutely right, and I'm really not in a position to give anything like a full picture of this, but I think we can already say some things about why the forms that democracy takes within capitalist societies are extremely limited and not capable, going back to the point you raised with the [inaudible 00:41:38], not capable of actually solving our problems and that we will need to reinvent democracy to solve these problems. Because first of all, I mean, many people would say that there is a problem of money in politics, citizen [inaudible 00:41:58] Supreme Court decision that removed all limits on the basis that contributing money was a form of speech, free speech, that's an obvious point. It's obvious that richer people have a much easier time making themselves heard how there are lots of obstacles to poor and people of color even getting valid access in the first place and so on. Those are the obvious problems about money and politics, but I think there are much deeper problems in addition. What I have in mind is the whole way in which we distinguish what is an issue for the market and what is an issue for the Congress. Capitalism essentially, let's say, devolves the whole question of what should be produced, how much, on what basis with what kind of energy underpinning with what materials, by whom on the basis of what sorts of labor relations, all of that is off the political agenda. That's for the market. That's for the- August Baker: For no one. Nancy Fraser: ... for the entrepreneurs to decide. August Baker: Well, that's a good point. Nancy Fraser: They decide on the basis of their profit, how they are going to survive in a world of cutthroat market competition. Democracy in a sense is already relegated to a remainder of issues that are left over, wants all of that. What all of that after all is our relation to nature, the character of our family life, all of that is somehow fall out from the way these productive decisions are made. I think we have to democratize. We'd have to not just get the money out of the politics understood as a predefined- August Baker: Understood. Nancy Fraser: ... political sphere. We have to democratize the question of what should be decided democratically and what should be left to the market. That's a kind of meta question in a way. August Baker: No, I understand. Nancy Fraser: The whole design of the society, it's become so dysfunctional that we have to have the capacity to redesign it and to call on democratic forms of deliberation and decision making in that redesign. Can't leave it to elites or authorities or wealth or market to decide. We've got to get into the act. That's a part of what I think is involved now is that whatever new form of post capitalist society we want to try to create, you can call it socialism if you like, I'm happy with that name, but not everyone will be. Whatever we call it, it's got to be democratic in the way it's going to operate in a robust way, and it's got to be designed and implemented in a democratic way. Now, that's a very tall order. How exactly we get there, I can't say. But my best guess is that we try to find some way of, let's say, bringing together the people who really care about climate, with people who really care about racism, people who really care about social reproduction and gender, with people who care about livelihood, insecurity, and democracy. The idea would be all of these issues have become acute crisis problems because all of them arise in one, in the same social system that is cannibal capitalism, and that basically, we have to stop cannibalization and the only way that we can be strong enough and a broad enough social constituency to do that is by bringing together all of those. Not everyone has to have the same priority, that climate is number one, or police murdering of Black people in the streets is number one. We don't all have to have the exact same lexical ordering of importance, but we have to all share the understanding that the root of all of this is this cannibal capitalism and that we have to transform. August Baker: You've provided a framework for understanding that, which I think is extremely valuable. It's hopeful, I must say. The easy thing is just to say, "Oh, well, nothing can happen." But I appreciate your going in and finding some optimism, finding some hope for the future. The book is Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System is Devouring Democracy, Care and the Planet and What We Can Do About It. Professor Nancy Fraser, thank you so much for writing the book and for joining me today. Nancy Fraser: Well, thank you. It's been a real pleasure to talk with you about it, and I enjoyed it a lot. Thank you.