This episode explores the pitfalls of understanding capitalism as a merely economic system. How does this narrow conventional view obscure distinct sources of non-economic wealth? And what is revealed by examining capitalism instead as a social order including aspects of expropriation, domestic labor and depletion of nature? Finally, why must progressive social movements recognize the common roots of structural problems against which they struggle?
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Shalini Randeria (SR): A very happy new year to everyone, and welcome to a new season of "Democracy in Question," the podcast series that explores the challenges democracies are facing around the world. I'm Shalini Randeria, Rector and President of Central European University in Vienna, and senior fellow at the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. This is the first episode of Season 8 of "Democracy in Question," and I'm really pleased to welcome Nancy Fraser, professor of philosophy and politics at The New School for Social Research in New York.
She has long been one of the foremost authorities in several fields: social and political theory, feminist theory, contemporary French and German thought. From her first book, "Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory,"[i] published in 1989 through "Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange,"[ii] which she co-authored with Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler and Drucilla Cornell, all the way to "Fortunes of Feminism,"[iii] and "Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto,"[iv] Nancy Fraser has made invaluable contributions to feminist critical theory.
Her most recent works are about capitalism, which is going to be the topic of our discussion today. In 2018, she published "Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory,"[v] co-authored with Rahel Jaeggi, "The Old is Dying and the New Cannot be Born,"[vi] in 2019, and in 2022, "Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet - and What Can We Do About It"[vii].
This book, a synthesis of the main intellectual and political concerns of her work, is going to be the focus of my discussion with her today. It reconstructs and expands the critical social theory of capitalism. It connects what Karl Marx called “the hidden abode of production”, that is the extraction of surplus value from labor with its even more hidden background preconditions and conditions. Nancy names some of these as racialized expropriation, domesticated reproduction, the depletion of nature, and the crisis-ridden colonization of the public political realm by the blind logic of accumulation. The conventional narrow understanding of capitalism as a merely economic systemobscures, in her view, the true nature of capitalist society. What we customarily take to be the economy relies, in fact, on the cannibalization of at least four different ostensibly non-economic externalized sources of wealth.
Throughout the history of global capitalism, capital accumulation has depended not only on the exploitation of contractually free wage labor. But it has relied equally on the forced labor and dispossession of colonized populations, on the invisible unpaid care work provided by women and families or communities, occasionally also more recently on the welfare state whose very structures are now being dismantled, and on the shortsighted treatment of nature. The shifting boundaries between the fetish of the market economy and these alternative spheres have been the major source of capitalist crises. Nancy will explain why the debate must be shifted from the fixation on neoliberalism to the structural contradictions inherent in capitalism per se, that is in successive regimes of capitalist accumulation over the course of the last several centuries.
Finally, we'll talk about the separation of the polity from economy and market that is itself a historical effect of capitalism. Any viable attempt to overcome the contemporary crises of democracy must start with the recognition that it cannot be limited merely to politics, let alone to policy. Nancy, a very warm welcome, again, to the podcast, and thanks so much for joining me this year.
Nancy Fraser (NF): It's a pleasure, Shalini. Thank you for inviting me.
SR: Let me start with the remark of Marx in "Capital, Volume I," which resonates so well with your book on cannibal capitalism. Marx uses the metaphor of vampirism, right? Capital, as he famously writes, is, "Dead labor, which vampire-like lives only by sucking living labor and lives the more, the more labor it sucks." In your book, you rely on a similar metaphor of capitalism as a process of cannibalization. And unlike vampires, of course, who feed on a different species, cannibals, according to traditional lore, consume fellow humans. So, cannibalism is something one could see as an act of self-destructive consumption. And this seems to be the inexorable dynamic of capitalist accumulation that eats into and indeed gradually eats up the natural resources that it depends on. But it also eats up human beings in very many ways, as you show, through colonial exploitation, but also through the exploitation of domestic labor.
So, there's something self-destructive at the heart of the capitalist enterprise, which, in a way, exhausts and destroys its own social, political and natural preconditions as you point out. And thus, conventional understandings of capitalism as a market economy based on endless accumulation are, in a way, too narrowbecause you say capitalism constitutes a total social order and let me quote you here, "in which a profit-driven economy preys on the extra economic supports it needs to function, wealth expropriation, nature, and subject people, multiple forms of care work, public good and public powers, which capital both requires and tries to curtail." So, let's begin by your explaining the role of these four externalized but essential spheres of capitalist society.
NF: The idea is, first of all, that capitalism is a social order. I call it an institutionalized societal order. The question for us should be: what is the relation between the capitalist economy and the other institutionalized arenas and spaces of capitalist society? It's a social order that doesn't just have markets, but it also has families, it has communities, it has nature and natural habitats, it has states and other forms of public power, it has geographical divisions between the center or the periphery, or the metropole and the colony. So, this is all part of the structure of capitalist society, not capitalist economy.
And I'm interested in the way capitalist society is organized, such that it incentivizes the owners and investors who are motivated by profit accumulation. It begs to help themselves to unpaid and underpaid care work, the land, natural resources, and labor of subjugated people, often racialized people, both in the hinterlands, so to speak, but also right in the center. It also incentivizes free riding or cannibalization of public power, as you said. The capitalist economy can't work without a legal architecture that guarantees private property, without police who keep law and order, without a money supply, without a whole set of regulations, and without some kind of public sector to boost demand when the economic system itself is unable to do that.
So, it needs public power, and yet these guys are primed from the get-go to try to evade it, circumvent it, weaken it. They offshore their operations, they try every trick in the book to evade paying their taxes. They lobby, they capture the regulatory agencies that are supposed to be regulating them. So, we've got cannibalization of public power. We've got cannibalization of nature,the climate crisis as well as all the forms of extinction and pollution. The exhaustion of people who have primary responsibility for care work, even when they're also breadwinners and wage-earners. So, there's a kind of depletion of the energies that we have for care. These are all forms of cannibalization, and you're exactly right that there's a paradox or a contradiction here.
The system needs these background conditions in order to function, but it is organized in such a way as to trash them. And it's not surprising, therefore, that periodically, various forms of crisis erupt in capitalism. Exactly when and how acute, there are a lot of contingencies there, but that crises erupt periodically is built into the system's DNA. And they're not just economic crises, but also planetarycrisis, crisis of care, political crisis, racial justice crisis. There are deep structural reasons why this system is prone to these forms of crises.
SR:Let me pick up on one particular aspect of this, and that is the relationship between capitalism and nature. Eco-politics has thus become ubiquitous. And there is an urgency to the debates around the climate question.Climate change is evident to a lot of people, and yet a lot of denialism around it still persists. And what you warn us about in the book quite explicitly is a relatively shallow nature of the emergent consensus in "So far as people agree more or less on the science but disagree more or less on the politics." And I think this is a very astute observation because capitalist society continues to treat nature as an inexhaustible tap for raw material and resources, but also as a bottomless sink for disposing of waste.
And it ignores, by this externalization, the irreparable and irreversible ecological damage, which economic growth generates, and will continue to generate if we continue to produce in this mode. So, just changing our individual consumption patterns is not going to mitigate the climate problem. Could you say something aboutthe blind spots of the environmental justice movements or degrowth movements from a perspective of what you call trans-environmental anti-capitalist agenda? Because the environmental ecological effects are so unevenly distributed geographically, and within societies according to class within and across the globe?
NF: Right. It's true that denialism persists, but I think there is more and more appreciation even in pockets that used to be denialist, that there's something real here and it has something to do with what we are doing. Or as I would say, what capitalism is doing. That's a step forward, but the question is, "What is the real diagnosis? Is it human beings, in general, have too large of a footprint, are consuming too much?" And if that's the case, as you point out, which human beings? There are billions of people across the globe who it would be absurd to say are consuming too much and generating greenhouse gases in great quantities, that's not at all the case. So, already, we see that the problem of a consumerist approach, let us each as individuals be very conscientious about recycling, let’s bicycle instead of using automobiles.
And I think the more people that do that, the better. But there's something else that is more deeply entrenched, and in the end, more consequential. I would put it this way. In capitalist societies, our lives are organized so that essentially the people who control production, and those are the mega-corporations, the private enterprises whose decisions are taken in the interest of keeping their share prices high, not in having a clean environment or in meeting human needs. They control how and where and when raw materials are accessed, how and where and when waste is disposed of. They're in charge of our oceans, our forests, our farmlands, the air we breathe, the water we drink. And they have zero incentive,zero interest in repairing what they damage, in replenishing what they take.
They just want to get in and out as fast as they can and make a buck as fast as they can to keep the shareholders happy. So, the wrong people with the wrong motives have the lion's share of influence on what our relation to nature is like. Unless and until we essentially take that huge power away from them, it's up to us somehow to organize ourselves collectively and in a democratic way. I appreciate that's not so easy, but it's gotta be up to us and not people who have a stake in plunder to figure out how to produce in ways that meet our needs and in ways that not just don't befoul nature but clean up the giant mess that has already been made. And in my view, this cannot be done within a system whose internal driving dynamic is capital accumulation.
I am saying we are not going to solve this problem within capitalist society. We are going to have to transform it. I don't believe that at the start everyone has to agree, become socialist, get rid of capitalism. But we all have to agree that mere individual consumer change is not enough and that we are looking for system changes of one kind or another. What I think is that for some people on this earth, environmental questions are the most pressing existential matters they face. Their islands are going to be under the ocean in a few years, their homes washed away by mudslides.
There are other people who are living in contexts where they have equally severe and pressing problems, but they don't appear immediately as environmental problems. They may be worried that their sons are going to be shot by the police when they're stopped by a traffic cop. They may be worried that they're going to lose their jobs and not find another one. We can't say these issues are not existential life and death questions, they are. So, my idea is that instead of a standalone environmental movement, we try to make connections among multiple social movements, anti-racist movements, feminist movements, democratic anti-authoritarian movements, anti-imperialist movements, and environmental movements because capitalism, this system, is the deep cause of all the ills that those various movements are trying to struggle against, and they need each other. No one movement is powerful enough alone to make the kind of deep system change we need.
SR: Let me turn to another aspect of the argument, which you just touched on, and which is the racialized nature of capitalism, which you have been pointing to in your recent writings very often. So, you agree with Rosa Luxemburg, David Harvey makes the same argument as you, that the process of expropriation and dispossession, which Marx had put at the origin of capitalism, that this process remains a core feature of capitalism throughout its history. So, it's not just the early history of capitalism, but these are the processes which we see ongoing even today. And that the processes are partly, as you argue, rendered invisible by the global color line, the uneven development in the world system.
And you put it very provocatively in the book, and I'll quote you here, "The subjection of those whom capital expropriates is a hidden condition of possibility for the freedom of those whom it exploits." Seeing this through the lens of demography as well as geography, this asymmetrical and hierarchical entanglement puts the relationship between racism and capitalism, certainly in a new perspective. Could you talk about the changing historical configurations of the nexus between race and capital? And do you think that the kind of neoliberal financialization which we are seeing in advanced capital societies, does it make it more difficult to distinguish exploitation from expropriation so that these lines can be drawn analytically, sharply, but in daily life and practice, they become extremely blurred?
NF: Great question, Shalini. It is important to distinguish between analytical distinctions and then real-world conditions, which are kind of messy. I think the analytic distinctions remain extremely useful even to understand the messiness. Let me give you a quick historical sketch. The thing that we see first at the beginning of capitalism is not exploitation in Marxist sense. We don't see in the 16th, 17th century free white men going into huge factories and being paid only for their necessary labor hours and not for the surplus hours. Exploitation in this classic sense, in this capitalist sense, does not exist. What does exist on a huge scale is expropriation. And it is not geographically only in one region. We see the dispossession in Europe of tenant farmers, of serves and vassals and other land workers from their lands, and we see in the so-called newly discovered new world the massive invasion and conscription of people into various forms of unfree labor,in Latin America, even before mass transport of Black Africans to the new world.
So, Marx is right about this. The first thing that happens in capitalism is expropriation. It's not really until late 18th and early 19th that industrialism arises, and that's when something new happens. That's when some of the people who've lost their land and have nothing but their labor power are actually constituted as the owners of their labor power. They don't have any choice, but they are juridically free, they're not bound to any master. And they might have, if their conditions permit, some relative freedom outside the factory, although they're working very long hours for very low pay.
And this is geographical, and this is about race and color, now we have, in the European and North American heartland of capitalism, the emergence of large-scale industry with exploitation of majority ethnic lighter-hued population, so to speak, and the ongoing dependency, in some cases, enslavement, in other cases, various forms of bonded labor in what we used to call the Third World, the colonial world. So, there, it looks like these things are distinct. We've got two kinds of workers, exploited workers and expropriated workers, I think they're both part of the working class, and they are divided by color. So, the system is generating, as it were, two different kinds of human beings. One is suitable for "freedom," for mere exploitation, the others are destined, marked by color, for expropriation. So, this is in 19th and well into the 20th century.
By the second-third of the 20th century, in some countries before World War II, and some countries immediately after, we get some changes, we get some successful independence movements, decolonization. In those countries, people who used to be unfree are citizens, and in some cases, they are even becoming factory workers. So, you could say, of course, there are very few that are factory workers in the broad sea of populations, and they are perhaps relatively privileged. But anyway, we have what I think of as a sort of hybrid condition. They're post-colonial, but so precariously so that we can't say that expropriation has disappeared. But it is overlaid now at least for some, with a straight-out exploitation. Meanwhile, in a country like the United States, we're talking about the New Deal era now, we have the so-called Great Migration. We have the descendants of African slaves in the South who had been transformed into debt peons in a kind of sharecropping bondage. We have some of them now able to move North and to enter the factories.
So, they on the surface now are exploited. However, they are shunted into the dirtiest and lowest-paid jobs. In some cases, their pay does not even rise to the level of exploitation, in the sense that it doesn't cover their necessary living costs. Plus, they are subject to harassment, violence, humiliation by police and by racist mobs. So, you can't say they have moved up and left behind expropriation because they've gone into the factory and now they're merely exploited, that's also a hybrid case. Now, what I think has happened with neo-liberalization is that this hybridization has become much more widespread because the situation of the, let's say, unionized manufacturing workers in the capitalist heartland, in the metropolehas worsened dramatically, their unions have weakened, their wages have been driven down, so, they too are facing forms of expropriation, even as they continue to be exploited.
And then, of course, you talk about the relocation of manufacturing on a mass scale to the BRICS countries, and then you see a lot of exploitation there. But intermingled still with expropriation through IMF astronomical debt, through all kinds of local debt, consumer debt. So, I think today we have a mixed picture, in which expropriation and exploitation are not anywhere near as neatly separated by geography and by color as they once were. And that presents a different political problem because at one level, you might think, "Oh, well, now there's a real basis for solidarity. They're all in the same boat."
But, no, when you have people who are losing advantages that they won and enjoyed, things can get very ugly. It's very different psychologically to feel that you are going down than to feel that you've been down for a while and are trying to get up. And these are two different psychologies. This has become very widespread among sectors of the white working class. And I think that this is the big problem that we face in figuring how to deal with this new formation, where the issue is people want to restore a clear division in which they were relatively privileged.
SR: One of the divisions that people want to restore is a gender division. I think there's a crisis of masculinity, which is part of the story, and that's what I'd like to talk to you about next. And you address it in the form of care work, where you say that neoliberal capitalism systematically cannibalizes social reproduction, partly also by eroding the welfare state. And it places the burden of care work on families and communities. But it also destroys or at least diminishes the capacity of these families to perform the work of care and reproduction due to, of course, also the unprecedented incorporation of women into the labor market. I quote you here "This has now led to a dualized organization of social reproduction commodified for those who could pay for it and privatized for those who cannot, as some in the second category provide care work in return for low wages for those who are in the first category."
And you very rightly say, "The problem here is not just neoliberalism, but the problem is capitalism." And you outline the shifting configurations of gendered care work through different successive accumulation regimes through the history of capitalism. Now, of course, this care work has been deemed unproductive, and therefore it's non-monetized at best, undervalued, underpaid. So, there's a gender division which hides in a sense the structural dependence. could you say something about the nature of care work and how that is needed as a precondition for the kind of capitalist society in which we live? And on the other hand, capitalism is undermining the ease in which families and communities could provide that care, also dismantling, in part, the welfare state, which could have, in some parts of the world, provided an alternative.
NF: Right. I think that what we call care work, or what some theorists would call social reproductive labor, is necessary to any society. Every society needs to grow some food, build some shelters from the weather, figure out how to clothe themselves, where to sleep, and make tools. That's what some people would call production. But also, every human society has to give birth to babies. It has to take care of those babies, protect them, keep them clean and healthy. Someone has to prepare the food, keep the living space clean and orderly. And that's what some people call reproduction. Of course, you need both of these things together, intertwined in order for a whole society to reproduce.
Now, throughout human history, in many societies, these things have not been sharply separated. There was no hard and fast distinction between production and reproduction. All of these activities were considered useful and valuable and important. And even if tasks were divided by sex or by age or some other prestige divisions, still they belong to the same social universe of useful effortful labor. Capitalism changes that. Because of this industrial system, especially, it separates what it calls the spaces of work from the other spaces that are supposedly spaces of non-work, the whole idea of a familial residential space apart from the factory or the office or the bank or whatever. Also, like, just as we were saying before about the system turning out two kinds of people, here, too, we get a making of kinds of people sharply divided.
These are the ones who are going to take care of people, and these are the ones who are going to do this work of production. Now, since only the production work, the object-making work, let's say, is monetized and organized on a for-profit basis, it somehow becomes the iconic idea of what work is. And the people who do it over time monopolize the title of being workers, even though the others who are in the home are certainly doing work, but their activity is signified as care, and that means non-work. Now, of course, even in pre-capitalist times, aristocratic classes had servants doing their care work for them, their women didn't do their own care work. And then, in our time, it's basically immigrants, especially immigrants of color in Europe and the United States who do more and more of that work.
And so, I would say they are expropriated and exploited, and in a sense, domesticated meaning, tamed into this space of non-work that's very low status. So, there, too, capitalism implants a sharp gender division, I think sharper than it was in pre-capitalist societies. We went from that to the aspiration of working classes in the exploited parts of the world for a family wage, which at least some minority among them were able to win by labor organization, able to win a wage that was sufficient to support a family with children. And therefore, you needed only one wage earner.
That's a different model from separate spheres because it's part of a real working-class push supported by women, too, as well as men who thought they (women) would be respectable by not having to go out to work. But today, as you said, we have the dual-earner family model. And here's where things get dicey because women are heavily recruited into the paid workforce. And at the same timeneoliberalism is driving down wages across the board. So that every household needs more hours of paid work than they used to in order to keep the operation afloat. So we have so many people running themselves, ragged, doing one little job hopping on a bus for an hour to get to a second little job.
And this is where we get the strain on care work and social reproduction. And if you add in austerity, the pressure from investors to cut social spending, to divert funds that might have been used for public forms of care into debt service, then you have a double whammy. You have women's energies being taken away from care work, you have public cutbacks, and, something's got to give. This is another form of capitalism consuming or cannibalizing, some of its own limbs. I think that this care dimension, like the ecological dimension, like the political and racial dimension, these are very acute forms of crises today.
SR: Nancy, let me turn to the question of the political because that plays a role in your argument. And as you said right at the beginning, capitalism also cannibalizes political public power. And your important caveat about thinking through the crisis of democracy today is your argument that this crisis is not exclusively a political crisis at all. Therefore, as you put it, "It cannot be resolved by reforming the political realm, let alone by restoring civility, cultivating bipartisanship, opposing tribalism, or defending truth-oriented fact-based discourse."You contend not only neoliberalism, but capitalism per se, in all its historically variable guises is prone to political crises and is actually inimical to democracy. And that's an argument I'd like you to develop.Political power serves, as you rightly point out, as an indispensable condition for the possibility of capital accumulation. But it's also destabilized by the cannibalizing logic of capitalism.
And the boundary between what is economic and what is political, is itself a shifting and contested boundary in neoliberalism. Of course, there is an attempt to mark that boundary in a very particular way to keep state regulation out of these spheres demarcated now as exclusively economic. But that demarcation in itself is part of the crisis-prone nature of capitalist accumulation and expropriation because, in a sense, there is an underlying deep tension between short-term profit-oriented interest, which is the logic of capitalism, and common will, which should be the logic of democratic political action. So, could you say something about the whole discussion about democratic deficit, etc., which seems to be totally decontextualized? It's taken out of any historical context as if it's just suddenly descended upon us that there is a wave of de-democratization, but then there'll be a regeneration afterwards.
NF: Yes, this is something I too feel very strongly about. I've been surrounded in my academic job by political theorists who are radical democrats or reformers, who are interested in just diagnosing the ills of a political system and thinking they can be fixed by changing things in the political system, not understanding that the problem, again, is the relation between the political system and the economic part of capitalist society. Now, once again, I would start by saying that a sharp division between the economic and the political is actually something that capitalism created. Feudalism had no sharp separation like that. The lord of the manor organized the labor, the distribution, and the armies. The relations of force and relations of labor were not separated.
Obviously, the ancient Greeks had what they called the oikos, from which our word economy comes. It was a household too, it wasn't anything like what we mean by the political or the economic rather. So, here, too, we get a separation much sharper than in any other form of society with the idea, as Karl Polanyi famously said, that the market could be self-regulating, and therefore, we didn't need political power to encroach upon it. That, of course, was very quickly shown to be a delusion with various forms of depressions and crashes. And I think that the deep contradiction here, you articulated very well, it's the same idea that capital needs public power, but its own logic drives it to weaken that power to try to free itself from the grip of that power; or to somehow free-ride on things like infrastructure that the market can't provide; law and order arrangements that it doesn't want to provide itself to help itself to these public goods, but to avoid taxes, to offshore and find friendly jurisdictions that don't have strong labor laws or environmental laws. And then, you add the ideological side of this, the neoliberal ideology thatmarkets and corporations are lean and nimble, states are heavy-handed, tied up in red tape. When you want something done right, let business do it.
So, we've been through a lot of that kind of stuff, and people who believe those things actually changed the whole architecture of the world financial system, and have been successfully trying to institutionalize limits on what states and public powers and democratic publics can do to constitutionalize forms of what they call “free trade”. So that any burdensome labor regulation is a restraint on trade.So we have this whole apparatus now in which at the very highest and most global level rules of the game have changed that boundary that you mentioned between market and state to the detriment of public powers and to the benefit, not of all business, but let's just say of mega-corporations, some of whom have more total net worth than lots of states. So, there's a structural side of our political crisis. We do not have the public capacities to solve our problems.
This became painfully clear in the early days of the COVID pandemic when we saw that neoliberal pressures had caused many states to draw down on their public health infrastructure, and they suddenly had to build it up again. There's a constant struggle for us to strengthen and build the kinds of public powers we need to solve our problems, that's the structural side. There's also the sort of ideological or hegemonic side And that is that people go crazy when they see that their problems are not addressed by those who claim to represent them in the halls of government. They imagine that the problem is that the immigrants, or the Muslims, orthe Blacks, the Mexicans are taking their stuff. They get completelyfalse pictures in terms of what the diagnosis is, and then they start to defect from the system and support strong men who are openly contemptuous of democracy. Andwe can talk about Hungary, the U.S., Brazil. This is a phenomenon that is rearing its ugly head everywhere.
SR: My last question to you, Nancy, is your overall diagnosis of the present conjuncture. And if you put it in Gramscian terms, we would say this is a crisis-ridden interregnum, where the old is dying and the new cannot be born. Your overall diagnosis of this conjuncture is rather grim. And yet your conclusion in the book is striving for an optimistic reaffirmation of the will by calling for a credible and effective counter-hegemonic block, transcending the limits of what Gramsci would have called the merely political. So, your critical analysis is spot-on in bringing together, in one single framework, all the oppressions, the contradictions, and conflicts structured by class exploitation, gender domination, racial, imperial hierarchies and oppression. You argue that anti-capitalism must address not just economic injustices or unfreedom, but also non-economic ones.
But if I were to play devil's advocate, the question I would have for you is, where do you locate the sizable societal forces today, which could engage in such a transformation? Because I must confess here to my own pessimism of the intellect to stay with Gramsci. I'm asking this because you invoke socialism in the 21st centuryas an “it”, as an impersonal system, though you recognize that it requires the combined efforts of activists, theorists, and the working class, the expropriated and the exploited. Will they make common cause across national boundaries? And do you see the organizational forms in which these could succeed? Could you reflect, finally, on the scales and temporalities of such changes as well as the potential collective actors if we are to see some of the changes?
NF: Well, this, of course, is the hardest question of all. And I have to start by confessing that when I was writing "Cannibal Capitalism," I was a little more optimistic than I am today. But I don't think it's a question of optimism, pessimism, this shifts with the zeitgeist. When you're thinking about these questions, bracket, the most immediate mood issues. Now, I think that every major social revolution has been powered, let's say, by some kind of a hegemonic block. It's never been a single class, or a party, or cause. And what counts is the ability of different social forces that are in motion, each for their own reasons, but all of whom are, or could be, potentially, emancipatory.
The key is what would have to happen for them to see themselves as battling against the same deep structural system, even as their emphasis are different, their social location is different, their immediate pressing needs are different. This is how I envision it. There are lots of social movements that are energized, that are out there fighting day in and day out. I have such admiration for these young people who are involved in anti-racist struggle, or in climate struggle.
I'm increasingly quoting Walter Benjamin. Marx thought revolution was the locomotive of history, but maybe it's really about pulling the emergency break. We need to pull an emergency break. So, I think that what we count on here is learning processes that people try to do something as a single issue or single-group movement, and it doesn't work. They see that they need to make connections. I would say that terms like intersectionality, which are so popular now, that is a symptom of this recognition of the need to forge connections. And as I say, I would see that more in the terms of a counter-hegemonic block, not at all in the sense of homogenizing everyone's situation and saying, "This is the primary contradiction, these are secondary, these are the real vanguard, these are not." I think we're past that kind of sort of hierarchy of oppressions.
And I think that's a more pragmatic feeling that the change we need is deep and it will require very broad and powerful alliances that will have to be transnational. You cannot fix climate change, you cannot fix the global financial order, you cannot ensure public health within the borders of any one country. These things have become painfully obvious. Now, that immensely complicates things because revolutions in the past have often stopped at national borders. So, I don't have anything like an organizational blueprint, but I have some intuitions. If things were to go well, and I cannot guarantee that they will go well, it would be because people are coming to understand the roots of their problems in one in the same social system, despite the differences in the experienced problems. They are coming to understand the necessity for a deep structural change of that system, they're coming to understand that that requires a very broad set of alliances. And I'm still using the word socialism, that "it" that you mentioned. Maybe we will find another word. Maybe for some people, that word has too much baggage. I don't care what we call it, frankly, as long as we disenable the cannibalization mechanism at the heart of our society that is driving us into the abyss.
SR: Nancy, thank you very, very much for this fascinating and wide-ranging conversation. Thank you very much for making the time to be with me here.
NF: My pleasure, Shalini. It's always great to talk to you. Thanks for the wonderful questions.
SR: Nancy Fraser emphasizes that we must replace our narrow conception of capitalism as a merely economic system, relying on markets and wage labor by a more comprehensive view of capitalism as a social order. The distinctive feature of capitalist society in this broad sense is its reliance on several crucial background conditions: like public power, the expropriation and subjugation of subaltern populations, free or underpaid domestic labor and care work, as well as the plundering of natural resources. All of these are cannibalized by capitalism, which creates its own systemic crises. It is for this reason that Nancy is skeptical of piecemeal solutions and individualistic quick fixes to such systemic crises within the confines of capitalism. She argues that the only chance for progressive social movements like anti-racist, anti-imperialist mobilizations, feminism, the movement for climate justice, is to transcend issue-specific limitations by recognizing instead the common roots of the structural problems that they are struggling against. It is in the absence of such recognition that authoritarian right-wing populists and nationalists are successful in instrumentalizing the discontent and divisions stemming from the erosion of historical privileges for specific social groups and the overall restructuring of global capitalism in recent decades.
Nancy has long theorized the gendered division of labor within the historically evolving context of capitalist society. She has once again provided us a compelling summary of this argument today. The growing strains on reproductive and care work due to neoliberal austerity measures and wage stagnation illustrate how capitalism cannibalizes its own foundations and preconditions. She's made a powerful argument about the theoretical as well as practical fallacies of focusing on the realm of the political in isolation. The separation of the political realm from the economic is itself the historical product of capitalist society. Their contradictory relationship is not specific to neoliberalism in her view. Whether such contradictions and crises will lead to the emergence of a counter hegemonic bloc that can successfully articulate a vision for a more just and equitable society remains an open question. One thing, however, is crystal clear. No alternative vision for emancipation can be built on a selective or a hierarchical understanding of the multiple forms of oppression under capitalism. All of these forms must be thought of, and struggled against, in their complex interrelationships.
This was the first episode of Season 8 of Democracy in Question. Thank you very much for listening. My guest next time is the economist Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek finance minister. I discuss with him the new form of capitalism that he calls techno-feudalism, which dominates our lives and curtails democratic freedoms today.
Please go back and listen to any episode you might have missed, and of course, let your friends know about the podcast if you've enjoyed it. You can stay in touch with the work of the Central European University at www.ceu.edu and the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at www.graduateinstitute.ch\democracy.
[i] Fraser, N. (1989). Unruly practices: Power, discourse and gender in contemporary social theory. Polity Press.
[ii] Benhabib, S. (1995). Feminist contentions: A philosophical exchange. Routledge.
[iii] Fraser, N. (2020). Fortunes of feminism: From State-managed capitalism to neoliberal crisis. Verso.
[iv] Bhattacharya, T., & Fraser, N. (2019). Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto. Verso Books.
[v] Fraser, N., & Jaeggi, R. (2018). Capitalism: A conversation in critical theory. Polity Press.
[vi] Fraser, N., & Sunkara, B. (2019). The old is dying and the new cannot be born: From progressive neoliberalism to trump and beyond. Verso.
[vii] Fraser, N. (2022). Cannibal capitalism: How our system is devouring democracy, care, and the planet - and what we can do about it. Verso.