Nancy Fraser, Cannibal Capitalism, Verso, 2022. Hbk £11.99
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RATING: 75
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Buy this book?
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Nancy Fraser is the author of a number of significant interventions over recent years on capitalism, social reproduction, and the 'crisis of care'. This short, punchy, and attractively produced volume repackages them, along with some other recent work, and adds an epilogue on COVID. The subtitle, How Our System Is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet - and What We Can Do About It, signals her purpose, and from the first page (which asks, 'Are We Toast?') it is clear that she has an urgent message, and is aiming for the book to reach a wide audience. Let's hope it does. It sets out the current consensus on the way that Marx's original 'economistic' analysis of capitalism needs correcting and updating for the present day, by giving greater prominence to dispossession and race, gender, ecology, and political power, which is useful, whether or not you agree. And it proposes a socialism for the twenty-first century, involving the transformation of 'production's relation to its background conditions of possibility: namely, social reproduction, public power, nonhuman nature, and forms of wealth that lie outside capital's official circuits but within its reach'. A 'socialism for our time,' she argues, 'must overcome not only capital's exploitation of wage labor, but also its free riding on unwaged carework, public powers, and wealth expropriated from racialized subjects and nonhuman nature' (142). This, she says, can be the basis for a broad progressive alliance, and her advocacy of a politics that places 'the nurturing of people, the safeguarding of nature, and democratic self-rule as society's highest priorities' (152) will resonate powerfully with many readers.
But in some significant respects the argument is problematic. The case she makes depends upon two related claims. The first is that capitalism not only produces recurrent economic crises, but also expropriates resources from racialized societies, puts the day-to-day reproduction of society everywhere in peril, with particularly severe consequences for women and for care, destroys the natural environment, and undermines public power, giving rise to crises in each of these areas. It is this that motivates the call for a broad alliance of anti-racists, feminists, environmental activists and democrats to challenge it. Fair enough, on the whole, except that 'capitalism' at times becomes a catch-all that is to blame for practically everything. The second is that these crises are also crises for capital itself, as it depends for its self-expansion on the resources it expropriates from racialized societies, the capacity of families and communities to produce and nurture its working class over time, the continued availability of natural resources, and the support it needs from public power. In short, capitalism not only 'feeds off everyone else', 'cannibalises' families and communities, habitats and ecosystems, state capacities and public powers in order to sustain itself, and 'draws into its orbit natural and social wealth from the from peripheral zones of the world system', but also resembles the ouroboros, 'the self-cannibalizing serpent that eats its own tail ... a fitting image for a system that's wired to devour the social, political, and natural bases of its own existence - which are also the bases of ours' (xiii-xiv). This part of the argument is generally asserted rather than defended. I shall suggest that it doesn't apply with any great force to dispossession, social reproduction, or political power, and that although there is a stronger case on ecology and climate change, there is a counter-argument to be confronted, and Fraser simply ignores it. All of this means in turn that the proposed basis for a broad progressive alliance is only obliquely related in key respects to the challenge posed by capitalism both in the "Global North' and the 'Global South' today.
After a first chapter that defends the need for an expanded conception of capitalism, chapters on dispossession and racialization, social reproduction, ecopolitics, and politics trace out the arguments summarised above; a final chapter asks what socialism should mean in the 21st century, and an epilogue discusses COVID as a 'cannibal capitalist orgy'. Fraser begins with a brief account of 'what Marx took to be capitalism's defining features': private property in the means of production, the free labor market, "self"-expanding value, or the 'thrust to accumulation', and the distinctive role of markets, which turn 'use values' into commodities, and determine how society's surplus will be invested (3-7). She then identifies four 'non-economic conditions for the possibility of a capitalist economy', conveniently summarised towards the end of the book (143-5) as follows:
Fraser knows this, but she does not take up the implications for her argument. As she notes, while capitalism has always been 'deeply entangled with racial oppression' and expropriation, its relationship with race has passed through 'a sequence of qualitatively different regimes of racialized accumulation' (29). On her own account, these have generally drawn new resources into production and new waves of 'expropriated' workers into capitalist labour relations of exploitation proper, while leaving plenty more to be drawn on in the future. And indeed, she goes so far as to suggest that while racialization remains deeply embedded in society in the United States and elsewhere, it is no longer strictly necessary, or productive, for capital (48-52). So it is, too, with social reproduction and care. The title of the chapter is 'Care Guzzler: Why Social Reproduction in a Major Site of Capitalist Crisis'. Fraser argues that
'our social system is sapping energies needed to tend to families, maintain households, sustain communities, nourish friendships, build political networks, and forge solidarities. Often referred to as carework, these activities are indispensable to society: they replenish human beings, both daily and generationally, while also maintaining social bonds. In capitalist societies, moreover, they assure the supply of commodified labour power from which capital sucks surplus value. Without the work of social reproduction ... there could be no production or profit or capital; no economy or culture or state. Indeed, it is fair to say that no society, capitalist or otherwise, that systematically cannibalizes social reproduction can endure for long. Yet the present form of capitalism is doing just that: diverting the emotional and material resources that should be devoted to carework to other inessential activities, which fatten corporate coffers while starving us. The result is a major crisis - not simply of care, but of social reproduction in the broadest sense' (53).
In short, she concludes, the "care crunch" is 'an acute expression of a social-reproductive contradiction inherent in capitalism' (54). But the story she goes on to tell does not bear this out. The first reason for this is that her depiction of the relationship between social reproduction and capitalism is flawed to start with:
'The capitalist economy relies on ... activities of provisioning, caregiving, and interaction that produce and maintain social bonds, although it accords them no monetized value and treats them as if they were free. Variously called "care," "affective labor," or "subjectivation," such activity forms capitalism's human subjects, sustaining them as embodied natural beings, forming their habitus and the cultural ethos in which they move. The work of birthing and socializing the young is central to this process, as is caring for the old, maintaining households, building communities and sustaining the shared meanings, affective dispositions and horizons of value that underpin social cooperation. Understood broadly, in this way, social reproductive work is essential to every society. In capitalist societies, however, it assumes another, more specific function: to produce and replenish the classes whose labor power capital exploits to obtain surplus value. ... Neither the waged work that is deemed productive nor the surplus value extracted from it could exist in the absence of carework. It is only thanks to housework, child-rearing, schooling, affective care, and a host of related activities that capital can obtain a workforce suitable in quality and quantity to its needs. Social reproduction is an indispensable precondition for economic production in a capitalist society' (55-6).
This assumes a degree of congruence between 'social reproduction' very broadly defined and the logic of the capitalist mode of production that is not warranted, and it overlooks the fact that as capitalism becomes dominant, it increasingly transforms society in accordance with its own logic. Self-evidently, the 'shared meanings, affective dispositions and horizons of value that underpin social cooperation' in pre-capitalist society were not magically attuned in advance to the logic of an as yet non-existent capitalism. Nor, as capitalism advances, are they fixed at any point in a form that meets its needs for all time. Fraser sees a crisis 'when capital's drive to expanded accumulation becomes unmoored from its social bases and turns against them' (57), where a classical Marxist framework would suggest that when social bases previously conducive to accumulation become fetters upon it, a 'crisis' ensues in which they are transformed, giving rise to new circumstances in which accumulation can proceed. On Fraser's own empirical account, this Marxist framework fits the facts better. As she puts it, in the crisis sparked off by the dragooning of women and children into industry in the early nineteenth century, 'capitalist societies found resources for managing this contradiction - in part by creating "the family" in its modern restricted form; by inventing new, intensified meanings of gender difference; and by modernizing male domination' (60). A period of "housewifization" followed, under which 'feminist opposition to male domination could easily be read as an endorsement of the economic forces that were ravaging working-class and peripheral societies' (63); this gave way to welfare and the "Fordist" family wage, forging 'a novel synthesis of marketization and social protection' (65). And when this regime faltered in turn, social protection was sacrificed, and women were massively recruited into the workforce, giving rise to the 'two-earner household', and a phase marked by 'a progressive neoliberalism, which celebrates "diversity," meritocracy, and "emancipation" while dismantling social protections and re-externalizing social reproduction' (69). In short, the current period is one of market-friendly neoliberal currents in all emancipatory movements; reduced real wages that '[raise] the number of hours of paid work per household needed to support a family and [prompt] a desperate scramble to transfer carework to others', often through importing migrant workers from poorer to richer countries; the offer of egg freezing as a fringe benefit by leading IT firms; and the double-cup hands-free breast pump. A multi-pronged assault on previous patterns of social reproduction, to be sure, but absolutely not a crisis for capital, which thrives on global labour markets shaped by burgeoning digital and related technologies, and a continuing division of labour that extends to the simplest tasks into which processes of production can be broken down. Symptomatically, Fraser declines to say in her conclusion to the chapter how things will develop from this point on. But on her own evidence, the current situation, far from being a crisis for capitalism, is one that suits it in every respect. And if we add evidence that Fraser does not consider - the increasing prevalence of childlessness, the shift in advanced countries generally from teens/early twenties to mid-thirties for the birth of the first (and often only) child, the dwindling significance of "nuclear" families, the shift to single-member or shared households, and the massive commodification of provisioning via ready meals and takeaways, the latter now produced on an industrial scale and delivered by a range of web-based services - this conclusion is further reinforced (Cammack, 2020).
The same cannot be said, of course, for ecology and climate change. Global warming may well bring about a terminal crisis for capital as well as for the rest of us. But here Fraser ducks the argument. Having dubbed the previous age the age of fossil fuel and the automobile (99-101), she suggests that 'we can't know for sure whether capitalism has any more tricks up its enormously inventive sleeve that could stave off global warming for a while; nor if so, for how long' (107). She refers in passing to a 'transition to renewable energy', but makes no attempt to assess its character or viability, or to explore the extent to which it might be entirely dominated by capitalist interests, or potentially subjected to broader social goals or democratic oversight. All kinds of considerations come into play here, and this is not the place to consider them at length. But the transition to renewable energy is real, and significant. It is currently dominated by scientific and technological fixes in which capital is taking the lead (with, for example, oil companies deploying their massive resources to invest heavily in non-fossil fuels). But capitalists will happily make money from whatever, not exclusively from products that destroy the planet. So, for example, the dramatic shift under way from the internal combustion engine to electric power has to be evaluated critically, not simply ignored (Fraser does not mention it), as do advances in wind-power and solar technology that offer benefits to far wider communities than that of financial capital (especially in the global South, and more so as small-scale solar units and improved storage advance). Beyond this, the potential role for the state has to be critically addressed, starting today with initiatives currently under way in the United States. Finally, any progressive platform has to have a worked-out position on the use of nuclear energy for power generation and on overall targets for energy use - not only in terms of the science, but also in relation to working-class and global South hostility to a uniform policy of reduced consumption or no growth. This is not to say that the answers are easy or that there is nothing to worry about (I think that the odds are we shall destroy the planet sooner or later, one way or another). But without consideration of any of these things, Fraser's proposed 'eco-socialism' is not for grown-ups.
After this, the chapter on politics suggests that democracy is in crisis, and that its woes are 'part of the general crisis of contemporary financialized capitalism': 'not just this form, but every form of capitalism harbors a contradiction that inclines it to political crisis' (117). Specifically, current political impasses are grounded in the contradiction 'between the imperatives of capital accumulation and the maintenance of the public powers on which accumulation also relies': 'legitimate, efficacious public power is a condition of possibility for sustained capital accumulation; yet capital's drive to endless accumulation tends over time to destabilize the very public powers on which it depends' (119). Again, though, the shifts in political regime described as accompanying the transitions to liberal-colonial, state-managed and financialized capitalism seem to benefit capital every time, for all the crises that surround them. And true to form, financialized capitalism has 'remade the economy/polity relation yet again' (127), as central banks and financial institutions replace states as the arbiters of an increasingly globalised economy, with debt as their weapon of choice; and the 'global financial crisis,' in turn, 'solidified the hold of private creditors over public power' (130). As it happens, this analysis is both over-stated and under-specified. It places far too much emphasis on debt, while taking far too little account of concerted efforts, by states and international organisations, to weaken workers' rights by reforming labour law, and to tweak social protection regimes further in order to force 'unemployed' or 'under-employed' individuals into an increasingly precarious labour market. In the end, anyway, Fraser notes the capacity of political systems to continue to produce 'progressive' alternatives that appear to legitimate but don't threaten the system, and seems to concede that this may continue for the foreseeable future (138-9).
From this point, she embarks on the hazardous task of defining an agenda for socialism without having engaged in any detailed analysis of the relationship between capital and labour in the contemporary global economy, as sketched out briefly immediately above. Hamlet, that is, without the prince. After token reference to the need to overcome 'capital's exploitation of wage labor' (142), not explored further, attention switches to the 'enlarged' or 'expanded' view of capitalism as an institutionalised societal order (143-50). The programme outlined revolves around abstract general principles, but is very weak on specific measures that will challenge the present reality of competitive global labor markets that increasingly shape the choices individuals, households, families and communities everywhere make in their efforts to survive from day to day; and the brief, scattergun account of COVID-19 that rounds off the volume confirms that what we have here is a heartfelt polemic, but one with serious analytical flaws.
References
Cammack, Paul. 2020. Marx on social reproduction, Historical Materialism, 28, 2, 76-106.
Foster, John Bellamy. 1999. Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundations for Environmental Sociology, American Journal of Sociology, 105, 2, 366-405.
But in some significant respects the argument is problematic. The case she makes depends upon two related claims. The first is that capitalism not only produces recurrent economic crises, but also expropriates resources from racialized societies, puts the day-to-day reproduction of society everywhere in peril, with particularly severe consequences for women and for care, destroys the natural environment, and undermines public power, giving rise to crises in each of these areas. It is this that motivates the call for a broad alliance of anti-racists, feminists, environmental activists and democrats to challenge it. Fair enough, on the whole, except that 'capitalism' at times becomes a catch-all that is to blame for practically everything. The second is that these crises are also crises for capital itself, as it depends for its self-expansion on the resources it expropriates from racialized societies, the capacity of families and communities to produce and nurture its working class over time, the continued availability of natural resources, and the support it needs from public power. In short, capitalism not only 'feeds off everyone else', 'cannibalises' families and communities, habitats and ecosystems, state capacities and public powers in order to sustain itself, and 'draws into its orbit natural and social wealth from the from peripheral zones of the world system', but also resembles the ouroboros, 'the self-cannibalizing serpent that eats its own tail ... a fitting image for a system that's wired to devour the social, political, and natural bases of its own existence - which are also the bases of ours' (xiii-xiv). This part of the argument is generally asserted rather than defended. I shall suggest that it doesn't apply with any great force to dispossession, social reproduction, or political power, and that although there is a stronger case on ecology and climate change, there is a counter-argument to be confronted, and Fraser simply ignores it. All of this means in turn that the proposed basis for a broad progressive alliance is only obliquely related in key respects to the challenge posed by capitalism both in the "Global North' and the 'Global South' today.
After a first chapter that defends the need for an expanded conception of capitalism, chapters on dispossession and racialization, social reproduction, ecopolitics, and politics trace out the arguments summarised above; a final chapter asks what socialism should mean in the 21st century, and an epilogue discusses COVID as a 'cannibal capitalist orgy'. Fraser begins with a brief account of 'what Marx took to be capitalism's defining features': private property in the means of production, the free labor market, "self"-expanding value, or the 'thrust to accumulation', and the distinctive role of markets, which turn 'use values' into commodities, and determine how society's surplus will be invested (3-7). She then identifies four 'non-economic conditions for the possibility of a capitalist economy', conveniently summarised towards the end of the book (143-5) as follows:
- a large fund of wealth expropriated from subjugated peoples, especially from racialized peoples, consisting above all in land, natural resources, and dependent unwaged or under-waged labor
- a sizeable fund of unwaged and underaged labor devoted to social reproduction, labor that is mostly performed by women
- a large fund of free or very cheap inputs from nonhuman nature, and
- a large body of public goods supplied by states and other public powers
Fraser knows this, but she does not take up the implications for her argument. As she notes, while capitalism has always been 'deeply entangled with racial oppression' and expropriation, its relationship with race has passed through 'a sequence of qualitatively different regimes of racialized accumulation' (29). On her own account, these have generally drawn new resources into production and new waves of 'expropriated' workers into capitalist labour relations of exploitation proper, while leaving plenty more to be drawn on in the future. And indeed, she goes so far as to suggest that while racialization remains deeply embedded in society in the United States and elsewhere, it is no longer strictly necessary, or productive, for capital (48-52). So it is, too, with social reproduction and care. The title of the chapter is 'Care Guzzler: Why Social Reproduction in a Major Site of Capitalist Crisis'. Fraser argues that
'our social system is sapping energies needed to tend to families, maintain households, sustain communities, nourish friendships, build political networks, and forge solidarities. Often referred to as carework, these activities are indispensable to society: they replenish human beings, both daily and generationally, while also maintaining social bonds. In capitalist societies, moreover, they assure the supply of commodified labour power from which capital sucks surplus value. Without the work of social reproduction ... there could be no production or profit or capital; no economy or culture or state. Indeed, it is fair to say that no society, capitalist or otherwise, that systematically cannibalizes social reproduction can endure for long. Yet the present form of capitalism is doing just that: diverting the emotional and material resources that should be devoted to carework to other inessential activities, which fatten corporate coffers while starving us. The result is a major crisis - not simply of care, but of social reproduction in the broadest sense' (53).
In short, she concludes, the "care crunch" is 'an acute expression of a social-reproductive contradiction inherent in capitalism' (54). But the story she goes on to tell does not bear this out. The first reason for this is that her depiction of the relationship between social reproduction and capitalism is flawed to start with:
'The capitalist economy relies on ... activities of provisioning, caregiving, and interaction that produce and maintain social bonds, although it accords them no monetized value and treats them as if they were free. Variously called "care," "affective labor," or "subjectivation," such activity forms capitalism's human subjects, sustaining them as embodied natural beings, forming their habitus and the cultural ethos in which they move. The work of birthing and socializing the young is central to this process, as is caring for the old, maintaining households, building communities and sustaining the shared meanings, affective dispositions and horizons of value that underpin social cooperation. Understood broadly, in this way, social reproductive work is essential to every society. In capitalist societies, however, it assumes another, more specific function: to produce and replenish the classes whose labor power capital exploits to obtain surplus value. ... Neither the waged work that is deemed productive nor the surplus value extracted from it could exist in the absence of carework. It is only thanks to housework, child-rearing, schooling, affective care, and a host of related activities that capital can obtain a workforce suitable in quality and quantity to its needs. Social reproduction is an indispensable precondition for economic production in a capitalist society' (55-6).
This assumes a degree of congruence between 'social reproduction' very broadly defined and the logic of the capitalist mode of production that is not warranted, and it overlooks the fact that as capitalism becomes dominant, it increasingly transforms society in accordance with its own logic. Self-evidently, the 'shared meanings, affective dispositions and horizons of value that underpin social cooperation' in pre-capitalist society were not magically attuned in advance to the logic of an as yet non-existent capitalism. Nor, as capitalism advances, are they fixed at any point in a form that meets its needs for all time. Fraser sees a crisis 'when capital's drive to expanded accumulation becomes unmoored from its social bases and turns against them' (57), where a classical Marxist framework would suggest that when social bases previously conducive to accumulation become fetters upon it, a 'crisis' ensues in which they are transformed, giving rise to new circumstances in which accumulation can proceed. On Fraser's own empirical account, this Marxist framework fits the facts better. As she puts it, in the crisis sparked off by the dragooning of women and children into industry in the early nineteenth century, 'capitalist societies found resources for managing this contradiction - in part by creating "the family" in its modern restricted form; by inventing new, intensified meanings of gender difference; and by modernizing male domination' (60). A period of "housewifization" followed, under which 'feminist opposition to male domination could easily be read as an endorsement of the economic forces that were ravaging working-class and peripheral societies' (63); this gave way to welfare and the "Fordist" family wage, forging 'a novel synthesis of marketization and social protection' (65). And when this regime faltered in turn, social protection was sacrificed, and women were massively recruited into the workforce, giving rise to the 'two-earner household', and a phase marked by 'a progressive neoliberalism, which celebrates "diversity," meritocracy, and "emancipation" while dismantling social protections and re-externalizing social reproduction' (69). In short, the current period is one of market-friendly neoliberal currents in all emancipatory movements; reduced real wages that '[raise] the number of hours of paid work per household needed to support a family and [prompt] a desperate scramble to transfer carework to others', often through importing migrant workers from poorer to richer countries; the offer of egg freezing as a fringe benefit by leading IT firms; and the double-cup hands-free breast pump. A multi-pronged assault on previous patterns of social reproduction, to be sure, but absolutely not a crisis for capital, which thrives on global labour markets shaped by burgeoning digital and related technologies, and a continuing division of labour that extends to the simplest tasks into which processes of production can be broken down. Symptomatically, Fraser declines to say in her conclusion to the chapter how things will develop from this point on. But on her own evidence, the current situation, far from being a crisis for capitalism, is one that suits it in every respect. And if we add evidence that Fraser does not consider - the increasing prevalence of childlessness, the shift in advanced countries generally from teens/early twenties to mid-thirties for the birth of the first (and often only) child, the dwindling significance of "nuclear" families, the shift to single-member or shared households, and the massive commodification of provisioning via ready meals and takeaways, the latter now produced on an industrial scale and delivered by a range of web-based services - this conclusion is further reinforced (Cammack, 2020).
The same cannot be said, of course, for ecology and climate change. Global warming may well bring about a terminal crisis for capital as well as for the rest of us. But here Fraser ducks the argument. Having dubbed the previous age the age of fossil fuel and the automobile (99-101), she suggests that 'we can't know for sure whether capitalism has any more tricks up its enormously inventive sleeve that could stave off global warming for a while; nor if so, for how long' (107). She refers in passing to a 'transition to renewable energy', but makes no attempt to assess its character or viability, or to explore the extent to which it might be entirely dominated by capitalist interests, or potentially subjected to broader social goals or democratic oversight. All kinds of considerations come into play here, and this is not the place to consider them at length. But the transition to renewable energy is real, and significant. It is currently dominated by scientific and technological fixes in which capital is taking the lead (with, for example, oil companies deploying their massive resources to invest heavily in non-fossil fuels). But capitalists will happily make money from whatever, not exclusively from products that destroy the planet. So, for example, the dramatic shift under way from the internal combustion engine to electric power has to be evaluated critically, not simply ignored (Fraser does not mention it), as do advances in wind-power and solar technology that offer benefits to far wider communities than that of financial capital (especially in the global South, and more so as small-scale solar units and improved storage advance). Beyond this, the potential role for the state has to be critically addressed, starting today with initiatives currently under way in the United States. Finally, any progressive platform has to have a worked-out position on the use of nuclear energy for power generation and on overall targets for energy use - not only in terms of the science, but also in relation to working-class and global South hostility to a uniform policy of reduced consumption or no growth. This is not to say that the answers are easy or that there is nothing to worry about (I think that the odds are we shall destroy the planet sooner or later, one way or another). But without consideration of any of these things, Fraser's proposed 'eco-socialism' is not for grown-ups.
After this, the chapter on politics suggests that democracy is in crisis, and that its woes are 'part of the general crisis of contemporary financialized capitalism': 'not just this form, but every form of capitalism harbors a contradiction that inclines it to political crisis' (117). Specifically, current political impasses are grounded in the contradiction 'between the imperatives of capital accumulation and the maintenance of the public powers on which accumulation also relies': 'legitimate, efficacious public power is a condition of possibility for sustained capital accumulation; yet capital's drive to endless accumulation tends over time to destabilize the very public powers on which it depends' (119). Again, though, the shifts in political regime described as accompanying the transitions to liberal-colonial, state-managed and financialized capitalism seem to benefit capital every time, for all the crises that surround them. And true to form, financialized capitalism has 'remade the economy/polity relation yet again' (127), as central banks and financial institutions replace states as the arbiters of an increasingly globalised economy, with debt as their weapon of choice; and the 'global financial crisis,' in turn, 'solidified the hold of private creditors over public power' (130). As it happens, this analysis is both over-stated and under-specified. It places far too much emphasis on debt, while taking far too little account of concerted efforts, by states and international organisations, to weaken workers' rights by reforming labour law, and to tweak social protection regimes further in order to force 'unemployed' or 'under-employed' individuals into an increasingly precarious labour market. In the end, anyway, Fraser notes the capacity of political systems to continue to produce 'progressive' alternatives that appear to legitimate but don't threaten the system, and seems to concede that this may continue for the foreseeable future (138-9).
From this point, she embarks on the hazardous task of defining an agenda for socialism without having engaged in any detailed analysis of the relationship between capital and labour in the contemporary global economy, as sketched out briefly immediately above. Hamlet, that is, without the prince. After token reference to the need to overcome 'capital's exploitation of wage labor' (142), not explored further, attention switches to the 'enlarged' or 'expanded' view of capitalism as an institutionalised societal order (143-50). The programme outlined revolves around abstract general principles, but is very weak on specific measures that will challenge the present reality of competitive global labor markets that increasingly shape the choices individuals, households, families and communities everywhere make in their efforts to survive from day to day; and the brief, scattergun account of COVID-19 that rounds off the volume confirms that what we have here is a heartfelt polemic, but one with serious analytical flaws.
References
Cammack, Paul. 2020. Marx on social reproduction, Historical Materialism, 28, 2, 76-106.
Foster, John Bellamy. 1999. Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundations for Environmental Sociology, American Journal of Sociology, 105, 2, 366-405.