ON NANCY FRASER'S CANNIBAL CAPITALISM AND THE POSSIBILITY OF A NEW ALLIANCE

The leading theme Fraser develops in her interesting and challenging book is that anticapitalism, feminism, anti-racism, environmentalism and so forth are imbricated struggles, and that we cannot be anti-capitalist without being at the same feminist, anti-racist, anti-imperialist, environmentalist, and radically democratic; and conversely that we cannot be feminist, environmentalist, anti-racist, and radically democratic without being at the same time anticapitalist. She therefore envisages the need for an alliance able to see how much the intertwining of different axes of domination, exploitation, and expropriation sustain capitalism. The only way to challenge capitalism (in the wider understanding she proposes) seems to be an alliance which will be able to use capitalism's own contradictions and the crises it inevitably causes (which are not separate crises but different aspects of a single crisis) for its own emancipatory aims. While I do agree with this major point Fraser makes, what I find more problematic, or at least in need of further clarification, is the idea of a single and non fragmented emancipatory counterhegemonic (and socialist) project which would encompass and coordinate the struggles of a multiplicity of social movements, political parties, unions, and so forth. In the paper I will lay out some of my doubts in this regard. The first relates to the way in which we might think of this alliance and its aims. The second concerns the identification of the grounds upon which we think the common struggle should be taken forward. Or, put differently, how we might understand the political struggle Fraser proposes.