The paper attempts to respond to the objections that have been formulated in reference to the book Cannibal Capitalism (Laterza, Roma-Bari 2023). Fraser Fraser starts from the assumption that capitalism harbors a structural basis not only for class exploitation, but also for male domination, for racial imperial domination, ecological plunder, political authoritarianism, and exploitation. It follows that if we were able to disable the capitalism’s cannibalizing logic we would have achieved a necessary but not sufficient condition for overcoming all of those injustices and irrationalities, including male domination. Above all a critical theory for our time should strive to develop a perspective that could, at least in principle, foster greater cooperation and coordination among social forces that are potentially emancipatory but actually dispersed. In Cannibal Capitalism the brunt of that burden falls on the concept of crisis. In her further reflection she explores another hypothesis, where the basis for cooperation would be a new, enlarged sense of working-class consciousness, premised on an expanded view of capitalist labor. Here an affective aspect enters the mix, as “labour” appears not only at the level of structure but also at that of identity. In addition to this, the author addresses other questions: the role of structural and symbolic violence within capitalist system and the imaginaries that can transcend it, the complicated relation between the processes of modern social differentiation and capitalism, the necessity to overcome the alternative between re formism and revolution, how to rethink the critique of alienation today, how to conceive of a feminism that is open to the practices and elaborations of the feminist movements of the global South.
