from the US to India to Hungary authoritarian movements are rising in popularity across the globe but why do these movements gain Traction in the first place and do we need a fundamental restructuring of society this week on upfront I'll ask those questions to Nancy Frasier professor of philosophy and politics at the new school Nancy Fraser thank you so much for joining us on up front thank you so much I'm really happy to be here you talk about how the world is facing multiple crises crisis that can't be understood if we look at them as uh
separate or distinct in fact you said uh it can't just be a coincidence that the planet is burning up at the same time that police are murdering black men and women in the streets at the same time that people are running from job to job this is not a coincidence uh in this present moment what are are the threats that we face and how are they connected yeah so I I think of this as a general crisis of the whole social order of the whole civilization if you like in other words as opposed to a
sectoral crisis like an economic crisis or a political crisis those things are part of the current mix but there are others as well a crisis of social reproduction or of care and of family life a crisis of uh racial oppression and Injustice and Imperial oppression uh a crisis of democracy a crisis of ecology the these are all happening at the same time and that's what makes it a general crisis and then the next question is are they separate or are they all interconnected and traceable to one and the same social system and I believe that
that second view is the correct view there is one social system that is very deeply irrational and perverse in many ways and that is generating non-accidentally for systemic reasons an ecological crisis at the same time as a financial crisis a crisis of livelihood a crisis of political Rule and geopolitical hegemony this is a very dangerous moment crises like these are quite rare historically they don't come along every day we may have had three or four in the modern history of capitalism by the way that I just gave it away from capitalism is the social system
I was going I was going to do the drum roll I was going to say uh would it be too simplistic to say that the single source of all of these multiple crises is capitalism I don't think so I I think that it is however everything depends on what we mean by capitalism usually people think of that as an economic system yeah and then it if you take that view then it seems like well you know then then you're assuming the economy drives everything and you get an economic determinism and that's problematic I think that
capitalism is the whole social order and that part of what goes on here is that it separates apparently the economy from the political system from nature from family life and the social reprodu side of things from geopolitics the the problem is the economy is allowed to prey on all of those things it's allowed to devour care work it's allowed to devour political capacities it's allowed to devour nature in fact more than allowed the system incentivizes large investors and mega corporations to help themselves to all of those sources of of wealth and energy and so on
uh to to help themselves and it gives them no responsibility zero responsibility to repair what they damage and to replenish what they take that's what I mean by perverse it's a very perverse system and that explains the title of your latest book which is called cannibal capitalism how our system is devouring democracy care and the planet and what we can do about it but the term cannibal I thought was a provocative term I mean it has a long history a long racist history uh European Colonial Powers use that term uh to degrade and to dehumanize
uh populations that they subjugated uh I'm thinking specifically about the black African populations you seem to be using the term differently though uh you're not using it to denigrate you're using it at least not the vulnerable you're using it to critique the capitalist class why that term it's exactly to turn the tables and say you want to talk about cannibals who are the real cannibals it's the the large investers the mega corporations and and all of the their political flunkies who who do their bidding they are basically sucking dry the wealth Health energies and capacities
of working people all over the globe so um we we the working people are being cannibalized by the capitalist class if you like so I'm giving you a quasi Marxist thing except but I'm expanding what I mean by capitalism to take into account the relation between capital and nature capital and Care work and family life capital and politics both at the domestic National level and at the geopolitical level um it's not just just an economic system it's it's a system that puts all those other things at the mercy of powerful economic say that let's drill
down on the political part for a second there are viewers who are going to say if you have a democracy all the people have to do is vote against that vote against the Elon musification of the world uh vote against the idea that corporations don't pay enough taxes vote against the idea that um you know that the wealthy won't have to pay Capital Gains all of the things that make it harder for everyday people if everybody has a vote why can't they just make different choices yeah this is a great Paradox because I think everyone
expected when universal suffrage was introduced that something like that would happen and it to be fair there have been periods the Social Democratic New Deal era and so on where something a bit better happened because of the the votes but um the problem is the the another aspect of the political system the political crisis Has Two Faces it has that governance problem and then it has what we could call the hegemony problem the problem of of consciousness of common sense in in in the you know the the sort of worldviews that people bring through which
they interpret what's happening well you know uh and and everybody watching this knows that we've had this um amazing uh uh defection from what used to be the ruling common sense in the world the the the neoliberal establishment parties this huge Rebellion uh which had some more emancipatory leftish currence at one point but we have to admit is now dominated by various forms of right-wing rebellion and populism which are anything but emancipatory so um these these people are angry they they are reacting to to the fact that government is not working for them that their
jobs don't pay enough that they don't have stable work that they they they don't have time to to sort of raise their children in the way they want to and so on they're reacting to all of that but with a very incorrect diagnosis of what the problem is let's talk about the diagnosis right um people as you're pointing out are saying look the government's not working our problems are not being solved by the systems in place by the politicians in place Etc and then they make choices whether it's in Italy whether it's in Hungary whether
it's in India whether it's right here in the United States they make choices toward uh right-wing authoritarian models why do they make those choices why are those compelling choices to people well I think a lot of it now here I think I have have to um double down a little bit on the United States because I know so much more about fair enough I think that um with the exception u in 2016 of the the attempt to build uh the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democrat with the exception of that they have had no alternative
yeah there is no counternarrative that is saying the kinds of things that we are saying here what the the the narrative is that uh the problem problem is the the Mexican rapists the Muslims the trans people uh etc etc the uh undocumented immigrants um so the Deep State wokeism here's a whole elaborate account of what the problem is and people buy it however illogical it is not everyone but a a substantial segment of the electorate in the US has bought this story and um where is the counter story that and and the problem is that
the dominant wing of the democratic party has now for three election Cycles done the exact same horrible thing which has been to not offer say you guys are right there is a serious problem there's a serious crisis but here's the real story about what causes it and what we have to do no instead of that it's oh look what Trump just said look what Trump just did I think a big part part of the problem is a lack of alternative and then you would have to actually also figure in the sort of Charisma of a
figure like Trump or Modi or you know a lot of these people actually sort of you know they they they radiate a kind of um not only authenticity but um you know that that they're going to really do something they're going to fight for you how does the left not just the Liberals but the actual left Mount uh a substantive response or build an alternative to what we have right now well um basically I don't know that we even have anything we could actually call the left what we have is a um an impressive but
uncoordinated array of right democratizing and emancipatory or potentially emancipatory social movements and struggles including Palestine solidarity including uh me too including movement for black lives uh including certain uh strands of the radical ecology movement and so on so forth and and some interesting and important efforts to revive trade unionism organizing the unorganized and so on these are from my to my way of thinking these are the potential building blocks of something that we could call a historic or hegemonic block the kind of broad political force that could in theory uh present itself as a credible
alternative to the liberal NE and liberal neoliberal wing of the democratic party and the one hand and to Maga and all of its counterparts around the world on the other um but for that to happen and this is what I was trying to get at in my book The the these different potential constituent elements of a of this kind of a of a force would have to begin to understand that it is again that one and the same social system that is at the root what I'm been trying to do is connect the dots and
and say to people if we could all understand the way in which we are connected in this perverse way through this predatory social system then we could we would have a different sense of who our real allies are and who our real enemies are because some of these social movements have been co-opted by the liberal neoliberal progressives yeah let's look at some examples of that because you you you connect some of those dots for us quite masterfully I think you give an example of how capitalism has historic ially exploited unpaid care work uh hous work
uh child rearing Elder Care uh in in the 1980s when women were encouraged to join the workforce care work was outsourced often to migrant workers from poorer countries the result was what you call a care crunch what does that mean can you explain what a care crunch is yeah um several things are going on at once and it's the convergence that is that makes the crunch on the one hand the old um Family wage ideal that a mail worker should be paid a salary large enough to support the whole family so that the wife can
be a full-time housekeeper and and mother and and and care provider that uh is dead in the water that's part of this neoliberal attack on the unions the Outsourcing of higher paid manufacturing jobs the introduction of low wage precarious service work a whole different economy from the ort of uh right 40s 50s and so on so on so people households have to work more hours in at paid work in order to maintain the same standard of living second thing cut back on public social services that's also part of neoliberalization okay so these two things are
coming together that means much a real time crunch people uh don't they can't can't afford their their their wages are too low they can't afford child care to pay for himself the public uh Head Start and kindergartens and all of this stuff is being cut and uh and they don't have time to do it themselves meanwhile you have something else going on you have the educated more prosperous professional managerial class of women becoming doctors lawyers corporate EX very demanding long hours work and they can afford to hire people to pick up the slack so where
we used to mainly attract migrants to do agricultural labor and um well we still have a and restaurant work and so on now uh lots of Migrant labor is doing domestic work either in for-profit institutions like uh old homes or uh rehab centers and and so on um or um in private homes there's a way that this is being presented to the world not as there's an exploitation of Labor from the global South it's look at this new generation and class of women who can now have it all who can now be corporate CEOs who
don't have to be bound to the to the domestic sphere they are leaning in and and this is called feminism in many ways exactly um but there's a connection between that and what's happening in capitalism totally it's totally connected you don't have the quote unquote liberation of the of the global North professional managerial class woman without this exploitation or expropriation of Migrant women of color from the global South absolutely and you give an example of companies that now offer egg freezing uh to their childbearing employees now many see this again is something that's liberating that
someone can now choose to have children later in life if they want to but you see the fact that it's become commonly offered by big corporate firms as a strategy as a way of saying wait and have your kids in your 40s your 50s hey even maybe your 60s devote all of your high energy productive years right to us right that that's a very different way of thinking about this yeah look that that's that is a um a symptom of this care crunch that that that uh women feel that they can't afford to have kids
in the way at the ages that people used to and they have to go to these technological extremes the other example I gave is um mechanical pumping of breast milk so that you can work uh and you know still so-called breastfeed your child of course if if that's really breastfeeding I don't know but in any case um this we're we are always this is the us we're always going for technological fixes to problems that really require a root and Branch transformation of the underpinnings of the whole social system you also talk about how capitalism usually
relies on the pillaging of the earth which has led to environmental degradation in La just recently they've had wildfires that have killed at least 29 people not to mention 2024 was the warmest year uh one record and over the past few years the world has seen catastrophic floods in Spain extreme heat waves in India typhoons across across East Asia uh in light of this you have stated that in order to save the planet we need an ecopolitics that is anti- capitalist you call it I believe ecosocialism uh how do we get there well how we
get there that's uh a very complicated issue but I just want to say that I do believe that um it is this predatory relation to Nature that is built into capitalism that is so intrinsic to capitalism that nature is just there for extraction extraction exactly again as I said before no responsibility to replenish or repair but but what would they look like differently in a socialist context I mean you still need to extract oils and and and gas uh and uh minerals for just to power devices we have in society I mean yeah it is
in a different mode of production right so I I I mean this is again a really interesting but complicated question um the thing is that in capitalism the incentive to trash nature is hardwired in socialism it is not hardwired although really existing socialist countries followed the sort of fossil path trying to play catchup and so on they did plenty of damage I'm not saying they don't do damage but that that system doesn't require it in the same way that capitalism does so um I I mean look the answer uh uh is is is to deosil
we have to uh transition and rather quickly to Renewables especially solar and and wind and water um we we we can't keep with the the oil the natural gas the fracking and all of that one has to build this broad kind of political Coalition that I was talking about before if we can connect the dots um and make that movement anti- capitalist it it will at the same time be green anti-racist pro-union and pro worker Pro people as opposed to profits uh um and and green look what what the power we are up against is
is uh is enormous you take all the musks and and and all the uh the uh extractive energy Industries and and the automobile manufact you take all of that this is a the the banks uh Silicon Valley this is a a huge mass of power you cannot you cannot win with them without a huge counterpower we need a very big Coalition but we need the right kind of Coalition it has to correctly identify what needs to be changed and my argument is that none of these very uh urgent but different problems that people are reacting
to can be solved unless we disable this Dynamic of Limitless accumulation of wealth for Capital that takes me predation how optimistic are you that we'll see a post capitalist Society emerge I go through Cycles I I mean um a few years ago I was more optimistic than I am now um I have watched uh around 2016 the emergence well even with occupy going back to 2011 and and uh the Arab Spring and so on I have watched movements that I thought had tremendous emancipatory potential um uh you know sort of Peter out or you know
not achieve their their goals and be hijacked and so on um even in um countries that like Spain and and Greece that tried to turn the the Occupy type movements into political parties like Serita and podos they've P petered out or or been bought off or or whatever so this this moment is you know we're sitting here after the uh the second uh electoral uh victory of trump um with no decent alternative that which is infuriates me really infuriates me but I don't think we should be completely swayed by the sort of mood of the
moment um things have ups and downs we have to believe that there will be uh you know um powerful uh movements for something better I I have to say that in this country I was very heartened with the the the depth and and commitment of the Palestine solidarity movements that developed and it has been one of the worst experiences of my life to watch that crack down that that that vicious crushing of that movement um so that's that's gives me tremendous uh sorrow and and and anger both um but I let's go back to my
one of the many often quoted lines from Antonio grami the great right Italian uh communist Marxist thinker uh right pessimism of the intellect optimism of of the will yeah this is important pessimism of the intellect optimism well because right now there's a lot to be pessimistic about if you think but we we have to somehow find that courage to yeah Nancy Frasier thank you so much for joining me in up front thank you pleasure to be with you
