A critical eye on Nancy Fraser

At a discussion on Nancy Fraser’s Cannibal Capitalism as part of the ongoing South London Socialist Feminist Reading Group, we reached very different conclusions to Stuart Jordan’s review for Solidarity 680. We thought it would be worth highlighting the key disagreements to open up some discussion.

Fraser is right that capitalism is structurally entangled with questions of racial injustice, crises of social reproduction, and ecological disaster. There is a tendency within left circles to say that these things are important for the “health” of our movement; that the left must be anti-racist, feminist, and so forth because these things are simply “right”. This evades exploring the actual relationship between these various phenomena, and Fraser is right that displaying the structural interaction between racism, sexism, climate collapse and the capitalist mode of production is an important task for the modern left. However, Fraser’s actual analysis of most questions has major flaws.

Perhaps the most glaring example is the chapter on “expropriation”. Fraser argues that the Marxist movement has focused on wage exploitation at the expense of analysing expropriation: brute capture and enslavement that continues alongside the wage relationship, not just the initial “primitive accumulation” capitalism required to get going. This creates a tiered system that also acts as a “colour line” in global politics (richer nations get waged labour, poorer ones are simply subject to “expropriation”), which is the structural basis of modern imperialism and racism.

This is wrong in almost every aspect. The relationship between wage-slavery and enslavement, the nature of imperialism, and the role of accumulation and expropriation, have been central topics to the history of the Marxist movement. She is wrong that these practices split along “colour lines”, and that “expropriation” (a term she defines incredibly vaguely) is the primary cause of modern-day racism. By expanding “expropriation” to include unwaged housework and socially reproductive labour, as well as seemingly incorporating all forms of individual and national debt, the term loses almost any meaning.

Social reproduction is Fraser’s strongest topic: her chapter tracing the history of the move from a “family wage” to the “double earner” family, and the growth of American middle-class families employing houseworkers from poorer countries, pushing the burden of unremunerated labour further down the “food chain”, is genuinely insightful. She does, however, have a tendency to insist that Marxists haven’t considered these questions before, which is untrue, and her book would benefit from discussing those prior debates.

This links to Fraser’s insistence that Marxism is an overly “economistic” mode of thinking, which blinds Marxists to other forms of social crisis. Perhaps the central claim of Marx’s late work, Capital in particular, is that the primary failure of bourgeois economics is its inability to see economic relations as social ones. (For an example of Social Reproduction Theory being applied in a manner that uses Marxism more fruitfully, I would recommend Tithi Bhattacharya’s articleHow Not to Skip Class, another former text discussed in the Socialist Feminist Reading Group). The focus on the working class is not because Marx was obsessed with “economics”, but because he saw the class as the structural “weak point” of the capitalist system, with a collective power in the workplace that other groups lack.

Fraser’s book is not particularly interested in providing practical answers or suggestions for the current movement. Prescriptions at the end of each chapter are kept very vague, shying away from recommending engaging with any particular political structures, movements or activities. This is a shame: for a book addressing the modern feminist, anti-racist and ecological movements, it would be useful to look at the political forms those movements have taken. In particular, an analysis of modern NGO politics and the obstacles that stop activists fighting for systemic changes through NGO structures would have made Cannibal Capitalism a much more useful text. This could also allow for an analysis of when, why and how the labour movement has (or hasn’t) engaged with questions of race, gender and ecological crises.

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The expropriation/exploitation distinction is not vague

Michael Baker asserts that Nancy Fraser defines the term expropriation “extremely vaguely” and in a way that is so expansive that “it loses all meaning”. I think this is simply Michael’s own misunderstanding. Frazer is trying to explain something important about a tendency in capitalist society towards consuming and laying waste to human and extra human nature. I think she does that elegantly and convincingly based on Luxemburg’s thoughts on primitive accumulation and Marx analysis the commodity form.

Whatever else Michael might think about Frazer’s book, I think it is important to get this right. It has been a common belief among many Marxists that Marx analysis of the commodity form, the contradiction between value and use-value, is central to any revolutionary praxis. In 1939 for instance, when the world was slipping into chaos of the Second World War Trotsky wrote:
“Whoever has not reasoned out in the spirit of Marx, in the footsteps of Marx, the essential nature of the commodity as the basic cell of the capitalist organism, will prove to be forever incapable of scientifically comprehending the most important and most acute manifestations of the epoch.”

Frazer’s explanation of the twin processes of capital accumulation is nothing new but is something that has been overlooked by the dominant currents of 20th century Marxism. Fraser approaches this question via Rosa Luxemburg. I’ll quote Luxemburg at length:

“[C]apitalist production, by its very nature, cannot be restricted to such means of production as are produced by capitalist methods. Cheap elements of constant capital are essential to the individual capitalist who strives to increase his rate of profit. In addition, the very condition of continuous improvements in labour productivity as the most important method of increasing the rate of surplus value, is unrestricted utilisation of all substances and facilities afforded by nature and soil. To tolerate any restriction in this respect would be contrary to the very essence of capital, its whole mode of existence. After many centuries of development, the capitalist mode of production still constitutes only a fragment of total world production. Even in the small Continent of Europe, where it now chiefly prevails, it has not yet succeeded in dominating entire branches of production, such as peasant agriculture and the independent handicrafts; the same holds true, further, for large parts of North America and for a number of regions in the other continents. In general, capitalist production has hitherto been confined mainly to the countries in the temperate zone, whilst it made comparatively little progress in the East, for instance, and the South. Thus, if it were dependent exclusively on elements of production obtainable within such narrow limits, its present level and indeed its development in general would have been impossible. From the very beginning, the forms and laws of capitalist production aim to comprise the entire globe as a store of productive forces. Capital, impelled to appropriate productive forces for purposes of exploitation, ransacks the whole world, it procures its means of production from all corners of the earth, seizing them, if necessary by force, from all levels of civilisation and from all forms of society. The problem of the material elements of capitalist accumulation, far from being solved by the material form of the surplus value that has been produced, takes on quite a different aspect. It becomes necessary for capital progressively to dispose ever more fully of the whole globe, to acquire an unlimited choice of means of production, with regard to both quality and quantity, so as to find productive employment for the surplus value it has realised. The process of accumulation, elastic and spasmodic as it is, requires inevitably free access to ever new areas of raw materials in case of need, both when imports from old sources fail or when social demand suddenly increases.” (337-8 Accumulation of Capital)

Far from being “extremely vague” Frazer’s distinction between exploitation and expropriation is extremely precise. Wealth (ie use-values) are produced by both capitalist and non-capitalist modes of production. Capitalist production involves the exploitation of wage labour. Non-capitalist production is everything that produces wealth outside of the wage labour relationship including both unpaid human work (slavery, prison labour, housework) and what Marx called the “productions of Nature” (biological and mineral wealth found in nature). Both processes contribute to the accumulation of capital. Luxemburg again:

“[C]apitalist accumulation as a whole, as an actual historical process, has two different aspects. One concerns the commodity market and the place where surplus value is produced - the factory, the mine, the agricultural estate. Regarded in this light, accumulation is a purely economic process, with its most important phase a transaction between capitalist and wage labourer. In both its phases it is confined to the exchange of equivalents and remains within the limits of commodity exchange. Here, in form at any rate, peace, property and equality prevail, and the keen dialectics of scientific analysis were required to reveal how the right of ownership changes in the course of accumulation into appropriation of other people's property, how commodity exchange turns into exploitation and equality becomes class-rule.

The other aspect of the accumulation of capital concerns the relations between capitalism and the non-capitalist modes of production which start making their appearance on the international stage. Its predominant methods are colonial policy, an international loan system-a policy of spheres of interest--and war. Force, fraud, oppression, looting are openly displayed without any attempt at concealment, and it requires an effort to discover within this tangle of political violence and contests of power the stern laws of the economic process.

…The conditions for the reproduction of capital provide the organic link between these two aspects of the accumulation of capital.

The historical career of capitalism can only be appreciated by taking them together. ‘Sweating blood and filth with every pore from head to toe' characterises not only the birth of capital but also its progress in the world at every step, and thus capitalism prepares its own downfall under ever more violent contortions and convulsions. (p432-3, Accumulation of Capital)

Luxemburg’s focus is on the main form of expropriation she observed in her day: colonialism. But I think Frazer does a good job in explaining how capitalism develops new regimes of accumulation in response to struggle. The days of high colonialism are long behind us but capitalism’s expropriation of the free gifts of nature along the ever-growing frontier of primary production, has continued. Since capitalism’s earliest days, the most accessible natural resources are exhausted and new resources are sought out in ever more inaccessible parts of the world.

Luxemburg is sharp on emphasising that primitive accumulation is not restricted to the genesis of capitalism but is a necessary background condition for capitalism in its full maturity (337, Accumulation of Capital). I think she "bends the stick" too far in posing this view sharply against Marx view. If there is a dispute here I think it is purely semantic. The core of Luxemburg’s analysis, that capital must constantly expropriate wealth produced by non-capitalist production processes, is rooted in Marx analysis of the commodity form.

In Capital volume 1, Marx explains "not an atom of matter enters into the objectivity of commodities as values" (p138, Capital vol. 1). "The commodity form, and the value-relation of the products of labour within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material relations arising out of this." (p165, Capital vol. 1). Under capitalism, "Use-values are produced...only because and in so far as they form the material substratum of exchange-value, are the bearers of exchange-value". (p293, Capital vol 1). The value of a commodity is measured only by the amount of socially necessary labour time it that went into producing it and so "as exchange-values, all commodities are merely definite quantities of congealed labour-time" (p130, Capital vol 1) and the use-values taken directly from nature are to the capitalist "provided by nature free of charge." (p.751, Capital vol 1).

This understanding of the commodity form is the foundation of the Marxist ecological critique of capitalism. Capitalism's labour time-based value system creates "an immanent drive, and a constant tendency, towards increasing the productivity of labour, in order to cheapen commodities, and by cheapening commodities, to cheapen the worker himself" (p436, Capital vol 1). In ecological terms “the growing productivity of labour is expressed precisely in proportion in which a larger quantity of raw materials absorbs a definite quantity of labour, hence in the increasing amount of raw material converted in say, one hour into products, or processed into commodities.” (p108, Capital vol 3). Capitalism is blind to material properties of natural resources whilst chasing ever faster turnover time, setting the social metabolism on a trajectory of permanent acceleration. The empirical evidence of this acceleration is found in the ubiquitous shape of material-flow graphs showing ever-rising resource use and waste production throughout capitalist history (see Growth, Smil, V.).

The “free gifts of nature" are products of biological (metabolic) and geological processes that take place on their own timescales. The natural metabolism, the biogeochemical movement that generates the biosphere, is a product of the sun, specifically the photosynthesising autotrophs (cyanobacteria, algae and plants) who convert light energy in biological life and chemical energy to feed the heterotroph bacteria, protoctists, animals and fungi. Engels notes: "Our earth itself allows of the existence of life on it only owning to the sun's heat, and the earth in turn finally radiates into space the sun's heat received, after it has converted a portion into other forms of motion." (p79, Dialectics of Nature). Most of the minerals we depend upon are also products of archaic biological metabolisms and hence stores of solar energy. In his penultimate letter to Marx, Engels notes: "the working individual is not only a stabiliser of present but also, and to a far greater extent, a squanderer of past, solar heat. As to what we have done in the way of squandering our reserves of energy, our coal, ore, forests, etc., you are better informed than I am." (Engels letters to Marx, 19th December 1882).

Capitalist time-pressure means that the material properties of natural resources are not valued for their worth to humanity or their ecological significance in the wider biosphere, but only to the extent these "free gifts of nature" can be exploited to reduce the amount of labour time expended to get the product to market. "Natural elements which go into production as agents without costing anything, whatever role they might play in production, do not go in as components of capital, but rather as a free natural power of capital; in fact a free natural productive power of labour, but one which on the basis of the capitalist mode of production presents itself as a productive power of capital, like every other productive power." (p879, Capital vol 3). The properties of material objects do not add to the value of a commodity but can enter in value-formation by increasing the productivity of labour. “The manufacturer who operates with the steam-engine…applies natural forces that cost him nothing but which make labour more productive, and, in so far as they cheapen the production of the means of subsistence the workers require, increase surplus value and hence profit; which are therefore just as much monopolised by capital as are the natural social forces of labour that arise from cooperation, division of labour etc. The manufacturer pays for the coal, but not the ability of water to change its aggregate state and transform into steam, nor for the elasticity of steam etc." (p782, Capital vol 3). Nor indeed, for the joules of chemical energy held within the coal. In this way the transhistorical role of human science to "discover the manifold uses of things" is exploited for the purposes of capitalism’s permanent material acceleration. "Like the increased exploitation of natural wealth resulting from the simple act of increasing the pressure under which labour power has to operate, science and technology give capital power of expansion which is independent of the given magnitude of the capital actually functioning." (p754, Capital vol 1)

In short, capitalist society based on wage labour and generalised commodity exchange is somewhat materially blind to both human suffering and the value of ecological sustainability. Material wealth is valued only in so far as it serves the needs of permanent material acceleration. Escalating ecological crisis is part of the deep structure of capitalism, inseparable from generalised commodity production.

I think that Michael has missed this big picture and what other criticisms he levels relate to peripheral or stylistic issues which hardly justify his claim that Fraser is "wrong on nearly every aspect".