Cannibal Capitalism Quotes

“An economic system defined by private property, the accumulation of “self”-expanding value, the market allocation of social surplus and of major inputs to commodity production, including (doubly) free labor, is rendered possible by four crucial background conditions, concerned, respectively, with social reproduction, the earth’s ecology, political power, and ongoing infusions of wealth expropriated from racialized peoples.”
― Nancy Fraser, Cannibal Capitalism: How our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet—and What We Can Do About It

“both those “exes” contribute to accumulation, but they do so in different ways. Exploitation transfers value to capital under the guise of a free contractual exchange: in return for the use of their labor power, workers receive wages that (are supposed to) cover their costs of living; while capital appropriates their “surplus labor time,” it (supposedly) pays at least for their “necessary labor time.” In expropriation, by contrast, capitalists dispense with all such niceties in favor of brute confiscation of others’ assets, for which they pay little or nothing; by funneling commandeered labor, land, minerals, and/or energy into their firms’ operations, they lower their production costs and raise their profits. Thus, far from excluding one another, expropriation and exploitation work hand in hand. Doubly free wage laborers transform looted “raw materials” on machines powered by confiscated sources of energy. Their wages are kept low by the availability of food grown on stolen lands by indebted peons and of consumer goods produced in sweatshops by unfree or dependent “others,” whose own reproduction costs are not fully remunerated. Expropriation thus underlies exploitation and makes it profitable. Far from being confined to the system’s beginnings, it is a built-in feature of capitalist society, as constitutive and structurally grounded as exploitation.”
― Nancy Fraser, Cannibal Capitalism: How our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet—and What We Can Do About It