Nancy Fraser

What must be reinvented, then, is the relation of production to reproduction, of private to public power, of human society to nonhuman nature. If this sounds like a tall order, it’s our best hope. Only by thinking big can we give ourselves a fighting chance to vanquish cannibal capitalism’s relentless drive to eat us whole.

And in this new world, where money is a primary medium of power, the fact of its being unpaid or underpaid seals the matter: those who do this work are structurally subordinate to those who earn cash wages in “production,” even as their “reproductive” work also supplies necessary preconditions for wage labor.

Truth be told, it’s a rare type of crisis, in which multiple bouts of gluttony have converged. What we face, thanks to decades of financialization, is not “only” a crisis of rampaging inequality and low-waged precarious work; nor “merely” one of care or social reproduction; nor “just” a crisis of migration and racialized violence. Neither is it “simply” an ecological crisis in which a heating planet disgorges lethal plagues, nor “only” a political crisis featuring hollowed-out infrastructure, ramped-up militarism, and a proliferation of strongmen. Oh no, it’s something worse: a general crisis of the entire societal order in which all those calamities converge, exacerbating one another and threatening to swallow us whole.