American philosopher Nancy Fraser has issued a new gospel for the ubiquitous Left, “Cannibal Capitalism: How our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planetand What We Can Do About It ” (Publisher Verso), where the free market economy system is presented as an insatiable source of ensuring profits for a small portion of successful entrepreneurs. In this effort, the unrestrained capitalists devour everything in their path, disregarding the wider society and their fellow human beings who suffer unjustly. So there is widespread exploitation, according to the Marxist saying, of those who produce for the benefit of the few capitalists.
The modern “dimension of exploitation” as it emerges from the combination of private property, the commodification of free labor power, self-expanding value and the decisive role of the market” dominates. Everywhere the few exploit the many, endlessly profiting from their labor. So Fraser’s book would hardly fail in the circles of the left-wing intelligentsia.
But there are issues, if we focus on its economic scheme, that the author’s conceptual structure does not seem to take into account. How can e.g. the cannibalistic exploitation argument to work in the context of financial capitalism. Of a system of economic relations where profits, often ill-considered, come from individual transactions that exchange intangible values. Who then exploits whom and how? Stock market capitalism escapes the classical Marxian scheme because it is not defined by the commitment of wage labor.
But there is also a much more serious and deeper element. Which brings to mind Aesop’s famous story about the cicada and the ant. Is the cicada, who has been working hard accumulating wealth and amassing financial surpluses, “exploiting” the cicada, who has been idle all this time living off public benefits, support measures and other types of interventions from above? And why is she taking advantage of him? Because she offers him a job in a business he built with the funds he collected from his savings? In other words, doesn’t the employer have the right to expect to secure a profit from the utilization of the capital wealth he leaves at the disposal of his employees?
In a practical question the theory of exploitation ends up upside down, feet up. When the capitalist spends on the establishment of a business, on equipment and on the hiring of workers, who are paid for months without even producing the slightest product, who is exploiting whom?
