Understanding Cannibal Capitalism and Its Crises | Nancy Fraser

[00:00:00]joining us for the first time I believe Nancy Frazier she is a professor of political and social science at the new school for social research author of cannibal capitalism how our system is devouring democracy care and the planet and what we can do about it Nancy thanks so much for joining us thank you for having me happy to be here so all right let's let's start with um the argument that you're making that um that we are facing uh multiple crises um across our society and um and and how that um uh would lead to an expanded conception of capitalism exactly I I think we're in a a very rare moment historically of a severe crisis the sort of Crisis that historians would call a general crisis meaning it's not confined to one sector it's not only an economic crisis or only an ecological crisis or only a political crisis but it's all of that rolled into one so it's a crisis that is engulfing the whole social order now I think that what lies at the bottom of this crisis are some deep irrationalities that are hardwired into our social structure which is a capitalist social structure but familiar views of capitalism focus one-sidedly on its economic dimension and they would generally direct our attention to looking at the economic aspect of the crisis you're talking about a Marxist critique exactly Marxist or Social Democratic uh you know left-wing theories derived from Marx and so in softer or harder forms let's say um the problem is those theories have tended to be too economy focused they haven't been expanded to take in other crisis Tendencies other contradictory and perverse aspects of capitalism those which lead it periodically to ecological crises to social crises and to political crises so what my book does is try to develop a different and larger view of what capitalism is that shows how it is primed hardwired to generate not just periodic economic crises but General crises of the sort we're facing now which also include these other dimensions okay so let's talk about these uh other dimensions and um and and the in the crises that are contained there and then and then I just want to go a little bit deeper into um how these different sectors and and which make up this General crisis um how they essentially broadly constitute capitalism um but let's let's start with these the these various sectors I guess we could start with the economy um outline four is the crisis that we have in this economy well I would say overall um understood in the most human way which is the way we should be thinking about it it's a massive deterioration in the conditions of life that the overwhelming majority of people on the planet are facing either because because their livelihoods are imperiled because the work does not pay a living wage certainly not a wage on which you could support a family and so people are driven into debt and that creates a whole new wonderful set of profit opportunities for now not the manufacturers but for the Banking and Financial sector so we've had the offshoring of production to low-wage Regions we've had the weakening of unions which were the only institutions that you know in in our country managed to support the claims of working people for decent wages we've got the precarisization of work no more like lifelong secure jobs uh you know that you could build build a life with some predictability around jobs that can disappear in a Flash and that usually get replaced by even more insecure precarious and even less well-paid jobs so people are having to Moonlight they you have to Cobble together in income uh based on a whole set of different streams uh different family members contributing if you have a family with more than one adult and um you know it's it's kind of a a big hot mess for the majority of people who do not have independent sources of family wealth or property ownership and this is the case in the United States which has always thought of itself as a relatively wealthy country but think about the other parts of the world that you know have never thought of themselves as wealthy and that are equally uh suffering from being more or less expelled from the official circuits of economic exchange and production more and more people are thrust outside of all that without much hope of ever finding a way in it's from an economic point of view it's a mess okay and and let's uh let's talk about uh social reproduction and just you know um for for those who haven't who aren't familiar with the term uh um explain to us what social breed production is and and how in in um in this era where it's in crisis exactly I I know this technical term social reproduction will know what I'm talking about if I talk about a crisis of care or a care crunch uh we we hear a lot about family work imbalance and so on now um what I've just said uh about the crisis of work that all pertains to paid work but there's a whole nother fund of work that's absolutely essential in a capitalist society which is largely unpaid and that is the work of care or social reproduction that is the the the birthing the raising the socializing of of children the new generations of workers it's the replenishing and restoring of existing workers who have to be fed and cleaned and rested and so on in order to continue work it's care for the elderly for Community family and friends now that work has traditionally been done for the most part not exclusively but for the worst for the most part by women it's gendered work uh you know care that's a feminine thing supposedly in our way of thinking uh but um uh nowadays women have been drawn into the paid Workforce partly because of what I said before the destruction of the idea of a family wage in which a man let's say could earn enough to support the whole family without a working wife okay that kind of system is gone and instead women's wage work is essential both for the profit makers for the corporate sector which needs it and for the families who rely on that income well that means that the time the energy and so on that was required before for this contribution this essential contribution in care work is being siphoned off to the corporate sector to the profit sector and add to that that there's been pressure from investors uh to on States on governments to cut back social spending all this talk about the deficit and so on so we have the contraction of Social Services at just the moment when women have less time to devote to care work privately all of the state supports for care in the form of of Day Care Child Care Elder Care Health Care all of these things are under pressure it's a perfect storm of social reproductive crisis where is is the energy where is the time where is the the the the revenue uh that's going to support this gonna come from where do we see um the the implications I mean is that in we have um uh children that maybe are entering into um a school with more of a uh a vocabulary deficit or we're seeing people who are um uh uh you know having to go into nursing homes uh before maybe prematurely because there is no ability to care for them at home where where do we see where does this manifest itself in terms of like uh and certainly I mean I I understand the concept of the stress that's associated with it but where do we see where do we see those outcomes well frankly uh in a whole lot of ways I think even uh although this might I couldn't spell this out quickly I think even in decline in life expectancy actually in certain sectors of the population because of you know just being socially cut off let's say um not being touched even you know things like that but also just think about the institutional side of this look at what goes on in nursing homes in hospitals in schools huge class size in schools because we're not putting the money into that um I just had a friend who had a hip replacement who um at one of the Premier hospitals in New York City who actually spent the night on a gurney in a hallway because they didn't have a bed for him uh this kind of stuff is happening more and more um nurses have uh case loads that exceed their capacity to actually do their job this is all part of this crisis of care because care is not only done in in the private home or in the community but also in these institutions that require uh public support as well as private Investments of time and energy you write too that we're facing a crisis of the environment I think I mean I think that's hopefully people are you know it's self-explanatory I mean I think the hopefully that people understand that we're we you know one third of Pakistan was was underwater uh recently we've had uh massive drought for years uh in the west coast of this country uh we've seen it you know um uh we could see it everywhere I mean uh uh around the world well talk about the the crisis in in the context of politics um that we're that we're facing I think there are two uh dimensions of this uh I mean one is that a capitalist economy in order to function the way it's supposed to requires public Powers it requires public goods infrastructure roads Bridges tunnels and now as we know uh a broadband and uh we think if you've been talking about the care infrastructure uh which was discussed a while back in the Congress uh that this is uh it requires uh regulatory capacity right because you know capitalists uh need sometimes to be disciplined for their own good they would often put the The Thirst for short-term profit uh over a longer term sustainable economic system so it's kind of like Ulysses you have to tie them to the Mast so that they won't destroy uh their own uh profit system uh so in what I'm saying then is that um hang on a second I've sort of lost my thread here uh yeah so we have we have two aspects of of our crisis in politics regulatory capacity and uh and public good infrastructure at least there are other things too uh legitimacy credibility I mean look think about the Supreme Court now the possibility of its loss of legitimacy that so there's a tendency to hollow out the public powers that the system needs because corporations and investors don't want to pay for it they don't want to pay the taxes to that all of this requires to support it and they want to capture the Regulatory Agencies put their own lobbyists in there we know about the revolving door people who work in the public agencies and then leave and go right back to corporate jobs the ferry corporations they were supposed to be overseeing right so there's regulatory capture and there is uh essentially um the loss of legitimacy all of this means that we actually don't have of the public powers that we need to rein in corporate power and if we don't have that at the national level we certainly don't have it at the transnational and Global level because after all we have problems that can't be solved at the national level we have some problems that require larger public Powers Enviro climate change Public Health in an age of pandemic and so on and so forth so um and we don't have the public Powers there that the the the investors the mega corporations they know how to uh offshore and jurisdiction shop they find ways to escape the state powers that try to constrain them and out there beyond the states it's a no man's land where they can sort of do what they want so that's one aspect but there's also a second and this I would call to use another technical term the hegemonic dimension of Crisis meaning loss of legitimacy loss of credibility when governance doesn't work when people feel their governments can't solve their problems or won't solve their problems even if they could then they start to lose faith in the system and they start looking for Alternatives that's the situation where in now I think politically it's why the mainstream public parties have lost a lot of their support it's why people are gravitating to more radical even out of the box ways of thinking in some cases those out of the box ways of thinking are actually promising and could lead to a a what I would call a progressive or an emancipatory restructuring of the system which I'd be all in favor of but plenty of the Alternatives that people trying out today are really noxious and if you look internationally I think we're we're I mean as well as in this country there's a pretty pronounced Trend towards that that more noxious version of authoritarianism and um and revanchism that we're seeing across the the globe all right so those are the areas in which we're facing these crises and we should say that these crises are also from the perspective of the capitalist system there there are crises that we're we're not we don't we're not we're not observing these crises um as a critique of of capitalism as much as it is um as a it's a problem that even for capitalism itself uh we should say I mean that's the cannibalistic um uh um uh quality of this um it is um it's almost like Beyond cannibalism when you start when the snake starts eating its own tail on some level uh but what what is just let's just take this moment to sort of like um place where we are in terms of capitalism that has brought us to this this point because this is we are living in an era of of capitalism that is uh may have been sort of a natural uh progression of capitalism but we we place it in context and sort of like temporarily uh to get a notion of it and then as a way of also introducing the idea of of what happens next with capitalism or the different possibilities of what happens next right I mean I should it's all of the crisis forms that we've been discussing all of the aspects of Crisis are are happening in a way that is non-accidental they are happening not in spite of but because of the system's inherent Dynamics and structure and that's important that means that every form of capitalism will have some kind of a tendency to crisis now that doesn't mean that the crisis always become severe like at the present uh but it but the tendency is there and that brings me to your point about the history how do we understand what the present form of capitalism is in relation to past forms and I would say that this is more or less the fourth phase in the history of capitalism we had first of all a form of Mercantile capitalism in the 16th through 18th centuries that's the period in which uh European uh uh wealth went abroad and conquered the so-called new world and instituted slavery and so on and so forth then we got the rise of industrial capitalism in the 19th century and that's we now see with the benefit of hindsight that's the invention of the steam engine of mass production industry the beginning of fossil capitalism and hence the beginning of the greenhouse gas crisis that we're now living from then we got an attempt to correct that to tame the system in so-called Social Democratic or New Deal capitalism that comes in the in the interwar period in the United States and in the post-war period in much of Europe it and and by the way that coincides with decolonization and the attempt in the ex-colonial world to build what uh to to build developmental states that would also try to soften the hard edges of capitalism by using state power now that was until let's say the 1970s the you could it's been called the Golden Age the French call it the 30 glorious years of capitalism uh but uh basically that began unraveling in the 1970s as corporations staged what has now become a success successful revolt against the regulations against the softening efforts to use state power right to tame capitalism they revolted against that and essentially have given us neoliberal capitalism this is what neo-liberalism means and that has put those inherent crisis Tendencies always involved in capitalism that has put them on steroids it has brought that these contradictions to a fever pitch in every sector that we've talked about in Social reproduction in the political sector in the economic sector and and the ecological sector neoliberalism has sharpened capitalism's inherent contradictions to the to the breaking point and and that's where we are now and covid really highlights this right I mean uh like the failure or the inability for our institutions to actually rein in the beasts that is capitalism because transnationally we were unable to really effectively address covid without having someone like Bill Gates uh come in and essentially say well we're going to hoard this vaccine IP I mean in terms of an example that touches on all of those points that you do that you laid out there covet is is a great one unfortunately I think that's absolutely true I think you can see every strand of our current crisis all sort of converging in this pandemic moment that we've just lived through in our guests still living through first of all there's the ecological strand because at where did where did the covid virus come from uh it came from species being brought close to each other that had previously never connected so that the viruses that have been in the bats forever were able to LEAP to other species and then from them to us and what brought all these species into contact global warming and uh the destruction of rainforests and other forms of development in pursuit of profit right which which destroyed habitats and caused Mass species migrations so I think the ecological is very closely related to the epidemiological and we are going to see more epidemics and pandemics because of destruction of rainforest and because of ongoing greenhouse gas emissions and planetary heating that's going to happen okay but then there's the question of what are the resources that we have to deal with it and you're absolutely right the political side of this becomes important because if we had had robust Public Health infrastructure and robust transnational Health infrastructure and governance capacity we could have done a lot better than we did I think the result was going to be bad in any case but we could have done a hell of a lot better if we had had those resources but neoliberalism had hollowed out those resources had privatized much of our prior Public Health infrastructure and today the the majority of uh of capacity that we have available on the planet for health is in the hands of private profit-oriented corporations who care nothing about the public good who care about their profits and of course we know the scandal of Therapeutics and vaccines being unavailable to large parts of the globe even though that's going to hurt the wealthy regions who do have them as well in the long run we know that the irrationality is mind-boggling but then look at the social reproduction Dimension there that's there as well because what did we see in covet during lockdown uh uh how the whole sort of care thing got re-privatized into the world of family and how impossible it was for that to go on there uh given uh you know kids being trying to do remote schooling what a disaster that was people who were lucky enough to do remote work and not everyone was still having to multitask like crazy then the so-called essential workers who had to be out there on the front lines uh in in very unsafe conditions without the resources to refuse and demand safe conditions without unions to back them uh you know without labor rights or federal labor bureaucracy to support them uh so you know all of that the the care side of this uh was was a disaster as well and then um you know the other thing back to the economic I would say um you know capitalism Prides itself it's ideologues tell us that there's nothing like the market to tell you the true value of everything you know what whatever the market says that's what things are really valued as well this pandemic showed how false that idea is because we talked about essential work and we saw what work was essential to actually Keep Us Alive and more or less functioning in under pandemic conditions and yet we know that those workers doing that essential work were treated as totally disposable they were exposed to disease they were paid a pittance uh and um so there's a lesson here and that market labor markets do not actually right value things at their true worth we need other social mechanisms to ensure that everyone is justly compensated for what they contribute I think that there's a sense in which the coveted pandemic was a kind of textbook lesson in how irrational capitalism is as a social system but are we going to learn that lesson and do something about it ha that remains to be seen even in the classification of essential workers right one is essential to uh yes combating the pandemic nurses doctors Etc but there also was the classification of essential workers for and we just had an interview last week about this that we're lumped in with that which is just essential to keeping capitalism functioning in a way that that keeps the wheels churning and they were put on the front lines and yet deemed essential and there was a conflation of those two things and not clarity about who was essential to keeping like people alive and who was essential to keeping profits up you know um I think that's a really interesting point um I would add that um that the the Amazon warehouse Pickers the UPS drivers the hospital cleaners uh the grocery store clerks they were essential that they were also keeping the profits going but they were essential I mean how could the rest of us who were lucky enough to be locked down at home survive without those grocery deliveries and and so on and so forth they they were essential too but that was the lower end of the spectrum the Health Care Professionals were certainly essential the trained doctors nurses and so on but there's this other sort of more working class face the non-professional phase and those are the ones that I was saying are essential but are not really valued by capitalist labor markets they were treated as Expendable exactly right um so we have these uh crises and I should say that because I'm getting corrected uh by our chat man uh still on vacation yes exactly um but this and and we don't know whether what we're looking at is a um is developmental in terms of how these uh crises will impact capitalism versus epochle in that we're at the end of the line or maybe not I mean because capitalism has a a long history of sort of making um some changes and and heading into a new phase that addresses these or at least sort of I guess lets the air out of the tires as it were uh for a certain a period of time why is it important for us to understand capitalism beyond the uh Marxist beyond the the uh economic essential essentialism that we sometimes see in Marxism like why is it important for us to see all of these elements uh to be to be indicative of capitalism right um you know I think it's related to the first part of what you said uh what's what are the possible resolutions here one resolution would be a new form of capitalism hopefully Kinder gentler uh or or probably or possibly worse uh um another possible resolution is some kind of a post capitalist Society again could be a better one could be a very authoritarian nasty one I guess a third possibility is a slow uh unraveling and descent into war against of all against all and barbarism of some kind but let's let's hope we can avoid that the point is for any real significant change you need a broad set of social forces a political block in in which a lot of people who are not necessarily exactly in the same boat who don't have exactly the same priorities can nevertheless come together and form a political force that has enough power and enough vision to right to uh insist on a big societal transformation hopefully one for the good what that means is that we have to think about how to construct a political block that can Encompass a lot of different social movements a lot of different political orientations I'm talking now about the ones that that most of us would assume would be Progressive and potentially emancipatory that means overcoming the dispersal and fragmentation of the mobilizations that we now see black lives matter me too Sanders campaign etc etc and um my thought here is that by showing that the various problems that different groups of us experience which differ from one another all have roots in one and the same social system and it's not until we restructure that social system we transform that social system that will get to the root of any of this so my idea is that it's not about saying everyone should forget about the fact that their children are being murdered in the streets by police and jump on the ecological bandwagon or everyone should stop worrying about sexual assault and sexual harassment and start worrying about police violence all of these things are Urgent it's it's not about telling people ranking them that the economy is more important than climate or that climate is more important than care or whatever it's about showing that all of these problems as I just said can be traced to the Dynamics of one social system and that is capitalism and especially the current neoliberal form of capitalism and then on that basis forming a kind of anti-capitalist front we can be open about what exactly that will mean we want to replace it not everyone may share the exact same picture of what a post-capitalist world or even whether we're looking going to end up with Kinder gentler capitalism I'm skeptical of that option but I'm perfectly willing to be in Alliance with people who who still hope for that uh in other words uh what I'm saying is that by expanding our view of capitalism beyond the economic to take in these other dimensions of the crisis we have a better chance of constructing of the broad kind of Alliance the broad kind of political front that we need to do something about it okay and so if the idea is you know we're we are um by expanding our definition of capitalism and these uh multiple crises that we will find more allies essentially um what is the limiting principle I mean because you talk about you know and and should there be one as we go out and look for allies you talk about the different types of uh of populism or the the two types of populism sort of the left and the right uh and and the left having a um a binary notion of of of what we're dealing with in terms of populism and the right having a tripartite uh uh aversion and then also there the way that the left and the right Define their enemies is different is that will you walk us through those and is that the sort of the limiting principle is that where we know not this gives us the lines to know where we don't look for allies or is that or is it that we're trying to change the way that those who look at the tripartite version of populism adopt the binary but but walk us through those and then and then answer I don't need to put that all together a great question um uh I mean uh you know what I said before about the people losing faith in the established parties and and political leaders and so on look looking for the out of the box that's what has given us left populism versus the right right populism in the United States we can say Sanders versus Trump if we go back to 2016 which is when this all exploded um and yes I think that um uh if you think about what's the difference between those two some in some of their language overlapped right both of them talked about a rigged system and that was very interesting and and that word rigged is such a powerful word it really resonated with many many many people who had been feeling for a long time that you know that they were being sort of played for suckers in in our whole form of life here um okay um what's the difference though uh basically I think that the if we if we talk about uh trumpism for example right wing populism I think that their picture of society is that there are the good Real Americans The Virtuous people that are caught between two blood-sucking enemies right the The Wealthy by Coastal Elites at the top and the immigrants the Mexicans the blacks the Jews you know the scapegoats du jour all of them and those people are are sucking you know uh preying on The Virtuous people caught in the middle that's their map of what uh how society looks three levels I think left-wing populism is much simpler I think it only has two levels it has the elites uh or the capitalist class or whatever language you want to use uh the corporate class let's say the one percent the one percent yeah perfect perfect and uh and then it has basically the people is understood much more broadly because many many people are preyed upon by that one percent it's not uh just those in the middle it's not just those at the bottom and the advantage of that is that it it opens the possibility of that broader Alliance of the bottom the middle and so on against the very top that was the whole Genius of the language of 99 versus one percent which is sociologically imprecise but rhetorically genius I think um okay so that's one aspect of it the other aspect that you mentioned is is how are the enemies conceived in each of the two maps the right populist versus the left populace and I would say that the right populist it's very concrete they want to characterize people in an ethnic way in terms of color uh in terms of religion cultural concreteness when you say that the the problems are the immigrants the Mexican rapists the the Jews who cannot replace us uh etc etc we are talking in very concrete terms left-wing populism is more abstract it it refers to Wall Street it refers to the one percent as you just said these are terms that don't say much about the specific identities or cultural profiles of the people but they talk about the function of those people within the society that's much better look Wall Street can slide into International Jewish conspiracy we we know the history I'm not saying that uh that it's impervious but still it's a lot better to talk about Wall Street or Silicon Valley than uh to talk about Mexicans or or Jews or in the left can conceive of a uh I get I guess a you know um someone who is a who can betray their class because they're talking about the function they can portray you know a wall Streeter can betray their fellow wall streeters because of their function as opposed to like you don't hear the concept of like this is the one good immigrant I mean you know maybe there's some maybe there's some good ones in there you know that type of thing but there's no you can't you're you're an immigrant or you're not it is uh that much more uh concrete and of an identity uh rather than the the function that you're serving um exactly and it's much harder to separate the the person from the identity than it is the person from the function I I completely agree with you and that's why I think that uh even though as I say I don't consider left-wing populism the end-all and be all I think I hope it would serve as a transition to something like Democratic so socialism but nevertheless it's a lot uh it's it's far superior it's far more sociologically correct in a way uh it's not Jews who are sucking the blood it is the corporate sector and the financial sector and these are not the same thing so um so so you know this is a lot better and I want to come to the second part of your question though because you asked how should the left look at those people who are now attracted to right-wing populism should we simply write them off and exclude them and I would say not exactly I want to introduce a distinction um I think that on that that the right-wing populist uh movement such as it is includes people whom I would call principled racists whom I want nothing to do with and a much larger number of people I would call opportunistic racists people who will vote for a racist who talks a good class line when there's no other alternative on the ballot who's talking a good class line so we know for example that lots of people who eventually voted for Trump especially in the Upper Midwest who had once voted for Obama when and they voted and some of them when he was on the ballot for Sanders in the Democratic primary this shows me that these people are not principled racists but opportunistic racist and I think that the the left strategy should be one of splitting two splits we have to make one we have to split the right wing populace block and get rid of the principled races on one side and the corporate Elites who play a big role in manipulating that side of populism okay and and we will or try to win the the other component of that right-wing populism I also think we need to split the other side and the other side I've called Progressive neoliberalism that might sound like a contradiction in terms but I I think it's a real thing I think it's the sort of the Clinton Wing let's say of the Democratic Party that basically Incorporated a a lot of sort of mainstream feminism mainstream anti-racism mainstream lgbtq political forces and and hook them up with this regressive pro-wall Street pro-silicon Valley Pro Hollywood uh political economy it was an anti-working class an Unholy Alliance of sort of Liberal meritocratic Liberal wings of social movements and the sort of cosmopolitan sector of the capitalist class um and I want to split them too I want us to win the feminists the anti-racist the lgbtq forces away from that Unholy alliance with corporate capital and I think it's it's Sanders was trying to do something like this I I don't want to idealize his campaigns they weren't perfect but uh I think he had something like that double splitting strategy we have right wing populism we have Progressive neoliberalism let's try to build the third thing call it left-wing populism or Democratic socialism is is part of the challenge there that because to the extent that we saw that separation between the opportunistic uh racist and the principled races if you will um and and I think we can argue as to like really what constitutes the the greater uh faction in that Coalition but but but assuming that there is ample amounts of both to the extent that we saw any of that split happen though it seems to me that the people who were peeled off to a large extent are sort of the same type of people who have who on the the the nominal you know Center left are that same sort of like like ilk of like people who have married that um anti-racism let's call it with some type of like corporate or neo-liberal Vision right like like repealed off uh you know in terms of let's say Biden peeled off a lot of like Suburban uh voters who were just sort of turned off by how gross Donald Trump was in those different ways and it it seems to me that if we were to probably look at an analysis of them they're they're more college educated more likely to be broadly speaking um in that sort of corporate world um and sort of in that financialized world is that a dilemma yeah that that that that that that would be a dilemma if it were not also possible uh to peel off I mean I'm uh the more let's call them working class sectors and I don't just mean the white working class I mean the whole working class which includes immigrants including Hispanics who are now tending to vote more Republican than they did previously um uh I you know I I'm I'm trying to um imagine a coalition that is sort of working class centered but also attracts um uh yeah more educated people who you can call them trainers to their class or whatever but who um who feel that they they don't have a future in this society and you know young people are extremely important in every period it's always the young people who are out in the Forefront of uh new Progressive uh forms of social struggle and look what's happening to the generation of research college graduates I see it in with my graduate students they will not have the kind of lives I've been privileged to have where they're going to become a tenured professor with a lifelong career in something they love that's not going to happen for 99 of them so these people who um might by by the if you take them in terms of who their parents are you might think of as headed up that professional ladder they're in a different situation and I think we I would like to expand our idea of what counts as the working class right and that includes professionals that includes teachers nurses all kinds of people not just truck drivers and coal miners and hopefully we'll have less coal miners in the future uh but you know uh some of the so-called pmcs perhaps on some level exactly and I guess it also I mean it was just a you you guys just the strike was settled at the new school recently and there's a uh 48 000 uh you see um uh University California uh workers uh a striking puts you know it adds a little bit more relevance to the idea that there is a uh sort of a a perception of folks involved in higher education as um as being workers um absolutely and and there was this very interesting account um a few months ago uh in the New York Times of the role of young people with a college degree or at least some years of college the role they played in organizing unions at Amazon at Starbucks there people who've been at some college who might have expected to be somewhere else and are working as Baristas and are organizing unions this is kind of extraordinary this is not the way we usually think of you know how these things happen so let me ask you um you know as a a final uh question which is it's a much broader one um what is the value uh or or I guess the role of of of theory in the context of these things of of these struggles because um I I I'm curious as to how much how much like theory is important in these type of struggles and like how broadly shared or how broadly embraced Must Be Theory and interest in theory and awareness of theory uh in these type of you know uh responses to these crises and you know in determining whether it's developmental or epocal in terms of the changes in a very simple way I would just say theory is about connecting the dots right it's about showing why black lives matter activists and me too activists and Starbucks unionizers and new school adjuncts and so on why uh they actually have a lot more in common or at least share some of the same enemies than might become Apparent at first glance um it just it doesn't have to be stated in an Arcane academically precise way I try to State it in an Arcane academically precise way uh but um if if ideas like that filter out and become part of the common sense of our time so that people connect the dots they understand that what connects us is not simply sense the the feeling of affinity with people like us but an impersonal system that is cannibalizing all of us uh then I think our political possibilities suddenly expand in a very positive way uh that's what what I I think uh the role of theory is it it it gives people narratives or accounts that helps them connect dots get a bigger sense of who their allies are and a sharper sense of who their enemies are so its value is is determined by its function in increasing uh solidarity at the at the most practical level yes I think that there are also a beautiful intellectual uh benefits to be had from Theory but yes at this level yes expanding solidarity to the point where you might actually be able to create a political force that is powerful enough and Visionary enough to change things in a way that would vastly improve all of our lives Nancy Frazier professor of political and social science at the new school for social research the book is cannibal capitalism how our system is devouring democracy care and the planet and what we can do about it we will put a link to that at majority.fm thanks so much for your time today really appreciate it thank you it's been very enjoyable pleasure thanks Nancy