Our impact outweighs on scope. Defenses of capitalism don’t account for its extra-economic violence, which creates interlocking crises that make all their impacts inevitable. It’s try or die for the alt because changing wealth production, not just distribution, is critical.

"Capitalism," too, cries out for clarification. The word is commonly used to name an economic system based on private property and market exchange, wage labor and production for profit. But that definition is too narrow, obscuring rather than disclosing the system's true nature. "Capitalism," I'll argue here, better designates something larger: a societal order that empowers a profit-driven economy to prey on the extra-economic supports it needs to function--wealth expropriated from nature and subject peoples; multiple forms of carework, chronically undervalued when not wholly disavowed; public goods and public powers, which capital both requires and tries to curtail; the energy and creativity of working people. Although they do not appear on corporate balance sheets, these forms of wealth are essential preconditions for the profits and gains that do. Vital underpinnings of accumulation, they, too, are constitutive components of the capitalist order.

In this book, accordingly, "capitalism" refers not to a type of economy but to a type of society: one that authorizes an officially designated economy to pile up monetized value for investors and owners, while devouring the non-economized wealth of everyone else. Serving that wealth on a platter to the corporate classes, this society invites them to make a meal of our creative capacities and of the earth that sustains us with no obligation to replenish what they consume or repair what they damage. And that is a recipe for trouble. Like the ouroboros that eats its own tail, capitalist society is primed to devour its own substance. A veritable dynamo of self-destabilization, it periodically precipitates crises while routinely eating away at the bases of our existence.

Cannibal capitalism, then, is the system to which we owe the present crisis. 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.

This book maps that massive tangle of dysfunction and domination. Expanding our view of capitalism to include the extra-economic ingredients of capital's diet, it brings together in a single frame all the oppressions, contradictions, and conflicts of the present conjuncture. In this frame, struc tural injustice means class exploitation, to be sure, but also gender domination and racial/imperial oppression-both non accidental by-products of a societal order that subordinates social reproduction to commodity production and that demands racialized expropriation to underwrite profitable exploitation. As understood here, likewise, the system's contradictions incline it not only to economic crises but also to crises of care, ecology, and politics, all of which are in full flower today, courtesy of the long spell of corporate bingeing known as neoliberalism.

As I conceive it, lastly, cannibal capitalism precipitates a broad array and complex mix of social struggles: not just class struggles at the point of production, but also boundary struggles at the system's constitutive joints. Where production butts up against social reproduction, the system incites conflicts over care, both public and private, paid and unpaid. Where exploitation crosses expropriation, it foments struggles over "race," migration, and empire. Then too, where accumulation hits natural bedrock, cannibal capitalism sparks conflicts over land and energy, flora and fauna, the fate of the earth. Finally, where global markets and megacorporations meet national states and institutions of transnational governance, it provokes struggles over the shape, control, and reach of public power. All these strands of our present predicament find their place in an expanded conception of capitalism that is simultaneously unitary and differentiated.

Armed with this conception, Cannibal Capitalism poses a pressing existential question: "Are we toast?" Can we figure out how to dismantle the social system that is driving us into the jaws of obliteration? Can we come together to address the entire crisis complex that system has spawned--not "just" the heating of the earth, nor "only" the progressive destruction of our collective capacities for public action, nor "merely" the wholesale assault on our ability to care for one another and sustain social ties, nor "simply" the disproportionate dumping of the ensuing fallout on poor, working-class, and racialized populations, but the general crisis in which these various harms are intertwined? Can we envision an emancipatory, counterhegemonic project of eco-societal transformation of sufficient breadth and vision to coordinate the struggles of multiple social movements, political parties, labor unions, and other collective actors-a project aimed at laying the cannibal to rest once and for all? In the current conjuncture, I argue here, nothing short of such a project can avail.

Once we expand our view of capitalism, moreover, we must also expand our vision of what should replace it. Whether we call it socialism or something else, the alternative we seek cannot aim to reorganize the system's economy alone. It must also reorganize the latter's relation to all those forms of wealth it currently cannibalizes. 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.