Auto-cannibalism. The system is built to plunder its own economic, social, and political foundations.

Second, in the narrow view, capitalism's chief irrationality is its built-in tendency to economic crisis. An economic system oriented to the limitless accumulation of surplus value, appropriated privately by for-profit firms, is inherently self-destabilizing. The drive to expand capital by increasing productivity through technical advances results in periodic drops in the rate of profit, the overproduction of goods, and the overaccumulation of capital. Attempted fixes like financialization only postpone the day of reckoning, while ensuring it will be all the more severe when it does arrive. In general, the course of capitalist development is punctuated by periodic economic crises: by boom-bust cycles, stock market crashes, financial panics, bankruptcy chains, mass liquidations of value, and mass unemployment.

Finally, the narrow view proposes that capitalism is deeply and constitutively undemocratic. Granted, it often promises democracy in the political realm. However, that promise is systematically undercut by social inequality, on the one hand, and by class power, on the other. Then, too, the capitalist workplace is exempt from any pretense of democratic self-governance. It is a sphere where capital commands and workers obey.

In general, then, the narrow view ascribes three chief wrongs to capitalism-injustice in the sense of class exploitation; irrationality in the sense of propensity to economic crisis; and unfreedom in the sense that democracy is undercut by social inequality and class power. The trouble arises, in every case, from the internal dynamics of capitalism's economy. Thus, the wrongs of capitalism reside, on the narrow view, in its economic organization.

This picture is not so much wrong as incomplete. While correctly identifying the system's inherent economic ills, it fails to register a range of non-economic injustices, irrationalities, and unfreedoms, which are equally constitutive of it. When we adopt the expanded, "cannibal" conception, by contrast, these additional wrongs come clearly into view.

First, the cannibal view of capitalism unveils an expanded catalogue of injustices. Far from residing exclusively within the system's economy, these are grounded in the relations between the capitalist economy and its non-economic conditions of possibility. A case in point is the division between economic production--where necessary labor time is remunerated in cash wages--and social reproduction--where it is unpaid or under paid, naturalized or sentimentalized, and recompensed in part by love. Historically gendered, this division entrenches major forms of domination at the heart of capitalist societies: women's subordination, gender binarism, and heteronormativity.

Similarly, capitalist societies institute a structural division between (doubly) free workers, who can exchange their labor power for the costs of their reproduction, and dependent "others," whose persons, lands, and labor can simply be seized. This division coincides with the global line. Hiving off the "merely" exploitable from the downright expropriable, it racializes the latter group as inherently violable. The result is to entrench a range of structural injustices, including racial oppression, imperialism (old and new), indigenous dispossession, and genocide.

Finally, capitalist societies institute a sharp division between human beings and nonhuman nature, which cease to belong to the same ontological universe. Reduced to a tap and a sink, nonhuman nature is opened to brute extractivism and instrumentalization. If this is not an injustice against "nature" (or against nonhuman animals), it is at the very least an injustice against existing and future generations of human beings who are left with an increasingly uninhabitable planet.

In general, then, an expanded view of capitalist society makes visible an expanded catalogue of structural injustices, which includes but far exceeds class exploitation. A socialist alternative must remedy these other injustices, too. Far from "merely" transforming the organization of economic production, it must also transform the latter's relation to social reproduction, and with it, the gender and sexual orders. Equally, it must end capital's free riding on nature and its expropriation of the wealth of subjugated peoples and with that, racial/imperial oppres sion. In sum, if socialism is to remedy capitalism's injustices, it must change not "just" the capitalist economy, but the entire institutionalized order that is capitalist society.

But that is not all. The expanded conception also enlarges our view of what counts as capitalist crisis. We can now see some built-in self-destabilizing propensities, above and beyond those internal to capitalism's economy. There is, first, a systemic tendency to cannibalize social reproduction--hence to provoke crises of care. Insofar as capital tries to avoid paying for the unwaged carework on which it depends, it periodically puts enormous pressure on the chief providers of that work: families, communities, and, above all, women. The current, financialized form of capitalist society is generating just such a crisis today, as it demands both retrenchment of public provision of social services and also increased hours of waged work per household, including from women.

The expanded view also makes visible an inherent tendency to ecological crisis. Because capital avoids paying anything close to the true replacement costs of the inputs it takes from nonhuman nature, it depletes the soil, befouls the seas, floods carbon sinks, and overwhelms the carbon-carrying capacity of the planet. Helping itself to natural wealth while disavow ing the latter's repair and replacement costs, it periodically destabilizes the metabolic interaction between the human and nonhuman components of nature. We are smack up against the consequences today. What threatens to incinerate the planet is not, after all, "Humanity" but rather capitalism.

Capitalism's tendencies to ecological and social-reproductive crisis are inseparable from its constitutive need for expropriated wealth from racialized peoples: its reliance on stolen lands, coerced labor, and looted minerals; its dependence on racialized zones as dumping grounds for toxic waste and on racialized peoples as suppliers of underpaid carework, increasingly organized in global care chains. The result is an entwining of economic, ecological, and social crisis with imperialism and racial-ethnic antagonism. Neoliberalism has upped the ante here as well.

Finally, the enlarged view of capitalism discloses a structural tendency to political crisis. Here, too, capital aims to have it both ways, living off public goods for which it tries not to pay. Primed to evade taxes and to weaken state regulations, it tends to hollow out the very public powers on which it depends. The current, financialized form of capitalism takes this game to a whole new level. Megacorporations outgun territorially tethered public powers, while global finance disciplines states, making a mockery of elections that go against it and preventing anti- capitalist governments from addressing popular claims. The result is a major crisis of governance, now paired with a crisis of hegemony, as masses of people across the globe defect from established political parties and neoliberal common sense.

In general, then, the expanded view shows us that capitalism harbors multiple crisis tendencies above and beyond the economic. As explained in chapter 5, I follow Karl Polanyi (and James O'Connor) in understanding the former as "inter-realm" contradictions, lodged at the joints that separate, and connect, the capitalist economy to its non-economic background con ditions of possibility. Bound to the four-D logic I explained in the previous chapters, capital has a built-in tendency to erode, destroy, or deplete--but in any case, to destabilize--its own presuppositions. Like the ouroboros, it eats its own tail. Self-cannibalization, too, forms part of what is wrong with capitalist society-and of what socialism must overcome.