Extraction, logistics, finance : global crisis and the politics of operations

Now that the global crisis of capitalism is entering its fifth year, it is possible to discern the contours of its unfolding. No New Deal or world war is emerging to save the day. The ritual purification of austerity has not cleansed the global sewer of finance despite the harsh and unequal punishments it has delivered. From the fall of Lehman Brothers to the protests in Syntagma Square, from the stalled development in Indian 'new towns' to the refusal of migrant workers to return to non-existent jobs in China's production belts or the Gulf states, the elusive temporality of the crisis does not deliver the sense of an ending. In its classical meaning, the notion of crisis sets the stage for a decision.1 What seems to be at stake at the present time is not decision as such but rather the indefinite prolongation of the time in which any decision might be made. The rhetoric surrounding austerity programmes is an example in this regard. Austerity is never enough. The myriad decisions it involves seem an expansion of micromanagement practices to ever-higher scales of governance, testing the rationality and flexibility of governance to the point that its boundary with sovereignty is blurred. Meanwhile the roots of the current economic and social turbulence remain unaddressed. The defining logics of contemporary capitalism - from the pervasiveness of debt to financialization, from the precarization of work to the penetration of entrepreneurial rationality into the institutional management of welfare and migration - are far from being challenged. On the contrary, they are being intensified and entrenched. In this article we highlight some of the main aspects of these logics, examining the intersection of finance, extraction and logistics. These three sectors of economic activity play a central role in shaping contemporary capitalism and therefore are important sites for the analysis of more general tendencies in its development.