The Extractive Circuit https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-extractive-circuit-singh-chaudhary
An exhausted planet at the end of growth Lead article in the Baffler issues "The squandering Earth".
accumulation-crazed multinationals ransack the planet for profit, making us all feel like used-up bottles of stuff while they amass exponentially more indestructible bottles of stuff. This waste-producing apparatus is vast, Ajay Singh Chaudhary writes in “The Extractive Circuit,” “the leaden reality of a global human ecological niche organized for maximal profitability—no matter how difficult or costly to maintain.” This circuit, he stresses, “is not a metaphor,” but an accelerating systems-crash that steals time and resources from zones of least resistance, like fragile habitats.
Some extracts:
The extractive circuit is the leaden reality of a global human ecological niche organized for maximal profitability—no matter how difficult or costly to maintain.
Eighty-three percent of the emissions occur at the point of production. The majority of such phones are produced in China, whether their end-use destination is the United States, Germany, Japan, or any other country on Earth. And, if we start looking at the other ways phone production exceeds planetary boundaries, in purely ecological terms, we find all measurable boundaries breached.[2] It’s not just a matter of carbon dioxide and other production emissions but also the processes of resource extraction (mining) itself: excessive freshwater use, eutrophication from biogeochemical flows, deforestation of nearby lands, biodiversity loss from land-use and others. At the same time such extraction is dependent, for just one component, on cobalt found primarily in mines in the DRC. The labor in such mines is, almost without exception, either slave labor, child labor, or both.
there are two simultaneous and related phenomena: value extraction and nodal exhaustion. Value is extracted not only through human labor but also through a series of natural and social inputs. Ecologically speaking, value at the simplest level can be drawn from the “free” use of water or air and other “commons.” But it’s also the value derived from their commodification, from so-called “externalities” in waste flows and mountains; in complex socioecological processes like industrial agriculture where not only are soils exhausted but output is dependent on massive fossil fuel, unsustainable pesticide and chemical-fertilizer inputs, or with the “free” exploitation of flora and fauna, from simple use as with logging to the patenting of DNA strands...
Financialized supply chains are structured to allow firms to ignore or skirt local, national, international legal.or even physical attempts to restrict the flow of extraction.
Neoliberalism’s matryoshka doll of financialization, international economic governance, risk shifting, state policies, and adjustments in cultural logic helped nurse profitability out of its 1970s doldrums. It did so through the redistribution of labor income to capital; through creating historically unprecedented speed and mobility for transnational capital flows, business-to-business commerce, and firm-level debt/currency creation; and through transforming the social functions of states into profit generating enterprises, diminishing democratic sovereignty, inhibiting decolonization, and quite a lot more.
The one-day or one-hour delivery, the expedited shipping, the synthesis of business and “leisure” hours: all of this is a lifesaver to the single parent, the double-shift employee in a food-desert, the downwardly mobile twelve-hours-a-day professional, the hustling informal or aspirational employee, hoping to claw their way out of generalized precarity.
“services” provided for consumers.,.. instead as facilitating the frenzy of these lives, as shifting literal time and energy not to these individual consumers but rather to the needs of an “always-on” capitalism, creating the very crises to which these services respond. Such services are dependent on the speed and ungovernability of GVCs which can, to a degree not possible before, dice up a production process into its most minute parts, spread them as far a global distance as comparative advantage dictates, limited, in strictly economic terms, by the current state of communications technology and the price of oil.
At every node of the extractive circuit, we find speed, coercion, and the inevitable stressors on the individual. One of the best analytic lenses we have for this intersection of affect, environment, psychosocial pathology, and neurology is the psychology and political theory of Frantz Fanon. The extractive circuit is a “divided society . . . characterized by a predominant nervous tension leading quite quickly to exhaustion.”
At every node of the extractive circuit, we find speed, coercion, and the inevitable stressors on the individual. One of the best analytic lenses we have for this intersection of affect, environment, psychosocial pathology, and neurology is the psychology and political theory of Frantz Fanon. The extractive circuit is a “divided society . . . characterized by a predominant nervous tension leading quite quickly to exhaustion.”
the extractive circuit is not a metaphor. It works through real people, specific geographies, economically strategic areas organizing, linking, and connecting our global human ecological niche. The granular level I began with in my paradigmatic example is the very real, material workings of this system. Imperialism does not vanish in such a system, but it is now a layer beneath. Colonization is more generalized. States (in a wide variety of forms) still play a crucial if dramatically changed role even when considered over the course of the last fifty years.
