Capitalism
is an extractive circuit
which quite literally crisscrosses the world.

1.  Its global value chains
stretch through physical infrastructure
and “frictionless” financial flows
at the speed allowed by
telecommunications; fossil fuels;
and geophysical, technological, psychosocial,
and bodily limits
and “optimizations.”

2.  It connects economically
and ecologically dispossessed
agricultural communities in the Global South
with regimes of hyperwork in the Global North;
rare earth “sacrifice zones”
with refugees;
migrant labor with social reproduction;
ocean acidification and atmospheric carbon
with profitable opportunity.

3.  It has required the transformation of states;
it has ripped through biomes and through flesh.
Capital often appears and is treated
as a historical abstraction;
this is double true of globalized, financialized capital.

The extractive circuit
is the leaden reality
of global human ecological niche
organized
for maximal profitability
–no matter how difficult
or costly to maintain.

4.  Its speed, frenzy, coercion, and brutality
reach into the very heart of the imperial metropolis.

Feelings of exhaustion –
depression, desperation, fatigue,
exasperation –
course through its wirings,
neurons, biochemicals,
and sinews.

How has this level of
degradation
become
so acceptable?

— Ajay Singh Chaudhary, The Baffler

Ajay Singh Chaudhary is the executive director of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and a core faculty member specializing in social and political theory. He holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University and an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics. His research focuses on social and political theory, Frankfurt School critical theory, political economy, political ecology, media, religion, and post-colonial studies. He has written for the The Guardian, The Nation, The Baffler, n+1, Los Angeles Review of Books, Quartz, Social Text, Dialectical Anthropology, The Hedgehog Review, Filmmaker Magazine, and 3quarksdaily, among other venues. Ajay is currently working on a manuscript on political theory for the Anthropocene.

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A light snowfall last night.  This morning the sun shines and its bitter cold.  A reminder of past winters in the Midwest, before global warming accelerated to perceptibly change weather patterns to a milder winter.

It is 41 degrees F in Kiev Ukraine this morning.  No doubt the ground remains frozen, which is optimal for armored assault.  Portents of war are evident.  The country is surrounded on three sides by the Russian army.  Ukraine is a pawn in the contest between the West (Europe+America) and the East (Russia+China). A lot of ink is expended in analysis of the forces, of the economics of the situation, — exercises in abstraction.  There is not enough time left to indulge in these language games.

The globe is girdled by a capitalist, extractive system.  Europe desires Russian natural gas as palpably as an addict needs cocaine.

There is bound to be blood, much blood.