ajay singh chaudhary — the extractive circuit — review
chaudhary's exhausting circuit
the first subchapter of the extractive circut "the dismal science" already makes it seem like this books flow is recursive and stacks intensities without cashing out. the writing doesnt develop exhaustion conceptually but argumentatively, and it follows diffuse lines. a lot of the statements dont compound into definitive delinations but just kind of stack like intensifying rhetoric. for example, the text starts off with "consider the phillippines", then talks about the gulf states right after, then talks about oil imports in the gulf states, considers filipino domestic labour just for a brief moment, and then suddenly takes a sharp turn with "now imagine a global north worker across the globe". these shifts are intentional, but they allow chaudhary to avoid ever making statements that implicate the context, forcing the reader to feel the impact of the writing but never the power of the respones this impact necessitates. this may be because chaudhary believes that the writing already proves its own moral weight, but for a book with intellectual stakes, that doesnt make it philosophically productive.
this rhetoric itself is convincing but it doesnt have that push that makes those same problems interesting to consider, it feels like an economic report on the failed conditions of the planet rather than a thinker who faces those same problems by routing them through a lense of consideration. the argument behind quantifying the value of migrant and domestic labour itself is suspicious since the north produces that same qualification or "circutizing" of labour that datafies it and makes it quantifiable to begin with. it also pulls into considerations of how capitalism extracts circutorally, but those considerations themselves undermine the logic of capital only to reinstate it the moment the consideration opens up. since circuits are already the dominant imaginary of systems theory, logistics and neoliberal management, the text risks accepting the cybernetic-economic ontology of capitalism in order to criticize capitalism itself.
at the same time, extraction chains themselves dont become philosophically meaningful on their own even if its interesting to mention that everyone knows exactly every step of the process to producing something or whatnot. the examples intensify morally and geographically. philippines → saudi labor → california domesticity → smartphones → cobalt mines → ecology. the movement is lateral and isnt recursive, and features an intensification that draws away from the first and into the third world, and then shows how this impacts the first world (hyperwork, which returns as a theme in the third subchapter "feeding frenzy").
not only that, but chaudhary's criticism of capitalism is itself extractive in the power it assumes. just take a look at how migrant workers are talked about: "in political scientist alyssa battistoni’s words, the value of the world’s “ecosystems and natural capital” as, on average, $33 trillion". of course this statement is meant to put existing extraction into context, but the trade-off here is that this quantification also looks perfect when viewed from the perspective of the glencore corporation, the same exact entity under fire in this text. how come by considering the value of migrant workers, chaudhary so casually allows the quantification of the entire yearly resource-gains of the planet as just a hinge to put future bets on? and these future bets don't sound particularly liberatory, here's what chaudhary wants the drc to do: "the drc should be able to command extraordinarily high prices for its cobalt, especially if mined in more sustainable socioecological ways."
of course, again, this occurs under the rhetoric of sustainability, but also under the rhetoric of accidentally confirming this exact same circulatory chain. what chaudhary is essentially saying is that, the drc, instead of trying to push away the vision of its cobalt-producing extractive value, should instead weaponize this value by integrating opportunistic units into a market compromise, one that actually banks on the exact same value of cobalt it is known for and generates? this produces a key contradiction in his narrative.
on the one hand, on a practical level this advice makes sense, and on a theoretical level it doesn't immediately implicate the drc as extractive in the same way the northern states that use phones to mediate between capitalism and the human layer, but not only is the capitalist logic already confirmed instead of denied here, furthermore, the implication of weaponizing your own securities and resources is already one that does not value the non-market option of rebellion. "at the same time, in those majorities, refugees, for example, can be mined for data, exploited for informal economies, or leveraged for geopolitical advantage"
even though this is true, it puts into question what migrants are supposed to do? is the lady that washes everyones laundry supposed to stop doing that so she can fight for some imagined western conception of labour rights and minimal wages that have already been shown to depend on third world extraction networks, or is her liberation on slavery implicit on her ability to wager her own human data as a "human resource?" or is the implication that laundry and all other forms of domestic work should even be further compartmentalized by western workers and should be quantized even more into the rough categories they regularly present as, to even further increase the supposed grammatization of all labour into discrete units that actually feed back into the economy of precarity and exhaustion? even if chaudhary later plans to analyze these questions more carefully, the fact that the entire field of implication is left open in a lot of already harvested examples is not a good look.
in a way, the prior example lets us know that the text oscillates between two incompatible visions: the idea that migrants as structurally trapped subjects inside extractive circulation, and the idea that migrants are latent political agents of planetary solidarity. but the transition mechanism between those states is absent due to the very fact that exhaustion itself is supposed to bridge them, yet exhaustion more often destroys collective agency than produces it, and even for chaudhary himself, exhaustion is onstantly spoken about in this subchapter as only the effect or consequence or "general state" of this process. the book gets close to mythologizing exhaustion into a unifying substrate without sufficiently theorizing disintegration and finding the exact place where opportunity is actually supposed to kind of solidify into a political praxis.
the second subchapter "dolls, doldrums, dynamics and disease" is essentially about profit and how capitalism fixes its own crisis of crisis management by creating more crisis and saving profit. but the chapter is full of language like “climate change tracks not only cumulative gdp growth [...] but such conspicuous features of contemporary global capital as the increased use of telecoms, non-recreational transportation, and fdi" that sounds like its saying something complex but is basically just corporate gibberishtalk. “ecological-economic crises are already social and political ones” is just insulting next to the most soulless material in this work.
one non interesting but at least actually authored claim arrives at the end, chaudhary says "some local actors (a diverse array of workers, surrounding communities, and social movements) are pitted against others." and follows up with "in Pennsylvania, families similarly enroll in the latest fracking initiative or otherwise sign away mineral rights as one of the last remunerative games in town." its true that capital weaponizes desparation and turns workers into remuneration slaves, but the idea that extraction compounds as extraction becomes a meta-game of extractive potential doesn't feel that original or important. one more authored claim about exhaustion appears with "this is the system working; profits recover and the brief dip in emissions is reversed” in reference to the covid pandemic. the claim attempts to trace the priorities of the system by showing how it has the surplus ability to prevent catastrophy only when its aligned with its own goals, which shows just how much empty social space for wager is still available. whilst on its own it can be seen as interesting, it sits embraced by a load of economic reports that dont say anything
there is one interesting idea thats floating around the chapter that isnt developed, and thats that profit is not just “extra money after costs” but that conceptually, it exists as the permission structure of capitalism. which tells the the system which activities deserve continuation, expansion and protection, by doing things such as accounting activities in or out, or creating signals for the flow of value, or sacrificing other activities. in this sense, profit actually has an extremely ritual function for society. except, chaudhary doesnt speak of it in this way. instead he goes for the boring option of saying that "capitalism profits, profit is pursued, profit becomes a crisis, profit is ensured and generated out of enterprises" an extremely non-metaphysical and flaccid view that forgets the most important function of profit is its signalling value rather than its existence as a guaranteed effect. on its own, the portrayal of profit in this chapter only has the useful function of reminding the reader to ask what profit even is to begin with!
"feeding frenzy" is a good chapter because it finally confronts global value chains which are only hinted at in previous chapters. its only weakness is that it fails to narratively connect the feeding frenzy with cobalt mining corporations. but it does structurally still connect them "it is not physically possible to achieve the just-in-time production and delivery-on-demand described above without burning through fossil fuels and human bodies with merciless efficiency." even if this is true, chaudhary cannot find a single interesting conceptual reworking to say irt. cobalt mining, and struggles to barely manage to get this one quote out about feeding “we should see these ‘services’ 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. they don’t strictly fulfill consumption ends; they are also part of production.” the idea that always-onness is very much the producer of the same crisis that requires always-onness (hyperwork) is at least a better idea than the one that argues that it becomes legible only when capitalism demands the working conditions that it does, but this idea itself is not a particularly strong narrative that you would see anybody argue.
similar ideas already exist in works such as the now-cliche "24/7" by crary, where, even if he never talks about food delivery, mining, accessability or similar concerns, does manage to theoretically scaffold accessabiity and hyperworking more creatively: "in relation to labor, it renders plausible, even normal, the idea of working without pause, without limits. it is aligned with what is inanimate, inert, or unageing. as an advertising exhortation it decrees the absoluteness of availability, and hence the ceaselessness of needs and their incitement, but also their perpetual non-fulfillment. "
however, an even more targetted idea here would be that food delivery itself is an augmentation of the existing hyperworked enviornment, so that essentially even though food is massively available under capitalism in some basic sense of nourishment, the advanced need that it offers in various new acclerated ways can only be accessed by the convinience of the delivery, whereas the convinience itself, or rather the assumed convinience (contrary to the often painful reality of dealing with the delivery) becomes the product, in a way that justifies or evolves the condition that makes hyperwork possible. this type of narrative is just a slightly more advanced version of the exact same narrative chaudhary is trying to push, but with the additional advantage of authorship and actual scalar development of the concept.
it can be argued that chaudhary is trying to focus on the overarching narrative more than develop conceptual specifics due to the style of this particular structure of writing, but this doesnt exactly stick, as the title of the writing is literally about this concept on an empirical basis. the text does also identify this mechanism: “its form effectively moves responsibility from the tnc to ‘the miners themselves’ for their own enslavement and abuses.” where chaudhary argues that the responsibility of the entire value chain itself becomes transposed into the worker, or in a certain sense, becomes a domain where the worker himself is forced to carry the overarching burden of their own position in the world, a classic trap of precarity markets.
there are other interesting narrative claims such as this one "this new mode of capital organization facilitates its own versions of “special economic zones.”38 samsung, for example, can extract concessions in the form of proposed local, state, and federal tax breaks and low-cost labor incentives, on top of existing environmental and social deregulation, in establishing a new semiconductor plant in texas." where chaudhary argues that zoning becomes permitted due to the global instability of regulation, so that large corporations win symbolic and corporate territory over specific areas by establishing networks of corruption that make the corporation auto-legible in its establishment. or rather, better said, chaudhary shows us that the corporation appears as economically indispensable before political negotiation even begins.
this theory is strong and well supported both in this text itself and in its citations. on top of that, it allows chaudhary to name various corporate entities like glaxosmithkline, g4s, glencore and other entities as involved in a feedback loop that creates private prisons, secures contracts to extradiate responsibility, and which gets grants directly from state-industrial entities. the real benefit of a chapter like this is almost exclusively the fact that it isolates lesser known entities in this chain, unlike the usually discussed ones like vanguard and state farm.
"the “privatization of stress” is a particularly apt phrase: just as one can mine fossil capital to boost petro-farming outputs, one can squeeze the standard “labor power” of a hyper-employed worker while also exhausting her “mind.” these are some of the latest frontiers in the long history of transforming ecological inputs (for what is labor but an extension of nature working on itself, as marx says) into abstract value."
even though the productive tension does exist conceptually here, this quote alone should let you know how burnt the next subchapter, "millenial burnout" really is. chaudhary suddenly switches registers into talking about exhaustion again, but when he has to face the fact that he studied different systemic parts of capitalism in the previous subchapters, he has to force equivalences together so that it doesnt appear entirely random next to the previous ideas. he also continues his streak of sounding like a google search result when he begins this chapter with "feelings of exhaustion, taken together — fatigue, burnout, stress, depression, pain — are globally prevalent. " and like an academic moralist in other sections where hes reliant on sweeping categories to get his point across “one of the most profound political consequences of this moment in the anthropocene...”
the issue is that the book earlier frames the global north as structurally implicated in extraction, but now pivots suddenly toward emphasizing shared exhaustion and dispossession. the transition works narratively, but not fully analytically because essentially dependency on extraction does not automatically dissolve complicity in it. and even though its systematically cleaner for chaudhary to ignore complicity in the moment, the sudden re-framing of both the narrative and thematic jump from earlier discussions leave a weakpoint where some of the earlier text simply doesnt connect with this portion of it
there is an interesting intersection of ideas in this chapter however, past its reliance on fisher and fanon, it lands a few thoroughlines, such as the accidental implication that ends up being drawn between this line: "most of what can be recorded as growth in the national account today is the disaggregated profits of “headquarters” corporations along a global value chain. " and this one "“for the first time in modern history, the vast majority of workers and communities in the global north have a mundane, material interest in the wealth and power of people and states in the global south.”.
since what chaudhary is saying is undoubtedly true, then in a certain sense, theres a sudden non-catastrophic narrative contradiction behind the idea that the current global economy is a global value chain that doesnt impact national (and in a lot of ways, civil) interest, and behind the idea that the global north's citizens now more than ever have real material interest in the ordering of the lives of the global south. this simultanoeusly should mean that the global north's citizens no longer have the ability to wager the stakes of the proliferation of global supply, but more than ever depend on the value this economic totality extracts, which does still implicate them to support this economy. in a sense, the economy's interest has grown so much wider than the citizen's, whilst still at the same time perfectly positioning itself as an order that does satisfy their interests far more than betrays them.
in fact, chaudhary actually supports this reading perfectly, because in the end he states it himself, "the concrete realities of the extractive circuit place such individuals and communities far closer to the super-majorities of the global south than “the 1%” or even “10%.” in other words, unevenly and to vastly different degrees, more and more are in the colony now." he uses the earlier line that even the global north has been alianated from the conditions of its own circulatory system, to claim that that technically ideologically aligns them with precarity and against the ideology that creates it, even if that ideology still temporarily supports their material interests. this narrative is both strong and nicely scaffolded, even if it breaks with the earlier analysis quite concretely.
as for the ending chapter "colony of the exhausted", it reads like something that wouldve been banging in the 80s, if it wasnt for the fact that its practically useless today for most of the readership encountering it. who in the world doesnt view corporations as an extracting mafia with increasingly limited limitations? limitation itself was a colonial weapon of rhetoric for the longest. the book shouldnt be allowed to market a structural correlation that is an expose that everyone already realized a decade ago. the strongest insight this book has about the concept of businesses under capitalism is a random thought that half the people would produce in under a minute of watching a blackrock documentary. he also goes into lines like "“climate change itself is the most obvious contemporary avatar of benjamin’s ‘storm of progress’...” which show him thinking through the implications of his own point for the first time within his own analysis.
the main claim of this chapter essentially ends in the idea that was already circled in the previous subchapter, that the economy no longer coheres nationally in the way political imagination still assumes it does. chaudhary names this "“island models of national economies give way [...] to ‘an interlocking matrix’ of corporate balance sheets.” and “most trade is happening firm-to-firm or within a cross-border gvc". even though this is aptly true, it further encircles his own argument in this self-concluding mesh. he even has to supplant his own exhaustion narrative periodically so he doesnt exhaust his own thematic focus "the carbon and materially intense structure of trade is inextricably linked to fossil fuels, “sacrifice zones,” and generalized exhaustion."
whats also often confusing is that chaudhary randomly goes on tangents against abstraction-views of capital that dont essentially exist? "accounts can often make it seem as if capital hovers about the earth in almost ethereal form." one of the first books on this view is "exocapitalism" by poliks and trillo which was released a year after this book dropped. who is chaudhary talking about, what accounts? there is a huge loadout of these exact type of postcolonial analysees of capitalism, almost nobody in the world except the actual purpatrators and the most fringe of theories believes what chaudhary is arguing against.
its clear that chaudhary has some type of focus when he says this (collqhoun, land, moldbug? it remains unclear). despite the heavily anglicized style and template, he randomly drops mckenzie wark in as a reference for capitalism finally cashing out its own interest and dropping its dependencies: "there has never been a time when capital could move more rapidly or more freely — from firm to firm, from geography to geography. it could even, theoretically, move out of bounds entirely — capital could cash out (it could be worse, as mckenzie wark remarks). "
the quote continues "but 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. " what this reads like is that he understands that the majority of the work was spent in sermonical circling and failed conceptual effort, and that a lot of the mechanisms appear as disjointed from the point of circulation. its extremely difficult in the modern age, with the anglophonic expectation of referential loading to develop a concept that makes sense. its true, the extractive circuit is not a metaphor – its a term. it gathers logistics, extraction, gvc, climate, exhaustion, sovereignty, and labor into one phrase, but the phrase literally never produces new analytic consequences except for the few times that its very briefly mechanized.
nobody in the world thinks its a metaphor except those that dont understand that metaphors are supposed to connect an idea to a seperate unrelated one. chaudhary doesnt metaphorize extraction, he just keeps circling it without developing its mechanisms. thats called a conceptual failure, an ultimately terminological feat. if chaudhary wanted to name a term for what he is analyzing, then he has succeed. if he didnt, then he's displaying his anxiety about not managing to turn this into a concept by the end of the chapter.
in regards to the contents of this subchapter, chaudhary partially defeats his own emphasized solution to capitalist extraction. simultaneously his research focuses on planetary independence, decolonial localization and anti-growth policies in unique zones such as cooperation jackson in mississipi, whilst at the same time proving in paragraphs an example of a concrete failure of this exact same model in india's kerala: "and yet kerala cannot be abstracted from the extractive circuit, from the global economy, or even its extreme precariousness within a now neofascist india. kerala still has many of the salutatory social outcomes described above (the best in all of india even with india’s, and now kerala’s, prodigious growth), but it is increasingly wracked by economic, political, and ecological forces. " he does show that he accidentally shows that partial exits are real but non-sovereign, but instead of trying to frame a model, he should just outright be naming the mechanism of bargaining that requires these models to exist.