Extraction, Logistics, and Finance

Extraction, finance, and logistics provide strategic conduits of analysis to unearth key logics and trends that otherwise remain obscured in discussions of contemporary capital and capitalism. Many analyses that make reference to the concept of neoliberalism in a generic sense point to the hegemonic circulation of economic doctrines or processes of deregulation and governance without really taking stock of the underlying transformations of capitalism that we try to highlight by focusing on extraction, finance, and logistics. Crucial to our analysis is the concept of operations of capital, which draws attention to both the material aspects of capital’s intervention in specific situations and their wider articulation into systemic patterns. The need to move toward such an analysis becomes particularly urgent in the context of the crisis of 2007–8. While the hegemony of neoliberal economic doctrines has definitely been questioned (and in some cases even shattered) by the turbulent pace of the crisis, the trends we analyze have only been entrenched. By bringing together in this issue studies of finance, extraction, and logistics, we wish to highlight the need to work through these different angles and analytically probe their conceptual and empirical intersections in ways that complicate and enrich our understanding of how contemporary capitalism is mutating in and beyond its returning crises.