The Politics of Operations

“Offering an ambitious lens through which to view the politics, temporalities, spaces, and struggles that constitute contemporary capitalism, Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson creatively conceptualize the problems and possibilities that emerge out of the current moment's multiple forms of crisis. Their emphasis on capital as a set of relations has enormous stakes for how we understand the world and orient ourselves to the possibility of transformation. An important work, The Politics of Operations should be widely read and debated.” - Deborah Cowen, author of The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade

“The Politics of Operations is a vital book in every sense. It is a lively and important account of the ways in which value materializes in the extractive, logistical, and financial operations of contemporary capital. Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson provide us at once with analysis, diagnosis, and prescription. Grounded in solidarity with labor movements around the world, this book serves both as critique and as manifesto. Its provocative conclusions open up essential debates for praxis today.” - Kaushik Sunder Rajan, author of Pharmocracy: Value, Politics, and Knowledge in Global Biomedicine

"Given the enormity of the task it sets for itself, it is little surprise that this text seems to stage the concretion of critical theory into a general intellect. Encyclopaedic in its theoretical apercus, the book at times reads like a lengthy literature review intent on synthesizing the entirety of the critical academic catalogue, from the canonical repertoire – Althusser, Arendt, Gramsci, Harvey, Lefebvre, Lukacs, Luxembourg, Weber, etc. – to more recent contributions by media and postcolonial theorists such as Jussi Parikka and Verónica Gago. Closer inspection, however, reveals a well-crafted organization of the argument that proceeds from the general to the concrete, and back again." - Juan Pablo Melo, tripleC

"The Politics of Operations is a challenging, highly ambitious work. . . . Ultimately, the reorientation that Mezzadra and Neilson are proposing is a subtle one, indebted to a rich archive of political ideas. But they rework and recombine those ideas into a book that is shrewdly reasoned, superbly written, and thick with insight into the contemporary moment." - Martin Danyluk, Society and Space

"Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson outline a novel perspective on the startling disjunctive synthesis of homogenization and heterogenization processes that characterize the global expansion of capitalist economy. Their second collaborative, book-length study offers a compelling account of the economic, political, and social relations to which these movements respond." - Nicolas Schneider, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal