Reconstruction Vol. 13, No. 3/4
Return to Contents»
Geomorphia: Did the Earth Move For You? Mobile Capital as Geomorphic Agent / Kane Faucher
Keywords: Globalization, Industrialism & Development, Place & Space
Strata consist of giving form to matters, of imprisoning intensities or locking singularities into systems of resonance and redundancy. [...] They operate by coding and territorialization upon the earth; they proceed simultaneously by code and territoriality. (Deleuze and Guattari 40).
<1> Mobilization strategies, be them of a geomorphic quality or with respect to labour, are imbued by an endocolonizing rhetoric supplied by a neoliberal discourse which relies on “state of nature” claims as the foundation upon which it can reconfigure the terms of economy, generally by what Deleuze and Guattari call “axiomatization.” These, in turn, shape a new model of labour relations that may be tied to a new relationship to the earth itself as mobile commodity. By appealing to the works of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, this article will attempt to provide a different insight by which to explore the issue of mobile capital in both the domain of earth-moving technologies and mobile labour. This article will explore the transition from traditional capitalist strategies of accumulation to those indexed on acceleration under the broader framework of what we might call modular capitalism.
<2> Capitalist modularity begins with an axiomatization that prescribes the necessity of the modular approach. Modules are self-contained yet interrelated components of processes that combine as a complex operation. Each module, as self-contained, might be otherwise called a “phase” but the distinction would be that modules do not depend on data inputs outside of each respective module, which thus renders them efficient and resilient to shocks. The benefits of modularity for capitalist expansion is in achieving flexible arrangement and relying on standardized practices, and these combined aspects allow for the creation of adaptive control mechanisms. Modules can be evaluated according to principles of “fitness,” thus calling to mind a genetic analogy associated with discrete genetically encoded units.
<3> The modular approach allows for the further segmentation of the labour force as disposable, standardized, and generalized units - like variables in a computation. Yet, at the same time modular capitalism proceeds by establishing axioms in advance that regulate and restrict possible action and discourse. Perhaps among the most notorious of axioms would be those introduced by Ludwig von Mises in his Human Action whereby he constructs a closed circular loop (i.e., the axiom of human action is that all human activity is rational, and to take issue with the axiom would involve rationality, and so therefore any critique only confirms the truth of the axiom). Leaving aside how such axioms, as introduced by the Austrian School of economic theory dispense with the need for verification or falsifiability, not to mention that we may question von Mises’ axiom by employing the prisoners’ dilemma, modular capitalism as a property of neoliberal economic theory must begin with stable axioms in order to narrow the range of possible critique according to the terms it sets.
<4> Modules also allow for a radical reductive segmentation of the earth, portioned out as resource hubs for accelerated extraction - be this of the actual natural resources, or the human resources in the form of labour that can be quickly scooped up and planted at the sites of extraction with a means to dispose of said labour when the extraction is at an end. Much akin to the Marinetti brand of futurism, acceleration is a defining value of such practices, as is the violence that results from it. Yet, this violence is contained and regulated by the modular approach, and the “victims” of said violence (labourers, the environment, fair relations between State and citizens) is generalized and diffuse.
<5> I adopt the terms “module” and “modularity” from Jerry Fodor’s work in cognition and apply it to capitalist practice. Modularity’s touted benefits in understanding cognition is best captured in the analogy made by Pinker where the mind is “a collection of instincts adapted for solving evolutionarily significant problems — the mind as a Swiss Army knife” (Pinker, 1994, p. 420). Modularity is antithetical to holistic or interconnecting processes unless there is rigid segmentation. To adopt Lieven de Cauter’s term, modularity is a form of “capsularization” that constructs an ordered inside versus a disordered or chaotic outside - although the “climate controlled” inside is also subject to its own chaotic iterations, such as the ad hoc sprawl effect of suburban development, vast deindustrialization and its effects on communities, and the shift from the urban centre to an expanding periphery that form self-contained and regulated suburban modular arrangements of sameness and emptiness in ways somewhat reminiscent of a Le Corbusier machinic vision of life. Modules are like closed systems that only admit exclusive inputs while rejecting any others, a kind of “gated community” of the mind (in cognitive terms), or a “gated economic process” in terms of capitalism.
<6> The notion of modularity in capitalism shares a zone of conceptual overlap with that of labour segmentation and fragmentation, generally bundled in most Marx-inspired arguments on alienation. The Neo-Marxian refrain, emerging out of early Lukacs and captured by Debord, is fairly standard Neo-Marxian fare:
The society’s entire sold labor has become a total commodity whose constant turnover must be maintained at all cost. To accomplish this, this total commodity has to be returned in fragmented form to fragmented individuals who are completely cut off from the overall operation of the productive forces. To this end the specialized science of domination is broken down into further specialties such as sociology, applied psychology, cybernetics, and semiology, which oversee the self-regulation of every phase of the process. (Debord, aph. 42, n.p.)
<7> In order for this segmentation or stratification to occur, it must rely on axiomatization as the central discursive restraint from which all else follows. For Deleuze and Guattari, axiomatization seeks to establish universal equivalency between terms. Nowhere is this more apparent than in how capitalism relies on axiomatization to draw equivalencies between labour, production, and time in terms of value. Proceeding by a method of generalized deterritorialization, labour is detached from the determinate relations and conditions, and reterritorialized according to the largely arbitrary axiomatic of capitalism. But, as Eugene Holland points out, “capitalist axiomatization is essentially a meaningless calculus: capitalism offers no stable code valid for the market it ceaselessly revolutionizes and expands; the belief in any general meaning under these conditions is paranoid.” (Holland 67).
<8> Modularity, with its synonymous association with segmentation and separation with its resulting arch-individualist after-effects of alienation, is not only the phenomenon of mobile capitalist strategies and resource extraction activities. For those particular modules to work, they must be nested or embedded - a la systems theory - into an environment that will be ready soil to receive the algorithmic seed. Where this fails, other modules to alter or circumvent State systems must be implemented to apply the right legal or social pressures to permit the embedding of the modular programming. This concept of modular capitalism would, in Debordian terms, have to be part of a totalizing instrument of control and the construction of consent among the obeying. That is, the module must be resilient and flexible enough to be detachable or modified ad hoc, but also be part of a broader narrative which brings together a confluence of factors from neoliberalism, arch-individualism, globalitarianism, cybernetics, and the mythic transcendental belief in infinite potentiality that leads to growth and prosperity. For Deleuze, this must involve a program of transition from disciplinary to control societies whereby individuals “become ‘dividuals,’ and masses become samples, data, markets, or ‘banks.’” (Deleuze 180). Virilio underlines a similar point by indicating the disintegration effect on populations whereby the social is divided into separable and mobile components, perpetually displaced, outsourced, and deportable (Virilio 78-9). This has its root in the Lukacsian-Debordian line of alienation whereby the divide and rule strategies perfect separation (self from self, self from other, self from world) for the ease of control in the swapping in and out of ‘dividuals’ as little more than variables in an equation.
<9> In general terms, modular systems are domain-specific, their operations requisite for functioning, self-contained, and computationally fast. In addition, the outputs must be initially simple before entering as inputs in subsequent modules that can complicate the output. For example, the basic output of resource extraction may be the raw, unprocessed material (ore, bitumen) which then enters into the next modular system involving processing, refining, and finally manufacturing. This is not to say that all outputs of a particular modular system will go immediately into a predetermined module, for in resource extraction it is also possible to channel a portion of those outputs into a “standing reserve.” In labour terms, the simple input is the actual labour itself, and the basic output is value, time, and production in terms of profit.
<10> The transduction aspect of modular capitalism involves data from the environment about resources - natural and human - that can be “processed” as inputs. These are “encapsulated” into formats that facilitate scalable input levels. Potential labour, as an input variable, is translated into actual labour of short and intense duration, controlled vertically. Outputs take the form of the extracted resources and profits. However, the labour and profit systems do not mix their operations although both modules possess a similar objective: acceleration and maximization.
<11> Local labour is an environmental resource that is “processed” according to the demands of the module. This reduces labour to a data input (a means to ends relationship based on modular progression of projects). Given the complexity of operations that are performed in, for example, launching and sustaining the extraction of bitumen using steam injection processes, this involves several tiers of labour, and these are not homogeneous. We might include here an expeditionary labour that seeks to assess the site’s suitability for development, teams dedicated to feasibility studies, those who seek investment for the initiative, promoters, the “shovels-in-the-ground” labour force tasked with supervising and conducting the extraction process, peripheral support labour, and shipping of materials for refinement and processing.
Earth-Moving
<11>The exuberant construction expansion of Dubai is but a single testament to the imposition of human will forcibly grafted upon a terrain that is not aligned with sustainable land use practices. Bringing these construction plans about required heavy reliance on earth-moving technologies and a considerable labour base. Now, with a concerted push to extract rare earth minerals to supply a large appetite for digital technologies and more far-flung and difficult to access oil reserves, the earth-moving equipment industry - involving their manufacture and operation - has experienced a significant increase in demand and thus demonstrable profitability. For example, the Peoria, Illinois company Caterpillar Inc. experienced a 44 per cent third quarter increase in earnings in 2011. This multi-billion dollar industry not only exceeds market analyst expectations, but also appears largely insulated against global economic market shocks as a result of the after-effects of the 2008 downturn and the creeping spread of the European sovereign debt crisis. The Japanese competitor, Komatsu, reported that upward price pressures on commodities markets resulted in higher sales performance for equipment in the energy and mining industries, particularly in North America and in Chile. J.C. Bamford, situated in the UK, experienced a 50 per cent increase in sales by June 2011 after a sluggish performance in the global construction sector.
<12> The terrain succumbs to an act of striation that effectively assists the flow and speed of capital, commerce, labour, and parasitic acts of resource extraction. Arguably, the history of exploration is inextricably bound to the search for resources. And in no way is resource extraction projects on a large scale particularly new: from the quarrying of stone for the pyramids, or marble in Ancient Rome according to Augustus’ plans, and up through the period of industrialization to extract coal and oil, strategies of extraction and accumulation imbue the exploratory nature of human beings. With respect to resource extraction, these are appropriated or captured as capital to be re-mobilized in the service of a transcendent economic model. It is less the interventions of State that once interfered with the relations between commerce and the war machine, but a remediation of that relationship that aligns the State with the multinational corporate micro-state – the flexible flow-state within the state with its nodal points distributed over a globalitarianized world, occupying the role of economic saviour and the dynamo that produces the State’s justifications for austerity financing and the subjugation of all social needs to the needs of the mystical Economy that occupies an almost transcendent role. This economy sets into motion a new regime of signs, currently under the regulatory controls of neoliberalization strategies. However, as David Harvey rightly points out, the flow of capital in the act of “creative destruction” (i.e., the vast transformation of natural landscapes into mines, quarries, instant-cities, etc.) is not one of frictionless mobility; that is, despite the fluidity of capital transfer using the instruments of computer technology, capital is still “tempered” in part by fixed capital in the form of actual structures that involve the paying of rents, upkeep, and staffing. Capitalism’s most major obstacle to realizing its frictionless ideal is in somehow overcoming the materialist fixity of its commodities: “Unfortunately material goods and people cannot move through cyberspace,” and “as capitalism relentlessly pursues speed and the reduction of spatial barriers, it must also temper its flows to the capital that is both fixed in space and slow to circulate.” (Harvey 190-191). Time compression to the instantaneousness of extraction is one of the two temporal registers of modular capitalism, while the other temporal register is that of extended time in terms of debt-as-accumulated-interest.
<13> If these landscapes cease to provide any further viable resources, then the structures positioned in these areas function as a drag to profit accumulation in which case capital must either demolish or re-purpose these structures. More commonly, a company will simply decide to abandon its interests in the area and set up elsewhere. A modular approach allows for simply the discontinuation of that module and its operations without endangering the entire company program. This “detachability,” as a function of flexible commitment levels on an ad hoc basis, empowers said companies through a process of selective (dis)engagement.
<14> Whereas Deleuze and Guattari indicate that mines are lines of flight, that imperial bureaucracies that seek to peripheralize labour and extract resources from nomadic peoples will invariably succumb to miners forming their own bonds as nomads to other nomads, (Deleuze and Guattari 412-3) the neoliberal solution to the problem was twofold: the first was to mechanize extraction and earth-moving processes to separate the worker from the subsoil of smooth space. The second was for these industries to become as nomadic and mobilized in their operations as possible, to decentralize themselves in adopting the model of the nomadic war machine. Given that neoliberalism has proven itself capable of adapting – and indeed thriving upon – chrono-economic stresses in an engineered environment of kairos time-criticality and microtemporality (i.e., “just-in-time production, microsecond market trading facilitated by largely cybernetic programs), the earth-moving industries have adapted the versatility of the nomad war machine in being able to re-mobilize its labour force and operations quickly. Pressures that endanger profit for the manufacture of earth-moving equipment such as labour costs are simply repackaged as unacceptable risks to profit accumulation, and thus operations are re-mobilized to where labour conditions are far more favourable to the corporation. Occupation of any territory where manufacturing takes place is not indexed on loyalty, and is always subject to slippage – the nomad war machine of these industries has the unobstructed ability to relocate operations. The site of manufacture resists sedentarism as such, and is never fully “locked in” to its surrounding labour environment. In such cases, the act of resource extraction extends the definition of “resource” beyond traditional commodities such as oil, minerals, or lumber to include local labour populations (what Marx referred to as “the industrial labour reserve army”). When corporations indexed on resource extraction identify a territory for their activity after successful prospecting, the discourse generally adopts the rhetoric of job-creation, positioning said corporation as a kind of economic saviour for, say, an economically depressed region. From there, labour is pooled as temporary aggregates that, once extraction is exhausted, is dissipated or discharged.
<15> The versatility of these industries is illustrated in the 2012 closure of the Electro-Motive Diesel - Caterpillar plant in London, Canada, and its subsequent move to Muncie, Indiana USA following the successful passage of right-to-work legislation in that state. The illusion of freedom for labour not to be compelled to work under unionized conditions effectively segments the labour force and diminishes the power of collective bargaining, employing a kind of neoliberal fragmentation that shifts competition to the site of the workers themselves. In its official statement available to the media, EMD-Caterpillar said, “The cost structure of the operation was not sustainable and efforts to negotiate a new, competitive collective agreement were not successful.” (The Star, Feb 3, 2012). What is lacking in the apparent vagueness of the statement would be what is precisely meant by sustainability (and for whom), and a disclosure of the plant’s current cost structure (which might be considered proprietary). It is possible to infer from the statement a narrow view of economy which is indexed on profit accumulation for its own sake, and that sustainability has little to do with regional employment, and is instead speaking directly to the company practice of sustained profit growth. Perhaps more troublesome is the use of the word “competitive” which is a common trope of the neoliberal discourse that attempts to naturalize a pseudo-Darwinian notion of natural selection via competition as an inviolable “state of nature.” With the invocation of competitiveness, apart from setting up an almost Manichean perspective, one would have to inquire what is meant by competition: who are the competitors in this “struggle”? From the labour perspective, the competition is clearly one of the employees competing against management for a share of profit redistribution in the form of fair compensation. From the management’s perspective, however, the competition is displaced from this context to mean competition between actual and possible workers. The workers at the EMD plant were in effect competing against a pool of ideal (i.e., non-union) workers who had yet to be hired or trained, but seemed to be defined according to the quality of working for less pay. By constructing the fiction of the ideal worker that performs the same task at a lower wage, and unfairly pitting the actual worker against this phantasm, the rhetoric of “competitiveness” is made to appear justified – unless the statement simply lacks qualification such as “competitiveness as compared to other skilled workers in comparable positions at other locations.” If this qualification is not made, then the reader is left to wonder what the labour value is being compared against, and precisely what actual labour pool is being compared with respect to labour value. And, even if this qualification is put in play, then this disregards the differences in the requirements (cost of living, labour market) across different geographical regions. Given that these are not standardized over broad areas, it would be fallacious to assume failure on the part of workers for not capitulating to “competitiveness” unless it were indexed on similar positions in their own region. And, if standardization of labour value (or assumptions of depressed wages become the norm), then the idea of competition to secure gainful advantage works within a lowered inscribed limit point that the company is “willing to pay.” The degradation of labour value takes on a new form of competition under the umbrella of employment scarcity, calling to mind the vicious underbidding among displaced Oklahoma farmers for fruit-picking jobs in California as portrayed in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. [1]
<16> One of the key outcomes of neoliberal practice has been the widespread deindustrialization of geographic areas to accommodate profit accumulation in relocating to areas with more lax labour laws. This heavy displacement effect on local labour pools which are largely geographically locked-in due to familial or other social-based commitments stands in opposition to the idea of the worker as flexibly replaceable human technology, a kind of ad hoc “plug and play” labour device. With respect to a highly flexible labour force, there is perhaps no larger human labour migration in the world than that reported by David Harvey: over 200 million people in the economically depressed rural regions of China have little choice but to make the long journey to the rapidly expanding urban centres in search of jobs.[2] In Canada, with newly legislated rules for eligibility for employment insurance (with seasonal workers most disadvantaged), the official policy has been to tie continued employment insurance payments for frequent claimants to their capacity to become far more mobile. In the particular case of changes to the employment insurance system, frequent claimants must be willing to take employment that pays at least 70% of their former employment, up to 100 kilometres away. Ideally, it would appear that the Canadian government, in its close alliance with the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, wants to encourage labour migration to the Alberta oil-sands, and this is trumpeted in planted stories raising the alarm of a critical shortage of skilled workers required in this area, tied in part to associated stories about the country’s “job skills mismatch” that is designed to steer education and training agendas in the postsecondary school sector. This cooperation between Big Oil and the State is not new, nor are the subsidies granted to Big Oil / Gas Industry for the purposes of initiating large scale projects such as extraction technologies involving pressure-drilling and fracking, and the selling of cross-border pipeline construction as conforming to the appearance of strong environmental regulations. Such industries depend on the State to instrumentalize its legislative powers to encourage production and labour migration when there are supposed acute worker shortages, and this is a continuing part of the interlocking functions of State and Capital to converge their interests as a collaborative venture whereby the State rewards said companies with indirect investment using taxpayer money, relaxing environmental regulations, and publicly promoting the economic benefits, while the companies can reciprocate by giving its support to the State, if not also opening up executive positions for politicians who are at the end of their terms. This convergence has succeeded in removing the last of the chinese walls that were to separate the State from the interests of transnational corporations, or TNCs.
Dubai
<17> In Dubai, the major construction firm, Arabtec, was embroiled in a controversial strike-breaking action making use of police intervention. The working conditions for the tens of thousands of employees of Arabtec are particularly poor, even if the work is considered “steady”: most of the workers live in barracks-style labour camp housing, earning the equivalent of a few hundred US dollars per month, toiling in high heat for long hours to satisfy Dubai’s ambitious construction plans. Many of these workers do not receive any salary increases, benefits, and the reporting mechanisms for abuse are largely token in nature. In Dubai where unions and public demonstrations are illegal, workers have little to no bargaining power, and agitation can result in deportation for foreign workers (which represent the majority of the workforce). According to the UN Human Rights Watch report, “Building Towers, Cheating Workers,” the reliance on migrant workers is particularly acute: “Foreigners constitute 95 percent of the workforce in the UAE, and as of 2005, there were 2,738,000 migrant workers in the country” and that over 20 percent of whom are “illiterate and from impoverished rural communities.” (p. 7). Construction companies accounted for 304,983 migrant workers in Dubai alone. (Rettab and Bakheet, “Dubai Construction Sector”). Although labour recruitment scouts under the employ of these construction firms that regularly source areas for potential migrant labour are not permitted under UAE law to charge a fee to prospective employees, enforcement of the law is wanting, and so undocumented cash transactions are made by migrant workers for visa processing and travel fees (UN Human Rights Watch 2006, p. 27). And, although also illegal, some firms confiscate migrant workers’ passports to prevent them from leaving: “By withholding workers’ passports, employers exercise an unreasonable degree of control over their workers.” (UN Human Rights Watch 2006, p. 39). Some have defended the practice for reasons of protecting proprietary information, return on investment on each worker, or as a goodwill gesture of “safekeeping” their passports so that they are not stolen. The “recruitment module” involves an extractive practice that is largely parasitic or predatory in nature as some recruitment firms lure desperate workers with claims of lucrative employment, but then trap said workers using a variety of methods that may include fees, passport or work permit confiscation, or placing the worker in debt (i.e., “investing” on behalf of the worker to process visas that the worker must pay off with earned wages). [3]
Chinese Mining Firms
<18> The world’s rare earth mineral (REMs) deposits, though spread out worldwide, are concentrated in various regions such as on the southern coast of China, a variety of monazite sources more inland of the coastline of Mozambique down through South Africa, and so forth. China’s scramble for African resources has meant that several Chinese mining companies have set up in various metals- and minerals-rich areas. Chinese interests in countries such as Angola, Zambia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Mozambique have embraced austere practices in employing local labour at just a nominal increase over a nation’s minimum wage, generally on short-term contracts, in some areas being paid one third that of a Chinese employee. There have also been numerous cited cases of poor sanitation (including cholera outbreaks), no increase in salaries even during boom times unless under political pressure, safety issues (whereby some workers were asked to supply their own safety equipment), excessive workload, and the use of child labour which is in contravention of the International Labour Organization’s principles. This has resulted in numerous closures, such as at the Chambishi Copper Mine (Zambia) until they redressed their practices.
<19> One of the reasons why working for a Chinese mining company may seem attractive despite poor labour conditions would be that there is no documentation requirement: only a will to work, as though a frontier system composed of “workers of fortune.” Despite the availability of cheap labour, some Chinese mining companies show hiring preference to Chinese employees, citing the need for high-skilled workers which may obfuscate the truth that some of the work does not meet what one could technically call “high-skill.”
<20> The enduring problem with Chinese mining companies might be an unwillingness or incapacity to harmonize their internal labour regulatory practices with the laws and labour regulations of the nation in which they set up. This may be further exacerbated by the close ties some Chinese investors develop with some members of government to look the other way (or offer protection and rubber-stamp safety audits of facilities) in exchange for monetary reward. Moreover, the local workers hired on are not given any training in skills that may be transferable, and their own local practical knowledge base is ignored.
<21> As the resources to be extracted present larger challenges to earth-moving and extraction equipment given the need to acquire harder to access resources, this entails a boom for mobilizing the knowledge economy for innovation in the domain of engineering. Ever more research projects in academia find their funding tied to the bias for immediate commercialization. As well, we find a vicious cycle in operation in the area of rare earth minerals where these are required for the production of more ICT devices, and thus the technology enhancements are needed to optimize extraction techniques. The failure of either innovation in engineering and computing technology, or the failure of innovating extraction techniques to meet a higher demand for technological devices, would amount to crisis at the level of production and consumption. Basically, innovation is indexed on market and economic determinism in the main.
<22> Earth-moving equipment technology does not only involve resource extraction, but also mass displacements and relocations of populations. In some cases, shades of eminent domain displace local populations in the name of progress such as the Three Rivers Gorges Project in China. “The externalization – outsourcing – under way, since the development of the very latest of ‘globalizations’, looks a lot like yesterday’s exterminations.” (Virilio 79). Daniel Bell charts the structural revolutions in geography as urban densification, expansion, to the transformation of the urban centre due to ethnic conflict. However, since Bell’s work (and to some extent the portents offered by the august urbanization thinker Lewis Mumford), the migration away from cities to leave them in a state of dereliction has taken place, but mostly in those cities that grew where labour was largely dependent on manufacturing industries that have now been deindustrialized and relocated (such as Detroit, Michigan and Gary, Indiana).
<23> Although the 2008 economic recession did have a negative impact on the natural resources sector with the closure of some mines combined with over a decade of steady decline in forestry, since 2011, the minerals sector saw growth by 4.1% while the energy sector saw an increase of 9% (Natural Resources Canada). In metal and nonmetal mining alone, employment levels have recuperated to their 2000 level.
<24> In the US, a 2011 study by Headwater Economics states that 10,000 jobs per month have been added in the energy sector, accounting for a 30-year high, but that the boom in newly found shale-gas sources has meant that “drilling is increasing at such a fast pace that there now is the prospect of a shortage of skilled labor and machinery.”(Headwater Economics, 2011). This sentiment has also been echoed in Canada with respect to the controversial development of the Alberta oil sands. Apart from the environmental impact of mining and drilling activities involving more difficult to access resources (for example, the compressed nature of shale from which to obtain natural gas, the temperatures required for the release of bitumen from sand, or the climatic challenges presented in drilling activities in the Arctic), the labour required is of a shorter and more intensive duration until at some point the “bubble” bursts, as is currently happening in Australia’s mining sector.
Acceleration surpasses accumulation?
<25> Mobilizing the resources of the earth involves four key phases: exploration, discovery, extraction, and transport. If the conditions are monetarily favourable (such as a discovery is “proven” and extraction and rental costs are calculated to be lower than net profits), resources can be channeled into local development and accompany a boom in the services sector once refining and processing needs are met. Improvements in exploration technology has led to the discovery of more earth metals than previously known to exist in the reserves furnished by “legacy data” in resource-rich areas (Gelb et al, 2012). This does not take into account the plethora of social impacts that are generally understudied or dismissed by governments and economic interests.[4] Moreover, resource extraction activities demonstrate that they are indeed vulnerable to market oscillations. For example, profitability in exploiting the Alberta oil sands can vary greatly depending on the price of oil. The province of Alberta has recorded a budget deficit for the 2012 fiscal year on account of a precipitous drop in the NASDAQ for the price of oil per barrel, and the high costs of extraction - despite this industry receiving overly generous government subsidies to maintain operations. Alberta’s arguably monocentric economic focus on oil places the province in a precarious position where a sudden plummet in the price of oil, or the exhaustion of the oil supply, would leave said province in a position of economic hardship unless they actively embraced a more robust diversification of their economic activity to act as a buffer against price shocks. A possibly similar scenario is occurring in Australia where there has been some concern that the mining boom has hit its peak and is now in decline. In early 2013, Cyprus was looking to avoid insolvency by the possible exploitation of recently discovered gas reserves in an area where Turkey has also expressed its territorial sovereignty.
<26> The extraction technology, taken as tools, shares a similar mechanical property with weaponry. Resource extraction “liberates” the earth of its hydrocarbons and minerals, but also “liberates” the earth from its state of raw non-utility. Additionally, the resources are “liberated” from their own communication circuit (for example, oil from its fixed geologic time scale and thrust into the instantaneity of the human economic time scale). Thus released from this geologic time scale, the earth’s resources are inputs in the communicative feedback loop of economic concern: rare earth minerals become batteries and wind turbine components, and oil is slotted into the communication framework of plastic production and consumption on a mass scale. It is a war of territory, or that terrain becomes territory: to use the weapons to project into the earth and seize its common property, just as a vampire fang is a projectile weapon into the body of the living to alter the communicative relationship where the circulatory system is pirated from its previous function of supplying nutrients throughout a single body.
<27> Semiotization occurs when the earth’s resources and their extraction is written into the discourse of the economy which in itself is the new body the resources are made to inhabit. This becomes a language of units: barrels of oil, tons of coal, cubic metres of natural gas. These units help determine the price which forms the lexical components of economic communication in the network of production, consumption and profit. Capital surplus is reabsorbed, where possible, into new speculative ventures.
<28> The very idea of mobile capital must always contend with obstacles of immobility. As previously stated, concentrated zones of fixed capital such as edifices and infrastructure to facilitate exploration and extraction represent limitations to frictionless movement. In addition, apart from the resources themselves being fixed in space, labour is not as mobile as the commercial transactions that occur over computer networks and so companies must compensate by discharging its labour force and drawing from an existing pool at the next resource extraction site (with the exception of specialists such as engineers who, in some ways, resemble the artisans and compagnonages of old). For as long as resource-seeking adventurism and urban expansion is a necessity to supply economic demand, we do know that earth-moving technology will continue to prosper, if not expand beyond the earth to entertain somewhat lofty and currently cost-ineffective ambitions to mine asteroids.
<29> The new metallurgy differs considerably from historical precedent when we consider the State demand for rare earth minerals and the desire for “energy security” via exploiting local sources. It is no longer the artisan or smithy that transforms these metals into objects, but the factory line that produces chips and batteries required for the manufacture of digital technology. This process is one based on a template where dequalified[5] workers produce the components in a computer assemblage. The aspects of artisanship occur prior to extraction by way of designers and engineers whose task is respectively geared toward the harmony of form and function. Precision machine tools are required in this process, and these can be largely automated as well as the quality control process to ensure optimal functionality in the manufactured end product - at least to a certain temporal threshold whereby obsolescence can take place in either the breakdown of the manufactured unit, or the creation of new units that boast in-demand features.
<30> In terms of resource extraction, this takes on the character of strategic guerrilla warfare. Just as the guerrilla militant must be flexible and nimble in understanding the changing micropolitical situation and thus respond according to even minor changes, the corporate entity must treat the earth and the fixed sociopolitical features as such. What defines guerrilla warfare also defines extraction policy: optimal action with maximum return in the shortest amount of time. In extraction terms, this is supplied by data that forecasts how long it will take to liberate the region of its resources given current technology, possible local resistance, State compliance, available labour supply and cost, possibility of technological innovation, and market price for the resources. State compliance can be assured if there is political stability and in the willingness of the State to advertise through its own propaganda mechanisms the derivative benefits of extraction activities such as packaging these as easing local unemployment, a boost to local service industries, and so forth. In other cases, some corporations must resort to making use of “alternative” levers, generally renewing older forms of social relation such as the patron-client model, involving in some cases the use of bribery:
The ongoing plunder of Cambodian forests provides another example of such rampant corruption and refurbished patronage, as public lands are leased for foreign companies not only with the typical neoliberal practices of allowing tax holidays and renewable leases, but also under circumstances of bribery, where government royalties fail to reflect the value of the timber. Many private companies have gained access to concessions through hostile takeovers and intimidation of locals through payoffs to local military personnel, and by forming alliances with Cambodian elites enabling them to skirt laws, manipulate judicial processes and influence national legislation. (Springer 133).
<31> However, certain care must be taken that supply of the resource does not exceed demand for fear of unit price falling and thus making the affair unprofitable. These tactics of predatory and parasitic methods provide the temporary illusion of sustainable development in any region in which extraction activities manifest. Failure to understand the broad, complex, and heterogeneous political composition of a region can result in situations of conflict such as the Canadian silver mining initiative in Bolivia where it is alleged an indigenous person was killed as a result of resistance. Or, in the case of extractive practices used by major water bottling firms like Nestle in the Great Lakes and the British Columbian region, rejecting drought provisions that would compel them to scale down their operations which may lead to public outrage. However, this can be mitigated by a steady stream of State-produced or indirectly financed propaganda that touts the benefit of extraction as a causative force for local and national social improvements, thus making use of the image-making technologies of contemporary media to carry out the “mission” of the spectacle which Debord, and later Giroux, identifies as having the pedagogical function to promote consent. (Giroux 28).
<32> Generalized fatigue marks the neoliberal ideological dynamo, and this despite its meta-regulating processes and hyperactivity. In fact, it may be inappropriate to speak of ideology at all when neoliberalism not only sheds its “ism” to wed itself with falsified reality to become the “natural state,” but ideology itself must depend on history – which cannot exist when the past has been (re)mastered by those who have set up the political framework and have complete control over the mediatic flows (the dynamism that is allegedly present in the interactive media environment is both the illusion of autonomous free-flow of information just as much as it is the gift of the political ruling elite). Any return to ideology is a return to its theatrical reenactment, the dramatized reflex that only haunts the screen. In normalizing a new atemporal order that has sacrificed the future in a war of attrition with the past, what is left is a perpetual “boom” of an eternal, yawning present with no boundaries, indexed on aggressive expansionism for the sole purpose of expansion itself. Just as neoliberalism has been able to absorb and thus capitalize upon every economic crisis, it has also succeeded in absorbing the traditional registers of time itself. Totalitarianism depends on the mythification of history to develop its megalomaniacal vision of the future, and this temporality is firmly indexed on space, measured according to ethnic situated-ness and the shift of borders; globalitarianism has no need of history at all since its megalomaniacal promise is situated in the amplified present-time, and so therefore has no need of a future-time except as a carefully engineered phantasm to orient its activities that are “justified” in advance according to the prophecies it packages as inevitable. The one exception to this is the function of debt.
<33> Despite a need to balance profit with social need to better construct sound and sustainable socioeconomic policies, the neoliberal discourse frequently subordinates social need to profit accumulation, which thus leads to specious reasoning (such as “trickle-down effect” policies) where social need becomes a byproduct of profit maximization strategies. Social needs that cannot be fully absorbed by the speed and accumulation rhetoric of full-scale economization are simply excluded from consideration, possibly repackaged as “unearned entitlements” that go against the neoliberal values of individualism and self-reliance (even if this obscures a kind of economic Calvinism whereby rich and poor are simply the new terms for blessed and damned). There is no doubt that an attention to social and labour needs, at least on par with a drive for profit, will inevitably lead to slower economic growth, which explains why this was not adopted in the capitalist expansion practices of the early 19th century. However, with the fixation on growth for growth’s sake that the neoliberal practices seem to espouse, social need is said to be provided for by some form of “miracle” that can only emerge if profit is maximized. Ideally, however, if current trends reach their apogee under the neoliberal banner, we open the way to a new kind of feudalism where a majority of citizens work for lower or frozen wages with diminishing benefits, while the managerial and executive classes continue to build upon their wealth, most of it obtained because it has been “liberated” from the workers. Growth, then, applies to two domains: 1) the growth of profit and wealth in concentrated areas; 2) the growth of a cheap and disposable labour class that is globally diffuse. It is these two major aspects of growth that portray the Janus-headed figure of growth as both concentrated and diffuse, merging in much the same manner as Debord’s revisitation of his concept of the spectacle whereby the Soviet concentration model and the American diffusion model unite their efficiencies in the post-Cold War global paradigm. No longer simply a matter of choosing between the broadcasting of the spectacle and its version of the real to a disordered outside (American diffusion model), nor the internally-directed mirror of the spectacle of ideology broadcast to the centrally organized inside (Soviet concentration model), the spectacle is a two-way mirror surface upon which the image of the inside and outside combine to form the global narrative.
<34> And it is in this “liberation” of wage encroachments on profits that is less a form of accumulation (although this does occur) and more to be understood as acceleration. It is not simply the inducements by the apostate defenders of the current economic model that call on the populace to accelerate their consumption and thus “spend” our way out of this recurring episode of kairos in capitalism. It is the acceleration of capital’s mobility where movement becomes falsely aligned with notions of speed in a non-relative sense. This acceleration is manifest by the haste in which geomorphic projects take place on the earth, thus also accelerating all the effects that emerge out of this relationship with the earth. Be these effects of circumpolar warming, the circulation of chemical toxins in the air or water table, or the mass displacements of populations in the migratory mobility of short-term labour, much of the alarming trends understood today begin with a relationship with the earth that is an acceleration of translating the earth-as-text into the ubiquitous and instantaneous economic discourse. What is lost in this translation is endemic to the narrow idiom of that economic discourse. Here in Canada we need only consider the recent passage of the notorious “kitchen sink” budget bill, Bill C-78, which stripped environmental protections under the auspices of “prosperity” and “job-creation” as though any time-scale of longer duration must be subordinated to the micronized time scale of economic transaction. In effect, the mobilization of the earth itself is an attempt to shift its time scale, to employ a program of geomorphia that is more on the order of geo-dysmorphia.
Toward a Definition of Modular Capitalism
<35> Although we have selected earth-moving technology and resource extraction practices as an example to illustrate capital’s relation to the earth, modularity of capital might be applicable in other domains of capitalist accumulation / acceleration. Simply stated, modular capitalism is characterized by its highly deregulated or near-frictionless movement, arrested only temporarily by the fixed structures in which it might be situated at any given time. The modular aspect of capital allows it to function efficiently and largely independently, in a highly mobile fashion so that it can be “detached” and re-attach itself elsewhere quickly. Constant remobilization of both its liabilities and assets present modular capitalism with a kind of “flexicurity” where it can “metabolize” its liabilities to preserve its goals of growth for growth’s sake, as well as mobilize its assets in the most strategically advantageous way possible. On a very temporary basis, a corporation can mimic the role of the State by becoming its subunit, effectively modulating State desire (such as economic growth, employment) through the filters of accumulation and speed. In this way, corporations that operate according to this modular scheme can operate as actuators of State desire, but given the quasi-independence of these modular entities, can remobilize its operations at will when the conditions are no longer favourable to the goal of growth for growth’s sake. In this way, despite the possibility of mutualism between State and corporate enterprise, the latter is not beholden to the former except to permit untrammeled activities that might require the State’s legislative apparatus to deregulate any obstacles to the rapid “liberation” of capital in any of its manifestations. Obstacles may include labour cost liabilities, environmental laws, tariffs, taxation code, immigration laws, zoning, legal liabilities in the event of deleterious harm to environment and/or persons, and waste management. In other words, the near-frictionless movement of capital is free to insert its modular operations in a territory, but once extraction is complete, it is the State left holding the bag, for it is the State that must answer to its citizens when there is significant environmental degradation leading to a drop in quality of life.
<36> The modularity aspect of capital inscribes a space of largely autonomous activity, but also leaves it impermeable to rhetorical attack. This is accomplished by the very nature of its symbiosis with the State which is leveraged to function as a buffer against public opinion. Simply put, the corporation performs the deed, and the State takes responsibility and ownership of the justifications for permitting the deed when the outcome can be positioned as favourable. This is abetted, in part, by the neoliberal apparatus of favouring a strong State apparatus to enable capital flow and corporate interests rather than simply a rolling back of State intervention, as originally advised by Hayek. By making explicit use of legislative mechanisms, criticism can be easily deflected by State rhetoric, steering control of judicial instruments, and taxpayer-funded propaganda that effectively narrows the terms of discourse by naturalizing certain terms (like “economy” which forms part of what I would “economyths”) that will restrict the debate to a pre-established set of terms and definitions. Moreover, the time scale of modular capitalism, based as it is on micro-temporal decision-making processes, make it a “slippery fish” for the public to mount any campaign of dissent, although this does not prevent efforts on the part of some groups to call said corporations to account, such as the current campaign by First Nations groups against the degradation of their natural environment by the encroachment of proposed pipelines, or the suing of British Petroleum for gross negligence in the case of the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill. However, the rhetorical function of lionizing and defending modular capitalism’s interests is generally taken up by the State, relying on a repertoire to either restrict debate, make specious counterarguments, or to employ distraction tactics that appeal to the economization discourse. In Canada, a variety of instruments have been employed to insulate the oil industry from criticism such as 1) Deploying a Natural Resources Minister to proselytize on the virtues of tar-sand extraction practices both domestically and in foreign-directed contexts; 2) Legislating looser environmental protections to permit practices that may be hazardous to the environment; 3) Denouncing environmentalists as foreign-funded lobby group extremists; 4) Muzzling federal scientists whose research contradicts the government’s claims that the tar-sands are environmentally safe; 5) De-funding various environmental research groups; 6) Tying federally funded research dollars to projects that can demonstrate a clear correlation between the research and immediate commercialization; 7) The redefining of environmental groups or figures, such as David Suzuki, as “political” which strips said groups of their charitable status; 8) The frequent claims of wide-ranging consultations with the public over any planned expansion of resource extraction or delivery which exclude certain people and groups, while only including representatives of industry or “oil-friendly” groups; 9) Frequent emphasis on the short-term economic benefits, packaged as the means by which “long term prosperity” will be constructed; 10) Planting “feel-good” stories on how the oil industry has invested in innovative technologies to diminish environmental impact; 11) Cherry-picked statistics and studies that make false comparisons on carbon emissions in the tar-sands.
<37> As we might note, modular capitalism’s ability to remobilize and reorganize at will vaguely resembles the ideal notion of an Internet as an unregulated, nonlinear, and organizationally flexible medium (despite the largely corporately controlled nature of the environment whereby much of the “digital commons” has now been closed). In occupying a region, modular capitalism territorializes said region, exploiting the static objects of labour for the time required to fulfill a specific objective before said labour is discharged. The extreme flexibility, mobility, and “metabolic” features of modular capitalism lends it versatility as well as durability, honouring as well what can be considered analogous to the network model ideal of reliability and resilience. That it resembles parasitism is more than just mere appearance or analogy. Guided in part by a mission of growth for growth’s sake, protected by existing State structures to operate in relative autonomy, and virtually untouchable given its speed and defenses, one might speculate what modular capitalism will become once it can become pure flow - absolutely frictionless and no longer impeded by the few remaining obstacles that temporarily arrest it. Another aspect of modular capitalism is in its flexible ability to “pick and mix” from a reserve industrial army that is effectively made nomadic, rootless, and thus (to use Marx’s phrase) a “mass of human material always ready for exploitation.” (Marx 632).
<38> Viable alternatives to modular capitalism are either not forthcoming, potentially undesirable, or involve mass social (re)organization that might be headed by NGOs and social protest groups. The “implosion engine” of capital that David Harvey says has been constructed out of the previous incarnations of capital seem indexed in chasing after energy - both labour and material - that becomes absorbed in a kind of black hole. Modular capitalism would need an emergency brake, for the only way its method of acceleration can currently stop is for it to run out of fuel or simply crash. A “hard reboot” whereby a new and more incremental form of capitalism is not guaranteed. In geomorphic terms, capitalism would have to be detached from the very territory it has already absorbed into its operational procedures of acceleration. Such a separation would require considerable effort as modular capitalism has in effect imbricated and intercalated itself in the very territory it exploits - but in such a way that it does not diminish in speed.
<39> The focus here has been on earth-moving technologies and the stage or phase of modular capitalism, but no less important would be data extraction practices that also follow modular lines. Although data is negligibly light, its energy burdens are not, and it is from the body of the earth and the body of the masses that become sites of data extraction for the purposes of accelerating production, regulating behaviours, and making extensive use of probability matrices for the purposes of control in the age of datapolitik. Issues of efficient flow and speed are inherent to understanding capitalist practices from mines to markets to masses, and it also carries the operational function of dividing classes in more radical ways that capital alone could not achieve.
Notes
[1] A telling fragment where a man is informing Tom Joad of the peach pick: “They’s a big son-of-a-bitch of a peach orchard I worked in. Takes nine men all the year roun’...Takes three thousan’ men for two weeks when them peaches is ripe. Got to have ‘em or them peaches’ll rot. So what do they do? They send out han’bills all over hell. They need three thousan’, an’ they get six thousan’. They get them men for what they wanta pay. If ya don’t wanta take what they pay, goddamn it, they’s a thousan’ men waitin’ for your job.” (Steinbeck 218). If we can be permitted some cheek here, we might recall Canada Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s response to proposed changes to the employment insurance program in stating, “there are no bad jobs.”
[2] Paul Virilio puts this “floating population” at about 100 million. The Futurism of the Instant: Stop-Eject 4.
[3] A similar practice of work permit and passport confiscation has been identified by the UN Human Rights Watch in the construction work being done in preparation for the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia.
[4] An effort to chart the social impacts against the rhetoric of economic progress can be found in S.M. Goldenberg, J.A. Shoveller, M. Koehoorn, and A.S. Ostry, “And they call this progress? Consequences for young people of living and working in resource-extraction communities” in Critical Public Health v.20:2 pp 157-168.
[5] We use this term in lieu of “unqualified” or “unskilled” since it is often the case that in some regions of high unemployment skilled workers are drawn upon to work in these types of jobs, and their skill set may have been “dequalified” or “disqualified” by technologies that render said skills obsolete. In the current Canadian climate, the government of the day has frequently cited the need for more “skilled” jobs (i.e., trades) which is of a piece with their current initiative to incentivize skills-upgrading for employment insurance recipients, skills-jobs matching, and an emphasis on vocational versus academic postsecondary education. In an article by Alex Usher in March 22 of The Globe and Mail (“Really, a skilled-labour shortage? In truth, we need arts grads.”), Usher correctly identifies the discursive narrowing of the original claim by Rick Miner about “skilled labour” into “skilled trades.” None too ironically, in Canada, the construction industry - a source of several skilled trades jobs - still suffers high unemployment despite the expansion of operations at the Alberta oil sands. Dequalified labour is also at issue in the shift of farmers losing autonomy to major biotech seed sellers like Monsanto where the farmer is reduced (and thus alienated) as being a mere seed-sower.
Works Cited
Bell, Daniel. The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. New York: Basic Books, 1976.
Deleuze, Gilles. Negotiations: 1972-1990. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Ferguson, Rob, Robert Benzie and Tanya Talaga. “Caterpillar closes Electro-Motive plant in London.” The Toronto Star. February 3, 2012.
Gelb, Alan and Kai Kaiser, Lorena Viñuela. “How Much Does Natural Resource Extraction Really Diminish National Wealth?: The Implications of Discovery,” Centre for Global Development, 2012.
Giroux, Henry A. Beyond the Spectacle of Terrorism: Global Uncertainty and the Challenge of the New Media. London: Paradigm Publishers, 2006.
Goldenberg, S.M., J.A. Shoveller, M. Koehoorn, and A.S. Ostry, “And they call this progress? Consequences for young people of living and working in resource-extraction communities” in Critical Public Health 20:2 (2010): 157-168.
Holland, Eugene W. From Schizophrenia to Social Control. IN: Deleuze and Guattari: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy, and Culture. (Eleanor Kaufman & Kevin Jon Heller, Eds.) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998.
Harvey, David. The Enigma of Capital: and the Crises of Capitalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Headwater Economics. US Energy Sector Employment and Trends, 2011(http://headwaterseconomics.org/wphw/wp-content/uploads/Status_Energy_Industry_September2011.pdf)
Marx, Karl. Capital, Vol 1. New York: International Publishers, 1967.
Natural Resources Canada. Information Bulletin, June 2012 (http://www.nrcan.gc.ca/minerals-metals/publications-reports/4477)
Pinker, Stephen. The Language Instinct. New York: Morrow, 1994.
Rettab, Belaid and Bader Aldeen Ali Bakheet, “Dubai Construction Sector,” Sector Monitor Series - Dubai Chamber of Commerce & Industry, 2005.
Springer, Simon. “The neoliberalization of security and violence in Cambodia’s transition.” IN Human Security in East Asia: Challenges for Collaborative Action. Ed. by Sorpong Peou. London: Routledge, 2008.
Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Bantam, 1964.
Virilio, Paul. The Futurism of the Instant: Stop-Eject. Trans. Julie Rose. New York: Polity Press, 2010.
UN Human Rights Watch, “Building Towers, Cheating Workers,” 2006.
Return to Top»