As always under capitalism, appearances are deceiving. Dismantling the globe-spanning processes of extraction, production, distribution, and finance would prove a bewilderingly complex task. These processes are mediated by technologies of transportation (containerization, intermodal transit) and computing (AI, machine learning, robotics); arranged in variegated economic geographies (corridors, gateways, clusters, special economic zones); structured by evolving inter- and intra-firm relationships (outsourcing, sub-contracting, vertical reintegration) and forms of market power (monopolies and monopsonies); and ultimately enabled by state authority, which furnishes the necessary logistical and regulatory infrastructure, and the repressive apparatus to defend the flow of goods at all costs. “Deglobalized capitalism” verges on an oxymoron. Since its dawn in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and Indigenous dispossession, the profit logic exerts a centrifugal force; the drive to accumulation is a spatially totalizing one. Whatever might be possible in theory, actually existing capitalism has always relied on the globally uneven cheapening of labor and nature, the sacrifice of far-flung lives and ecosystems at the altar of relentless production, and the constant expulsion of populations alternately surplus and super-exploited.

Nationalist retreat is thus a fantasy. But fantasies can prove politically powerful: in practice, calls to “bring manufacturing back home” portend a grim world of even harsher policing of migrants and supply chains increasingly securitized by state violence. The task of the left today is to grasp the fundamental planetary scale of global capitalism—and the planetary horizons of our transformative projects. It is this planetary interdependency—its brutal reality and emancipatory possibility—that Martín Arboleda depicts with rigor and generosity in Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction Under Late Capitalism (Verso Books, 2020). And, by doing so from the vantage point of the sprawling zones of extraction that stretch from Chile to China—mines, refineries, ports, ships, power plants, data processing centers, and entire cities that serve as capital’s logistical hubs—Arboleda not only centers the periphery but inverts our impoverished spatial vocabulary. The margins of the world system are far from backwards: they are sites of novel techniques of exploitation—and of the vanguard of subaltern futurisms.

It is only in combination with labor, of course, that machines take on their lively powers. Since 1992, 400 million Chinese peasants have been forcefully “depeasantized” and put to work in industrial factories. On the other side of the Pacific, campesinos and Indigenous peoples are also being driven off their land. Marx dubbed this process “primitive accumulation”: the forcible separation of people from their means of subsistence, compelling them into wage labor and the cash nexus. These shifts in class structure aren’t unfolding in parallel; they are internally related. The reproduction of the Chinese working class hinges on the dispossession of Latin American peasants—and the deforestation, contamination, and cancer epidemics that rapacious extraction and mega-agriculture entail. Their shared domination is, for Arboleda, a clue to the shared conditions of their emancipation: Chinese and Chilean workers have more in common with one another than they do with their respective ruling classes. And, in a useful corrective to Sinophobic tropes, China shouldn’t be seen as a conniving, conspiring hegemon bent on world domination. Rather, riffing on Stuart Hall, imperialism is the modality through which global capitalism is lived. In this reading, the role of Chinese banks and firms in expanding the extractive frontier is an expression of a process that is global in scope.

As Deborah Cowen recounts, ever since their origin in military logistics, supply chains have always imbricated capital and coercion

What is the ecosocialist alternative? Arboleda argues forcefully against nationalism in either politics or analysis. It’s convincing. Like the extractive circuits detailed in Planetary Mine, the supply chains for green technologies such as wind turbines and electric vehicles will, and must, cross borders: the resources to make them are unevenly deposited in the earth’s crust, and the left’s commitment should be to global access, which means prioritizing globally equitable distribution. Their far-flung networks of production are strategic nodes to exercise popular power in the twenty-first century. From Indigenous blockades of lithium extraction in Chile to labor organizing at Tesla factories in the United States, communities and workers resist nascent green capitalism and imagine alternative green futures. Such resistance is a necessary but insufficient condition for an ecosocialist transition: with a decade to avert the worst of the climate chaos, the state has the capacities to reorient economic activity in the here and now. Public investment, democratized finance, stringent regulations, public and worker ownership, and trade and industrial policy all have a role to play in building a democratic, low-carbon future. In the hands of social movements, labor unions, and allied state actors, these tools can fashion a new world out of the dying old one.

From the planetary mine to the global factory, the future organization of supply chains is up for grabs. Grassroots struggles alongside, against, and for state power will help shape the coming economic order.