After the waning of the poststructuralist moment, interest among social and political theorists in capital’s dynamics and political vulnerabilities has rekindled. Vital questions present themselves. How might analysts reinitiate ambitious efforts to think capital and radical politics simultaneously in their mass-scale dimensions without sacrificing insights into complex relations between power and difference? When capital actively produces social and political difference as a core means of self-valorization and expansion, while still evolving structural mechanisms that spread over increasingly globalized territories, how should a broadly coordinated yet locally attentive fight for noncapitalist social life-forms be construed and pursued?

Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson foreground these urgent problems in The Politics of Operations. The book raises a salutary call to identify and cultivate instances of radical political possibility that occur when capitalist logics and situated patterns of human activity that are not strictly determined by capital interact. Mezzadra and Neilson thus clear, or at least herald, a path toward newly cogent evaluations of capital’s entanglements with difference, even as capital hones and extends its generalizing rubrics. They also offer a provocative vision of radical political organization that (mostly) avoids fetishizing the disruptive moment and sets its sights on creative ventures in institution-building palpated by impulses of popular protest.

Mezzadra and Neilson argue for theorizing capital in ways that refuse to relinquish either a regard for overarching dynamics of capitalist power or the distinctive configurations of domination that result from capital’s perpetual activity as a difference-generating machine. Social theory’s task, they contend, is to apprehend how “the deep heterogeneity of contemporary global space is the result of a continuous and systematic process of production that is adaptive, temporally variable, and constantly redefines its own boundaries” (p. 37, emphasis mine). As these lines indicate, Mezzadra and Neilson figure the heterogeneous forms of social existence as not simply different from capital (and from one another) but also as in some sense located beyond capital—as capital’s “outsides,” which capital needs to generate new value but which elude capital’s total control. The authors acknowledge the difficulty of designating any aspect of social life entirely outside capital’s workings when capital’s instrumentalities so profusely pervade society: “The multiple outsides of capital take on a rather paradoxical character . . . . Far from being limited to spaces . . . that have not yet been subdued to the domination of capital, they are also continually produced from within capital, both through its initiative and through resistance to its logic” (p. 66, emphasis in the original). They approvingly cite Nancy Fraser’s insistence on “the tension between the commodity logic . . . and a social world that, even when it is fully shaped by that logic, continually reproduces spaces external to its domination” (p. 66). The world “outside” capital thus, at once, is thoroughly fashioned by capital and constitutes itself as capital’s external, recalcitrant otherness.

At its most compelling, Mezzadra and Neilson’s investigation of capital’s dealings with its outsides embraces these ambiguities and sees both capitalist expansion and anticapitalist possibility as inseparable from such paradoxical circumstances. The notion of capital confronting its outsides comprises the core thematic of the extractive, logistical, and financial “operations” they discuss as their basic approach to analyzing capital. This is an optic trained on technologies and genealogies of power, rather than one aiming to trace systematically the unfolding of capital’s logics in the manner of David Harvey’s The Limits to Capital (1982), Moishe Postone’s Time, Labor, and Social Domination (1993), or Marx’s Capital: Volume One. The focus on operations opens a welcome view on how capital accumulates and circulates through multiple territorially, temporally, and politically differentiated contacts with its outsides. Such processes, the authors stress, have indeterminate outcomes and depend on “multifarious and not necessarily predictable connections” (p. 67). The acuity of this pluralized perspective, however, requires sustaining a keen sense of the outside–inside ambivalence. Thus, we understand the extractive dynamics common to fishing, slavery, social media data “mining,” and “biocapital” formation better for grasping how capital participates in the composition of its own “natural,” human-relational, and fleshly “outsides” (pp. 139–46). The same goes for the authors’ observations on the permeation of financial “rationality” (“speculative, risk-based, promissory, and ‘mimetic’”) into production protocols, currency flows, and informal workers’ subjectivities (pp. 158–60). It also holds for their comments on how the deployment of logistical systems “to reduce capital’s turnover-time” not only moves objects across spaces but also “actively produces environments and subjectivities, including those of workers and labor forces” (p. 151).

At times, however, Mezzadra and Neilson write in ways that suggest a more rigid ontological and conceptual distinction between capital and its outsides, and these passages threaten to compromise both the argument’s theoretical sophistication and its political generativity. Spatial rhetoric marks this tendency, including recurrent references to capital’s “edges” and “frontiers” and, above all, the notion of “capital hitting the ground” as a favored metaphor to characterize capital’s contact with its external other. Consider what entities are colloquially said to “hit the ground.” They include bombs, paratroopers, and new employees (“running”): operatives on a mission with no time to think because of imperatives of survival or efficiency. This motif skews our analytical vision away from capitalist processes’ dependence on—and active engagement in—the constitution of hegemony through longue durée processes that interweave habits of consent with patterns of coercion (as in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks; see also Michael Buroway’s Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process under Monopoly Capitalism, 1979). More generally, with capital and its other hypostatized as discrete entities with hard shells, the sense gets lost that capital’s outsides are never fully external to capital even as capital never wholly commands them.

Mezzadra and Neilson’s retreat, in this way, from their own objectives of demonstrating not just the heterogeneity of “lived and grounded circumstances” but also “the articulation of operations into larger and changing formations that make up capitalism as a whole,” and of disclosing the latter by examining the former, relates to another problem: the need for a stronger rationale to privilege extraction, logistics, and finance as essential for understanding capital today (pp. 70–71). The authors offer suggestive remarks on the “intertwining” and “resonances” among these operations, but these comments do not amount to an account of capital’s unitary workings (p. 161). I would ask, Can a convincing account of capital result if we only view production and reproduction through the lenses of this operational triad? Or does critique need a more multifaceted exploration of productive and reproductive activities, especially work in its myriad forms as well as endeavors often assumed not to be “work” but frequently entangled with capitalist logics (Christian Marazzi, The Violence of Financial Capitalism, 2010; Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries, 2011)?

For Mezzadra and Neilson, potentialities for anticapitalist politics emerge in capital’s interfaces with its outsides. The authors evoke the prospect of combining transformative impulses that stem from difference with those generated by systemic domination, yet they tend to hang their hopes on the former. They do this particularly when they celebrate the politics of “event” and “performance” in passages that chime with their accent on heterogeneity but downplay the patient, continuous efforts needed to knit together counter-hegemonic projects on which systemic change relies (as I argue in Breaks in the Chain: What Immigrant Workers Can Teach America about Democracy, 2010; see also Alfonso Gonzales, Reform without Justice: Latino Migrant Politics and the Homeland Security State, 2014). Mezzadra and Neilson insightfully draw from “strains of feminist and queer thought,” as well as antiracist and decolonizing theory, an understanding of “difference . . . as a moment of excess that puts subjectivity into action, generates political creativity, and prompts struggles for liberation” (p. 33). They themselves, however, challenge us to resist identifying political possibility with “moments of excess” and to cultivate anticapitalist power by politicizing experiences of being simultaneously implicated in capital’s totalizing tendencies and constituted-in-difference by, and sometimes not by, capital. This is precisely the challenge I see migrant day laborers meeting in my new book featured in this critical exchange.

It is also a challenge to which Mezzadra and Neilson fortunately rise when they articulate their political vision most pointedly. The authors advocate reworking Lenin’s concept of “dual power in terms of a stable political framework that is capable of articulating a political dynamics of struggle, transformation, and government through the establishment of a stable system of counterpowers” (p. 241). A network of autonomous people’s councils would comprise one pole of this dualist arrangement. Designing such bodies, the authors note, “means reflecting on and reinventing the soviet . . . as an institution of self-organization and self-government, while rethinking its relations with formal political institutions” (pp. 241–42). It also means reconceiving members as not limited to “workers” and recognizing the innovations of popular movements outside the traditional proletariat, detached from dominant Left parties, and inciting racial and indigenous upsurges (pp. 184–85, 242). For the authors, the state remains a vital “field of struggle” for Left politics (p. 232). To be sure, “a politics of radical transformation cannot be centered on the state” (p. 241) because the national state no longer has the power on its own (if it ever possessed such power, as the book’s review of imperial history asks) either to secure capital’s material conditions and ideological legitimation or “to confront . . . capitalism” antagonistically (pp. 61–64, 131, 238). Set in catalytic relation with an autonomous organizational apparatus, however, and subjected incessantly to this “second power’s” “radical contestation” and efforts at “redirecting [state] resources to oppositional ends,” state power can supply a crucial arm of anticapitalist dualism (p. 243).

Theorists should ponder whether work-related critical exercises and political demands might need to play a more powerful, even synthetic role in forming this “second power” and whether Mezzadra and Neilson’s relegation of production and reproduction to the supporting cast in their drama of capital’s operations may obscure this need. We should also consider how a further layer of organizational infrastructure—perhaps of a different kind, such as a party (Jodi Dean, Crowds and Party, 2016)– might be necessary to ensure the coordination among autonomous popular groups that would enable grounded struggles against capital’s operations to be converted into assaults on systemic capitalist power. Nonetheless, Mezzadra and Neilson are sounding the right themes when they underscore the task of “translating” (pp. 176, 243) particular outbreaks of capital-defying politics into the advancement of general social alternatives and when they insist that the Left must regain the courage to institutionalize anticapitalist action.