We are pleased that the limitations that Paul Apostolidis finds in The Politics of Operations work at the level of metaphors rather than concepts. As Emile Benveniste (Problems in General Linguistics, 1971, p. 25) writes, metaphors are “a powerful factor in the enriching of concepts.” We intend the metaphor of “capital hitting the ground” as a means of enriching our concept of “operations of capital” or, at least, as a way of dramatizing one of its important moments—capital’s grappling with and enmeshment in “dense constellations of flesh and earth” (p. 3). Held in tension with the tendency of capital’s operations to mesh with each other to generate wider and differentiated formations of capitalism, this moment is crucial to understanding how capital interacts with social and spatial realities. That Apostolidis finds our favored metaphor for describing this interaction to recall bombs and paratroopers perhaps says more about the reader than the text. Not only are we clear that we do not intend this metaphor to be interpreted simply as “a Promethean lightning strike” but we also explain that “we use the word ‘ground’ in a sense that is at once material and prospectively constructed as an operative surface on which capital intervenes” (p. 3). These provisos underscore the ontological and political complexity that we find characterizes capital’s contact with its outsides. They should also make clear that we do not hypostatize capital’s relation with its multiple outsides as a relation between “discrete entities with hard shells,” as Apostolidis writes.

Far from advocating finance, logistics, and extraction as an exclusive triad for analyzing capital’s operations, we see them as “different points of entry or relative framings for a wider analysis of the mutating fields of politics and capital” (p. 4). That our study ranges widely in its case studies does not mean inattention to production, reproduction, or the politics of work. This should be clear from the prominence given to work-based struggles and to struggles that find impetus in the crossing of labor and life in the chapter titled “Vistas of Struggle.” Likewise, the emphasis throughout the book on social reproduction as an area in which state activity is no longer effective illustrates the importance we attribute to this process and its gendered and racial dimensions. Moreover, discussing “the unity of capital” in chapter 2, we stress the relevance of the reproduction of labor power, which provides us with a crucial angle for the analysis of the state in chapter 3.

According to Apostolidis, we claim that “potentialities for anticapitalist politics emerge in capital’s interface with its outsides.” We definitely see “boundary struggles” as an important source for anticapitalist politics today, but we are far from taking them as an exclusive source. Again, the wide range of struggles that we analyze in chapter 5 (“Vistas of Struggle”), including labor and antiracist insurgency, mobilizations in slums and metropolitan fights, migrant struggles and battles for the common, should give an idea of our take on the diversity and heterogeneity of anticapitalist politics today. All these struggles raise complex and crucial problems of political organization, and the question of connecting them is even more difficult and urgent. Contrary to what Apostolidis writes, we do not “celebrate” the politics of “event” and “performance.” Our discussion of those politics in chapter 6 is clearly critical. We advocate “a politics capable of confronting the operations of capital at the level of their encroachment on variegated fabrics of daily life.” Such a politics, we emphasize, “must be effective at local sites of production, reproduction, and cooperation, opening up spaces liberated from exploitation at the same time that it builds connections, translation, and even institutions with wider geographies beyond the local and the national” (pp. 249–50). It is easy to see, we believe, that we are not far from Apostolidis’s concerns here.