Arbete
The sugar plantations demanded an exacting and ceaseless labour. The tropical earth is baked hard by the sun. Round every ‘carry’ of land intended for cane it was necessary to dig a large ditch to ensure circulation of air. Young canes required attention for the first three or four months and grew to maturity in 14 or 18 months. Cane could be planted and would grow at any time of the year, and the reaping of one crop was the signal for the immediate digging of ditches and the planting of another. Once cut they had to be rushed to the mill lest the juice became acid by fermentation. The extraction of the juice and manufacture of the raw sugar went on for three weeks a month, 16 or 18 hours a day, for seven or eight months in the year.

– CLR James, The Black Jacobins (1938)

Extraktion I
”Extractivismo, as extractive capitalism is known in the Américas, indicates an economic system that engages in thefts, borrowings, and forced removals, violently reorganizing social life as well as the land by thieving resources from Indigenous and Afro-descendent territories. […] Extraction operates through material and immaterial forms of converting Indigeneity into exchange value, where intellectual and spiritual resources are taken to produce new forms of colonial currency.”

– Macarena Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone (2017)

Extraktion II
The dominant form of extraction of value is neoextractive insofar as it configures the relationship between territory and the global market. The internal circulation of goods and products depends on the success of the country’s insertion into the global market.

– Verónica Gago, Neoliberalism From Below (2017)

Exploatering
Working through the difference but also the important relations between exploitation, on the one hand, and dispossession, power, domination and alienation, on the other, we try to rescue this crucial notion from the ‘economistic’ reading that has long prevailed in Marxism.… The need to stress the political nature of exploitation becomes clear once the concept is plunged into the dense material relations that surround the production of subjectivity. Once the relationship between exploitation and subjectivity comes into view, raising issues of embodiment as well as social difference, the very possibility of considering questions such as race and gender as secondary with respect to some primary contradiction of capital and labor simply vanishes.

– Sandro Mezzadra & Brett Neilson, The Politics of Operations (2019)

Gräns I
Min bror sa: Om du inte darrar när du korsar en gräns är det inte gränsen du korsat.

– Athena Farrokhzad, Vitsvit (2013)

Gräns II
Det som på nordsamiska heter Sápmi, på lulesamiska Sámeednam och på sydsamiska Saemie är ett landområde som sträcker sig över fyra nationers gränser, från Idre i Dalarna i söder till Ishavet i Norge i norr och i öster mot Kolahalvön i Ryssland. För människorna som lever här är gränserna enbart streck på en karta. Språken, kulturerna och kropparna korsar nationsgränserna i vardagen men de lämnar inte en nationalstat för en annan, utan befinner sig hela tiden i Sápmi.

– Helena Fagertun, Timimie Märak och Malin Nord, Kritiker nr. 52, ”-Frihet” (2019)

Gräns III
”The problem is not the migrants, nor the refugees, nor the asylum seekers. Borders. Everything begins with them, and all paths lead back to them.

– Achille Mbembe, The great riddance (2018)

Industri
Oljepriserna fortsatte ned på måndagsmorgonen. Kinesisk statistik över bland annat detaljhandel och industriproduktion var svagare än väntat och spädde på oron för minskad efterfrågan på det svarta guldet från Kina, som är världens största oljeimportör.

–
”Oljepriset sjunker på måndagsmorgonen”, Dagens Industri 2022-08-15

Motstånd
Men, sa Ferdinand och trummade lätt mot väggen. Men men och men! Om det nu blir så att Öfverheten kommer för att lyfta ut oss härifrån så ska dem få lyfta! Godvilligt gå vi int ut. Fast ibland tänker jag ut andra sätt. Tillsammans med Storsonen min. Han är så trofast och klok. Medan vi springa av och an, ut och in – du kan ju tänka dig hur kärlingen ska yla med småen som pissa och skita i förskräckelse. Men plötsligt har jag satt henne och allihop i långsläden som länsman och fjärdingen kommit i. Jag tar tömmarna och piskar överhetens häst och kör – oppåt till Lappträskvattnet eller nedöver, vi får väl se, kanske nedöver för där verkar ju folk hava mer hjärta i kroppen? Och är det tänkt att vi ska utrotas så må det vara hänt. Men överheten ska få känna på några timmar hur vårt liv var här, i åbyggnaderna deras.

– Sara Lidman, Den Underbare -Mannen (1983)

Naturresurs
This Nation has been portrayed for too long a time to the people as being energy-poor when it is energy-rich. The coal that the President mentioned: Yes, we have it, and yet 1/8 of our total coal resources is not being utilized at all right now. The mines are closed down… The other thing is that we have only leased out and begun to explore 2 percent of our Outer Continental Shelf for oil, where it is believed by everyone familiar with that fuel and that source of energy that there are vast supplies yet to be found.

– Ronald Reagan, presidentvalsdebatten i Cleveland (1980)

Operation
In the kitchen, ’bout to make some magic
Then blow it all in Magic (Haha)
Pull up on my partner in traffic
Gave it to him, it was all in plastic (Damn)
All I know, I ain’t tryna go to jail (Go to jail)
Heard that shit closest thing to hell (Yeah)
When it’s stepped on, make it hard to sell (What? What?)

– Jeezy, Seen It All (2014)

Plattform
While digital platforms have long faced pressure from governments around the world to take down content, block political critics, and open local offices on which government control can be more easily exerted, Western pressure and Russia’s crackdown are accelerating a paradigm shift for how tech firms operate.… The reason for this shift is clear: In the digital age, internet platforms are inextricably linked to power. Governments use Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok to spread propaganda, sow division, intimidate their critics, and otherwise further their political agendas. Likewise, civic movements and activists turn to the same platforms to mobilize their followers, call out despots, and organize mass actions against governments. The COVID-19 pandemic, which forced a good portion of the world online, has accelerated the centrality of digital platforms in politics and society.

– Steven Feldstein, ”4 Reasons Why Putin’s War Has Changed Big Tech Forever”, Foreign Policy (2022)

Rasism
Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.

– Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag (2007)

Stadsliv
Some say that we should leave the city, that this complexity is stifling. No, we cannot live outside the city, we cannot free ourselves from common exploitation except through collective action – through the ‘insurrection of the common’. We cannot liberate ourselves from complexity to seek autonomy, solitude or – worse – simply to limit consumption (what a stupid rhetoric!). We have to invest the complexity, reorganizing it and bringing it back to the ‘common’.

– Antonio Negri, From the Factory to the Metropolis (2018)

Stadsliv II
The right to the city is not merely a right of access to what already exists, but a right to change it after our heart’s desire. We need to be sure we can live with our own creations (a problem for every planner, architect and utopian thinker).

– David Harvey, The Right to the City (2003)

Utsida
The geography of the earth had also had to be known in parallel Spirit/Flesh terms as being divided up between, on the one hand, its temperate regions centered on Jerusalem – regions that, because held up above the element of water by God’s Providential Grace, were habitable – and, on the other, those realms that, because outside this Grace, had to be uninhabitable. Before the fifteenth-century voyages of the Portuguese and Columbus, which disproved this premise of the nonhomogeneity of the earth’s geography, the Torrid Zone beyond the bulge of Cape Bojador on the upper coast of Africa had therefore had to be known as too hot for habitation, while the Western hemisphere had had to be known as being devoid of land, seeing that all land there had to remain, in the framework of Christian Aristotelian physics, submerged in its ‘natural place’ under water, since ostensibly not held ‘unnaturally’ above the water by Divine Grace.

– Sylvia Wynter, Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom (2003)