2. The Oceanic Question

Capitalism and the Sea

Campling and Colás begin by posing a “terraqueous predicament”: while capitalism aims to subsume the planet and its life forms, it “regularly confronts geophysical barriers to its own self-expansion, which in the case of the sea are especially challenging,” because “the high seas cannot be permanently occupied.”3 This is in some ways a restatement of the classical agrarian question, which explains the unevenness and differentiation of agrarian capitalism as a consequence of agrarian ecological and social difference. What makes capital’s encounter with the sea different is that, in its quest for a “spatial fix” to its immanent contradictions, it is forced to forge “new articulations of terraqueous territoriality” or “uniquely capitalist alignments of sovereignty, exploitation and appropriation in the capture and coding of maritime spaces and resources.”4 This is how they set up the problematic of oceanic capitalism.

One of the things that happens in oceanic books is that they can mirror the expansiveness of their object of study, and hence the adjective “Braudelian.” I cannot rehearse all that Campling and Colás do. What I can do is draw out some key threads that might help us think about the oceanic question as the agrarian question at sea: as concerned with how capital creates “terraqueous territorialities” in relation to the challenges of marine environments. I read the book for moments in which we see oceans as produced through various conjunctures, as an oceanic Gramsci might, as products of different configurations of capital, law, labor, geopolitics, and technology, and importantly, of the natural qualities of the ocean that humans have apprehended as a source of energy, as protein for consumption or energy for propulsion.5 Through attention to these organic qualities, the oceanic question is analogous to the classical agrarian question but with its distinctiveness. The ocean’s specificity as an organic space of a different kind from farms, pastures, or forests is that it cannot be similarly “improved.” There are limits to an oceanic green revolution, despite sea-cucumber farming, or Japanese high-value tuna ranching, or experiments in deep-sea mineral seeding. Rather, capital has to find different ways of extracting value from highly migratory species through rent extraction from national-territorial EEZ waters or from fishing quotas. We will return to the importance of rent in oceanic extraction.

Capital, state, and multilateral agencies come together to appropriate value from parcels of marine biomass that are in fact value in motion. The same principle applies to the extraction of value through oceanic shipping, still the cheapest means of enabling massive flows of goods in our time. But the lively unpredictability of the ocean consistently thwarts the fantasy of frictionless movement across and through the seas, as witnessed in the periodicity of oceanic accidents and spills and in containers thrown overboard through storms and accidents.

The materiality of the ocean means that every new form of oceanic extraction—of deep-sea minerals, wave energy, desalinized water, or oceanic cooling systems using temperature differentials of surface and deep waters—comes at such great cost because of the added expense of legal, administrative, and military power needed to bring order to the sea. This means that hegemonic powers benefit most, and a key though not uncontested beneficiary has been American naval and commercial hegemony over the seas since 1945, the specific oceanic hegemony whose emergence Gramsci was concerned with. As a consequence, a “global commons,” meaning the high seas beyond any nation’s territorial waters, appears to privilege hegemonic corporate and state powers that seem to order and protect these interests through a naval, communication, energy, and financial infrastructure bequeathed by prior sinews of imperial power, to draw from Laleh Khalili’s framing.6

Part of the oceanic question has to attend to the way in which the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) in 1982 effectively enclosed the oceans. Campling and Colás call this “the largest enclosures in human history” that used national-territorial EEZs to turn coastal terraqueous space into state property, and that made the high seas a “global commons” or “heritage of humankind” supposedly beyond reach of sovereignty and property.7 These zones recall a relation between the notion of the “free sea” from Hugo Grotius’s 1609 Mare liberum and the “closed sea” in John Selden’s 1618 Mare clausum, as well as Western legal concepts of imperium or sovereignty and dominium or property over maritime space, conceptions that have recurred in histories of the seas ever since. We return to these imperial dynamics in the next chapter. The U.N. convention has to be seen in light of histories of imperialism and decolonization in and through the oceans, as we will see in chapter 4.

Another aspect of the “agrarian question at sea” is the ceaseless production of a diversity of labor regimes, rather than a march of proletarianization. This was one of the great insights of the agrarian Marxist tradition: it demonstrated painstakingly the diversity of arrangements of land, labor, and credit, and the nonlinearity of forms of tied or unfree labor even in dynamic regions of agrarian capitalism. Intense exploitation and persisting forms of unfreedom including debt bondage and slave labor have had extremely nonlinear histories in the oceans, and they persist into today’s hidden oceanic labor regimes, including in twenty-first-century forms of slavery and indenture. Campling and Colás make a stronger argument that “people labouring at sea in the early twenty-first century remain crucial to keeping capitalism global; . . . their work makes possible the fragmentation of production and labour arbitrage across the planet.”8 Differentiated and highly exploitative labor at sea enables the arbitrage at the heart of global inequality, as it connects the unequal diversity of labor regimes across global capitalism today. This is also an interesting point because maritime labor has also been a conduit of resistance to various moments of power and inequality. The agrarian question at sea also has to attend to attempts to discipline these potentials for resistance as well.

One aspect of disciplining maritime labor regimes is that international labor law and trade unionism have tended to distinguish and deal separately with seafarers and fishing crews. Another set of issues emerge from the articulation of labor regimes across land and sea. All maritime labor regimes are in fact terraqueous: they begin with onshore recruitment, and higher levels of exploitation are enabled by “flags of convenience,” the registration of ships in locations with weaker labor and environmental protections. G. Balachandran, indispensable Indian Ocean labor historian, shows that by the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, the constant churn in the maritime labor market was linked to agrarian landscapes through a range of intermediaries.9 Political and economic subordination of agrarian households has been key to sustaining cheap maritime labor regimes in the past and present. And if the maritime workforce has historically appeared to be male dominated, still the larger terraqueous landscape of labor has continued to rely on a range of gendered forms of unpaid reproductive and productive labor, including of course hidden domestic- and community-care work. Linebaugh and Rediker present this argument particularly on the making of the Atlantic as a racial capitalist ocean, but it holds across oceanic conjunctures.

Ships are also labor regimes unto themselves. Rediker’s history of slave ships carefully details the way in which they were also despotic factories meant to produce the commodity “labor” through systematic terror while also exploiting seafarers, but slave ships also enabled new and enduring forms of solidarity below deck.10 Stephanie Smallwood’s Saltwater Slavery shows that there is more than simply the transatlantic slave trade being the rational machine we see through the archives of slavery: for slaves, the process of commodification was violent in its indeterminacy, and this violence persisted in the “serial repetition of one-way departures” as “salt-water slaves” kept arriving on American shores. These accounts can be read in dialectical relation to think about the indeterminacy of all forms terraqueous labor, and also of possibilities of solidarity in the face of pervasive indeterminacy and violence.

Apart from the exploitation of human labor is the massive extraction of marine life through a fishing industry that has increasingly eroded the fisheries it relies on. Capital’s response has been through new technologies for extraction from untapped frontiers or for removing fish from the wild ocean through intensive aquaculture that is fed by wild-fish protein. Both options in fact depend on further depleting the wild ocean, a kind of “pelagic imperialism” in which powerful states and corporations collude in the desperate search for an endless “gift of nature” in more distant and deeper waters through new technologies and forms of property.11

Campling and Colás make the case for eras of pelagic imperialism: the whaling industry of the eighteenth century in which Dutch whalers profited through the doctrine of mare liberum; the rise to prominence of the New England whaling in which the Pequod sailed forth in Moby Dick; the “new imperialism” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in which Japan expanded its pelagic reach in South East Asia; the postwar period of “national” industrial fisheries in tension with the Pax Americana, which in turn expanded its pelagic imperialism through a network of bases and through new instruments like the Truman proclamation of the U.S. right to “conservation zones” to manage fisheries in the high seas next to U.S. coasts, using the pseudoscientific concept of “maximum fisheries yield” (MSY) which asserted “that fishing could be sustained at high levels into perpetuity.”12 An oceanic Gramsci would ask how these waves of pelagic imperialism accumulate in specific oceanic conjunctures, as David Vine does in his book on imperial power and dispossession in Diego Garcia.13 Another direction would be to follow the exciting directions opened up by Jesse Rodenbiker’s research on race, class, and gender differentiation in the labor regimes of oceanic fisheries in relation to markets for high-value fish maw in Hong Kong and New York City, to show how pelagic imperialism transforms “urban oceanic relations.”14

After the 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), 90 percent of the world’s marine-fish populations have been enclosed in EEZs as national property while they are within these areas. Was this an ocean grab by former colonizers, through the overseas territories of Britain, France, and the United States, and the white settler colonies Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, which together control a third of the total global surface area of EEZs? Campling and Colás argue that the answer is more complex, since China has a relatively tiny EEZ in per-capita terms, and since UNCLOS emerged through a process of mid-century Third World-ist assertion.15 They argue that we should think of EEZs as “a sovereign mechanism for extracting ground rent, where the coastal state assumes the ‘class function’ of modern landed property.”16 We will return to these arguments about rent and decolonization in the next two chapters.

While Gramsci probably did not have the corpus of the classical agrarian question at his disposal, his elaboration through the initial recasting of the Southern Question and subsequent exploration of waves of passive revolution help us extend his own thoughts about the sea as part of his distinctive form of conjunctural diagnosis. I’d like to turn somewhat schematically to two new categories that will have to do with oceanic questions in our time in various parts of the world, and perhaps also of the world ocean as a whole. The first is a scholarly and activist category of “extractivism,” and the second, which I will only touch on, is an industry category, the blue economy. I’d like to bring insights from or about these categories back to where I began, with deep-sea mining as a new form of passive revolution.

Extractivism Reconsidered

The concept extractivismo emerged in the Iberophone Americas in scholarship and activism detailing the wider effects of natural-resource extraction, including “neo-extractivism” under putatively leftist regimes: Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva Lula in Brazil, or Evo Morales in Bolivia. The normative hopes of the concept are in forging solidarity with Indigenous resurgence and with substantively altered forms of living, relations to nature, and world-making. Key progenitor Edouard Gudynas, in the translations we have in English, argues that “extractivism” signifies more than “extractive industries” and that it is a wider mode of appropriation of nature, a new common sense and political theology. Gudynas recounts Morales raising a flask of crude oil at a hydrocarbon project like a priest with a chalice of holy wine, dipping his fingers into the oil, and anointing his ministers’ helmets with the divine blood of extraction.17 Rather than securing the terms of order, however, Gudynas argues through the work of the Renée Zavaleta Mercado that extractivism has become a field of struggle over the surpluses from appropriation of natural resources.18 The question from Zavaleta’s Gramscian perspective is how extractivismo galvanizes national-popular collective will in a way that is internationalist and that sustains Indigenous movement.

One strand of academic thinking on extractivism has followed the “decolonial” and linked “ontological” turn, sometimes through a renewed romance of Indigenous knowledge.19 Another strand extrapolates broader possibilities. Michael Watts argues that “hyper-extractivism” can refer to the quantitative increase in the extraction and consumption of biomass, fossil fuels, metal ores, and nonmetallic minerals through mining, as well as through secondary extraction from used material through recycling, all of which increased from twenty-seven billion tons in 1970 to ninety-two billion tons in 2017.20 This quantitative expansion, he argues, is part of a planetary recomposition of what Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson call “operations of capital” linking extraction, logistics, and finance in new ways. The clearest invocation of the planetary in this line of thought comes from Mazen Labban’s argument that capitalist industry always involves the extraction of resource energies and of surplus value; through a consideration of biomining and recycling, he argues that contemporary extraction in both these senses takes new spatial form that is at once planetary and molecular.21 Martín Arboleda has written a book on the topic, although it does not, to my reading, productively extend Labban’s insight. Part of the problem is that Arboleda’s book appears to see the planetary as a “scale” on the model of Russian dolls, a big thing out there. In contrast, Labban brilliantly poses “the planet as a living body with material capacities” everywhere, and the problem of the “becoming-mine of the planet” as “a process without beginning or end in time and space, always in the middle, au mileu.”22

In a different vein, Véronica Gago and Sandro Mezzadra’s “expanded concept of extractivism” includes digital mining as well as the predations of finance capital, and they argue that this exceeds the notion of exploitation through the wage relation.23 Continuing this line of thought, Mezzadra and Neilson extend their argument about the operations of capital to the metaphorical mining of cryptocurrencies, as well as to gaming, platform urbanism, logistics, and so on, which, in their worlds, “involve heterogeneous forms of labour and exploitation.”24 I will come back to these point through Marx’s “trinity formula” in the next chapter, because how we conceptualize a retreat from what is taken to be a classical Marxist notion of exploitation is important. In a final strand, Watts identifies the political economy of extraction as a regime of rent extraction, and he surmises, through reflection on Alexander Arroyo’s doctoral dissertation on tech and finance from San Francisco’s Bay Area invested in the “digital Arctic,” that “extraction is less an old-world nineteenth century industry rooted in classical imperialism than a leading edge of contemporary capitalism ceaselessly searching for new frontiers of real and formal subsumption of nature.”25

But of course, it can be both, one building on the other, depending on where and how one looks. That is what the neologism “racial capitalism” is a reminder of, the transformation of older forms of ethnoracial or imperial authority in new capitalist forms, with no presumption that any particular racial-capitalist form lasts forever. Watts’s many decades of research in Nigeria’s oil landscape seems to show a very complex and changing geography of rent extraction that, in the case of oil theft, relies on a mosaic of “quasi-sovereignty . . . populated by its own petty sovereigns.”26 And this is what one might expect in the complex aftermaths of imperialism across the African continent. Consider two studies of extraction that productively build on agrarian studies and show the protracted, though by no means eternal, importance of imperial forms in contemporary landscapes of capitalist extraction.

The first is the work of historian Matthew Shutzer, who looks closely at India’s fossil-fuel capitalism over a century, from the 1870s to the 1970s, and particularly at the coalfields of eastern India, which have also been the site of sustained Indigenous resurgence.27 There is a lot to commend this study, but I want to focus on the curious story of property in subterranean resources that Shutzer offers by taking seriously the idea that ground rent, in his words, “represents the sedimentation of historical struggles over who is permitted to monopolize finite reserves of land and nature,” which prompts a question for him: “How do preexisting forms of landed property and ground rent come to interact with new social and ecological pressures generated by the land-intensive logic of extractive industries?”28

Shutzer’s response from the history of mining in colonial Bihar and Bengal is that the colonial Permanent Settlement of Bengal built on the ambiguities of zamindari large-landowning agrarian property, which was particularly ambiguous about the legal status of subterranean wealth; while mining companies reinforced zamindari in order to extract coal as tenants, this only heightened struggles over subterranean property. The attempt at fixing rights through new forms of calculation did not solve matters either, because, as Shutzer puts it concisely, “extraction does not take place in the frictionless space of scientific circulation, but much closer down to earth.”29 Perhaps this is what Gramsci means by an “earthly” form of thought that is not just a critique of speculative thought but also is attentive to ways of apprehending earthly processes. What postcolonial India inherited was the enduring “unresolved contradiction between an agrarian topsoil vested in cultivators, and a mineral subsoil vested in zamindars and coal companies”; and when the postcolonial state, in its wisdom, abolished zamindari, it effectively became “a coal zamindar.”30 Property regimes over new forms of subterranean “land,” Shutzer shows, have to be seen through grounded struggles over capital accumulation, custom and law.

The second study is from Gavin Capps, his 2010 doctoral dissertation, “Tribal-Landed Property,” on the political economy of mining under the BaFokeng chieftaincy in South Africa from the nineteenth century to the advent of democracy in 1994. Capps takes on recent orthodoxy in African studies that has presumed that the colonial investment in chieftaincy across the continent has limited the emergence of capitalism and the usefulness of Marxist critique. I will come back to this aspect of Capps’s work in the next chapter, but what he shows expertly is that chieftaincy was a colonial instrument both of domination and of capital accumulation, and that the proliferation of land deals with foreign capital across the African continent today are intertwined with the persistence of chieftaincy, or petty sovereignty more generally.31

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the area of Bafokeng and Rustenberg, about 130 kilometers northwest of Johannesburg, saw a spate of land purchase by Africans, registered “in-trust” to the state under a recognized chief of the BaFokeng tribe; landholdings were bifurcated as either tribal-trust land with attached mineral rights or farms under a form of state land. In the 1960s, mining in this region accelerated through the auspices of Impala Platinum, which negotiated access to mining areas through the apartheid state. This racial-capitalist state of the 1970s started to offer “independence” in quotation marks to homelands, and BaFokeng was absorbed into the homeland of Bopthatswana, with its own president. When the BaFoking chieftaincy began to be more assertive in its relations with Impala, the courts empowered that the homeland president as state trustee, and he renewed Impala’s lease with low royalties. Conflicts continued in democratic times, with the minister of land affairs now the state trustee, and a new minerals bill in 2002 shifted “custodianship” of minerals to the state and launched a process of racial transformation of corporate ownership, including in the mines, called Black Economic Empowerment (BEE.) The Bafokeng chieftaincy deftly shifted strategy to seek an equity stake with Impala, which satisfied Impala’s BEE requirement while ridding the chieftaincy of state interference. In effect, Capps argues that tribal authority had become a form of capital.32 What is so exciting about the work of Shutzer and Capps is that these studies add a new twist to debates about “racial capitalism” in the Black Marxist tradition by showing how ethnoracial forms can become hegemonic, leaving the overt traces of their “traditionalism” behind. To my mind, this is exactly the kind of critical diagnosis that Gramsci was engaged in.

Terraqueous Extractivism and the “Blue Economy”

Does this matter for terraqueous extraction from the seabed, which is unlikely anywhere to be anything like the situations I have just described, in which traditional authorities might be able to claim deep-sea resources? While coastal communities have in some instances been able to fight along on the lines of landed extractive contracts, there is no such possibility on the high seas.33 My point is broader: the extractivism of state and capital in the name of the nation is shaped by colonial histories that configure postcolonial realities, one way or the other, and even the notion of extraction through the tech-mediated digital ocean is not free of the imperial past.34 Depending on one’s theoretical and political perspective, the point is to diagnose how every instance of capital is shaped by the imperial or racial past. That is what the Black Marxist concept “racial capitalism” is a reminder of, and as both Gilmore and Keeyanga-Yamahtta Taylor argue, this is what we should simply assume of “capitalism.”

I have not attended to the complexity of the notion of the blue economy, but I would point to the work of Rosanna Carver, who has been investigating its complexities as a discourse emerging from Small Island Developing States (SIDS) and from the Third World-ism of UNCLOS, but with more complex politics surrounding “resource sovereignty,” particularly complex in unlocking its potential for Namibia’s blue economy, in which especially phosphate mining at the point where the Benguela current wells up running along the southwest of the subcontinent will be in the national interest.35 Carver argues that the EEZ is in fact an ambiguous vertical space of territorialization, with a surface where other states have “right of innocent passage” under UNCLOS, with a water column under the jurisdiction of the coastal state, and with a seabed and subsoil over which the state has sovereign rights rather than full territorial sovereignty. The terraqueous process of dredging the seabed and extracting phosphate through the water column is a complex problem that is bound to be contentious.36 The water column brings phosphate mining into contradiction with fishing capital, further demonstrating how distant actual environmental concerns are for the wild ocean that lurks somewhere beyond the fetish of the blue economy.

I have suggested that approaches to extractive industry from agrarian studies are particularly suited to extending the insights of an oceanic Gramsci. This has taken us at various moments to questions of imperial power that Gramsci saw as central to his conception of capitalism. We turn next to think more carefully about waves of imperial power that prefigure the making of the ocean as a blue economy waiting for the predations of corporate capital.