File spoon-archives/postanarchism.archive/postanarchism_2003/postanarchism.0308, message 2


Date: Sat, 2 Aug 2003 18:27:52 -0700 (PDT)
From: "J.M. Adams" <ringfingers-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: [postanarchism] Armitage: "Dromoeconomics: Toward a Political Economy of Speed" (1 of 2)


Dromoeconomics: Towards a Political Economy of Speed 
John Armitage and Phil Graham

1
And what are we to say of the enthusiasm of post-
industrial companies for the cellphone which enables 
them to abolish the distinction between working hours 
and private life for their employees? 
Or the introduction in Britain not simply of 'part-
time' but of 'zero-hour' contracts, accompanied by the

provision of a mobile phone. When the company needs 
you, it calls and you come running. - Paul Virilio.

2
It is at bottom false to say that living labour 
consumes capital; capital … consumes the living in the

production process. The more production comes to rest
on exchange value … the more important do the physical
conditions of exchange -- the means of communication
and transport - become for the costs of circulation.
Capital by its nature drives beyond every spatial
barrier. Thus the creation of the physical conditions
of exchange -- of the means of communication and
transport -- the annihilation of space by time --
becomes an extraordinary necessity for it. - Karl
Marx.

3

In this article we present an alternative theoretical 
perspective on contemporary cultural, political and
economic practices in advanced countries. Like other
articles in this issue of parallax, our focus is on
conceptualising the economies of excess. However, our
ideas do not draw on the writings of Georges Bataille
in The Accursed Share, but principally on Virilio’s
Speed & Politics: An Essay on Dromology and Marx’s
Capital and the Grundrisse.4 Using a modest synthesis
of tools provided by these theorists, we put forward a
tentative conceptualisation of 'dromoeconomics', or, 
a political economy of speed. 

It is important to note at the outset that our 
general argument concerning excess speed departs
considerably from postmodern conceptions of political
economy, as well as from traditional Marxist
formulations.5 Instead, our synthesis arises from our
individual contributions to the ideas of
'hypermodernism' and 'hypercapitalism'.

6
We argue that the two contradictory forces of warfare
and international trade drive the necessity for a
conceptualisation of dromoeconomics. These apparently 
antithetical but actually interdependent logics
identified by Virilio and Marx find their 'suspension'
in an institutionalised form of irrational
rationality, or what we call 'hypermodern
managerialism'; an extended, 'evolved', or 'advanced'
form of sociopathic managerialism. It is a
rationalist, secular fundamentalism that now extends
into almost every aspect of life. In short - 
and we take this to be self-evident - dromoeconomics
has become necessary because warfare has become
industrialised while trade has itself become outright
war. Both are indistinguishable in their hypermodern
managerialist emphasis on the need for a political
economy of speed. We begin by focusing on the work of
Virilio and the idea of excess speed before
considering its relationship to complementary aspects
of Marx's work on the scientific 
critique of political economy and our conception of 
dromoeconomics. The second and third sections
concentrate on excess speed and overproduction from a
hypermodern perspective before centring on human
warfare as the basis of international 
trade, and the suspension of these antithetical
forces. In the fourth section we focus our efforts on
the concept of hypermodern managerialism and the need
for speed, the (il)logic of which suspends the
antithetical tensions between war and trade. This
section shows how hypermodern managerialism is related
not only to war but also to trade, excess speed, the
annihilation of space by time and the contemporary
conditions of human life. In the fifth section, 
before concluding our argument, we discuss some of the

conceptual difficulties inherent in synthesising
Virilio and Marx as well as in developing the concept
of dromoeconomics. 

Dromoeconomics
For a number of years now, Virilio has been advancing
the idea of ‘dromology’, the study of the logic of
speed. Virilio believes that the logic of
ever-increasing acceleration lies at the heart of the
political and economic organisation and 
transformation of the contemporary world. As he puts
it: To me, this means that speed and riches are
totally linked concepts. And that the history of the
world is not only about the political economy of
riches, that is, wealth, money, capital, but also
about the political economy of speed. If time is
money, as they say, then speed is power.7

Thus we see that Virilio equates money, power and
speed, implicitly recognising that the circulation
time of 'ephemeral' capital (money, for example) can,
at least theoretically, substitute for 'massive'
wealth and the labour it commands.8 But it is not
enough to say that we have defined excess speed in
terms of dromology and that this, in turn, is 
linked to wealth and power. Rather, we need some way
of being able to grasp the relationship between the
political production of speed and the economic
production of manifest wealth. Clearly, in the current
'globalised' environment, speed, mobility and wealth
are somehow linked. But how do we connect the
circulation time of money with the speed of 
violence? Virilio answers by calling for the
development of a political economy of speed in
addition to a political economy of wealth. Indeed, for
Virilio, the ‘physiocrats who provided 
the basic studies of political economy’ were doing the
‘same sort of work’ as himself. However, the
difference is that his ‘research examines the
comparable power of speed and its influence on morals,
on politics, strategies and so on’. 

Virilio continues: 
I'm a physiocrat of speed and not of wealth. So I'm 
working in the context of very old traditions and 
absolutely open situations. At present, we still don't

know what a political economy of speed really means. 
It’s research which still awaits subsequent 
realisation.9 Despite apparently confounding the
Physiocrats’ agrarian political economy with de
Tracy’s school of ‘ideology’, Virilio's allusions to a
research agenda featuring a political economy of speed
provide us with food for thought.10

It would of course be possible to develop such a 
theoretical conception from an explicitly Marxian
perspective. Yet we believe that an important aim of
this article is to attempt a synthesis of Virilio's
ideas on dromology with Marx's rather undeveloped yet
scientific and critical conceptions of a political
economy of capitalist production, circulation, space
and time. Beginning in earnest in 1867 with the
publication of Capital, Marx developed his scientific
critique of political economy when investigating the
development of the industrial revolution. For Marx,
the origins of capitalist wealth lie in the production
of an economic surplus, an excess that is 
distributed unevenly in the context of international
economic growth thus giving eventual rise to conflicts
over ownership, prices, profits, wages and employment
conditions on a global scale. 'Let me point out once
and for all', Marx writes: that by classical political
economy I mean all the economists who … have 
investigated the real internal framework … of
bourgeois relations of production, as 
opposed to the vulgar economists who only flounder 
around within the apparent framework of those
relations … systematising in a pedantic way, and 
proclaiming for everlasting truths, the banal and 
complacent notions held by the bourgeois agents of 
production about their own world, which is to them the

best possible one.11

In Marx's terms, classical political economy gave way
to vulgar economics in the first half of the
nineteenth century when the bourgeoisie became
politically dominant. Armed with the often-contested
authority to subject the growing industrial
proletariat to its rule, bourgeois economists 
abandoned their previous scientific aims and offered
the status quo as the model for all future
developments in political economy. Marx's scientific
critique of political economy is therefore a radical
perspective on the question, definition and central
characteristics of classical, conservative and
'neo-classical' economics.12

Of course, in the present period, the key question 
is: how do we synthesise Virilio's call for the
development of a political economy of speed with
Marx's scientific critique of the political economy of
wealth? For us, Virilio and Marx provide the basic
starting point for a novel conceptualisation 
of dromoeconomics, a new political economy of speed. 
Nonetheless, our inquiry diverges from both Virilio
and Marx because it is a synthesis of the related
influence of excess speed and its impact on war, on
international trade and hypermodern managerialism.
For, as Marx suggested: 

Circulation proceeds in space and time … It is … an 
essential process of capital … The constant continuity

of the process, the unobstructed and fluid transition 
of value from one form into the other, or from one 
phase of the process into the next, appears as a 
fundamental condition for production based on capital 
to a much greater degree than for all earlier forms of

production.13

Marx's incisive remarks on circulation, space and time

conclude our initial discussion of dromoeconomics.
However, it is important to stress that our attempt to
synthesise Virilio's ideas on dromology and the
political economy of speed with Marx's conception of a
scientific critique of political economy is a radical
perspective on the conceptualisation of dromoeconomics
and the political economy of speed. We now turn to the
second section, and to issues of excess speed and
overproduction, to the issues of hypermodernism, war
and trade. 

Excess Speed and Overproduction: 
Into the Hypercapitalist World of War and Trade 
As noted, the significance of our argument with regard
to excess speed and overproduction is that it departs
markedly from postmodern notions of political economy.
Like postmodern political economists, we are of course
centrally concerned with the 'difficult restructuring
of corporations in a constantly changing cultural
climate' but we disagree with postmodernists such as
Sassower that this process 'defies the classical
categories of capitalism'.14

Equally importantly, we distance ourselves from
conventional Marxist interpretations such as those of
Mandel not because we want to eschew the idea of 'late
capitalism' but because we are seeking a less
determinist epistemology that is open to a rethinking
of Marx's corpus.15

As a result, our own work rests 
on the ideas of hypermodernism and hypercapitalism,
the latter of which is the most significant in the
present context. Broadly, we define hypercapitalism as
the system within which the most intimate and
fundamental aspects of human social life -- forms of
thought and language -- are formally subsumed 
under capital and become its most predominant
commodities. The two most distinguishing differences
between hypercapitalism and its previous forms is the
speed at which processes of circulation and
self-valorisation occur, and the ephemeral 
nature of hypercapitalist commodities associated with
its speed-of-light infrastructure of communication
technologies.16

In what follows, then, we suggest that the twin
antithetical impulses of war and trade power the
compulsion for a contemporary conception of
dromoeconomics. As Virilio and Marx have both 
argued, all hypercapitalist trade presupposes the
overproduction of something, an excess of speed or a
particular commodity within a community, for instance.
It also presupposes a perceived or potential need for
something for which a particular person or community
lacks the means to produce, and which another 
person, group, or community produces to excess. All
human activity produces something. And this something,
and the activity that produces it, is the axiomatic
basis of excess production. Excess production is a
time-dependent process. Therefore dromoeconomics
becomes an absolute imperative for systemic
overproduction. This is because, as Virilio and Marx 
separately suggest, not only do the 'higher speeds
belong to the upper reaches of society' and 'the
slower to the bottom' but also, in a very real sense,
'the whole development of wealth rests on the creation
of disposable time'.17

Speed, disposable time, surplus production, and a
devotion to abstract wealth constitute one side of the
two interdependent and contradictory extremes of the
political economy of speed: trade and war. However,
one of the earliest forms of socially
institutionalised excess is well evidenced by the
works of Virilio and Marx with regard to the wars of
antiquity, to the maintenance and, crucially, to the
movement of standing armies.18

Considered historically, war is for Virilio a 'method 
of total control over a territory and of a
population'.19 War is thus a matter of necessity in
settled societies. Indeed, according to Marx,
throughout the history of human settlement, 
war has been: the great comprehensive task, the great
communal labour which is required either to occupy the

objective conditions of being there alive, or to 
protect and perpetuate the occupation. Hence the 
commune consisting of families [is] initially
organized in a warlike way – as a system of war 
and army, and this is one of the conditions of its 
being there [in a particular place] as proprietor.20

To some extent, then, it is possible to speculate that

professional warfare - mercenary warfare - is one of
the earliest institutions of overproduction. It is
therefore feasible to argue that it is the institution
upon which all established systems of excess
production, agrarian and industrial are founded.
21 For us, therefore, the logics of war 
and trade are, at their roots, historically
inseparable. It has long been recognised that, while
trade is dependent on the overproduction of speed,
capitalism is also based on systemic economic excess.
Indeed, the systematic and conscious production of
massive excess which, according to Virilio and Marx,
is founded firstly on 'the increasing speed 
of information transmission' and secondly on
production 'for export, for the external market’.
22

Thus capitalism, by definition, and at its very
foundation, has its historical roots in warfare and
international trade. And since excess production
implies an emphasis on creating excess time,
relatively speaking, economic growth in contemporary 
capitalism appears to be reliant on the production of
faster processes of production. Nowhere in known
history has this been achieved more intensively than
in the world wars of the twentieth century. Herein
lies a central paradox, which is expressed by the very
nature of what is called, rather mystically by
postmodern political economists, 'globalisation'. 
International trade and its imperatives for
ever-accelerating productive activities is the
organising logic of the 'globalised' society’s tempo.
That is to say, the social organisation of
overproduction demands, whether positively or 
negatively, ever-more 'efficient' use of fractured,
punctuated and rigidly organised social time –
seconds, hours, days, months and years – each of which
has its socially significant meaning in relation to
excess production. But postmodern globalisation cannot
simply refer to the restructuring of corporations,
since it apparently requires increasingly 
massive militaries to maintain its trajectory. This is
no less true even if we accept the current reduction
of nuclear arsenals by the superpowers and the recent
reappearance of tribal, ethnic and religious militias
and paramilitaries around the world. For there is a
paradox at the heart of these two co-existent systems,
war and trade. It is this: whereas globalisation is
said by postmodern political economists to be 
dependent on, and to produce, increasing amounts of
international ‘harmony’ and depends, by definition, on
the expansion and integration of national economies,
the increasingly complex and expensive system of
warfare presupposes increasing amounts of inter- and
intra-national conflict.23

War therefore appears as an antithetical force to 
that of international trade. But that is not the case.
They are complementary systems. This, then, is what we
mean by the hypercapitalist world of war and trade.
Today, both systems command, control, solicit, and
deploy highly sophisticated information technologies,
including, and especially, communication technologies.
Both are concerned with control of space and time, and
the production and consumption of people. Both are
ultimately concerned with increased efficiences of 
time, acceleration, increased rates of increasing
speed.24

Both are intra- and inter-national systems. And,
despite their apparently antithetical natures, they
are in fact unitary and unifying aspects of the same
hypercapitalist system. Any political economy of speed
will, by necessity, be two-sided. As Virilio has
suggested, war is 'the art of embellishing death'
while Marx has noted the excess production 
of death and the excess production of the means of 
destruction.25

On the other, we have the production of excess 
time - surplus troops and surplus labour, surplus
people - and the excess production of the means of
excess production. Combined with social and religious
reasons, these both seemingly rely upon and solicit
increases in the velocity of technology, violence and
population growth. In trade, acceleration is sought to
reduce production, consumption and circulation time;
in warfare, to reduce destruction time. Suspension 
These outwardly contradictory yet truly interlocking 
developments discovered through focusing on the work
of Virilio and Marx attain their suspension in a
gruesome, 'pragmatic', and programmatic synthesis that
feeds on the antithetical relationship that unites
them. The economies of excess speed and power depend
upon surplus time, surplus value and thus surplus
labour being available. What, for example, asks
Virilio, is to become of the surplus 'people 
whose lives are being destroyed' by the technological 
revolution currently bringing about the 'end of
salaried work'?26

Marx answers that such revolutions translate –
precisely – into a demand for more people: 
what is required for all forms of surplus labour is 
growth of population; of the labouring population for 
the first form (absolute surplus labour); of 
population generally for the second (relative surplus 
labour).27

Speeding technological development and growing wealth
require increases in surplus time; surplus time
requires surplus labour; surplus labour means surplus
human activity, surplus human life. This last is
manifest in the explosion of global populations during
the last century.28

Meanwhile, as Virilio maintains, the fastest growing 
part of the global economy’s 'consumer goods' sector
is armaments. Indeed, for him, the recent war in
Kosovo not only 'gave fresh impetus' to the
military-industrial complex but also to the
development of a new 'military-scientific complex'. As
Virilio suggests, we 'can see this in China … 
[and] in Russia with its development of stealth planes
and other very sophisticated military machines'.
29

Or, as Marx puts it, in mechanised, dromoeconomic
hypercapitalism, '[i]nvention becomes a business, and
the application of science to direct production itself
becomes a prospect which determines and solicits it'.
30 Simultaneously, according to the United States (US)
Census Bureau, the global population continues to
mushroom at the rate of about 80 million people 
per year.31

Human life - 'the labour market' – along with its 
means of destruction remains, quite clearly, the real
'growth' areas at the beginning of the 21st century.
Each, it seems, provides the rationale and impetus for
the other. Hypermodern Managerialism: The Need for
Speed We call the programme that actively suspends the
central dromoeconomic paradox hypermodern
managerialism, the irrational 'rationality' of trade
and warfare management, both of which have fallen
progressively under the same logic since 
Fredrick W. Taylor’s 'industrial soldiering' became
sine qua non in industrialised nations.32

Hypermodern managerialism has its secular faith in
'the reality of numbers'. It is a religion presided
over by high priests of technical abstraction. Its
most vicious phase begins in 1961, with the
intensification of managerialist values in the defence

department of the US. That intensification was
personified -- though not invented -- by Robert
McNamara -- the then US Secretary of Defence and
former president of the Ford Motor Company.33

Armed with the rational, militaristic, 'Management By
Objectives' (MBO) system, McNamara mounted an assault
on the defence industries’ economic inefficiencies.34

>From that point onwards, global warfare came to be
seen in the US as ‘a rational business’, no different
from any other.35 War and trade once again fell
(officially) under the same system of 
management for the first time since the liberal
overthrow of mercantilism. McNamara decided that from
a business perspective the Cold War had been run very
inefficiently.36

To solve this, he ‘concluded that it would be rational
to limit armament costs by producing larger runs of
each weapon and selling the surplus abroad’.37 This
would have a number of desirable effects, improving
the balance of trade for the US and making the
production of arms much less expensive. It would also 
ensure ‘a unity of material’ amongst allies of the US 
throughout the West should they need to fight a war
together.38

VietNam, the first fully-fledged managerialist war in
history, was an abject, destructive and miserable
failure. It rang in the era of hypermodern
managerialism. Some insight into the militant,
neo-mercantilist logic of our emergent global system
can be seen in the attitudes expressed by Friedman: 
The hidden hand of the market will never work without 
a hidden fist – McDonald's cannot flourish without 
McDonnel Douglas, the builder of the F-15. And the 
hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon 
Valley’s technologies is called the United States 
Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps. 'Good ideas 
and technologies need a strong power that promotes 
those ideas by example and protects those ideas by 
winning on the battlefield,' says the foreign policy 
historian Robert Kagan.39

Here the dromoeconomic paradox becomes much more
crytalline. As Virilio suggested above, the most
excessive, massive and currently profitable sector of
'consumer goods' production is the armaments industry,
an industry dependent on what Marx called the
annihilation of space by time and, today, 
paradoxically, by distance.40 Capital, too, has
precisely the same tendencies and dependencies.41

The productive excesses of capital, which presuppose
ever-expanding populations and geographical markets,
are led by economies of speed, or more specifically,
by an industrialised human culling machine – the 
military-industrial complex – on the one hand, and by
a system of parasitic and abstract speculation - the
financial market – on the other. Even though it is the
single largest sector in the 'consumer goods' market,
armaments constitutes a miniscule percentage of global
trade once we include the currently unsustainable
levels of speculation in financial abstractions. 
In 1995, the global economic trade in physical goods
totalled $US 3.9 trillion per annum.42

Approximately one-third of this was arms sales. In the
same year, $US1.7 trillion per day was traded in
currency alone, 100 times the amount of actual goods 
and services traded. In 1999, the currency trade
reached $US6 trillion per day.43 The ‘parasitic’ trade
in monetary illusions has replaced production of the
means of life as the focus for the 'new economy'.
44

As Marx argued above, no longer does circulation in
space and time play the role of a mere facilitator.
Circulation has become an essential process of
capital, an end in itself. The largest corporate
mergers and takeovers in history have happened in the
last two years. What Virilio calls 'globalitarian'
economic power is today centralised to a degree
previously unknown in history, with over fifty percent

of wealthiest economic entities being corporations,
not countries. As Virilio notes: 

Now, through the single market, through globalisation,

through the convergence of time towards a single time,

a world time, a time which comes to dominate local 
time and the stuff of history, what emerges - through 
cyberspace, through the big telecommunications 
conglomerates is a new totalitarianism … and this is 
what I call globalitarianism. It is the 
totalitarianism of all totalities.45

Meanwhile, the US multi billion-dollar war machine is 
presented as the primary producer of global peace. The
overall result: the shrill calls for increased
efficiencies of 'friction-free' speed by irrational
management become ever louder based on claims of
success. Billions of dollars are made and lost in
seconds in a form of trade, which is both 
illusory and inflationary.46

More people have been murdered in 
a violent manner since 1945, when world peace
apparently broke out, than in all the wars of the
previous 100 years: over 75 million lives, most of
these civilian, have been lost in the ongoing series
of 'minor incursions'.47

Hypermodern trade and hypermodern wars are economies 
of excess speed, life and death; theirs is the logic
of dromoeconomics. And all of this is joyously
construed as being productive of wealth, or excess
time. But the over-production of speed is the negation
of time; it is the consumption and destruction of time
rather than its emancipation. Conversely, 
the production of arms is the latent negation of human
life, and thus of production itself. The paradox of
Schumpterian 'creative destruction', carried to its
illogical extremes, is now juxtaposed to a vulgar
Marxian impulse for a revolutionary and 'democratic'
global economy. But, as Virilio suggests, the 'speed
of light does not merely transform the world. It 
becomes the world. Globalisation is the speed of
light.48

Murder at twice the speed of sound, beyond the horizon
of murderers, is juxtaposed to and complemented by the
global integration of the telecommunications media
through which speed-of-light speculation in financial
abstractions forms by far the largest and most
'productive' sector of the global economy. It would
seem humanity has reached the apotheosis of an almost
universal system of irrational rationality, the 
logic of hypermodern managerialism. 

Towards a Political Economy of Speed 
Although the focus of this article has centred on
Virilio's excess speed, Marx's critique of political
economy and the concept of dromoeconomics, it is
important to note that there remain at least three
critical conceptual problems and interpretative
questions that require resolution. The first concerns
the political economy of excess speed, or, rather,
Virilio's obsessive conceptualisation of it in terms
of war and dromology. As Brügger maintains, Virilio's 
formulation tends towards ‘one-dimensionality and
totality’. 49

In short, according to Brügger, in Virilio's world, 
acceleration explains everything. Consequently,
Virilio's analyses tend to overlook other forces at
work that he professes to be interested in, namely,
the economics of overproduction. Virilio's work is
problematic because, although he is deeply concerned
with the idea of a political economy of speed, in
reality he merely focuses on war and the political
logic of speed, leaving aside any meaningful 
explanation of international trade, its economic
production and suspension. While it would be untrue to
suggest that Virilio's analyses focus only on speed,
it would be true to say that it is virtually
impossible to develop a conception of hypermodern
managerialism and the need for speed from his 
chosen stance: there is no method in Virilio's
madness. That is why, in this article, we have focused
our efforts on providing a Marxian method for a
Virilio-inspired hypermodern dromoeconomics. There 
are a number of conceptual advantages associated with
synthesising Virilio and Marx with the aim of 
developing the idea of dromoeconomics. But there are
also a variety of drawbacks. For some, Marx's
political economy veers towards an obsession with
production, and what postmodern thinkers like Sassower
consider to be his ‘essentialist’ tendencies,
especially in relation to his broad claims to, and
belief in, truth, scientificity, and progress.50

Nevertheless, in this context, the richness of Marx's 
standpoint on excess production stems from the fact
that, unlike Virilio's conception of speed, he does
not believe that production literally explains
everything. In truth, Marx's writings are, in
Kellner's conceptual terms, 'multiperspectival' in
scope.51

They seek to take account not only of political and
economic forces, but also of war, speed, the
globalisation of capital, the effects and functions of
philosophy and metaphysics, and, indeed, of any number
of other forces in human society. Marx's
'multiperspectivism' is thus to be welcomed because it
is only from such a perspective that a dromoeconomics
may actually be developed. Our argument is that a
fusion of Virilio's analyses of speed with Marx's 
critique of political economy is the most fruitful way
to develop a dromoeconomics. 

The second set of problems concerns the use-value of 
an approach that centres its analysis on excess speed,

overproduction, hypercapitalism, war and trade.
Obviously, we believe that there is much to be gained
from such an approach. Yet a common criticism of
Virilio's writings is that they are not simply
overburdened with newly minted neologisms, but that 
they also arrive unannounced and without any
subsequent definition or explanation. However, no such
criticisms could be levelled at Marx's works in this
regard. Indeed, his conceptual writings are known for
their prolonged efforts of clarification and exegesis.
Our vantagepoint is therefore founded on the belief
that by fusing Virilio's anarchic and conceptual
excesses with Marx's theoretical precision, a new 
kind of hypermodern political economy of speed can be
forged. 

The recognition of hypermodern political economy also 
implies the acknowledgement of the significance of
suspension, hypermodern managerialism and the need for
speed. This leads to our third and most important set
of problems and questions. For our study of
hypermodern managerialism and militarism is not
intended as an ‘objective’ description of the status
quo, but as a new and hopefully significant critique
of such developments. Indeed, we maintain that there
is something fundamentally at fault in the present
system of hypermodern managerialism and
globalitarianism founded on the irrational 
promotion of war in terms of international trade and
vice versa. Is there an alternative? We think there
is. 

First, it is important while developing the idea of 
dromoeconomics to continue to question orthodox
thinking about the role of speed in the economy. This
is particularly the case with regard to the current
mania for fast companies; unrelenting and unreasonable
efficiency gains; hypermodern managerialism’s concerns
with dromological resource allocation and
optimisation; as well as the irrational conduct of
trade and war at the international level.52

Second, it is important to focus on a viewpoint that
simultaneously encompasses new concerns posed by the
globalisation of hypercapitalism, as well as those
addressed by the traditions of classical political
economy. Specifically, 'dromoeconomists' need not 
deny the orthodox insistence on the significance of 
international trade. However, we argue that such a
focus is too one-dimensional to grasp the reality of
contemporary global conditions. It is for this reason
that we have decided to centre our conceptualisation
on the neglected dimension of the political economy of
speed. For what is required, above all, is recognition
of the centrality of speed in contemporary societies.
But such an acknowledgement must also be joined by 
the recognition that a focus on speed alone will not,
in and of itself, suffice. It is imperative,
therefore, to link the issue of speed to relationships
of power, of exploitation, of coercion, of hierarchy,
and to the accelerating characteristics of the work
and market places in global capitalism. 



===="The world is the natural setting of and field for all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not 'inhabit' only 'the inner man' or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world and only in the world does he know himself."

— Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 1945

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