Mapping Logistical Capitalism

Martín Arboleda (2020) Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction Under Late Capitalism. London and New York: Verso. ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-296-3, £19.99

Laleh Khalili (2020) Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula. London and New York: Verso. ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-481-8, £18.99

A rich field of scholarship on logistics has gathered momentum over the past decade. This scholarship, I argue, offers rich resources for understanding the matrix of crises weighing on the present, for mapping the world system and clarifying debates on totality among critical theorists, and, in demonstrating the intrinsic coloniality of logistics, offers vital resources for understanding racial capitalism. Energized by Deborah Cowen’s ground-breaking The Deadly Life of Logistics (2014), this scholarship reinterprets globalization in terms of the militarization sustaining it. Many of the most profitable multinational companies today, such as Amazon and Walmart, owe their success in large part to innovations in infrastructural planning inherited from the military, encompassing a focus on spheres of circulation as much as, if not more than, conventional sites of production.

With ‘just-in-time’ delivery, for example, retail chains such as Walmart owe a considerable part of their success to the capacity to estimate and calculate the precise moment when goods will be needed for sale, meaning that they can reduce wasteful stockpiling and the excess costs and investments that come with overstock as well as cutting back on labour costs. This suggests one way in which logistics was central to capitalists responding to de-industrialization in the West and economic crisis dating from the 1970s, when, in Robert Brenner’s account of ‘long downturn’, falling rates of profit started setting in due to endemic problems in overproduction. ¹ Moving capital out of regions in search of cheaper labour was one solution to this problem and necessitated more fluid connectivity, managing supply-chains across far-flung territories. But logistics also became a kind of science in itself; not just a means to an end but a site of value-creation.

This seemed like a contradictory development for logistics because its function was as a science of means rather than ends. It traditionally took a backseat to strategy in both commercial and military activity. Cowen (2014: 26) points to the example of Lt. Col. George C. Thorpe who wrote in 1917 that ‘strategy is to war what the plot is to a play’, while ‘logistics furnishes the stage management, accessories, and maintenance’. It has often been noted that a key part of Napoleon’s military successes was in logistics, in skilled calculations in coordinating supplies and troops but also in the systematization of plundering, a kind of ‘mobile logistic reservoir’ where, as Manuel De Landa notes (1991: 114), ‘food and fodder were extorted from people through an administrative machine’. But in the modern era logistics actually comes to dominate over strategy. How is it, then, that furnishing stage management came to be seen as more important than the theatre of battle itself? De Landa argues that from the First World War and the rise of POL (petrol, oil, lubricants) wars, access to and control over oil and other key resources of fossil capital have been the key advantages that entirely change the balance of power. Throughout the 20th century there was a growing feeling that ‘war is no longer in its execution, but in its preparation’ (Virilio and Lotringer, 2008: 176). Paul Virilio was a particularly astute observer of the rise of logistics during the Cold War when he argued that logistics had become the whole of war because ‘in an age of deterrence, the production of arms is already war’ (Virilio and Lotringer, 2008: 103). For Virilio, this situation of ‘pure war’ inevitably entailed logistics leading over strategy because the very concept of the battlefield took backseat to the weaponization of threat.

Logistics similarly came to be a core consideration of commercial and wider economic and political activity in the 20th century. Circulation has always been intrinsic to the reproduction of capital but, as Martín Arboleda explains, following Cowen, the qualitative difference dating from the latter half of the 20th century is that the logistics revolution ‘has deliberately and decisively blurred the boundaries between making and moving – production and distribution’ (Arboleda, 2020: 115). Italian autonomist theorists referred to this as ‘the social factory’, an illustrative way of thinking about how labour and value-creation were increasingly taking place in sites far beyond conventional spheres of production, but the point is that it was not only Marxists and critical theorists who were thinking about the ‘totality’ and the wider social picture. Capitalists, business managers, management consultants started adopting a ‘total systems perspective’ to their advantage. The development of ‘integrated business logistics’, for example, entailed ‘a total approach to the management of all activities involved in physically acquiring, moving and storing raw materials, in-process inventory, and finished goods inventory from the point of origin to the point of use or consumption’ (Lalonde et al., 1970, quoted in Cowen, 2014: 35). Firms began integrating logistics calculations into production flows and, as the idea of the ‘social factory’ suggests, it was not so much that circulation or distribution replaced production, but that the entire supply chain was viewed as of crucial importance for value creation and was managed as such in an integrated approach. This often amounted to increasingly monopolistic retailers playing suppliers off against each other in cost-cutting price wars.

The commitment to cost-cutting in the form of minimizing overstock comes with the risk of understock but the logistical tendency to eliminate space and fixed capital creates problems of surplus too. As the centre of the Covid-19 crisis initially moved from China to Europe and the US, the economic crisis moved from being a supply-side one to a demand-side problem, with resumed Chinese manufacturing coupled with shipping containers piling up on US shores. The Financial Times (Williams, 2020) reported on ports receiving panicked calls from companies asking if they could store their containers of cargo. ² The logistics revolution was based on eliminating these sorts of frictions, on ensuring smooth and constantly flowing circulatory systems in which goods are never static and in which capitalists try to reduce the burdens of fixed capital. As with capitalism’s broader deterritorializing and reterritorializing contradictions, we repeatedly see this tension play out within the logistics industry where projected images of smooth abstraction are undercut by more territorial frictions, whether it be the violent processes of mining and extraction entailed in getting raw materials in the first place, or, as we have been seeing with the Covid-19 crisis, the problem of space: this desire to eliminate the costs entailed in storage was a key part of the crisis in supply chains who gambled on the success of ‘just-in-time’ and were subsequently lacking in either goods themselves or the space to store them when surpluses did arrive. This was a key aspect of the oil crisis where producers were faced with falling demand in the range of tens of millions of barrels a day below supply. Exposed by the lack of storage facilities, many turned to supertankers to store oil at sea. With tankers lining the shores of the west coast of the US, these logistical breakdowns have taken on spectacular proportions during the recent crisis, but these sorts of problems and fatal contradictions are endemic to the longer history of logistics.

Laleh Khalili’s new book provides an embedded and analytically rich insight into these core contradictions via a journey through some of the major ports of the Arabian peninsula. Khalili focuses on maritime space because, as she notes in the introduction, 90 per cent of the world’s goods travel by sea. The sea provides the ideal spaces for the ambitions of logistical flow in contrast to the problems of friction thrown up by land, but Khalili repeatedly notes the extent to which both the sea and land are assumed to be malleable from the perspective of logistics. The mega ports she visits are based on perpetual remakings of the limits and jurisdiction of land and sea via dredging, land reclamation and other reengineering mechanisms. Khalili discusses how land reclamation can bring about disputes over maritime borders and redefinitions of international waters as well as ecological devastation, but it also creates value ex-nihilio ‘giving those major investors access to land-as-commodity conjured out of the sea […] The authority to magically create land out of the sea is also a form of accumulation by dispossession, an enclosure of a space held in common – the sea – for the purpose of speculation and sales’ (2020: 82–3).

Visiting Khor Fakkan port, Khalili notes the beauty of the mountainous landscape in the backdrop facing the Gulf of Oman, to which the container terminal manager points dismissively during their conversation and says that he could ‘move that mountain’ if he needed. The normalization of such relentless expansion has pushed ports out of cities and rendered their operations less visible to the public. When Walter Benjamin visited Genoa on a freighter in 1925 he described ‘the sounds of unloading freighters all around me’ as the modernized ‘music of the world’. Today in port cities around the world the main harbours have often been transported into tranquil tourist destinations but the music is still playing for a smaller audience on a larger scale far from city centres. This process of invisibilization is part of a war on labour driving the history of logistics. Dubious labour practices flourish in port spaces that are further from urban centres – out of sight, out of mind – and in which it is more difficult to pursue accountability and labour organization. The invention of the shipping container, the primary unit of globalization, was conceived as a labour and time-saving technology. The mass implementation of a standardized unit for global trade meant ships no longer had to be carefully and intricately loaded with a Tetris-like approach or unloaded with manual-intensive labour. Standardization facilitated automation and containers enabled supply-chain management systems, just-in-time technology and a whole range of developments which attempted to smooth out the friction posed by workers.

But the nefarious processes of labour invisibilization are also accompanied by a relentless insistence on visibility from the perspective of management. As Khalili emphasizes, port management systems are hyper-visible for port managers for whom trade magazines and conferences bristle with advertisement for all sorts of algorithmic software and engineering innovations that will supposedly make the work of ports more efficient, cleaner, error-free, more frictionless. Blockchain technology, which stores the entire history of exchanges from the beginning at each ‘chain’, is seen as a panacea to problems that hindered supply chain management previously: unavailability of information, loss of data and the difficulty of visualizing all the intricate components at any one stage (2020: 180). The chasm between the grand promises of such technologies and the banal reality of their implementation is everywhere evident, but following the logistics industry’s fetish for visualizing its own processes has been illuminating for more critical attempts to offer visualization and orientation within the opaque world system of global capitalism today.

Jasper Bernes (2013) has suggested that logistics represents capital’s own project of ‘cognitive mapping’, a term signifying representational attempts to map, and hence orient oneself within, an elusive totality. From this perspective, logistics is that mapping project which permits capitalists to visualize and render more tangible their diffuse, abstract and complex transnational supply chains. Similarly, Khalili shows how supply-chain mapping necessitates coordination, standardization and knowledge-sharing between ports and across different industries. Like finance, new innovations in data modelling, visualization and mapping practices give clues into rendering abstract processes more comprehensible and traceable.

Logistics’ function as a mapping project on behalf of capital is also bound up with its history as a weapon of imperialism. In this regard, Khalili reminds us of the continuity between the routes of telegraph cables mapped at the bottom of the sea and followed by copper telephone cables in the 20th century before internet cables.

Looking at these maps and tracing postcolonial trade routes, she emphasizes how mapping practices, familiarity with ports and ethnography ‘all served the purpose of more effective competition and inter-imperial rivalry’. It is not difficult to find echoes of these dynamics in contemporary organizations like the Logistics Performance Index which ranks nation-states according to their logisticality and the adaptability of their infrastructure for supply-chain management. They refer to connectivity in terms of ‘the physical internet’. Khalili’s stories unveil similar moves from apparent abstraction to physical lines which trace power across history. The telegraph cables laid down by the British added a ‘concrete weight’ to the empire’s claims to rule the waves and ‘transformed the less visible pathways of its dominion into materially substantial subsea passages’ (2020: 26). Even shipping routes, she notes, have ‘a durability that their marine ephemerality belies’, and shipping companies all have their origins in colonial expansion and the knowledge-making that went with it. The Suez Canal route ‘reproduced the empire itself through feedback loops and self-perpetuation mechanisms’, an infrastructure constructed in service of further colonial extraction like the railways crisscrossing colonies in Asia and Africa. When the Suez Canal temporarily closed in 1957, there was an intensified interest in pipeline construction and oil extraction from West and North Africa. The abrupt closure also meant that the demand for more efficient cargo transport ‘accelerated the containerisation process that had begun in the early 1950s’ (p. 244).

Logistics has also indexed contemporary empire through its central role in the rise and decline of America as a hegemon of global capitalism. In the 1950s and 1960s the Pentagon worked extensively with commercial actors to increase efficiencies in cargo handling and support for US military activity abroad. The push for containerization was accelerated by the ‘demands of the Vietnam War’ (Noble, in Reifer, 2004: 25) and became further standardized as a consequence. In 1961 Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara founded the Logistics Management Institute and deployed new logistical functions to meet the demands of the war. These functions were then adapted and deployed to meet the strains of a declining empire. In this sense, I would argue that we can better understand the role of logistics and war in our capitalist present with reference to Giovanni Arrighi’s account of crisis. Wars have repeatedly played crucial roles in accelerating the downfall of a global hegemon and, in Arrighi’s account, the Vietnam War was central to the ‘signal crisis’ of US hegemony. This is the moment in a cycle of accumulation when capital comes up against the inevitable systemic contradiction of rising overcapacity. The expanding mass of profits in trade and production has arrived at a point of accumulation over and above what can be reinvested without drastically reducing profit margins. At this point, Arrighi explains, ‘capitalist agencies tend to invade one another’s spheres of operation; the division of labour that previously defined the terms of their mutual co-operation breaks down; and competition becomes increasingly vicious. The prospects of recouping the capital invested in trade and production decrease, and capitalist agencies tend to keep in liquid form a larger proportion of their incoming cash flows’ (Arrighi, 2005: 87).

Rereading the history of globalization in terms of crisis, it is clear that logistics was central to the invasion of ‘one another’s spheres of operations’, to unruly compulsions for connectivity, to stretch the supply chain, to do more with less, and to wage war on labour. Arrighi refers to finance and the use of liquidity to avoid the burden of fixed capital in times of crisis but this is also precisely the dynamic we have seen at work in logistics. This capacity to compensate for losses in one core sphere (industry) by innovations in finance (and logistics, I would add) is, according to Arrighi, the main reason why all declining centres of world capitalism enjoy a ‘belle époque’ of significant but ultimately temporary reflation of their wealth and power. These temporary fixes nevertheless always deepen the underlying overaccumulation crisis, exacerbating competition, social conflicts, and interstate rivalries to levels beyond the hegemon’s capacity to control (Arrighi, 2005: 88). Successes such as those of the Reagan administration’s aggressive undermining of Third World and Soviet power thus created serious delusions about US imperialism’s underlying strength and sustainability.

Khalili shows how maritime shipping routes and port spaces were affected by these changing dynamics of empire in the Middle East from the Suez crisis through the Iran-Iraq war, leading to an escalation of tankers wars in which, ‘By 1988, the Gulf bristled with eighty-two Western and twenty-three Soviet naval vessels, including combat ships and minesweepers. Given how little they disrupted assaults on tankers by mines or missiles, the warships seemed to be protecting the abstraction of shipping routes rather than the ships themselves’ (2020: 252). The further militarization of shipping routes also led to dubious but ultimately effective justifications of US naval sovereignty overseas. The overthrow of the US’s closest ally, the Shah, in 1979, instigated the founding of the task force US Central Command (CENTCOM) in 1980 to manage the need for greater US presence in the region in the wake of its previously loyal client state. A flurry of logistical activity was pursued into the 1990s, but the Iraq War and the War on Terror acted as turning points for even more exponential expansion. Khalili discusses Kuwait-based Agility as one example of such expansion and of the inextricable ties of commerce and war embodied in logistics. Initially a Kuwaiti state-owned firm, then privatized in the 1990s, its revenue just prior to the US invasion of Iraq was US$154 million, while by 2008 its success in the market on provision of goods and logistical services to the US military had escalated its revenue to US$6.3 billion.

Khalili concludes her book with a reminder that ‘On battlefields around the world, when the fighting recedes, the material and places of warmaking are expediently transformed into sites of logistics and commerce’. Camp Bucca in Iraq becomes Basra Logistics City, and the bases Subic Bay and Clark in the Philippines become air-sea hubs. ‘But just as easily as military bases become emporia of trade, they can be reconverted into military outposts’ (p. 265).

Martín Arboleda’s Planetary Mine considers this fungibility between commercial and military logistics and links it to the politics of resource extraction in order to rethink capitalist totality today. Arboleda’s linking of logistics to increasingly dangerous and environmentally hazardous forms of mining can be understood in the context of crisis described by Arrighi and Brenner, in which capitalists experiment with riskier innovations in economically turbulent times. Similarly, Achille Mbembe (2020: 10) has argued that the militarization of contemporary power is more and more bound up with facilitating of extraction. Arboleda reminds us of the ways in which ‘the metabolism of the supply chain of extraction’ is embedded in the unspectacular and banal routines that weave together everyday life in the 21st century: sending an email, commuting to work, ordering food online: ‘It is an intrinsic feature of the commodity form and the bourgeois ideologies and epistemological frameworks that support it to constantly and systematically break the totality of the urban experience into apparently disconnected and unhistorical fragments’ (Arboleda, 2020: 13). Drawing on an array of recent and historic Marxian writing on totality, Arboleda responds to the misinterpretations of the concept found in certain traditions of poststructuralist and postcolonial thought, according to which Marxian totality has been misleadingly depicted as shorthand for homogenization. Instead, he illustrates how the perspective of totality allows for taking account of difficult sets of contradictions intrinsic to the idea of ‘the planetary’: the fact that as the world market expands, the ‘liberal’ state becomes increasingly militaristic, interventionistic and coercive, and similarly as the same world market binds more and more people into proletarianization, it does so in fragmented ways that reproduce racialized divisions.

Arboleda is careful to warn the reader that ‘extraction’ is not a one-size-fits-all approach which explains contemporary capitalist totality. While expanding sites of extraction are particularly illustrative of the changing geography of capitalist totality, the underlying dynamics of value, impersonal domination as well as labour exploitation are also central. The book is thus anchored in a ‘revitalized critique of political economy that posits value as the pulsing engine that drives the process of environment-making in contemporary society’ (p. 248). The focus on value informs his argument that ‘the periphery’ should therefore no longer be expressed exclusively in terms of a geographical relation but instead should be understood in temporal and social terms. This means that capital’s constitutive outside ‘can no longer be cast in terms of a straightforward North/South or West/non-West divide. Rather, cores and peripheries need to be understood as immanent to the capitalist production of space’ (p. 60). Some of this is debatable but I think broadly right.

If modernization theorists earlier in the 20th century predicted and planned for a gradual scaling up of ‘under-developed’ countries with those of the core, our current reality suggests historical motion moving in almost the opposite direction with common ground more likely to be found on the basis of the decline of the ‘Global North’, the ‘long downturn’ of advanced capitalist economies.

However, some of the conclusions he draws from these sorts of analyses can be somewhat rushed and less convincing. As mentioned, he warns against assimilating totality with homogeneity but elsewhere is quick to describe the conditions of global working classes as homogenizing (p. 241). He argues that that the logistical worldscapes mapped in the book render immanently possible ‘the construction of a global proletariat’ (p. 83). Similarly, in the introduction it is argued that the concrete determinations that produce spaces of extraction are found in the ‘reproduction of relative surplus value at the world scale and the reproduction of the working class as a fragmented, polarizing, yet unitary whole or industrial organism’ (p. 6). This is largely convincing except for these final rushes to unity. There is an echo of the Endnotes collective’s perspicacious account of global class composition in terms of ‘unity-in-separation’, but in Arboleda’s understandable and compelling push towards proletarian unity he glosses over the problems and blockages to unity he is undoubtedly well aware of. Contrary to Marx’s predictions, proletarianization has not led to unification except in the form of relating to one another through the common experience of alienation and separation. It is clear that workplace struggles and the politics of class and work remain as urgent as ever. What has changed, following the decline of the workers movement, is the decreasing possibility that widescale proletarian antagonism will take place on the basis of self-identifying working-class unity. Instead, the atomization of class is such that class is less likely to provide the explicit basis for far-reaching collective uprisings, and the intuitive recognition of this limitation has informed uprisings over the past decade which have been less directly focused on worker identity, or class unity, and instead grasped towards other organizing principles: Occupy, the 99%, the movement of the squares, the Indignados, Black Lives Matter, the Gilets Jaunes, etc.

While Arboleda adds major contributions to thinking through questions of struggle and mobilization within logistical capitalism and empowerment through blocking and disrupting its ‘chokepoints’, his conclusions suggest that ‘unity’ will be provided organically by the development of the forces of production today. Instead, as Endnotes argue, ‘unity has and always will be forged in self-organised struggle when workers overcome their atomisation by creatively constructing a new basis for collective activity’ (Endnotes, 2015: 165). The theoretical sophistication of Arboleda’s hugely insightful and energizing book suggests he is well aware of these problems, so it will be interesting to see how he thinks them through in future work. ³

The contradictions of logistical capitalism mapped by Arboleda, Khalili and others have become more widely recognized amidst the coronavirus pandemic and re-emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement following the murder of George Floyd. Where the state proved utterly incompetent and disinterested in ensuring the provision of basic sanitation for the public, it was much more proactive and interventionist in the deployment of police brutality. What this highlights is that logistical capitalism is not only ‘fragile’ in the exposure of its supply chains, but that its supply-chains and broader social infrastructures are actively and violently organized against human flourishing in deeply racialized ways. Cowen’s recent work (2020) on indigenous struggles has furthered understanding of the (settler-)colonial dynamics of logistics while the fact that many Black Lives Matter uprisings entailed moving from anti-police riots and demonstrations to the blockading of motorways also says something about the intrinsic connection between race and logistics that Joshua Clover has mapped in terms of ‘circulation struggles’ (2016). Similarly, The Invisible Committee’s claim that ‘the power is logistical, block everything!’ (2014) captured how revolutionary imagination today had moved from positioning itself in terms of ‘locomotions of history’ and instead in terms of pulling emergency breaks and blocking power’s circulation in infrastructure. But overly-schematic oppositions between circulation and blockage are not always helpful. Logistics produces value from borders as well as movement and a counterlogistical imaginary might not be simply targeted at blocking circulation as much as enabling different kinds of circulation and motion, like the Hong Kong protestor’s ‘Be Water!’ – signifying a tactical set of innovations that entailed constant movement with the aim of exhausting the police – or reproducing social life in ways independent of the state, as we’ve seen with renewed references to the Black Panthers’ social reproduction programmes and inspiration taken from their ‘survival pending revolution’. In this sense, some of the richest resources for understanding logistics and counterlogistics can be found in the black radical tradition.

As Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2013) have argued, logistics was intrinsically racial and colonial from the beginning because its first major operation was the transatlantic slave trade. Harney and Moten argue that slavery, like logistical capitalism, was driven by a pathological desire for total access: to get pure labour without the inconvenience of the human subject. But the black radical tradition is based on the insight that the enslaved were never reduced to blind labour. When not engaging in fugitivity, marronage and insurrection, they still remained opaque to their slave masters on the plantation, communicating in elusive terms, never entirely captured despite all the brutality. As CLR James argued, they remained, despite everything, ‘invincibly human’. This is the perspective of always-incomplete totality we find borne out by a black radical tradition that always insisted on the ‘right to opacity’ (Edouard Glissant) and suggested in the contemporary evidence mapped by scholars, theorists and workers in logistics: as it continues to wage war today, logistical capitalism nevertheless comes up against the limits of its own fantasies and contradictions, and never quite succeeds in its efforts to gain the total access that racial capitalism always fantasized about.