Room with Children’s Games (1970) by Fernando Botero
“Sources in his inner circle say that after two days of silence while hiding in a cellar with two of his ministers after the countercoup, one of these ministers said, ‘How badly it all turned out, how badly!’ To which Mossadegh responded, ‘And at the same time how really well it turned out, how really well!’” - Roy Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet
The attempts to rapidly resume pre-pandemic levels of consumption activity have opened a curious resurgence of a long-repressed image to the forefront of media coverage and popular discourse in the US. The current turmoil in the organization of “supply chains” is one of many catch-all designations for the persistent economic anxieties of this era. These sentiments appear to attach themselves to any number of specific phenomena, yet never seem to find a steady or durable resolution. The term “supply chain” is itself misleading, creating a semblance of coherent passages of commodities from one location to the next. Yet it is rather an abstraction for a globally fragmented landscape of points of connection in the total process of production, a formal homogenization operating through immense parcellization that composes geography in the image of the commodity. The organization of global capitalist production cannot be usefully understood by relying on such an abstraction tout court, as the universality of the commodity form must be understood in relation to the uneven particularities that are the reality of its social constitution. Thus the dynamics of an uneven and combined relation of capitalism as a global phenomenon is not ancillary, but essential to understanding the operation of the “supply chain” as a concept, amorphous in its ambiguity, yet solid in the security that its conception seeks to impart.
Now, as the general concern shifts to a discourse on inflation, and economists and commentators debate the merits of causal arguments, while the image of ports filled with containers and bays littered with massive ships awaiting the offloading of their contents shapes the unease that is articulated by this static disjunction. The desire to return to a smooth flow of circulation brings shipping news back to the front pages of The New York Times, the paper-of-record that had once run regular coverage of shipping and transport industry news alongside the weather, but had since reduced it to a small bulletin in the corner of the business section by the 1980’s.1 This resurgence, however, still appears less a sudden return to popular coverage of industrial transport activity than a continuity with the relegation of news of maritime commerce and the terraqueous globe to instances of disaster, as the sluggish post-pandemic re-synchronization of global trade and shipping is still merely another abstract horror defying comprehension. Appraising the perception of threats that loom over us from the sea, the disjointed movement of commerce appears to instill a greater fear of God than mounting ecological catastrophe. This clamor is further obscured with calls for its resolution that find an easy explanation in many of the tried and true methods of capital accumulation.
John Manners-Bell, chief executive of the consulting agency Transport Intelligence, attributes the logjam of ships to a “lack of automation and out-dated labor practices” at ports, despite the vastly mechanized infrastructure of port operation that has developed into the 21st century following the decades-long revolutions of containerization and peripheral industrialization.2 Meanwhile, the unloading of ships is further inhibited by a growing number of empty containers taking up space on chassis, preventing truckers from loading and leaving with containers. This phenomenon involves a convergence of shifts and the barriers erected by them, less to do with the labor process on the port than gaps forming throughout the total process of distribution. Some containers have been left in the middle of the US at the sites where they were first transported, as drivers would not have made any money transporting empty containers back to the coast. The decline of container transport by rail has exacerbated this trend, and the end of exporting recyclable waste to China in 2018 has seen a declining use for empty containers in the US.3 That the persistent trade deficit between China and the US could be cast in such drastic relief by the refusal of waste products overseas underscores a deeper urgency of international competition, as the US works with Canada and Mexico to firm up the resiliency of regional supply chains and production networks to alleviate the burden of their reliance on the ascension across the Pacific.4
Executive intervention seeks to demonstrate a sense of urgency and a devotion of state capacity to the issue, but it has thus far only amounted to the establishment of a 24/7 schedule for the the Los Angeles-Long Beach port complex, despite it already operating 112 hours a week (16 hours a day if open all week), and commitments from firms such as Walmart, UPS, Target, Home Depot, Samsung, and FedEx to extend their working hours in turn.5 Even then, port complexes and dockworkers have already been working extended hours for several months,6 and seafarers, both in transit and in the bays awaiting their berths, have been stranded, often for months and without promise of compensation.7 The San Pedro Bay has become a “maritime parking lot that currently exceeds 70 vessels waiting an average of 18 days.”8 Amidst the labor shortage in trucking, of which the American Trucking Association estimates a shortage of approximately 80,000 drivers,9 Congress is exploring options to permit 18-year-olds to obtain permits to work in long-haul trucking, as CDL permit certification eases up restrictions to cover the gaps brought on by intensifying and increasingly disorganized workloads.10 So far, the only solution is for the extant workforces to work harder and longer, while legislation operates to expand qualifications into an untapped reserve army of labor residing in the country’s relative surplus population.
Yet the 3,500+ containers that the commitments of private companies are expected to move only account for a fraction of the traffic passing through the port complex, and even then warehouses in the US are still packed with record levels of inventory, leaving little space for goods, even if transported on time.11 The blockage of the Suez Canal by the container ship Ever Given earlier this year, while a more singularly enduring image of bloated fixed capital operating beyond the constraints of global commerce’s oceanic arteries, has come to pass as a more remote disturbance than the present dysfunction on the home front. While economists and political opportunists debate the origins of the present inflationary pressures on consumer commodity prices, frequently attributing them to a policy error in the unemployment insurance and relief checks disbursed over the past year, high shipping rates, soaring freight bills, and delivery delays point to a causality that is more adequately located in the social organization of production and distribution networks themselves, a cost chokepoint that is specific to a sector upon which the arrival of all commodities ultimately relies.12
Spot-market pricing to ship a 40-foot container from China to the West Coast has increased upwards of five times its pre-pandemic rate, costing now between $10,000-$15,000 on average.13 Likewise, the attempts to ease inflation induced by restrictions in oil supply by tapping into the nation’s oil reserves, a 2.5 day’s worth of supply for the whole of the US, appear to be backfiring, as the Brent crude benchmark continued to increase by 3.3 per cent the day of the announcement, and the intransigence of OPEC+ to ease restrictions on their shipping of oil betrays the notion that this is a politically-neutral problem of inadequate supply.14 In the US port complex system, organization of such logjams is inhibited by the privatized appropriation of information flows regarding port operations given by the constraints of industrial competition, as “concerns over data privacy, business secrets and security have resulted in a fragmented approach. Individual ports operate as separate fiefdoms rather than as part of a national system.”15 The specter of a consumer and manufacturer demand exceeding expectations in its resumption of activity rather begs the question: why is the supposedly flexible organization of lean, just-in-time production models so inflexible to such a shift?
The doubt instilled by this concern, whether it be consciously apprehended or merely a dissonant tone not yet fully registered, appears to animate much of the panic that articulates coverage of these disruptions and their consequences. A recent opinion piece by Claire Jones in the Financial Times’ Alphaville commentary identifies the limit to the responses seeking to extend work hours, as “the convenience of this kind of almost-instant delivery to which we’ve become so accustomed is where the problem lies.”16 Panic appears then as a possible recognition of finitude, resonating out as a low din from these subtle tectonic movements in commercial fault lines. Writing for Bloomberg, Brooke Sutherland17 claims that port congestion appears to have peaked, citing an eight-week decline in ocean freight rates; a 19% reduction in the spot-pricing for the Shanghai-Los Angeles trade route; and the effectiveness of a penalty fine levied by the Port of Los Angeles on excessive dwell times for containers, charging carriers $100 per container, increasing in increments of $100 per day, a maneuver that immediately applied to 58,900 containers between the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports.18 Yet even as this moment’s cacophony appears to wane, it may yet be just another calm before the following swell, a pause granting mercy to an amnesiac sociality that wishes to avert its gaze.
This gaze has long been spared an attentive consciousness of the landscape of maritime labor that sustains its vision. Allan Sekula describes this material psychology of the near-invisible rendering of capitalist social relations and their operation in seafaring industries, the social alienation from the sea and its essential role as an inorganic condition of existence:19
“The metropolitan gaze no longer falls upon the waterfront, and a cognitive blankness follows. Thus despite increasing international mercantile dependence on ocean transport, and despite advances in oceanography and marine biology, the sea is in many respects less comprehensible to today’s elites than it was before 1945, in the nineteenth-century, or even during the Enlightenment. This incomprehension is the product of forgetting and disavowal. In this sense elites become incapable of recognizing their own, outside of narrow specialist circles. Consider, by contrast, the obscurity of Malcom McLean, the trucking executive who initiated containerized cargo movement in 1956, alongside the historical and cultural importance accorded to Donald McKay, the nineteenth-century Boston clipper-ship builder.”
This notion of repressed memory and disavowal is given life by Sekula in the comparative statures of McKay and McLean, two figures of maritime innovation bridging distinct epochs of American industrialization. McKay’s renown and the bluster of capital’s conquests of the 19th century appear a relic compared to the world-encompassing movement of McLean’s muted fame, despite the intensified concentration of capital and decimation of organized labor that occurred by aid of his invention. The increasingly dominant position of capital asserted through the efforts that made possible such monumental passages of dead labor across the seas creates, for Sekula, an image of the “new model hero,” that is “less Walt Whitman’s ‘common man’ than Herman Melville’s archetypal American swindler, the Confidence-Man.”20 Exploring this analogy, it is not that there is a real glory to these industrial crusades that has since waned, but a question of what emphasis that we are now able to perceive of two simultaneously emergent narratives of this same history: that of Whitman’s transcendentalist visions of cosmic ecstasy that became the literary proverbs of the settler’s self-imagination, and Melville’s satirical unearthing of the cynical instrumentalities of reason and violence at play, forging a radical evil immanent to this society, which it ignored at its own peril.
The titular character of The Confidence Man adds to our understanding of this era’s personifications of capital, the manner in and through which the invisible hand appears so, despite the impossibility of a totally impersonal animation. The novel is a Canterbury Tales of numerous cons, requests for trust from strangers aboard a steamboat on the Mississippi, and the vernacular dialectic that emerges from the person of the confidence man and his many interlocutors. Whether there is one schemer of various disguises or several, in cooperation or operating separately, is unclear. Melville continually leverages this uncertainty throughout to build this paranoiac panorama of a society where interpersonal interaction characterizes a low-intensity conflict of all against all. The confidence of 1850’s America is itself a character, the old Anacharsis Cloots deputation in the cosmopolitanism of modern capitalist society. This brotherhood of nations is built upon creditors and those in their debt, not of the blood shared in common struggle. The de-politicized crowd is the backdrop for vignettes that touch upon cases of fraudulent joint-stock share schemes, a growing immunization to a social obligation to poverty, the liberal virtues embodied by the violence of settler-colonial expansionism, and the racial domination and exploitation of the plantation economy operating just beyond the banks of the Mississippi River upon which they traverse towards New Orleans, at the time the most essential port for the export of Mississippi Valley plantation cotton to the textile mills of Manchester.
This continual passage that marks the exchanges aboard the steamboat is a microcosm of the manifold such appearances and obfuscations made by capital’s personifications. Such a relationship between the conditional movement of structured historical agents within the limits imposed by their environment and the capacity for determination to emerge from these very agents is captured in the complex of determinations that have developed into the dynamics of commercial shipping. Malcom McLean’s development of the container model, first conceived of in 1956, operational along the US coast by 1957, and only profitable by 1961, had to overcome the barrier of organized dockworkers before it saw general usage. It could even be said that such a model for commodity transport had the aim of liberating capital from the leverage of organized labor. At the time of the container shipping model’s introduction, ports and shipping were extremely labor-intensive industries, requiring hundreds of dockworkers to unload a single ship, and this concentration of labor and the dependence of commerce’s success on its cooperative endeavor gave dockworkers’ unions substantial power in critical points in the movement of world capital. Upon a departure of the SS Ideal-X from the Port of Newark in the late 1950’s, Freddy Fields of the International Longshoremen’s Association was said to have declared “I’d like to sink that son of a bitch.”21
The antagonism to labor is given in the operation of technological innovation itself. As an intermodal freight technology, container transport possesses the distinctive properties of being universal in its capacity to ship commodities, standardized in practice across ports, and the requirements of mechanical infrastructures capable to move any one container, all combining to render large teams of laborers redundant to the operation, increasing productivity by increasing throughput per worker. McLean’s intermodal transport firm Sea-Land Service, Inc. commissioned the design of a container “that could be detached from trucks and directly stacked onto seagoing vessels” as a means of defusing the “increasing congestion and social conflict” rife on US highways and waterfronts.22 According to Liam Campling and Alejandro Colás, the capitalist imperatives driving the adoption of containerization developed from the “ambition to minimise labour costs and the turnover time of capital” as well as an objective to introduce “greater regularity into shipping patterns -- enhancing the ability of capitalists to plan increasingly fragmented networks of global production.”23 Sea-Land Service’s procurement of US government contracts for container shipping to Vietnam during the war, comprising 40% of the firm’s revenue between 1968-69,24 would solidify the practice in the Pacific by the late 1970’s.
This operates as a concretization of social and political determinants in the infrastructure of capitalist commercial transport industries, but it is essential to not conflate this process of fragmentation with the introduction of containerization itself, as it is merely one of many technical developments that facilitated and accompanied the exigencies of class struggle that produced this dynamic of capitalism’s cross-oceanic organization of logistics. As Campling and Colás, moving beyond this reduction, tell us:25
“The container ship typically comes to mind when picturing the movement of commodities across the oceans. And when thinking about (and with) logistics the centrepiece is the process of containerisation – the intermodal movement of commodities between trucks, trains and ships in metal twenty-foot equivalent-unit (TEU) containers, feeding from and into ports, PLCs [port-based logistics clusters] and hinterlands. Much has been written about containerisation, including from technical, economic and political perspectives, spanning popular non-fiction to the latest fashion in social theory. The container unquestionably carries significant analytical weight in writing on logistics and supply chain capitalism. Yet most of this work on logistics papers over segmentation in the shipping industry. For example, combined bulk shipping (dry and oil) dominates the tonnage of the world merchant fleet at three-quarters of the total. Indeed, over 60 per cent of global tonnage shifted by sea in the twenty-first century is associated with two sectors alone – energy and metals. We think even less about the variety of ships specialised in moving particular cargos, the main ones being chemicals, liquefied gases, vehicles, forest products and refrigerated and frozen food – each integrated into discrete global production networks, which are in turn dominated by a small number of giant multinational corporations.”
In addressing the segmentation of the shipping industry and the fragmentation of global production networks, we cannot rely upon any one series of technological determinations, nor are we likely to find much satisfaction in the approaches of one single nation or entrepreneurial actor. The international proprietary relations and inter-state dynamics of capital accumulation allow us greater clarity in determining the composition of so-called supply chains today and the particular aim of such fragmentary organization. The competition strategies at play in the shipping industry are instructive: “investment in ever-larger vessels that need fewer crew per tonne of cargo, state subsidies, corporate concentration and centralisation, buying flags of convenience to increase post-tax profits and reduce the costs of compliance with labour and other laws, and precariously employing seafarers from lower-income (‘labour supply’) countries.”26 Capital concentration at the level of the firm seeks to consolidate holdings and command over the technical composition of production by way of its massification, reducing labor to a minimum possibility and its cheapest possible expression at that.
This is not a new phenomenon, as the shifting composition of energy regimes historically also point to this tendency. The introduction of steam ships imbued a greater command over the shipping vessel, and thus labor, by freeing capital from the caprice of wind patterns as much as the appropriation of the vessel by mutinous seafarers. Coal inputs became another chain of supply that subordinated the workforce to an energy regime made resistant to appropriation by the segmentation of the total production process.27 The transition to fossil fuels is the historical construction of a global energy regime that is resilient for the very impediments of its operation to large concentrations of workforces, and the fragmentation of logistics labor afforded by the atomized organization of truckers on highway networks. The reduction of risk is historically the movement of centralization of capital’s political command structure in the hands of a specific class, while itself not always a uniform actor, still beholden and defined by its drive to produce and expropriate surplus value from the surplus labor this command of production afforded.
Even if this is not novel to the historical dynamics of capital accumulation, the specificities of the contemporary period are worth elaborating upon more closely. The responses that emerged from the slowdowns in port construction and decline in world tonnage from the late 1970’s to 1985 would come to characterize the specific adaptations that capital would develop against this crisis. Flags of convenience (FOC) allow for multinational capital owners of shipping vessels to choose nations whose laws their ships operate under, effectively allowing capital a choice in what labor laws it is subject to on any one vessel. These have provided shipping capital with legal mechanisms to undermine organizational efforts among national workforces and opened maritime labor markets to crews from so-called developing countries, reducing wage costs per trip throughout the industry.
The competitive dynamics emerging from this have developed alongside and through the geopolitical dynamics of the late 20th century, as various modes of state-backed industrialization efforts emerged throughout the post-colonial global South as a response to the crushing of import-substitution industrialization models and the imposition of export-led industrialization by IMF debt obligations and the waning political capacities for counter-hegemonic regional powers to form following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the liberalization of the People’s Republic of China. The dispersed industrialization throughout the world’s colonial peripheries, the actuality of the much-bemoaned “deindustrialization” in the US and other Northern states, has evolved into a foundation for potential overcapacity endemic to the shipping industry. The intensified competition that emerges from this overaccumulation of capital has driven investment towards more profitable avenues than material expansion, seeking to develop labor productivity from its diminished capacity to absorb it through such means as specialized container vessels carrying intermediate commodities for production inputs within this fragmenting international division of labor, further intensifying trade volume and competitive intensity. This landscape is the foundation for contemporary maritime logistics, a designation for the relative capacities for capitalist planning of this fragmentary landscape of regional production networks linked through mechanisms of global labor arbitrage and integrated into just-in-time supply chain imperatives, allowing for “simultaneous competition between regional and national labour regimes in a system of global production that is coordinated and controlled by a small minority of multinational corporations.”28
Understanding the ability of world capital to operate through multinational corporations administering the complexity of such regionally fragmented global production networks can be understood by placing in context the maritime dynamics discussed above with its landed counterpart, the export-processing zone (EPZ). The EPZ is a diversified industrial site that has proliferated throughout the global South, uneven yet widespread, in upwards of 130 countries, offering, much like the flag of convenience, great legal flexibility, such as duty-free imports of raw and intermediate inputs and capital goods, long-term tax concessions, concentrations of advanced industrial infrastructure, utility and rental subsidies, and the flexible labor laws and regulations that make for reliable sources of low-wage labor. John Smith’s Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century is an essential text for understanding this reliance of global capital on low-wage labor residing in nations of the global South, as it is the case that capital’s dynamic of surplus value production is produced in and through a dynamic formal constitution of the production process that is conditional upon the extraction of surplus labor, and this is constituted by means of the simultaneous operation of wage arbitrage as a mode of surplus labor’s command by capital. Profitability itself is downstream from this motive force constitutive of capital’s antagonistic relational composition, as even the EPZ form is not itself primarily useful as a profitable organization of enterprise, but, much like the implementation of energy regimes mentioned above, a means of commanding surplus labor:29
“The general failure of EPZs to stimulate economic development outside of the zones, typically importing all inputs except labor and paying little or no taxes to host governments, has aroused further controversy. EPZs have also received much criticism because the export subsidies and other trade-distorting emoluments dangled by host governments to lure outsourcing TNCs confound efforts by the World Trade Organization to create a ‘level playing field.’ Given the controversy surrounding EPZs and their paltry contribution to the economic and social development of their hosts, the question arises, why are they continuing to proliferate? The answer is that, having signed up to the IMF/World Bank–promoted strategy of export-oriented industrialization, EPZs provide governments in low-wage countries with a way to attract inward FDI [Foreign Direct Investment] and connect to global value chains. In addition, what ‘may be the most important political factor,’ according to [William] Milberg, is that ‘governments find the employment creation in EPZs to be essential for absorbing excess labor.’”
Yet FDI is not the only means of following the movements of global capital investment into industrial development in regions with access to greater supplies of low-wage, more exploitable labor. Arms-length outsourcing is as essential, if not more prevalent now than FDI, in the composition of such regional fragmentation of global production. While FDI remains the on-paper visible connection, the manifold contracting out of labor tasks for production of intermediate commodity inputs for other processes and raw material extraction comprises the dispersal of the capitalist industrialization across vast swathes of the world, distancing multinational corporations from the direct internalization of cost, while allowing them the lion’s share of the profit, through their role in mediating the appropriation of the sale of the final product in global North markets. As Smith summarizes the dynamic, “outsourcing enables capitalists to replace higher-paid domestic labor with low-wage Southern labor, exposing workers in imperialist nations to direct competition with similarly skilled but much lower paid workers in Southern nations, while falling prices of clothing, food, and other articles of mass consumption protects consumption levels from falling wages and magnifies the effect of wage increases.”30 This operates both as “economic imperative and a conscious strategy”, that buttresses the power of capital’s personifications and maintains the fragmentation of labor across a disjointed and always shifting landscape, allowing capital greater mobility in the competitive labor market it engenders.31
The combinatory implementation of FDI and arms-length strategies for outsourcing produce a specific advantage to multinational capital of both Northern and Southern origins, while also deepening the rift of underdevelopment and intensified exploitation that characterizes their separation. The arms-length relationship does not generate flows of repatriated profits from South to North, and it does not involve direct capital flows from North to South, allowing Northern firms to invest funds into financial vehicles for intermediation and speculation, such as various acquisitions and share buybacks that intensify the centralization of capital and further fragment production. The arms-length relationship in turn also affords a “hands clean” relation between multinational corporations and the lax regulatory environment of EPZs and the legal conduct of nations within which they reside, thus a transference of risk from the dominant partner in this contract.32
This intense disparity in economic development and the geopolitical relations which maneuver to instantiate capitalist reproduction in the accumulation process, as a progressive deepening of this unevenness, produces an internally-constitutive hierarchy of competition between firms, where Northern firms compete with each other, as do Southern firms, but there is no direct competition between Northern and Southern firms in various markets. Yet the global workforce is enmeshed within an antagonistic labor market where the threat of offshoring production constitutes a national particularity to labor mobilization that is a buffer to the formation of international solidarities.33 This dynamic is constitutive of and constituted by a dynamic of labor productivity that is managed between the technical development of the production process and the wage rates conditioned by the mechanisms of global labor arbitrage and labor market competition, as a manner of expression of the internal movements of the organic composition of capital. In developing this relationship, Smith adopts the example of the globally uneven proliferation of the service sector, its greater prevalence in the North, the so-called tertiarization of advanced economies, and its diffusive appearance in the South in tandem with sporadic industrial development corresponding to regions of low-wage labor:34
“Intensification of the labor process through brutal speed-ups and the introduction of labor-saving technology have undoubtedly made their contribution to productivity advances in industry, but some of the apparent increase in labor productivity in manufacturing is due to firms in this sector externalizing service tasks. When an industrial firm contracts out labor-intensive services such as cleaning, catering, etc., the productivity of its remaining employees increases, according to the conventional and most widely used measure of productivity. This occurs even if nothing about their work may have changed, and is the simple result of the firm’s unchanged output now being divided by a smaller workforce. The trend in this direction accounts for a part of industry’s rise in productivity and exaggerates the decline of industry’s reported share of the total workforce. if an industrial firm contracts out service provision to a firm that employs cheap labor in another country the apparent gains in productivity in the industrial firm’s productivity are even larger, since labor has not only been outsourced, its price has been slashed, reducing the cost of this input and therefore boosting the numerator in the formula for productivity (the firm’s value added) while reducing the denominator, the size of the directly employed workforce.”
Thus what can be apprehended here is a movement of productivity’s social constitution between commodity producers in the totality of capitalist production, and not a conditional development reliant upon the actions of an individual capital. “Value added”, far from here being reified into a definite contribution of a single labor, is an attendant result of the ongoing instantiation of this direction of capital accumulation within the social form of labor in the capitalist production process. Its concrete historical actuality in globally uneven and combined processes subordinated by an imperialistic exploitation by multinational corporate entities residing within definite nation-states is itself constitutive of the dynamics of its abstract operation. We then are able to apprehend how this integration of so-called primitive accumulation, that process by which proletarianization is overdetermined in its direct instantiation contributes to the historical foundation of global disparities within which capital operates through regionally fragmented global production networks as a means towards the end of a flexible labor market, where lower wages can be found or made if necessary. The class antagonism does not cease in the movement of world capital, but is its essence.
This historical actuality of capital’s concrete mediations, according to Smith, operates through capital’s international labor market and its national particularization of geopolitical competition in a distinct movement, where “[s]uppression of [labor’s] free movement across borders has interacted with [its] hugely increased supply to produce a dramatic widening of international wage differentials between industrialized and developing nations, vastly exceeding price differences in all other global markets. This steep wage gradient provides two different ways for northern capitalists to increase profits: through the emigration of production to low-wage countries, or the immigration of low-wage migrant workers for exploitation at home.”35 This is global labor arbitrage in its abstract determination, occurring through any number of struggles over the freedom of movement and the destructive administrations of a global relative surplus population. This kind of relative overpopulation specific to capital is then less technologically determined, as is often expressed in anxieties of automation, but the geopolitical administration of technological development that operates to increase productivity by means of global labor arbitrage, reinforcing this dynamic of combined and uneven development, As Smith explains:36
“What is especially ironic is that instead of being a means to raise the productivity of labor, new technology is being used to lower its cost through outsourcing; and instead of replacing labor through the introduction of more advanced machinery, capitalists are using new technology to replace labor with cheaper labor, thereby prolonging the life of obsolete production processes while freeing up corporate income for speculation in financial assets, where much bigger profits are to be made.”
The present endogenous disruption to supply chain infrastructures stems from this form of the production process in which economic organization is rather an expression of a social antagonism internal to and constitutive of the social relations of production. The discrepancies between supply and demand are rather not neutral indicators of a process that is currently being mismanaged, but an endemic condition to the disjunctions in the routine and predictable organization of these globally-integrated relations of exploitation. That said, the crisis at present is not yet determinate of any definite direction, and still relies upon the balance of forces at play between capital and labor, as present dynamics indicate. In one such example, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union that represents the 15,000 workers at the Los Angeles-Long Beach port complex has refused another year’s extension on their contract with the Pacific Maritime Assn. through 2023. As it is set to expire on July 1, 2022, likely before these supply chain issues have been resolved, negotiations could become more heated, and the union now finds itself in an advantageous position.37
Likewise, overdetermined tendencies of overcapacity, overaccumulation, and declining profit rates do not necessarily entail a general crisis throughout the sector, and its displacement can yet be facilitated into a temporary management of fallout, as in the case of the commodity super-cycle earlier this century, when the Baltic Dry Index peaked in 2008 and the profits generated an increase in shipping vessel construction that temporarily deferred the stagnation of overcapacity until it set in again as this momentum petered out. Despite this, shipping tonnage increased almost three times between 2005 and 2016, and upon its decline at the end of the cycle, Hanjin, at the time one of the largest container shipping firms in the world, collapsed under $4.5 billion in debt.38 Its competitors would quickly fill the gap left by its collapse, facilitating capital’s operation through the centralizing movement of the accumulation process. Hanjin’s case, prompting a fear of “zombie carriers”, other shipping companies likewise overleveraged and only alive on easy access to credit, resulted in more active purchases of shipping companies’ debt by the Korea Development Bank in attempts to stabilize the industry.39
The administration of supply chains and their management follows the dictums of capital accumulation and the chaotic movements of multinational personifications of capital in their fragmentation of the production process driven by a social metabolism that reproduces its conditions of existence through the dynamic production of the commodity labor-power and its exploitation. Moments of disruption and crises of disorganization are intrinsic to this mode of production, and the exorbitant privileges of the global North are not immune from the undulations of this constitutive class antagonism in such moments. The Financial Times paints a rosier portrait of demand surging beyond expectation, escaping a normally effective economic management, saying that “for decades the goal of economic management, primarily delegated to central bankers, has been to keep the total amount of spending — or aggregate demand — growing in tandem with the capacity of the economy to provide the goods and services that consumers want, labelled aggregate supply. Keeping the two in balance is meant to preserve economic stability and stop price growth from accelerating, or decelerating, out of hand. The pandemic jolted both at the same time, reorientating consumer spending from services to goods that could still be enjoyed at home; closed gyms meant a scramble for exercise equipment, for example.”40 Yet it is rather the case that this frailty exposes the perpetually shifting ground of global and hierarchical differentiations in the intensity of exploitation that this management seeks to control through limited mechanisms of direct aid and fiscal buttresses, aspiring to capital’s smooth operation, and labor’s struggle to survive.
Allan Sekula, Fish Story (1995) p. 53
https://www.ft.com/content/e8a87a67-3877-4fe9-8a5e-3322a58d43b0
https://www.ft.com/content/40f667ce-b979-4171-9cd1-b935d06728c4
https://www.ft.com/content/10f59665-8279-4ac4-ba3f-7e912bb1164c
https://www.businessinsider.com/california-longshoreman-describes-record-port-backlog-los-angeles-long-beach-2021-10
https://www.ft.com/content/d5953bb9-67ac-4d33-bc51-09f55c72ab71
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-congestion-at-americas-busiest-port-strains-global-supply-chain/
Ibid.
https://www.ft.com/content/aa24d82e-16c7-4e3e-868e-42bd32f593be
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-congestion-at-americas-busiest-port-strains-global-supply-chain/
“Saudi Arabia, Russia and other members of the Opec+ group of oil exporters have rebuffed repeated US pleas to increase supply. The oil price rises came as traders calculated that the total volume to be released would be less than expected, and that Opec+ could retaliate by holding back more oil than planned. Opec did not respond to requests for comment.” https://www.ft.com/content/4e7f2590-1a4f-4792-9e64-eafabdef6534
https://www.ft.com/content/0eb86078-34a0-4b3d-8e66-92f2c2896237
Sekula (1995) p. 54
Ibid.
Liam Campling and Alejandro Colás, Capitalism and the Sea (2020) p. 254
Ibid, p. 255
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08jbd20
Campling and Colás (2020), pp. 240-2
Ibid, p. 147
Fossil Capital by Andreas Malm is an essential resource for understanding that the historical shift to fossil fuels has been less motivated by the immediate profitability of such capital-intensive technological revolutions, but rather the immediate command over labor made possible by their introduction in the production process.
Campling and Colás (2020), pp.251-2
John Smith, Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century (2016) p. 56
Ibid, p. 45
Ibid.
Ibid, p. 82
“A most striking feature of the imperialist world economy is that, as we have seen, Northern firms do not compete with Southern firms, they compete with other Northern firms, including to see who can most rapidly and effectively outsource production to low-wage countries. Meanwhile, Southern nations fiercely compete with one another to pimp their cheap labor to northern “lead firms.” We therefore have N-N competition, and we have cutthroat S-S competition, but no N-S competition—that is, between firms, if not between workers.” Ibid, p. 84
Ibid, p. 65
Ibid, p. 188
Ibid, p. 193
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-11-23/west-coast-dockworkers-decline-contract-extension-seek-talks
Campling and Colás (2020), pp.259-60
Ibid, p. 260
https://www.ft.com/content/84c2555b-68f0-4654-bb73-d1b995d45bc2