How the Logistical Revolution Defined Modern Colonialism

Imagine you are the owner of a factory. You have optimized your production process as much as you could, reaching the point at which you cannot extract any more profit. You are glancing over the shoulders of overpoliced workers, trying to find an answer somewhere on the production line. The answer though, lies outside of the factory—you should weaponize the outside space in order to make it an extension of the factory. You can turn the area that lies between production and consumption into a source of extraction that could be optimised. In other words, you can extend the factory production line with a supply chain, creating a phenomena that in 2009 was named “supply chain capitalism” by Anna Tsing—a system in which outsourcing becomes the heart of the production process, with even wars and torture becoming outsourced.

This change in the exploitative mindset was labeled “logistical revolution” and solved the issue of capital reaching its own glass ceiling. Basically, this is how “just-in-time production” started—rendering the spaces between outsourcing facilities into a part of the production process. Charmaine Chua uses a very telling anecdote to explain the mindset of contemporary regimes of exploitation: “It is now cheaper to ship freshly caught fish from the West Coast of the United States to China to be deboned and filleted by Chinese workers and then shipped back again than it is to pay for the cost of that work under U.S. labour regulations.” Since then, logistics as an industry has grown extensively, becoming a new place for a “political and class conflict,” as Alberto Toscano puts it, that comes along with, or even replaces, the factory. Logistics today is “the new black” of the military-industrial complex—taking the form of the police, Amazon, or proxy soldiers.

Logistical revolution was not an event, despite its name, but a complex transformation with multiple histories, ranging from the spread of the use of containers during the colonial war in Vietnam, to the developments in cybernetics that allowed new calculations of the geographies of the distribution of goods. To some extent, it is possible to say that the war in Vietnam in the 70s provided a kind of a “hardware”—standardized boxes that brought closer the fantasy of seamless flow that would facilitate the colonial expansion of capital. Cybernetics after the second world war were a “software,” that when merged with logistics in the 60s, allowed the scheduling of new “geographies of calculation”—plan distribution/outsourcing on a qualitatively new level.

Logistics is, initially, a military art. It was born, according to Deborah Cowen, to solve the problem of fueling the battlefield. For a long time it has been in the background of military actions, considered as inherently secondary towards them, but responsible for making them possible in the first place. Later, logistics was adopted and brought to the forefront of seemingly civilian capitalist production. The division between civilian and military logistics should be operated quite carefully, though, as it is not legitimate in a majority of cases. There are not only military goods and people being transported by private companies, and in most cases through civilian infrastructures with other “normal” goods on board, but also vice-versa—“many of WalMart’s managers and executives—who set the standard for the industry as a whole—come from the military,” according to Jasper Bernes. It creates conditions in which the blurred line between these two categories becomes the smokescreen for warfare, making it harder to distinguish from seemingly non-militarized flows of capital.

Logistics, taken as a method of research, allows us to outline the materiality of connections, introducing the third dimension to the two-dimensional line that goes from the point of dispatch to the delivery address in tracking apps. One could think of logistics as a way to blueprint hollows, like the one that was left in place of a logistical worker in a monument dedicated to food delivery staff working during the Covid-19 lockdown in Moscow. We should strive to locate these hollows and see the nodes that connect those negative spaces, not only spatially but also temporally. We should see historical processes logistically, reconnecting the orphans of Russian logistical history that seem to have appeared out of thin air with their origins in the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.