Infrastructural Enclosures: Southern California Logistics and US Empire

• In Event: 50460 - Section on Comparative-Historical Sociology Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 5: Contentious Politics

Abstract

The widespread goods shortages leading to empty grocery store shelves during the early days of the 2020 COVID-19 shutdowns in the US, and in different ways around the world, brought to the forefront the everyday reliance on logistics. Other recent historical events further showcased the current-day reliance on supply-chain management in the capitalist world-system. Logistics as a supply-chain management science only emerges during global neoliberal restructuring in the 1960s. However, adopting a longer view of capital circulation and the infrastructure it relies upon offers crucial insight into the present state of world historical social and ecological change. This especially includes the centrality of logistics infrastructure within the organizational structures of capitalist imperialism and colonialism, expanding a counterinsurgency of capitalist white supremacy and heteropatriarchy. Embracing such an infrastructural enclosures perspective also looks to draw attention to the strategic impact of everyday, community, and labor orientated organizing to restore cooperative human and non-human relations through environmental resistance. I understand modes of circulation, modes of enclosure, and environmental resistance as the primary mechanisms regional power blocs and counterhegemonic blocs use as a vehicle for change. Modes of circulation focus on ways capital accumulation emerging through the inter-firm networks of global commodity chains land in space, seeking to shape regional development in ways for expanding the potential for accumulating capital. Meanwhile, modes of enclosures describe ways oppression, including violence, provides an ongoing basis for ways regional hegemonic blocs exercise power. Although the particular spatial divisions and historical conjunctures of Southern California’s three logistics corridors remain a unique struggle between hegemonic power blocs of imperial administrators and everyday environmental resistance, the region’s contested transportation infrastructure planning offers broader insights. This includes a recasting of social and ecological histories of settler colonialism and racial capitalism in local environmental, planning, and development contexts.

Author

• Luc McKenzie, University of California-Irvine