Logistics and Power: Supply Chains from Slavery to Space

From supply chains to surveillance, how logistics drives modern power--and its consequences.

Movement is the lifeblood of capital, even more so than growth. If goods, people, and information don’t flow, then profits don’t either. Ensuring that laborers, shipping containers, media, commercially valuable data, and much else are in the right place at the right time demands a subtle choreography. Enter logistics.

Susan Zieger argues that logistics is the foundation of power in our time. Blending detailed historical research with real-life stories that crystallize the human and ecological consequences of supply chains, Logistics and Power shows how the pursuit of efficient movement has come to organize economies while disordering societies and selves. Logistics emerges as the key to consumerism and the experience of work. It justifies corporate and police surveillance, illuminates patterns of migration and exploitation, and explains why the oceans are clotted with plastic. It is in the sphere of logistics that capitalist motives are most dramatically in tension with planetary needs.

A headfirst encounter with the obscure forces subordinating all goals below those of capital, Logistics and Power points the way to an alternative: a mindful and politically attentive kind of movement compatible with human thriving.

Susan Zieger is Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside and author of The Mediated Mind and Inventing the Addict.