My research examines the social and spatial production of difference within global capitalist formations, and crosses the fields of international relations, global political economy, human geography, labor studies, and political theory. Grounded in a commitment to historical materialist research and method, I’m particularly interested in the ways in which planetary networks of production and distribution shape the organization of racialized and classed divisions within capitalist social formations, with particular attention to how these divisions are lived, contested, and overcome across anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist social movements.
I am currently working on two book projects. My first monograph, The Logistics Counterrevolution: Fast Circulation, Slow Violence, and the Transpacific Empire of Capital, examines the rise of the global logistics industry from the vantage of the Global South. Drawing on ethnographic, archival, and scholar-activist research in China, the Philippines, Singapore, California, the UK, and on board a 190,000 ton container ship sailing on the international seas, The Logistics Counterrevolution examines the deepening integration of transport and logistical infrastructures into the mechanisms of capitalist empire across the Transpacific contact zone. While scholars have largely referred to the expansion of just-in-time supply chains since the 1960s as the “logistics revolution,” I argue that this expansion is better understood as a “logistics counterrevolution,” an ongoing project of transnational capitalist empire to demobilize labor struggles and grassroots projects of economic self-determination through governing the global supply chain.
The Logistics Counterrevolution reframes the conjuncture of postcolonial nation building with the rise of containerized shipping as a story of competing visions over global resource distribution. Although typically written as separate histories, the rise of logistics in the 1950s and 60s intersected with the period of decolonization, when states allied with the Third World project began to imagine nationalized industry and maritime sovereignty as key pillars of economic self-determination. At the same time, as traditional maritime powers, the United Kingdom and United States pursued and promoted export-oriented growth models that prioritized the mobility of capital and foreign investment over social and political questions of postcolonial redistribution. Building a commercial trade system that intensified border regimes for human mobility at the same time that it attenuated borders for goods and capital, these imperial powers standardized the structure of global commerce through legal, financial, and material instruments that standardized the channels of commerce from factories to the oceans, warehouses, and marketplace and back. My research insists that these ‘in-between’ spaces of transportation — the trans of the transpacific — are far from marginal to studies of the global economy, and provide a crucial infrastructure for the distribution of racialized inequality within, between, and across the Transpacific passage between the U.S., China, and Southeast Asia. Yet, in examining the class composition of the contemporary logistics industry, the book also traces how movements grounded in internationalist labor solidarity have seized on the contradictions and crises elicited by supply chain disruptions to build global labor movements that materially connect chains of workers across the manufacturing, logistics, and retail sectors.
My second book project, How to Beat Amazon:The Future of America’s New Working Class Struggle, co-authored with Spencer Cox, builds on years of ongoing labor organizing and activist research with the solidarity union Amazonians United. The book, written to and for a popular audience, examines the political economy of Amazon.com’s corporate expansion. We develop a spatial analysis of Amazon’s monopoly power, arguing that Amazon is both central to the recomposition of class structure and emblematic of a broader bifurcation between urban professional managerial class tech workers and an increasingly suburbanized, and majority Black, brown, and immigrant logistics working class today. How to Beat Amazon seeks both to diagnose Amazon’s power and to be a manual for the fight against our generation’s biggest corporate behemoth. Amazon, we thus argue, is the logical center for building a new political bloc rooted in building a revolutionary class consciousness and redistributing class power in the United States.
We trace Amazon’s unique capacity to control and coordinate a vast logistics network by combining logistics, retail and digital services into a single corporate entity, allowing it to extend market domination over massive global supply chains. Its influence, stretching from the geographies of factory production in China to suburban working class structure in the US, and to the very doorsteps of our homes, has not only been increasingly crucial to patterns of global consumption but also to local and national economies, and to the coordinates of working class life in the US. Yet, as we argue, an urban-concentrated and increasingly restive Amazon tech workforce is refusing the atomization of white and blue-collar working classes, building momentum and solidarity with warehouse workers by waging united demands around climate justice, healthcare access, and resistance to the military and prison industrial complex. Amazon, in other words, is the frontier for the working class struggles of the future. Learning from workers struggling in the hinterlands of Amazon’s empire and their tech worker comrades, we chart a strategy for building a revolutionary class consciousness that confronts managerial domination with a multiracial class struggle that centers feminist and anti-racist intersectional justice.
I have also written about issues of economic inequality, infrastructural racism, ecological change, financialization, counterinsurgency, police abolition, and housing justice, and continue to explore these topics as part of a broader interest in mapping terrains of anticapitalist and antiracist struggle against empire.