Capital’s logistical fix: Accumulation, globalization, and the survival of capitalism

By Martin Danyluk. 2018

179 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The growth and transformation of logistics have been attributed to a specific confluence of forces that compelled firms to turn their attention to the circulation of commodities in the second half of the 20th century. This article seeks to develop a more theoretically informed account of the logistics revolution by delineating the industry’s role in promoting the accumulation of capital and the reproduction of capitalism. Drawing on Marxian geographical thought, I contend that the logistical turn of the past five decades has facilitated a multifaceted “spatial fix” to capitalism’s chronic problem of overaccumulation—one that has reconfigured the geographies of circulation as well as production, consumption, and appropriation. This argument has important implications for our understanding of globalization. By enhancing the mobility of both commodity capital and the production process itself, advances in logistics have been an essential, albeit neglected, condition of global economic integration since the 1970s.

Subfields: Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e1679f82146b3f774cbdcc1245004d4b48b7cd75

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Political Science and International Relations

1. Seth Schindler
2. Jon Silver
3. J. Kanai
4. Alan Wiig

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Seth Schindler
2. Jon Silver
3. J. Kanai
4. Alan Wiig

In Strategy and Management

1. Seth Schindler
2. Jon Silver
3. J. Kanai
4. Alan Wiig

Citations in the corpus

• Getting the territory right: infrastructure-led development and the re-emergence of spatial planning strategies (2019, background): “Infrastructure-led development is first and foremost an industrial strategy that integrates production processes across expansive geographies stitched together with extensive logistics networks (Cowen, 2014; Danyluk, 2017).”
• Turbulent presents, precarious futures: urbanization and the deployment of global infrastructure (2019, background): “From networked services such as electricity, to extractions such as oil, the logic of standardization underpins operation of global capitalism, including the reordering of urban spaces (Brewster, 2017; Danyluk, 2017).”