Logistics, Labor, and the Struggle Against Amazon

About the event

Charmaine Chua will give a talk titled The City as Supply Chain: Fast Circulation, Slow Violence, and Urban Futures, in which she maps Los Angeles as an example of a logistical city. Starting at the port then proceeding inland to Amazon warehouses, the talk will show how the spatial geographies of supply chain capitalism shape the class composition of American working classes and why Amazon has become a central engine of "job growth" in these deindustrialized hinterlands. While centered around LA, the talk will also invite comparisons to Rotterdam, with its port and hinterlands forming a vast logistical landscape. 

About Professor Chua 

Charmaine Chua is a Singaporean organizer and writer, and Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her interdisciplinary scholarly and political work is interested in how planetary networks of production and distribution shape the organization of racialized and class 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. She is currently writing two books, The Logistics Counterrevolution: Fast Circulation, Slow Violence and the Transpacific Empire of Capital, and How to Beat Amazon: The Struggle of America's New Working Class (co-authored with Spencer Cox). Her work has been published in The Review of International Studies, The Socialist Register, Theory and Event, Antipode, Society and Space, The Boston Review, The Nation, and Jacobin, among other venues. She co-founded the Marxist Institute of Research and organizes with Cops off Campus and Amazonians United, an independent union of Amazon warehouse workers. She was named a 2023 Freedom Scholar and is the 2023-24 winner of the UCSB Plous Award.