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

Abstract

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.