Browsing by Subject "Political Economy"
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Item Chattel Land: Legal and Labor Histories of Reclamation in Singapore(2020-07) Fok, BeverlyAfter fifty years of aggressive augmentation, reclaimed land now makes up a quarter of Singapore’s total landmass. Cut out of sea, this artificial land aspires to cut the chain of causality: to self-found and so give law to itself (auto-nomos). How to analytically capture that gesture of self-authoring? From what vantage point does one study an object like reclamation whose structure is that of recursion? This is the challenge—at once methodological and theoretical—to which my dissertation responds. I proceed first by asking: what exactly is being reclaimed in reclamation? Why should the creation of “new” land need to be enacted in the idiom of a “re,” that is, as a re-taking, a retrieval, or a return? Though reclamation purports to create land “from sea,” key to this land-making is not saltwater but sand and labor, both of which Singapore imports in vast quantities from its South, East, and Southeast Asian neighbors. Harnessing those flows, reclamation would appear to put the very ground itself in motion. Foreign coastlines are dismantled, ferried piecemeal, then reassembled into new land in Singapore by migrant workers on barges. In the process, land paradoxically becomes chattel. What then becomes of chattel—including certain forms of labor? A tentative answer might be obtained, I argue, by looking to the legal and labor histories that inform this present-day fabrication of mobile land. Thus the dissertation rehabilitates a link between today’s migrant labor and its earlier prefiguration, colonial convict labor, which was first tasked with creating new land in the island’s interior. Just as today’s reclaimed land needs labor’s upkeep to fend off the tides, interior land needed constant servicing to prevent its return to the jungle. Where convict labor’s lot was “imprisonment in transportation, beyond sea, for life,” reclamation workers, confined in vessels, trace an unending circuit between dredge sites at sea and fill sites near land. By situating reclamation within those longer-standing political economies of extraction, I show that mobile land—made here to be eternally remade against rising seas—is not “new” and cannot be claimed, but rather must always be re-claimed, even in the very first instance.Item Containing the Ship of State: Managing Mobility in an Age of Logistics(2018-07) Chua, CharmaineThis dissertation argues that global logistical circulation, although often taken for granted as a banal economic process, is a political project central to the making of world order. To make this argument, it examines the social and political economic impacts of the concomitant rise of logistical management and shipping containerization as twin operations intensifying the global circulation of commercial capital. Since the 1960s, businesses have increasingly experimented with just-in-time logistical techniques to speed the realization of surplus value, leading to the rise of global transoceanic networks of distribution that reorganize commercial circulation across distinct yet densely interconnected political geographies. As logistical management systems have sought to regularize, standardize, and create flexible networks for circulating goods across vast distances around the world, they have become crucial to the expanded reproduction of capital. Accordingly, states have also adopted logistics-oriented growth strategies, investing in organizing and securing a socio-spatial order that produces a world safe for the movement of commercial capital, often in ways that inhibit the social and spatial mobility of vulnerable populations that live and work along global supply chains. The empirical focus of the dissertation is a multi-sited ethnographic study of the Trans-Pacific shipping passage between the US and China. Understanding logistics as both a material practice and calculative rationality, this dissertation employs an ethnographic approach to interrogate the effects of logistics’ global rise through four cuts: 1) A theoretical and historical analysis of the rise of logistics management and shipping containerization in the 1960s, 2) the securitization of goods movement in US maritime cargo policy, 3) the expansion of logistical infrastructure across the world’s oceans and in Los Angeles and Singapore, and 4) the seafaring labor process. My overarching claim is that logistical practices and rationalities exacerbate growing and often contradictory tensions between the mobility of capital and the containment of people and infrastructure that facilitate global circulation. Rather than understand containment as a static process of sequestration or enclosure that impedes the ability for capital and people to circulate, processes of containment have gained fundamentally productive functions that intensify and facilitate, rather than prevent or deter the long-distance expansion of capitalist networks. In this way, logistics produces a set of relations in which moving the world’s goods across space comes to be understood as normative and desirable, while containing the human lives that do this work is seen as necessary and productive.Item Neoliberalism’s Last Days: Amazon and the Rise of America’s New Working Classes(2022-09) Cox, SpencerThis dissertation asks the questions: What is neoliberalism? How is it ending? And, from the perspective of political strategy, what can be done to make what emerges next more just? Drawing on long-wave Marxist theory, I argue neoliberalism is first and foremost a popular political bloc led by the financial and entrepreneurial wings of the bourgeoisie in alignment with broader ‘middle-layers’ in the US class structure. Rather than viewing neoliberalism as a process driven solely by the economic logic of the pursuit of surplus profits, I argue that creative destruction is a political process, with an ascendant neoliberal political bloc emerging in response to the profitability crisis in the 1960s. The neoliberal bloc sought to restore the rate of profit and US global economic hegemony, and to do so, aggressively suppressed the US working class directly through the exercise of political power, and indirectly through the structural reorganization of capital accumulation. The structural and organizational decomposition of the working class diminished its power, with large sections of the class protesting – often in vain - its dissolution via defensive struggles. Concomitantly, as the trajectory of long-wave shifted from the pursuit of surplus profits to the stabilization of the system to extract profits from new waves of fixed capital investment, neoliberal hegemony faces a legitimacy crisis. With right populism and reformed liberalism two competing blocs, the trajectory of the new bloc depends on the loyalty of the working classes. Today, the US working classes remain deeply fragmented and atomized despite re-composition into new spaces and workplaces, diminishing the ability of the class to exercise power to enact changes the class broadly desires. Strategically imperative to a more just future is creating new class organization that bridges the divides in the new working classes. I argue that Amazon.com is at the heart of working class re-composition in the United States, socializing both high skilled tech workers and diverse low wage suburban logistics workers into shared spaces of exploitation and domination. Structurally located in the heart of capital accumulation, organized Amazon workers contain both the potential structural and associational power to shift the dynamic of capitalist restructuring more in the working class’s favor as the long-wave cycle matures. Building autonomous class organization – at Amazon and in other workplaces and working class neighborhoods - is crucial for not just winning reforms, but also generating a counter-hegemonic force that, in the long-run, may challenge bourgeois political hegemony in an era of increasing calamity.Item A Tale of the Digital: Governing China with Data Infrastructure(2023-06) Liu, KevinThis dissertation is about how data technologies become an “infrastructure of governing” in contemporary China’s pursuit of socialist modernity. The research is situated in China’s current endeavor of utilizing “New Infrastructure” for national governance, and of achieving an enhancement of the state’s governing capacity through digital technologies. It describes the “structure of feeling” of digital governance, which I argue is emerging as a new Chinese governmentality. The research critically contextualizes today’s digital endeavor within China’s modernization history, and with detailed case studies focusing on one of China’s eight National Data Hubs—Guizhou Hub, it reveals how data technology has become and is still becoming an infrastructure for the Chinese state’s governance of its people and the Chinese people’s understanding of their everyday lives. I argue that through what I call “state-commercial complexes” and “infrastructure of feeling,” data technologies become the undergirding networks of power that sustain a mode of digital governance. The research combines theoretical interventions of infrastructure studies, governmentality, and media studies. It provides “thick descriptions” of the political-economic arrangements, local institutional formations, and complex interactions among the central/local government, stateowned-enterprises, as well as domestic and international corporations in the process of Guizhou Hub’s emergence; It also unearths how these formations involve particularities of local, ordinary people as they live through the landscape cultural-scape transformation of Guizhou’s development of data centers and data technologies, and how these, in turn, produce contingent outcomes that shape and re-configure how data technologies are localized. With an interdisciplinary approach that combines historical, political economy, cultural and ethnographic analysis, this research showcases how national strategy and digital technologies are institutionalized and normalized on regional and local levels and thus become a symbiotic part of the local power network. It argues that we are witnessing the emergence of a new Chinese governmentality that—with datafication and dataismrevitalizes the socialist rationality of seeking full access to its governing subject. However, the localization of digital governance rationality is challenged by the very processes of its own implementation, as the infrastructurizing of data technologies inevitably involves contingent processes of localization where anti-hegemonic forces emerge.