Capital now returns to deindustrialized regions through logistics infrastructure, exploiting their surplus labor.

Evidence

Thus, the warehouses of Lehigh Valley reveal two linked but distinct transformations. For one, they represent the centrality of logistics in contemporary capitalism, the measurement and tracking of objects as they move across the globe. … But additionally, these warehouses demonstrate an essential feature of what Mandel identified—drawing on the arguments of Latin American and African Marxists—as the cultivation of imperialist “dependencies.” Through varied extractive logics of exploitation, capital can impoverish particular geographical areas and then pretend to “save” these very same areas with the promise of “development.” … In other words, late capitalism relies on the promise of reintegrating geographic regions either decimated or left “undeveloped” by previous waves of capitalist production and extraction. The building of warehouses in Lehigh Valley is not only a result of the centrality of logistics and shipping to contemporary capitalism; it is also because deindustrialization left a surplus population willing to work for lower wages, without meaningful guarantees of rights for workers. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 286

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly supports the ‘Corpocene’ argument that the corporate form’s spatial infrastructures (here the warehouse) depend on exploitable surplus populations produced by prior waves of capital flight.
• XREF: Connects to Jesse LeCavalier’s work on Walmart logistics architecture — a follow-through on how the warehouse infrastructure book-ends land and corporation.