At around 1:45 AM this morning, March 26th, a container ship, the Dali, flagged out of Singapore, was leaving the port of Baltimore when it briefly lost power and control. That brief loss of power - in the video of the incident it appears to occur for only a few seconds - led the ship to crash into one of the support pillars of the Francis Scott Key bridge, which spanned the Patapsco river, and which collapsed entirely within seconds. (...)
The Port of Baltimore is, by tonnage, the fifth busiest port on the Eastern Seaboard. It handled about 265,000 containers in 2023, about 1/3 as many as the port in Norfolk and about 12% of what is handled annually in the massive New York/Newark complex.
It is likely that this amount can be picked up by other ports, although the global shipping system is already facing severe disruption from the Houthi attacks in the Red Sea, drought-lowered water levels in the Panama Canal, and continued insecurity in the Black Sea thanks to the war on Ukraine. Container ships were already backed up across the Eastern Seaboard by January. Shipping companies have been facing significant rerouting over the last few years, increasing the cost of shipping in terms of fuel spent, cargo spoilage, and war risk/conflict insurance and security.
These cost increases are then experienced as inflation in the cost of commodities and goods. In the case of fuel, which overwhelmingly goes through the Red Sea, this can have a spiraling inflationary effect as transporting the fuel gets more expensive, which increases the cost of the fuel, which then again increases the cost of shipping the next batch of said fuel, etc.* This also increases emissions as ships travel both further and faster to make up for differences. (...)
Thus, a brief mechanical failure in a single ship can lead to consequences that reverberate across the global economy. This eventuality was more comically underlined in March 2021, when the container ship the Ever Given got stuck in the Suez Canal. And perhaps more interesting to people interested in the revolutionary potential of infrastructure disruption, the Houthi attacks on the Red Sea have dropped shipping through the Suez by over 60%, and lead to drastic and dramatic transformation of global shipping patterns which, according to historian and shipping expert Sal Mercogliano, is potentially the largest disruption of shipping since the world wars.
The just-in-time supply-chain economy, in which elaborate global information and logistical structures allow companies to respond in real time to shifts in market availability and demand, is often described with terms like "flexibility". This is most infamously practiced in the fast fashion industry, in which companies can track exactly how certain styles are selling live in all of their stores around the globe, and adjust how much of each garment, style, size or design they are making so rapidly that within a few weeks slight shifts in consumer preferences are reflected in store inventories.
A particular sundress sells out in Southern California, store managers across the region request resupplies, a research analyst in Bangalore recognizes the blip, who informs a marketing team in New York that sends orders to production management in Hong Kong, who mobilize four different contractors in Bangladesh, who order more of the particular cloth pattern; the factory that makes that pattern hires fifteen temp workers to meet this sudden demand, which they then ship to the sweatshops where the design is sown, the sweatshops crank out a quadruple order of the popular sundress, which a Cambodian truck driver takes overland to Shanghai, where it will take flex space in a pre-booked shipment (organized by a Vietnamese subcontractor) and move across the Pacific in a container ship built in South Korea owned by a Swedish company and registered in Panama, crewed by an Indonesian captain with a Filipino crew using navigation software designed in Norway. All of it happening within a few weeks.
But this kind of "just-in-time" production and information forward economy is also reflected in "surge pricing", "print-on-demand" technologies, drop-shipping Amazon storefronts, and any other variety of borderline scammy business models that allow companies and retailers to scale particular pieces of their operations up and down at incredible speeds.
As we have seen from the Houthis, from Supply Chain Inflation, and will likely now see from the Baltimore Port disaster, this "flexibility" is built on a severely rigid set of conditions. Logistical outcomes must go smoothly. When the system is working well, sellers have a level of flexibility in inventory management, price setting and demand response that retailers thirty years ago could only dream of. But one small disruption - a single ship having a mechanical failure, a single political actor attacking a particular choke point - can have untold cascading effects, effects that require massive geopolitical and economic efforts to adjust for.
In classic capitalist ideological fashion, rather than supple, flexible and strong, the system is in fact incredibly rigid and brittle, amplifying small problems into massive disasters. What is actually made flexible is the work force--who can be easily hired and fired to meet demand, who can be "offshored" or avoided entirely if they protest, unionize, or otherwise see wage increases. Precarity, surplus population status and an explosion of slums, scams and grey markets are the results.
This massive system offloads the insecurity and costs of this constantly changing "flexible" arrangement onto the workers, who pay through their bodies, their wages, their lives a cost that used to be held by the capitalist firms as "risk". This risk took the form of inventory and warehousing, sales competition and the basic vagaries of fads and fashions when it came to consumer demand, and more structural fluctuations when it came to basic commodities.
But this mass downward redistribution of risk and flexibility has also put tremendous strain on "nature" itself, through the acceleration of emissions and waste produced by this mode of production. Workers and the ecology of our planet have paid for the construction of this system. But the physical world and the social world have real limits to what they will take.
by Vicky Osterweil, ACAB | Read more:
Image: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images via
