95% of container ships that would’ve transited the Red Sea are now going around the Southern Tip of Africa as of this morning. The ships diverting from their ordinary course are marked orange on the @flexport map below.
This really does have the potential to be devastating to global capitalism. It’s not just the additional fuel et al costs that get passed on to suppliers and customers. It’s the slowdown of turnover. The time a commodity spends between when it is manufactured and when it is consumed is considered dead time that creates no value. Capital needs to minimize that time as much as possible. Slowing it down means the capitalist is less able reinvest capital as rapidly and is no different from say, seeing your costs increase (so a slowdown in distribution, even if in itself doesn’t “cost” the capitalist anything, still can lead to significant reductions of surplus value being created).
David Harvey defines capitalism as “value in motion”. Slow down the motion and you slow down capitalism. There’s a reason capital needed the COVID “lockdowns” to end after a couple weeks (and I firmly believe the US would never have done even the meagre actions they did take if Target, Amazon, et al weren’t all allowed to stay open). There’s a reason there was a big push to “get back to normal and go out and buy things” just a couple days after 9/11. Capitalism cannot abide anything that slows down its motion.
I also am of the opinion that just-in-time production has actually been able to somewhat mitigate the crises of overproduction that Marx talks about (emphasis on somewhat). However, that comes at a cost that capitalism has never really had to pay until COVID came around: it makes the entire system much more fragile. That’s the trade off. I’m curious to see what happens if this goes on - I imagine we’ll start to see big slowdowns in production as factories simply don’t have the inputs they need (because supply chains have been managed on such tight timelines).
This really does have the potential to be devastating to global capitalism. It’s not just the additional fuel et al costs that get passed on to suppliers and customers. It’s the slowdown of turnover. The time a commodity spends between when it is manufactured and when it is consumed is considered dead time that creates no value. Capital needs to minimize that time as much as possible. Slowing it down means the capitalist is less able reinvest capital as rapidly and is no different from say, seeing your costs increase (so a slowdown in distribution, even if in itself doesn’t “cost” the capitalist anything, still can lead to significant reductions of surplus value being created).
David Harvey defines capitalism as “value in motion”. Slow down the motion and you slow down capitalism. There’s a reason capital needed the COVID “lockdowns” to end after a couple weeks (and I firmly believe the US would never have done even the meagre actions they did take if Target, Amazon, et al weren’t all allowed to stay open). There’s a reason there was a big push to “get back to normal and go out and buy things” just a couple days after 9/11. Capitalism cannot abide anything that slows down its motion.
I also am of the opinion that just-in-time production has actually been able to somewhat mitigate the crises of overproduction that Marx talks about (emphasis on somewhat). However, that comes at a cost that capitalism has never really had to pay until COVID came around: it makes the entire system much more fragile. That’s the trade off. I’m curious to see what happens if this goes on - I imagine we’ll start to see big slowdowns in production as factories simply don’t have the inputs they need (because supply chains have been managed on such tight timelines).