Event Details

What does anti-imperial working class internationalism mean today?

Working through two core theoretical concepts —“internationalism” and “class composition” — I explore how concepts central to the anti-imperial internationalisms of the past must be re-examined and re-fashioned in the context of the contemporary supply chains and the imperial violence they circulate. Grounded in a participant-activist reflection on a decade of organizing around supply chain internationalism in the Block the Boat movement and with Amazon warehouse workers, this talk examines how contemporary prospects for the organization of a genuinely working-class, anti-imperial internationalism are shaped by the dialectical relation between geographical fragmentation and financial consolidation produced by by the planetary extension of supply chains. Although multinational corporations geographically decentralize global production, they also increasingly centralize the financing of supply chains as they seek to capture markets for the circulation of global commodities. In the process, they inadvertently build planetary chains of workers who are more materially linked across the manufacturing, logistics, and retail sectors than they have ever been. I trace how workers are re-constituting internationalist struggle in spite of the class decomposition and recomposition of the planetary working class, and use these lessons to draw out key reflections on rebuilding anti-imperial struggle in the contemporary logistical age.

Charmaine Chua is a Singaporean scholar, organizer and writer, and Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. They taught as a visiting instructor at Macalester College from 2016-2017. Their interdisciplinary research focuses on political economy, postcolonial development, and technological change, with a specific interest in how planetary supply chains shape the organization of racialization, colonialism, and class relations, with particular attention to how these divisions are lived, contested, and overcome across working class social movements. They are currently writing two books, The Logistics  Counterrevolution: Fast Circulation, Slow Violence and the Transpacific Empire of Circulation, and How to Beat Amazon: The Struggle of America's New Working Class (co-authored with Spencer Cox). Her work has been published in The Review of International Studies, The Socialist Register, Theory and Event, Antipode, Society and Space, The Boston Review, The Nation, and Jacobin, among other venues. They co-founded the Marxist Institute of Research and organize with Workers in Palestine, Researchers Against War, and Amazonians United, an independent union of Amazon warehouse workers. Chua received the 2023 Harold J. Plous Memorial Award, one of UCSB’s highest faculty honors, and was named a 2023 Casey Foundation Freedom Scholar in recognition of movement leaders who participate in academia with a demonstrated commitment to supporting social movements.

Reception in the Loch to Follow