Logistics Struggles in the Po Valley Region: Territorial Transformations and Processes of Antagonistic Subjectivation

This article investigates the logistics of contemporary global capitalism from two primary vantage points: the grounded perspective of recent struggles in the logistics sector of northern Italy and a more general interpretation of contemporary spatial transformations. Starting with a few genealogical and theoretical vignettes, we argue that logistics plays a decisive role in contemporary processes of both the establishment of new and mobile forms of territoriality and the production of subjectivity. We hypothesize that these two productive aspects of logistics must be understood as crisscrossed and mutually interacting. The article further takes up the geographical question of scale and attempts to advance the development of analytical tools capable of grasping at once global flows and local peculiarities. With a view to northern Italy and beyond, we conclude by proposing a few conceptualizations: the terraqueous territory; the Po Valley as a form of regionalization; the cooperative system as a specific form of labor exploitation; and the new spaces of antagonistic subjectivation processes.