More than ever, the current health crisis highlights the “logisticization” of the world. From the outset, the pandemic followed the routes of global trade; it is part of a generation of viruses whose potential for harm owes not so much to new biological forms as to the accelerated modes of transmission and circulation. Traveling on living beings or objects, by trucks, buses, planes, or cargo ships, in markets, airports, and within metropolitan areas, COVID-19 fits into every pore (and port) of globalized economies. Leaving a viral imprint on the infrastructures of capitalism, it exacerbates and makes visible their noxiousness.

Capitalism’s fundamental dependence on global logistics infrastructures has triggered contradictory political reactions. At first, we saw a loud insistence on closing the borders — as if the pandemic were sensitive to nationalist reflexes. But the circuits of logistics quickly overcame these constraints. To get around the closure of the borders between France and Italy, for example, the flow of goods was diverted via Switzerland and Luxembourg — as we saw when we interviewed dockworkers. Logistics knows how to play with borders very well, as was also apparent in the changes in logistics circuits caused by the rise in oil prices. Despite the ecological cost, many cargo ships currently avoid the Suez Canal and prefer the long way around the Cape of Good Hope.

Very quickly, the transportation and warehousing industries appeared essential to the reproduction of the confined society, particularly in the food and health sectors. Logistics took advantage of this to claim the glorious status of “operator of vital importance.” France’s secretary of state for the digital economy, Cédric O, echoed Emmanuel Macron’s militaristic rhetoric by comparing the logistics sector to the “rear” that must “hold on” and push its employees to continue operating — brushing aside concerns about workplace health conditions. Worse, labor minister Muriel Pénicaud announced a removal of the upper limits on working time (twelve hours a day, sixty hours a week) in sectors considered “strategic,” including logistics. Such exemptions from the labor code worryingly extend the “state of emergency” to the world of business.