Border Economies/Capitalist Imaginaries: Dispelling Capitalism’s System Effects

How do the contradictory demands of sovereignty and globalization, border walls and supply chains, co-exist? Drawing on research along the U.S.-Mexico border, I trace global production networks in the Rio Grande Valley. Things are not made in one country and sold in another; they are produced across, or on top of, the border. Crossing borders is what makes globalization global. Moving bits and pieces across territorial lines not only allows companies to arbitrage national inequalities for profit; it also presents an analytic opportunity to view capitalism itself from a different angle. Extensive infrastructures are needed to allow global production networks to cross, but not breach, the territorial claims of sovereignty. I refer to the cross-border infrastructures as the sluice gates of globalization. Rather than seeing capitalist logics as the problem and anti-capitalism the cornerstone of a critical counter-politics, I draw on Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit discussion to consider sluice gates as evidence of both capitalism’s rapacious reach and its internal heterogeneity and limits. From this perspective, sluice gates allow us to see capitalism as an assemblage rather than a system: fantasies of coherence recede. Following Timothy Mitchell, I suggest that once capital’s system effects have been dislodged, new economic imaginaries appear.