‘The workers’ crew must seize the helm…’ ; Film Exposes Bosses’ Exploitation of Global Transport

“The Forgotten Space” is a poetic, visually stunning, and unabashedly anti-capitalist documentary about the global transport system. The film opens aboard a massive cargo container ship carrying products from low-wage manufacturing and farming centers to major ports in Europe and the United States. 

The seas are the pathways over which 100,000 ships, manned by 1.5 million seamen, deliver materials and goods worth trillions of dollars to a web of manufacturers (like Foxconn in China), importers (like Walmart and Apple), and banks and financiers on Wall Street and elsewhere. “The Forgotten Space” interviews the normally invisible people who make and transport the goods, rather than the billionaires who get both the credit and the profits.

The film depicts how the entire transport system of capitalism relies on cheap labor: factory workers in China; Korean and Indonesian workers who service the cargo ships; low-paid truck drivers at the huge port in Los Angeles. 

As economist Minqi Li explains, capitalism relentlessly seeks to lower production costs by cutting wages and benefits and also by demanding lower taxes and minimal environmental regulations, giving it freedom to pollute the oceans. 

The cargo container — a standardized metal box that can be moved from ship to train or truck — was developed by U.S. shippers who were eager to cut the number of dockworkers required to load cargo. Millions of containers now travel the globe’s oceans, a watery conveyor belt that moves 90 percent of the world’s cargo. Once they reach their destinations, trains and trucks bring their contents to stores. 

Meanwhile, farms in Holland are uprooted to make room for the tracks the railroads run on, while the entire village of Doel is demolished to expand the port of Antwerp, Belgium. Nothing appears to stand in the way of global capitalism as it moves factories abroad and shunts industrial workers to the unemployment lines or to stock shelves at retail stores.

Yet Minqi Li argues that something does stand in the way. The workers of China are now demanding higher wages and benefits, with a record number of strikes and job actions. Li asks, What happens to capitalism when it runs out of workers it can super-exploit? 

His comments have a certain deterministic ring, as though capitalism will somehow fall apart when wages rise globally. Yet the film — which the filmmakers declared to be “openly Marxist” — concludes by suggesting, “The lowly crew must seize the helm.” 

Indeed, only when the working class destroys capitalism with a communist revolution, and takes over the global economy, can it begin to plan a society that treats people humanely.