Freedom of Negativity: NAFTA's Legal Form in the Logistical Borderlands

Capitalism is constituted through specific social forms that ground accumulation and mediate class struggle. This essay tracks capital's legal form through the labyrinthine uptake of trucking liberalisation amidst the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). It argues that juridical contestation over NAFTA—known as the US–Mexico Trucking Dispute—both expresses and conceals class struggle between labour and capital on the one hand, and different fractions of capital on the other. The legal form of NAFTA binds workers into a condition of negative mobility or rather the non-identity of capitalist motion and social organisation for use. At the same time, the legal form is inverted into the “neutral” realm of technical regulation through NAFTA's trucking liberalisation clause. Through a critique of reification, and an empirical unfolding of wage and labour conditions evidence, the essay explicates how living labour is thrown into the social retort of circulation.