Ned Rossiter

The logistical city is a city of peripheries. These peripheries are occupied by intermodal transport terminals, warehouses, IT infrastructure, container parks and shipping ports. Such logistical facilities do not stand isolated, of course, but are interspersed with suburbs, green belts, roads, railways, water systems and barren land. The interconnection of peripheries on a transnational scale comprises a special kind of globality, one in which the complex network of distribution systems – roads, rail, shipping, aviation – makes concrete the otherwise mysterious abstractions of capitalist operations. Yet for all this materiality, the logistical city goes largely unnoticed in the metropolitan imaginary precisely because the margins of cities tend to be overlooked and made invisible by more spectacular elements – magisterial feats of architecture, harbour views, cultural festivals and so forth. We long ago resigned ourselves to not needing to know how things work or where things come from. And we are in no rush for a reminder. The logistical city ticks along in the background as we get on with our busy daily lives.

Samita Sen

How do we conceptualise ‘transit labour’? I would suggest that we see this at the intersection of two major conceptual grids characterising the understanding of labour in the present: first, transitional forms of labour, which are inextricably related to transitions in mode of production, involving change in forms of labour arrangements, shifts in, creation or closures of labour markets, and in types and structures of labour deployment; and, second, transitory labour, which may be considered in chronological/empirical frame to denote changing and shifting patterns of employment or, in a more particularised sense, may address questions of labour mobility, both physical and structural.

Byasdeb Dasgupta

Excerpt from (2012) ‘“Disinterring Labour in Transit in Terms of Class Processes’, Policies and Practices, 43, pp23-25.

In any economy, the three essential components are production, distribution and consumption. Following the Althusserian logic of over-determination, these three components as processes are over-determined as they mutually constitute each other to determine the social plane, the very existence of which is effectuated by ever-changing contradictory and conflict-ridden economic, political, cultural and natural processes. This write-up is not meant to theorise such social planes as it is evolving today. Rather, it is an attempt to understand the very process of labour in transit as opposed to the traditional process of labour in situ in production processes and to unfold in its term the very transition of economy and society as it is taking shape against the backdrop of a globalised reality construed by the dictate of global capital. The question of transition is perhaps a never-ending process of evolution and negation and a journey which goes on and on in any social plane. And if one adheres to the logic of a class-focused Marxist approach then, this transition needs be understood in terms of transition of several heterogeneous class processes which do coexist in a social plane at a time. The question of transition if visited in terms of class transition then brings to the fore the very question of different labour processes as they exist today and as they are evolving and influencing the surplus accumulation at the dictate of global capital. Let us begin with the fundamental notion of labour process as it shapes any class process and let us then draw the line between the traditional notion of labour process and emerging notion of labour and work in transit.

(In memory of Kalyan Sanyal)

Giorgio Grappi

The news of Kalyan Sanyal's departure reached us unexpectedly. Sanyal passed away on February 18th in a clinic in his hometown, Kolkata, at the age of sixty. We therefore want to dedicate this note to the memory of a brilliant Bengali economist and intellectual with whom we had an intense dialogue. We had the opportunity to meet Sanyal several times, lastly in September 2011 in Kolkata, during the roundtable on Karl Marx's The Capital part 8, vol. 1 (chapters 26-33), “The so called primitive accumulation”. Sanyal was one of the keynote speakers, together with Ranabir Samaddar, Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson. The roundtable opened the Critical Studies Conference on Development, Logistics and Governance, the fourth of a series organized by the Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group. The conference occurred alongside the Transit Labour Kolkata Platform which brought together a group of researchers from India, Australia and Italy in the exploration of selected sites at the core of economic and governmental developments of metropolitan Kolkata.