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.