This article investigates the logistics of contemporary global capitalism from two primary vantage points: the grounded perspective of recent struggles in the logistics sector of northern Italy and a more general interpretation of contemporary spatial transformations. Starting with a few genealogical and theoretical vignettes, we argue that logistics plays a decisive role in contemporary processes of both the establishment of new and mobile forms of territoriality and the production of subjectivity. We hypothesize that these two productive aspects of logistics must be understood as crisscrossed and mutually interacting. The article further takes up the geographical question of scale and attempts to advance the development of analytical tools capable of grasping at once global flows and local peculiarities. With a view to northern Italy and beyond, we conclude by proposing a few conceptualizations: the terraqueous territory; the Po Valley as a form of regionalization; the cooperative system as a specific form of labor exploitation; and the new spaces of antagonistic subjectivation processes.

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This article introduces this special issue of Work Organisation, Labour and Globalisation on logistics. First of all, it furnishes a brief genealogy of logistics in the modern era. Then, it frames some of the main issues in current critical debates on logistics. Finally, it presents the contents of the special issue in detail, connecting them with more general attempts to develop a ‘logistical gaze’ as a methodological perspective on the different and multiple transformations of contemporary capitalism.

Introducing this issue, this paper reflects on the role of peer-reviewed research in documenting and analysing the restructuring of labour under rapidly changing global conditions. It summarises the contents of the issue, placing it in the context not only of the 2020-2021 global COVID-19 pandemic, but also in relation to past theoretical debates in the pages of this journal about the dynamics of platform capitalism.

The article tackles the question of platform capitalism within the framework of a general understanding of the specificity of modern and contemporary capitalism. Digital platforms, which are emerging among the winners from the current pandemic crisis, facilitate processes of capital accumulation, blur the boundaries between politics and economics, and embody a new type of firm. An emphasis is placed on the infrastructural roles performed by platforms, as well as on their ability to reshape existing spaces and produce new ones. In the last section, the authors describe emerging figures of “algorithmic subjectivities” and contend that an effective critique of platform capitalism, whose operations are predicated upon those figures, should take their movements and struggles as its point of departure.