Over the past several decades, capitalism has broken up the production process into individual steps carried out in separate work sites scattered across the globe. As a result, logistics, the systems that organize the physical movement of goods through space and time, has become more central to global capitalism than ever, and that gives workers in the logistics sector — including ports, rail, trucking, and other industries — tremendous potential leverage over the capitalist class. Any attempt to think strategically about strengthening working-class power must therefore grapple with the sector and how it works.

Fabian Vugrin and Alexander Brentler from the German edition of Jacobin spoke with Katy Fox-Hodess, a sociologist and cofounder of the International Labour and Logistics Research Network, to discuss the possibilities.