Local Labour Control Regimes, Reproduction Zones and the Politics of Classes of Labour in South India

Contemporary questions about how to transform the conditions of classes of labour have to address the scarcity and informality of wage-labour. With most labouring households making a living across multiple locations, they also have to address the spatial diffusion of their simple reproduction (how they make a living). In response, this chapter deploys two intermediate categories, which are located between the labour process and the world historical dimensions of capitalism, and analyses the relationships between them. The first is reproduction zone, which characterises the spatial patterns of how labourers from particular places make a living, and the second is local labour control regime, which characterises class relations in particular places and analyses their differences. These concepts and their interrelations offer a perspective on the trajectories of labour’s political agency and its unevenness across space – part of a broader objective of contributing to dialectical frameworks for understanding how, where and when informal labour organises collectively in its interests.