ILPC 2026

 India's 'classes of labour' mostly reproduce themselves through precarious, informal labour in multiple locations. This paper focuses on labourers who work across the construction and agriculture sectors, and have relatively little structural and associational power. They are fragmented spatially, through the forms and terms of their employment, by gender and caste relations, and due to their uneven relations with the state. The paper uses the term 'local labour control regimes' (Jonas 1996) to explain how the class relations that they experience are shaped by these patterns of accumulation and work, forms of social difference, and state mediation. It does so in order to improve understanding of how sustained gains in their material and political conditions might be achieved. Although unorganised, and despite their political strength being undermined by the broader neoliberal regime, informal Indian workers show their agency in a variety of ways. Such counter-trends, in so far as they exist, take new spatial and temporal forms as a mobile, fragmented and unprotected workforce responds to the strictures of accumulation as best it can. Understanding how it does so requires mapping the interplay of 'agency' and patterns of control over labour across many scales - from the consciousness of the individual worker to the world-historical, and from actual to latent forms of action.