Precarization, in its form and consequences, varies across workers, sectors and geographies. The five articles in this special issue examine ways that workers have struggled with and against precarious labor in different contexts, from low-wage retail and service workers in Canada and the USA, to manufacturing and construction workers in India and China. In particular, they show that the role of the state has been crucial in shaping the terrain of struggle at the workplace and in the wider community. They argue that against all odds protesting workers have repeatedly exercised some power to influence employer and government policies.

This article surveys the scholarship on the countermovement against the diffusion of capitalism and market economy in the Global South. We identify two streams of analysis in the literature. On the one hand, scholars observe contentious politics instances where the spread of capitalist production relations enables the associational capacity and bargaining power of social classes. On the other hand, there are voluminous studies on contentious politics in the Global South where groups such as peasants, shopkeepers, and urban poor resist the intensification of the market economy. We use Beverly Silver's distinction between Marx‐type and Polanyi‐type protests, which focuses on how globalization makes and unmakes social groups, to unpack the heterogeneity of the impacts and experiences of globalization. We argue that although Silver's distinction is of great analytical value, there are strong warrants for separating the effects of the market economy from capitalism in studying contentious politics against globalization. Such an analytical strategy (i) expands the scope of the distinction between Marxian and Polanyian contention to social groups other than the working class and (ii) emphasizes that the roots of these struggles lie in the interconnected diffusion of capitalism and market economy.

The state seizure of land from farmers for development projects has triggered numerous protests in India. How far can these protests be characterized as a Polanyian countermovement to reclaim rights on land, resisting the encroachment of neoliberal market forces on society? Based on field research conducted in 2013–17 in two villages in prosperous western Uttar Pradesh that were host to a series of dramatic and violent protests in 2011, this article argues that rather than reclaiming land from commodification, the farmers were using the land as a market instrument, a transactional asset, in negotiating for a better deal within a dominant market‐driven template. The author suggests that valuing land as a transactional asset to be deployed in the market symbolizes a new moral economy in this region, prompted by increasing risk in farming, improved economic standing and aspirations, and a lack of faith in the neoliberalizing state and political institutions.

Contract work in India, though legally regulated by a 1970 Act, is widespread and mostly unrecognized. With the implementation of neoliberal policies in India since the 1990s, contract work has become the norm. There are now few spaces in which contract workers can get redress through the legal system. Using oral history narratives of contract workers' participation in a labor movement, this article shows how narratives of contention differ in the rendering of agency, success, and future, between one group of contract workers employed in the 1970s in a state-owned mine and another employed in the 1990s in an industrial area owned by private and foreign capital. The evidence for the article is ethnographic, collected in Chhattisgarh region in central India. This article suggests that these workers' narratives show the transformation in practices of citizenship, resistance, and militancy in India over time. Such differences are essential in understanding phenomena like the resurgence of the Maoist movement in Chhattisgarh.

This article analyzes the protest repertoire of an Indian labor movement between 1990 and 2006. Chhattisgarh Liberation Front led a seventeen year struggle against the industrialists and state in central India for the recognition of contract workers' entitlements. During this long contentious history, the movement deployed disruptive repertoire, ranging from relatively legitimate "wild-cat strikes" (illegal stoppage of work) to extreme physical attacks, against the industrialists, and non-disruptive repertoire, ranging from disciplined participation in court-cases to mass martyr day celebrations, against the state. The mixed repertoire points at the two distinct capacities in which the movement was acting, as a radical trade union against the industrialists and a social movement in relation to the state. The finding suggests that the CMM participants perceived the state as holding genuine power, and their relation to it as citizens, and perceived the industrialists, despite their being indigenous capitalists, as adversaries.