Presentation short abstract

The presentation examines how infrastructures for food provision set up by French activist movement 'Les Soulèvements de la Terre' help both dismantling capitalist infrastructures and prefiguring a post-capitalist transformation that combines political autonomy with ecological restoration.

Presentation long abstract

The presentation focuses on insurgent food provisioning networks that corrode the infrastructures of the agro-industrial complex—farms, granaries, and canteens managed by activists. I conceptualise these initiatives as ‘alimentary infrastructures’, a definition foregrounding their life-sustaining capacity. Such infrastructures not only offer an entry point into the materialities of post-capitalist struggles but also crystallise strategic issues for grassroots movements.

From its creation, 'Les Soulèvements de la Terre' has placed ‘dismantling’ at the core of its ideological corpus and repertoire. Resistance to infrastructural harm, their leitmotiv, enables highly disruptive actions to halt development projects. The group thus recently established the ‘Uprisings Granaries’, a network of food provision schemes supplying camps, strikes, and occupations. These initiatives, based on communitarian self-organisation, shift control over subsistence away from both state and market.

Simultaneously, they embody the group’s commitment to ecological restoration and highlight creative techniques to repair the metabolic rift. Activist food systems prefigure post-capitalist economies by discarding profit, upholding solidarity, and establishing alternative relations with non-humans through food production, circulation, and consumption. These practices pursue human-centred autonomy without obstructing nature’s regenerative force. Hence, infrastructures become a strategic tool for both anti-capitalist dismantling and post-capitalist repair.

However, the nature of these infrastructures warrants critical examination. Tensions emerge as material arrangements are crafted and negotiated by activists. Farms, granaries, and canteens become sites of conflict revealing disagreements over agricultural models, diets, and relations with local territories and non-humans. Decisions on development and maintenance thus expose divergent strategies and shape alliances with activist groups and residents.