Presentation short abstract

The presentation explores how a REDD+ project in Colombia reshapes value relations and rural class dynamics. It brings together three bodies of Marxian literature to propose a framework of rural class conflict around socioecological reproduction.

Presentation long abstract

Carbon credit schemes integrate forests and rural livelihoods into global value circuits redefining socioecological relations at multiple scales. Although class-based understandings of these processes are emerging, we still lack a theory of rural class conflict attuned to them. This presentation attempts to advance this project through an examination of how a REDD+ project in Colombia’s Alto Magdalena reshape forest-based value relations, class structures, and dynamics of class conflict. To do so, it connects three bodies of Marxian literature: debates on value-nature relationships, socioecological reproduction, and rural class conflict. The main argument is that REDD+ projects reproduce and recast unequal class relations rooted in geographically specific trajectories of agrarian change, enabling new conflicts around socioecological reproduction. Differences around landownership, source of livelihood, and the integration of paid/unpaid forest-care work by the project, shape differential capacities to contest the terms in which socioecological reproduction take place. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the presentation traces three key movements in the redefinition of value-nature relations in the REDD+ Huila Project: the devaluation of forest socio-environmental reproduction work; the resignification of uneven landownership, and the reorganization of forest-based agrarian relations. This supports the elaboration of a framework for theorizing about the dynamics of rural class conflict that REDD+ is steering. By tracing the transformations in value-nature relations produced by REDD+ projects, this analysis contributes to debates on the emergence of new labor regimes based on socioecological reproduction in green capitalism, as well as to those around its distinct forms of labor politics and class struggle.