Presentation short abstract

This presentation explores the class nature of capitalism’s socio-metabolic crisis articulated in agrarian frontiers of extraction. It shows how struggles over labour, nature and territories reshape (post)agrarian class formations, repositioning agrarian subjects as key agents of ecosocialism.

Presentation long abstract

The political question of ecosocialist transformation rests on a recognition of the immanent socio-ecological contradiction of the capitalist world economy, which is increasingly manifesting as a social and ecological crisis of reproduction at planetary scale. The emerging class character of this contradiction and the socio-environmental struggles that articulate it have often been underrecognized, despite political ecology’s expansive focus on environmental justice movements.

This presentation addresses how this contradiction unfolds in the agrarian frontiers of expanding and deepening extractive capital accumulation, reproducing rural-agrarian and urban-post-agrarian subjectivites. The concrete conflicts between agrarian and post-agrarian communities, on one hand, and capital, on the other, manifests across at multiple interconnected nexuses that crosscut labour, land/nature, and territorial dimensions. These conflictual dynamics, in turn, reconfigure the former as a central anti-systemic class force vis-à-vis the latter.

Based on a historically grounded comparison of multiple empirical examples of (post)agrarian movements, I argue for the vital pertinence of global agrarian transformations and the class (re)formations they generate across relational rural and urban socio-spatial contexts for ecosocialist politics. In turn, this discussion will contribute to the understanding of the changing forms of agrarian subjectivities in making agrarian subjects a key world-historical agent of building an ecosocialist future.