Expansão da mineração carbonífera no Rio Grande do Sul e a crise de valor do capitalismo contemporâneo: Uma análise socioeconômica do EIA/RIMA da Usina Termelétrica Nova Seival nos assentamentos da reforma agrária em Candiota e Hulha Negra

Neste trabalho, compreendemos a expansão da fronteira extrativista minerária no Rio Grande do Sul à luz do movimento atual do capital, vinculando a crise de sobreacumulação do capitalismo à decorrente intensificação da acumulação por despossessão, tendo o land grabbing como um dos seus principais ajus­tes tempo-espaço. Nosso objetivo consistiu em apontar as contradições e ameaças sobre os territórios dos agricultores assentados em Hulha Negra e Candiota-RS, considerando os sujeitos diretamente atingi­dos pelo empreendimento, bem como o impacto sobre o processo de reterritorialização como um todo na região, levando em consideração a dinâmica de mobilização e desmobilização de mão-de-obra e os impactos nas estruturas públicas dos municípios. Por meio de revisão teórica marxista e demais fontes secundárias, analisamos criticamente o EIA/RIMA (2020) apresentado pela empresa proponente. Para subsidiar a pesquisa, também foram realizadas entrevistas por ligações e reuniões virtuais com morado­res e representantes das organizações locais, levando em conta i) a Geração de expectativas e incertezas na população; ii) Mobilização e desmobilização de mão-de-obra; iii) Pressão e interferências sobre infra­estruturas e serviços públicos; iv) Dinamismo na economia; v) Aumento/diminuição de arrecadação mu­nicipal, entre outros. Considerando os impactos sobre os assentamentos, a geração de energia por meio de matéria-prima já rejeitada e os danos ambientais já encontrados na região causados pela mineração do carvão pretérita, identificamos que esse empreendimento não se vincula ao desenvolvimento susten­tável local, mas ao land grabbing tão importante à acumulação por despossessão. Palavras-chave: extrativismo; crise de valor do capital; acumulação por despossessão; Assentamentos rurais; Land grabbing. Abstract In this paper, we understand the expansion of the mining extractive industry’s frontier in Rio Grande do Sul (the southernmost state in Brazil) in light of the current movement of the capital, linking the overaccumulation crisis in capitalism to the resulting intensification of accumulation by dispossession, where land grabbing plays a major role in its time-space adjustments. Our goal is to point out the contradictions and threats on the territories of the peasants settled in two municipalities (Hulha Negra and Candiota), considering the subjects directly affected by the undertaking, as well as the impact on the re-territorialization process as a whole in the region, taking into consideration the dynamics of mobilizing and demobilizing labor force and the impacts in the public structures of the municipalities. Through a Marxist Theoretical review and secondary sources, we critically analyze the EIA/RIMA (2020) presented by the proposing company. To support the research, interviews were also conducted through calls and virtual meetings with residents and representatives of local organizations, taking into account i) the generation of expectations and uncertainties in the population; ii) Mobilization and demobilization of labor; iii) Pressure and interference on infrastructure and public services; iv) Dynamism in the economy; v) Increase/decrease in municipal collection; between others. Considering the impacts on the settlements, the generation of energy through raw material that has already been rejected and the environmental damage already found in the region caused by past coal mining, we identified that this undertaking is not linked to local sustainable development, but to land grabbing that is so important to the accumulation by dispossession. Keywords: extractivism; capital value crisis; accumulation by dispossession; rural settlements; land grabbing. L'espansione delle miniere di carbone minerale nel Rio Grande do Sul e la crisi del capitalismo contemporaneo: Un’analisi socioeconomica dello EIA/RIMA della centrale termoelettrica Nova Seival negli insediamenti di riforma agraria in Candiota e Hulha Negra Astratto In questo articolo analisiamo l'espansione della frontiera estrattiva mineraria nel Rio Grande do Sul alla luce dell’attuale movimento di capitale, congiungendo la crisi di sovraaccumulazione del capitalismo alla conseguente intensificazione dell'accumulazione per espropriazione, avendo il fenomeno land grabbing come uno dei suoi principali aggiustamenti spazio-temporali. Il nostro obiettivo era di evidenziare le contraddizioni e le minacce sui territori degli agricoltori insediati nei lotti in Hulha Negra e Candiota-RS, considerando i soggetti direttamente impattati dall'impresa, nonché l'impatto sull’intero processo di ri-territorializzazione nella regione, portando a considerare le dinamiche di coinvolgimento e smobilitazione del lavoro e gli impatti sulle strutture pubbliche nei comuni. Con una rassegna teorica marxista e altri dati di campo, analizziamo criticamente lo EIA/RIMA (2020) presentata dall’impresa proponente. A supporto della ricerca sono state realizzate interviste tramite call e incontri virtuali con residenti e rappresentanti delle organizzazioni locali, tenendo conto i) della generazione di aspettative e incertezze nella popolazione; ii) Surgimento e smobilitazione del lavoro; iii) pressioni e interferenze su infrastrutture e servizi pubblici; iv) Dinamicità nell'economia; v) Aumento/diminuzione della riccetta comunale; tra altri. Considerando gli impatti nei lotti di riforma agraria, la generazione di energia attraverso materie prime già scartate e i danni ambientali già riscontrati nella regione causati dalle attività estrattive del carbone fossile passate, abbiamo identificato che questo progetto non è coerente allo sviluppo sostenibile locale, ma al land grabbing che è il fenoeno importante per l’accumulazione per espropriazione. Parole-chiave: estrattivismo; crisi del valore del capitale; accumulazione per espropriazione; lotti agricoli; land grabbing.

Land grabbing and resistance of indigenous landowners in Ibadan, Nigeria

The focus of existing studies on land grabbing in Nigeria has been on acquisition by foreign investors for their socio-economic gain, usually supported by the national government. However, narratives on land grabbing by government through the Land Use Decree and the consequent resistance deployed by the indigenous landowners are scarce. The Accumulation by Dispossession theory and an exploratory design were combined with qualitative methods to gather data from 41 participants through a combination of key informant and in-depth interviews and focus groups in Ajoda New Town. Data were ethnographically and content analysed and findings revealed that locals resisted government activities consequent upon their exclusion from compensatory and resettlement activities promised by the government. Displacement from patrimonial inheritance led to resistance, though government claimed it discharged its financial and moral responsibilities. Resistance took the form of violent, economic and civil protests.

Marxism and the logics of dis/integration

Marxism is a large and diverse body of thought that has weathered many storms over the last 150 years. While its explanatory and political relevance to today's world is enormous, Marxism lacks mass appeal and largely resides in universities (notably, the social sciences and humanities). While this is, in one sense, a sign of defeat, in another sense it's been productive insofar as it's offered exponents space and time to make sense of capitalism's ever-changing configurations. This article homes-in on classical Marxism and its enduring importance as a tool of analysis and political thinking. It focuses on the author's attempts to understand how the biophysical world is entrained in the dynamics of capital accumulation, especially during the period of neoliberal political economy that began around 35 years ago. Marxist geographers continue to offer important insights into capitalism in a more-than-capitalist world that is, nonetheless, utterly dominated by the contradictory logics of growth, economic competition, endless technological innovation, uneven development, accumulation by dispossession and crisis. For me, classical Marxism's attention to capitalism as an expansive ‘totality’ is critical, obliging us to attend to how different places, people and political projects are brought into a single, if exceedingly complex, universe. The article reflects on how the embrace of classical Marxism necessarily folds the professional into the personal, though in ways that inevitably highlight some of the contradictions that Marx and Engels identified. It's to be hoped that a new and talented generation of Marxist geographers will continue the work initiated 50 years ago by David Harvey and others. The article suggests that a key research frontier for Marxist geography is normative: what sorts of political visions and proposals will gain traction in a variegated yet tightly connected world where capitalism is so manifestly dangerous for people and planet?

Labour power, materiality and protests in Ghana’s petroleum and gold mines

We examine the role of resource materiality in extractive labour protests in Ghana. Focusing on petroleum and gold mining, we centre contestations as part of the resources’ socio-natural constituents. Research data was obtained from social conflict databases, newspapers and field interviews. The analysis focused on themes and discourses on protest emergence, mobilisation, negotiation and impacts. Findings show how petroleum labour protesters use passivity and chokepoints to impede gas supply to households. Ghana petroleum workers attempt to garner structural power through workplace power, albeit unsuccessfully. Conversely, gold mineworkers protest by actively reappropriating machinery and extraction spaces. They centre protests in mining towns to emphasise their work as lifeblood. The ‘landedness’ of gold and the introduction of surface mining reshaped such protest tactics. Thus, materiality can help excavate the relational and comparative logic, tactics and potentialities of labour power in resource extracting countries. We suggest extractive labour to forge stronger cross-class coalitions to align workplace exploitation with broader issues of accumulation by dispossession.

Capitalist crisis and uneven development applied in Southern Africa

Some of the most decisive moments in the neoliberal era were implanted first as major changes to the United States and world financial system during the early 1980s. As an inside observer at the Federal Reserve briefly during the time, learning a bourgeois mode of economic theory and description—especially applied to the global recession, financial failures, and worsening inequality of that era—was unsatisfying. The ideological and applied power configuration was shifting from Keynesianism to Monetarism and with it came irresponsible banking deregulation. Seeing this from the Fed, and beginning to grasp the formidable implications for low-income people of the Global South—from redlined West Philadelphia to debt-riddled Southern Africa—meant that instead of social-democratic nostalgia, I sought an antidote in Marxist theory and anti-apartheid solidarity activism. With the help of Johns Hopkins University geographers, the financial frothiness that was washing over sites I was learning about in detail, suddenly became explicable in terms of underlying capitalist crisis tendencies. As I saw how they applied to uneven development, race, gender, ecological, and other super-exploitative relations in Zimbabwe and South Africa, especially using Rosa Luxemburg’s capitalist/non-capitalist framing in her theory of imperialism, not only analysis but praxis became all the more urgent. Those overaccumulation tendencies, their spatial and temporal displacement, and accumulation by dispossession have been central categories for analysis and strategy ever since.

Extended Urbanization through Capital Centralization: Contract Farming in Palm Oil-Based Agroindustrialization

The discussion on extended urbanization considers accumulation by dispossession as a key apparatus for instilling urban logic into predominantly rural areas. This paper contends that extended urbanization can also be produced without physical dispossession of community land. This is illustrated by the case study of Sei Mangkei, an emerging palm oil agroindustrial district in North Sumatra, Indonesia. Capitalist industries prefer monetization through contract farming rather than privatization as an instrument to capture the productivity of palm oil smallholder land. The people who serve as smallholders in the palm oil industry are not victims of land appropriation. Moreover, this situation was also triggered by an opportunity for maximizing the socio-economic welfare of smallholders. However, the limited options to access other economic activities when the commodity crisis occurred was a consequence that smallholders were not aware of in the past. Thus, we assert that extended urbanization was (re)produced through the articulation of socio-economic and cultural practices of smallholders on a local-scale with regard to the dynamics of the broader process of global industrialization.

Dispossession as depotentiation

This paper proposes a theory of urban dispossession as depotentiation. ‘Depotentiation’, as I employ the term, indicates the diminishment of imminent capacities, affects and potentialities. I propose this formulation to both complement and critique Harvey’s dominant notion of accumulation by dispossession as the commodification of the urban commons and to contribute to conceptual developments on the stratified and affective dimensions of eviction. The evictions in my study operate in liminal urban spaces where there are no ‘commons’, but rather incomplete and fragile processes of ‘commoning’ and high levels of mobility and precarity. This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2011 and 2019 in inner-city Johannesburg in unlawful and other informal occupations, frequently termed ‘bad buildings’, ‘hijacked buildings’ or ‘dark buildings’ and other low-income accommodation. These are sites of extreme precarity and liminality, endurance and potentiality, where tens of thousands of inner-city residents, South African and foreign-national, live without essential services and subject to the constant threat of eviction or deportation. Dispossession of their residents operates not only through the commodification of an urban commons but also through the diminishment of urban potentiality.