Analytical Categories of Territorial Accumulation. Working Paper Series N° 002

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No 873082. Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Research and Innovation Staff Exchange (RISE) Call: H2020-MSCA-RISE-2019 Grant Agreement nº 873082 CONTESTED_TERRITORY From Contested Territories to alternatives of development: Learning from Latin America Deliverable 3.1: Working Paper 1 Analytical Categories of Territorial Accumulation CONTESTED_TERRITORY – D3.1: Working Paper 1 – Territorial Accumulation 1 Deliverable 3.1: Working Paper 1 Analytical Categories of Territorial Accumulation TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. DELIVERABLE FACTSHEET 2 2. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 3 3. CATEGORISING TERRITORIAL ACCUMULATION IN THE CRISIS OF THE WORLD-ECOLOGY 4 3.1 Introduction 4 3.2 State-of-the-art and background 5 3.3 Epistemological critique of modernist thought 10 3.4 Historical and geographical analysis of territorial accumulation 14 3.5 Case studies 19 4. BIBLIOGRAPHY 28 CONTESTED_TERRITORY – D3.1: Working Paper 1 – Territorial Accumulation 2 1. DELIVERABLE FACTSHEET Work Package WP3 Documenting and visualising Contested Territories Deliverable D3.1: Working Paper 1 – Analytical Categories of Territorial Accumulation Due Date M28: 30 June 2022 Submission Date M29: 07 July 2022 Dissemination Level [x] PU – Public Deliverable Lead La Hidra Author(s) Mauro Castro, Isidro López, Karen Mejía Forero, Alejandro ArmasDíaz, Natalia Lerena Rongvaux, Rita Silva, Carlotta Monini, Manuel Bayón Point of Contact [email protected] Status [x] Final [x] Approved internally Abstract (for public dissemination only) Territorial Accumulation is explored preliminarily as a situated conceptual tool that can grasp the current phase of the long secular capitalist crisis in all its multidimensional complexities. Rooted in Marxist intellectual tradition, feminism and decolonial theory, we develop a multi-disciplinary approach to the concept of Territorial Accumulation that defines its object from cultural, epistemological, historical, geographical, economical, anthropological and social perspectives. The WP deconstructs the notions of centre and periphery, aiming at searching for transformative dynamics that go beyond the north and south dividing line. The operational dimension of the concept of territorial accumulation is set forward in two case studies from the Canary Islands and the Ecuadorian Amazon, which demonstrate exemplarily the application of the concept for further research activities in the project. Keywords Territorial Accumulation, Extractivism, World-Ecology, Post-Colonialism, Political Ecology, Latin America, Southern Europe CONTESTED_TERRITORY – D3.1: Working Paper 1 – Territorial Accumulation 3 2. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Territorial Accumulation is explored preliminarily as a situated conceptual tool that can grasp the current phase of the long secular capitalist crisis in all its multidimensional complexities. Rooted in Marxist intellectual tradition, feminism and decolonial theory, we develop a multidisciplinary approach to the concept of Territorial Accumulation that defines its object from cultural, epistemological, historical, geographical, economical, anthropological and social perspectives. The WP deconstructs the notions of centre and periphery, aiming at searching for transformative dynamics that go beyond the north and south dividing line. The operational dimension of the concept of territorial accumulation is set forward in two case studies from the Canary Islands and the Ecuadorian Amazon, which demonstrate exemplarily the application of the concept for further research activities in the project. CONTESTED_TERRITORY – D3.1: Working Paper 1 – Territorial Accumulation 4 3. CATEGORISING TERRITORIAL ACCUMULATION IN THE CRISIS OF THE WORLD-ECOLOGY . 3.1 Introduction In this paper we propose to make a first approach to the theoretical proposal that sustains the project CONTESTED_TERRITORY: Territorial Accumulation. This work is the product of two different moments of reflection within the network: on the one hand, a first shared document and a series of independent contributions, in which the main cores of theoretical tension in the definition of territorial accumulation were presented internally. Different nodes or members of the Network participated in this instance. Some of these contributions were presented in the Contested Territories webinar on 24 and 25 September 2021. A second moment of reflection took place in Spring 2022 at the University of Leipzig and TORERO Film, within the framework of simultaneous research stays undertaken by international researchers belonging to different partner institutions. Thus, the reflections put forward in this paper are the result of discussions carried out by researchers from very different backgrounds (Sociology, Political Economy, Philosophy and Geography) focusing on contemporary processes of capitalist accumulation and its ecological dimension. Within this framework, the contributions of the previous stage were discussed and, based on these, a reading group with new contributions was organised. Based on the team's trajectories, the work was based on a series of hypotheses, namely: a) the capitalist accumulation model and its ontological and epistemological foundations are in crisis, and new categories are needed to enable us to think beyond. b) these categories need to be decentred from Western modernity, and therefore integrate alternative cosmovisions and epistemologies. -StuctureThe paper is organised along three dimensions of analysis: theoretical, epistemological and historical-geographical. In this way, the first section reviews the main categories that have been used to explain the geographies of capital accumulation, organised into three dimensions: accumulation by appropriation of unpaid labour; accumulation by dispossession as an internal and external element of the capitalist system; and accumulation in the fabric of life. In a second section, a discussion with the thought of modernity is raised, reviewing to what extent many of the categories used are not capable of apprehending the current organisation of the web of life in the times named 'Capitalocene'. We then postulate some epistemological approaches that might contribute to this goal. In the following section, we analyse the historical and geographical longue duree processes in which territorial accumulation finds its characteristics as a situated and tactical concept both in terms of time and space. We argue that territorial accumulation in its current form is inextricably linked to a general crisis of capitalism in its wider sense (cultural, political and economic), that we have termed the world-ecology crisis. Finally, the last section aims to show, through two case studies carried out in the framework of Contested Territories, how Territorial Accumulation is a category that allows us to understand the current geographies of capital accumulation. The reflections expressed in this paper are work in progress and should therefore be understood as provisional and incomplete. We hope that they will inspire debates and provoke new exchanges, bringing us closer to a formulation of Territorial Accumulation that is capable of serving as a lens for the analysis of the current dynamics of accumulation, dispossession and resistance in our territories. CONTESTED_TERRITORY – D3.1: Working Paper 1 – Territorial Accumulation 5 3.2. State-of-the-art and background The aim of this section is to review the concept of accumulation by analysing the deployment and conceptual content of terms key to understand the renewed dynamics of dispossession, devastation, degradation and reorganisation of life. This journey will allow us to delimit the concept of Territorial Accumulation as a new synthetic framework to address the "geography of capital accumulation" from the intersection of ecological, postcolonial, feminist and Marxist thought. That is, linking Marxist-feminist and ecological critiques of capitalism and reflecting on capitalism's current anthropocentric, patriarchal and colonial logics of domination of nature. Territorial Accumulation, then, should be understood as a synthesis of different conceptualisations that have sought to explain the way in which capital advances over people, territories and non-commodified natures, addressing a central element of capitalism and its current worldecology: the role of accumulation by appropriation of immense amounts of unpaid labour/energy (human and non-human) outside the classical circuits of capitalist production. In turn, the approach of Territorial Accumulation aims to contribute to a debate that has been open for a long time, but is still particularly relevant today: despite its multiple crises, how does capitalism manage to survive? The answer from critical geography tells us that capitalism survives through the production of space/territory (see pioneering critical geography works such as those of Lefebvre, Harvey, Castells or Soja among others). This project of broadening the concept of accumulation is methodologically and politically connected to a long history of struggles and theoretical elaborations that expanded the very concept of exploitation and that have tried to offer a consistent explanation of the spatial (and temporal) dynamics of capitalism. Among these categories, some have made significant contributions. Through the idea of original accumulation, Marx (1867) demonstrated that the origin of capitalism is founded on the violent appropriation of natural resources and the extermination and advancement of non-capitalist forms of production. According to this idea, the transition from a feudal economy to a capitalist-based economy was driven by a violent process that expelled the peasant classes from communal lands, which were their main source of survival. Enclosures were the set of plundering practices, accompanied by parliamentary laws, which separated the peasant classes from their means of production. Marx thus dismantled the supposedly natural and harmonious transition advocated by liberal economists, who claimed that the origin of capital came from the savings of the most far-sighted workers. In his concept of primitive accumulation, Marx also raises the importance of the appropriation of territory for the accumulation of capital, pointing out how the appropriation of communal lands is consubstantial to the origins of capitalism. Enclosures were the set of plundering practices, accompanied by acts of parliament, that separated the peasant classes from their means of production. Marx thus dismantled the supposed natural and harmonious transition advocated by liberal economists, who claimed that the origin of capital came from the savings of the most far-sighted workers. In his concept of primitive accumulation, Marx also raises the importance of the appropriation of territory for the accumulation of capital, pointing out how the appropriation of communal land is consubstantial with the origins of capitalism. Later, Luxemburg (1913) added to primitive accumulation the quality of a permanent process, not a unique episode in the history of capitalism. “Primitive” accumulation did not disappear with the advent of industrial capitalism, but re-emerged in the last decades of the 19th century with the distribution of the international map among the European capitalist powers. According to the author, capitalism continually needs this type of land appropriation process, on the periphery of the system itself, in order to be able to reproduce itself. Capitalism perpetually needs an "outside" in order to obtain new sites of exploitation, production and consumption. This is the role historically played by colonial processes. CONTESTED_TERRITORY – D3.1: Working Paper 1 – Territorial Accumulation 6 In recent decades, these concepts, unavoidable to explain how capital expands beyond capitalist wage relations, have been revisited in the light of the current 'neoliberal' phase of capitalist development and the increasing penetration of capital into new spaces, resources and social relations. Without wishing to be exhaustive, three sets of contributions are presented below that have undoubtedly made Marx and Luxemburg's original ideas more complex and up to date: First, formulations from feminist and gender studies, black studies and indigenist studies, which revisit the problem of accumulation beyond the law of labour-value, i.e. unpaid labour; Second, geographical and territorial approaches, which emphasise accumulation by dispossession not only outside, but also within fully capitalist societies, and throughout the history of capitalism's development. Finally, a third group, which takes up both contributions and proposes to understand capitalism as a way of organising nature, or capitalism in the web of life. 3.2.1 Accumulation by appropriation of unpaid labour (the re/production of life) On the one hand, feminist and gender studies (Mies 1986; Federici, 2010) took up the discussions on original accumulation to understand the links between colonisation, expressed in the international division of labour, and the oppression of women, expressed in the sexual division of labour. That is, the re-/production of life, i.e. subsistence production, carried out mainly in an unpaid form by women, slaves, peasants and other colonised subjects "constitutes the perennial basis on which "capitalist productive labour" can be built and exploited" (Mies 1981; 48). Since it is not compensated by a wage, its capitalist appropriation (or "super-exploitation", as she put it) can only be achieved through violence or coercive institutions. Along these lines, Federici (2010) points out that during seventeenth-century Europe the female sex had become "an instrument (...) for the expansion of the labour force, treated as a natural breeding machine that functioned according to external rhythms" (Federici, 2009: 49). (Federici, 2009: 49). This new sexual division of labour, she argues, has redefined proletarian women as a natural resource, a kind of commons open to appropriation in the name of productivity. Federici places at the centre of the analysis of original accumulation the witch-hunts: the persecution and burning of women who did not accept their subservient role towards men. An event that was as important for the foundational development of capitalism as the expropriation of the lands of the European peasantry and the colonisation of other territories. Another critical revision of the theoretical body on the process of accumulation comes from National liberation struggles in the 60's and 70's that would signal the end of colonialism as it was practised by the british and french empires were the political and cultural setting in which a new reading of the accumulation process as an always ongoing process of plundering, subjugation and outright theft by colonisation. The subaltern were, for the first time in the course of historical capitalism, putting forward their own views on the power of capital over communities and ecosystems. Afro Caribbean writers such as Frantz Fanon, Aimee Cesaire or C. L. R. James explored the new black political consciousness as an insurgent voice against any sort of white supremacist reading of history. And of course, this also applied to the eurocentric readings on the accumulation process carried out by marxists until that moment. Two classic works stand out as pioneers of the analysis of the process of accumulation from the point of view of black marxist consciousness: Capitalism and Slavery (1994), first published by Eric Williams in 1962, is recognized as pioneering work in this last sense. With an interpretative apparatus coming from quantitative economical historiography, Williams made the case for the dependance of european capitalist development on unpaid slave work. The atlantic triangular trade was the spatial fix that allowed colonial powers to stablish a commodity frontier based on slave trade and slave work. This was the first version of a thesis that has run since in which the industrial development of Europe could never have taken place without the brutal uprooting and exploitation of slave CONTESTED_TERRITORY – D3.1: Working Paper 1 – Territorial Accumulation 7 workforce. Moreover, Williams pointed towards abolitionism as a phenomenon related to the exhaustion of the land and labour conditions in the plantation economy. A case of exhaustion of the commodity frontier. The guayanese author Walter Rodney went further down the argument than Eric Williams in How Europe underdeveloped Africa (1972), stating that colonialism is the permanent source of the “underdevelopment” of Africa. Not only the colonial powers found extra profits in the era of triangular atlantic slave trade, but have kept doing so well after the abolition of slavery. Rodney’s classical argument points at the total lack of investment by European capitals in Africa in any sort of health or education systems that could somehow make the conditions of exploitation less brutal, as it has happened in Europe. On the whole, Rodney strongly sustained that colonising powers benefited much more from African wealth than the other way around. 3.2.2 Accumulation by dispossession as an internal and external element of the market system On the other hand, from the perspective of territorial studies and critical geographies, Harvey (2004) has reviewed Marx's and Luxemburg's idea of original accumulation. He agrees with Luxemburg that Marx relegates accumulation based on predation, fraud and violence to an "originary stage" that is no longer considered relevant, while he criticises Luxemburg for seeing this stage as something "external" to the capitalist system. Thus, one of Harvey's main contributions is to consider the way in which, with a consolidated capitalism, processes of accumulation by dispossession of livelihoods of broad layers of the population occur within capitalism, as a solution to the crisis of overaccumulation and in the search for new sources of profit. Thus, territorial accumulation operates simultaneously outside and inside the market system. This is clearly seen in countries of the periphery, through the advance and depredation of natural resources and the creation of intellectual property rights over them, creating a "new wave of enclosure of the commons", but also in many central countries through fraud and financial speculation, for example through the credit system. With his analytical proposal of the term spatial fix, Harvey (2004; 2018) takes up from Luxembourg the insatiable drive of capitalism to solve, always temporarily, its inherent crisis tendencies through its geographical expansion. He offers numerous examples of the relationship between crisis and spatio-temporal displacement. In moments of systemic crisis, Harvey argues, capital seeks to displace its contradictions through a long process of destruction, production and/or reconstruction of space. Thus, urbanisation has been used to circumvent processes of devaluation, absorb surplus and extend the circuit of accumulation over territory. This is what Harvey calls the secondary circuit of accumulation. And, in this process of geographical expansion, capital creates a geography suited to its needs; a physical landscape in its own image, only in order to destroy it once its capitalist valorisation is exhausted. Each new cycle of accumulation entails processes of territorial expansion, infrastructure and communication networks, and practices of plundering natural resources. Another potentially interesting point to understand historical processes of territorial accumulation is the literature on "commodity frontiers" (Martinez-Alier,2018; Barbier, Edward B, 2014; Beckert, Sven, 2014). A powerful lens through which to analyse capitalism's history, global commodity production, rural societies and the historical geography of capital. And a concept that resonates strongly with Harvey's idea of spatial solution and has been used to refer to the spaces of capitalist expansion, the frontier as capitalism's "constitutive exterior". According to Fraser, capital would depend 'for its very existence on non-commodified zones': what she calls 'boundary clashes' thus emerge. (Fraser, 2014:7). Resources are thus made available for commodification through processes of dispossession involving enclosures, land grabbing and other forms of primitive accumulation or accumulation by dispossession. Plains, valleys, forests, marine spaces and mountains have been cultivated, logged, fished and extracted to provide raw materials and food for a rapidly urbanising and CONTESTED_TERRITORY – D3.1: Working Paper 1 – Territorial Accumulation 8 industrialising world economy, extractive processes that have been crucial drivers of capitalist expansion. A process that is vividly demonstrated in the historical and current manifestations of colonial and extractivist power. The "Americas" are rightly considered the ground zero of capitalist accumulation in the early modern period, opening up the never-ending conquest of the Earth: the "Great Frontier" (Webb 1964). Today, new frontiers of commodities, such as fracking, water, agrobiotechnology and biopharmaceuticals, are emerging, constituted in the neoliberal drive to appropriate and financialise nature. Contemporary political ecology perfectly captures this process of spatial extension and internalisation through the metaphor of 'grabbing' (see, for example, Borras Jr, Saturnino M., et al. 2011; Giraldo, 2015; Rasmussen and Lund, 2018). Or we can also approach from this lens the role of tourism, an industry that (as we will discuss in more detail later in the case study) has long been inscribed in the processes of creating new mercantile frontiers, through the revaluation of nature and culture (from beaches or forests to cultural practices or ethnic identities) as "free gifts'' (Moore, 2020) that become legible commodities to be further exploited for capital accumulation, giving way to new socio-spatial transformations. J. W Moore's central question is whether today's frontiers are of sufficiently large mass that they can provide investment outlets for the now massively over-accumulated capital, and revive accumulation. Moore suggests that the neoliberal regime that emerged in the late 1970s is now mired in an epochal crisis, faced with the disappearance or exhaustion of new frontiers and the diminishing returns of the financialisation of nature. Moore highlights this constant movement of frontier-exhaustion. As capital expands and appropriates cheaply without paying the costs of its reproduction, it tends to exhaust its own socio-ecological conditions. When the frontiers of commodities in each successive ecological regime are exhausted and are no longer capable of producing surplus, then the conditions of accumulation falter, until new ecological revolutions arise. According to Moore, the "end of cheap nature" is an insurmountable limit to capital accumulation, which leads him to interpret the current crisis as terminal. As we will explore in more detail in the historical section, the contemporary ecological crisis should be addressed in this same category. 3.2.3 Capital accumulation in the web of life A final group of works seeks to understand capital accumulation by integrating the previous dimensions: thus, they seek to go beyond the sphere of production and understand the appropriation of unpaid labour, ancestral knowledge and natural commons, as well as the associated dynamics of violence and dispossession, as an intrinsic part of the accumulation process. Among these, a central category for thinking about the dynamics of territorial accumulation, with a focus on the capitalist periphery, is that of extractivisms (Gudynas, 2015; 2017), or neoextractivisms (Svampa, 2019; Gago and Mezzadra, 2015). Emerging in Latin America in processes of resistance "from below", the category of neo-extractivism refers to a development model based on the overexploitation of increasingly scarce, largely non-renewable, natural resources, as well as the expansion of the frontiers of exploitation into territories previously considered unproductive from the point of view of capital. Drawing on feminist and decolonial perspectives, neo-extractivism emerges as a "privileged window" (Svampa, 2019) to look at the contemporary crisis from a complex perspective, which includes the dimension of the appropriation of territories-bodies, ancestral knowledge and common goods. Furthermore, neo-extractivism as a category has been extended to urban studies through the notion of urban extractivism (Gago and Mezzadra, 2015), to analyse forms of appropriation and dispossession that occur in cities through real estate development and various forms of social dispossession of urban commons, giving rise to all kinds of displacements (Janoschka, 2016). The analysis of the dynamics of the extractivism of the commons and the phenomena of neoliberal cities allows us to observe that the logics, practices and consequences of activities such as mega-mining, the advance of the agricultural frontier and fracking are related to those CONTESTED_TERRITORY – D3.1: Working Paper 1 – Territorial Accumulation 15 3.4.1 Crisis of the capitalist world ecology The current phase of capitalism has been reached as a historical result of the accumulation of crises that capitalism has partially faced throughout its development and whose effects have been shifting in space and time, only to be encountered on a higher scale in the future. The current world ecology crisis can be understood as the boiling point of all those contradictions that have been displaced during the last fifty years of historical capitalism. Following this approach, and without being in any way exhaustive, we find at least three nested processes, of increasing scope, that define the current world ecology phase. ● Crisis of the industrial world ecology, in the same essential terms in which it manifested itself throughout the 1970s: a crisis of permanent overproduction that prevents the production of new surplus value on the scale required to relaunch the process of accumulation. ● Crisis also of the Financial Fix that was the main milestone on which industrial capitalism built the answer to the crisis of industrial capitalism of the seventies. The rise of finance took the shape of territorial and social restructuring, according to the criteria of financial markets and under the rule of capital in its money form. The dramatic rise of interest rates by the Federal Reserve of the USA in 1979 is usually understood as a founding moment of the new financial regime. ● The third process would be the Crisis of the ecology of capital itself. Incipient as it still is at this stage, the crisis of the ecology of capital is the sum of the previous unresolved crises. In each episode of crisis, capital has been colonising new spheres in order to incorporate them into the capitalist discipline. 3.4.2 Crisis of industrial society Since the 1980s, the diversion of productive investment towards finance has been gaining weight. Investment fearful of generating unprofitable fixed capital structures, has circulated en masse towards banks, investment funds and financial vehicles of all kinds avoiding heading towards industrial cycles where cost-cutting, labour saving, competition has its main stronghold (Brenner, 2006). This secularisation of the problems of profitability of capitalism has brought with it levels of competition between companies, first, and between nation states, later, that did not exist before 1973, when economic dynamics were politically circumscribed within the limits of the nation state marked by order of Bretton Woods. The main consequence of this competition for profit in the non-financial sectors of the economy, mainly in manufacturing, has resulted in unrealized investments, that is, investments that do not find demand in the market, have been increasingly frequent. The productive surplus generated by each wave of growth in labour productivity was the economic figure on which the world ecology of industrial society was based. Be it understood in welfarist terms as the result of an original pact between capital and labour in the capitalist centre or in the global south, in developmentalist terms, as a process of industrialization by import substitution (Link, 2020). These industrial and manufacturing processes that were the milestone of the fordist world ecology were matched by an ideology of mass consumption, and the rise of the figure of the global consumer as the main source of integration into the global political order (Aglietta, 1976; Boyer & Durand,1997). The manufacturing industry with high technological and productive capacity was the pillar of this model of industrial society, its gradual disappearance from the central countries first, and from the emerging countries later, has lasted for more than four decades and it can be said that, in many territories of the capitalist centre has already been completed as a material process, but in ideological, cultural and political terms, the notion that capitalist societies are shaped to the model of a deal between capital and labour is far from having disappeared (Silver, 2003; Breman, 2010; Benanav, 2021). CONTESTED_TERRITORY – D3.1: Working Paper 1 – Territorial Accumulation 16 Still today we can say that, on those very ideological, cultural and political terms, the industrial society ideal is still the hegemonic self-representation of capitalism that, as it is presented by its defenders, will be restored after the cyclical, external shocks that generate temporary chaotic situations have been fixed. Crisis of the extractivist model in the capitalist periphery In Latin America, the processes of territorial accumulation, as an expression of the crisis of the fordist world ecology in its developmentalist shape, have their expression in the crisis of what some authors have called the "commodity consensus" (Svampa, 2019), a generalised (neo) extractivist consensus, which has taken place during the first 15 years of the 20th century among the different states of the region, beyond the nuances of their ideological orientations. Based on the appropriation and export of raw materials in an international context of high prices, the governments of all countries have based their development projects on the export of primary goods and the expansion of domestic consumption. The novelty, compared to other stages based on the appropriation and export of raw materials, is that progressive governments have sought to justify neo-extractivism, claiming that this is the way to generate foreign currency for the state and then allocate it to income redistribution and domestic consumption, or to activities with a higher value-added content (Svampa, 2019: 27). However, governments have denied or underestimated the new inequalities and social and ecological asymmetries brought about by this development model. Two decades later, the neoextractivist model is increasingly being challenged, and environmental, feminist and territorial struggles are putting more and more brakes on extractivist projects, giving rise, as we show before, to what (Svampa, 2019) has called the "eco-territorial turn of struggles". As seen in the cases of oil in the Amazon, fishing in the South Atlantic, open-pit mining throughout the Andes, pig factories in Argentina and the advance of the agricultural frontier in Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay, among many other examples, the main struggles in the region are organising against this model of territorial accumulation and more and more projects are being stopped. 3.4.3 Crisis of the financialization of capital Throughout the neoliberal period, finance has been the main vehicle in the attempt to relaunch a new regime of accumulation and a cycle of profit formation that would avoid the constant pressure of rising production costs, permanent excess capacity and destructive competition (Brenner, 2006) Finance, understood, as a gigantic mechanism for concentrating capital in its money-form has been the main lever on which the transition from the phase of material expansion (Capitalization) to its current phase of decomposition and systemic chaos (Appropriation) (Arrighi, 2009), always through the dominance of money over the rest of the figures and class positions, that make up the mosaic of capitalist power. The historical trajectory of deregulated financial markets since the beginning of the 1980s has meant a constant and growing capture of any social or territorial tendency that can be monetized and commercialised. From its enormous capacity to suck up socially and ecologically produced wealth, finance has functioned as director of the social allocation of resources on credit in the sphere of social reproduction and, very especially, in urban real estate markets. Tourism, housing, transport infrastructure, with its logistic variant and with the masses of credit to finance them, are central components of Territorial Accumulation in its financialized version. And they are also the material base for the emergence of a new dominant fraction of the capitalist class: banks, residential building companies, civil works construction companies and tourist holding companies. And in an associated way, the electrical and communication networks necessary for a constant expansion of diffuse urban environments. CONTESTED_TERRITORY – D3.1: Working Paper 1 – Territorial Accumulation 17 From the environmental point of view, the plundering of touristic and urban environments together with the extreme financialization of an essential good such as housing and the consumption of fossil fuels from the proliferating transport of people and goods that implies the dominance of road transport, have involved traditionally a much higher territorial, material, intensity of production (Murray, 2015) In fact, the result of this upscaled process of Territorial Accumulation was the destruction of coastal ecosystems, vital points of systemic exchanges between the continental and insular masses and the oceans and seas, through the almost complete sovereignty of land uses that imply the sealing or artificialization of the soil, in any case its loss from the point of ecosystem productivity. Cities and urban processes are at the core of the expansion of territorial accumulation processes in the era of financialization. The city, as opposed to the nation state in the industrial society phase, is the main economic driver of this phase. Within this logic, the urban governance of this phase has strongly emphasised the entrepreneurial role of cities within a frame of generalised competition. The result of the financialization of capital and this public-private partnerships in the frame of interurban competition was the global process of expansion of diffuse urbanism, and of record breaking consumption of territory, land and resources, necessary for such expansion, during the years of the massive global real estate bubble between 2001 and 2007 During the neoliberal rule of finance over the ecosystems, housing has been the main financial asset for households and, also, their primary source of indebtedness. The expanded growth of finance through urban ecosystems has been the engine for consumption and effective demand, designed as a response to the crisis of wage society that came from Fordism. However, this strategy aimed at forcing growth did not last long and it burst with great impact in the global financial crisis. Historically, financialisation is developing in different forms and phases, according to macroeconomic, financial, technological, political and spatial dynamics. Nonetheless, a process of financial appropriation and extraction from urban areas has developed over the last 40 years, with substantial social, territorial and urban consequences, negative impacts on the access to housing and violence associated with the making and remaking of the urban territory (and beyond) according to the needs of capital in crisis. 3.4.4 Crisis of the ecology of capital The crisis of the ecology of capital is understood as an irreversible crisis of historical capitalism that drags with it all the cyclical crises, always shifted into the future, never closed: crisis of industrial capitalism, crisis of the financialization of capital and, finally, crisis of the gigantic ecosystem that capitalism has built on a global scale to ensure the extended reproduction of the process of accumulation at the lowest possible price (Wallerstein, 2010). Following the conceptual structure that we have put forward above, accumulation as a continuous incremental process of capitalization and appropriation, the current crisis of the ecology of capital manifests itself as a crisis of both constitutive dimensions of capital. Crisis of capitalization insofar as downwards trends in investment, labour productivity, profitability and, moreover, employment, understood in its fordist wage regime shape, are far from over. But, and this is the defining new trait of the crisis of the ecology of capital, the crisis of capitalization is matched by a crisis of appropriation that is fully starting to unfold in its intertwined effects with the historical long wave of effects of the crisis of capitalization after the covid 19 global pandemics. If functioning appropriation mechanisms work producing cheap inputs for the capitalization process, its reverse, non-functioning appropriation mechanisms are felt as a plethora of rising costs that threaten to slow down the accumulation process creating all sorts of social, political and economic instability that can lead, as it is arguably the case today, to systemic chaos. CONTESTED_TERRITORY – D3.1: Working Paper 1 – Territorial Accumulation 18 The completion of the cycle of migration of capital to Asia, and particularly to China, is creating a new spatial fix, qualitatively distinct from the previous spatial fix, globalisation. The shift of high added value production to China that has been going on since 2015 onwards. 5G technologies, renewable energies and electric cars are the flagship of this scaling up in production that has visibly given China a hegemonic position in the capitalization process. This leap towards a leading role in capital accumulation, has put an end to the sweatshop of the world model in which global commodity chains were controlled by western high added value capitals (Nolan, 2012) that relied on a permanent outsourcing to China searching for a lower cost structure in terms of labour costs, environmental costs and tax burdens. A displacement of the commodity frontier has taken place along this process due to the depletion of the conditions that defined the previous commodity frontier in terms of appropriation of cheap natures. This redefinition and relocation of the commodity frontier has shaken one of the central, constituent, traits of globalisation, understood here as an historically determined form of spatial fix: commodity value chains. If value chains in the era of globalisation were defined by diminishing production costs and just in time delivery, we are experiencing the opposite phenomenon: rising costs and rising temporal gaps between production and delivery of goods for consumption. Linked to this recent displacement of the commodity frontier correlative to the newly gained productive hegemony in Asia we find a consistent rise in prices of energy and materials. Of course, this reminds of the rising oil prices that triggered the structural crisis of capitalism in the seventies, but in this case, it is natural liquified gas and not oil where the driver of rising costs has to be found. The high pricing of emissions related to oil in carbon markets have prompted a flee towards less emission costly NLG directed by energy futures in global markets in desperate seek for profitability. China in its new role as undisputed leader of profitable production processes has taken also the lead in the production of capital and consumption goods linked to green capitalism and climate transition, both understood as underpinnings of the endogenous green fix that capitalism is producing as a governance tool for the very disasters and turmoil it has created. Carbon Markets, a market tool for pricing emissions of GHG emissions that didn't register much activity since it was introduced in the 90’s have boomed in the past two years after China, with its huge volume of economic activity started using them as a pricing tool and changing all the relative prices of energy and resources in an upward sense. But the current price crisis is just one of the empirical manifestations of the crisis of the ecology of capital. A looming debt crisis that could well signal a shift in the dominant position of finance is the result of three decades of financial appropriation of the reproduction sphere that was not matched by any rise in wage incomes, rather the opposite. Today the global mass of debt is bigger and wider than ever in history, raising the question very clearly of the feasibility of its servicing. As in the seventies, energy markets have a leading role in the dynamics of the crisis, but this crisis of the ecology of capital runs deeper than that as it points to relatively new elements that change the actual unfolding of the crisis. A demographic crisis is being felt in the central countries as a result of the historical tightening and fragmentation of labour markets in the last forty years. As an effect of uneven development, non-central capitalist countries keep being in a situation of high demographic trends that cannot be absorbed by their labour markets. This contradiction has led to a crisis of the border regimes and the control of migration flows with which the central capitalist countries have used as a control tool for pricing down migrant labour. Climate crisis can be understood as the pinnacle of the crisis of the ecology of capital. IPCC reports have been growing more and more consistent in the description of the trends of climate change (IPCC, 2021). And these trends point to faster than anticipated and more chaotic effects of climate change related to perceived changes not only in temperature anomalies but in precipitation and dominant wind patterns, depicting a situation of explosive extreme weather effects coupled with a steady rise of temperatures. In political economy terms, climatic crisis CONTESTED_TERRITORY – D3.1: Working Paper 1 – Territorial Accumulation 19 signals a crisis that cannot be displaced to the future as it cannot be “fixed” by either money or political power, but that rather is the result of all the contradictions “fixed” in the past by displacing them to the future. The cancellation of that future is the defining trait of the crisis of the ecology of capital. That future is now. 3.5. Case studies The following is an attempt to apply, illustrate thus operationalise the concept of territorial accumulation in the analysis of tourism on the island of Tenerife and oil extractivism in the Ecuadorian Amazon. After reconstructing interpretations of capitalist development and its current crisis, these two case studies can be mobilised to deepen our understanding of the Capitalocene and to explain the renewed dynamics of dispossession in a context of ecological crisis in contexts of both the (peripheral) Global North and the Global South. 3.5.1 Territorial accumulation in Tenerife (Canary Islands, Spain) Tenerife is the largest of the islands of the Canary archipelago, located in central-eastern Atlantic, near the African continental coast. At the beginning of the 1960s, along with other Canary Islands – although not all of them – it experienced an extraordinary growth in touristic activities, making this region the third preferred Spanish destination for foreign tourism in 2019. Tourism activity accounts for 35% of the GDP and employs 40% of the working population. Worldwide semi-peripheral and peripheral islands of the capitalist world-economy assume subordinate functions, such as tourism and real estate, production and export of plantation crops, extraction of mineral resources, and so on. Territoriality constitutes an essential force in capitalism, which materialises through support from state policies to economic processes (Harvey, 2003), as is the case with the redefinition of insular areas as regions dedicated to energy supply or peripheries of pleasure. Further, with tourism as the organiser of territoriality of some islands, which is a very lucrative option for governments, the private sector and international organisations, as a way for economic growth, incorporate peripheral or semi-peripheral economies into the global market (Pons et al., 2014). This is also the case with the Canary Islands. Here, the island of Tenerife acts as a gateway for tourism, which constitutes Spain’s contribution toward the international division of labour, receiving 10 million international visitors. The interests of capital and ruling elites, through their control of institutional powers, regulated the territorial transformation of these islands, establishing systemic cycles of accumulation which ultimately led to crises. This chapter presents the intimate relationship between tourism, accumulation and the capitalocene (Hall, 2022). We then delve into the production of the island and the expansion of the frontiers of the commodity, which implies the subordination of nature in a context based on tourist activity. Tourism, nature and capitalocene Tourism is a geophysical force which has contributed to the reshaping nature for capital purposes, to the ecological crisis, and has a central role in sustaining and expanding global capitalism (Hall, 2022). Like other regions far from the metropolis, tourism implies an extreme specialisation and a further territorialization that starts from the process of conquest and dependence. Colonial through successive commodity frontiers (Moore, 2010) and from the colonial period to more recent discourse of development and economic growth, tourism is embedded in capital accumulation (Hall, 2022). In this way, tourism can be understood as providing a series of spatial, temporal and other “fixes” to transcend limitations to capital accumulation (ibid: 526). As the recent construction of a Hotel on La Tejita beach shows there is a reification of tourism in current accumulation cycle towards visitors with a high purchasing power and the label of “ecological friendly” next CONTESTED_TERRITORY – D3.1: Working Paper 1 – Territorial Accumulation 20 to highly sensitive protected areas, exploiting hitherto protected nature enclosures or by taking back environmental regulations, thus obstructing the conservation of species and ecosystems and putting them for exploitation purposes (Sabaté-Bel & Armas-Díaz, 2022). Since the process of commodification enables things to become valuable and circulate, tourism becomes capital when tourism products and the value generated circulates (Büscher & Fletcher, 2017). This economic activity produces and depends on inequalities, is socially alienated of its producers (i.e. expropriation of resources such as land to make space for tourism), but also relies on the appropriation of the surplus of workers’ labour. Thus, tourism is somehow a new form of colonialism and causes cash outflow from destination societies, that it creates only poor jobs and that in any case development and jobs scarcely benefit local societies (Santana Turégano, 2006), but also because of the imposition of a dominant discourse and an imaginary picture, that reflects the desires of their creator and of the elite group (Macleod, 2013; Devine & Ojeda, 2017). As Moore (2017:610) reminds in “many regions peasant life continued much as it had for centuries. But on the commodity frontiers –Canary islands (....)– capitalism radically changed life and land within a generation or two. If this was commercial capitalism, it was no less productivist for being so. For in each of these places, commercial advance depended upon new machines, new economic organisation and, frequently, new labour systems.” In Tenerife, since the middle of the last century, "cheap nature" -protected or unprotectedhas been used in different ways, especially for urbanisation and to facilitate the construction of hotels and infrastructures that favour the circulation of visitors and capital. Likewise, in that time, and especially since the 2008 crisis, the commodification of nature, through green or ungreen grabbing mechanisms, i.e. the reorientation of environmental policies to harness crisis towards the terrain of protected nature as an opportunity for further accumulation (Fletcher 2019) or/and resorting to traditional resource extractive processes (Apostolopoulou & Adams 2015). According to Moore (2022: 162) this means the conjunction of the proletariat together with the biotariat working for capital, and the “dialectical relations between them in a multi-species class struggle” as we already mentioned one of the strategies is using un-green and green grabbing processes in order to foster urbanisation and tourism (see Armas-Díaz & Sabaté-Bel, 2022). Indeed, capitalism is based on the “separation of Humanity and Nature” (Moore, 2017: 7). This fact allows capitalists to act on and commodify nature (Harvey, 2006), and also to alienate humans from non-human nature. As capitalism expanded, not only people were incorporated into it but nature too -first via the exploitation of cheap resources and then creating and producing new environments (Moore, 2017). Tourism is not an exception. This activity utilises “cheap nature by giving value to land that was otherwise worthless for other commercial purposes”. In particular, this process was undertaken recently via commodification of nature to develop eco-tourism and other ecological or species dependent tourism experiences (Hall, 2022). As Büscher et al. (2012) argued, tourism acts as a capitalist instrument to fix overaccumulation and give no solution because it remains in the premise of expansion and growth. Violence and dispossession frequently define everyday practices, livelihoods and representations in tourism (Devine & Ojeda, 2017). According to Harvey, ongoing dispossession is necessary for the reproduction of capital. Dispossession can occur in situ, that is, without necessary displacing of local communities. This is very common in tourist sites, as dispossession associated with tourism development often translates into the privatisation or enclosure of commons such as beaches, water sources, and rural land. His contributions have been central to recent literature on grabbing in the Americas and elsewhere. However, the concept of Territorial Accumulation expands the concept of dispossession, integrates colonial forces and incorporates a web of life perspective (human and non-human nature as equal species under exploited by capital). CONTESTED_TERRITORY – D3.1: Working Paper 1 – Territorial Accumulation 21 In sum, this example captures the intimate and violent relationship among tourism -as a colonialist artefact and a main instrument for capital accumulation-, privatisation of commons, dispossession and commodification of natural and cultural resources for tourism purposes in a peripheral region of the Global North. The production of Tenerife as a tourist site During the second part of the past century and late on, the massive tourism industry was established almost a decade apart from other Spanish islands, like the Balearic case because it had to wait for further development of the jet plane - charter flight in order to make medium distances profitable, such as those between the archipelago and the European airports where tourists come from. The first tourist boom (1960-1973) was marked by a fundamental feature, which was maintained in all subsequent thriving periods: the subordination of the travel industry to the capital gains of the construction-real estate dimension. The phenomenon was concentrated in a few foci but with a high urban density. This affected the insular ecologies, including human ecology. In this phase, under a dictatorial regime and with a population with semi-colonial roots plunged into chronic poverty, social contestation was almost impossible. The second tourist boom (1985-1989), closely linked to a phase of acceleration of the international circulation of capital, had a very large territorial impact despite its short duration wherein the urbanised land for tourism doubled (Martín, 2000), and the demand for water (to the detriment of agricultural irrigation), energy consumption or waste generation multiplied. Besides, for the first time in the contemporary history of the Canary Islands, labor force was imported. Contestation was marked by myriad conflicts driven by local groups against urbanisation, the construction of hotels or other infrastructures. These actions and the progressive majority in the regional Parliament permitted the Canary Islands Law of Natural Spaces (1987) to be approved. More than 40% of the regional surface was safeguarded from direct urbanisation (almost half in Tenerife). Between 1997 and 2006 Spain witnessed a housing boom, exceptional due to its intensity and duration and especially intense in big cities and tourist areas like the Canary Islands (Burriel, 2008). Unlike the previous boom, it affected most of the insular urban territory, and it was not limited to the increase in the tourist supply. It extended to habitual homes, second homes, apartments, and luxury villas for foreign seasonal residents as well as an intense development of infrastructure and megaprojects. The previous experience of the 1980s, its environmental ravages, and consequent opposition gave rise to another contradiction: a dual model that aimed at the containment of tourism growth via moratoriums in some areas, though unleashing other types of conflicts. That measure prioritised the containment of lodging supply, renewal and requalification of the consolidated tourist areas instead, the incentive for infrastructure linked to ‘higher quality’ tourism as well as permissiveness in the expansion of residential use, for which the urbanisation growth continued (García-Cruz, 2014). New tourism infrastructures emerge, fewer but much larger establishments, with greater accommodation capacity and a much higher ecological footprint: double water consumption and waste generation, quadruple demand for electricity, and so on (Hernández, 2001). The expansion of the tourism fabric was only stopped by the 2008 crisis when the collapse in real estate revenues temporarily limited the construction pressure (García-Hernández, et al., 2018). In the Canary Islands, tourism, and above all, construction were the most damaged economic activities from the 2008 crisis. As the Spanish real estate and banking sectors underwent a profound restructuring, the Spanish and regional governments focused on tourism as a fix for the crisis (Murray, 2005). Legislative changes were promoted so that hitherto partly protected rural land could be re-rated apt for development, allowing for activities other than agricultural ones. The regional authorities deregulated land by rolling back environmental legislation and, with it, the consensus achieved in the 1980s on land as an essential resource for the ecosystem. At the same time, the regional authorities reduced the protection given to endangered CONTESTED_TERRITORY – D3.1: Working Paper 1 – Territorial Accumulation 22 species so as not to hinder urban development and the construction of forthcoming infrastructure (see the Port of Granadilla; Armas-Díaz & Sabaté-Bel, 2020). Under the regime of the tourism moratoria exceptions such as grant construction licences to luxury hotels -with a low density, ecologically friendly in terms of energy consumption and landscape mimetismas well as to foster innovation and renewal of the existing infrastructure. Not surprisingly, tourism Moratoria led to a significant increase in the 5-star accommodation supply in the Canary Islands (Inchausti-Sintes & Voltes-Dorta, 2020). Projects for the construction of new hotels in coastal areas involving the enclosure of common natural spaces and their commodification for the benefit of transnational bodies are also being reactivated (see the project in Puertito de Adeje in the South of Tenerife, the construction of a Hotel in La Tejita Beach or the Maguenes Resort in the Southwest of Tenerife). As Fletcher (2019) argues, an increasingly prominent strategy is to try to harness the “end of nature” itself as a novel tourism “product”. The appropriation of cheap nature in a touristic context These processes have intensely transformed the previous island territorial organisation. On the one hand, the model is based on the notion of a coastal 'island-city' that is highly specialised in services that combine a hyper-transformation of coastal areas - 0-600 m - while leaving the rest of the island territory right up to the mountain peaks de-ruralised and conceived, if at all, as 'natural areas to protect' and in certain cases, to be converted into tourist amenities. On the other hand, it has facilitated the processes of capital accumulation and has produced a form of nature oriented to the extraction and exploitation of resources from the island-territory. A situation that has worsened with the successive tourist and urbanisation booms, and which is manifested, among other aspects, in the massive destruction of the natural coastal resources where much of the tourist activity is concentrated. This is one of the contradictions of capitalism, an "economically self-destructive appropriation and use, by capital, of labour power, infrastructure and urban space, and external nature or environment" (O'Connor, 1998). While it is true that nature plays a fundamental role in the accumulation of capital (Smith 2007), it is also true that the fight to prevent the destruction or deterioration of natural assets is a powerful source of opposition to neoliberalism (Heynen et al. 2007; Apostolopoulou & CortesVazquez, 2018) and a new source of possible future alternatives (Smith, 2010). The territorial conflicts related to the protection of marine and coastal ecosystems, for example, feed a large portion of the protests in the tourist regions of southern Europe (Kousis et al., 2008). Environmental protests have especially managed to mobilise groups and people in islands (Valdivielso and Moranta, 2019). Like the Buen Vivir tradition in Latin America, there exists in the Global North South - and at least in the Mediterranean islands - a unique collective imaginary centred on slowness, moderation and coexistence called "southern thought" as opposed to Western principles of necessary continuous growth. From an islandness perspective “special insular experiential identities form and contribute to a diversity of modes of existence” (Kallis et al., 2022). Furthermore, exist alternative non-mainstream forms of island development, based on communing, which “provide spaces of hope that community reciprocity is capable of integrating local economies in coevolution with – rather than being displaced by – market exchange and state redistribution” (Clark & Kjellberg, 2018: 388). These demands form part of broader debate on the style of island development and its effects, with the population having a democratic right to decide on their present and future models of socioeconomic development, taking into account their historical experience, specific island culture, and accumulated skills and knowledge. Experience shows that the local communities and populations of island territories traditionally tend to develop a more pronounced awareness of limits than communities in continental areas. Debate on the now classic yet very topical issue of the limit to growth (Meadows et al., 1972) seems to be expressed in islands in a more direct, spontaneous way due to obvious physical and social factors, such as the clear perception of islands’ territorial limits, bounded by the sea, the habitual fragility of both their natural ecosystems and their social and community-based CONTESTED_TERRITORY – D3.1: Working Paper 1 – Territorial Accumulation 23 ones, frequent irreversibility when areas are destroyed, and the verification that all goods that cannot be produced locally must be imported from overseas, leading to strong external dependence (Sabaté-Bel & Armas-Díaz, 2022). Final remarks First, nature continues to be a key factor in the accumulation of capital (Apostolopoulou & Adams, 2015). Although the relationship between capital and conservation is nothing new, increasing ways of exploiting nature have emerged in recent decades, especially in the period after the 2007–2008 economic crisis (Apostolopoulou & Adams, 2019). Second, with the swift process of urban development, based on the construction of infrastructures and specialisation in tourism, large flows of capital have been channelled into the real estate sector of tourist areas in order to meet the ruling classes’ desire to integrate the islands into the world economy (Harvey, 2003). Third, tourism is a new form of colonialism and causes cash outflow from destination societies, that it creates only poor jobs and that in any case development and jobs scarcely benefit local societies (Santana Turégano, 2006). Capitalists use nature by giving value to land that was otherwise not much lucrative. We see this trend in via commodification of nature to develop eco-tourism and other ecological or species dependent tourism experiences, such as the luxury hotel in a protected -and unprotectednatural area. Finally, a territorial accumulation approach integrates some of the aforementioned dimensions integrating nature and non-human nature as a web of life, and not disaggregating these two interlinked words. As some authors suggest, nature is an accumulation strategy and capital produce a particular nature to be exploited (Smith, 2007; Moore, 2016). 3.5.2. Oil extractivism in the Ecuadorian Amazon Another periphery where the opening of capital's borders over interstitial spaces is taking place at an accelerated pace is the Amazon (Little, 2002). Once central spaces of extraction have been filled, the opening of infrastructures to reach increasingly remote spaces has become a way of incorporating territories into the capital's organised network (Guerra, 2012). From this approach, the Amazon has become one of the spaces globally that has attracted the most research into how these processes of subsumption of space to capital occur, and therefore absorbs increasing attention to processes of territorial accumulation (Monte-Mor, 2014, p.; Wilson & Bayón, 2017a). This way of studying territorial accumulation involves the intersection between the extractivism of primary commodities such as oil, minerals or agro-export products, and the construction of road or river infrastructures to bring these previously inaccessible resources into the global market. The volatility of international prices does not prevent the fact that, although cyclical, the advance over Amazonian territories continues if we analyse the 'longue duree processes', depriving indigenous communities, peasant peoples and biologically protected areas of their living conditions (Burchardt & Dietz, 2014; Dávalos & Albuja, 2014; Svampa, 2012). Oil extraction is an essential element in understanding how the construction of infrastructure, the circulation of goods, and the dynamics of unequal development and urbanisation of the world as a whole operate (Harvey, 1982; Smith, 1984). Processes of territorial accumulation are necessarily intertwined with oil consumption, and at the same time, oil extraction is itself a process of territorial accumulation, in an exponential growth of its consumption, regardless of the crises of industrial societies in the North, rapidly replaced by more expansive processes in Asia. The historical study of the dispossession generated by oil extractivism in the northern Amazon provides us with a multitude of analytical possibilities for thinking about territorial accumulation from the perspective of the processes of exporting materials and energy from the peripheral spaces of capital to the central spaces of urbanisation, through a perspective from the peripheral spaces of the global processes of capital accumulation. CONTESTED_TERRITORY – D3.1: Working Paper 1 – Territorial Accumulation 24 Oil exploitation as a consolidator of the colonisation of the Ecuadorian Amazon Oil exploitation began at the end of the 1960s. After previous attempts by transnational companies to settle in the territory of Waorani indigenous peoples who repelled oil colonisation, this was able to materialise in the north, on Cofán, Siekopai, Siona, Tetetes and Sansahuaris territories, the last two of which disappeared in the process of oil colonisation (Maldonado, 2001). Although these spaces had previously been incorporated into international markets, their weak infrastructural connections and the precariousness of the state's control over them had led to the disappearance of previous gold, hacienda and rubber activities (García, 1999; Gutiérrez Marín, 2002; Muratorio, 2000). The creation of oil roads and the construction of the first oil camp, which today is the largest city in the Ecuadorian Amazon (Lago Agrio, with 100,000 inhabitants), allowed for the consolidation of colonisation in the 1970s, which would become irreversible, and which would simultaneously incorporate this space into international markets and state control (Bayón, Durán, Bonilla, Zárate, et al., 2020). The spatialisation of the oil extraction activity simultaneously leaves enclaves where the oil stations are located, attracting a series of activities such as commerce, prostitution, lodging and food services, while at the same time unfolding other processes of agrarian migrations through the pipes and oil wells, based on the dispute over the oil rent (Bayón, 2019; Galarza, 1972; Maldonado, 2001). Due to the failures of oil activity in previous decades due to indigenous attacks, oil exploitation in the northern Amazon was consolidated through the generation of a peasant contingent that displaced indigenous communities from their territories, as well as a strong military contingent (Carrión & Cuvi, 1985; Galarza, 1972; Gondard & Mazurek, 2001). The way in which oil exploitation was carried out by the US company Texaco involved serious crimes against humanity due to the pollution caused and the dispossession of indigenous peoples and peasants (Maldonado, 2001; Wasserstrom, 2016), in a form of destruction of the living conditions of the communities that continues to this day (Coba, 2016). In the face of all this devastation generated by the way in which the northern Amazon was exploited, strong indigenous struggles and the organisation of the peoples affected by Texaco have emerged, as well as articulations in the areas where oil companies have tried to enter since the 1990s (Coba Mejía, 2021; García Torres, 2017; Whitten & Whitten, 2008). This has resulted in plurinational uprisings for the legalisation of indigenous lands, indigenous women's organisations that generate a dispute over what poverty is or is not, and civilising conceptual proposals such as Sumak Kawsay or Buen Vivir, which was institutionalised in the 2008 Constitution, but also Kawsak Sacha or Selva Viviente as a proposal by the peoples against the developmentalist model of capital (Coba & Bayón, 2020; Colectivo Miradas Críticas del Territorio desde el Feminismo, 2014; Cubillo-Guevara & Hidalgo-Capitán, 2015; Uzendoski, 2018). The destruction brought about by oil exploitation has generated new political subjects, horizons of struggle, conceptualisations and a whole stock of struggle of the diverse Amazonian peoples, in ontological, anti-racist, class and anti-patriarchal struggles (Bayón Jiménez, 2021; Bayón Jiménez et al., 2021; Vela-Almeida et al., 2020). 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