Extending the conceptualisation of class across field and city: Transgressing servitude towards an emancipatory praxis

Abstract

This article advocates the transgression of incumbent theoretical divisions between rural and urban abodes of production and draws on new analyses of contemporary spaces of capital and labour antagonisms in Brazil. It does so to articulate a broadening of the definition of class and class struggle towards an emancipatory praxis that does not necessarily prioritise industrialised workers. The study has a particular focus on the reconfiguration of socio-spatial arrangements linked to 21st century commodity cultivation, extraction and trade and subsequent class tensions on the material and epistemological frontier between (hydro, agro and mineral) mega projects and the autonomous territories of rural subjects. The renewed degradation of conditions for a labour force that has always been precarious, the dissolving dichotomy between proletarianised and peasant labour, and the ongoing resistance to corporate capture by communities is evoked to contrast distinct metabolic relations within rural territories with the objectification of labour and nature under capitalism. The analysis reveals new configurations of class domination, tension and counter movements. Many critical scholars, particularly those in the Global South, have been attentive to alternate readings of the world by indigenous, African descendent, peasant and agro-extractivist communities that may be unfamiliar yet underpin vociferous, and often fatal, resistance to capital accumulation. The task to effectively situate these struggles within a theory of broader, heterogeneous class struggle and integrate this ‘wealth’ of collective struggle and knowledge towards societal transformation remains important work in progress. In this spirit, the paper offers some possibilities for making new conceptual and material connections between rural and urban productive spaces and across currently fragmented class formations and identities.

Introduction

This article concerns itself with extending and transgressing the demarcations of incumbent theoretical frameworks commonly employed for understanding class dynamics of contemporary capital restructuring. It does so in order to better understand and address the changes taking place in and beyond the workplace that take us to arguably some of the most contested spaces of economic accumulation and social production in the 21st century.

With a particular attention to Brazil and the territorial expansion of agro-hydro-industries, the paper explores the reconfiguration of socio-spatial arrangements linked to major infrastructure projects and commodity trades since the late 1980s. These have a particular signature across the global south and, in Brazil, have been accompanied by a more recent weakening of labour and environmental protections alongside an authoritarian turn in governance. The subsequent degradation of the conditions and protections for a labour force that has always been precarious and northwestward expansion of agroindustrial frontiers draw new lines of expression of contemporary social conflict. These are not effectively captured by incumbent analyses of capital versus (salaried) labour tensions as developed from ‘a small corner of the world’ (Harvey 2018: xiii). In considering the emergent labour capital antagonism on these frontiers, therefore, Marx’s interpretation of human-nature metabolic relations is revisited to help analyse ill-considered configurations of class domination, tensions and resistance emerging from the spatial and technological advances of corporate control across rural and urban abodes of production.

This paper aims to, in the first place to draw on empirical evidence gathered largely through two decades of research undertaken by the Centro de Estudos de Geografia do Trabalho (Centre for the Study of the Geography of Labour network), Brazil and more recent collaborations by the authors in the centre west region of the country. It does so to help unveil, name and conceptualise the contemporary forms of servitude and resistance in relation to capital and class. This requires that we update orthodox interpretations of what it is to work in the countryside, whether as wage earners or as peasants (or as a fluid category in between) and what it is to work in the city (as a wage earner, self-employed, unpaid or informally paid).

Second, the paper departs from a determined privileging of the industrialised and salaried labourer as the fulcrum for social struggle under capitalism. By investigating the antagonism between forest, agrarian and riverine communities and encroaching industries reliant on super exploited labour, the paper broadens the conceptualisation of class struggle to interpret the motivations for, values and acts of resistance on the commodity frontiers.

Third, the paper tales an active position and thus builds upon observations by Thompson (2009) and Huws (2019) that a project of emancipation requires that differentiated actors can consciously situate themselves and their relationships within the logic, social and spatial relations of the dominant system, or the ‘social metabolism’ of capital (after Marx 1975; Mészáros 1995). When the prism is shifted to the contours of contemporary struggle in Brazil, where lives and land are threatened and lost by outright murder and disruption of agrarian livelihoods, the ‘untouchability’ of specific groups from a dedicated analysis of class formation and struggle no longer holds. The paper recalls that labour is a historically proven transcendental force and in doing so refutes both a fatalistic reading of the economy but also discourses of the inevitably of radical social change. The ambition here is a contribution to understanding certain objective conditions affecting the totality of labour today linked to contemporary subjective experiences of struggle across spaces of production and social reproduction.

The paper thus brings attention to diverse forms of work on the commodity frontiers and highlights the within class contradictions whereby the condition of work is deteriorating within advancing construction, mining, energy and agricultural industries, and that these projects of poorly rewarded workers are being met by indigenous, peasant, extractivist, fishing and African descendent ‘Quilombo’ communities that are resisting to proletarian co-option. Indeed, the ongoing flight from waged labour taken by the landless and the unemployed on urban peripheries draws attention to both the immiserating character of working life, and collective aspirations for radical alternatives that traditional, or newer, territorial occupation makes possible.

The paper is structured as follows. In the first part, it revisits the literature that has updated Marx’s foundational work on human-nature metabolic relations to provide for a sharper analysis on socio-ecological interactions and conflicts. These theoretical innovations are then considered in relation to Brazil and the contested socio-spatial strategies of labour and capital that are etched in the physical landscape and violently represent the political, economic and ontological boundary between a common use value of human–nature interactions on one hand, and the subsumption of land and labour to the laws of exchange value under capital on the other. These concepts materialise in the subsequent section that unveils how the contemporary state, subject to significant influence from powerful rural lobbies, has acted to weaken labour and environmental protections and subdue social movements. These state-corporate dynamics are brought down to earth, literally, in the next aspect of the paper that seeks to understand the intensification of conflict from subjects not routinely considered in class analysis. Here, the distinct forms of work – and hence metabolic relations with nature – of communities that resist capital advance are analysed and contrasted with the objectification of labour under capital.

The study concludes by considering how the juncture of state-corporate pressures on labour are laid bare by the downwards pressure on conditions and the hazardous ‘externalities’ of the productive process (including that of the green economy) via a dramatic loss of life through mega project failure, and the more gradual harm and poisoning of the worker’s body through industrialised chemicals. This corporeal rupture signifies the consequent limits to the worker’s ability to reproduce his or her labour, which alongside ecological detriment, jeopardises vital sources of future value creation for capital. These contradictions help articulate a relative class position of both urban and rural actors and point to possible pathways of resistance and emancipation across the abodes of production and consumption, town and countryside.

Metabolism and the territorial

Marx drew an analogy between the chemical processes of metabolism and the mutually transformative interactions between humans and nature in order to meet material needs for social reproduction. Defining labour as ‘an eternal natural necessity which mediates the metabolism between man and nature, and therefore human life itself’ (Marx 1975: 637), he observed how the work undertaken in this pursuit underpinned social organisation and its associated meanings and values. Under capitalism, Marx noted, the enclosure of land and the separation of town and countryside shifted the metabolic relationship away from this ‘first nature’ and the production of ‘use’ value towards the production of ‘exchange’ value through the commodification of biophysical world and of human labour, alienated from the immediate means of production; a second nature. Hence, this production of nature and space, notably interrogated by Lefebvre (1991), Harvey (2001), Santos (1977) and Smith (1984) is socially constructed through highly inequitable relations of power and governed by the logic, meanings and laws of capital.

There is, then, a material and ideological struggle over the interests that are served by the social production of nature. Ekers and Prudman (2017: 1379, 1381) reach beyond what they view as the ‘value theoretical’ and ‘economistic’ work of Smith (1984) and Harvey (2001) to restate that the ‘metabolic action of human labor in transforming material nature thus also involves the production of ideas, representations, and understandings of nature’ (italics added by author). The manifestations of this struggle call attention to specific tensions between territorial signatures of capital and labour, the struggles over costs and guarantees of social reproduction, and the within-class conflicts that pitch – as we will see – the immediate interests of waged labourers in primary industries against the life strategies of adjacent agrarian communities. Ekers and Prudman (2018) contest that there remains a task to better conceptualise the both diverse histories and geographies of first nature production and the legacies of patriarchy, racism and colonialism in the social metabolism of capital. Feminist scholars have pointed to capital’s encroachment and shifting of costs on to partly or non-commodified space and labour, where women disproportionately bear the costs (e.g., Federici 2012; Katz 2001), a tendency accelerated by privatisation of once public goods and technological advances that blur work-leisure boundaries (Antunes 2011, 2016; Huws 2019). Foster and Clark (2018) bring these arguments into a closer alignment with ecological studies in order to demonstrate that future generations in both commodified and relatively non-commodified space are not only being robbed of the ecological conditions necessary to sustain human life in the future but point to how the laws of capital disrupt contemporary human metabolism. Their ‘corporeal rift’ extends beyond social struggles around reproduction and follows Marx from his observations of 19th century social medicine to identify how contemporary social-epidemiological effects of capitalist development undermine, disrupt or thwart human development (See Marx 1975, vol. 3: 949). For Mészáros (1995, 2018); this ultimate contradiction of capital, the inability to sustain its key life giving property – labour – lays bare its inherent uncontrollability. The unrelenting drive of capital to accumulate despite, for example, climate change and critical ecological degradation, leads Mészáros (1995) to conclude:

the system breaks down at the point of its supreme power; for its maximum extension inevitably generates the vital need for restraint and conscious control with which capital production is structurally incompatible. (pp. 893–894)

Cognizant of capital’s remarkable capacity to reinvent itself and postpone crises; new ‘ecological’ or institutional fixes for ‘green’ capital investment are a case in point (Castree & Christophers 2015; Garvey et al. 2015), Mészáros presents the stark option between a metabolic order of capital that is, ‘undermining of the vital conditions for existence’ (see Foster & Clark 2018: 134) and a popular social control based upon a collective willingness to return to a use value of nature and productive means. To this end, there is an inseparability of social and ecological struggle, of equality and environmental sustainability, of rural and urban practice.

In what follows we bring together these strands of capital’s socio-spatial advances and labour subjugation, the still contested understandings of nature, and the corporeal rupture in relation to Brazil. There is a dangerous conjuncture to be found where meets the degraded conditions for a fragmented force of wage labourers, the erosion of the protection mechanisms for labour and the environment, and relentless corporate, territorial capture. These various components can be difficult to extract immediately within the composite social metabolic structure of capital, but by making a broadened conception of labour central to the analysis, the outworkings reveal themselves in terms of spontaneous strikes, occupational illness, massive scale accidents, and proliferation of land related conflicts. By laying bare the social relations of destructive metabolism of capital towards the ‘the possibility and necessity of social transformation in the mode of production’ (Clark & Foster 2010: 128), atomised and disparate workers may better locate their relations within capital and with other workers are pressing questions to which the remainder of this paper seeks to contribute. It does so by providing a brief background to Brazil’s neoliberal and neo-authoritarian regimes that have overseen a restructuring of work across formal and informal sectors, and between rural and urban abodes of production and social reproduction.

Neoliberalism and social control

The distinct reorganisation of capital since the 1980s was based on changes within the ideological and political system of domination,

[. . .] whose most obvious contours were the advent of neoliberalism, the deregulation of labor rights and the dismantling of the state productive sector [. . .] of which the Thatcher-Reagan era was the strongest expression. (Antunes 1999: 31)

The neo-liberal regimes, chosen by some governments (e.g. United States and United Kingdom) and enforced through military coups or IMF structural adjustment programmes on others (e.g. Argentina, Chile, Ghana, Brazil), oversaw a marked concentration of wealth linked to a privatisation and financialisation of all productive sectors and the reproduction of capital on a successively greater scale (Harvey 2018). The 21st century organisation of work in primary, secondary and tertiary sectors bears the hallmarks of capital’s steep learning curve in its dealings with the only factor of production capable of resistance, labour. Brazil’s sugar cane sector is a useful example. The pressure placed upon the factory owners by collective workers struggles during the classic ‘Fordist’ era, typified in Brazil by the now historic auto and metallurgy sector struggles of Sao Paulo in the 1980s, has been dissipated by increased social control via ‘old’ means of coercion and more modern means of fragmentation and co-option (Alves 2018; Briken 2020; Huws 2019; Stewart & Garvey 2015). Where large enterprises have relatively high sunk, fixed costs; sugar-ethanol distilleries for example (where a satisfactory return on investment may take as much as 10 years), corporations have avoided dependence on a sedentary labour force living in tight knit communities in close proximity to the factory. Toyota-inspired ‘lean’ techniques see (Stewart et al. 2016) converge with historically elitist employment relations to facilitate just in time and continuous production alongside conventional methods of harassment, such as blacklisting of trade union members and wage theft (Garvey & Barreto 2016). The cumulative of effect of these introduces a certain ballast to expectations of industrial insurrection in large, populous countries of the global south (Ness 2015). The subsumption of labour towards cost cutting and control includes (a) a standardisation of ‘skilled’ tasks that permits a consistent rotation of staff in and out of the workplace and across a country of continental proportions, (b) the supervised transportation of workers from various locations to and from the workplace, (c) the formal entrenchment of flexible and seasonal work for (internal migrant and immigrant) manual labour, and (d) sub-contracting of skilled within-factory jobs and outsourcing haulage tasks (Garvey et al. 2015; Thomaz Junior 2017, 2018b, 2019)

Where manual labour persists in the sector these workers are made cognizant that their daily output is pitched against the relentless drive towards automation and work on in the hope that loyalty and extra effort may be rewarded amid the diminishing numbers of human bodies within the enterprise. The pressure to increase output has consequences for work intensification that have proven fatal, especially among sub-contracted workers (Silva & Martins 2018).

Newly introduced government legislation normalises and enhance flexibility and outsourcing of tasks that previously would have legally been the direct responsibility of the employer. Sweeping changes since 2017 have affected more than 120 articles across the labour law institutes including the principles of employment law, the parts of the employment contract, types of employment contract, working hours, vacation, remuneration, termination of the employment contract, collective bargaining and work processes. Incredibly, these changes were rushed through with only 3 or 4 months of public discussion and only 4 months from publication of the new law to its implementation. ¹ Parallel to these sweeping changes has been the constitutional amendment to allow a freeze in public spending for the next 20 years (2016) and radical reduction to pension entitlements (2019).

This process is part of a distinct global convergence towards a definitive form of work that 30 years ago, for much of the world, would have been at most provisional, temporary, or contingent (Lambert & Herod 2016). In Brazil, technological developments have allowed an assembly and co-ordination of tasks across space in real time via the disassembly of workers who operate at the geographic margins between the urban periphery and rural placed industries; and often between formal and informal work. The availability and hence pliability of this workforce reflects the fact of 1.8 million currently unemployed, and 38 million in informal labour conditions in Brazil. Under this scenario the further and flexibilisation of the labour market exacerbates acute socioeconomic inequities and structural discriminations typical of the ‘harmful hierarchical and social division of labor’ (Antunes 2011: 76) inherited from colonialism and still dominant in Brazil (Virginio et al. 2022), with new implications for health and security.

The upshot of this confluence of automation, lean technique, and state-enabled flexibility is in essence a greater production of value in tandem with the ongoing creation of surplus labour that is then (re)absorbed without the conventional costs associated (such as pensions, insurance or sick pay). Changes to the social wage and health provisions for workers reinforce this. For example, the criteria for working 12 hours continuous work followed by 36 hours rest was relaxed; travel compensations for workers, often travelling great distance to remote areas was negated; the rights for teleworkers to receive more earnings due to extra-hours of worktime disappeared. Outsourcing in Brazil is synonymous with occupational accidents and slave like labour. Currently, each year, around 3,000 workers lose their life due to work accidents, 14,000 suffer of disabling injuries and 700,000 became ill through work. It is calculated that every 48 seconds one worker suffers a work related accident (DIEESE 2020). Slave like labour in Brazil includes degrading work conditions, exhausting working hours, debt servitude and forced labour. In the last 25 years, 54,000 workers were rescued from slave-like conditions in Brazil, mostly as sub-contracted workers and with agroindustry and construction sectors over represented. The coincidence of slave like labour with large project expansion on Brazil’s frontiers merits attention.

The constant reproduction of capital on an ever-larger scale intensifies the metabolic demands on nature (Foster 2013; Marx 1975), the further co-option of labour and hence introduces new forms of socio-ecological exchange. The intensified global demand for water, minerals, cellulose and grains and the techno-industrial developments in agriculture, mining and energy extraction incorporates new spaces into capital production and generates new resource conflicts. The scale and pace of this in countries such as China, Brazil and India may have been unforeseen at the time that Marx was writing but he had identified the inherent destructiveness of capital that is subsequently picked up by Mészáros (1995):

neither the degradation of nature nor the pain of social devastation carries any meaning at all for its system of social metabolic control when set against the absolute imperative of self-reproduction on an ever-extended scale. (p. 173)

The construction of dams, mines and agroindustrial complexes demand large numbers of workers, for relatively short periods. The owners of the projects in the Amazonian frontier, for example, benefit from the relatively high unemployment rates to the north of the country that has historically provided manual labour to diverse Brazil states. As an indication of this regional disparity, unemployment in Northeast Brazil grew by over 70% in 2020 as Covid-19 spread, compared to 5.6% in the more industrialised southern region. The scale of, and implications for, labour involved in these megaprojects was revealed during construction of the Jirau and Santo Antonio dams that form part of the Madeira River hydroelectric complex. As many as 37,000 workers, mostly internal and non-unionised migrants from northern and northeastern states were engaged in the controversial projects. In 2011, around 5,000 workers who were employed for plant construction in Jirau, spontaneously took to the streets to protest unpaid wages, substandard food, accommodation and health access and halted the construction (Alves 2016).

The example is illuminating not just for the uncovering of slake like labour. The damming of the Madeira river, as a gateway to the Amazon, was borne amid controversy owing to ecological damage and disruption of indigenous communities. Indeed the company was fined US$640,000 for illegal deforestation by the environmental agency, IBAMA. Here lies the tension between the explicit support for capital intensive, large scale plantations, mines and dams by successive governments and transnational institutions, most profoundly since the 1980s, and a permanent situation of structural instability and land tenure insecurity for rural subjects dependent on these territories for distinct livelihoods.

Capitalism naked and raw

It is abundantly clear that neoliberalism cannot resolve the societal disenfranchisement from growing inequity, while further accumulation demands of resource intensive industries are encountering legal and territorial limits. One outcome from these contradictions has been a perceptible deepening of autocratic, oppressive, and militaristic forms of governance. The ‘new’ bosses of the technological age do not replace but accompany the persistence of ‘old boss’ methods of control such as harassment, black listing of workers, punitive redundancy, the threat of and actual violence (Garvey et al. 2015, 2019). Furthermore, just as neoliberalism emerged from a quirky cohort of conservative economists, as the zero contract moved from a back street curiosity to a shop front format, this decade has ushered in once marginal, far right individuals and groups onto the political centre stage. Latin America has not been spared from this trajectory and the tendency is apparent in conservative, counter movements in Nicaragua, Bolivia, Colombia, Mexico, Argentina, Ecuador, Brazil, and Venezuela.

In contemporary Brazil, orthodox economic policy under former military personnel, Jair Bolsonaro, has all but buried the class conciliation project of the preceding Workers Party and the agency of class is disappeared by a manipulative media-legal-political-ecclesiastical system. With a nostalgia towards the military counterrevolution, which ‘straightened’ society, capital’s ‘endemic, cumulative, chronic and permanent’ structural crisis (Mészáros 2011: 11–12) is masked by moral preoccupations whereby social deterioration is blamed on migrants, women, reds and gay people. Those who have not subscribed to the market-liberal /social-autocratic have faced denigration and a sustained assault. This has been most apparent in the criminalisation of social movements such as the Landless Workers Movement of Brazil, the attempt by the Bolsonaro government to arm landowners, the rhetorical promises not ‘to give an inch’ to indigenous communities, insulting of African descendent peoples. The denigration and oppression of civil society groups has been paralleled by the hollowing out, closure or merging of statutory bodies tasked with labour or environmental protection.

On evidence, illegal loggers, land grabbers, and forest arsonists have been emboldened (Stewart et al. 2021); and there is a concerted push of illegal land occupations underpinned by a belief that the current administration will pass further legislation that would legitimise these land grabs. With the stalling of agrarian reform and suppression of popular movements, the most marked resistance has emerged from traditional and indigenous communities in territories subject to expropriation.

Here, the territorial dynamics of labour are important in conceptualising the spatial configurations that underpin and are sometimes set against the rearrangements of capital (Herod 1997). In the territories of the agrarian reform settlements, landless camps, indigenous reserves, fishing, agro-extractivist communities, and African descendent Quilombolas, labour manifests varied different forms of expression and social organisation that depart from conventional proletarian struggle but are nonetheless counter hegemonic and set against further capital accumulation. The unfamiliarity of the diverse perspectives and plural territorial productions should not preclude their analytical and explanatory contributions, which expose us to other ways of living, feeling, speaking and thinking about space (see Mota 2015) and of work. What many communities are defending, and frequently with their lives, is an inseparability between the geographical space, their labour, ancestral knowledge and cultural identity. While each of these dimensions are the focus of substantial study across a range of disciplines, the emancipatory potential of their composition is seldom considered, and much less so in their relation to class conflict. By repositioning ‘work’ as the focus of the labour process within and without of capital relations, we can see a clearer divergence between objectified labour on one hand, and the sensibility, symbolism and sustainability of first order metabolic relations as communities ‘work’ their immediate environment. In their struggle to resist deterritorialization and protect their ‘Tekoha’, the indigenous Guarani, for example, represent a progressive distinction from the ‘industrialised, large-scale capitalist agriculture in statist form’ of the North American plantation or the Soviet agricultural commune (Pye 2019: 5). Their resistance reflects Marx’s communist aspiration for a return of man to himself and the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature (Marx 1981: 43); a de-alienation from the productive forces of labour-nature relations (Barca 2017),

[A]s we have been saying, it is the Tekoha, where being [ . . . ] is only possible in their traditional territories, because this being is linked to social relations, the omnipresence of their culture, relations with the sacred, rites and dynamics proper to territorial occupation. It is in this tekoha territory, and not in another, that there are its ancestors, their family origins, but also mythical and religious being. (Santos 2019: 66; authors’ translation)

In this regard Mota (2015) asserts that the tekoha cannot be treated as the geographical entity separate from the social relations and expressions that form the Guarani territory, much less a ‘property’ relation. The resistance to private property and proletarianisation represents ontological and epistemological conflict between the thousands residing in the forest who depend on the immediate use value soil, water and forest, and the venture capitalists following the expansionist logic of the market in to the once protected biome (Garvey et al. 2019).

Here too, empirical evidence assists to dispel unhelpful categories of pre-capitalist or non-proletarianised labour that too often suggest the historical inevitability of subsumption to capital; or worse still an inadequate condition for any radical social transformation. The boundaries between the peasantry and salaried labour have long been porous. Capital’s territorial expansion, emboldened by state policies that denigrate the rights and question the humanity of the communities above, exerts pressure on the autonomy of these territories while at the same time degrading the conditions for those labouring in the encroaching enterprises. The struggle to sustain livelihoods beyond capital’s grasp and the hyper flexibility, or formalised informality of wage labour, makes porous the boundaries between agrarian communities and the proletarianised, working class. Others have pointed to the reliance on wage labour as a significant part of agrarian household income so that idealised notions of the rural break down. Semi proletarian labour is well documented in, for example, China (Zhan & Scully 2018), and India (Gidwani & Ramamurthy 2018). In the same token, the swelling peripheries of cities, most marked in the global south, points to swathes of the working class that are not ‘urban’ in the complete sense and do not enjoy access to what the city is supposed to offer (Davis). From new reserves of labour (Li 2011), workers are bused to plantations, mines and farms and it is also from these ranks that the landless movements have enjoyed most support over the last two decades as proletarianised, unskilled workers give up on finding secure work, or seek to escape the wage slavery they have previously experienced (Stahler-Sholk et al. 2008). The fluidity between these categories, within families, across seasons and between town and country require conceptualisations of class that are both broader and more refined. Changing socio-economic situations matter and can encourage sons and daughters to seek temporary salaried work in often-distant sites, or to remain in their territories where distinctive reproductive work continues. In the struggles for and against accumulation, one finds that the collective determination of agrarian groups against appropriation is juxtaposed with workers who are subject to a formalised informality. The latter are both integral to, and victims of, capital expansion on these frontiers. Indeed, very often the ‘face’ of land grabbing and illegal logging and mining incursions that belie well-organised networks are locally sourced relations of those whose territories are invaded. And, as highlighted by Torres and Branford (2018), the very illegality of the activity insists that this labour is unregistered, undocumented, mobile and consequently, slave-like by Brazilian legal definition.

There are swathes of the peasantry assuming a more proletarian experience and consciousness, and proletarianised workers retaining a peasant consciousness and aspiration (Jacobs 2018). Amid these dynamics there is a further important ontological point, in that many of these experiences, the functional performance of the salaried worker does not entail a complete subsumption of labour to capital nor the sacrifice of the use value of land to capitalist, private property relations. This has been well demonstrated by the Terena indigenous peoples of Mato Grosso do Sul. Many of those toiled for over 30 years as day labourers in the sugar cane plantations, and were thus widely regarded as having been co-opted to capitalist relations. A visit to their territory today, however, finds a community that have largely turned their back on these relations and in their place have re-established agroecological practices. These avail of contemporary technical expertise, but are rooted in a relearning of community links, values and symbols that have endured despite centuries of disruption.

Here too; however, the limitations placed on communities by capital; even where territorial sovereignty is assured, are revealed. At this intersection between monocultural commodity production and biodiverse and culturally plural food producing communities, it could be argued that the ultimate contradictions of capital are crystallised. Inherent to the uncontrollable and destructive tendency of capital is the inability to assure a future for labour, the force from which it derives value, thus jeopardising its own systemic reproduction (Mészáros 1995, 2018) This ‘corporeal’ rift (Foster & Clark 2018) accounts not just for how future generations are being robbed of conditions for human survival through ecological degradation and disruption of the biological metabolism of the human body in the present. The techno-scientific developments that underpin in-situ intensification and territorial expansion of production continue to generate hazardous waste and social costs that are passed on to the individual, the community or public sphere. There is the hard evidence of this in the injuries, physical and mental illness and deaths follow the planetary growth of capitalism as evidenced by some 3 million occupation illness and accidents annually (LaDou et al. 2018). Spectacular examples continue to appear as notorious cost cutting exercises of mega projects that insist on the most precarious of labour and lowering of safety standards have had devastating consequences. The Mariana dam collapse of 2014 that spread pollutants along 668 kilometres, killed 19 people (Fernandes et al. 2016) while the 2019 Brumadinho dam disaster claimed at least 270 lives in January 2019 (Armada & Souza 2019).

A more gradual corporeal rupture; however, can be traced to Brazil’s 21st century (re)turn to primary commodity production that has involved intensive research and development, favourable public investment and policy towards massive scale agroindustry (Leite & Wesz 2016). Since 2007, the country has vied with United States as the globe’s greatest consumer of agricultural chemicals. There has been an increase of 50% between 2007 and 2014 (Vasconceles 2018) and today Brazil consumes around 20% of all agrotoxins commercialised worldwide (Bombardi 2019). Sugarcane, corn and soyabean cultivation command 74% of all agricultural use of agrochemicals and the exponential increase in cultivated area for these crops into the Cerrado and Amazon biomes bring them into conflict with food producing communities (Bombardi 2019; Garvey et al. 2015). Aerial spraying, food and water contamination respect neither occupational nor territorial boundaries and are compromising the livelihoods of small farmers. These subjects, who continue to be the producers of most commonly consumed foods, have been squeezed by drastic cuts in support as evidenced by cuts to the Food Aquisition Programme (PAA). This programme guaranteed purchase from small farmers and stemmed from the struggles and demands of the rural social movements began in 2003. At its peak in 2012, government investment was $586.5 million Brazilian reais. This fell to R$241, 1 million in 2015, to R$181.8 million in 2016; to R$95.3 million in 2017, to only R $ 17.2 million in 2018 and received no investment in 2019. These cuts accompany a territorial squeeze by encroaching commodity production (Mitidiero Junior et al. 2018). Furthermore, their efforts to produce organic, toxin free varieties of food are compromised by this proximity to industrialised farming. The contamination of their produce, air, soils and water underpin the health concerns that they share with salaried employees, not uncommonly from their familial networks, that are tasked with toxin application. In research carried out in Goiás state, hosting the most dramatic 21st century sugar cane expansion (Garvey et al. 2019), the gendered divisions of labour were striking, with the numbers of a male dominated workforce within the distillery dwarfed by the labour intensive spraying in the plantations, where women dominated the workforce. They were tasked with applying these chemicals from 11 litre tanks strapped to their backs in temperatures of over 30 degrees (Bombardi & Garvey 2016), with scant time to change or shower within lunch breaks as per regulations, and returning home with contaminated clothes. Their concerns for their safety and that of those in their households are supported by statistics. Between 2007 and 2014 more than 25,000 cases on intoxication from agricultural chemicals were reported with 1,186 confirmed deaths. Some 10,911 of these were workplace incidents. The dissolution of work and domestic boundaries with implications for social reproduction are also evidenced. There were 343 cases of babies poisoned in the same period and the risk of congenital malformation through exposure to toxins such as acephate is the focus of research (Dutra & Ferreira 2017). When one considers that only one in every 50 cases of poisoning is officially reported, these figures can be read as an indication of the problem only. Related concerns over food contamination by consumers in urban centres, and hospitalisation of school children have led to civil society campaigns against agrotoxins (e.g. Campanha Permanente Contra os Agrotóxicos e Pela Vida) and engendered further site-specific epidemiological research on genetic damage and malformation through exposure to toxins (Dutra & Ferreira 2017; Pignati et al. 2014). Amid freezes to public expenditure and rising poverty and hunger since 2017, however, a renewed direct food provisions from agrarian communities to poor urban peripheries, to schools and hospitals, and development of solidarity and campaigning networks on toxins and healthy foods are instructive. Civil society is making these connections, as popular campaigns against agrochemicals and public assemblies involving concerned elected representatives and public ministry advocates are proving. Furthermore, agricultural chemical contamination of city water supplies is becoming increasingly apparent and forcing new considerations of rural-urban connections in Brazil (The Guardian 2019).

These socio-spatial dynamics of labour that are expressed within, without and against the productive processes of capital demonstrate a heterogeneity in class formation and the plurality of antagonistic capital-labour relations. Spontaneous strikes for better conditions take place in the same regions as struggles against proletarianisation, against mining and agroindustrial conglomerates as the extending circuits of commodities reconfigure productive spaces. The complexity of working class formation undoubtedly increases as it extends beyond the formal, conventional reference points. The proletariat sells its labour to lean factories, to subcontracted haulage workers, digital performance software developers, laboratory specialists and so on, but those workers, whose food producing livelihoods depend on access to the natural resources targeted by many of the same industries, are set in tension with capital. A dialectical, and class attentive reading of commodification acknowledges how a fragmentation of labour takes place across space and time but also how capital requires co-ordination and control, and, therefore, by necessity, connects previously disparate workers across time and space. This is considered further in the section below that posits opportunities and limits to class based resistance and transgression.

Centrality of labour

Labour is, ‘an eternal natural necessity which mediates the metabolism between man and nature, and therefore human life itself’. (Marx 1975: 133). Marx understood how capital disrupts the interaction between human kind and nature and, therefore, between humankind and work. Of the 21st century Mészáros (2018) remarks:

For the first time ever in history, human beings have to confront a mode of social metabolic control which can and must constitute itself – in order to reach its fully developed form – as a global system, demolishing all obstacles that stand in the way. (p. 45)

A long, difficult struggle for social transformation must be undertaken in order to reorganise labour relations and conceptions of production, which at the same time will mend the rift between nature and society. It is contended here that humanity must overcome the fragmentation of society and find this unity if it is to survive. Following decades of neoliberal policy and a now vexing panorama of counterrevolutionary processes, a renewal of a praxis of a socialist and emancipatory nature is timely.

Given that the successive deviations from an ideal of dignified work can be traced over the past three decades the problems may seem easily correctable. Understanding the historical trajectory underscores the insolubility of capital’s contradictions, manifest in the increasing periodicity of crises. As Huws (2019) has stated elsewhere, the Keynesian humpty dumpty can’t be put back together again. Given the scale of the problem, it is perhaps unsurprising that intervention is most commonly confined to the sphere of effects, rather than a sustained uprooting of the causes (Harvey 2015), and that activism too often falls into the ditch of least resistance (Mészáros 2018).

Above we have tried to sketch some manifestations of the living totality of work with differentiated and contradictory forms of expression across geographic and ontological space. The locus of these processes are concrete, material, and cultural expressions of workers' subjection to, resistance to, and detachment from, different types of exploitation and control, as exercised by local, national and international capital an across (agro)industrial sectors. In emphasising the centrality of labour to the project of capital, its transcendent historical component requires restating. The end of work and with it the proletariat (Bell 1973; Gorz 1982; Kurz 1991) has been refuted elsewhere by those who explain the value of labour, including the dead labour invested in machines, is both relevant and measurable at the global scale in which capital global circulates and accumulates wealth (e.g. Alves 2018; Antunes 2016). We are, however, witnessing on one hand the decrease of formal, registered employment with its associated social rights and, on the other, the actions that compromise and destroy the autonomous forms of work such as family and community labour involved in, for example, direct food production (Thomaz Junior 2018b).

The resurgence of Marxist thought that points to the metabolic relations between humankind and nature, and the disruption of these under capital provides fertile ground with which to analyse and make operational a broader conception of labour that accommodates the differentiated realities above and offer radical pathways to escape servitude. This urges a revisiting of the processes and values attached to labour within and without capital; and the historical materialist method to substantiate the labour capital antagonisms beyond the factory floor. This illuminates and a potential, revolutionary rupture to the social metabolism of capital, the territories and the spaces it dominates. In other words, the dialectical method that is attentive to capital’s inherent contradictions contains explanatory force for understanding, and linking, the concrete expressions of social struggles. Although the construction and induction of the class struggle is a result of class consciousness formation (Thompson 2009), it is not inevitable that workers recognise this consciousness as a class (Huws 2019), or that recognition necessary leads to transformation. In setting out particular objective conditions and locating work and labour agency across spatial, technical and epistemological divisions; however, unhelpful theoretical assumptions and related limitations to emancipatory praxis can transgressed.

Just as returning to a much romanticised Keynesian political economy that only ever held for a small corner of the globe is not possible, the notion of a solution to crises being found in return to small scale property relations and artisanal production also short circuits the commitment required to envisage and realise a future that is both socially and ecologically committed (Pye 2019). If Marx is to have a relevance beyond a useful analysis of capital and class, and labour as an antagonistic force within capital is to retain its revolutionary potential in theory and practice, then there is value in taking seriously his contention that a collective, metabolic restoration of human-nature interactions can be, ‘accomplished consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous development’ (Marx 1981: 43, as cited in Pye 2019: 5).

In this advocated return to the future, class is not defined a priori, but is a construction of both objective and subjective dimensions and emerges from the experiences of workers and their collective knowledge that embraces plural belief systems and values. Through struggles that widen the aperture on the class antagonisms, consciousness can be elevated to a revolutionary maturity as a product of the contradictions that reside in the relations of production (Luxembourg 2011). In the examples above, a permeability in the relations of production involve a contradictory but dialectical movement between work, environment and health (Thomaz Junior et al. 2016), as predatory capital expansion, degradation of chemical, environmental and labour protections overlap in new zones of production (Perpétua & Thomaz Junior 2016).

Disparate workers may be struggling to find each other across factory floors, fields, monitored gateways, virtual and domestic spheres of economic production; however, the statistics for occupational ill health and depression, exposure to risk and injury, pollution of air, waterways, foodstuffs and human cells, link geographically and occupationally discrete experiences and provide new conduits for communication between town and country, labourer and consumers.

Making visible these tensions and the systemic degradation of work, the social costs of production (met increasingly through privatised or unpaid care work) and also the potentialities for common cause are a necessary step to counter the capture of the labourers’ subjectivity within the social metabolism of capital and to imagine a reorganisation of labour in its own interests. It does not; therefore, serve the interests of the labouring classes to delink or further ignore the meaning of the struggles of the indigenous, Quilombolas and peasantry in all its diversity (tenant farmers, sharecroppers, extractive workers, artisanal fishing communities). Conversely, in the face of the isolation and enhanced political repression, particular attention to their distinct identities and organisation forms that are inviting the wrath of capital is merited.

This theoretical (re)construction requires us to rethink the fundamentals of capital-labour antagonism, which recognises the roles of diverse social subjects and their complex class identities, amid all sorts of territorial conflicts. Thompson (2009) was clear that ‘[. . .] theory cannot do without the reality of class conflict’ (p. 73). The contemporary conflicts across space demonstrate clearly that resistance and opposition to capital are not limited to the conventional understandings and representations of proletarianised labour within the immediate capitalist production of goods but arise on the margins of its commodified/non-commodified spaces. A fresh analytical framework need not advocate the resignation of trade unionism, nor diminish the centrality of the proletarian labour movement, and even less question Marxism as a theoretical-political-ideological reference. It is precisely the opposite. In practical terms, however, recent history is warning against elevating of the proletarian of the organised labour movement as the preferred representative of the working class, as the exclusive revolutionary subject. In the face of such fissures caused by the heterogeneity of working lives, the fragmentation and precariousness that affect the totality of work today it would appear unwise to limit our analyses to the technical-positivist division of scientific work. Instead, we can broaden the horizons to better interrogate the contradictions and the real existing struggles that lie beyond the immediate workplace but within the living and breathing totality of work (Thomaz Junior 2018a: 26).

Conclusion

This paper has sought to unveil the contemporary socio-spatial signature of capital and the implications of organisational and territorial restructuring of class formation, fragmentation and dynamics. With a focus on Brazil, which hosts massive-scale commodification through dam complexes, mines and agroindustry, the degradation of labour and environmental laws are shown to dovetail with expansion of commodity frontiers. Toyota inspired, lean processes and a hyper flexibility of labour that is facilitated by high unemployment make labour organisation difficult, especially as elitist and oppressive governance structures are retained and deepened under the current administration. Highly exploitative practices; however, whereby workers struggle to sustain a condition of work sufficient for their reproduction, generate responses that are demonstrated here to involve both spontaneous strikes and the incentive to escape the wage labour relation and return to the land. The prevalence of workers from urban peripheries among the landless movements underscore this point. Taking a turn to the land, and to the frontiers of commodity expansion, the paper explores the spatial centrality of labour; the specific content of the struggles and violent conflict in defined and contested places and territories that link with, further reveal and obstruct the spatial dynamics if capital. Hence, amid actions to protect or renew partial or full autonomy lie emancipatory and revolutionary potentialities. This territorial identification and demarcation of class conflict as a breathing expression of the labour movement invites us to consider, following Moreira (2012), the ways of building society and constructing space, or ‘counter-space’ to capitalist society. It is necessary to understand that there is a cohabitation of opposing subjects and classes based on a permanent conflict that is expressed between hegemony and counter-hegemony, subordination and resistance. Capital is a societal structure whose spatial content predicates, contains and reproduces class inequality, and also counter-space, that is, the spatial, ontological and epistemological expression of resistance (Heck 2017). This is why it is essential to grasp, interrogate and make linkages between the conflicts that arise forms of resistance of workers to proletarianization, exploitation, and degradation and those struggles for the claim to land, water, health, employment and housing as public goods.

It is not in the interest of a revolutionary praxis to constraint the concept, meaning and content of work and the working class (Thomaz Junior 2006) and hence limit the construction of alternatives built upon the front lines of grassroots mobilisations and their existing popular councils, direct actions and defence committees. Concrete answers may well lie in material and subjective realities of these contemporary class antagonisms between capital and labour, with lessons to help navigate the turbulent waters of the political economy. The increasing periodicity of capitalist crisis is undermining ‘there is no alternative’ argument among the populace. Public concern over ecological crisis, oil spills and dam collapses, can undermine the economic viability, or political legitimacy of particular productive trajectories (Ekers & Prudham 2018). The contemporary concerns over food safety, pesticide use and health concerns shared by workers and rural subjects, and consumers across borders.

In this regard the current political system in Brazil has, contradictorily, served to make class bonds more explicit in its implementation of elitist and divisive public policy; although there persists a disorientation of workers amid powerful media misinformation and disappointment with the previous Worker’s Party government. The latter’s appropriation of social movement proposals to purchase food from peasant agriculture to be distributed free of charge to the undernourished poor (the rural and urban) may have been viewed as progressive, but it also substituted the direct solidarity and class relations between peasant and worker/unemployed and across rural and urban locales (Reis 2015; Thomaz Junior 2006). Deepening environmental and economic uncertainty and the questions raised over food security by COVID-19 related restrictions may give fresh impetus to establishing territorial ‘zones’ of food production that rival the existing, state supported zones of agroindustry. The restoration of a use value to land/nature labour interactions and to town and country connections with a focus on food provision to the urban peripheries is an embryonic and feasible practical representation of the conceptual work developed here. This, of course, demands principled, political intervention and organisation that can link economic strategy to the social struggle for equality and democracy.

This paper contends that widening and deepening our conceptions of class and class struggle to integrate territorial, labour-capital antagonisms across rural and urban productive spaces is a key task in the development of transformative theory and practice. Addressing the personal and shared discontent under capitalism requires deconstructing the needs created and imposed by its social metabolism, making visible what makes us unwell, and rendering more clearly the connections between disparately situated workers within, without and against distinct economic structures of the governing ideology. The search and research for counter-hegemony and counter-space, effectively in line with the demands of workers and contemporary struggles, should rescue values based on the culture of collective mechanisms of organisation, and help to share the entire wealth of our class development, towards an emancipatory praxis.