ABSTRACT
The resistance on the extractive frontier has taken diverse forms, including social and political conflicts, and experimentation with alternative scenarios of transformative change. For example, the author begins this chapter by noting that many peasants and Indigenous peoples across the world live in communities that are implementing their own visions of the many new worlds that will be part of the global reorganisation underway. Furthermore, these communities are enriching this local practice with a systematisation of their cosmologies, creating effective models of social, political and environmental organisation that lend authority to their claims to be able to manage their territories autonomously.
In this chapter, the author moves beyond the issue of extractivist conflict and resistance to the broader question that has bedevilled the critics and opponents of capitalism throughout the 20th century: the search for an agency of revolutionary change and social transformation. On this point, he advances the argument that the communities on the extractive frontier could possibly or very well serve as an agent of transformative change, reviving the search for and dwindling hopes on the political left for a social force with the capacity to instigate if not lead a process of revolutionary change.
