Communities Against Capital ? Unravelling the Politics of Resistance to Colombia ’ s Agro

In the past decade, a new project of agrarian capitalism has emerged in the Colombian countryside driven by the expansion of commercial agribusinesses, particularly in palm oil. This process is often referred to as an emergent form of agrarian extractivism or land-grabbing. While for the Colombian government, this agro-extractivist project represents one of the main locomotives driving the economic growth strategy, for peasant, indigenous and afro-Colombian community activists, these rapid changes threaten their ecosystems and ways of life. Indeed, it is clear that the rapid expansion of extractivist agriculture has been contested with a new cycle of resistance from local communities. Yet the emergence and character of this resistance are more diverse and complex than is commonly believed. Taking a comparative case study of two peasant communities in the Magdalena Medio region of Colombia, this paper explores the divergent class basis, political interventions, strategies and practices conditioning the the political reactions to landgrabbing ‘from below’. In one case, the outcome was ‘subordinated incorporation’ of peasants into the agro-extractivist regime, while in the other the outcome was the formation of a peasant resistance movement. What these cases show is that the common presentation of a homogenous peasant ‘way of life’ as confronting capitalism can be misleading, and peasant resistance is not the only, or even the most likely political reaction to agro-extractivism. The conclusions of this study are relevant both to our understanding of the political dynamics of land-grabbing as well as discussions related to peasants, class and social movements.