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HP07 - Metamorphoses of Capitalism, ecological and social crises: questions and possibilities

Convened by Marcelo Moreira (Universidade Estadual de Goiás, Brazil, and Centre for African and Development Studies (CEsA), Lisbon School of Economics and Management, University of Lisbon, Portugal), Arlindo Fortes and Sónia Frias (CEsA)

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Since the end of the 1960s, the accumulation process “sustained” by parasitic and speculative capital, shows that the global economy is immersed in generalized inertia, with slow accumulation, low investment, and limited growth rates, but with a high level of profit, which is caused by intense pressure on the levels of existing inequalities, combining global restructuring of wealth and income generation with a pattern of reproduction of the labour force at the level of its limited maintenance. This inertia is intensified from the productive-financial crisis of the years 2008-2009. In all this process, the shock of the new coronavirus exposed a health-economic-civilization crisis, by making explicit the failure of the globalizing process as an ideology and as a civilizing process, in its essence based on volatile production and consumption structures and globalized financialization of capital, under the purposes of the dominance of parasitic and speculative capital over substantive capital. The crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic, in these terms, reveal the effects of the advanced industrial civilization with its offensive dynamics of reproduction of material life, supported by an exhaustively exploitation of natural resources. All these changing aspects will end up resulting in an intense ecological crisis, accentuated by the dynamics of accumulation focused on global finance, reproducing, and making harder the conditions of cultural, economic, intellectual, political, and social life of the poor, namely the working people, the family producers and peasants, riverine populations, and of traditional populations in the Global South. It is expected from this panel, the space for reflection on development experiences constitution, from studies and research that express new analysis methods and strategies development as counter-hegemonic responses to the capitalist offensive described above, with description of structural conditions (territorial, socioeconomic and confrontation actions) in which such strategies take place and their effects on the living conditions of the groups mentioned here. Therefore, in the light of political economy and agrarian and economic geographies, are welcome contributions from specialists, researchers and practitioners who interrelate the central question of this panel to the challenges and possibilities that arise in terms of local territorial realities and dynamics.