Kawsak Sacha: production of the common, social counter-production of nature and capitalist condensation

Abstract

How does the production of nature take place under communitarian forms or the ones found at the frontiers or peripheries of capitalist colonial expansion? How is the social-natural space being produced (or counter-produced) from the commons and communality? How is nature being thought or expressed in the representation and imagination of the natural world from these frontier spaces? The following essay proposes that the social production of the commons is closely related to a social counter-production of the natural space, which constitutes a form of deacumulation of the capitalist logic, thus resisting different forms of dispossession. A possible example of this counterproduction lies in the experience of resistance against oil extractivism of the Kichwa community of Sarayaku in the Ecuadorian Amazon. The life project of the community departs from the principles of Sumak Kawsay or Buen Vivir (good living), thus establishing a central concept: Kawsak Sacha, the jungle of beings. These new concept entails a “trascendental” conception of territorial space, where the emotional, psychological, physical and spiritual dimensions of the community are being projected.