Strategy in/for progressive transformation: A pluri-scalar war of position

Abstract

This chapter addresses the strategic-processual question of how collective action may generate an alternative, counter-hegemonic structure or counter-spatiality within the constraints of the prevailing historical structure, against the accumulated power of global capital. In the context of a resurgent interest among the global left in the question of strategy, this chapter develops the concept of “pluri-scalar war of position”. The concept is grounded in earlier socio-spatial ethnographic research into the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA-TCP) and Petrocaribe. As a geographical relational approach to transformative praxis, the pluri-scalar war of position integrates neo-Gramscian concepts with critical human geography. Thus, the chapter argues for the importance of capturing state power on the one hand, and for a politics of place-space-scale to transform the existing power geometries on the other. The chapter underscores that a transformative politics needs to gain from greater engagement with place-space-scale as objects of inquiry, while aiming to increase the visibility of pluri-scalar war of position for progressive academia and activism.