Cartographies of Contemporary Class Struggles

Abstract

This essay provides an interdisciplinary analysis of the work of the Iconoclasistas, a Buenos Aires-based duo whose practice combines graphic art, counter-cartography, radical pedagogy, and militant research. The Iconoclasistas’ heterodox landscape illustrations and collectively produced maps demonstrate how various territorial conflicts in South America express class struggles that operate at multiple geographic scales. In so doing, they show how apparently local conflicts express dynamics of transnational capitalist accumulation, including its neocolonial character, while also revealing material relations between seemingly disparate popular struggles. This essay focuses on the Iconoclasistas’ early work representing urban life in Argentina from 2007, as well as on works addressing the deleterious effects of extractivism (or neoextractivism) created between 2007 and 2019. I argue that these works contribute to the insights of ecological Marxism by showing how contemporary processes of capitalist accumulation plunder nature and shape social and natural environments in ways that degrade the living conditions of people of the working and popular classes, as well as those of other species. The Iconoclasistas’ collective mapping workshops utilize techniques of Marxist pedagogy, while bringing attention to visual ideologies and ways spatial relations shape consciousness. This essay shows how this practice was influenced by the politics and organizational forms of recent social movements, and how it contributes to their production of knowledge. It also situates the Iconoclasistas’ work within a tradition of Marxist cultural praxis that values formal experimentation and that concerns itself with reworking the social relations of cultural production, distribution, and reception.