Ownership, inequality and class formation in socio-ecological transformation conflicts.

The project examines the twofold structural change of and through ownership based on overlaps between class struggles and social conflicts rooted in ecological issues. It sets out to develop an ownership-based, heuristic approach to class with reference to four discrete types of ownership: private means of production, power of control, social property and collective ownership of nature.

The principal hypothesis underlying the research assumes that the old, democratically contained industrial class conflict is successively becoming a socio-ecological transformation conflict whose dynamism is affecting and, quite probably, changing the hegemonic ownership structure of capitalist societies.