Tamara Ortega-Uribe
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz
Tomas Ocampo
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz
Extractivism is derived from the word “extract” or “extraction.” To extract is to take something out using effort or force, while extraction refers to the act or process of extracting something. Typically, extraction refers to obtaining a substance or resource, such as natural resources like metals or oil, via physical force—to literally remove them from their location. However, the word extract can reference any kind of extraction, from digital information to labor and culture. Extractivism today is used to reference many of these other “frontiers” from which something can be extracted, not just extractive industries of natural resources (Riofrancos 2020). Additionally, the concept of extractivism is related to the Spanish word extractivismo, which refers to the discourse of “left-intellectuals and grassroots activists in Latin America” on the extractive model (extractivism) that has been adopted by several Latin American governments (Riofrancos 2020). As such, extractivism for them is a political and economic model of accumulation, or appropriation, founded on intensive and extensive exploitation of natural resources (Riofrancos 2020; Svampa 2019). Therefore, extractivism concerns the intensive exploitation of natural resources under a capitalist mode of production, and the social struggles resulting from the impacts of extractivist activities. In this sense, the term extractivism connects the theoretical concept to political contestation (Gudynas 2013). However, despite the increasing attention to the topic, especially in Spanish speaking countries, the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language still does not include the term extractivismo (Acosta 2013).
Extractivism refers not only to natural resource extraction but also large-scale excavation activities of renewable and non-renewable resources that “are not processed (or processed only to a limited degree), especially for export” (Acosta 2013, 62). Similarly, Eduardo Gudynas (2013) contends that the concept of extractivism should include three dimensions: volume of resources extracted; intensity of extraction; and destination of the resource. In this sense, extractivism is a particular case of extraction of natural resources, in large volume or high intensity, which are essentially oriented to be exported as raw materials without or with minimal manufacturing (Gudynas 2013, 3). Some activities included in this understanding of extractivism are mining, hydrocarbons, export monocultures, and fisheries (Gudynas 2013); hydraulic fracturing for unconventional gas (known as “fracking”), coal and oil extraction; gold, copper and ore mineral mining, and the surrounding infrastructure including roads, pipelines and storage facilities; large-scale single-crop or cash-crop plantations (i.e. palm, soy) that do not support or feed surrounding communities; projects that take critical water sources from communities and ecosystems, such as hydroelectric dams and commercial water bottling operations; corporate- and profit-driven renewable energy and climate mitigation projects carried out at the expense of rights of indigenous peoples and local communities (Columban Center for Advocacy and Outreach).
These activities have caused immense environmental damages —in some cases irreversible damages— and lead to deleterious social consequences, including: deforestation and biodiversity loss; acidification of soils and water in natural run-off, which pollute rivers, seas, air, and soils; massive holes in the ground/earth; the toxification of soil and ecosystems from the use of toxic chemicals in minerals extraction; public health problems resulting from toxic waste and polluted water; forced displacement of peoples; negatively altered traditional ways of life and means of subsistence; impoverishment and unemployment; division of communities; destruction of indigenous peoples’ sacred places; and the violation of human rights, discrimination, persecution, and criminalization of social activists. In this sense, the definition of extractivism is deeply linked to the social and environmental transformations carried out historically by extraction as an economic model, unevenly distributed across geographies and axes of social difference. As such, the extractive economic model is a type of accumulation based on an over-exploitation of natural resources as well as the expansion of frontiers to territories formerly considered ‘unproductive’, building large-scale projects of transport, communication and infrastructure with high levels of capital investments and risks for society, the economy and environment (Svampa 2012).
Extractivism is sustained by extractivist industries that export raw materials, while domestic industries are underdeveloped. This causes enclave economies, where the primary export activities are not integrated in the rest of the economy, inputs and technologies are imported, a significant proportion of technical staff is recruited from abroad, and do not foster national industrial chains, thus remaining tied to international financial markets and fluctuations (Acosta 2013; Gudynas 2013; Svampa 2012). In addition, the increasing complexity of the global capitalist economy has put into practice a sort of subordination of industrial activities, which are subordinated under financial logic, changing traditional structures and processes of industrial paradigm (Gago & Mezzadra 2017), showing thus the evolving but dependent nature of the extractive sector.
Additionally, extractivism does not refer only to particular activities, but is part of a specific mode of accumulation (Acosta 2013), or as a development model itself (Wolff 2017; Brand et al., 2016), because extractivist activities are deeply rooted in transnational commodities flows and are part of the territorial unevenness of global capitalism (Riofrancos 2020). The topic has been widely developed by contemporary Latin American scholars, highlighting the colonialist implications of extractivism. Certainly, Latin America and the Caribbean have historically experienced extractivism as a structuring model of the region. It constituted an economic mechanism of colonial and neocolonial capitalist plunder, appropriation (Acosta 2013), and dispossession, which unfolded in the Americas, Africa and Asia. Therefore, extractivism is deeply linked to the colonial capitalist system. However, the important changes carried out by neoliberal capitalism has marked a different tendency of the extractivism model. The commodity boom at the beginning of the twentieth first century has marked the increasing growth in the exportation of natural resources, causing what Maristella Svampa and Enrique Viale (2014) called the transition from the Washington Consensus to the Commodities Consensus. Indeed, in recent years, extractivism has spread throughout Latin America and beyond, precisely because of international demand. However, despite the historical nature of extractivism, it has acquired recent aspects based on new types, scales, speed, and integration of extractivism across environments/societies. The result is that extractive ventures are approved and implemented to serve export interests, perpetuating the subordination and dependence of those countries. As a result, the capacities of national governments to regulate extractivism are limited and subordinated (Gudynas 2013).
Problematizing the structural nature of extractivism, scholars have developed Marxist perspectives that understand extractivism as an economic problem internal to capitalism regarding the ever growing and intensive use of energy in the capitalist accumulation process (Diamanti 2018). Extractivism thus represents a technical system of processing nature through labor, introducing greater transformation. In this sense, it is a technical form of the capitalist mode of production, rather than a mode of production itself. Nevertheless, any mode of accumulation develops certain relationships between human beings and nature, and according to Alvaro García Linera (2013) all societies, capitalist or non-capitalist, have performed a certain level of extractivist activities. As such, extractivism constitutes a specialization in the productive activities within capitalist societies, based on the colonial and post-colonial division of labor and production throughout the world. As a consequence, dependent economies on the extraction and exportation of raw materials are located mostly -but not exclusively- in certain places in the world, such as Latin America and Africa. However, other analyses offer different and new perspectives to understand the extractive industries into transnational supply chains, based on Marx’s analysis of the circulation of capital (Arboleda 2020b) and the financial exploitation in contemporary capitalism that operate under extractive modes (Gago & Mezzadra 2017).
The complexities of extractivism have opened new analysis and conceptualizations and the concept has acquired new striking paths from different approaches and fields, pluralizing the initial idea of extraction of natural resources, and turning towards urban extractivism, data extractivism, financial extractivism, and green or aeolian extractivism (Riofrancos, 2020). Recent studies point out that extractivism has even moved to extra-global frontiers like lunar and outer space landscapes (Klinger 2017), or raise the idea of deterritorialized extraction, which transforms the spatio-temporal processes of extractive industries, including the nonhuman nature in the production of value (Labban 2014). Regardless, the political debate around extractivism identifies certain continuities and variegated forms it acquired regarding different political projects, mainly placed in Latin America, showing the discursive/ideological realm of the term. For instance, the idea of “neoliberal” extractivism versus “neo-” or “progressive” extractivism (Burchardt and Dietz 2014; Gudynas 2009), which shows the structural continuities of an extractive imperative in the region (Arsel et al. 2016). The most prominent conceptual stem is neo-extractivism. Neo-extractivism refers to the continued reliance on extractive activities under a nationalist developmental stance to improve the social welfare of the population through the benefits of exportation of raw materials (Acosta 2013), a criticism that Latin American scholars have pointed out against progressive governments, mainly the so-called pink tide. The central claim of this criticism is that progressive governments in Latin America continued the same extractive economic model rather than moving towards a new economic model.
Some scholars have posited that neo-extractivism maintained and reproduced key elements of the extractivism from the colonial period (Acosta 2013; Gudynas 2013). In this sense, neo-extractivism maintained the same structure that subordinates Latin America’s position in global markets, something that some scholars have called the extractive imperialism (Veltmeyer & Petras 2015), and from a different perspective, the resource imperialism in late capitalism (Arboleda 2020a).
On the other hand, neo-extractivism is not only linked to progressive governments in Latin America, but to different countries and realities especially since the year 2000 as part of a new phase in the capitalist development and socio-ecological transformation (Brand et al. 2016). According to some scholars, “neo-extractivism is not only an economic/technical form of resource appropriation or a renaissance of the Latin American economic model, but rather should be seen as a central expression of political domination, in which the material, cultural, and socio-political dimensions and conflicts of a new development model coalesce” (Brand et al. 2016, 150). Based on this perspective, we are facing a neo-extractivist development model or transformation in the capitalist mode of accumulation, which we can think of as a geography of extraction that transcends the focus on intensity and scale of natural resources because it is rooted in the internal dynamics of the production of value at the world scale (Arboleda 2020a). Similarly, Veronica Gago and Sandro Mezzadra (2017) have pointed out the need to expand the notion of extractivism considering contemporary processes of valorization and accumulation of capital, where current development models of capitalism take place, alongside social struggles and progressive governments of Latin America. Thus, a new notion of extractivism comprises other economic domains, such as finance, real estate, logistics, digital technology, and knowledge (Gago & Mezzadra 2017; Arboleda 2020a). In this sense, there are no such continuities in the development model, leaving peripheral extractives spaces in a strictly subordinated position, but a new phase of contemporary capitalism, where a critique of neo-extractivism should expand the category of exploitation, including financialization, and rethink dispossession (Gago & Mezzadra 2017).
Finally, another recent debate seeks to elaborate knowledge toward alternatives to extractivism, such as post-extractivism, Buen Vivir or Sumak Kawsay, the ecosocial pact, economic degrowth or stationary growth (Riofrancos 2020; Arsel et al. 2016). These proposals seek to promote a “re-encounter with indigenous worldviews in which human beings not only coexist in harmony with Nature but form part of it” (Acosta 2013, 81). These efforts stem from calls from scholars and activists to rethink how communities and governments can move beyond extractivism, and from indigenous groups and movements that have long witnessed – and felt – the effects of extractivism on their territories. Whatever direction a “post-extractivism” future holds, the rich debate on extractivism and its many delineations and perspectives continues. Some ongoing questions are related to the links between the criticisms from post and anti-extractivism, and the possibilities for a structural change, just transitions, climate justice, and indigenous sovereignty, among others. The continued relevance of these debates are significant issues to many academic disciplines including political economy.
[1] The author acknowledges the members of the Extractivism and Society Research Cluster at University of California Santa Cruz, for the meaningful conversations and contributions to this definition.
(See Accumulation, Enclave, Fossil Fuels, Nature, Neocolonialism, Primitive Accumulation, Sovereignty)
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