{"id":259121,"date":"2024-04-15T12:00:14","date_gmt":"2024-04-15T11:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=259121"},"modified":"2024-04-10T05:53:23","modified_gmt":"2024-04-10T04:53:23","slug":"extractivism-in-the-anthropocene","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/04\/extractivism-in-the-anthropocene\/","title":{"rendered":"Extractivism in the Anthropocene"},"content":{"rendered":"

April 2024<\/em> – Over the last decade and a half, the concept of extractivism has emerged as a key element in our understanding of the planetary ecological crisis. Although the development of extractive industries on a global scale has been integral to the capitalist mode of production since its onset, commencing with the colonial expansion of the long sixteenth century, this took on a much larger worldwide significance with the advent of the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, marking the beginning of the age of fossil capital. Nevertheless, it was only with the Great Acceleration, beginning in the mid-twentieth century and extending to the present, that the quantitative<\/i> expansion of global production and of resource extraction in particular led to a qualitative<\/i> transformation in the human relation to the Earth System as a whole. This has given rise to the Anthropocene Epoch in geological history, in which anthropogenic (as opposed to nonanthropogenic) factors for the first time in Earth history constitute the major determinants of Earth System change.1<\/sup><\/a> In the Anthropocene, extractivism has become a core symptom of the planetary disease of late capitalism\/imperialism, threatening humanity and the inhabitants of the earth in general.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Illustration by Dio Cramer for \u201cExtractivism in the Anthropocene,\u201d previously published in Science for the People, vol. 25, no. 2 (Autumn 2022)<\/p><\/div>\n

The Great Acceleration is dramatically depicted by the Anthropocene Working Group of the International Commission on Stratigraphy in the form of a series of twenty-four charts, each showing a hockey stick-shaped curve of economic expansion, resource depletion, and overloading planetary sinks, representing a sudden speeding-up and scaling-up of the human impact on the earth, similar to the famous hockey stick chart on increases in global average temperature associated with climate change.2<\/sup><\/a> Viewed in this way, the Great Acceleration is seen as having brought the Holocene Epoch of the last 11,700 years of geological history to a sudden end, ushering in the Anthropocene Epoch and the current planetary crisis.<\/p>\n

Recent research has shown two separate periods where global resource use\u2014including all biomass, minerals, fossil fuel energy, and cement production\u2014has increased much more rapidly than global carbon emissions: the first resource-use acceleration occurring in 1950\u201370 and the second acceleration in 2000\u201315.3<\/sup><\/a> The first resource acceleration is associated with the rapid economic expansion of North America, Western Europe, and Japan after the Second World War; the second resource acceleration coincided with the rapid growth of China, India, and other emerging economies beginning around 2000. In the case of the wealthy capitalist countries or \u201cdeveloped economies,\u201d resource use per capita has tended to level off in recent years, while remaining at levels far beyond overall sustainability from a limits-to-growth perspective. Yet, much of this apparent leveling off in per capita natural resource use in the Global North has been due to the outsourcing of world industrial production to the Global South, while world consumption of goods and services remains highly concentrated in the Global North, associated with an \u201cimperial mode of living.\u201d4<\/sup><\/a> In 2016, the Global Material Flows and Resource Productivity Report<\/i> of the UN Environment Programme indicated that \u201csince 1990 there has been little improvement in global material efficiency [that is, efficiency in the extraction and use of primary materials per unit of GDP]. In fact, efficiency started to decline around 2000.\u201d5<\/sup><\/a> Global extraction of materials tripled in the four decades prior to the 2016 report.6<\/sup><\/a> These conditions have resulted in an acceleration of extractivist pressures in key regions throughout the earth, particularly in the Global South.<\/p>\n

In many countries in the Global South, particularly in Latin America and Africa, primary commodities, including both agriculture and fossil fuels\/minerals, dominate the export economy, reminiscent of an earlier age. In 2019, percentages of primary commodities in merchandise trade exports were as high as 67 percent in Brazil and 82 percent in both Chile and Uruguay. In Algeria, dependence on the export of fossil fuels is almost complete, now accounting for 94 percent of the value of its merchandise trade exports.7<\/sup><\/a> In Latin America, in particular, the import-substitution industrialization era of the early post-Second World War years, which promoted manufacturing, has been succeeded by the recent era of accelerated resource extraction and by a new dependence on primary commodities, including both agricultural goods and fuels\/minerals. In 2017, natural resource rents (including mineral, oil, natural gas, and forestry rents) accounted for 43 percent of GDP in the Republic of Congo.8<\/sup><\/a> In Africa, the drive for resources and new agricultural lands has fueled vast land grabs throughout the continent, made possible by the failure of the decolonization process in securing the rights to the land for Indigenous populations.9<\/sup><\/a> In island nations around the globe, fishing and resource rights over vast ocean territories have been ceded to multinational corporations as the ocean commons are being intensively exploited.10<\/sup><\/a> New technologies have led to a global race for new rare minerals, as in the case of lithium mining.11<\/sup><\/a> A vast financialization of the earth, in which international finance based in the Global North is taking over the commodification and management of ecosystem services, primarily in the Global South, is now underway.12<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Nor is this acceleration of resource extraction and extractive infrastructure confined simply to the periphery of the capitalist world economy. The United States is now the world\u2019s largest oil producer, as well as the world\u2019s largest oil consumer. There are 730,000 miles of oil and gas pipelines worldwide, equal to thirty times the circumference of the earth. The United States and Canada alone account for about 260,000 miles of fossil fuel pipelines, or over a third of the world\u2019s total.13<\/sup><\/a> In Canada, primary commodities in 2019 accounted for 43 percent of export value in merchandise trade, while in Australia it was 81 percent.14<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

The ecological consequences of all these trends are catastrophic, extending all the way from the devastation of the land and communities up to climate change and the destruction of a human-habitable planet. Fifty years after The Limits to Growth<\/i> report was published by the Club of Rome, resource depletion is following what it referred to as its threatening \u201cstandard scenario,\u201d with the result that the very existence of planet Earth as a home for humanity and innumerable other species is endangered.15<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

In Latin America in particular these conditions and their effects on the ground have led to the development of extractivism as a critical concept, which in recent theoretical discussions has often taken on an expansive meaning, encompassing wide aspects of capitalism and forms of exploitation. Numerous academic analyses have sought to stretch the notion to account for the entire set of economic, political, cultural, and ecological problems of modern times, largely displacing capitalism itself, encompassing questions as varied as modernity, violence, production, exploitation, environmental destruction, digitalization, and the new \u201contological assemblages\u201d of the so-called \u201cnew materialists.\u201d16<\/sup><\/a> For such thinkers, extractivism is viewed as the insatiable source of capitalist modernity\u2019s destructive and nonreproductive drive to commodify and consume all life and all existence, what some theorists refer to as \u201ctotal extractivism\u201d or the \u201cworld eater.\u201d Such views end up displacing the critical concept of capital accumulation itself, as well as removing attention from the very concrete popular struggles occurring at the ground level against extractivist capital.17<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

For this reason, the Uruguayan ecological critic Eduardo Gudynas, a leading Latin American analyst of extractivism, has insisted that the concept be approached in relation to modes of production\/appropriation, giving extractivism a very definite meaning directed at the development of a broad political-economic-ecological critique. Gudynas specifically objects to what he sees as the loose academic approach that now proposes vague and ambiguous \u201clabels for extractivism such as \u2018financial,\u2019 \u2018cultural,\u2019 \u2018musical,\u2019 and \u2018epistemological,’\u201d creating endless sources of confusion and removing the concept from its basis in political economy and ecological critique. \u201cExtractivism,\u201d he writes, \u201ccannot be used as a synonym for development or even for an exporting primary economy. There is no such thing as extractivist development\u2026. Extractivisms\u2026do not account for the structure and function of an entire national economy, which includes many other sectors, activities and institutions.\u201d18<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Gudynas\u2019s own theory of extractivisms, which will be a central focus of what follows, can be seen as having arisen out of the broad historical-materialist tradition. Thus, to understand the significance of his work, it is necessary to situate it within a larger historical-materialist tradition, going back to the classical analysis of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, related to issues of the appropriation\/expropriation of nature, extractive industries, and the metabolic rift. In this way, it is possible to provide the foundations for a critique of extractivism in the Anthropocene.<\/p>\n

<\/section>\n
<\/section>\n
<\/section>\n
<\/section>\n
\n

Marx and the Expropriation of Nature<\/h2>\n

The notion of \u201cextractive industry\u201d dates back to Marx in the mid-nineteenth century. He divided production into four spheres: extractive industry, agriculture, manufacturing, and transport. Extractive industry was seen by him as constituting the sector of production in which \u201cthe material for labour is provided directly by Nature, such as mining, hunting, fishing (and agriculture, but only insofar as it starts by breaking up virgin soil).\u201d19<\/sup><\/a> In general, Marx drew a line between extractive industry and agriculture, insofar as the latter was not dependent on raw materials from outside agriculture, but was capable of building up from within, given agriculture\u2019s reproductive, as opposed to nonreproductive, characteristics. This, however, did not prevent him, in his theory of metabolic rift, from seeing capitalist industrial agriculture as expropriative, and in ways that we now call extractivist.<\/p>\n

Some of Marx\u2019s most critical comments with regard to the capitalist mode of production are directed at mining as the quintessential extractive industry. In his discussion of coal mining in the third volume of Capital<\/i>, he treats the absolute neglect of the conditions of the coal miners, resulting in an average loss of life of fifteen people a day in England. This led him to comment that capital \u201csquanders human beings, living labour, more readily than does any other mode of production, squandering not only flesh and blood but nerves and brains as well.\u201d20<\/sup><\/a> But the destructive effects of extractive industry and of capital in general, for Marx, were not restricted to the squandering of flesh and blood, but also extended to the squandering of raw materials.21<\/sup><\/a> Moreover, Engels, in writing to Marx, famously discussed the \u201csquandering\u201d of fossil fuels, and coal in particular.22<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

In interviews that he gave responding to radical and Indigenous movements against extractivism, Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa rhetorically asked: \u201cLet\u2019s see, se\u00f1ores marxistas<\/i>, was Marx opposed to the exploitation of natural resources?\u201d The implication was that Marx would not have opposed contemporary extractivism. In response, ecological economist Joan Martinez-Alier pointed to Marx\u2019s famous analysis indicating that \u201ccapitalism leads to a \u2018metabolic rift.\u2019 Capitalism is not capable of renewing its own conditions of production; it does not replace the nutrients, it erodes the soils, it exhausts or destroys renewable resources (such as fisheries and forests) and non-renewable ones (such as fossil fuels and minerals).\u201d On this basis, Mart\u00ednez-Alier contends that Marx, though he did not live to see global climate change, \u201cwould have sided with Climate Justice.\u201d23<\/sup><\/a> Indeed, the extraordinary growth of the Marxian ecological critique, building on Marx\u2019s analysis in Capital<\/i> of the \u201cnegative, i.e., destructive side\u201d of capitalist production in his theory of metabolic rift, has provided the world with penetrating insights into every aspect of the contemporary planetary crisis.24<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Not only was the expropriation of land and bodies recognized in Marx\u2019s analysis, but the earth itself could be expropriated in the sense that the conditions of its reproduction were not maintained, and natural resources were \u201crobbed\u201d or \u201csquandered.\u201d<\/p>\n

Key to a historical-materialist analysis of extractivism is Marx\u2019s analysis of what he called \u201coriginal expropriation,\u201d a term that he preferred to what the classical-liberal political economists called \u201cprevious, or original accumulation\u201d (often misleadingly translated as \u201cprimitive accumulation\u201d).25<\/sup><\/a> For Marx, \u201cso-called primitive [original] accumulation,\u201d as he repeatedly emphasized, was not accumulation<\/i> at all, but rather expropriation<\/i> or appropriation without equivalent.26<\/sup><\/a> Taking a cue from Karl Polanyi\u2014and in line with Marx\u2019s argument\u2014we can also refer to expropriation as appropriation without reciprocity<\/i>.27<\/sup><\/a> Expropriation was evident in the violent seizure of the commons in Britain. But \u201cthe chief moments of [so-called] primitive accumulation\u201d in the mercantilist era, providing the conditions for \u201cthe genesis of the industrial capitalist,\u201d lay in the expropriation of lands and bodies through the colonial \u201cconquest and plunder\u201d of the entire external area\/periphery of the emerging capitalist world economy. This was associated, Marx wrote, with \u201cthe extirpation, enslavement, and entombment in mines of the Indigenous population\u201d in the Americas, the whole transatlantic slave trade, the brutal colonization of India, and a massive drain of resources\/surplus from the colonized areas that fed European development.28<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Crucial to this analysis was Marx\u2019s very careful distinction between appropriation<\/i>, understood in its most general sense as the basis of all property forms and all modes of production, and those particular forms of appropriation, such as for-profit expropriation<\/i> and wage-based exploitation<\/i> that characterized the regime of capital. Marx conceived appropriation in general<\/i> as rooted in the free appropriation from nature, and thus as a material prerequisite of human existence, leading to the formation thereby of various forms of property, with private property constituting only one such form, which became dominant only under capitalism. This general historical theoretical approach gave rise to Marx\u2019s concept of the \u201cmode of appropriation\u201d underlying the mode of production.29<\/sup><\/a> These distinctions were to play an important role in his later ethnological writings, and his identification with the active resistance to the expropriation of the lands of Indigenous communities in Algeria and elsewhere.30<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Not only was the expropriation of land and bodies recognized in Marx\u2019s analysis, but the earth itself could be expropriated in the sense that the conditions of its reproduction were not maintained, and natural resources were \u201crobbed\u201d or \u201csquandered.\u201d31<\/sup><\/a> This was particularly the case with capitalism, in which the appropriation of nature generally took a clear, expropriative form. In Marx\u2019s analysis, the free appropriation of nature by human communities, constituting the basis of all production, was seen as having metamorphosed under capitalism into the more destructive form of \u201ca free gift of Nature to capital<\/i>,\u201d no longer geared primarily to the reproduction of life, the earth, and community as one ultimately indivisible whole, but rather dedicated solely to the valorization of capital.32<\/sup><\/a> The robbery<\/i> of the earth and the metabolic rift<\/i>\u2014or the \u201cirreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism\u201d between humanity and nature\u2014were thus closely interwoven.33<\/sup><\/a> Although some contemporary theorists have attempted to define extractivism as meaning simply the nonreproduction of nature, it is more theoretically meaningful to view this in line with Marxian ecology in terms of what Marx called the robbery or expropriation of nature, of which extractivism is simply a particularly extreme and crucial form.<\/p>\n

Gudynas and the Extractivist Surplus<\/h2>\n

These conceptual foundations arising out of Marx\u2019s classical ecological critique allow us to appreciate more fully the pathbreaking insights into extractivism provided by Gudynas in his recent book, Extractivisms<\/i>. A crucial point of departure in his analysis is the concept of modes of appropriation<\/i>. In his pioneering 1985 work Underdeveloping the Amazon<\/i>, environmental sociologist Stephen G. Bunker introduced the notion of \u201cmodes of extraction\u201d to address the issue of extractive industry and its nonreproductive character, contrasting this to Marx\u2019s larger concept of \u201cmodes of production.\u201d34<\/sup><\/a> Gudynas claims that Bunker was generally on the right track. However, in contrast to Bunker, Gudynas does not adopt the category of modes of extraction. Nor does he retain Marx\u2019s notion of modes of production, arguing unaccountably that Marx\u2019s concept has been \u201cabandoned,\u201d citing anthropologist and anarchist activist David Graeber. Rather, Gudynas turns to the concept of \u201cmodes of appropriation,\u201d while seemingly unaware of the theoretical connection between appropriation<\/i> and production<\/i> and between modes of appropriation<\/i> and modes of production<\/i> that Marx had constructed in the Grundrisse<\/i>, and how this is related to current Marxian research into these categories.35<\/sup><\/a> Still, Gudynas\u2019s modes-of-appropriation approach allows him to distinguish between human appropriation from the natural environment in general and what he refers to as \u201cextractivist modes of appropriation,\u201d which violate conditions of natural and social reproduction.<\/p>\n

Gudynas defines extractivism itself in terms of processes that are excessive as measured by three characteristics: (1) physical indicators<\/i> (volume and weight), (2) environmental intensity<\/i>, and (3) destination<\/i>, with extractivism seen as inherently related to colonialism and imperialism, requiring that the product be exported in the form of primary commodities.36<\/sup><\/a> Not all appropriation of nature carried out by extractive industries is extractivist. This is perhaps clearest in his short piece, \u201cWould Marx Be an Extractivist?\u201d As in Mart\u00ednez-Alier\u2019s response to Correa, Gudynas states:<\/p>\n

Marx did not reject mining. Most of the social movements do not reject it, and if their claims are heard carefully, it will be found that they are focused on a particular kind of enterprise: large scale, with huge volumes removed, intensive and open-pit. In other words, don\u2019t confuse mining with extractivism\u2026. Marx, in Latin America today, would not be an extractivist, because that would mean abandoning the goal of transforming the modes of production, becoming a bourgeois economist. On the contrary, he would be promoting alternatives to [the dominant mode of] production, and that means, in our present context, moving toward post-extractivism.37<\/sup><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Today\u2019s global extractivism, what Martin Arboleda has called The Planetary Mine<\/i>, is identified with \u201cgeneralized-monopoly capital\u201d and conditions of \u201clate imperialism.\u201d38<\/sup><\/a> A central concern of Gudynas\u2019s work is a critique of the renewed imperial dependency in the Global South resulting from neo-extractivism, raising the question of \u201cdelinking from globalization\u201d as perhaps the only radical alternative.39<\/sup><\/a> A similar view was powerfully developed by James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer in their Extractive Imperialism<\/i>, which described the new extractivism as a new imperialist model, forcing countries into a new dependency, the ground for which had been prepared by the neoliberal restructuring that virtually annihilated many of the earlier forces of production in agriculture and industry.40<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Gudynas\u2019s signal contribution, however, lies in his attempt to connect extractivism to the concept of surplus in order to explain the economic and ecological losses associated with the reliance on extractivist modes of appropriation. Here, he relies on the concept of economic surplus developed by Paul A. Baran in The Political Economy of Growth<\/i> in the 1950s, which was designed to operationalize Marx\u2019s surplus value calculus in line with a critique that had rational economic planning as its yardstick.41<\/sup><\/a> Gudynas notes that in Baran\u2019s concept of economic surplus, in conformity with Marx\u2019s surplus value, \u201cground rent and interest on money capital\u201d are components of total surplus rather than production costs. In introducing the concept of economic surplus, Baran sought to reveal what were, in capitalist accounting, essentially disguised<\/i> forms, as Gudynas puts it, of the \u201cappropriation of the surplus.\u201d42<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Employing this idea, Gudynas seeks to add to the economic or social<\/i> dimension of surplus, based on the exploitation of labor, two environmental<\/i> dimensions of the surplus in the context of extractivist modes of appropriation. The first of these, the environmental renewable surplus<\/i>, is seen as related to the classic Ricardian-Marxian theory of agricultural ground rent focused primarily on renewable industry. It is meant to capture surplus not only associated with monopoly rents and thus integrated directly into the economic calculus, but also, according to Gudynas, to grapple with how ecosystem services such as pollination are extractively appropriated\/expropriated. Gudynas indicates that a larger \u201cmonetized surplus\u201d is created for corporations by neglecting such crucial environmental aspects as soil and water conservation, thus generating an artificially large surplus based on the extractivist appropriation of renewable resources. This is related to what Marx called the \u201crobbing\u201d or expropriation of the earth, part of his theory of metabolic rift.43<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

According to Gudynas, the third dimension of the surplus (the second environmental dimension) is the environmental nonrenewable surplus<\/i> related to nonrenewable resources, such as minerals and fossil fuels. \u201cThe key distinction here,\u201d he writes, \u201cis that the resource will be exhausted sooner or later, and therefore the surplus captured by the capitalist will always be proportional to the loss of natural heritage that cannot be recovered. Similarly, the space occupied by a mining enclave will be impossible to use for another purpose, such as agriculture.\u201d Whatever extractivist surplus is obtained has to be set against the loss of natural wealth associated with resource depletion, something that is disguised by the common employment of the concept of \u201cnatural capital,\u201d conceived today not, as in classical political economy, in terms of use value, but rather, in accord with neoclassical economics, in terms of exchange value and substitutability.44<\/sup><\/a> The current planetary ecological crisis has to be seen in terms of the generation of a destructive expropriation of nature, which needs to be transcended in the process of going beyond capitalism.<\/p>\n

In Marx and Engels\u2019s classical historical materialism, a very similar analytical approach was adopted with respect to the expropriation of nonrenewable resources to that presented by Gudynas in his analysis of the environmental nonrenewable surplus. For Marx and Engels, the destructive expropriation of nonrenewable resources could not be treated as a straightforward case of robbing<\/i>, as in the case of the soil, forests, fishing, and so on. Hence, they approached extractivism with respect to nonrenewable resources under the rubric of the squandering<\/i> of such resources, a concept that was especially used in relation to the avaricious expropriation of minerals and fossil fuels, particularly coal, but also applied to the extreme \u201chuman sacrifices\u201d in extractivist industries, related to what is nowadays sometimes called the \u201ccorporeal rift.\u201d45<\/sup><\/a> Capitalism\u2019s relation to both renewable and nonrenewable resources was thus seen in the classical historical-materialist perspective as pointing to the destructive expropriation of the earth, either as the \u201crobbing\u201d or the \u201csquandering\u201d of nature\u2014an approach that closely corresponds to Gudynas\u2019s two forms of extractivist surplus appropriation\/expropriation.<\/p>\n

Gudynas\u2019s approach to what he calls the \u201cextractivist surplus\u201d associated with his two environmental dimensions of surplus is meant to encompass externalities, highlighting the fact that the \u201cactual surplus\u201d appropriated\u2014to use Baran\u2019s terms\u2014is, in some cases, artificially high, in relation to a more rational \u201cplanned surplus,\u201d as it does not account for depletion of fossil fuels and other natural resources.46<\/sup><\/a> This basic approach is employed in the remainder of Gudynas\u2019s analysis to engage with struggles on the ground over this bleeding of the extractivist economies and its relation to late imperialism, which carries out such bleeding on ever-larger scales to the long-term detriment of the relatively dependent peripheral or semiperipheral (that is, emerging) economies. As he argues in Extractivisms<\/i>, this ultimately becomes a question of \u201cextractivism and justice.\u201d47<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Extractivism and the Crisis of the Anthropocene<\/h2>\n

Given that the Anthropocene, though still not official, has been defined as that epoch in which anthropogenic rather than nonanthropogenic factors, for the first time in geological history, are the primary drivers determining Earth System change, it is clear that the Anthropocene will continue as long as global industrial civilization survives. The current Anthropocene crisis, defined as an \u201canthropogenic rift\u201d in the biogeochemical cycles of the Earth System, is closely associated with the system of capital accumulation and is pointing society toward an Anthropocene extinction event.48<\/sup><\/a> To avoid this, humanity will need to transcend the dominant \u201caccumulative society\u201d imposed by capitalism.49<\/sup><\/a> But there will be no progressive escaping from the Anthropocene itself in the conceivable future, since humanity, even in an ecologically sustainable socialist mode of production, will remain on a razor\u2019s edge, given the current planetary-scale stage of economic and technological development, and the fact that the limits of growth will need to be accounted for in the determination of all future paths of sustainable human development.<\/p>\n

It was the recognition of these conditions that led Carles Soriano, writing in Geologica Acta<\/i>, to propose the Capitalian<\/i> as the name of the first geological age of the Anthropocene Epoch.50<\/sup><\/a> According to this outlook, the current planetary ecological crisis has to be seen in terms of the generation of a destructive expropriation of nature, which needs to be transcended in the process of going beyond capitalism and the Capitalian Age. Others independently proposed the name Capitalinian<\/i> for this new geological age, while also pointing to the notion of a Communian<\/i>\u2014standing for communal<\/i>, community<\/i>, commons<\/i>\u2014as the future geological age of the Anthropocene; one that needs to be created in coevolution with nature, necessitating a \u201cgreat climacteric\u201d by the mid-twenty-first century.51<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

In the present century, combating the capitalist expropriation of nature and in particular the extractivism that is more and more dominating our time\u2014along with surmounting the present accumulative system itself\u2014has to take priority at all levels and in all forms of social struggle. In the classical historical-materialist perspective, production as a whole\u2014not simply extractive industry, but also agriculture, manufacturing, and transportation\u2014needs to be confronted in order to transcend the contradictions of class-based capital accumulation. In this regard, the insights of the broad historical-materialist tradition are crucial. As Marx observed: \u201cSince actual<\/i> labour is the appropriation of nature for the satisfaction of human needs, the activity through which the metabolism between man and nature is mediated, to denude labour capacity of the means of labour, the objective conditions for the appropriation of nature through labour, is to denude it, also, of the means of life<\/i>. Labour capacity denuded of the means of labour and the means of life<\/i> is therefore absolute poverty as such.\u201d52<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

With the growth of accumulation, denuding labor of its role as the direct mediator of the metabolism between humanity and nature, and substituting capital in this role through its control of the objective conditions of the appropriation of nature, has meant that the means of life<\/i> on the planet are being destroyed. The only answer is the creation of a higher form of society in which the associated producers directly and rationally regulate the metabolism between humanity and nature, in accord with the requirements of their own human development in coevolution with the earth as a whole.<\/p>\n

Notes<\/h2>\n
    \n
  1. \u21a9<\/a> On the Anthropocene, see Jan Zalasiewicz, Colin N. Waters, Mark Williams, and Colin P. Summerhayes, The Anthropocene as a Geological Time Unit<\/cite> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene<\/a><\/cite> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016).<\/li>\n
  2. \u21a9<\/a> See Zalasiewicz, Waters, Williams, and Summerhayes, The Anthropocene as a Geological Time Unit<\/cite>, 256\u201357; Angus, Facing the Anthropocene<\/a><\/cite>, 44\u201345.<\/li>\n
  3. \u21a9<\/a> Christoph Gorg et al., \u201cScrutinizing the Great Acceleration: The Anthropocene and Its Analytic Challenges for Social-Ecological Transformations,\u201d Anthropocene Review<\/cite> 7, no. 1 (2020): 42\u201361.<\/li>\n
  4. \u21a9<\/a> Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen, The Imperial Mode of Living<\/cite> (London: Verso, 2021).<\/li>\n
  5. \u21a9<\/a> Alicia B\u00e1rcena Ibarra, United Nations Environmental Programme Press Release, \u201cWorldwide Extraction of Materials Triples in Four Decades, Intensifying Climate Change and Air Pollution,\u201d July 20, 2016.<\/li>\n
  6. \u21a9<\/a> United Nations Environment Programme, Global Material Flows and Resource Productivity<\/cite> (2016), 5.<\/li>\n
  7. \u21a9<\/a> World Trade Organization, Trade Profiles 2021<\/cite>. See also Martin Upchurch, \u201cIs There a New Extractive Capitalism?,\u201d International Socialism<\/cite> 168 (2020).<\/li>\n
  8. \u21a9<\/a> Eduardo Gudynas, Extractivisms<\/cite> (Blackpoint, Nova Scotia: Fernwood, 2020), 82.<\/li>\n
  9. \u21a9<\/a> Mark Bowman, \u201cLand Rights, Not Land Grabs, Can Help Africa Feed Itself,\u201d CNN, June 18, 2013.<\/li>\n
  10. \u21a9<\/a> Guy Standing, \u201cHow Private Corporations Stole the Sea from the Commons,\u201d Janata Weekly<\/cite>, August 7, 2022; Stefano Longo, Rebecca Clausen, and Brett Clark, The Tragedy of the Commodity<\/cite> (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2015).<\/li>\n
  11. \u21a9<\/a> Vijay Prashad and Taroa Z\u00fa\u00f1iga Silva, \u201cChile\u2019s Lithium Provides Profit to the Billionaires but Exhausts the Land and the People,\u201d Struggle-La Lucha<\/cite>, July 30, 2022.<\/li>\n
  12. \u21a9<\/a> John Bellamy Foster, \u201cThe Defense of Nature: Resisting the Financialization of the Earth<\/a>,\u201d Monthly Review<\/cite> 73, no. 11 (April 2022): 1\u201322.<\/li>\n
  13. \u21a9<\/a> Mohammed Hussein, \u201cMapping the World\u2019s Oil and Gas Pipelines,\u201d Al Jazeera<\/cite>, December 16, 2021.<\/li>\n
  14. \u21a9<\/a> World Trade Organization, Trade Profiles 2021<\/cite>, 22, 70; \u201cUSA: World\u2019s Largest Producer of Oil and Its Largest Consumer,\u201d China Environment News, July 29, 2022, china-environment-news.net.<\/li>\n
  15. \u21a9<\/a> Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, J\u00f8rgen Randers, and William W. Behrens III, The Limits to Growth<\/cite> (Washington, DC: Potomac Associates, 1972); Dennis Meadows interviewed by Juan Bordera, \u201cFifty Years After \u2018The Limits to Growth<\/a>,’\u201d MR Online, July 21, 2022.<\/li>\n
  16. \u21a9<\/a> See John-Andrew McNeish and Judith Shapiro, introduction to Our Extractive Age: Expressions of Violence and Resistance<\/cite>, ed. Shapiro and McNeish (London: Routledge, 2021), 3; Christopher W. Chagnon, Sophia E. Hagolani-Albov, and Saana Hokkanen, \u201cExtractivism at Your Fingertips\u201d in Our Extractive Age<\/cite>, 176\u201388; Christopher W. Chagnon et al., \u201cFrom Extractivism to Global Extractivism: The Evolution of an Organizing Concept,\u201d Journal of Peasant Studies<\/cite> 94, no. 4 (May 2022): 760\u201392.<\/li>\n
  17. \u21a9<\/a> Alexander Dunlap and Jostein Jakobsen, The Violent Technologies of Extraction<\/cite> (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 34, 100, 120\u201321.<\/li>\n
  18. \u21a9<\/a> Gudynas, Extractivisms<\/cite>, 4, 10.<\/li>\n
  19. \u21a9<\/a> Karl Marx, Capital<\/cite>, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 287; Marx and Engels, Collected Works<\/cite>, vol. 30 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 145; Marx and Engels, Collected Works<\/cite>, vol. 35, 191. Gudynas attributed the popularization of the term \u201cextractive industry\u201d to international financial institutions such as the World Bank. He rejected the term as connoting that the extractive sector is part of industry and therefore productive. It is important to note that Marx employed the term as part of a sectoral analysis of production as a whole, and thus not separate from production. See Gudynas, Extractivisms<\/cite>, 3, 8.<\/li>\n
  20. \u21a9<\/a> Karl Marx, Capital<\/cite>, vol. 3 (London: Penguin, 1981), 181\u201382.<\/li>\n
  21. \u21a9<\/a> Marx, Capital<\/cite>, vol. 3, 911.<\/li>\n
  22. \u21a9<\/a> Marx, Capital<\/cite>, vol. 3, 911; Marx and Engels, Collected Works<\/cite>, vol. 30, 62; Marx and Engels, Collected Works<\/cite>, vol. 46, 411.<\/li>\n
  23. \u21a9<\/a> Joan Mart\u00ednez-Alier, \u201cRafael Correa, Marx and Extractivism,\u201d EJOLT, March 18, 2013. See also Eduardo Gudynas, \u201cWould Marx Be an Extractivist?,\u201d Post Development<\/cite> (Social Ecology of Latin America Center), March 31, 2013.<\/li>\n
  24. \u21a9<\/a> See \u201cMetabolic Rift: A Selected Bibliography<\/a>,\u201d MR Online, October 16, 2013; Marx, Capital<\/cite>, vol. 1, 638.<\/li>\n
  25. \u21a9<\/a> Marx and Engels, Collected Works<\/cite>, vol. 20, 129. I am indebted to Ian Angus for drawing my attention to this passage.<\/li>\n
  26. \u21a9<\/a> Marx used the term expropriation about thirty times in Part Eight of Capital<\/cite> on \u201cSo-Called Primitive Accumulation,\u201d and he used \u201cprimitive accumulation\u201d\u2014which he repeatedly prefaced with \u201cso-called\u201d or placed within scare quotes, and used in passages dripping with irony\u2014about ten times. He explicitly indicated in several places that the reality (and historical definition) of \u201cso-called primitive accumulation\u201d was expropriation, while the titles of the second and third chapters of this part both include \u201cexpropriation\u201d or \u201cexpropriated.\u201d See Marx, Capital<\/cite>, vol. 1, 871, 873\u201375, 939\u201340. For a general discussion of Marx\u2019s concepts of appropriation\/expropriation, see John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, The Robbery of Nature<\/a><\/cite> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020), 35\u201363.<\/li>\n
  27. \u21a9<\/a> On Polanyi, appropriation, and reciprocity, see Karl Polanyi, Primitive, Archaic and Modern Economies<\/cite> (Boston: Beacon, 1968), 88\u201393, 106\u20137, 149\u201356; Foster and Clark, The Robbery of Nature<\/cite>, 42\u201343.<\/li>\n
  28. \u21a9<\/a> Marx, Capital<\/cite>, vol. 1, 914\u201315.<\/li>\n
  29. \u21a9<\/a> Marx and Engels, Collected Works<\/cite>, vol. 29, 461.<\/li>\n
  30. \u21a9<\/a> John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Hannah Holleman, \u201cMarx and the Indigenous<\/a>,\u201d Monthly Review<\/cite> 71, no. 9 (February 2020): 1\u201319.<\/li>\n
  31. \u21a9<\/a> Marx, Capital<\/cite>, vol. 1, 638; Marx, Capital<\/cite>, vol. 3, 182, 949.<\/li>\n
  32. \u21a9<\/a> Marx and Engels, Collected Works<\/cite>, vol. 37, 733, emphasis added.<\/li>\n
  33. \u21a9<\/a> Marx, Capital<\/cite>, vol. 1, 638; Marx, Capital<\/cite>, vol. 3, 182, 949.<\/li>\n
  34. \u21a9<\/a> Stephen G. Bunker, Underdeveloping the Amazon: Extraction, Unequal Exchange, and the Failure of the Modern State<\/cite> (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 22.<\/li>\n
  35. \u21a9<\/a> Gudynas, Extractivisms<\/cite>, 26\u201327; Marx and Engels, Collected Works<\/cite>, vol. 28, 25; Marx and Engels, Collected Works<\/cite>, vol. 29, 461. On current Marxian work on expropriation, see Nancy Fraser, \u201cBehind Marx\u2019s Hidden Abode,\u201d Critical Historical Studies<\/cite> (2016): 60; Nancy Fraser, \u201cRoepke Lecture in Economic Geography\u2014From Exploitation to Expropriation,\u201d Economic Geography<\/cite> 94, no. 1; Michael C. Dawson, \u201cHidden in Plain Sight,\u201d Critical Historical Studies<\/cite> 3, no. 1 (2016): 149; Peter Linebaugh, Stop,<\/cite> Thief!<\/cite> (Oakland: PM Press, 2014), 73; Foster and Clark, The Robbery of Nature<\/cite>.<\/li>\n
  36. \u21a9<\/a> Gudynas, Extractivisms<\/cite>, 4\u20137.<\/li>\n
  37. \u21a9<\/a> Gudynas, \u201cWould Marx Be an Extractivist?\u201d<\/li>\n
  38. \u21a9<\/a> Martin Arboleda, Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction under Late Capitalism<\/cite> (London: Verso, 2020). Generalized-monopoly capital<\/cite> is a term introduced by Samir Amin to designate twenty-first-century world political-economic conditions in which monopoly capital, with its headquarters for the most part in the imperial triad of the United States\/Canada, Western Europe, and Japan, has spread its tentacles across the globe, including the globalization of production under its control. Late imperialism<\/cite> is a term indicating how these conditions have promoted new forms of the drain of surplus\/value from the periphery to the core of the capitalist system. See Samir Amin, Modern Imperialism, Monopoly Finance Capital, and Marx\u2019s Law of Value<\/a><\/cite> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018), 162; John Bellamy Foster, \u201cLate Imperialism<\/a>,\u201d Monthly Review<\/cite> 71, no. 3 (July\u2013August 2019): 1\u201319.<\/li>\n
  39. \u21a9<\/a> Gudynas, Extractivisms<\/cite>, 143\u201344.<\/li>\n
  40. \u21a9<\/a> James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer, Extractive Imperialism in the Americas<\/cite> (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 20\u201348.<\/li>\n
  41. \u21a9<\/a> Paul A. Baran, The Political Economy of Growth<\/a><\/cite> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1962), 22\u201343. In developing his notion of surplus and its relation to the environment, Gudynas declared that Marx\u2019s theory of rent is helpful, \u201cbut even so the Marxist perspective is limited, particularly because it does not address environmental considerations.\u201d His argument here runs into two problems. First, it failed to acknowledge the enormous advances in the understanding of Marx\u2019s ecological critique in the last several decades, which have generated a vast literature globally. Second, in turning to Baran\u2019s analysis of surplus to generate a political-economic and ecological critique of extractivism, Gudynas was drawing his inspiration from one of the leading Marxist economists of the twentieth century.<\/li>\n
  42. \u21a9<\/a> Gudynas, Extractivisms<\/cite>, 83. On the relation of Baran\u2019s concept of surplus to Marx\u2019s concept of surplus value, see John Bellamy Foster, The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism<\/a><\/cite> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2014), 24\u201350.<\/li>\n
  43. \u21a9<\/a> Gudynas, Extractivisms<\/cite>, 83\u201384.<\/li>\n
  44. \u21a9<\/a> Gudynas, Extractivisms<\/cite>, 84\u201385. On how the concept of \u201cnatural capital\u201d was converted from a use-value category in classical economics to an exchange-value category in neoclassical economics, see John Bellamy Foster, \u201cNature as a Mode of Accumulation<\/a>,\u201d Monthly Review<\/cite> 73, no. 10 (March 2022): 1\u201324.<\/li>\n
  45. \u21a9<\/a> Marx and Engels, Collected Works<\/cite>, vol. 46, 411; Marx and Engels, Collected Works<\/cite>, vol. 30, 62; Marx and Engels, Collected Works<\/cite>, vol. 34, 391; Marx, Capital<\/cite>, vol. 3, 182, 949. Although Marx and Engels sometimes applied squandering to the destruction of the soil or human bodies, which were also seen as forms of robbery, the destruction of nonrenewable resources was characterized simply as squandering. On the corporeal rift, see Foster and Clark, The Robbery of Nature<\/cite>, 23\u201332.<\/li>\n
  46. \u21a9<\/a> Baran, The Political Economy of Growth<\/cite>, 42.<\/li>\n
  47. \u21a9<\/a> Gudynas, Extractivisms<\/cite>, 112\u201313.<\/li>\n
  48. \u21a9<\/a> Clive Hamilton and Jacques Grinevald, \u201cWas the Anthropocene Anticipated?,\u201d Anthropocene Review<\/cite> 2, no. 1 (2015): 67.<\/li>\n
  49. \u21a9<\/a> The notion of \u201caccumulative society\u201d is taken from Henri Lefebvre, The Critique of Everyday Life: The One-Volume Edition<\/cite> (London: Verso, 2014), 622.<\/li>\n
  50. \u21a9<\/a> Carles Soriano, \u201cOn the Anthropocene Formalization and the Proposal by the Anthropocene Working Group,\u201d Geologica Acta<\/cite> 18, no. 6 (2020): 1\u201310.<\/li>\n
  51. \u21a9<\/a> John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, \u201cThe Capitalinian: The First Geological Age of the Anthropocene<\/a>,\u201d Monthly Review<\/cite> 73, no. 4 (September 2021): 1\u201316; John Bellamy Foster, \u201cThe Great Capitalist Climacteric<\/a>,\u201d Monthly Review<\/cite> 67, no. 6 (November 2015): 1\u201317.<\/li>\n
  52. \u21a9<\/a> Marx and Engels, Collected Works<\/cite>, vol. 30, 40.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    ___________________________________________<\/p>\n

    Volume 75, Number 11 (April 2024)<\/em><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

    \"\"<\/a> John Bellamy Foster is a North American professor of sociology at the University of Oregon and editor of the <\/span><\/em>Monthly Review<\/span>. He writes about political economy of capitalism and economic crisis, ecology and ecological crisis, and Marxist theory.<\/span><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    Go to Original \u2013 monthlyreview.org<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    April 2024 \u2013 The idea of extractivism is a key concept in understanding our current planetary crisis. The accelerated extraction of Earth\u2019s resources since the mid-twentieth century threatens not only the natural world, but the means of life for the entire planet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":259124,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-259121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=259121"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259121\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":259140,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259121\/revisions\/259140"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/259124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=259121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=259121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=259121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}