#Neoextractivism as a response to #disastercapitalism? An Inquiry.
In the article by Dr. Christoper A. Loperena (CUNY Graduate Center) entitled “Honduras is open for business: extractivist tourism as sustainable development in the wake of disaster?” Loperena complicates the relationship between (neo) extractivism and neoliberalism. The work asks us to complicate the mechanisms of “sustainable development” as a ricochet of what historical materialists like David Harvey consider to be the ‘state/finance’ nexus. When the state has to respond to natural disasters and protect multinational economic investment, Loperena demonstrates how contested land can be assumed as empty by the state after a disaster and used toward development.
Loperena reminds us that at the heart of extractivism or “neo”- extractivism, there is “state-orchestrated natural resource expropriation, enclosure and dispossession.” In the case of the Garifuna, a Afro-Indigenous group that center their politics around autonomy and decolonial plurivision political reality, the extractivism elements of state supported tourism actively disrupts the claims of autonomy and resistance to exploitation by the Garifuna. After Hurricane Mitch (1998), the state hurried to salvage investment by expanding (rapidly) “special” legislation meant to reform and encourage international investment areas like mining, energy, and tourism. He centered his analysis by ethnography and highlighting what could be seen as anti-extractivist protest by community leaders against a resort being developed in Tela Bay, Honduras.
Christopher A. Loperena (2017) Honduras is open for business: extractivist tourism as sustainable development in the wake of disaster?, Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 25:5, 618-633, DOI: 10.1080/09669582.2016.1231808
Hurricane Maria is another example of #disastercapitalism that amplifies how #neoextractivism works from the United States. As the United States treats Puerto Rico as an extended colony, economic accumulation from the island to the U.S. is obfuscated because the United States asserts itself as a settler colony. Nevertheless, the policy response and lack of government response display that Puerto Rico is and has been a site of knowledge extractivism. Federal agencies (FEMA) and the academy have modeled their study around #disastercapitalism and #resilience by actively abandoning the island’s immediate needs when there is an emergency. In the article, “Puerto Rico: The Future in Question”, Dr. Adriana Garriga-López highlights this conflict as she does fieldwork after Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. By focusing on autonomous organizing, especially around food sovereignty, Dr. Garriga-López effectively shows how the United States produces scarcity after a natural disaster by allowing the state to accumulate and reconfigure what can be salvaged as economic means without island consensus. Moreover, this construction is part of colonial exploitation that reproduces itself within the neoliberal era. Similar to the anti-extractivist protests in Tela Bay, the autonomous organizing in Puerto Rico included a rise in agroecological awareness- a specific and political orientation around food sovereignty.
Garriga-López, A., 2019. Puerto Rico: The future in question. Shima, 13(2), pp.174-192.
presentation on Agroecology in Puerto Rico found on Wikipedia Commons
Dispossession as #disastercapitalism, #stateviolence against Land Defenders
This piece explains the long arduous struggle land defenders in Honduras have engaged with against the state. Consequently, in the struggle of overcoming contradictions among the peasant class, autonomous afro-indigenous class, and those who are laborers, projects that go against the state push those activities closer to a premature death. In particular, land defenders as environmental activists, conservationists, and practitioners of development from below, are vulnerable to being ‘disappeared’ either by the state or by corporations. OFRANEH (Organización Fraternal Negra Hondureña) is a grassroots organization dedicated to Black autonomy and pluralvision politics in Honduras. Members and allies, including well-known #BertaCaceres have been abducted, tortured, incarcerated, and at times murdered by the state. Below is a documentary that explains the work of OFRANEH.
Though the term neo-extractivism was coined in relation to particular left-leaning Latin American governments who relied heavily on extractivist activities as means of financing social reforms, this partial list of sources posits that we might also apply the term to certain practices and patterns of governance Western “democracies” have co-opted from big tech in recent years under the guise of egalitarian progress. This list explores examples that can largely be grouped under Shoshana Zuboff’s moniker “surveillance capitalism,” or the entanglement of invasive tech policies which are “not an overthrow of the state but rather an overthrow of the people’s sovereignty and a prominent force in the perilous drift toward democratic deconsolidation that now threatens Western liberal democracies” (Zuboff, 2019). Such policies include algorithm-based policing, state-run data accumulation, state tracking under the facade of “national security,” lack of big tech regulation, and other means by which big-tech-born data mining and surveillance have become a state-sanctioned logic of accumulation and commerce.
Some Grounding Texts on Digital Neo-extracitivism:
Barris-Gomez, Macarena The Extractive Zone, Duke University Press, 2017.
Buolamwini, Joy. Coded Bias, Netflix, 2021.
Broussard, Meredith. Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World. MIT Press, 2018.
Couldry, Nick The Costs of Connection: How Data is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating it For Capitalism. Stanford University Press, 2019.
Heaven, William Douglas “Predictive Policing is Racist, No Matter What Data You Use” MIT Technology Review, 2021.
O’Neil, Cathy. Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. Crown Books, 2016.
Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, Public Affairs, 2019.
Following the introduction by the group, New Extractivism of the 21st Century: 10 Urgent Theses by Eduardo Gudynas, neo-extractivism as defined by Gudynas is different from extractivism because “the state is much more active, with rules that are much clearer (regardless of whether they are good or not), and not necessarily oriented to serve “friends” of political power”. As we are post- pink tide, and many extractive sites have come into contention and beyond contradiction versus the state and the public, was this a new form of extractivism (capitalist accumulation) or rather just a primer toward entering neoliberal development with enough commodity for international trade? As states like Ecuador, Brazil, and even Venezuela were proponents of this state control around natural resources for its development, they still allowed multinational corporations to provide the infrastructure and purchase the raw materials extracted. The following pieces I will present in this blog question whether there is actually something new about this form of extractivism.
Gudynas notes that “while the old extractivism pointed toward “exports” or “the world market,” the progressive governments have replaced that discourse with one that points to “globalization” and “competition.” According to Professor Dennis Canterbury, the recognition that these states had enough natural resources to trade as an alternative, maybe considerable ethical capitalism, is a political farce. In his text, Neoextractivism and Capitalist Accumulation, Professor Canterbury argues that “the crisis and reform” of capitalist development through a world-systems theoretical approach best describes what neo-extractivism is trying to present. Instead, Canterbury is interested as these countries as periphery to the Global North and does the genealogical work of tying capitalist accumulation to continued colonial relations. He is invested in complicating how a natural resource is defined via anti-colonial struggle, which also seemed to remedy unfree labor established by colonialism. Canterbury uses Guyana as his site of intervention, as the Caribbean country also has ‘natural’ resources that global capitalism has already situated as what Guyana needs to exploit for development. Canterbury asks us to be careful with interchanging terms and instead focus on how neoliberal capitalism reinvents itself to the demands of globalization.
Canterbury, D. C. (2018). Neoextractivism and Capitalist Development. United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis.
In his piece “Extractivism and neoextractivism: two sides of the same curse” Alberto Acosta, Ecuadorian economist, asks those who also use the term to be critical of fetishizing processes of capitalist accumulation as novice to neoextractivism. In particular, he is focused on understanding the role of deterritorialization vis a vis the state, in relationship to capitalist development and accumulation. He argues that there is no way that these governments that promote El Buen Vivir that have yet to decolonize their relationship with natural resources, because deterritorialization from extractivism has long lasting effects that would be seen as counter, or rather another decimation via colonial capitalist modernity.
Acosta, Alberto. “Extractivism and neoextractivism: two sides of the same curse.” Beyond development: alternative visions from Latin America 1 (2013): 61-86.
Two pieces ask for us to expand our understanding of extractivism instead of embracing #neoextractivism. Veronica Gago and Sandro Mezzandra, in their piece, ” A Critique of the Extractive Operations of Capital: Toward an Expanded Concept of Extractivism,” call for us to think about finance and financialization as a different realm to think through extractivism- the continued element of this is also debt. The work supports Acosta’s view, which calls for the end of consumption and overproduction as a sign of modernity and instead continued indoctrination into neoliberal globalization.
Verónica Gago & Sandro Mezzadra (2017) A Critique of the Extractive Operations of Capital: Toward an Expanded Concept of Extractivism, Rethinking Marxism, 29:4, 574-591, DOI: 10.1080/08935696.2017.1417087
IF modernity depends on extractivism, then cultural studies should be isolated as a point of study and struggle. Authors Aikio and Cortes-Servino in their article, “Cultural studies of extraction” claim that, “extractivism’ is increasingly understood also as an analytical and also political concept that enables the examination and articulation of deeper underlying logics of exploitation and subjectification that are central to the present conjuncture of capitalist globalization and neoliberalism.” Morever, extractivist logics know no limit in what can be or should be extracted. The space to nuance this within cultural studies adds a layer of the ability to contextualize and discern contradictions within development, accumulation, and extractived material. Using cultural studies for the authors just allows for room to develop additional methodologies and analytical frameworks meant to protect future and uphold an anti-extractivist world. Although not mentioned in the piece, cultural studies is a great place to understand societal relations, like migration, in relationship to extractivism. Cultural studies can also provide testimony or witness to the violence and harm created by extractivist projects.
Laura Junka-Aikio & Catalina Cortes-Severino (2017) Cultural studies of extraction, Cultural Studies, 31:2-3, 175-184, DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2017.1303397
La Salada is an Argentine film that focuses on the various new immigrants to Buenos Aires who find themselves in community in the informal- most migrate to find work in precarious employment related to extractivist industries
In 2009 the Uruguayan author E. Gudynas’s text “10 Tesis Urgentes sobre el Neo-Extrativismo” (10 urgent tesis on neo-extractivism) introduced the new political economic concept of neo-extractivism. Since then it has been widely used in Latin America and the rest of the world.
As analyzed by Mezzadra and Neilson the notion of ‘neo-extractivism’ has emerged in this context as a critical lens with which to view wider transformations of capitalism even under ‘progressive’ governments in the region. “Debates on this topic have unfolded within the framework of what has been described as a transition from the ‘Washington consensus’ to the ‘commodities consensus’ (see for instance Massuh 2012, Svampa and Viale 2014, Svampa 2015). Speaking of ‘neo-extractivism’ implies a reference to the continuity of a long history of the region’s insertion within the capitalist world system through violent forms of raw material extraction and associated processes of dispossession. What the prefix ‘neo’ signals is, on the one hand, a shift towards Asia as the main market for Latin American commodities and, on the other hand, the fact that the ‘re-primarization’ of the economy is connected to the state’s ability to use and direct a certain part of the extraordinary rent from natural resources to the financing of social policies. Critics of ‘neoextractivism’ make strong arguments against the qualities of ‘development’ connected to this primacy of extractive rent, shedding light on environmental pillaging, land grabbing, and the disruption and dispossession of Indigenous and peasant economies.” (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2017:2)
With this #syllabus, and following these opening considerations, our project is to interrogate the concept, trying to understand its contradictions through a dialectical approach. By asking the classic questions What – Where – When – Who – How and using them as a guideline for different case studies, we will try to break down the idea of neo-extractivism and complicate its understanding. What does “neo” mean and what are the ruptures and continuities with historic extractivism? What are the categories of actors engaged with it? What is the specific role of the State? How to examine neo-extractivism through different scales, in different places and incorporating the wide varieties of commodities that are involved? What kinds of social practices and commoning can we detect around/against it?
We will use a variety of material and formats to think through each case, maintaining the inherent chaos of a hashtag research while bringing up resources that invite a more complex understanding of the issue at stake. The geographic and topical variety of the cases will conform a kind of countertopography that will also help us think through the concepts of Global South/North.
Mezzadra, S., & Neilson, B. (2017). On the multiple frontiers of extraction: Excavating contemporary capitalism. Cultural Studies, 31(2–3), 185–204.https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2017.1303425
Need help with the Commons?
Email us at commonshelpsite@gmail.com so we can respond to your questions and requests. Please email from your CUNY email address if possible. Or visit our help site for more information:
