The Violent Technologies of Extraction

Political ecology, critical agrarian studies and the capitalist worldeater

Alexander Dunlap, Jostein Jakobsen

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783030268510
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030268527
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Environmental Science
• Index: Biological Sciences

Offering a thought provoking theoretical conversation around ecological crisis and natural resource extraction, this book suggests that we are on a trajectory geared towards total extractivism guided by the mythological Worldeater. The authors discuss why and how we have come to live in this catastrophic predicament, rooting the present in an original perspective that animates the forces of global techno-capitalist development. 

They argue that the Worldeater helps us make sense of the insatiable forces that transform, convert and consume the world. The book combines this unique approach with detailed academic review of critical agrarian studies and political ecology, the militarization of nature and the conventional and 'green' extraction nexus. It seeks radical reflection on the role people play in the construction and perpetuation of these crises, and concludes with some suggestions on how to tackle them.

© The Author(s) 2020

A. Dunlap, J. JakobsenThe Violent Technologies of Extractionhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26852-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Consuming Everything—Capitalism and the Imperative of Total Extractivism

Alexander Dunlap¹ and Jostein Jakobsen¹

(1)

Centre for Development & the Environment, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

Alexander Dunlap (Corresponding author)

Jostein Jakobsen

Email: [email protected]

Certain human realities become clearer at the periphery of the capitalist system, making it easier for us to brush aside the commoditized apprehension of reality.

—Michael Taussig

The beast knows itself to be a machine, and it knows that machines break down, decompose, and may even destroy themselves. A frantic search for perpetual motion machines yield no assurances to counter the suspicions, and the beast has no choice but to project itself into realms of beings which are not machines.

—Fredy Perlman

Abstract

The earth and its inhabitants are on a trajectory of cascading socio-ecological crisis driven by techno-capitalist development. Presenting the aim and scope of this book, the introduction lays out the key conceptual issue of total extractivism, naming the spirit and amalgamation of violent technologies comprising the totalizing imperative and tension at the heart of the present catastrophic trajectory. Total extractivism denotes how the techno-capitalist world system harbors a rapacious appetite for all life—total consumption of human and non-human resources—that destructively reconfigures the earth. Drawing on hostile, dissident authors and their companions—humans who have resisted techno-capitalism—the introduction sets the scene for viewing the Leviathanic capitalist state system and its expanding grid of extractive infrastructures as the Worldeater(s).

Keywords

CapitalismExtractivismCrisisExtractionViolence

End Abstract

Forests are replaced by plantations, estuaries with asphalt and water with synthetics liquids—chemical solvents or industrial wastes—that have technical names such as methylene chloride or arsenic. The rate of poisoning of the earth and its inhabitants is astounding, a rate corresponding to the progressive erosion and tokenizing of land-based practices and knowledges. Shocking, on the other hand, is the amount of scientific knowledge, measurement and debate of this destruction while it proceeds unabated and is normalized into ecosystems, daily life and the organisms of humans and non-humans. The question emerges: Why? How can the destruction of so much beauty and life continue? Drinkable water is turned into sewage and chemical run off; life is confined by concrete, steel and particle board; and interactions with nature are turned into a hobby to be sold as an identity. This book tries to make sense of this trajectory of ‘progress’—as it is perversely called—and its continuation through the spirit of the Worldeater.

This book is a provocation. It is even a cry for help to consider the accumulative implications of the present socio-ecological trajectory and its ramifications on humans and non-humans in the age of anthropogenic climate change, species extinction and overall cascading ecological crises. To be more precise, according to the United Nations (UNSDG 2018), ‘thirteen million hectares of forests are being lost every year’; meanwhile the ‘degradation of dry lands has led to the desertification of 3.6 billion hectares.’ Habit loss and soil degradation coalesces with the proliferation of roads, power lines, plantations, mines and factory farms that colonize rural areas and feed the rapidly growing urban populations that have increased ‘from 751 million in 1950 to 4.2 billion in 2018’ (UNSDG 2018). The world total energy supply has increased 60% since 1990 levels as mass consumption continues unabated (UNSDG 2019).¹ Energy production and consumption—industrial economic development—is at the heart of climate change, which is resulting in ocean acidification, 3-inch (7.62 centimeters) rises in sea levels since 1993, the increased frequency of extreme weather since the 1960s and the proliferation of large-scale forest fires since the 1980s (Wuebbles et al. 2017). Nature loss is rampant, leading the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES 2019: 4) to assess that ‘[n]ature across most of the globe has now been significantly altered by multiple human drivers, with the majority of indicators of ecosystems and biodiversity showing rapid decline’. ‘Progress’, as it is popularly conceived, is radically discredited by these catastrophes. In short, Polanyi’s (industrial) Great Transformation has come home to roost in the form of multilayered socio-ecological crises, but how does it continue? The kids are peacefully striking for climate change, the adults tweet about it and we—academics—sit at our computers and respective jobs while the world burns. Why? Is this the only way?

In his classic anthropological study examining ‘peasants’ or ‘neophyte proletarians’ employment of the figure of the devil to explain the onset of plantations and mines, Michael Taussig (1980) acknowledges how their perspective is belittled. The devil of extractive exchange-value is reduced to anxious emotional reactions—superstition—of ‘savages’ or written off as a social function or utility within rural communities. Unsatisfied with this blind discrediting of mythology that performs capitalist and/or extractivist apologetics, Taussig (1980: 17) asks: ‘why not see them in their own right with all their vividness and detail as the response of people to what they see as an evil and destructive way of ordering economic life?’ Given the sustained trajectory of (classist, racist and patriarchal) industrial humanity and where it has placed itself, non-humans and the planet as a whole, we see great value in this approach. This book thus seeks to build on the social hostility of the people who have tried to make sense of their domination by governments, commodities and technologies—to list the broad signifiers of ‘progress’—through mythical figures. In this tradition, we also seek to draw on “creatures” and “spirits” to understand a world on fire with peoples’ complacency indicating their seeming eagerness to watch it burn—even celebrating the expanse of megaprojects—meanwhile researchers measure and fixate over abstract calculations of increasing ecocide, and ultimately appear puppeted under an industrial regime of asphalt, concrete, steel and enchanting electronics. Because remember, according to a recent (conservative) overview (Hickel and Kallis 2019: 7, 15), ‘green growth theory—in terms of resource use—lacks empirical support’ and at best ‘remains a theoretical possibility’ which means that there ‘is no reason to design policy around it when the facts are pointing in the opposite direction’. Said simply, the techno-capitalist solutions are not working, or they only work to the extent that they are based on faulty scientific assumptions and reductive measurements, but this should not be surprising to a keen observer.

Distraught over the present state of the world—and even bitter in our own forced participation in it²—this book roots itself in the mythology and hostility of people appalled or in opposition to the techno-capitalist system. This is a theoretical perspective, discussed at length in Chap. 2, which views modernization and the euphemistic progress headed by the Leviathanic state—or state system—as geared toward systematically (1) affirming the organization of statist political economy (despite organizational restructuring and prioritizing); and (2) realizing the logic and imperative of total political and natural resource control. We have to question the purpose, reason and determination of universal categories—‘state’, ‘society’, ‘corporation’ to name a few—what they create and how they are assembled and re-organize themselves. While state organizations and various national and international institutional apparatuses exist, and comprise a complex and now computationally based (state) system, the movement toward total resource control remains a tension and lived trajectory of industrial society. We see the state as the coercive-institutional framework that houses the economy and private sector often executing extractivist or mega-development projects, which together form the motor of techno-capitalist modernity that transcends political regimes. This book takes a distanced perspective—looking down from an airplane—at the formation and accumulation of larger socio-political and infrastructural outcomes. From this distance, the book extensively animates cr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Consuming Everything—Capitalism and the Imperative of Total Extractivism
• 2. The Spirit and Metaphysical Form of Capitalism: Devils, Worms, Octopuses and Worldeater(s)
• 3. Studying the Worldeater(s): Political Ecology and Critical Agrarian Studies and Their Origins, Differences and Convergence
• 4. Claws & Teeth: The Militarization of Nature
• 5. The Worldeater(s) in Process: Uncovering the Nexus of Conventional and ‘Green’ Extraction
• 6. Conclusion: Out of the Entrails—Reflections on Human Power
• Back Matter