A Critique of the Extractive Operations of Capital: Toward an Expanded Concept of Extractivism

Abstract

This essay explores the lively debates around notions of extraction and extractivism in Latin America so as to expand these notions and thereby grasp the specificity of contemporary processes of the valorization and accumulation of capital within the region and beyond. Going beyond mining and the extensive agriculture that characterizes the notions of extraction and extractivism used in Latin America today, the essay seeks productive angles for a critical investigation of finance and financialization and also the persistence and mutations of neoliberalism in the region. This attempt to expand the notions of extraction and extractivism connects to a long history of struggles and theoretical elaborations that have expanded the notion of exploitation itself to include topics such as the hegemony of rent, the persistence of primitive accumulation, and accumulation by dispossession, all against the background of contemporary developments of capitalism, social struggles, and “progressive” governments in Latin America.