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ABSTRACT
The commonplace notion of extractivism relates to the production of value through physically extractive processes (mining, oil extraction, certain kinds of agriculture, etc.) where value generation is necessarily temporary and generally followed by barrenness and an inability to sustainably reproduce livelihoods in the affected habitat. In this article we aim to rethink extractivism in more general, politico-economic terms, i.e. as a particular way of structuring the processes of production and reproduction. This allows us to ask if extractivism is limited to the sectors mentioned above or a pattern that could, actually or potentially, emerge in other sectors of the economy. This paper also aims to contribute to the debate on the rise, and current problems, of emerging economies and how they relate to global capitalism. It develops the hypothesis that at least some of the BRICS countries have operated as laboratories in which extractivism has been developed into a wider politico-economic system that is now also being applied outside the BRICS countries.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Dr Parrott of TextualHealing.eu for his English language editing.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Jingzhong Ye is a Professor of Development Studies and Dean at the College of Humanities and Development Studies, China Agricultural University. His research interests include development intervention and rural transformation, rural society and agrarian change, rural–urban migration and the left-behind population, agrarian sociology and land politics, rural education and social problems. Corresponding author: [email protected].
Jan Douwe van der Ploeg is an adjunct professor at the College of Humanities and Development Studies (COHD) in China Agricultural University and a professor of rural sociology at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. His research interests include heterogeneity of agriculture, farming styles, rural development, and transition processes in agriculture.
Sergio Schneider is a Full Professor of Sociology of Rural Development and Food Studies and work at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. He holds a CNPq research scholarship for high scientific productivity, PQ1D.
Teodor Shanin is a Professor Emeritus at University of Manchester, Fellow of the Academy of Agricultural Sciences of RF, President of Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences. His research interests include epistemology, historical sociology, sociology of knowledge, social economy, peasant and rural studies, theoretical roots of social work.
Notes
1 Borras et al. (Citation2012), 850 typically refer to land grabbing as ‘control grabbing’.
2 There are examples of small-scale mining that follow a completely different pattern and which result in a significantly different distribution of the obtained wealth. See e.g. Donaldson (Citation2011) on small-scale mining in Guizhou, which he contrasts with large-scale and centralized mining in the neighbouring province of Yunnan.
3 In the literature this is known as the resource-curse. The wealth of available resources translates into widespread marginalization, deprivation and poverty (Ross Citation1999; Melhum, Moene, and Torvik Citation2006; Zhang et al. Citation2007).
4 This is notably the case in Brazil, Ecuador and Bolivia. For a critique see Gudynas, (Citation2009 and Citation2013).
5 To a degree, because the restoration of the landscape (especially after open-cast mining), compensation, medical care and pensions for ex-miners are possible (although in practice often lacking). More generally, in the case of mining, (some of) the profits obtained can be used to explore for, and invest in, new resources. This implies a kind of reproduction. However, in truly extractivist activities all this is absent.
6 Hobsbawn (Citation1995) gives a detailed analysis of how capitalism in the late 20th century built on, and exploited, values delivered by previous generations.
7 The extractive capture of value might be defined as value appropriation that occurs and proceeds without securing the material conditions that allow for the continuation of such value appropriation. Therefore, mobility and conquest (jumping towards and taking over new locations and domains) are inherent to extractive capture. At the same time it leaves behind barrenness.
8 See e.g. Beste and Boeddinghaus (Citation2013). One of these dangers is the widespread use of herbicides (notably glyphosate). There are, though, agronomic alternatives (see Altieri et al. Citation2011) although these do not fit well with large scale approaches of the Cargill type. Other negative effects reside in strongly reduced employment, weakening of the regional economy, reduction of biodiversity and destruction of scenic landscapes.
9 Danube Soy claims that this project will put an end to the deforestation of the Amazon and thereby contribute to the mitigation of climate change.
10 This feature evidently relates with the ease with which reproduction (of the factories, the fields, the buildings, the plantations or the next generation of trees in the forests) can be ignored.
11 Outsourcing fits, in a seamless way, into the extractivist pattern (partly because it shifts all responsibility for reproduction to others).
12 In practice, extractivist enterprises normally sell a property as soon as they have obtained it and lease it back for temporary use. This enlarges their potential mobility and cash-flow and, in economic terms, there are no ‘sunk costs’.
13 Other examples are the artificial (i.e. illegal) creation of capital and hostile take-overs of enterprises.
14 This wording is, in a way, a bit non-sensical. Clear rules applied: those of the mob. What we want to single out here is that, in the first place, state regulation was not applied here and secondly that the overall deregulation (that followed later on as part of the neo-liberal restructuring of capitalist economies) paved the way for similar practices in other places.
15 Often not just once, but many times. Thus, on top of the ‘real work’ a whole system of extractiveness emerged.
16 In the sense that they nearly always operate globally and, more importantly, are operated as if they represent ‘mastership of the universe’.
17 One third of all international trade takes place within transnational companies, e.g. Cargill Brazil selling soy to Cargill Europe (Chen Citation2015). As a consequence, ‘market power’ is obtained: considerable impact can be exerted on the ‘world market’ as a whole.
18 The enlarged availability of capital (and the relative scarcity of opportunities to realize a high return) also triggered strong speculative drives (strengthened by fears of inflation and recessions) that have nurtured the waves of land grabbing.
19 In the case of agricultural land there are two additional dimensions of considerable importance: speculation and the pursuit of anti-inflationary policies. These have a specific relevance when considering the similarities between extractivism in general and land grabbing in particular. Land grabbing gives capital groups far more control than when they have to engage in ongoing negotiations with (possibly unwilling) local producers. When these local producers are semi-subsistence peasants or nomadic herders or slash-and-burn farmers (or, ironically, incompetent state-agencies or tired landlords) it is relative easy to claim that ‘these lands are empty; that there is nobody here’, and to organize a massive shift in land-tenure (Borras et al. Citation2011). This establishes direct control, the basis for establishing extractivist forms of agriculture (or forestry). This process is more intense when there are fears about inflation: investment in land then becomes a much more interesting speculation (especially when prices of agricultural products are booming).
20 This was related to the quota system in place at the time
21 The stock-holder value reflects the value the enterprise is expected to have in the future and is critically related with the possibility of sell the enterprise in its entirety.
22 For a range of material reasons, agriculture and food production are arenas that are very amenable for the emergence of such countertendencies. This turns agriculture and food into one of the main arenas where labour and capital are engaged in multiple struggles. The construction of spaces where a labour income might be produced as opposed to being appropriated is a concrete expression of capital-labour relations. The encounter between the two is the current form of class struggle.
23 In the Netherlands there are some 1,000 markets that function on a weekly, daily or in-between basis. Together they have 38,000 stalls. Their total yearly turnover is 3 billion Euro, 60% of which is spent on fresh food. This can be compared to Albert Heyn the largest supermarket chain in the country and part of AHOLD. Albert Heijn has some 1,000 shops and a yearly turnover of 3.3 billion Euro. Only part of this is for fresh food. This means that many markets together might be as large (or even larger) that the Netherland’s biggest supermarket chain.
24 For an extended discussion see Van der Ploeg and Ye (Citation2016), especially chapter 4.
25 Power relations should not necessarily be seen as asymmetrical. Timothy Mitchell’s study of Egypt and the ‘Rule of Experts’ stresses the need for ‘thinking of power as something local in construction’. The essence of his argument is that ‘[although power is] drawing upon and shaped by larger logics, [it is] built out of the practical relations between farmers and labourers, landowners and middlemen, bureaucrats and merchants, men and women. The fields [or more generally: the spaces of production] that villagers own or rent, labour in or supervise, sell or seize control of, are the crucial sites for constructing and contesting rural power relations’. Mitchell underlines the need to reintroduce the spaces of production, or ‘the fields’ as he calls them into the analysis. ‘Seen from the perspective of the fields [… .] the state becomes a […] complex set of relations. These no longer appear primarily in the form of a central power intervening to initiate change, but as local practices of regulation, policing and coercion that [… .] are themselves a site of struggle and reversal’ (Mitchell Citation2002, 167–168; italics added).
26 Shanin (Citation1990, 91–92) discusses a far wider range of such models: the family production unit; the small specialized unit (based on skills); the interfamilial reproduction of labour; the ‘second’ economy (that operates as supernumerary source of income through the use of one’s free time); the black economy, etc.
27 This echoes Chayanov’s observation that: ‘we must take as an unquestionable fact that our present capitalist form of economy represents only one particular instance of economic life’ (Citation1966, 24). This implies that ‘the validity of the scientific discipline of national economics […] based on the capitalist form […] cannot and should not be extended to other organizational forms of economic life’ (Citation1966). They require their own, specific, theorization.
28 The complete statement goes as follows: ‘This mode of resistance gives the illusion of the existence of opposition, but in reality these critical expressions function as part of a process that supports the neoliberal corporate regime’