Murphy's Simple Story

The Simple Story of Civilization. Tom Murphy. Dec. 19, 2022
(go to tom's site via the link above in order to access all the links from his work)


The stories we fashion about ourselves are heavily influenced by our short life spans during an age of unprecedented complexity. We humans, it would seem, are unfathomably complicated creatures who defy simple “just-so” characterizations. Animals, or humans tens of thousands of years ago are fair game for simple stories, but not so for transcendent modern humans.

Two major problems I have with this attitude are that 1) we are animals, and 2) we have exactly the same hardware (albeit with slightly smaller brains) as we had 100,000 years ago.

So allow me to pull back from our present age of baffling complexity to outline a simple story covering the broad sweep of the human saga. The result may be a little startling, and, for a number of readers, sure to be rejected by cultural antibodies as “not applicable” (see also my views of our civilization as a cult).


Story Timeline

In order to make comprehensible the vast tract of human time on this planet—itself 5,000 times shorter than the age of the universe—I will compare the 2.5–3 million year presence of humans (genus Homo) on Earth to a 75 year human lifespan: a span that we can grasp intuitively. On this scale, we get the following analogous periods:

1. First 70 years: various species of humans evolve and coexist (sustainably) on the planet;
2. Last 5 years: the age of Homo Sapiens (about 200,000 yr; mostly sustainably);
3. Last 15 weeks: the age of civilization (agriculture; then cities) (10,000 yr);
4. Last 4 days: the age of science (400 yr);
5. Last 36 hours: the age of fossil fuels (150 yr of increasingly significant use);
6. Last 12 hours: the age of rapid global ecological devastation (50 yr).

On this lifetime scale, agriculture is a recent, unexpected hobby we picked up, and one that is still pretty new to us in the scheme of things. Or maybe we can compare it to a gateway drug that radically changed our behavior, values, attitudes, and expectations (gave us the munchies?). Or maybe it’s like the rapid onset of a mental disorder. In any case, our friends and relatives would be pretty alarmed by this uncharacteristic change toward the end of a long life.

In the last four days, we took our hobby to a whole new level. Agriculture is about control of at least part of nature. Science put that control on steroids. Maybe it’s like cocaine following the gateway drug. It gave us a mechanism by which to learn from controlled experiments and then exercise (imperfect, problematic) control over an expanding set of domains. It “amped” things up.

In the last day or so, we found an even more potent enabler. Let’s see…I’ve already used steroids for the previous step, so what would steroids on steroids be? Fossil fuels equipped us with superpowers to carry out our scientifically-guided ambitions to previously-unimaginable new levels. I seem to recall from the “scare” films in my youth that drugs like PCP can make us think we have superpowers so we’re prone to jump out of a window, convinced we can fly. Similarly, the superpowers granted by this short-lived finite resource have tricked us into thinking that these powers are an intrinsic human quality: owing to our big brains, not the substance. Beguiled by this false flattery, we tell ourselves that nothing can stop our boundless juggernaut of innovation!


In this altered state, we find ourselves on a destructive rampage, as evidenced by the severe toll on habitats and biodiversity: about 85% of primary forest is gone; vertebrate populations have declined by about 70% on average since 1970; and now 96% of mammal mass on the planet is embodied in humans and our livestock. The dots are not difficult to connect. The combination of methods and substances available to us have allowed explosive exploitation of resources on a global scale. A paltry and decreasing amount of habitat—increasingly fragmented—remains. The healthy, biodiverse regions are disappearing fast.

So, reflect on how you would react to a 75-year-old relative who went on a euphoric bender as extreme and damaging as the one in this story. It’s as if this otherwise stable and (mostly) harmless person spiraled into manic behavior so quickly as to leave us stunned. It’s as jarring as a crash; like slamming into a brick wall. We might even suspect an alien baby gestating in our relative’s stomach cavity, so outlandish is their behavior. For the safety of your relative and all those around them, you’d probably want them sedated and strapped to a bed in a hospital for observation. Ironically, our recent “hobby” obsession with control has left us spiraling out of control.

The backdrop, or fabric of your entire existence—the few hours for which you’ve been alive on our scale—seems entirely normal to you, but the whole point of this post is that it’s really just not.


No Facile Solution

This condition seems unlikely to be solved by technology. Wouldn’t we say that technology is a primary ingredient of the illness? Cleverness and an illusion of control got us here, and they are not our best tools for extracting ourselves from the mess.

I have written other pieces about the foundational flaws in our growth trajectory on a finite planet; about the idiotically narrow construct of money (Box 19.1 in textbook), and how decisions based on money will be bad ones (if it makes economic sense, it almost certainly batters the ecosystem). I have posted about the cognitive distortion produced by fossil fuels, and the tragic fallacy of building an enormous human population on the back of a finite resource that threatens a devastating population crash when its availability inevitably declines. The real, ultimate value is in biodiversity and ecosystem health, which suggests de-emphasizing the primacy of humans and becoming subordinate partners on the planet rather than its self-appointed and ultimately inept overlords presiding over the demise of our transitory empire.

But stepping back and using our temporal framework as a mental guide, we are justified in asking whether our path of civilization is wrong at its very roots. That might seem extreme, but we are indeed at an extreme nexus in the history of our planet. I didn’t start out thinking this way (as the long evolution of this blog series attests). I mean, I knew our growth path could not last, and that fossil fuel substitution would be harder than many appreciated, but I never entertained the idea that civilization itself was a bad idea. It is not eagerly that I tread these waters.

The surprisingly recent gateway experiment of agriculture led—in a causally-connected way—to surplus, storage, permanent settlements, accumulation of material possessions, hierarchy, standing armies, property rights (the laughable conceit that we own the land!), patriarchy and monotheism, subjugation of humans and animals, soil degradation, habitat destruction, extinction rates far above normal, and all the rest. A bad trip—all for the sake of controlled food production and storage, the lack of which did not prevent humans from living sustainably for millions of years. Likewise, wild animals in healthy ecosystems don’t appear to live in constant misery: they’ve got it figured out in a way that works and is stable. We don’t look at a bird chirping and flitting through the trees and react in horror at the pitiful state it must find itself in, lacking the means to control its environment. Why should we look at pre-agricultural humans and imagine horrific misery, as many are inclined to do?

Since our civilization is not built on a foundation of sustainable principles, it is no surprise that we find it now to be utterly unsustainable. Unsustainable means certain failure, by the way. Thus, our civilization was custom-built for failure. Congratulations. The unfolding story just transpires over enough life spans that it all seems gradual to us as individuals, and therefore does not feel pressing or inevitable based on our narrow direct experience. In hindsight, I suspect it will be forehead-slapping obvious—to the point of making us look rather dull-witted.

I like flight analogies here. A rock is not designed on the aerodynamic principles of sustainable (indefinite, level) flight. A rock can nonetheless become airborne, follow a graceful and exhilarating arc through the air, but then certainly plummet back to Earth. Likewise, our civilization—also not founded on principles of sustainability—can soar upward for a time (during our inheritance spending spree) and seem like great fun—giving its paying passengers tremendous satisfaction for a time. Patiently waiting for us is Earth and planetary limits.

An important aside is that this condition is not intrinsic to the human animal. Most of our life on this planet has not been characterized by a smash-and-grab rampage. That’s our new trick for the last 15 weeks, recently perfected and at fever pitch. Dazzling! We can learn other tricks—take up new hobbies that don’t wreck our lives and those of our loved ones (i.e., other species): slow, thoughtful hobbies rather than this frenetic one.


Can’t We Just…?

You might be thinking: well okay, maybe we’ve overhsot a bit and need to dial things back…but surely (Shirley?) we can hold on to something we would recognize as civilization—I mean, come-on! Well, truthfully, I don’t know if it’s possible to preserve civilization—and neither does anyone else! To state the obvious: wanting civilization to continue is not enough without biophysical backing. I suspect that for most people who assume a continuation and even expansion into space, their examination is paper thin—not based on a careful consideration of biophysical limits, but more a matter of uncritical and fantastical extrapolation based on an admittedly head-spinning recent binge…I mean history.

My reasonable doubt is semi-quantitative. We have consumed a sizable fraction of our non-renewable inheritance (mineral concentrations, fossil fuels, etc.) on the time scale of a century. Even at a tenth the current scale (itself a terrifying prospect to many), we might slow the draw-down to give us another 1,000 years or so—another few weeks in our life span analogy. Aggressive recycling and more resources than I credit might stretch things for 10,000 years (translating to a few months). Keep in mind, this is already in the context of a substantially and deliberately dialed-down human footprint, lacking any precedent. Note that 10,000 years is still very short in the scheme of things and signals that we may well be nearer the end of civilization than the beginning. The doctor is saying: we have—at best—a few weeks or months to live unless we make a radical change in our lifestyle and practices. At this rate, it’s more likely mere days. If we heed the advice and make a major course correction, be prepared for the detox experience to be unpleasant, but necessary.

I’m not interested in fantastical or magical thinking. The suggestion—against mounting evidence to the contrary—that we could (or should) maintain the architecture for this ecologically devastating mode of living for any significant duration strikes me as simply wishful and also heartbreaking. I’d like to get beyond that and be hard-nosed about what can really happen, subject to planetary limits: most importantly, preserving habitat and biodiversity.


But Big Brains?

A common reaction is: can’t we use our big brains to solve this problem? Extending civilization for even another 1,000 years will surely give us time to think of something, our faith tells us. What if that “something” is the realization that civilization is inherently unsustainable and must be replaced with alternate, simpler (but richly meaningful) approaches to life on Earth? Maybe we can use our brains to save ourselves some time, agony, and further devastation by reaching this conclusion sooner.

Implicit in the leading question above is usually the notion of a technological solution. My viewpoint has become that technology is not the right tool to solve a predicament caused by a technological approach. But yes, we can (and should) use our big brains. It’s just that the task at hand is to figure out how to adopt a whole new way of living on this planet and how to dismantle civilization in a way that is least destructive to biodiversity and to humans. We need to relinquish our hubristic (and illusory) grip on control and our naive ambition of total mastery. We fall into the trap of thinking: “if we just learn a little more, we’ll finally have it.” But it’s never enough, and never can be. We have barely scratched the surface of understanding the machinery of Earth’s ecosystems, and it’s a fool’s quest to imagine we can achieve the requisite omniscience to maintain a successful reign—especially as the biophysical clock ticks more and more urgently.

What we need to learn instead is how to live with the long-term constraints of the natural world as it is presented to us—not take it upon ourselves to shape it to our unrealistic wants and whims, which is a proposition certain to fail. It’s about responding and adapting in an attitude of humility, not solving, mastering, exerting, defining, and dictating. Our brains are nowhere near big enough to pull off complete wizardry over nature, but maybe they are big enough to make this leap of intentional humility. We’ve been there before. I hope we still have what it takes.

Priorities for Success

It is in this context that the push to transition to renewable energy is misguided, in my view. The implicit aim is to preserve civilization in essentially its current glorious state by keeping it fueled to carry on in the least disruptive way. Disruptive to what? Economic concerns? Civilization is proving to be frighteningly disruptive to the natural world. In prioritizing a preservation of civilization, we are elevating this ephemeral, artificial construct above biodiversity and a healthy ecosystem: a prescription for certain failure. It’s doubling down on the wrong thing: propping up and accelerating the machine that’s eating the planet alive. Barreling forward on renewable energy is the last thing Earth’s critters would vote for, and would be considered one of the more disruptive decisions we could make.

Granted, any sustainable future must by definition utilize renewable energy in the broadest sense, as humans did until very recently. The current practice is the anomaly. I can’t rule out the notion that photovoltaic panels might play a role in the far future. But dependence on mined materials makes this gizmo less likely to fit into a truly long-term scheme. My inclination is to not sweat projections at that level. If we get the foundation right, the rest will follow as it may.

Any path to success must start on a sound ecological foundation, whatever the field of concern: economics, politics, belief systems, human rights, science, engineering, and the rest. Is that the first chapter/lecture in any of these fields? Of course not, but it ought to be. Otherwise we are teaching a blind path to failure. Think of it this way: what would you trade (technology, comforts, materials, even relationships) for all the (non-human) animals/life on Earth? Probably nothing, upon realizing that we ourselves can’t live without a functioning (healthy) ecosystem, and that we are just one of ten million species. Okay. Then we need to act like it. Make biodiversity and ecological health the highest priority and work within the resulting constraints. All decisions should start with the question: “would this action help or harm the (larger, and ultimately more important) non-human world?”


Post-Script: Recent Influences

As my posting history reveals, I have been on a journey of expanded thinking about the nature of our predicament, moving beyond the initial phase of quantitative assessment of energy (during which I was still in the mindset of a tech-driven solution space), into deeper questions of what we’re all about and why we do the things we do. In the summer of 2022, after several recommendations over the years, I finally sat down to read Ishmael, a novel by Daniel Quinn. I was simultaneously impressed by how familiar the logic already was to me and by the degree to which it sharpened my ability to separate successful approaches from (ultimately) unsuccessful ones. I followed this up by the two other installments in the series (The Story of B and My Ishmael) and Quinn’s non-fiction framing work, Beyond Civilization. I have valued them all, and view them as helping to crystalize the path I was already walking down. I wouldn’t call myself a faithful adherent—accepting all arguments/premises—but a largely-resonant admirer of the worth of these important works. Check your library and give it a try!

More recently, I read An Inconvenient Apocalypse by Wes Jackson and Robert Jensen. This work also deeply resonated as a careful, deliberate, sober, thoughtful, and insightful approach to how we deal with the predicament of civilization. It’s not a go-to resource for making the case that we’re in deep trouble, although it plucks some of those chords. Mostly, it reflects on our reactions and choices in this moment, and offers valuable food for thought for those who already sense that this deal is going sideways. My small-town library had a copy, to my surprise and delight.

Other voices are starting to broadcast what I think is an accurate message. I already posted last year praising David Attenborough’s powerful conclusion. In the last few weeks, articles in The Intercept (amazing!) and New York Times made the case for biodiversity and ecosystem health above secondary concerns like climate change and the usual technological “solutions” proffered in response. Although, I have to complain that the NYT article contained one of those paragraphs almost always accompanying warnings about an animal’s endangerment: what potential benefits those animals have to humans, including the ever-present dangling of a possible key to some medical cure. It drives me crazy that we are so transactional as to require direct benefit to us to justify another animal’s existence.

To echo a provocative sentiment others have used to great effect: What good is a Honduran white bat, you ask? Well, what good are you? How have humans, or you personally, (on balance, or in net terms) helped the planet’s wild species or overall ecosystem health? Are you more valuable, or less valuable to sustaining biodiversity than the bat, the newt, or even the mosquito? Yeah, that hard truth stings me, too.

John Bellamy Foster on Extractivism

Extractivism in the Anthropocene. John Bellamy Foster, Monthly Review. Nov 22, 2022.

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 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 expansion of global production and of resource extraction in particular led to a qualitative 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 force in Earth System change. 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.

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. 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.

Recent research has shown two separate periods where global resource use (including all biomass, minerals, fossil fuel energy, and cement production) has increased much more rapidly than global carbon emissions; which can be characterized as the first (1950—1970) and second (2000—2015) accelerations in resource use within the Great Acceleration as a whole. 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 “developed economies,” 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 decline in natural resource use has been due to the outsourcing of world industrial production to the Global South, while consumption remains highly concentrated in the Global North, driving an “imperial mode of living.” In 2016, the Global Material Flows and Resource Productivity Report of the United Nations Environmental Programme indicated that “since 1990 there has been little improvement in global material efficiency [i.e. efficiency in the extraction of primary materials]. In fact, efficiency started to decline around 2000.” Global extraction of materials tripled in the four decades prior to the 2016 report. These conditions have resulted in an acceleration of extractivist pressures in key regions throughout the earth, particularly in the Global South.

In many countries in the Global South, particularly Latin America and Africa, primary commodities, including both agriculture and fossil fuels/minerals dominate the export economy, reminiscent of an earlier age, with percentages of primary commodities in merchandise trade exports in 2019 as high as 67 percent in Brazil and 82 percent in both Chile and Uruguay. In Algeria, export dependence on fossil fuels is almost complete, now accounting for 94 percent of the value of its merchandise trade exports. In Latin America, in particular, the import-substitution industrialization era of the early post-Second World War years, which promoted manufacturing, has been succeeded in the new 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. 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. 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. New technologies have led to a race for new rare minerals, as in the case of lithium mining. 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.

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’s largest oil producer as well as the world’s 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’s total. In Canada, primary commodities in 2019 accounted for 43 percent of export value in merchandise trade, while in Australia it was 81 percent.

The ecological consequences of all of 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 report was published by the Club of Rome, resource depletion is following what it referred to as its threatening “standard scenario,” with the result that the very existence of planet Earth as a home for humanity and innumerable other species is threatened.

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 new “ontological assemblages.” For such thinkers, extractivism is viewed as the insatiable source of capitalist modernity’s destructive and non-reproductive drive to commodify and consume all life and all existence, what some theorists refer to “total extractivism” or the “world eater.” 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 extractive capitals.

For this reason, 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 “labels for extractivism such as ‘financial,’ ‘cultural,’ ‘musical,’ and ‘epistemological,’” creating endless sources of confusion, and removing the concept from its basis in political economy and ecological critique. “Extractivism,” he writes, “cannot be used as a synonym for development or even for an exporting primary economy. There is no such thing as extractivist development. … Extractivisms … do not account for the structure and function of an entire national economy, which includes many other sectors, activities and institutions.”

Gudynas’s 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, in order 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.


Marx and the Expropriation of Nature

The notion of “extractive industry” dates back to Marx in the mid-nineteenth century. Marx 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 “the material for labour is provided directly by Nature, such as mining, hunting, fishing (and agriculture, but only in so far as it starts by breaking up virgin soil).” In general, Marx drew a line between extractive industry and agriculture, insofar as the latter was not dependent on raw materials from outside agriculture itself, but was capable of building up from within, given agriculture’s 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.

Some of Marx’s 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 Capital, vol. 3, 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 “squanders 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.” 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. Moreover, Engels, in writing to Marx, famously discussed the “squandering” of fossil fuels resources, and coal in particular.

In interviews that he gave responding to radical and Indigenous movements against extractivism, Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa rhetorically asked: “Let’s see, Señores marxistas, was Marx opposed to the exploitation of natural resources?” The implication was that Marx would not have opposed contemporary extractivism. In response, ecological economist Joan Martinez-Alier pointed to Marx’s famous analysis indicating that “capitalism leads to a ‘metabolic rift.’ 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).” On this basis, Martinez-Alier contends that Marx, though he did not live to see global climate change “would have sided with Climate Justice.” Indeed, the extraordinary growth of the Marxian ecological critique, building on Marx’s analysis in Capital of the “negative, i.e. destructive side” of capitalist production in his theory of metabolic rift, has provided the world with penetrating insights into every aspect of the contemporary planetary crisis.

Key to a historical materialist analysis of extractivism is Marx’s analysis of what he called “Original Expropriation,” a term that he preferred to what the classical-liberal political economists called “Previous, or Original Accumulation” (often misleadingly translated as “primitive accumulation).” For Marx, “so-called primitive [previous] accumulation,” as he repeatedly emphasized, was not accumulation at all, but rather expropriation or appropriation without equivalent. Taking a cue from Karl Polanyi—and in line with Marx’s argument—we can also refer to expropriation as appropriation without reciprocity. Expropriation was evident in the violent seizure of the common lands in Britain. But “the chief moments of [so-called] primitive accumulation” in the mercantilist era, providing the conditions for “the genesis of the industrial capitalist,” lay in the expropriation of lands and bodies through the colonial “conquest and plunder” of the entire external area/periphery of the emerging capitalist world economy. This was associated, Marx wrote, with “the extirpation, enslavement, and entombment in mines of the Indigenous population” in the Americas, the whole trans-Atlantic slave trade, the brutal colonization of India, and a massive drain of resources/surplus from the colonized areas that fed European development.

Crucial to this analysis was Marx’s very careful distinction between appropriation, understood in its most general sense, as the basis of all property forms and all modes of production, and particular forms of appropriation, such as expropriation and exploitation under the regime of capital. Marx conceived appropriation 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’s concept of the “mode of appropriation” underlying mode of production. These distinctions were to play an important role in Marx’s later ethnological writings, and his identification with the active resistance to the expropriation of their lands by Indigenous communities in Algeria and elsewhere.

Not only was the expropriation of land and bodies recognized in Marx’s analysis, but the earth itself could be expropriated in the sense that the conditions of its reproduction were not maintained, and natural resources were “robbed” or “squandered.” This was particularly the case with capitalism, in which the appropriation of nature generally took a clear, expropriative form. In Marx’s 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 “a free gift of Nature to capital,” no longer geared primarily to the reproduction of life, the earth, and community as one largely indivisible whole, but rather dedicated solely to the valorization of capital. The “robbery” of the earth and the metabolic rift—or the “irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism” between humanity and nature—were thus closely interwoven. Although some contemporary theorists have attempted to define extractivism as meaning the non-reproduction of nature, it is much 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.


Gudynas and the Extractivist Surplus

These conceptual foundations arising out of Marx’s classical ecological critique allow us to appreciate more fully the pathbreaking insights into extractivism provided by Gudynas in his Extractivisms. A crucial point of departure in his analysis is the concept of modes of appropriation. In his pioneering work, Underdeveloping the Amazon of the mid-1980s, environmental sociologist Stephen G. Bunker introduced the concept of “modes of extraction” to address the issue of extractive industry and its nonreproductive character, contrasting this to Marx’s larger concept of “modes of production.” Gudynas claims that Bunker was generally on the right track. However, in contrast to Bunker, Gudynas does not adopt the notion of modes of extraction. Nor does he retain Marx’s notion of modes of production, arguing unaccountably that Marx’s concept has been “abandoned,” citing anthropologist David Graeber. Rather, Gudynas turns to the concept of “modes of appropriation,” while seemingly unaware of the theoretical connection between appropriation and production and between modes of appropriation and modes of production that Marx had constructed in the Grundrisse, and how this is related to current Marxian research into these categories. Still, Gudynas’s modes of appropriation approach allows him to distinguish between human appropriation from the natural environment in general and what he refers to as “extractivist modes of appropriation,” which violate conditions of natural and social reproduction.

Gudynas defines extractivism itself in terms of processes that are excessive as measured by the three characteristics of: (1) physical indicators (volume and weight); (2) environmental intensity; and (3) destination, with extractivism seen as inherently related to colonialism and imperialism, requiring that the product be exported in the form of primary commodities. Not all appropriation of nature carried out by extractive industries is extractivist. This is perhaps clearest in his short piece, “Would Marx Be an Extractivist?” Writing, as in Martinez-Alier’s case, in response to Correa, Gudynas states:

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’t confuse mining with extractivism….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 production, and that means, in our present context, moving toward post-extractivism.

Today’s global extractivism, what Martin Arboleda has called The Planetary Mine, is identified with “generalized-monopoly capital” and conditions of “late imperialism.” A central concern of Gudynas’s work is a critique of the renewed imperial dependency in the Global South resulting from neo-extractivism, raising the question of “delinking from globalization” as perhaps the only radical alternative. A similar view was powerfully developed by James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer in their Extractive Imperialism, which described the new extractivism as a new imperialist model, forcing countries into a new dependency, the ground for which had been prepared by neoliberal restructuring, which had virtually annihilated many of the earlier forces of production in agriculture and industry.

Gudynas’s 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 in the 1950s, which was designed to operationalize Marx’s surplus value calculus in line with a critique that had rational economic planning as its yardstick. Gudynas notes that in Baran’s surplus concept, in conformity with Marx’s surplus value, “ground rent and interest on money capital” are components of total surplus rather than production costs. In introducing the concept of economic surplus, Baran sought to reveal forms of surplus value that were, in capitalist accounting, as Gudynas puts it, disguised forms of “what is essentially an appropriation of the surplus.”

Employing this idea, Gudynas seeks to add to the economic or social dimension of surplus, based on the exploitation of labor, two environmental dimensions of the surplus in the context of extractivist modes of appropriation. The first of these, the environmental-renewable surplus 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 “monetized surplus” 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 “robbing” or expropriation of the earth, part of his theory of metabolic rift.

The third dimension of the surplus (the second environmental dimension), according to Gudynas, is the environmental-nonrenewable surplus related to non-renewable resources, such as minerals and fossil fuels. “The key distinction here,” he writes, “is 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.” 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 “natural capital,” 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.

In Marx and Engels’s 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, as in the case of the soil, forests, fishing, etc. Hence, they approached extractivism with respect to nonrenewable resources under the rubric of the squandering 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 “human sacrifices” in extractivist industries, related to what is nowadays sometimes called the “corporeal rift.” Capitalism’s relation to both renewable and non-renewable resources was thus seen in the classical historical materialist perspective as pointing to the destructive expropriation of the earth, either as the “robbing” or the “squandering” of nature—an approach that closely corresponds to Gudynas’s two forms of extractivist surplus appropriation/expropriation.

Gudynas’s approach to what he calls the “extractivist surplus” associated with his two environmental dimensions of surplus is meant to encompass externalities, highlighting the fact that the “actual surplus” appropriated—to use Baran’s terms—is, in some cases, artificially high, in relation to a more rational “planned surplus,” as it does not account for depletion of fossil fuels and other natural resources. This basic approach is employed in the remainder of Gudynas’s analysis to engage with struggles on the ground over this bleeding of the extractivist economies, and the relation of this to late imperialism, which carries out such bleeding on ever-larger scales to the long-term detriment of the relatively dependent peripheral (or semi-peripheral, that is, emerging) economies. As he argues in Extractivisms, this ultimately becomes a question of “extractivism and justice.”


Extractivism and the Crisis of the Anthropocene

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 forces 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 “anthropogenic rift” 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. To avoid this, humanity will need to transcend the dominant “accumulative society” imposed by capitalism. 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’s 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.

It was the recognition of these conditions that led Spanish geologist Carles Soriano, writing in Geologica Acta, to propose the Capitalian as the name of the first geological age of the Anthropocene Epoch. 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 have proposed the name Capitalinian Age for this new geological age, while also pointing to the notion of a Communian Age—standing for communal, community, commons—as the future geological age of the Anthropocene that needs to be created in coevolution with nature—with a “great climacteric” in this respect necessarily occurring by the mid-twenty-first century.

In the present century, combatting the capitalist expropriation of nature, and in particular the extractivism that is more and more dominating our time—along with combatting the present accumulative system itself—has to take priority at all levels and in all forms of social struggle. In the classical historical materialist perspective, production as a whole, not simply extractive industry, but also agriculture, manufacturing, and transportation, need 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,

Since actual 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. Labour capacity denuded of the means of labour and the means of life is therefore absolute poverty as such.

Today we are faced with an even bigger problem, arising out of this one, since the denuding of labor of its role as the direct mediator of the metabolism between humanity and nature, and the substitution of capital in this role through its control of the objective conditions of the appropriation of nature, has meant, with the growth of accumulation, that the means of life on the planet as a whole 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.