Extractivism

Book Chapter

Summary *

Recently, the concept of extractivism has enjoyed wide diffusion in Latin Americain order to renew a critique of developmentalism and, at the same time, cometo grips with the region’s insertion into the global commodities market. Manyauthors (e.g. Escobar, 2012, preface; Gudynas, 2016; Lander, 2016; Svampa,2015) use the concept to denounce forms of dependence, which update logics ofplunder and looting, linking this debate to dynamics of ‘accumulation by dispos-session’ (Harvey, 2003).The entry will start by reviewing the literature associated with those debates.Then, the concept will be broadened along three lines of investigation: 1) theneoextractivist form of contemporary economies in Latin America and its organicrelationship to consumption and finance; 2) the need to expand the concept ofextractivism beyond its sectorial limitation to the extraction of raw materials;and 3) the relation between this expansion and the expansion of the margins ofvalorization, to understand the crucial roles played by popular economies andterritories in the urban peripheries in this new moment of accumulation. Information provided by the agent in SIGEVA