Commodities Consensus: Neoextractavism and Enclosure of the Commons in Latin America (No research, just blah blah blah about how, why and where to of this problem.. bear with me!)
According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, in 2011 agricultural, mineral, and commodity raw materials represented 76 percent of the exports of the countries of the Union of South American Nations, compared to only 34 percent for the world as a whole. The manufacture of advanced technology, in comparison, represented 7 percent and 25 percent, respectively (UNCTAD 2014).
Neoextractivist development is usually defined as the pattern of accumulation based on the overexploitation of generally nonrenewable natural resources, as well as the expansion of capital’s frontiers toward territories previously considered nonproductive. Characterized by large-scale enterprises, a focus on exportation, and a tendency for mono-production or monoculture. Its emblematic figures include strip mining, the expansion of the petroleum and energy frontier, the construction of large hydroelectric dams, the expansion of the fishing and forestry frontier, and the generalization of the agribusiness model (soy and biofuels).
The Washington consensus placed financial valorization at the center of its agenda and included policies of adjustment and privatization, which redefined the state as a metaregulating agent. This tendency toward exportation allows for the coexistence of progressive governments, which question the neoliberal consensus, with governments that continue to deepen a neoliberal, conservative political framework. Finally, the commodities consensus is built on the idea that there is— tacit or explicit—agreement about the irrevocable or irresistible character of the current extractivist dynamic, resulting from growing global demand for raw materials. Consequently, critical discourse or radical opposition is considered in terms of anti-modernity, negating progress, “infantile ecologism,” or even “colonial environmentalism” promoted by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) or foreign agents. In the vision of the progressive governments that support it, the commodities consensus is associated with the state’s action as producer and regulator, as well as with funding social programs for the most vulnerable from extractivist rent.
The most paradoxical scenarios of the commodities consensus are those presented by Bolivia and Ecuador. In these countries, where there exist strong participatory processes, new concept horizons have been generated, such as the plurinational state, autonomy, buen vivir (living well), and the rights of nature, which appear in the Ecuadorian and Bolivian constitutions.
There is a tendency to consolidate a model of appropriation and exploitation of the commons, which advances on populations through a top-down logic, threatening the improvements in the field of participatory democracy and inaugurating a new cycle of criminalization and violation of human rights.
Conflict, Environmentalization of Struggles, and Bad Development
One consequence of the current extractivist turn has been the explosion of social-environmental conflicts, visible in the strengthening of ancestral struggles for land by indigenous and campesino movements, as well as the emergence of new forms of mobilization and citizen participation focused on the defense of the common, biodiversity, and the environment.
Has led to the creation of a complex social fabric, characterized by the articulation between different
actors: indigenous-campesino movements, social-environmental movements, environmental NGOs, networks of intellectuals and experts, and cultural collectives.
Additionally, these languages of valorization have promoted new laws and norms and even legal frameworks seeking to construct an alternative environmental institutionality in opposition to current extractivist public policies and the dominant culture itself. Beyond the specific contexts (which depend on local and national settings), the dynamic of social-environmental struggles in Latin America gives rise to what has been called the ecoterritorial turn, a common language illustrating an innovative intersection between the indigenous communitarian and environmental discourses. The commons, food sovereignty, environmental justice, and buen vivir are among the topics emerging from this productive intersection between different frameworks, to which can be added the ecofeminist perspective.
Today not a single Latin American country with large-scale mining projects has been free of social conflicts pitting mining companies and governments against communities. This context of conflict directly or indirectly contributes to the judicialization of social-environmental struggles and human rights violations, including the arrest and murder of activists. In this political-ideological framework dominated by the productivist vision, the current dynamic of dispossession becomes a nonconceptualizable blind spot. Although the Latin American Left has undergone a process of revalorization of the communitarian-indigenous matrix in recent decades, it still adheres to a productivist vision of development, tightly linked to the ideology of progress and confidence in the expansion of productive forces. Progressive governments seek to justify extractivism by affirming it as the path that allows the state to generate revenue, which is later reoriented toward the redistribution of income and domestic consumption or, rather, toward activities with more value-added content. This leads to four interesting issues for the authors:
Within the framework of the commodities consensus, Latin American progressive governments have opted for a predatory type of extractivism, as demonstrated by the enormous multiplication of development programs based on large-scale extractive projects (gas, soy, oil, and minerals), whose social, environmental, cultural, and political consequences are systematically denied or minimized. Due to the characteristics of territorial appropriation and new social, ethnic, and gender-based inequalities, these extractive projects can only be imposed through a troubling setback in human rights and freedoms. Governments tend not only to empty the already bastardized concept of sustainability of all content but also to manipulate forms of popular participation, seeking to control collective decision making.
Predatory extractivism described above entails the consolidation of models of bad development Bad development refers to problems “that affect the system as a whole and that represent a decrease in the satisfaction of human needs and/or in people’s opportunities”. Bad development comprises of inequality, waste and plundering.
In the framework of the commodities consensus and in the name of “comparative advantage,” Latin American governments promote a model of inclusion tied to consumption, where the figure of the citizen consumer overdetermines the imaginary of buen vivir. The short-term coupling of the state’s advance, economic growth, and the citizen-consumer model appears as the condition of possibility for governments to have electoral success and remain in power. In Latin America, the central wager that progressive governments place on the citizen-consumer model, based on the hegemonic imperial mode of living, reinforces the refusal to consider any hypothesis or scenario of transition and gradual exit from extractivism.
Fourth, unlike during its first years, the commodities consensus has stopped being a tacit agreement that embarrassingly links extractive progressivism to liberal neo-developmentalism. On the one hand, progressive governments have recently been consolidating a conspiracy hypothesis, which emphasizes the interested action of outside agents and foreign NGOs. On the other hand, in the heat of territorial and environmental conflicts, they have assumed a belligerently developmentalist discourse, accompanied by a practice of criminalizing resistance.
In short, the campesino, indigenous, and new social-environmental movements are located on a difficult battlefield. On the one hand, they must directly confront the global action of large transnational corporations, which have clearly become the hegemonic actors of the extractive-export model in this new stage of capital accumulation. On the other hand, they must also confront the general orientations and politics of popularly elected progressive governments that, for the most part, believe that in the current international conjuncture extractive industries constitute the most rapid path—if not the only path—toward progress and development. Finally, they must wage an immense and necessary cultural battle in the material as well as symbolic realms in relation to the hegemonic mode of life that has been generalized not only in the global North but also in the South.
Buen Vivir and Rights of Nature
Ideas such as dependency and revolution, democracy and human rights, or, more recently, the plurinational state and buen vivir, among others, are categories of Latin American thought, inextricably linked to social and political struggles that traverse and structure different periods.
The commodities consensus has opened a breach, a profound wound, in Latin American critical thought, which was much more united during the 1990s against the monopolistic character of neoliberalism as an ideological powerhouse.
One of the most mobilizing concepts is buen vivir, which proposes new forms of relation between human beings and nature and among human beings. Highlighted in this new civilizational paradigm are the abandonment of the idea of development as unlimited economic growth, a sustainable solidarity economy, and the egalitarian prioritization of other ways of valuing activities and goods beyond financial considerations, in short, a deepening of democracy. The vision also revolves around the recognition of the rights of nature, which supposes not a virgin nature but rather respect for nature’s existence and the maintenance and regeneration of its vital cycles, structure, functions, and evolutionary processes, the defense of life systems. Thus if development aims to “Westernize” life on the planet, buen vivir rescues diversity; it values and respects “the other”.
This has various consequences:
The new paradigm points to a progressive and indispensable process of the decommodification of nature
The paradigm of the rights of nature also recognizes the intrinsic value of nature itself independent from human valorization
Nature as a subject of rights demands a relationship of equality and respect. Equality must transcend the human to recognize in nature a life that must be respected, a necessary interrelation between humanity and nature, humanity as part of nature.
Recognizing the rights of nature encourages the establishment of another field of justice: ecological justice, whose objective would be not to charge fines for damages but rather to engage in environmental recomposition independent of its economic cost. Criteria for such justice focus on ensuring vital processes and not economic compensation
The debate around the rights of nature was put on the agenda by Ecuador’s new constitution. There, nature appears as a subject of rights, defined as “the right for its existence to be fully respected, as well as the maintenance and regeneration of its vital cycles, functions and evolutionary processes”.
From Defense of the Common to a Communal Ethos
Concept of the common appears today in the global North, where struggle is defined against policies of adjustment and privatization (neoliberalism), as well as in countries of the South, where struggles confront developmentalist neoextractivism.
On one level, common goods are not understood as commodities, as pure merchandise, nor are they exclusively understood as strategic natural resources or the public good, as different progressive governments seek to define them. Beyond utilizing the concept of common goods (principally in the cases of the Ecuadorian and Bolivian governments), governmental narratives oscillate between the vision of natural resources as commodities and their redefinition as strategic natural resources.
On a second level, the notion of the common poses a different view of social relations, based on the configuration or emergence of spaces and forms of social cooperation and the use and enjoyment of the common, in the spirit of what Gustavo Esteva (2007) characterized a few years ago as “spheres of communality” or what could be called, as freely inspired by Ecuadorian Bolívar Echeverría (2002), a communal ethos.
The notion of a communal ethos allows us to consider preexisting communitarian elements in Latin America as well as the current political dimensions of resistance oriented toward radical democracy. Last but not least, what we understand by communal ethos is very close to another perspective, that of the ethics of care, which is advocated by ecofeminism and feminist economy and highlights the parallels between the exploitation of women and the exploitation of nature, through invisibilized and nonrecognized reproductive labor.
Transition and Postextractavism
Debates about alternatives to the dominant development model and its link to asymmetrical globalization in Latin America are neither new nor unique. Prominent are the efforts of the Permanent Working Group on Alternatives to Development which proposes a discussion of ways out of extractivism, which implies thinking about transitional scenarios, from two different levels of action: first, a set of public policies acting on a macro-social and global level and, second, intervention on a local and regional scale aiming to detect, value, and empower already existing cases of alter development. Peruvian economists demonstrated the viability of a transition to postextractivism through the combination of two measures: tax reform (higher taxes on extractive activities or taxes on mining windfall profits) for increased tax revenue and a mining-oil-gas moratorium for projects initiated between 2007 and 2011.
Authors also feel the need for revisiting the general definition of a “better life” as it appears to be associated with the democratization of consumption, in the frame of the dominant imperial mode of life, rather than the need for cultural change, in respect to consumption and the relationship with the environment, based on a different theory of social needs.