Abstract
The earth and its inhabitants are on a trajectory of cascading socio-ecological crisis driven by techno-capitalist development. Presenting the aim and scope of this book, the introduction lays out the key conceptual issue of total extractivism, naming the spirit and amalgamation of violent technologies comprising the totalizing imperative and tension at the heart of the present catastrophic trajectory. Total extractivism denotes how the techno-capitalist world system harbors a rapacious appetite for all life—total consumption of human and non-human resources—that destructively reconfigures the earth. Drawing on hostile, dissident authors and their companions—humans who have resisted techno-capitalism—the introduction sets the scene for viewing the Leviathanic capitalist state system and its expanding grid of extractive infrastructures as the Worldeater(s).
Certain human realities become clearer at the periphery of the capitalist system, making it easier for us to brush aside the commoditized apprehension of reality.
—Michael Taussig
The beast knows itself to be a machine, and it knows that machines break down, decompose, and may even destroy themselves. A frantic search for perpetual motion machines yield no assurances to counter the suspicions, and the beast has no choice but to project itself into realms of beings which are not machines.
—Fredy Perlman
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
While one might justifiably argue we have benefits from growing up in industrial societies, and continue to indulge in their pleasures, they were not of our choosing and have resulted in psycho-social and ecological costs, begging the question: do these costs collectively outweigh their benefits?
- 3.
The spread of fracking in the United States and England as well as Trump’s opening of national parks to extraction serve as recent examples.
- 4.
While this short book offers a wide-ranging mapping exercise, we acknowledge its limitations—and the limitations of our knowledge—suggesting instead that readers interested in exploring total extractivism further may want to interrogate works on aquatic resources or narcotics as key frontiers to extractivist expansion, or think of digital media technology as a key violent technology at its service—to name but a few possible avenues.
- 5.
In earlier translations, called ‘spooks’.
- 6.
While plantations do not appear particularly ‘green’ in their exhaustion of the soil, this exhaustion is not complete in the same sense as with conventional extraction.
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Dunlap, A., Jakobsen, J. (2020). Introduction: Consuming Everything—Capitalism and the Imperative of Total Extractivism. In: The Violent Technologies of Extraction. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26852-7_1
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