Ecosocialism matters
On post-extractivism and the transformation of production in transition strategy
First things first.
This substack has been mostly left on its own the past months and we could almost say it was on a silent hiatus. This is my safe space to write in whatever language I choose - I feel I may add a Spanish section at some point -, but this also means it loses in priority to the things that pay my bills and to which I dedicate most of my labour.
So, I guess that having to work on three books at the same time, while being a monthly columnist for a high profile portal, while taking up on a short-term scientific residence at one of Brazil's best universities, while rennovating my apartment, while running a small consultancy, while being a public speaker, while dealing with a myriad of health issues… the blog suffered a bit.
Since some of these things are now in the past and I have some writing energy building up again, I had the urge to come back and talk about ecosocialism.
I'm happy that I got to contribute, alongside many people dear to me, to spread the word of ecosocialism in the past years. I think there's a bit of a special imprint in Brazil, but being a part of international networks - such as the Global Ecosocialist Network - also allowed me to enter into some interesting exchanges throughout the years. I also made a point to study Ecosocialism and to publish about it, trying to connect it to other areas of my research whenever possible, from food sovereignty, to internationalism, to even industrial policy.
So, it's an honour to travel to Australia next month to be a part of Ecosocialism 2026, happening from 11 to 13 September, at Albion Peace Centre, in Magan-djin/Brisbane. I'm a featured international speaker and I'm contributing to two sessions. The first one is on Resisting Trump's new colonialism, alongside N Sai Balaji from India. The second one is on Ecosocialist perspectives, together with one of the people responsible to bringing me to the Ecosocialist side of the force, Ian Angus.
I'm excited about both, but let me stress how they connect to each other. I think historical materialists are making a huge mistake if they choose to privilege the concept and experience of imperialism over the debate of (neo)colonialism. It's really weird to me how there are people who think it's either one or the other, as if imperialism could not co-exist with neocolonial dynamics. To be fair, I agree that the idea of neocolonialism is sometimes poorly defined, but this is not true of all the scholarship about it. Still, I've seen journal articles, substacks, and even sly comments here and there arguing that those of us on the post-extractivist spectrum and who point our the neocolonial veins of projects deemed to be part of a “just transition” (green colonialism) are ignoring or downplaying imperialism. This makes absolutely no sense.
(Side note, I really want to read and learn from Geo Maher's intervention into this debate, but I don't have a handy online library subscription to access all the nice journals right now. If you do and want to share the pdf with a fellow researcher working in the Global South outside institutional academia, let me know.)
I suppose there's a tendency, especially in the Global North, to mingle together everything that argues that colonial hegemony is still an issue in the 21st Century. Many Marxists are resentful of the “decolonials” and vice-versa. The result is a poor binary that is not helping us update our anti-imperialist strategies. It is also undermining alliances to resist initiatives presented as cooperation, investment, and partnerships that depend on colonial notions of power, knowledge, progress and development to support supply chains that ignore planetary boundaries and the demand for just lives in our territorries.
Honestly, I've seen some ‘wild’ stuff out there. Anything from claiming that those of us who critique green colonialism are ignoring the industrial and development demands of the Global South to the kind of disgusting sectarian speech that will say that “true Marxists” should not be engaging with decolonial speakers and writers.
It is kind of funny to me, considering that I'm both an economist and sociologist by trade. Sometimes, I get to wear one hat at a time. Most of the time, I'm wearing both and fighting inside my head to produce the syntheses I think are necessary to move us towards a more radical path of ecosocial transitions. My economist side is thinking of the pragmatic approaches, my sociologist side is urging me to consider power and consent. Ecosocialism is guiding me on principle and strategies, always.
This means that, for me, a “just transition” can only be considered truly just if it applies across the supply chain. If it levels power inequalities and includes better parameters for us to measure development and quality of life. One requirement, then, is to avoid tunnel visions, especially carbon tunnel visions. It is shocking to see how much academia and even leftist organisations continue to reduce our nature-based challenges to greenhouse gas emissions only.
This normalises and enables processes where we overextract from Earth in the name of a transition, which is mostly reduced to decarbonisation through electrification nowadays - so, fitting what the IEA has called the Age of Electricity.
To anyone who will tell you post-extractivists are romantics, idealists and out of touch with reality because they're calling to end ALL extraction, let me tell you: it's a very convenient (and lazy) strawman argument. Yes, there's a few people who would like to cut it down so radically that we'd be halting global production. But I place them in the “anti-extraction” category, devoid from a sound debate on transition. Perhaps, they're getting ahead of themselves, confusing what could be already a post-growth scenario in some societies, but definitely not everywhere.
Post-extractivism, truly, is a perspective within ecological transition, calling for the transformation of production. If you look for basic texts on this, you may find Eduardo Gudynas talking about a distinction between all extraction and sensible extraction - which I particularly like and have engaged with in writing and activism.
For me, post-extractivism is a beautiful dialectic strategy. To achieve one's goal, you must make many conditions that impede it obsolete. As such, how we deal with development and industry has to change. We need to make room for certain kinds of production while doing away with the unecessary and the damaging kinds.
One way I've put this recently: considering the worsening of the climate crisis, cooling should be a right. So if there's an issue with growing energy consumption in the Global North, how about we cap the electricity for data centers and those types of hungry AI that focus on extracting more value for corporations rather than benefitting people directly? Then we can perhaps add more ACs for real people suffering from heat. Then couple this with building adaptations and more regulation aimed at the best materials and designs fit for thermal comfort. This will ensure AC is part of our adaptation strategy, but without making us wholly dependent on it. Creating more dependency is a symptom of a bad strategy, economically and in terms of moving us back into a safe zone inside the planetary boundaries.
This is post-extractivist thinking, inside a transition framework, with ecosocialist principles in mind.
It does not reject industrial investment. It doesn't even reject economic investment. But it repurposes all of it in radical, more crisis-solving - less crisis-managing - ways.
In another example similar to what I've written here before: One part of the job is calling out how problematic is to see nickel extracted from a country to supply special batteries for special EVs somewhere else and treat a mineral downstreaming policy in the place of extraction as the big solution in development policy. The other part of the job is questioning why so many EVs in the first place? Shouldn't we treat transition as a reverse engineering endeavour? One where we evaluate what resources are available, which zones rich in resources should be protected from sacrifice no matter what, and then distribute them according to real, just and equittable priorities in end use. We cap, and then we trade. It requires us to think about sufficiency and about what big changes have to be made to reduce uses, dependencies and impact elsewhere (even in aggregate terms). It's what I spent most of my new book manuscript thinking about.
(side note: Outro fim é possível - or Another end is possible - is my book on transition and the polycrisis to come out for sale in Brazil at the end of the year and I couldn't be more excited to see it published soon!)
Thinking this way shouldn't be so hard, but it requires calling out the colonial paradigm behind development, technology and expertise that is embedded in many projects and discourses commonly identified as “alternatives” to the imperialist project.
I’ll be honest: in my humble opinion, they are indeed still better than the imperialist project. But, also in my humble opinion, they cannot be considered ‘just’ only because they're not the worst case scenario.
I made this argument a while ago in a few book chapters and articles, most notably in "Right-Wing Authoritarianism Against Nature: The Latin American Context" and “‘Just’ Means 'Just’ Everywhere: How Extractivism Stands in the Way of an Internationalist Paradigm for Just Transitions”.
And this is why I'm excited to share more about this when I arrive for the conference in Australia in September. Debates on the need to decolonise alongside ecosocialist strategy absolutely make sense and can help us improve our understanding of sovereignty. What real sovereignty looks like - ecological sovereignty, as I see it.
In preparation for the conference, I talked to Fred Fuentes through a video call, exchanging some key ideas on ecosocialist strategy.
The interview is available here, slightly edited in text in order to be more precise. A quote:
The prefix “eco” is not there by chance. “Eco” modifies how we think about a socialist society. It reflects our understanding that we cannot build socialism on a scorched Earth and that we must consider the planet we will inherit. Ecosocialists do not separate the struggle against capitalism from the struggle against capitalism’s destruction of nature.
We also understand that a post-capitalist society must do more than just overcome capitalism. It will have to overcome productivism, extractivism and other practices that disrespect nature and cause irreparable damage to Earth. We need to change the mode of production not just to end labour exploitation but also the exploitation of nature.
You can also watch it (or listen to it) as made available by our friends at the Green Left:
And if you're around Australia and would like to attend the conference, you can register here. A few sessions will be made available online too, but I hear you also have to register to get the link.
If you've made it to the end of this text, thanks for reading and for the patience with my absence.