Add new comment

To be fair the neocolonialism some of us talked about before is pretty much the same as what you're calling extractivism. Obviously a neo-subsistence land movement in the South is directed against monoculture cash-crop production. Though, we also need to target the regions which aren't being actively plundered at a given time, but just neglected. 50s/60s decolonisation was considered a threat because it might stop extraction by western powers (even if just by moving it to the Soviet bloc); it was tamed by allowing political independence but with western control over "resources" left intact. The struggle against dispossession is one of the things which could draw marginal regions into a post-left/autonomous politics. Destroying the whole system might not be viable now but it becomes so if autonomous zones spread virally. It's happened in incomplete forms before, Bougainville, Chiapas, the Niger Delta, Azawad, various Maoist and nationalist insurgencies, the affected regions become useless for global profiteering and the extractive operations are either shut down entirely or downscaled to a petty commodity level. So far, the problem has been that new politicians, entrepreneurs, gangsters etc take over and the areas which become autonomous slip back inside the system - that's why there needs to be a strong post-left/eco-anarchist anti-politics for these zones to remain resistant. Subsistence, DIY living, local survival networks with or without a petty commodity element are completely normal in most of the peripheral regions but my impression is that very few people embrace a subsistence politics, a lot of them aspire to "modernise" or redistribute power to themselves, and they get easily tricked and misdirected by bosses seeking power.