Abstract
Mineral, oil, and gas prices turned upward in 2003, beginning the latest boom in Latin American extractive industries. The boom was intense, with high mineral-dependence in Peru, Chile, and Bolivia and high gas- and oil-dependence in Ecuador and Bolivia. By 2014 its speculative origins and the resulting easing of demand in consuming countries had caused something of a retreat (Zibechi, 2016). Even so, there is no foreseeable end to the predominance of extractivism in shaping Latin American political economy and society.
The convergence with the extractive boom of a resurgent left spurred a boom in academic production. We now know that despite the leanings of leftist governments, extractive industries exert their own force, somewhat contained by the repositioning of the state and the use of rents for social welfare. Progressive regimes did more to reduce poverty. However, because of the material form of extractive industries and their imbrication in transnational legal and economic webs, dependence inevitably produces conflicts between state sovereignty, popular demands, and extractive capital. Left or right, governments defend the idea that one or another resource is the key to progress. There has been little transformation of the industries in the form of worker ownership, the promotion of small-scale operations, radical oversight, or detachment from global finance capital. The politics of redistribution has been demand-oriented rather than structural, and therefore even in progressive regimes redistribution has fomented a politics of consumption rather than economic diversification (Zibechi, 2016). An overview of recent research sheds light on export dependence and possibilities for envisioning postextractivist political economies.
It may seem strange to review a ten-year-old World Bank tract, but the Bank continues to be a major player, offering loans to expand these industries and shaping policy debates through claims to expertise. 1 Once deployed, as in Lederman and Malone’s Natural Resources: Neither Curse Nor Destiny, Bank ideas become part of the justificatory political technology of the extractive apparatus and operate as political constraints on alternative thinking.
Some background is necessary. Historically, Bank pronouncements unfailingly promoted free-market export-oriented growth and thus enabled destructive industrial practice. 2 Yet during the 2000s one of the Bank’s own publications conceded that extractive-industry dependence contributed to slower growth of the gross domestic product (World Bank, 2003: 2). An external review showed that Bank investments did little to impact poverty and exacerbated environmental destruction (Salim, 2003, cited in Redman et al., 2015). A group of (non-Bank) economists developed a critique by revisiting the “resource curse” (Humphreys, Sachs, and Stiglitz, 2007; Sachs and Warner, 2001). The resource-curse argument is that dependence on one or two export commodities undermines manufacturing, distorts exchange rates, corrupts political institutions, and generates slow or negative growth. These free-market revisionists argued for a stronger state role (even to the point of ownership), for rents to go to productive and social needs rather than international financiers, and for public participation in contracts and oversight. Read generously, these revisionists were rethinking the orthodox model. Natural Resources: Neither Curse Nor Destiny was orthodoxy’s attempt to rebut the revisionists and restore faith in free-market extractivism as compatible with “good governance” and “growth.” The rebuttal is unconvincing.
Through 300 pages or so the contributors try to show that resource export-dependency might produce growth. The work is an exercise in methodological gymnastics with a lot of caveats. The editors’ conclusion (10) is revealing: In sum, this book provides ample . . . evidence to suggest that natural resources are neither curse nor destiny for developing countries. Nor are they a short-cut to equitable and sustainable long-term development. Natural resources are assets for development that require intelligent public policies that complement natural riches with human ingenuity. It is only through these complex interactions that resource-led growth can take off.
The mathematical excursion that follows is largely smoke and mirrors. Chapter 2 argues that if natural resource concentration lowers productivity in other sectors and thus hurts total exports, the problem is not natural resources but export concentration (31). But this is the entire point. Chapter 3 acknowledges that, since governments take on bad debt in times of plenty and default when the boom recedes, the resource curse involves currency and debt crises. The authors argue that if we discount bad debt, a.k.a. “debt overhang,” then we can see signs of growth. Yet the debt cycle is part of the systemic link between finance capital and resource extraction. This approach deflects blame from international creditors (like the World Bank) and asserts that the problem is bad government. Chapter 4 suggests that we look at the long term, when some countries with natural resources get richer. For example, Scandinavia has had high levels of education (human capital, in Bank terms) and (albeit slower) growth. We are asked to discount a long history of imperialist capitalism, neoliberal cuts to public education and other services, and the role of external political and economic actors. If Latin American states would only invest in “human capital” along with natural resources, we are told, there would be no curse. And so it goes, with a series of “yes, but” and “if only they would” stories deployed to justify neoliberal extractivism.
The book then engages Raúl Prebisch (1950), an early critic of commodity dependency and declining terms of trade who argued that specialization had a crippling effect on development. But the rebuttal to Prebisch (Chapter 5) is weak. It concludes that commodity prices are historically flat and that price shifts are random and thus irrelevant for policy formulation. This is a curious conclusion, since relative flatness of commodity prices against increasing costs for manufactured imports reaffirms Prebisch. A final chapter argues that countries might reduce dependence with trade liberalization, capital and skill accumulation, and cheaper transportation—in other words, more neoliberalism. Alongside this sleight-of-hand it is argued that diversification to industrial agriculture—a process with its own curse effects—is an improvement.
As methodological fetish, the book carries out its primary political task while reaffirming antiquated ideas. Neoliberal economists deride those who invoke “dependency” today, but this book invokes without irony the 1950s-era idea of “take-off” (10). The volume paternalistically chides imprudent leaders in the South while ignoring the financial agencies, industries, and capitalists of the North. Sachs and company differ only in their tepid embrace of the state. Ever constrained by market thinking, which presumes the normatively reasonable centrality of global capital, even the revisionists leave one concluding that capitalist economists will never be capable of envisioning transformations to address our current crises of climate, nature, and inequality.
New Political Spaces in Latin American Resource Governance takes on extractivism by critiquing the resource-curse idea for its narrow focus on macroeconomic variables. Instead, it borrows from Nancy Fraser’s Scales of Justice (2008) to consider natural-resource contention as struggle for social justice (recognition, redistribution, representation). The volume explores new political spaces where struggles over justice unfold. Chapter 2 considers similarities between what its authors call “neoliberal’ (Peru and Colombia) and “alt-neoliberal” (Bolivia and Ecuador) regimes. Bebbington and Bebbington argue counterintuitively that Colombia has made somewhat more legal advances than countries deemed progressive (34), that such legal and institutional change is needed in all phases of the extractive cycle, and that we also need shifts in capital markets to create new sources of employment. Social movements are said to be key actors, although the specifics are not detailed. In Chapter 3, McNeish questions the essentialization of indigenous peoples as ecologically noble savages, reminding us that indigenous organizations are complex and often contradictory political actors—at times for extractivism, at times against it. If justice is the question, McNeish argues, then indigenous sovereignty should be the primary issue. Hall examines Reduce Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation, an ambiguous set of proposals that is often held up as a way for polluters to pay and protectors to earn from conservation, and concludes that its projects are a “mixed blessing” with limited impact (76). The underestimation of social complexity, the top-down approach, and a failure to transform the root causes of poverty all call these proposals into question. Haarstad and Campero return to Bolivia and Peru to argue that change is constrained by “interstate extractive relations” at the transnational level (85). This includes infrastructural “integration” such as the Initiative for the Integration of the Regional Infrastructure of South America, part of the neoliberal apogee, and the Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América, the countermovement tied to the pink tide. In this connection the authors show how arbitration agreements subvert sovereignty. The free-trade approach undermines grassroots and state sovereignty, while the counterapproach extracts “surplus” sovereignty yet cannot bridge the chasm between extractivism and grassroots demands. The pushback against investment treaties and arbitration has not transferred “surplus” sovereignty downward. Even so, cases like Bolivia offer political potential that is absent in more neoliberal settings.
Barton, Román, and Fløysand describe conflicts between gold mining, forestry, aquaculture, and hydroelectric projects and local views of justice in Chile. Despite the emergence of new forms of democratic struggle, Chile continues to commodify territories to create “extractive spaces” (124). Nongovernmental organizations and communities struggle for sustainable visions, but authoritarian neoliberalism carries the day: a centralized pro-growth, pro-export, pro-market state dominated by trickle-down economics—in other words, injustice in the name of capital accumulation. In Chapter 7 Anthias examines gas development and the dilemmas for indigenous peoples in southeastern Bolivia. Territorial rights are subordinated to the priorities of natural gas extraction. Against this reality, the Guarani create new political strategies and visions, at times mobilizing transnational support to bring the “state to account” (150). Chapters on oil enclaves in Ecuador (Guzmán-Gallegos) and Peru (Okamoto and Leifsen) show how oil companies—whether in mundane operations or in times of catastrophe—detach themselves from material commitments to local communities. Instead, enclaves operate through tactical engagement, taking advantage of their knowledge of the community’s social complexity to disrupt some territorialities while recrafting others. Using the concept of “unruly engagement,” these analysts suggest that conflicts be read through three lenses—the politics of representation and the control of knowledge, the implementation of participatory forms, and the possibility of confrontation to challenge “invited spaces” (194). Certomá and Greyl explore Ecuador’s flirtation with a “keep it in the ground” policy for Yasuni. At the end of the day, the plan’s reliance on international financing has reinforced the dilemmas of natural-resource-based “development”: imbrication with global financial interests or, in this case, whims. Finally, Nem Singh compares Chile and Brazil to consider hybridities between systems deemed neoliberal or post-neoliberal. In Chile, the state copper industry and free-market orthodoxies coexisted through the “socialist” era of Bachelet. In Brazil, the rise of the Workers’ Party created new relationships with private capital rather than supplanting it with the state. In both cases, labor unions played a key role as the “fulcrum of resource conflict[s].” Nem Singh concludes (pre-Temer) that Brazil’s economic pragmatism might lead toward a deepening of social justice. The volume ends where it began, highlighting what neoliberalism has failed to erase: the idea that “natural resources belong to society” (248). Even so, the pursuit of justice continues to confront structures and interests (such as those put forth in the World Bank volume) working in direct opposition to this ideal.
Li’s Unearthing Conflict is a rich account of Peru’s mining boom. In the genre of “corporations vs. communities,” it focuses on the Conga project. Multiple conflicts unfold. Li’s tripartite approach, focusing on the materiality of mining, environmental impacts and the deployment of expert knowledge, and emergent forms of contentious political mobilization, echoes chapters of the Haarstad volume but expands our understanding by merging political ecology with the anthropological approach to “things” such as mines, springs, toxic waste, and mountains. This introduces ontological politics—struggles over what counts as reality.
Li explores social and environmental disruptions in the “immense concessionary area” (78) of Conga. The first revolve around irrigation water, a sacred infrastructure in the Andes. Since the mine took control of water, the company offered compensation, a new canal, and treated water, arguing that this would be equivalent to what was lost. Yet water quantity and quality were objects of concern. Li calls this the “politics and logic of equivalence.” The company’s logic of compensation opposed the community’s experience of water as it related to agrarian existence and livelihood. A second conflict arose around accountability and environmental impacts. Li suggests that procedures like environmental impact assessments are a trap. Once people are lured into participating, they engage in strategies for securing social permission for projects already approved by state. Some approaches to extractivism suggest that these assessments just need to be done better. What Li implies is that the most effective strategy of resistance might be to boycott the process. It forces people to engage in the “technical language of environmental management” (225), which treats issues like water and livelihood as manageable phenomena. To implement an environmental impact assessment is not to consider whether the project goes forward but how to compensate for damages. This returns people to the “logic of equivalences” through which social and natural violence is assigned a monetary value. The technical approach discounts other languages of struggle as irrational.
Li’s work will be invaluable for scholars of extractivism. The focus on things, now trending in anthropology, offers an anchor. Writers such as Barry (2013) have suggested that the study of politics often loses sight of things, although thing studies often lose sight of politics. Li combines the two by drawing attention to the politics of things in struggles over mining. What we are left wanting to know more about is the political struggles beyond the things. Since a politics of possibility requires attention to ontological politics as well as the correlation of forces that transcend the constraints of the projects themselves, future work must link the managerial spaces of the project to broader political horizons and processes. What Li’s work does best is reveal the limits of activism focused on transparency, accountability, and social responsibility.
Historical perspective is useful for new political thought, especially given the near invisibility of labor in recent critical work on extractivism. Pavilack’s Mining for the Nation offers a case study of labor in the extractive industry and its potential role in national progressive politics. Though counterintuitive given the progressive resistance to coal in the United States, the history of coal labor in Chile was one of radical socialist and communist struggle. This history was truncated with Pinochet and brought to an end with the closure of most coal mines in the late 1990s. Pavilack’s account echoes Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy (2011) and brings to mind the history of Bolivian tin miners narrated by June Nash (1979): Mitchell’s view that political processes that emerge from fossil fuel extraction have much to do with the politics of place, labor, and the materiality of the industry (i.e., labor-intensive mines vs. oil extraction enclaves) and Nash’s that local histories of ideological struggle and the making of resistant communities are central to the national politics of extractivism. The intimate portrait that Pavilack offers is one of heroic struggle, reminding us of the need to think critically about labor if we are to transcend extractivism as we know it.
Pavilack retells the history of mining from the Popular Front period of the 1930s and 1940s through the cold war. The book reveals internal struggles over democracy and citizenship, the role of alliance-building between miners and rural laborers, the lines of conflict and accord between various strains of socialist and popular democratic politics at the national level, and the betrayals of national leaders such as President Gabriel González Videla (1946–1952). González Videla led the center-left project known as the Popular Front but turned state violence against labor during a fit of anticommunist paranoia (338). In this and other episodes, Pavilack details moments large and small through a wonderful combining of texts, interviews, newspaper accounts, official documents, and even the poetry of the day. The material, such as Neruda’s critique of González Videla as a “wretched clown, miserable mixture of monkey and rat, whose tail is combed with a gold pomade on Wall Street.” (332), resonates today.
The work argues for the centrality of often violent class struggle in the making of the Chilean state. Against popular democracy, Chile’s coalition politics, often manipulated between elite interests, was a politics of intermittent violence against and opening to the struggles of labor. Rule was sustained by the reactionary violence of elites, whose dependence on foreign capital was countered by the workers’ deep embrace of popular nationalism and democratic aspirations. This came amid progressive-era efforts by the United States to promote worker welfare while countering communist ideas. In this context, Pinochet was merely an extension of a long history of elite betrayal of the nation. In contrast, labor was an anchor for popular nationalism. A detail that emerges is that Pinochet was a young officer at Pisagua, an internment camp for labor leaders established in the 1940s. Pinochet recalled cultivating his anticommunism through this experience of institutionalized criminalization of labor (346). In short, coal miners had much to do with the violent struggle over Chilean politics that culminated in the Allende government and the Pinochet coup. In a monumental way, Pavilack recreates this in Mining for the Nation.
The book also documents forgotten voices and anonymous martyrs of the workers’ struggle. For example, the communist leader Luis Emilio Recabarren of the 1920s offered a Mitchell-like critique of the bourgeoisie-dominated coal industry, arguing that a “legalistic modern industrial relations system” would ultimately hinder real popular emancipation (54). Santos Medel, born in 1905, watched his father receive 50 lashes for organizing a communal workers’ organization and went on to resist industry control of local town councils and expand the power of communist labor in the 1930s. Carlos Silva Torres was killed by the army during the Lota massacre of 1942, when he stepped out of the union office carrying the Chilean flag (150). Coal miners worked deep underground or, more accurately, under the Pacific Ocean. Daily life was marked by poor sanitation and crowded housing in a harsh, cold, wet climate. As in many mining enclaves, women struggled to maintain households amid dependency on company stores, problems with alcohol and domestic violence, and bleak possibilities for children. As the elite reaction deepened, women’s local voting rights were abridged because of their power to shape the crucial spaces of local struggle (311). Even Pinochet, stationed at the prison for labor leaders at Pisagua, recalled that the most militant were the women. Yet figures like Eusebia Torres Cerna, a communist councilwoman from the mining center at Coronel, rose to become national political actors, pushing for improved conditions (270).
Whether and how very different modes of labor organization tied to the extractive industries of today offer progressive purchase remains an open question. Yet Pavilack’s book brings us full circle from the myopic doxa of World Bank economists to the violence inflicted in the name of resource extraction. If commodity dependence deepens, and despite political proclamations about worlds otherwise, extractive industries will continue to exert an outsized influence on the meaning and practice of politics. As scholars and sometime political actors, we must maintain a multiscalar approach informed by political and economic critique, a concern for human livelihoods, ontological politics and their imbrication in natural worlds, and the politics of labor. These works suggest that future research articulate these scales of understanding as part of a wider critical project aimed at imagining alternatives or at least carving out what Haarstad and others call “new political spaces.” It is in these complex, interconnected political spaces—perhaps against extractivism altogether, perhaps with some acceptance of extractivism and the aspirations of labor—that new forms of struggle and visions of broader transformation might be made and remade and take hold.