Extractivismo
extractivisme (fr.)
In Eduardo Gudynas' work, *extractivismo* doesn’t refer to extraction in general—every society extracts resources—but rather a large-scale mode of appropriation geared toward exporting barely processed materials. What defines the concept isn’t the resource (*gold, oil, soy, ore*), but the structure: massive volumes, low added value, external destination, and a host of social and environmental impacts treated as the normal cost of development. Gudynas makes it the key to understanding South American economies, from colonial times to so-called progressive governments.
El extractivismo, definido como la extracción intensa de grandes volúmenes de recursos naturales para ser principalmente exportados (con poco o nada de valor agregado) y que, por lo general, deja importantes impactos sociales y ambientales en los territorios, constituye una acelerada tendencia global de la que los países andinos no somos ajenos.
The word doesn’t merely translate the English extraction: the suffix -ismo signals a doctrine, a system, an organized way of doing—not a one-off act. Any society extracts from the soil what it needs to live; extractivismo, in Gudynas’ terms, refers to something else entirely: an entire economy structured around the large-scale export of raw materials, with almost no processing, to foreign markets. Colonial gold, rubber, oil, transgenic soy—these aren’t isolated episodes but variations on the same pattern.
This pattern has a precise signature: little value added locally, dependence on international prices set elsewhere, and social and environmental harms—population displacement, watershed pollution, territorial conflicts—treated as acceptable externalities of “development.” Gudynas emphasizes a point that shifts the Latin American political debate: so-called progressive governments that nationalize extractive rents without altering this pattern remain, in his view, extractivist—hence his concept of neo-extractivismo, an extraction managed by the state rather than overturned.
To be distinguished from Ecuador’s sumak kawsay, which is not a diagnosis but a horizon: where extractivismo describes an economic structure to critique, sumak kawsay proposes a different relationship with the living world, outside the logic of extraction itself. The first names the problem; the second seeks the good elsewhere.