Revolutionary Reflections | Anti-extractivism and radical politics in Ecuador by Melissa Moreano Venegas, rs21, Feb. 5 https://www.rs21.org.uk/2021/02/05/revolutionary-reflections-anti-extractivism-and-radical-politics-in-ecuador/
Melissa Moreano Venegas looks at Sunday’s presidential election in Ecuador through the lens of Thea Riofrancos’ recent analysis of extractivism and its opponents - Thea Riofrancos, Resource Radicals: >From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2020) On February 7 Ecuador will elect as its new president one of three candidates: the banker Guillermo Lasso, who represents traditional right-wing parties; the young economist Andrés Arauz, of former president Rafael Correa’s political movement and part of the so-called Latin American ‘pink tide’; or Yaku Pérez, candidate of the indigenous party. These elections are historic for three reasons: 1) The COVID-19 health crisis has been managed with negligence and corruption. As in most countries, the pandemic has revealed the deep contempt of elites for the working class, whom they consider disposable and replaceable... 2) For the first time in the history of this profoundly racist country a candidate from the powerful Ecuadorian indigenous movement (organised around the indigenous organisation CONAIE and its political arm, Pachakutik), have a very good chance of winning the presidency... 3) The elections also present the possibility of an apparent return of the so-called ‘pink tide’ in Latin America... . . . Of the three presidential candidates, two present themselves as left-wing but confront each other with more passion than they confront the candidate of the right. As mentioned above, the differences arose at the beginning of Rafael Correa’s government between a left that stayed with Correa and one that separated from his political project and now supports an indigenous candidate who is an anti-extraction and environmental activist. The Ecuadorian elections – much as the Bolivian elections last year– put a spotlight on the troubled relationship between the mainstream left and environmental and indigenous movements. . . . The second characteristic Riofrancos identifies in the comprehension of extractivism that led to the antagonism between the two lefts in Ecuador rests on the contentious issue of national sovereignty versus local autonomy... The left in resistance presented indigenous, local autonomy as opposed to national sovereignty as vital for protecting peoples and nature from extractivism through the previous consultation. The left in power, on the other hand, assumed a position of defence of the national interest, for which extractivism was vital. The government’s breach of indigenous territorial autonomy to implant extractive projects led to racist politics, hundreds of indigenous leaders criminalised and dozens of communities violently evicted. This authoritarian and violent past is definitely taking its toll on Andrés Arauz’s chances of winning the elections, and favouring Yaku Pérez. . . . Finally, Riofrancos turns to a third element of extractivism that affects the global environmental movement itself: its inability to inspire a mass movement able to build a global politics for fighting the ecological crisis. In the concluding chapter she questions the capacity of the left within the anti-extractive movement to mobilise ‘a mass movement of the scale and strength of the anti-neoliberal popular sector coalition that swept the leftist governments into office in the first place’ (p. 174). This inability is due in part to the analysis of extractivism as an autonomous dynamic which explains everything that is wrong in Latin America, a position held by a myriad of Latin American anti-extractive activists and intellectuals... So defined, extractivism is the main enemy to be confronted, while the goal of fighting capitalism, or even neoliberalism, has been forgotten or at least postponed. The anticapitalist vocabulary has been foreclosed also by a misdiagnosis of a ‘really existing socialism’ that was as damaging to the environment as capitalism, a superficially apolitical stance inside the anti-extractive movement in which both the right and the left, ‘capitalism and state socialism [exhibit] a wanton disregard for socio-natural harmony’ (p. 174). In this panorama, the anti-extraction struggle places post-extractivism as the final goal, which, according to Riofrancos, leaves local communities alone fighting both the oil and mining companies and the ‘extractivist state’. For me, the rejection of the state together with the distrust of leftist regimes brings the anti-extractive movement closer to right-wing politics, as it is evident with Yaku Pérez candidacy. . . . This alternative understanding of extractivism would have two effects on political strategy, and here rests the central contribution of Riofrancos’ book for us, anti-extraction and climate activists within the global environmental movement. First, we need to push for the breaking free from narrow and limited anti-extraction (or carbon neutral or nature conservation) demands. It is necessary to define an alternative that does not take as its endpoint a post-extractive future or the end of fossil fuels dependency but goes beyond and fights capitalism... Second, the book shows us that without an anticapitalist political objective, environmentalism can be easily co-opted by the right, as we are witnessing today in the Ecuadorian elections...For an ecosocialist transition, we must think seriously about shifting ownership and control of the means of production, reorganising the international division of labour that confines millions of people to the role of tearing raw materials from the natural world. We must face the ecological disaster head-on whilst building political projects capable of understanding sub-national sovereignties and indigenous self-determination. Those are objectives that any new Latin American pink tide government must consider once they are back in office. # -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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