Le blog de Berliner Gazette

The showdown between carbon capitalists and post-carbon capitalists is also a struggle over the collective perception of the climate crisis, aimed at brushing us off with quick answers and preventing us from questioning capitalism, as media researcher Paul Schütze argues in his contribution to the BG text series “After Extractivism” by focusing on the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

A foray through technology parks in Germany reveals: the infrastructures of the so-called “cloud” are in constant flux, like clouds in the sky. Unlike such clouds, however, they leave behind an immobile materiality: sealed surfaces and concrete, as well as an impenetrable web of private ownership, researcher Christoph Marischka argues in his contribution to the BG text series “After Extractivism.”

After the Gulf boom propelled the growth of both the region and of oil-devouring economies in the West, new realms of capitalist expansion are being developed in the name of smartness and sustainablity, ultimately reproducing the lasting systemic crisis of which Dubai is somewhat representative, researcher Özgün Eylül İşcen argues in her contribution to the BG text series “After Extractivism.”

Welzow, a provincial coal mining town in the Lusatian mining district of Eastern Germany, is an exemplary case of how the transition from extractivism to post-extractivism reaches the limit of anthropocentric technological solutionism, calling for a radically new approach, anthropologist Friederike Pank argues in her contribution to the BG text series “After Extractivism.”

At the edges of big cities, the world’s often unnoticed energy centers are arising to supply energy-guzzling growing cities with their lifeblood. But alternatives and lived counter-designs are also literally cultivated there, as activist and author Andrea Vetter shows in her contribution to the BG text series “After Extractivism,” drawing on an exemplary caring economy in the ex-GDR.

In the face of the Ukraine war, Green parties in Europe, e.g. in France, Germany, and Bulgaria, are advocating “pragmatic” solutions which nullify their much-vaunted “commitment to non-violence” and hold out the prospect of an end of the world even sooner than the climate catastrophe entails, Rositsa Kratunkova argues in her contribution to the BG’s “After Extractivism” text series.

As was the case with the British Empire, today’s global form of extractive capitalism is a system of human sacrifice hidden in plain sight. A critical look at the palm oil industry reveals both the violence of this trajectory in an exemplary way and the challenges for a transition into a just world, social thinker Max Haiven argues in his contribution to the BG’s “After Extractivism” text series.

The calculus of imperial expansion often contradicts conventional cost-benefit analysis. Using the example of Belarus and Russia, Mark Cinkevich and Anna Engelhardt in their contribution to the BG text series “After Extractivism” show: Apparently irrational economic activity, for which no price is too high and no ecological damage too severe, nevertheless follows a politico-economic rationality.

The upheavals, transition plans and dislocations of the present make us forget what actually happened in the post-socialist countries after 1989. But it is precisely the reappraisal of this phase that would be of great importance in order to better understand our time, artist and writer Stefan Tiron argues in his contribution to the BG’s “After Extractivism” text series.

Resource extractivism has been captured by capitalism – last but not least as its driver. But are there not still alternatives at the margins of the capitalist world system, especially where socialist-oriented states try to fight against capitalist domination? Critical geographer Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro searches for answers in his contribution to the BG’s “After Extractivism” text series.