Extractivism is crucial to the continuation of imperial modes of living---that fundamentally depends on an outgroup to externalize socioecological destruction towards

Similar to later arguments about ‘ecologically unequal exchange’ and ‘ecological debt’ (Dorninger et al., 2021; Martinez-Alier, 2002), Bunker (1985, 22) insists that ‘modern’ social formations ‘can only emerge in regions where industrial modes of production derive large amounts of energy and matter from subordinate modes of extraction [...] [that] create unequal exchange’. In thermodynamic terms, the extraction of energy and materials from regions creates entropic peripheries if no equivalent amount of energy and/or materials is returned (Leff, 2021). As detailed in section 2 of this chapter, such subordination is associated with political, economic and social inequalities. Following Arboleda, Mezzadra and Neilson, and Dunlap and Jakobsen, these dynamics cannot be captured in meta-geographical categories of interstate, centre/periphery and global North/South dynamics. Instead, these asymmetric socioecological relations cut across nations, incorporating and excluding population strata according to class, gender and race inequalities. This generates emergent and relational supra- and subnational centre–periphery dynamics that sustain the social metabolism of ‘the imperial mode of living’. Brand and Wissen (2021, 39–40, emphasis in the original) conceive of ‘the imperial mode of living’ (in the singular) to describe how ‘everyday life in the capitalist centres is essentially made possible by shaping social relations and society–nature relations elsewhere, i.e. by means of (in principle) unlimited access to labour power, natural resources and sinks’. The adjective ‘imperial’ denotes that the IML is ‘based on exclusivity’ and can be sustained ‘only as long as an “outside”’—which can be geographically near or far—exists to extract from and externalise socioecological destruction towards (Brand and Wissen, 2021, 7). The IML thus ‘presupposes an imperialist world order […] [and] creates asymmetric interdependencies between various places and territories […] in a way in which the mechanisms of reproduction in one part pose severe restrictions for the practices of a majority of people in other parts’ (Brand and Wissen, 2022, 76). Whereas the concepts of ‘global labour arbitrage’, ‘labour aristocracy’ and ‘super-exploitation’ describe the IML’s organising effect on labour processes (Cope, 2019; Marini, 1991; Smith, 2016), I propose that extractivisms denote the IML’s organising effect on the socioecological relations that ensure access to energy and materials. In line with Arboleda’s, Mezzadra and Neilson’s, and Dunlap and Jakobsen’s joint attention to the scales of planetary relationships and everyday life, the IML ‘points towards the norms of production, distribution, and consumption built into the political, economic, and cultural structures of everyday life for the populations of the global North […] [and] increasingly in the countries with “emerging” economies of the global South’ (Brand and Wissen, 2021, 41). In contrast to Dunlap and Jakobsen, Brand and Wissen (2021, 42) propose that the IML represents ‘an essential moment in the reproduction of [a] capitalist society’ whose norms have their origins in Eurocentric conceptions of progress, modernity and development that emerged with the colonial encounter and capitalist world market. While ‘initially limited to furnishing the upper classes with luxury goods’ (Brand and Wissen, 2021, 83), the IML progressively incorporated larger bourgeois strata of the global population, becoming entrenched in the nineteenth century through discourses of progress, modernity and development. Historically, populations that resisted being enrolled in the MoEs, MoAs and MoPs undergirding the IML were ruthlessly oppressed and violently dominated. Successful socio-economic struggles have often culminated in the (re)integration of peoples into an extended and consolidated IML. In this way, ever-larger sections of the global population have been persuasively enticed with imperial privileges. This progressive incorporation of populations into the IML constitutes a ‘kind of compromise between the interests of those in power and the demands and desires of their subalterns’ (Brand and Wissen, 2021, 70). Building on Gramsci’s approach to hegemony, Foucault’s understanding of critique and subjectivation, and Bourdieu’s notions of habitus and lifestyle, Brand and Wissen highlight the intimate link between everyday practices and subjectivity. The IML’s lived everyday practices co-produce subjects who internalise its norms, developing psycho-emotional attachments that make them desire enrolling or remaining in it. In addition, the IML provides ‘conditions for income-generating production, just as the acquisition of products (home appliances, industrialized food, cars, smartphones) makes everyday life easier’ by lowering the cost of social reproduction. These conditions also ‘broaden the spectrum of leisure activities and possible travel goals’ while creating a sense of security in crisis situations (Brand and Wissen, 2021, 53). For many, the IML thus entails ‘the opportunity to have a subjectively fulfilled […] [and] materially more comfortable life’ (Brand and Wissen, 2021, 117). The IML is not universally experienced in the same manner. Its hegemony is ‘secured through complex spatial strategies that reproduce highly uneven social structures’ stratified along class, gender, race and other dimensions (Brand and Wissen, 2022, 77). The IML only became hegemonic in the global North under Fordism through the ‘generalisation’ and ‘universalisation’ of ‘modern’ or ‘Western’ consumption norms. During this period, many middle classes in ‘non-Western’ societies came to adopt similar modes of living as those in the capitalist centres, constituting ‘a peripheral IML’ that equally relied on ‘access to cheap labour power and nature elsewhere for the production of commodities for the world market, as well as for internal use’ (Brand and Wissen, 2022, 80). From the 1970s onward, ‘neoliberal globalisation’ deepened the IML in the global North and expanded it to the planetary scale ‘due to the rise of emerging economies […] [where] it is becoming the dominant model of prosperity, even for those who have not yet been integrated into the imperial mode of living’ (Brand and Wissen, 2021, 114). Brand and Wissen point to OECD, UNDP and ILO statistics to indicate that around 1.9 billion people could be designated as living a middle-class life in 2010, often implying the IML. However, rather than classifying some absolute category of individuals as falling within or outside the IML, it is a relational concept describing emergent supra- and subnational centre–periphery dynamics that link victims and beneficiaries, contenders and collaborators. These ‘relations of dominance and subordination’ give rise to an ‘articulated hierarchy’ that cannot be abstractly deduced but that is historically specific and constructed as part of the analysis (Hall, 2018, 196–202). With due respect to Dunlap and Jakobsen, who trace extractivisms to ‘civilisation itself’, I prefer Brand and Wissen’s more restrictive temporal range from the colonial moment onwards for two reasons. First, while hierarchies and domination certainly existed before and will last beyond the capitalist horizon, the historical co-constitution of colonialism and the capitalist world market marks significant differences in the prevalent modes of living and MoEs. According to Fraser (2014), this inaugurated a novel ‘institutionalised social order’ that structurally differentiated a) production from social reproduction, b) humanity from ‘nature’, c) the political from the economic, d) public from private power, and e) the ‘domestic’ from the ‘inter-national’ in a Westphalian system of states. Concomitantly, an ‘epochal shift’ occurred ‘in what was valued […], from land productivity under conditions of seigneurial power to labour productivity under the hegemony of the modern world market’ (Moore, 2017, 610; emphasis in the original). Together, these changes occasioned a cascading series of technological inventions and a set of technics that unleashed spatio-temporal dynamics through which ‘everything moved faster – a lot faster’, including the extraction of materials and energy. I therefore concur with Durante Kröger and LaFluer (2021, 20–24), who locate the ontological roots of extractivisms in ancient Greek natural law and Roman property law, yet argue that ‘what differentiates the ancient deforestations and other extractions from the past 500 years of extractivism[s] is the scale, and the greater domination of certain mindsets, by the advancement of modern technology alongside political and military power’. Second, this more restricted temporal application does not normalise extractivisms as inherent to civilisation, which makes it difficult to conceive of alternative post-extractivist modes of living suited to large-scale social formations. While critical scholarship and praxis should strive toward the dissolution of all kinds of hierarchies between human and non-human beings, lumping together all historical forms of domination and inequality mythologises the past, obscuring more than it reveals (Graeber and Wengrow, 2021). I nevertheless acknowledge that imperial modes of living (in the plural) could be repurposed to analyse continuities and differences in the strategic relationships shaping everyday life and the extraction of materials and energy along Dunlap and Jakobsen’s civilisational time frame, which would be an interesting but separate research agenda. The coupling of an undisputedly imperial mode of living in the Aztec Triple Alliance with certain MoEs described above points in this direction. Future modes of living could also be structurally organised in non-capitalist ways without becoming less imperial. Regardless of the IML and extractivisms’ precise historical origins, maintaining and deepening the IML and extractivisms has become a contemporary ‘imperative’ for governments as this functions as the societal pact stabilising the contradictions inherent in relying on in principle unlimited labour, resources, and sinks. The powerful psycho-emotional attachment of dominators and dominated alike to the IML in part explains this persistence in the face of overwhelming socioecological destruction. Nevertheless, the IML is not a total system of domination and is always challenged by alternative modes of living and counter-hegemonic subjectivities. In fact, the socioecological destruction of extractivisms provokes counter-hegemonic proposals and ‘insubordinate’ subjects that point to the possibility of transitioning to post-imperial solidarity modes of living. Let me conclude with brief reflections on such transitions and highlight