Extractive capitalism

Extractive capitalism describes accumulation that works by removing value from a territory, a resource base or a population, rather than by creating it through production.

The distinction that matters. Productive capitalism raises output by combining labour and capital; extractive capitalism captures rent from an existing stock. Acemoglu and Robinson's contrast between extractive and inclusive institutions makes the same distinction at the level of the state.

Its forms.

• Classical extractivism — mining, oil, timber and plantation economies, historically organised through colonial rule and continuing as commodity dependence in the global South.
• Neo-extractivism — the Latin American pattern in which even left governments funded social spending from commodity exports, and so stayed locked into the same model.
• Financial extraction — value stripped through debt, asset sales and shareholder payouts rather than investment.
• Data extraction — Shoshana Zuboff's surveillance capitalism, where behavioural surplus is taken from users without compensation and sold as prediction.

Consequences. Enclave economies with weak linkages to the wider economy; the resource curse and volatile revenues; dispossession of forest-dwelling and indigenous communities, which in India runs through the fifth schedule areas and the conflict over mining leases; ecological damage borne locally while profits leave; and politically, a state that depends on rent rather than on taxing its citizens, and is correspondingly less accountable to them.