Extraction: The Logic We Cannot Think Our Way Out Of
I. The Problem Isn't Capitalism's Excesses—It's Capitalism Itself
We keep trying to fix extraction with better management. Conscious capitalism. Stakeholder value. ESG metrics. B-corps. These aren't solutions—they're negotiation tactics within a system designed for one outcome: the maximum conversion of everything into privately captured wealth.
Extraction isn't a bug in capitalism. It’s the operating system. It's the source code.
Consider what profit actually measures: the difference between what you paid for inputs (labor, materials, energy, ecosystem services) and what you captured in revenue. Profit is literally the measure of how much value you extracted and kept. The entire system rewards maximizing this delta.
This creates an inexorable logic:
Pay workers less than the value they create: extraction from labor
Pay less than the true cost of materials: extraction from supply chains
Externalize environmental costs: extraction from ecosystems
Privatize gains, socialize losses: extraction from the commons
Accumulate capital, concentrate power: extraction from democratic possibility
Every efficiency gain, every productivity improvement, every innovation gets channeled into the same outcome: more value flowing upward, more concentration at the top, more depletion everywhere else.
You cannot reform this. A "gentle" capitalism that regenerates what it takes would produce no profit. It would lose to competitors still extracting. The system itself selects for maximum extraction—anything less gets outcompeted or absorbed.
II. Extraction Goes Deeper Than Economics
But capitalism didn't invent extraction. It perfected it, systematized it, accelerated it to geological speeds—but the pattern is older.
Evolutionary: For 300,000 years, humans evolved under scarcity. Taking more than you need, storing surplus, controlling resources—these were survival strategies. Our brains are optimized for extraction under conditions of scarcity. We are good at this.
Agricultural: The shift to farming created new extraction possibilities. Surplus production, storage, hierarchies to control that surplus. Civilization itself emerged from organized extraction of agricultural production. Every ancient empire was an extraction machine converting peasant labor into monuments and armies.
Colonial: European expansion perfected extraction as planetary system. The Americas didn't just provide new resources—they provided a template for total extraction: land, labor, resources, even bodies. Slavery was extraction refined to its purest form: the complete conversion of human life into economic value.
Industrial: Fossil fuels unleashed extraction at speeds natural systems never experienced. We could extract energy stored over millions of years and burn it in decades. We could extract from the deep ocean, from the atmosphere, from beneath the earth's crust. The planet itself became inventory.
Financial: Modern capitalism abstracted extraction one level further. You don't need to own mines or factories—you can extract value through pure financial engineering. Debt extracts future income. Speculation extracts from price volatility. Private equity extracts from struggling companies. Finance is extraction weaponized.
This is why you can't just "choose" a different economy. Extraction is layered into our evolutionary wiring, our social structures, our technology, our institutions, our definitions of progress itself.
We should not feel guilty about this.
Guilt implies moral failure. This is evolutionary inheritance. For 300,000 years, extraction was adaptive. The humans who stored surplus, controlled resources, and took more than they immediately needed—those humans survived winters, droughts, famines. Those who didn’t, died. We are descended from the ones who got good at extraction.
The moral framework is wrong. This isn’t about being bad people in a good system or good people in a bad system. This is about a survival strategy that worked for millennia suddenly threatening survival itself because the context changed.
Bacteria don’t feel guilty for consuming all the nutrients in a petri dish. They’re doing what they evolved to do. The problem isn’t moral—it’s ecological. They changed their environment faster than they could adapt to the change.
We’re in the same position. We got so good at extraction that we changed planetary conditions. Now the strategy that made us successful is killing us. That’s not a moral failure. It’s an evolutionary trap.
Guilt is actually counterproductive here.
It:
• Focuses on individual responsibility when the problem is systemic
• Triggers defensiveness rather than clear seeing
• Creates paralysis rather than action
• Lets the system off the hook by making it about personal virtue
• Distracts from the structural work that actually matters
What we need isn’t guilt. What we need is recognition: The conditions changed. The strategy that worked no longer works. We have to adapt or die.
That’s not a moral judgment. It’s an evolutionary fact.
III. Why Every Reform Fails
Look at the history of attempts to moderate capitalism:
The welfare state in post-war Europe—built on colonial extraction elsewhere, now being dismantled as that extraction runs out.
Labor unions—powerful when they could threaten production, decimated once capital became mobile enough to extract elsewhere.
Environmental regulations—constantly eroded, circumvented, or simply ignored when enforcement gets expensive. EPA enforcement down 70% since 1990 even as environmental crises intensify.
Corporate social responsibility—pure theater. The same companies publishing sustainability reports are funding climate denial and lobbying against regulation.
Impact investing—requires market-rate returns, which means extraction, just with better optics.
Every reform movement gets absorbed, financialized, or destroyed because the underlying system is intact. You cannot build regenerative structures inside an extractive economy without them being either crushed or corrupted into extraction with better branding.
The system is working exactly as designed. When people say capitalism is broken, they're wrong. Capitalism is functioning perfectly. Wealth concentrating upward, resources depleting, ecosystems collapsing, labor squeezed—these aren't failures. These are features.
IV. The Democracy of Physics
But something fundamental has changed.
For the first time in human history, we've hit planetary boundaries. There is no "elsewhere" to dump waste, no "out there" to extract from, no "away" where problems disappear.
We've become the dominant geological force on Earth:
6th mass extinction underway
Human-made mass exceeds all living biomass
CO₂ levels unprecedented in 3+ million years
We've altered 75% of ice-free land surface
Ocean chemistry changing faster than any time in 300 million years
This creates what we might call the democracy of physics. Atmospheric chemistry doesn't recognize property rights. Ecosystem collapse doesn't stop at borders. Tipping points don't negotiate.
The wealthy thought they could escape the consequences of extraction. Build compounds in New Zealand, bunkers in abandoned missile silos, cities on Mars. But there is no escape from planetary systems collapse. You cannot buy your way out of atmospheric chemistry.
This changes everything.
For the first time, we face challenges that truly affect everyone. The illusion that extraction could externalize costs indefinitely—dump toxins elsewhere, degrade ecosystems no one "owns," treat the atmosphere as a free waste sink—has collided with physical reality. We've hit the boundaries. There is nowhere else to dump anymore.
V. Dis-Extraction: Not Choice, But Necessity
This is where the concept of dis-extraction becomes crucial—but we need to be unflinchingly clear about what it means and why.
Dis-extraction is not an ethical choice. It's not about being better people or building better companies. It's an evolutionary forcing function. The conditions that made extraction adaptive are disappearing. The system that optimized extraction is destroying the substrate extraction depends on.
We will move toward dis-extraction not because we become wise, but because extraction becomes impossible.
The question is only: consciously or through collapse?
What Dis-Extraction Actually Requires
Dis-extraction is not merely the absence of extraction. It is the deliberate dismantling of extractive structures and their replacement with systems built on circulation, regeneration, and mutual benefit.
1. Economic Redesign
Not reform. Redesign. New measures of value that account for full costs. New ownership structures that distribute rather than concentrate. New incentives that reward regeneration over depletion.
This means:
Value flowing toward need, not accumulation
Success measured by system health, not wealth extraction
Time horizons extending to generations, not quarters
Resources treated as commons, not commodities
Labor receiving the value it creates
2. Organizational Transformation
From hierarchies that concentrate decision-making upward to networks that distribute sensing and response throughout the system. Moving from:
Value flowing upward → Value circulating based on need
Concentrated power → Distributed authority and sensing
Short-term taking → Long-term stewardship
Competition for scarcity → Collaboration within abundance
The mycelial model provides the biological blueprint: forests where nutrients flow from abundance toward scarcity, where the whole system's health becomes every node's self-interest, where intelligence emerges from distributed sensing rather than central command.
This already exists in nature. We're just extraordinarily bad at copying it.
3. Regenerative Practice
True dis-extraction involves several interconnected elements:
Resilience: Building redundancy, diversity, and adaptive capacity so systems don't collapse when parts fail. Moving from brittle hierarchies to networks with multiple pathways.
Restoration: Active repair of depleted systems. Investment in people, communities, and ecosystems. Recognition that what has been extracted must be restored or the whole system decays.
Maintenance: The continuous, invisible work of keeping systems healthy. Reinforcing what works, recycling what doesn't, adapting to local conditions. This requires a completely different relationship to time and attention than extraction allows.
Mutual accountability: Accountability as learning and repair, not control and punishment. Reciprocal accountability where those with more power are more accountable, not less.
Acceptance of interdependence: Recognition that the illusion of independence was always just that—an illusion. We are fundamentally dependent on each other and on living systems. This is not weakness; it is reality.
Slowness: Time for trust to build, for systems to adapt, for wisdom to emerge. Extraction requires speed; regeneration requires patience.
Grief and release: Letting go of the narratives, status hierarchies, and power arrangements that extraction created. For those who benefited, this is genuine loss.
4. Cultural Deprogramming
We have to unlearn stories wired deep:
Competition over collaboration
Accumulation as success
Independence as strength
Control as intelligence
Speed as progress
Growth as health
These narratives served extraction. They're killing us now.
5. Political Permission Structures
Individual organizations cannot dis-extract inside an extractive economy without being crushed. This requires collective political will to redesign the rules—break up monopolies, prevent wealth concentration, internalize externalities, protect commons, democratize capital.
This is why billionaires fund libertarian think tanks and anti-government movements. They understand that the only threat to extraction is collective political power capable of changing the rules.
6. Technological Reorientation
AI could accelerate our understanding of complex systems, help us model regenerative approaches, coordinate distributed networks at scales humans can't manage alone.
Or it could be the final amplification of extraction—optimizing every last drop of value from every last system before collapse.
Which path depends entirely on who controls it and what they're optimizing for. Right now, it's controlled by extractive capital optimizing for extractive goals. AI currently requires immense energy, rare materials, and computational infrastructure—and is being deployed to extract more value, more efficiently.
VI. The Timing Problem
Here's the nightmare scenario:
We know what needs to change. We have frameworks, examples, technologies. What we don't have is time.
Climate tipping points don't wait for us to redesign capitalism. Ecosystem collapse doesn't pause while we build new institutions. The 6th mass extinction isn't negotiable.
We're in a race between:
Conscious adaptation to dis-extractive systems
Collapse forcing adaptation through chaos and scarcity
And we're losing.
Every year of delay makes conscious transition harder. Every degree of warming locks in more chaos. Every species extinction removes resilience. Every increment of inequality makes collective action more difficult.
The forcing function is already here. We're just pretending we still have time to think about it.
VII. What Clarity Demands
If this analysis is correct—and the evidence strongly suggests it is—then everything changes.
We're not trying to build a better world. We're trying to avoid a catastrophic one.
We're not optimizing for flourishing. We're adapting to survive.
We're not choosing between competing visions of the good. We're choosing between conscious transition and forced transition through collapse.
This clarity matters because it cuts through the noise:
"Sustainable capitalism" is contradiction in terms
Individual consumer choices are rounding errors
Corporate sustainability initiatives are theater
Incremental reform is guaranteed to fail
We don't have time for gradual cultural evolution
What we need is system-level transformation at emergency speed.
This will not happen through market forces. Markets are extraction engines. They will extract until they can't, then collapse.
This will not happen through individual virtue. Personal ethics cannot override structural incentives.
This will happen only through collective political power capable of forcing system redesign—or through collapse that makes extraction impossible.
VIII. The Work—And The Central Problem
The conventional list of actions—build proof of concept, create alternatives, win elections, change narratives—is necessary but insufficient. These tactics assume a level playing field. We're not on one.
The system isn't just biased toward extraction. It's actively designed to prevent the accumulation of collective power capable of threatening extraction.
Consider the mechanisms:
Economic:
Unions decimated through right-to-work laws, capital mobility, automation threats
Alternative economic models (cooperatives, mutual aid) starved of capital access
Wealth concentration creates asymmetric political power—billionaires outspend movements 100:1
Precarity keeps people too exhausted, too scared, too indebted to organize
Political:
Corporate capture of regulatory agencies
Lobbying spending dwarfs public interest groups
Citizens United equates money with speech—extraction can literally buy democracy
Gerrymandering, voter suppression, electoral college—structural advantages for capital
Two-party system absorbs dissent into incremental negotiation
Cultural:
Media ownership concentrated in extractive hands
Narrative control: "There Is No Alternative," "job creators," "free markets"
Individualism as ideology—collective action framed as un-American, authoritarian
Consumer identity replacing citizen identity—politics as shopping
Surveillance and Control:
Digital tracking makes organizing visible
Algorithmic amplification of division, suppression of solidarity
Predictive policing targets movements before they threaten power
Psychological:
Learned helplessness: "the system is too big," "nothing ever changes"
Fragmentation: identity politics dividing class solidarity
Captured opposition: nonprofits dependent on foundation funding from extractive wealth
Fatigue: constant crisis keeps people in reactive mode, unable to build
This is not conspiracy. It's emerged design. The system didn't need an architect—it evolved to protect itself. Every mechanism that successfully defended extraction got reinforced. Those that didn't, disappeared.
So when we say "develop political power," we're not just saying "organize better." We're saying: How do you build power inside a system optimized to prevent exactly that?
The Historical Precedents
This has happened before. Not at planetary scale, but at civilizational scale. Systems that seemed eternal, that had evolved sophisticated defenses against change, that controlled military force, economic production, narrative, surveillance—collapsed anyway.
Not through gradual reform. Through rupture.
Soviet Union: Collapsed in two years (1989-1991) after appearing permanent for 70 years. Not through votes or revolution, but through cascading failure of legitimacy. When the system stopped delivering, when the narrative broke, when elites defected—it was over.
Feudalism: Didn't reform into capitalism. Plague, war, and technological change destroyed the conditions that made feudalism workable. New economic relations emerged in the wreckage.
Apartheid: Ended not through moral persuasion but through economic pressure, international isolation, and making the system too expensive to maintain. When global capital decided apartheid was bad for business, it ended.
American slavery: Required a civil war. The most profitable economic system in American history did not end through reform—it ended through violence that killed 2% of the population.
These precedents tell us something uncomfortable: Extractive systems don't reform. They collapse or they're destroyed.
The Three Viable Paths
Given this, there are only three plausible pathways to system transformation:
Path 1: Collapse Creates Opening
Extraction continues until it triggers systems failure—climate chaos, economic collapse, resource wars, ecosystem breakdown. The legitimacy of extractive institutions fails. New systems emerge in the chaos.
Probability: High
Timeline: 2030-2050
Cost: Catastrophic
This is the default path. It requires no intentional action—just continuation of current trajectories. The forcing function becomes undeniable. Extraction becomes impossible. Whatever survives builds something different because there's no choice.
The problem: billions die. Most knowledge is lost. Outcomes are unpredictable. Might rebuild extraction in new forms. Might not rebuild civilization at all.
Path 2: Elite Defection
A critical mass of elites—those who currently benefit from extraction—decide the system threatens their own survival and actively dismantle it.
This happened partially with the New Deal: elites chose to accept Social Security, labor rights, progressive taxation rather than risk revolution. It happened with ending apartheid: Afrikaner elites decided maintaining the system was more dangerous than negotiating transition.
Requirements:
Extraction must threaten elite interests (not just others')
Alternative must seem viable and protect some elite interests
Must happen before collapse forecloses options
Probability: Low but not zero
Timeline: 2025-2035
Mechanism: Climate impacts become undeniable, even to the wealthy. Insurance markets collapse. Supply chains fail. Elite enclaves become unsustainable. Some defect and use their resources/power to force transition.
The problem: Elites are very good at insulating themselves from consequences. They consistently underestimate systemic risks. By the time they defect, it may be too late.
Path 3: Distributed Power Overwhelms Control
Mass movements build political power faster than the system can suppress it. Achieve electoral victories, constitutional changes, institutional capture. Force system redesign from within.
Requirements:
Overcome fragmentation—build actual class solidarity across race, nation, identity
Overcome surveillance—organize in ways resistant to infiltration, disruption
Overcome economic precarity—free people's time and energy to organize
Overcome narrative control—break legitimacy of extractive institutions
Overcome violence—either achieve change faster than repression, or be willing to meet violence with resistance
Do all this simultaneously, globally, at emergency speed
Probability: Very low
Timeline: Would need to happen by 2030
Historical examples: None at this scale
The problem: This is what democratic socialism, labor movements, anti-colonial movements have tried. They've won battles but never fundamentally transformed the global system. Capital is mobile, coordinated, and willing to use violence. Movements are fragmented, under-resourced, and often committed to nonviolence even when facing state violence.
The Realistic Assessment
Path 1 (collapse) is nearly certain. We're already in early stages.
Path 2 (elite defection) is possible only if climate/ecological breakdown accelerates faster than elite insulation. Some billionaires are already building bunkers—that's not defection, that's doubling down on extraction.
Path 3 (distributed power) would require a level of global coordination, solidarity, and strategic sophistication that movements have never achieved.
Most likely outcome: Path 1, with elements of 2 and 3 shaping what emerges from collapse.
What This Means For Action
If this assessment is correct, "the work" looks different than the conventional progressive to-do list.
1. Build Resilient Alternatives Now
Not to replace the system (we can't), but to survive its collapse and provide templates for what comes after. Think seed banks, not political campaigns.
Economic: Cooperatives, mutual aid, local production, commons management
Social: Strong communities, practical skills, face-to-face networks
Knowledge: Preserve understanding of what works, what failed, why
Infrastructure: Distributed energy, water, food systems that can survive breakdown
This is what the mycelial organizations are for—not to compete with capitalism, but to persist through its collapse.
2. Accelerate Delegitimation
The system's greatest defense is the belief it's inevitable, natural, or optimal. Breaking that narrative matters.
Make extraction visible: Name it, track it, expose it
Make alternatives imaginable: Show regenerative systems work
Make collapse real: Don't soften the truth about where we're headed
Make power legible: Help people see how control operates
This is narrative work, but it's not marketing. It's truth-telling in service of breaking the spell.
3. Strategic Opportunism
Build political power where possible, but don't mistake local victories for system change. Use whatever openings exist—elections, organizing, direct action—but understand they're buying time and creating space, not transforming the system.
The goal is not to win within the current system. The goal is to build capacity for when the system fails.
4. Prepare for Rupture
Collapsed systems create dangerous openings. Fascism thrives in chaos. So does authoritarianism. So does warlordism.
If we want post-collapse to be regenerative rather than extractive-with-more-violence, we need:
Clear alternatives ready to implement quickly
Organizing capacity that can move fast in crisis
Widespread understanding of what failed and why
Enough people committed to regeneration to shape what comes next
This is the most uncomfortable piece: we're not preventing collapse. We're preparing for what comes after.
5. Tell The Truth
The greatest act of resistance right now is refusing to participate in comforting lies:
No, sustainable capitalism is not possible
No, individual actions are not enough
No, technology will not save us
No, gradual reform is not working
Yes, we are heading for collapse
Yes, it will be terrible
Yes, what we do now still matters
Honesty is the foundation everything else builds on.
The Central Paradox Resolved
So how do we build political power inside a system designed to prevent it?
We don't. Not in time to prevent collapse.
What we build instead is the capacity to act decisively when the system fails. We build the knowledge, skills, relationships, and structures that can shape what emerges from collapse.
This is not defeatism. It's strategic realism.
The system is designed to absorb, co-opt, or crush threats to extraction. It has succeeded at this for centuries. But it cannot adapt fast enough to planetary boundaries. Physics doesn't negotiate.
Our work is not to reform the system. Our work is to ensure that when physics forces transformation, we're ready with alternatives that aren't just extraction 2.0.
We're not building a revolution. We're building lifeboats, seed banks, and blueprints for what comes after the flood.
And we're telling the truth about what's coming, so people can prepare.
IX. Conclusion: The Organisms That Survive
We are not choosing dis-extraction because it is noble or right. We are being forced toward it by planetary boundaries and the democracy of physics.
The organisms that adapt to the actual environment survive. Those that continue optimizing for conditions that no longer exist do not.
We have the knowledge. We have examples—Haier, Buurtzorg, mycelial networks in nature. We have frameworks—Sociocracy, Holacracy, Platform Cooperatives. What we lack is the economic permission structure and the collective will to prioritize survival over extraction.
That permission structure may come only when extraction becomes more costly than change. We may be waiting for the forcing function to become undeniable.
There is perhaps one lever that matters: collective consciousness of what is actually happening. Not optimistic or pessimistic framing, but clear seeing. We are extracting the foundation that extraction depends on. We are in a race between adaptation and collapse. The economics that govern us reward the behavior that is killing us.
That clarity—unflinching, honest clarity—might be the condition that allows conscious adaptation rather than forced adaptation through chaos.
Dis-extraction is not a choice between better and worse futures. It is a choice between consciously transitioning to regenerative systems or having that transition imposed by ecological collapse.
One path is difficult. The other is catastrophic.
The conversation we need to have is not "How do we reform capitalism?" but "How do we build the capacity to act when the system fails?"
Everything else is distraction.
The journey of dis-extraction has only begun—and the window for conscious transition is closing fast.
Footnote: Extraction Beyond Capitalism
Extraction predates capitalism and persists in non-capitalist systems. Feudalism extracted agricultural surplus through rents and tithes. Ancient empires extracted through slavery and tribute. Every complex civilization that developed agriculture, hierarchy, and technology became extractive.
The Soviet Union proved you can have catastrophic extraction without private capital. State-directed extraction of labor, resources, and human freedom was arguably worse than capitalist extraction in many dimensions—the Aral Sea, Chernobyl, the Gulag system. The same extractive logic, just with state power replacing private capital.
Modern Russia demonstrates extraction without capitalism's ideological cover. Oligarchs extract natural resources with state permission, converting oil and gas directly into concentrated wealth and political power. No pretense of "creating value" or "stakeholder capitalism"—just extract, sell, keep the money, use violence to prevent resistance. Saudi Arabia, UAE, and other petrostates follow identical patterns under completely different political systems.
China's current model—authoritarian state capitalism—may actually be more efficient at extraction than democratic capitalism. When state power and capital are fused, and political dissent is suppressed, you can extract without the friction of environmental movements, labor organizing, or democratic accountability.
What makes capitalism unique is not that it invented extraction, but that it systematized, globalized, and accelerated it. Capitalism made extraction the explicit goal (profit), created automatic selection mechanisms for maximum extraction (competitive markets), and abstracted it so thoroughly that financial instruments can extract value from things that don't yet exist.
The deeper pattern: hierarchy + surplus + technological capacity + scale = extraction, regardless of the economic system's name.
Agriculture creates surplus to extract. Hierarchy creates power to appropriate it. Technology creates capacity to extract faster. Scale creates distance from consequences. Every society that combined these elements became extractive.
This doesn't absolve capitalism. Capitalism is extraction optimized to maximum efficiency and planetary scale. But it means post-capitalist futures must be designed explicitly for regeneration—not assume that eliminating private capital automatically creates regenerative systems.
The Soviet Union's environmental catastrophe, China's ecological crisis, Russia's petrostate model, and the extractive nature of every empire in history all warn us: concentrated power plus industrial capacity equals extraction. The political system's name is almost irrelevant.
The reason to focus on capitalism in this essay is not ideological but practical: capitalism is the dominant global system driving extraction at speeds that are triggering planetary boundaries. We're not in a race against Soviet-style extraction or feudal extraction—we're in a race against capitalist extraction because that's what's actually happening right now at civilization-ending scale.
The argument isn't "capitalism bad, socialism good." The argument is: extraction at industrial scale under any system of concentrated power is destroying the biosphere, and we're running out of time to build alternatives before physics forces the transition through collapse.