Extractivism and the Polycrisis: What Lies Beneath? A Commonist Response

Extractivism and the Polycrisis: What Lies Beneath?

A Commonist Response

S A. Hamed Hosseini, Senior Lecturer in Social Sciences, The University of Newcastle, Australia; Fellow, World Academy of Art and Science

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The following text is a polished transcription of Dr. Hossein’s presentation at an international webinar, co-hosted by EXTRA – Existential Threats and Risks. To All and EXALT – The Global Extractivisms and Alternatives Initiative (University of Helsinki), under the title of: Is extractivism a prime cause of the polycrisis?
Watch the whole webinar here: https://www.youtube.com/live/TWeLp_ZHljM?si=-QGoB8aRvCq2trZh

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Climate breakdown, biodiversity collapse, widening inequality, democratic erosion, pandemics, mass displacement; we may call this the “polycrisis.” The term helpfully signals that these are not separate problems but interconnected, mutually reinforcing crises. Yet our responses remain stubbornly fragmented. Climate policy here, social policy there, economic policy elsewhere; each locked in its own silo, often working at cross-purposes.

This fragmentation is not a separate problem from the polycrisis. It is the crisis itself – perhaps its deepest layer. We might call it a meta-crisis: our collective inability to respond coherently to interconnected crises. The usual prescriptions, like better coordination, more interdisciplinary research, and holistic frameworks, assume that fragmentation is simply an intellectual or administrative failure. But if that were true, decades of sustainability science and systems thinking should have made more headway by now.

Both the converging crises and our fragmenting responses share a common structural root: the architecture of modern capitalist societies.

From Decommonization to Compartmentality

In societies organized around commoning (and many such formations existed before capitalism and persist today), what we now separate into “economic,” “social,” “ecological,” and “political” domains were woven together. Production, care, spirituality, governance, and relationship with land formed an organic whole. This is not to romanticize pre-capitalist societies, many of which had their own hierarchies. But the specific compartmentalization we take for granted today (where “the economy” operates as an autonomous sphere, disembedded from nature and society) is distinctively modern. It emerged with capitalism and was essential to its functioning.

The rise of capitalism required breaking apart these organic connections. Commons (such as shared lands, waters, forests, knowledge systems, care networks, and collective decision-making practices) had to be enclosed, privatized, destroyed, or relegated to a subordinate “third sector.” This process, which we may call decommonization, did more than transfer resources from collective to private hands. It restructured how different dimensions of life relate to each other.

In a commoning way of life, creativity, liveability, conviviality, and alterity are deeply intertwined, like organs in a living body. But capital cannot operate on such an organic whole. It needs to extract, measure, and accumulate, and you cannot extract from a living relationship without first severing it. Capital must separate these dimensions into distinct modules that can be independently managed and exploited: labor abstracted from its social meaning, nature reduced to raw materials, care commodified or made invisible, and political imagination constrained to managing what already exists.

The result is compartmentality: a world divided into isolated domains, each governed by its own logic, each blind to the others. This is not just a way of thinking; it is the structural outcome of decommonization.

Why Compartmentalized Responses Fail

This explains why our responses to the polycrisis consistently fail. Carbon trading treats emissions as an isolated variable to optimize through markets, while ignoring the social relations that produce emissions and the communities harmed by extraction. “Sustainable development” promises to balance growth with environmental protection, but the very grammar of “balancing” assumes these are separate things to trade off.

Even critical movements often reproduce compartmentality. Environmental movements that overlook labor. Labor movements that take ecology too lightly. Identity politics severed from political economy. Each fights on its own terrain, unable to see how the terrains are connected, because capitalism has structurally disconnected them.

The Commonist Impulse

Yet compartmentality is not total. In research with nearly one hundred Australian grassroots organizations (like cooperatives, transition towns, and commons-oriented projects), I found both the persistence of compartmentality and something else: what I call the commonist impulse.

This is a countertendency: an orientation toward seeing and acting on connections that compartmentality obscures. Many initiatives showed significant compartmentalization: an eco-village focused on carbon footprint but disconnected from broader struggles, a worker cooperative ensuring internal democracy while ignoring its environmental supply chain. Valuable work, but isolated.

However, organizations embracing commons-based principles, food sovereignty, de-growth, and economic democracy showed substantially higher commonist orientations. Those prioritizing decolonization demonstrated the most balanced attention to both ecological and social dimensions. Certain ways of thinking actively cultivate the capacity to see beyond compartmentality.

From Commoning to Re/Commonization

If compartmentality results from decommonization, the response must be re/commonization: actively rebuilding organic connections that capital has severed.

But we need an important distinction. Commoning refers to practices through which existing commons sustain themselves – stewardship, reciprocity, and collective decision-making. Think of Indigenous land management or a community garden where neighbors share tools and harvests. These are precious.

Re/commonization, by contrast, is the transformative project of creating or restoring commons from conditions of decommonization. It does not just maintain what exists but actively challenges the compartmentalized architecture of capitalist society. It is explicitly political.

This matters because commoning alone is perpetually vulnerable. A food cooperative may operate beautifully internally but find itself forced to compete on capitalist terms externally. Worse, capital actively mimics commons to neutralize their challenge, what I call “pseudo-commoning.” On social media, billions do commoning work daily: sharing knowledge, building relationships, and supporting each other. But this takes place on infrastructure designed to harvest that activity for corporate profit. Users build community; platforms extract value.

The Dual Strategy

Re/commonization requires a dual strategy: building alternatives from below while simultaneously contesting the political and legal structures that enforce compartmentalization. Neither alone is sufficient.

Grassroots commoning without political struggle remains marginal, vulnerable to absorption. Political movements without rooted alternatives become empty; they may win elections but lack institutional forms to reorganize society. The two must develop together.

Imagine a municipality that declares water a legal commons; a “switch” that changes the default logic governing an essential commons. But switches do not accumulate automatically into systemic change. Without political movements defending them, progressive institutions can be defunded, cooperatives outcompeted. The threshold where re/commonization becomes irreversible must be fought for through movements that challenge power structures, contest elections, and push for constitutional change.

Beyond Extractivism

Is extractivism a prime cause of the polycrisis? Yes, but extractivism is one face of a deeper structure. Extraction of minerals, forests, water, labor, and data all depend on prior decommonization that severed these from organic connections and made them available as isolated “resources.”

The polycrisis cannot be solved by better coordination across existing domains. What is required is the transformation of those domains themselves: their re/commonization into organically interconnected forms of life.

This is not utopian dreaming. The ‘commonist impulse’ already exists in movements that refuse compartmentalized thinking, that insist on connections between ecological health and social justice, between economic democracy and decolonization. The task is to strengthen this impulse, build it into durable institutions, and fight politically for conditions in which they can flourish.

We move beyond compartmentality not by thinking our way out, but by building and fighting our way through.