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From 2007 to 2017, Ecuador's ‘Citizens’ Revolution’ launched an ambitious series of post-neoliberal megaprojects in the Amazonian region, including an inter-oceanic transport corridor, a world-leading biotechnology university, and a planned network of two hundred ‘Millennium Cities’.
The aim was to liberate the nation from its ecologically catastrophic dependence on Amazonian oil reserves, while transforming its jungle region from a neoliberal frontier into a brave new world of ‘21st-century socialism’. Japhy Wilson's Reality of Dreams: Post-Neoliberal Utopias in the Ecuadorian Amazon (Yale University Press, 2021) documents the heroic scale of this endeavour, the surreal extent of its failure, and the paradoxical process through which it ended up reinforcing the economic model that it had been designed to overcome. The book deconstructs the utopian fantasies of the post-neoliberal extractivist state and draws attention to the eruption of insurgent utopias staged by those with nothing left to lose.
In this seminar, Japhy Wilson (University of Manchester), Thea Riofrancos (Providence College, http://www.theariofrancos.com) and Mazen Labban (Rutgers University) will discuss the challenges of social transformation in Latin America under conditions of global capitalism, in the light of the contrasting fortunes of left electoral projects in Ecuador and Chile.
Thea Riofrancos will draw on her book Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador (Duke University Press, 2020) and her current book in-progress, Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism, to take up a core challenge of extraction for the left, respectively, the dilemmas facing Global South movements and governments, located on the peripheries of the world system and with historic and current extractive models of development, and the dilemmas facing the global climate justice movement with respect to the extraction entailed by the energy transition.
Mazen Labban is a Marxian political ecologist and expert on the oil industry with a strong knowledge of the Latin American context. He is author of Space, Oil and Capital (Routledge 2008).