Extraction, Exploitation, and Religious Surplus in the Capitalocene

Abstract

Efforts to address the logic of extraction, which arguably is at the core of our current environmental catastrophe, are examples for a non-reductive material turn in the study of religion and theology. These efforts are linked with the logics of property, possession, human/nature, and human/land relations. This emphasis on materiality and relationship creates welcome openings for another set of relationships that is still under-reflected in the material turn in religion and theology, namely the various connections between extraction and exploitation, specifically of labor, both productive and reproductive, human and other-than-human. In this article, the logic of extraction will be interpreted and reevaluated in its relation to exploitative relationships of labor, which in turn will be deepened in conversation with extraction. Relationships of extraction, production, and reproduction will further be investigated in terms of the notion of a religious surplus, which examines the multiple contributions of religion and theology as generated in broader surplus-producing relationships.

1. Introduction

A significant number of scholars of religion and theology are engaged in what might be described as a material turn in their fields. Instead of understanding the study of religion and theology as interpreting ideas in themselves, which is how these fields have operated for a long time, they are investigating the material conditions in which these ideas take shape. The result of these newer methods is not another materialist reductionism of religion but a deeper understanding of the factors that go into the production of religion and an awareness of its complexity.1 While this creates substantially richer and more interesting understandings of religion, when combined with various analyses of power, these approaches also throw light on alternative religious developments that are often not understood well. Such alternatives are worth considering at a time where dominant approaches are colonizing the imagination to such a degree that alternatives seem increasingly impossible.

Efforts to address the logic of extraction, which arguably is at the core of our current environmental catastrophe, are examples for a material turn in the study of religion and theology. These efforts are linked with the logics of property, possession, human/nature, and human/land relations. The work of Terra Schwerin Rowe and others in the field has been pathbreaking in this, taking their cues from developments in social science and historical investigations. As Rowe notes, “There is no more important task before humanity in the twenty-first century than to rethink models of relationship and exchange among humans and between humans and other-than-human matter” (Rowe 2017, xxxix). Religion, in Rowe’s account, can help envision different models of exchange and alternative relationships.

This emphasis on materiality and relationship creates welcome openings for another set of relationships that are still under-reflected in the material turn in religion and theology, namely the various connections and distinctions between extraction—unlimited efforts to control other-than-human resources—and exploitation—increasingly unconstrained efforts to control labor, both productive and reproductive, human and other-than-human. In this article, the logic of extraction will be interpreted in its relation to exploitative relationships of labor, with a special focus on the consequences for the production and reproduction of religion, defined here in terms of Paul Tillich’s notion of the “ultimate concern”. Relationships of extraction, production, and reproduction will further be investigated in terms of the notion of religious surplus, developing my earlier notion of a “theological surplus” (Rieger 2007), which examines the multiple contributions of religion and theology as generated in broader surplus-producing relationships.

2. Emerging Concerns for Materiality in Religion and Theology

Several decades ago, eminent theologian and religionist Paul Tillich defined the task of theology and, by implication, the study of religion as engaging with that which concerns us ultimately. While many things concern people urgently, what ultimately concerns humanity, in Tillich’s language, are matters of being and not-being. Yet where Tillich defined the ultimate concern in terms of the meaning of life and human anxiety and despair (Tillich 1951, p. 14), I have recently argued that the ultimate concern might be more appropriately understood in terms of labor, both productive and reproductive as well as human and other-than-human. (Rieger 2022) This move accomplishes various things that contribute to a non-determinist material turn in religion and highlight its importance and relevance in fresh and urgent ways. In addition, this is also where I am locating the most effective responses to the existential threat of climate change, as will become clear later.

First, this move puts Tillich’s work “from his head on his feet”, as Karl Marx once claimed he had achieved with Hegelian philosophy. After an intensification of idealist thought in modernity, especially in the study of religion and theology, this is no small task, and we are only at the very beginning. Second, it opens up the conversation for all of humanity and beyond. While Tillich’s definition of the ultimate concern in terms of meaning, anxiety, and despair captured well the sentiments of certain segments of humanity (especially the North Atlantic middle class post World War II), the broader definition of the ultimate concern suggested here applies to the proverbial 99 percent of humanity who have to work for a living, some more than others. Moreover, it applies to all living beings. Third, defining the ultimate concern in terms of production and reproduction, human as well as other-than-human, engages matters of being and not-being in the most immediate sense because nothing would exist without production and reproduction.

To begin with, no biological life would exist without reproductive labor, often relegated to women, minorities, and other-than-human labor. More specifically, no human beings and no other mammals would exist without the gestational labor of their mothers, which is labor in the most literal sense of the word, a matter that has been picked up by feminist theologians.2 The existential importance of reproductive labor in particular is of course also true for all other life forms, including the contributions of the simplest single-cell organisms. Included here is also the reproductive labor of past life forms that now exist in the form of oil and natural gas deposits, at the heart of today’s extractive economies. Here is a link between exploitation and extraction that will be developed further below.

Turning to production and reproduction in this way joins many of the concerns of the material turns in the study of religion and theology, linking it to broader economic and political developments in a complex fashion. This is not optional if religion cannot be relegated to abstract religious ideas or matters that seem to have mysteriously fallen from the sky, as many religious people seem to assume. In this way, it complements several other welcome material turns in religion and theology that have highlighted the body, land, race, gender, identity, and broader notions of practice, as well as “lived religion”.

Putting extraction and the exploitation of (human and other-than-human) labor together in terms of conversations about the “ultimate concern” has, therefore, the potential to add another step to the study of religion and theology that deepens the material turn in significant ways. But defining the ultimate concern in this way also contributes to defining and understanding our current geological age beyond the notion of the Anthropocene that is in wide circulation.3 Talk about the Anthropocene implies not only that the fate of the planet is now determined by human beings in general; one of the tacit implications of this conversation is also that the solutions are also anthropogenic and perhaps even anthropocentric. While scholars of religion and theology have critiqued anthropocentrism even before historian Lynn White pointed out the ecological consequences in the 1960s, we are still trying to figure out what the alternatives to anthropocentrism might be.

In this context, reflecting on the ultimate significance of productive and reproductive labor, human and other-than-human, in the context of exploitation and extraction opens several doors. First, it helps develop a deeper sense of the problem. At the core of what produces climate change may not be humanity in general but the forces at the heart of rampant exploitation and extraction. The notion of the Capitalocene describes these dynamics better than the notion of the Anthropocene, because it relocates the conversation from an indiscriminate focus on humanity to a clearer account of the driving forces of our age, anchored in the flows of capital, which shape everything, not only the economy and politics but also culture and religion.4 If we are indeed facing a crisis that is a matter of being and not-being because it can end much of life as we know it, it is imperative to name as precisely as we can what we are up against.

Second, this approach helps understand some of the core problems of the Capitalocene that are not well understood at present. While there are many critiques of capitalism and global warming, even among scholars of religion and theology, too many of them focus on generic notions of ownership, greed, or consumerism, without paying attention to the deeper structures at work when capitalism reigns supreme.5 When consumers are blamed, for instance, the corporate interests that shore up capitalism and consumerism tend to remain out of sight. More profound analyses zero in on the ownership of property or capital but still neglect the crucial dynamics of the exploitation and extraction of production and reproduction. The bulk of attempts to resolve the problems of capitalism focus on the redistribution of property, money, land, etc., with little attention to how relations of production are at the heart of misdistribution and obvious inequalities in ownership, and they disregard how reshaped relations of production might be part of the solution.6 This is, paradoxically, true even for Andreas Malm, who is sometimes critiqued for foregrounding labor relations too much. At the end of his book Fossil Capital, the focus is on the “climatic destructivity of property relations”.7 Not surprising, therefore, is that the most effective resistance he can imagine is to blow up pipelines rather than to organize labor (Malm 2021).

Finally, reflecting on the ultimate significance of productive and reproductive labor (human and other-than-human) in the context of exploitation and extraction expands notions of agency beyond humanity. This is crucial not only to understand what is going on but also to understand what possible alternatives and solutions might be pursued. If exploitation and extraction are not generic metaphors for generic ideas of domination and colonialism but, in the case of exploitation, always linked to specific forms of labor, productive and reproductive, human and nonhuman, perhaps labor that manages to liberate itself is what might save us in the end. The same may be true for extraction, as we will see, which takes the shape of specific extractivisms that point to specific alternatives.

Turning the gaze back to religion, what is most interesting here is not that religion is produced and reproduced in material relationships. What is most interesting are the kinds of religious expressions produced in relationships of exploitation and extraction as surplus, which emerge under pressure. This theological surplus, to be sure, is the opposite of what many theologians critiquing capitalism celebrate as “divine abundance”, which supposedly comes out of nowhere, somewhere “from above” or from some imaginary outside. The theological surplus which interests us here, in contrast to ethereal notions of abundance, is that which is produced “from below” by labor, human and other-than-human, including images of the divine, emerging in conjunction with the surplus on whose exploitation and extraction capitalism establishes itself.8 Even the much-discussed finance capitalism, seemingly free-floating and independent from labor, is never totally removed from the surplus of labor. This picks up on Marx’s well-known observation of the foundational reality of capitalist exploitation of surplus labor, which is not merely an economic phenomenon but a cultural and ultimately religious one as well, as this is where key relationships are formed.9 The theological and religious surplus, therefore, is what is produced under the pressures of capitalism with the potential to subvert it. While surplus is that which capitalists are siphoning off in the labor process, they are never completely successful and so some of the surplus of labor remains with working people, for instance, in terms of the solidarity produced by collectively experiencing exploitation and the emergence of spirits of resilience and resistance that scare the ruling class to such an extent that they try to foreclose even the mildest efforts at worker organizing.10 Some of this dynamic turns into theological and religious surplus via the imagination and religious practices of the working 99 percent, which can be found throughout human history, for instance, when the divine is envisioned and worshipped as a laborer (in the Hebrew Bible, God is often envisioned in terms of menial and feminized labor like planting, working with clay, cooking, sewing, etc., and in the New Testament, God is born into a family of day laborers in construction), and time-honored traditions, some of which are also found in Muslim creation stories. All this is worth fighting for in order to reclaim what belongs to the many rather than the few and in order to produce viable alternatives in the Capitalocene.

From an entirely different perspective, the work of anti-globalization activist Vandana Shiva also provides an example of pulling together the concerns of religion, labor, and sustainability. She draws on the Hindu notion of shakti as “the personification of primordial energy and the source of all divine and cosmic evolution and also the source and controller of all forces and potentialities of nature” (Shiva 2008, p. 136). For Shiva, “energy is Shakti” (Ibid., p.136) and “work is energy”, which is the foundation for her argument that the “two crises of our times are intimately connected—the climate crisis and the unemployment crisis. As long as we address these crises separately, we will not solve either”. (Ibid., p. 137) Here, too, extraction and exploitation are inextricably related.

Shiva’s proposal is worth considering, without needing to follow some of the nationalist tones of her work: “Bringing work to people and people to work can be a significant solution of the crisis of human disposability and the crisis of climate corruption”. In this way, she brings extraction and exploitation together: “As the fossil fuel economy has grown, it has substituted energy for humans”. This has “rendered humans redundant to the economic enterprise of production”. On the other hand, “it has led to the problem of carbon pollution” (Ibid., p. 138). Expanding Shiva’s account, we might add that the crisis of labor is not merely one of unemployment and the lack of work; it is also the ever-increasing exploitation of work at all levels. And while the substitution of extracted energy for human energy is a crucial problem, human energy and work can never be totally eliminated. Here lies its interest and its power, as well as its ultimate concern. Vice versa, the exploitation crisis cannot be fully understood without the developments of extraction, which is where we need to begin.

3. Extraction, Exploitation, and Religion

While exploitation and extraction are closely related in the Capitalocene and together constitute the heart of the climate crisis, a first cursory look at extraction can help clarify and deepen the question what we are up against. At the most basic level, human life cannot exist without some forms of extraction from other-than-human nature: extracting animal and/or plant life and water is needed for sustenance (food); extracting fibers, rocks, and minerals is needed for sustainability (clothing, shelter, tools, etc.). These forms of extraction are facts of life; one might also include air, and one can discuss various levels of extraction, but what concerns us here is what has been defined as “extractivism” by Eduardo Gudynas and others: the large-scale extraction of minerals, hydrocarbons, and export crops under the conditions of what some of us have been calling the Capitalocene, which is the geological age when the logic of capitalism has taken over all of life.11 Extractivism is the particular form of extraction—perhaps in expanding Gudynas’ observations we might consider adding the extraction of data—that will also need to be investigated further in light of our conversation about the ultimate concern and religion. While the basic forms of extraction can be considered matters of being and not-being, extractivism is not directly needed for human survival, although it is sometimes justified even by progressive governments in this way, namely as producing necessary resources for social welfare.12

While extractivism—unlike specific forms of extraction mentioned above—is, therefore, not necessary for the survival of life, it has commonly been argued that extractivism is the foundation for the development of the modern world, including modern economics, politics, culture, and religion, for good or for ill. At the heart of modern economy—capitalism in its various forms—are the dynamics of extraction—and exploitation, as we shall see. Andreas Malm has narrated the long history of “fossil capital”, starting with the extraction of coal and the steam engine in Britain.13 Raj Patel, Jason Moore, and many others have expanded similar critiques to include the extraction of wealth in the Americas, Africa, India, and the rest of the world (Patel and Moore 2017).Timothy Mitchell has examined the political implications of extraction by coining the notion of “carbon democracy”, pointing to the fact that extraction shapes human relationships and societies.14 Terra Rowe has painstakingly examined the religious consequences of extraction with enlightening results. Few scholars of religion and theology have been aware, for instance, that even the theology of the Reformation in Germany was shaped to some degree by sixteenth-century mining interests in Saxony (Rowe 2023, chp. 3).

Contemporary critiques of extractivism tend to be directly related to growing concerns about CO2 emissions, the main drivers of climate change. Unfortunately, this connection still goes mostly unrecognized or is suppressed. This is true even for official statements at the highest level. As Rowe and others have pointed out, the Paris Climate Agreement, signed in 2016, mentions only emissions and not extraction.

How might the understanding of extractivism be further developed, taking into account these observations? Gudynas starts by differentiating between extraction and production. He notes that there is no production of minerals, hydrocarbons, or export crops, because “in extractivism nothing is produced but everything is extracted”, resulting in a “net loss of natural heritage”(Ibid., p. 63). The result of these extractivisms is that they reinforce the commodification of the non-human world, spilling over into other areas of life (Gudynas 2018, p. 67). This goes hand in hand with Patel and Moore’s observation of how the dominant system is built on seven cheap things, including nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives (Patel and Moore 2017). In other words, extractivism pulls everything into the production of capitalist profit, which is the central driver of life in the Capitalocene.

Nevertheless, since the production of profit ultimately depends on the exploitation of productive processes, even extractivism is more closely tied to production than Gudynas realizes. This is not just a matter of analysis of what is going on, it is also a matter of identifying resistance and the potential for the production of alternatives. In Patel and Moore’s list of seven cheap things, cheap labor is of course the place where production and extraction are most immediately related, but we might even think about the extraction of natural resources in this broader perspective. Elsewhere, Gudynas implicitly acknowledges the role of (re)production in extraction when he observes that some extractivisms are renewable, like grain, while some are not, like fossil fuels (Gudynas 2018, p. 70).

But production is a factor even in the context of fossil fuels, coal, and natural gasses, as these resources did not appear out of nowhere but are the product of the reproductive labor of countless past lifeforms over millions of years. In other words, we might argue that what is at the heart of the climate crisis is the extraction of other-than-human reproductive labor—in this case, the extraction of past reproductive labor in particular. This observation can be linked with our discussion of labor as the ultimate concern and therefore the subject of religion. Based on this argument, religionists might argue for greater respect for these resources. The topic could be picked up and expanded, for instance, by some Christians who are now talking about creation care.15 While this may be a start, this approach is limited because it stays within the realm of ideas, as does much religion in modernity. A somewhat more promising approach might be to point out, via business ethics, that what is being extracted is part of past reproductive processes that ought to be honored appropriately and should therefore not be considered merely as externalities to the calculations of business. Such arguments might be extended to economic calculations, which is what some theologians have tried to do, unfortunately with little success.16

Still, these various responses remain at the level of ideas, with little chance to find much of a hearing in the Capitalocene. Putting together extraction and exploitation can help expand these perspectives by introducing a notion of agency, which may come as a surprise to those dealing with extraction. This might be a more promising and robust approach to extractivism, as it points to emerging alternatives. Expanding the interpretation of extraction in terms of the exploitation of reproductive labor, which is any labor that fosters and nourishes life and keeps life going and alive, points us back to matters of being and not-being. Without reproductive labor, life would simply cease to exist, an observation which also points to its potential significance in conceiving of alternatives and resistance.

In the Capitalocene, reproductive labor is generally taken for granted and often goes unpaid. In terms of human reproductive labor, it is commonly relegated to women and minorities and goes hand-in-hand with new forms of slavery in the twenty-first century (Bales 1999). It is no wonder, therefore, that non-human reproductive labor fares no better, throwing light on the profound problem of extractivism. In the Capitalocene’s perennial drive to create profit for shareholders, it seems as if the most essential forms of labor are also the most exploited and extracted. And dominant religious imaginations appear to make things worse. The Christian notion of the dominium terrae (the mandate for humans to rule over the earth, as Genesis 1:26 is often interpreted), for instance, has caused its own share of damage, although the power to rule over the earth was of course never an option for humanity in general, as critics of religious anthropocentrism seem to imply.

How to address the realities of extraction under the conditions of the Capitalocene? Talking about ownership of land and resources, as many now do, is important but does not quite get to the heart of things. A deeper analysis of the dynamics of the Capitalocene is required. As Gudynas points out, large corporations in the business of extraction are not even interested primarily in ownership but in access. In some cases, ownership might even be detrimental because it creates conflicts with local communities, according to Gudynas, and, we might add, ownership imposes the burden of some accountability and responsibility that corporate interests prefer to keep off the books (Gudynas 2018, p. 65). One way to describe what is going on in extraction, therefore, is not directly acquisition and ownership but the virtually absolute maximization of profit by all means. What could possibly be done about this?

One way to address what looks like an unsurmountable problem might be to recognize the solidarity of that which is being extracted: reproductive labor, human and other-than-human, as well as the essential nature of this labor. This is not primarily a romantic idea, what Chaia Heller called with tongue in cheek “eco la la” (Heller 2023), but a practical insight into what really matters, including our ultimate concerns. In the history of the United States, for instance, human and other-than-human labor were connected early on. Rowe points to historical parallels between mineral extraction and human enslavement as pillars of the emerging United States (Rowe 2023, p. 76).

Recognizing how extraction produces the connectedness of such (re)productive labor can, therefore, be an effective tool that should not be underestimated, especially when it is tied to its foundational significance to life in the Capitalocene. For the extraction of human reproductive labor, this might begin with a recognition of the fact that reproductive laborers are never “minorities”: to the contrary, women, enslaved peoples, and the racial and ethnic minorities of the world together make up the majority of the population. The contribution of this labor is more foundational than most other factors that are commonly credited, like the economic and political leadership of prominent individuals. These considerations are true for other-than-human reproductive labor as well.

Deepening the solidarity of human and other-than-human reproductive labor entails paying attention to where such labor coalesces in resistance. Human reproductive labor can take a cue from other-than-human reproductive labor, for instance, where it is applying the brakes through seemingly “natural” catastrophes, the ever-more-difficult extraction of remaining fossil fuels, and the diminished returns of exhausted farmland. It is as if we are witnessing here the other-than-human refusal to bail out an extractive economy that is ultimately unsustainable. Slowdowns and refusals have long been recognized resources in the toolbox of exploited and enslaved human labor, and we can now expand this to other-than-human labor.

All this has implications for the transformation of religious imaginations as well. Even some of the most ancient subjects of extraction can now be seen in new light: earth and water have their own creative agencies, and without their reproductive labor, nothing would exist, as the first creation story in Genesis understands (Genesis 1:20; 24). And the second creation story in Genesis depicts the divine as a laborer as well, planting a garden and making the first human from clay (Genesis 2:7–8)—in stark contrast to images of the divine as manager or ruler.

Based on these reflections, the alternatives become clearer, pushing beyond what is currently envisioned. Gudynas talks about a “postextractivist” transition that imagines “a very different organization and dynamics in relation to nature and how to achieve a condition of ‘living well’, while simultaneously offering very pragmatic proposals of changes to move in that direction, for example in taxation, environmental assessment, a territorial ordering and citizen participation” (Ibid., p. 75).

While these are important steps, the fundamental agency that humans and other-than-humans have through their productive and reproductive labor goes unreflected here. Malm concludes his monumental book Fossil Capital by talking about political action related to social movements.17 What is missing are proposals to combat extractivism and exploitation by building collective economic and therefore labor power.

The practical question, which is also a question of lived religion, is how that which is extracted and exploited might be employed in producing alternatives. What if labor, broadly conceived, were not just a place of deprivation but also a place of resistance, subversion, and the production of alternatives? To be sure, the various forms of productive and reproductive labor accomplish this in different ways—the unpaid worker may have less leverage than the established worker whose work is in high demand. But even parents’ reproductive labor can become subversive if they understand what they are up against, and in subversion lies resistance and the production of alternatives. And then there are always the blades of grass or other kinds of plants that start growing over and through the pavement, often sooner rather than later.

4. Exploitation, Extraction, and Religion

It is interesting that the exploitation of human labor as part of the ecological crisis is noted by various ecological theorists, including Andreas Malm’s history of fossil capitalism and Timothy Mitchell’s investigations of carbon democracy, while scholars of theology and religion concerned about ecology have paid little attention to the matter until recently.18 Even though the reasons for this near-total silence cannot be explored here, let us see what happens when these various concerns are put together further.

If labor, productive and reproductive, human and non-human, is indeed a matter of being and not-being, the exploitation of labor touches on the core of human existence. In the Capitalocene, this exploitation of labor is also at the heart of the climate crisis, along with the extraction of fossil fuels and other resources, as both extraction and exploitation are driven by the production of profit for the few by the many. The central importance of labor can be demonstrated also by a cursory look at the conflictual nature of labor relations, which is growing stronger everywhere we look. Capitalists in places like the United States are worried about every little sign of labor solidarity, even trying to control and limit bathroom breaks for workers and conversations around water coolers. Union busting has become a USD 400 million dollar/year industry (Union Busting Is Big Business 2024). Even professional labor, once seen as a near-paradise for those who have to work for a living, has come under pressure and is increasingly controlled, reaching from the universities to medical care and the practice of law. Of course, just as we noted earlier that not all extraction equals extractivism, we might add here that not all labor relationships have to equal exploitation.19 What we are interested in here are the particular forms of the exploitation of labor in the Capitalocene.

Investigating extraction further in this context can help us understand the full predicament of exploitation. As Jason Moore has pointed out in a 2023 article, “socially-necessary labor time stands on the pedestal of socially necessary unpaid work/energy delivered by the femintariat and the biotariat” (Moore 2023). Expanding the traditional notion of the proletariat in this way helps deepen the analysis of what we are up against and how solidarity shapes up in the Capitalocene. For capitalism to succeed and survive, the extraction of reproductive labor—both other-than-human and human—is foundational for the exploitation of productive labor at every level. In other words, the Capitalocene rests on the back of other-than-human and human minoritized, feminized, and colonized agents. We should add that this is also related to capitalism’s structural imperative to keep costs low due to the economic law of “diminishing returns”, which means that returns become proportionally smaller the more money or energy is invested in a project. What is important to keep in mind here is that we are not only talking about exploitation and extraction but also about how resistance, subversion, and alternatives are built.

All this has deep implications for how lived religion, both religious imagination and religious practice, shapes up in various ways. Vandana Shiva, putting culture and labor together, notes that “economic distortions lead to social and cultural [and we might add religious] distortions. Creative and productive human beings are laid to waste, and creative work is perceived as second-class work, as obsolete. Craftspeople are expected to disappear for industrialized production of petro-products; small farmers are expected to disappear to make way for industrial agriculture. And the with the disappearance of creative work comes the disappearance of the very knowledge and skills we need to shape economics beyond oil” (Shiva 2008, p. 139). In terms of our earlier arguments, the ultimate concern of humanity is deeply distorted here and pushed underground.

Extraction, thus, sets the stage for exploitation, with far-reaching consequences. In the Capitalocene, even human labor is increasingly treated as if it were an externality. The logic of externalities, long realized as the problem of extraction of natural resources as well as pollution, whose real cost is excluded from business calculations, now appears to be increasingly applied even to productive labor in addition to reproductive labor, where it has long set the stage. This extends all the way to professional labor and the work of higher education, where core activities like teaching students are increasingly relegated to adjuncts, thereby putting pressure even on tenured faculty that once upon a time considered itself exempt from the rat race of labor. In all areas—resource extraction and labor exploitation—the race to the bottom is picking up speed, with one area reinforcing the other. The notion of the Anthropocene especially ignores the second half of this equation, labor exploitation, by blaming all of humanity for extraction and ecological destruction and—by extension—holding everyone responsible for fixing it without considering the dynamics of life in the Capitalocene.20

It is therefore crucial to consider the logic of extraction when talking about exploitation, because it reminds labor of some of the mechanisms by which its value has been reduced and it serves as a dire warning that this value can always be reduced further. In other words, just as our understanding of extraction can be deepened in conversation with exploitation, as argued above, our understanding of exploitation can also be deepened in conversation with extraction. The brief moment when labor could be discussed as “essential” during the COVID-19 pandemic has passed, and it is time to become aware of the increasing brutality with which profit is maximized all around and the ever-greater scale on which that happens.

Other factors are tied into these dynamics as well, including race, gender, and colonialism.21 Rowe, for instance, points out the connections between mineralogical extraction as ”entwined with fleshly extractions”, an insight from ecofeminism. Moreover, she also notes racial extractions, as “racialization has been constructed in and through mineralogical and human extractions”.22 Disputing the widespread perception that extraction is natural, inevitable, and quintessentially human, Rowe further points out that extraction is tied to particular relations to land and theologies. The underlying theological problem is unchecked images of God’s sovereignty and a notion of unconstrained omnipotence that emerged at the end of the Middle Ages (Rowe 2023, pp. 64, 67, 71) and continues its detrimental history of effects even today. This runs parallel to the consolidation of papal and monarchial powers at the heart of slavery and colonization, and, following Rowe’s historical narrative, colonizing North America later on was only possible because of mineral extraction and enslavement.23

While the mutual reinforcement of extraction and exploitation deepens our predicament, what is exploited and extracted may have still something to contribute, and here labor, productive and reproductive, human and other-than-human, as well as enslaved, may point the way. Note that this is also the place where alternative lived religion is being produced and new religious imaginations and practices can emerge. Malm notes the history of the “irreducible, elusive, frustrating autonomy” of labor, which does not go away even in the Capitalocene.24 His list includes workers’ abilities to slow things down, ignore guidelines, or go on strike. He further notes the parallel to the power of water in contrast to the power of coal: water, like labor, can also subvert capitalist authority by failing to cooperate. The paradox, in this connection, is that while it may be easier for business interests to control coal than water, the use and production of coal is more dependent on labor than the use of water, which gives labor some power at certain points in history. Malm notes the special position of labor in these contexts, which can be controlled but never fully be replaced, unlike water, which was eventually replaced by coal (Malm 2016, pp. 312–14). These thoughts could be developed further for the present, when labor may seem to be more defeated than ever but is also absolutely necessary, even for the purposes of energy extraction or other increasingly important forms of extraction, like the extraction of data that is at the core of AI.25

Searching for alternatives, Vandana Shiva distinguishes between bottom-up and top-down models, which is instructive for our efforts to engage extraction and exploitation: “A top-down model for sustainability results in pseudo-sustainability and eco-imperialism. A bottom-up search for sustainability creates an Earth Democracy based on living economies. Unleashing our living but latent energies can create new economic and political possibilities. But recognizing the emergent possibilities requires a paradigm shift from a mechanistic worldview and its limited and limiting categories of mechanical energies” (Shiva 2008, p. 133). In other words, engaging with extraction and exploitation in terms of the dominant mindset that produced these phenomena, the push for profit, might make things worse. Simply shifting policy, laws, or even property titles will not change things without also shifting human agency from top to bottom. This brings us back to the promise of labor. In Shiva’s words, “there are multiple levels at which the human capacity to do work needs to be put back into the energy equation and into human destiny. First is the internal energy of human beings in all its dimensions—spiritual, cultural, emotional, intellectual, physical. If it is tapped, this is the largest energy source we have—inexhaustible, replenishable, and ever enlarging. Human energy, combined with the energy of the sun, the plants and animals, the wind, the air, the sea and water, the soil and the earth, is both the basis of work and livelihoods and the source of sustainable and renewable energy” (Shiva 2008, pp. 139–40). Here, all forms of labor are put together, human and other than human, productive and reproductive, in terms of the contributions they are making to matters of being and not-being. For theologians, it might be worthwhile to search for the contributions of the surplus of divine labor here as well, which do not have to be located in the ethereal and transcendent but in everyday transformations of the status quo.

What Shiva’s proposals are missing, perhaps because she trusts too much in human cohesion and certain embodiments of community and nationality, are the more organized attempts of labor movements to produce cohesion and solidarity. Here, labor unions might be helpfully mentioned, even though the question of labor is much bigger, as it includes informal and reproductive human labor as well as other-than-human labor. Even religion has a role to play here. These are huge tasks with many roadblocks, some of which I am trying to tackle elsewhere (Rieger 2022, chps. 3 and 4).

5. Conclusions: Surplus and Religion

Extraction and exploitation are not natural occurrences—or natural disasters, depending on one’s point of view. They are the key engines in the production of surplus (profit) for the few by the many. The labor of the many for the few is part of it, starting with reproductive labor that includes fossilized labor, mineralized labor, or labor alive today. While what is extracted can be distinguished in terms of what is other-than-human and human, there is no absolute distinction, as both natural resources and reproductive labor (especially in its racialized, gendered, and colonized forms) are treated as externalities in capitalist accounting, even though they are the foundation of capitalism’s success and survival, rather than the genius of its CEOs, as we are led to believe.

What would it mean for the study of religion and theology to engage the close relations of extraction and exploitation that we have identified here? First, we need to take another look at the problem: the dominium terrae (Gen. 1:26), often critiqued by environmentalists as a form of anthropocentrism, is indeed one of the pillars of extractivism, but it ultimately is also the foundation of exploitation. This may sound like a no-brainer, but this is exactly what is missing in Lynn White’s classic argument, which is still rehearsed today in all kinds of variations in theology and religious studies, and what is missing in the notion of the Anthropocene. Connecting extraction and exploitation deconstructs common notions of other-than-human nature (or land, biomass, minerals, fossil fuels, etc.) as something “out there”, to be addressed independently of the agency of productive and reproductive labor, as if it were not always already part of the ongoing metabolism of life.

What comes back here is a broader notion of agency, which includes both human and other-than-human energies. This agency is not developed apart from extraction and exploitation, as there is no place outside, but moves through it, refusing to be totally appropriated. While surplus is produced for the few, there is also some surplus produced that escapes the exploitation of surplus and pushes further towards the many. As stated above, this is true at various levels, including material production of goods and services, the production of relationships, and the production of religious imaginations and practices. It may be possible for people of faith to engage the divine here, but this is also the place where truly alternative energies of the universe might be explored and harnessed and where alternative forms of religion can thrive.

Vandana Shiva talks about reinventing democracy, noting that

“a renewable-energy economy will only be built through the renewable energy of free and self-organized citizens and communities. The transition beyond oil is not merely a technological transition—it is above all a political transition in which we stop being passive and become active agents of transformation by recognizing that we have the capacity, the energy, and the creativity to make the change. Life is based on self-organizing energies of the universe, from cells to Gaia, from communities to countries. We as living systems are networks of chemical and energetic flow and transformation. Thus life is energy—not fossil fuel energy, but living energy”.

(Shiva 2008, p. 135)

In less esoteric language, scholars of religion and theology might simply say that the alternative to the Capitalocene depends on the recognition of the contributions of the shared agency and the cooperative labor—the “creativity” in the most literal sense of the word—of human and other-than-human agents, which may include the divine.