Extractive capitalism and Trump’s adventurism

“THE gleaming cities of capital, the spires of skyscrapers, our handheld devices with access to avalanches of information, data centres that perform the millions of calculations our gadgets require to function, the transportation we take on land and sea or in the air all depend on the extraction of raw materials from the earth.....

- By Dr. Ameer Ali

Primary commodities like sand, iron ore, bauxite, coal—and of course oil - are excavated, transported, refined or assayed, and then sold on at great markup. Where labour is unionised and legally protected, the process of extraction is increasingly automated. Where labour — or life — is cheap, many of the steps in the process of extraction are still performed manually. Think of shipbreaking in South Asia or stevedoring in Africa, which still rely on the power of human muscles rather than gleaming high-tech machinery. To understand how globally and locally unequal the world was made, extractive capitalism holds many of the answers (Laleh Khalili, Extractive Capitalism, Profile Books, 2025, pp. 1-2).

EGOMANIAC Donald Trump’s adventure into Venezuela, kidnapping its head of state Nicolas Maduro, producing him before a US court on charges of narcotrafficking and threatening the interim head of that country Delcy Rodriguez of even more punishing consequences if she doesn’t abide by Trump’s plan for Venezuela, if anything, has made a mockery of national sovereignty and the rule of international law. Following this adventure Trump has renewed his threat either to annex Greenland or buy it outright, has threatened to invade Cuba, Panama, Mexico and a few other countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, and is crowing about bombing Iran to reinstall the Pahlavi Monarchy: all this indicates that the US Presidency under this maniac has become a “threat to civilization” as the American political economist Robert Reich put it, and signals the collapse of a world order which the US itself pioneered to install after WWII. But is Trump acting alone or in concert with the agents of another program?