Manufacturing Alienation in the Bakken: Toward a Political Economy of Extraction

This article complicates the neoclassical factors of production––land, labor, and capital. Instead, it uses Georges Bataille's "general" economy, which situates all human activity within the energy system of the sun. This means that human domination of nature, and its resultant alienation, must be manufactured within the system of production. Also, a general economy's necessity of profitlessly consuming surplus energy recasts extractive sites as necessary sites of reproducing alienation in capitalism through destructive waste. The Bakken oil fields are a site of destructive extraction to consume excess energy but because capitalism insists on productive consumption, it has destructive social consequences.