Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Communication as Commons in the context of Extractivist Capitalism: tensions and possibilities

Abstract

The necessity of incorporating the SDG18 into the debates on the Agenda 2030 put two challenges in the first order on the table: the analysis of the fundamental characteristics of the current sociopolitical context of extractive capitalism and the ability to think on an alternative post-capitalist horizon.

The first theoretical effort, of contextual nature, allows identifying the fundamental characteristics of extractive capitalism (Gudynas, 2020; Kidd, 2019) as an economic and political project radically tackled to the one underlying in the formulation of the SDGs. As much the material goods (water, food, etc.) as the social and communicative rights are, within the framework of current capitalism, resources that to be intensively exploited from the commodity logic.

On the contrary, a conception of the goods (material and social) and of communication as commons implicates a radically alternative worldview and political horizon. This standpoint incorporates a look to the economy, the environment, and the communication that finds a theoretical matrix of great utility in the formulation of the commons for constructing alternatives to extractive capitalism.

The foundational works about the commos by authors like Hess and Ostrom (2007) and Benkler (2013) have had further development in the field of communication that can offer clues for our work (Fuchs, 2021). This alternative theoretical effort is not entirely new since in the history of Communication for the Development (Servaes, 2002) antecedents worthy of being recreated being found in the current context. The case is, for instance, the work of the dependentistas. Based on these elements, it’s possible to offer some theoretical bases for the foundation of the proposed alternative.