REVIEW ESSAY Contesting total extractivism: Between idealism and materialism Thomas F. Purcell International Political Economy, Department of European & International Studies, King's College London, London, UK Abstract This review essay develops a methodologically-minded criti- cal engagement with two books that seek to make big theo- retical contributions to our understanding of the socially and ecologically destructive dynamics of extractivism. By reading both texts through their methods of concept build- ing and abstraction, the essay points towards the potential and pitfalls of science and technology in the capitalist mode of production and, in turn, the prospects for human agency to contest the forces of extractivism. Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction under Late Capitalism, by Martín Arboleda. 2020. 288 pp. £11.99 (paperback). Verso:. ISBN: 9781788732963 The Violent Technologies of Extraction: Political Ecology, Critical Agrarian Studies and the Capitalist Worldeater, by Alexander Dunlap and Jostein Jakobsen. 2020. XIII, 164 pp. €42.79 (ebook). Palgrave MacMillan:. ISBN: 978-3-030- 26852-7 Since its emergence in Latin American social movement's struggle against the intensification of an export- oriented, resource-intensive model of capital accumulation (Riofrancos, 2017), the notion of extractivism has gone on to gain traction across the social sciences. Especially within agrarian political economy, extractivism has emerged as a key concept to grapple with a whole host of politically urgent themes such as ecological destruction, global heating, accumulation by dispossession, depeasantization, land grabbing, and the financialization of nature—to name a few. Clearly, this runs the risk of overburdening a concept (sometimes a moral sanction or pejorative adjective) with explanatory and analytical demands that it simply cannot meet. It is in this light that we can appreciate the call to develop an “expanded conception of extractivism” (Gago & Mezzadra, 2017) that can offer up a theory of 21st century capitalism and tell us about more than injustices and ecological damage wrought in the physical sites of extraction or the pathologies of resource curses. The two books under review here set out to do just that. Yet they do so in very different ways. What caught the attention of this reviewer was the different, if not diametrically opposed, methodological approaches to a common— extractive and socioecologically destructive—condition of late capitalism. Reading these texts side by side was Received: 1 October 2021 Accepted: 7 October 2021 DOI: 10.1111/joac.12458 J Agrar Change. 2021;1–6. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/joac © 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 1