Extractivism and Universality: Inside an Uprising in the Amazon. Japhy Wilson. Routledge, London, UK and New York, USA, 2023, pp. 120. <scp>ISBN</scp> 978‐1‐003‐34587‐9 (ebk).

This cracking read recounts a two-week strike and barricade (paro) of oil installations in the northern Ecuadorian Amazon, and its aftermath. The story of the paro is topped and tailed by Wilson's reflections upon its theoretical implications. With the oil workers already fed up with precarious employment and poverty wages, the ‘drop that spilled the glass’ (p. 20) on 22 August 2017 was the company's failure to pay utilidades, the share of profits that Ecuadorian workers are entitled to annually. The strike became a blockade when it was joined by the indigenous Shuar community on whose land the striking workers’ oil platform was located, with the community arguing they had not received adequate compensation from the oil company. A few days later, unemployed workers joined the blockade and at the same time, by pure coincidence, Wilson arrived in town. Told in a first-person style inspired, like much of Wilson's work, by Hunter S. Thompson's gonzo journalism, readers get to know the protagonists of the paro and their goals, motives and rhetoric, which Wilson describes as ‘insurgent universality’ (p. 6). From the front-row, we watch the arrests of paro leaders and the retaliatory kidnapping of an oil company manager. We see how the campaign was sought to be divided by both the state-company alliance as well as, Wilson alleges, by established social movements in Ecuador, before finally triumphing according to its original goals, though it is a triumph Wilson judges as a pyrrhic victory. The book is arguably ‘up-stream’ of similar studies of extractivism (Cepek, 2017; De la Cadena, 2015; Kirsch, 2014; Li, 2015), for as engaged as their authors strive to be, few are fortunate enough to be on the scene when protests begin, and so depend on second-hand information for their accounts. One wonders, too, how many would be bold enough to risk violence, arrest, deportation and derailment of research plans for as long as Wilson did here, and as he also did previously in Uganda (Wilson, 2018; see also Vangsnes, 2024: Ch. 8). This boldness benefits the book in enabling Wilson's access to the paro's own sources of information, including the oil company's internal security reports that they acquire, and Whatsapp messages from the phone of the kidnapped manager. Wilson's account also provides a rare insight into the overtures by elite actors to induce strikers to cease and desist. These include machinations on the part of various ‘community relations officers’ (p. 21); leaders of the 2007 strike who Wilson paints as co-opted, due to their having accepted positions in the Rafael Correa government (2007–17); and a smartly dressed expert in ‘Socio-Political Conflict Management for Hydrocarbon Development’. Wilson practically spits when commenting, ‘The Oil Ministry is full of people like him, with postgraduate degrees in Sociology and Anthropology’ (p. 55). It is a surreal book to read behind high windows in a university office: I could not help a dark rumination on its possible future as assigned reading for social movement studies students who go on to assess ‘sovereign risk’ for international consultancy firms. Theoretically, the book extends from Susan Buck-Morss's (2009) universalist interpretation of the Haitian Revolution; it situates itself against the Modernity/Coloniality school and a range of proponents of what I have elsewhere called ‘counter-modern anti-extractivism’ (Tym, 2023). Here, the joint indigenous and non-indigenous campaign for a fairer share of oil revenues clearly gives the lie to those who argue that ecological and anti-capitalist sentiments flow automatically from non-dominant identity positions. In opposition to such ethnocultural identity-centred searches for political alternatives and revolutionary protagonism, Wilson argues that in the ‘insurgent universality’ of the strike, ‘the racial, ethnic, and cultural divisions that marked the region miraculously ceased to matter’, because the strike's ‘motley crew was united by a common material relation to capital’ (p. 86). In this light, he casts the belated interventions in October 2017 of renowned indigenous movements CONAIE and CONFENIAE as acts of division (p. 81). Holding a common position with respect to capital clearly is a cause for unity across different identity groups, just as class differences within ethnocultural groups constitute divergences of interests that decolonial, political ontology, and anti-extractivist thinkers commonly ignore. The difficulty, as Wilson recognizes in the book itself, comes after the insurgent moment. What holds the movement together when its protagonists are enjoying the spoils of victory? It seems more than possible, as Wilson contemplates, that in this case study, ‘[t]he only thing they were after was their share of the oil rents. And once they got it, they were happy. The end’ (p. 86). Or relatedly, in the words of a Guaraní representative on the Bolivian gas frontier, ‘If they are willing to provide the good money, we are willing to discuss’ (McNeish, 2012: 47). Wilson's efforts to prove that there was more at stake than money pass into Bakhtinian invocations of revolutionary carnival and Zizek's Part that stands in for the Universal Whole. While intellectually inspiring, it is difficult to credit that this mattered more to the paro's participants than the USD 20 000 to 30 000 ultimately paid out to each worker as utilidades (p. 81). In the wake of the pay-outs, Wilson laments the supposed degeneration of the revolutionary moment in the form of the new cars, liquor stores and gaudy constructions in the jungle towns of Coca and Dayuma, writing in a tone that strangely parallels the counter-modern anti-extractivist critiques he opposes (see Tym, 2023). Marxism has always had ‘materialist’ and ‘spiritual’ components, the former more associated with statism and the latter with anarchism. In my view, this split shows up here in the contradiction between the essentially universal, material desire for a better cut of capital, on the one hand, and on the other, the much more niche, spiritual desire for the transcendence of capitalism. If Wilson had leaned more towards the universalist potential of Marxist materialism rather than its spiritual side, he might have found space to praise the Correa administration's constitutional abolition of labour sub-contracting in 2008, which provided the legal basis for the campaign for payment of utilidades. And if he saw other causes for ‘immaterial’ unity than anti-capitalist transcendentalism, he might have seen more value in the decades-long mobilization capacity of CONAIE and CONFENIAE, not to mention the profound ethnic and historical consciousness of the Shuar, which though so key to the success of the paro is scarcely mentioned in the book. Nonetheless, these differences in theoretical commitments and emphasis should not detract from the story of the paro nor the significant contribution that is Wilson's animated account of it.