Extractive masculinity and the war on subsistence: thinking with Ariel Salleh’s DeColonize EcoModernism!

Engaging Ariel Salleh’s theorization of the Androcene as a patriarchal–colonial–capitalist ‘debt matrix,’ this commentary article on DeColonize EcoModernism! argues that contemporary ecomodernism—liberal and socialist—extends a war on subsistence. We introduce the concept of extractive masculinity as the affective-political engine of the Androcene. The concept organizes desire, authority, and legitimacy around the conversion of living relations into controllable ‘resources.’ We argue that technology, state, and money-fetishisms rooted in coercive ‘war’ relationships render existences and worlds as legible, ‘productive’ and/or disposable/unproductive. This imaginary underwrites terra nullius logics in green industrialism, digital governance, and geo-fixes mentioned in Salleh’s book. The commentary foregrounds reproductive labour, vernacular autonomy, and embodied knowledges as the material basis of ecological politics, which are rendered legible, controllable, and plundered through extractive masculinities. Thinking with Salleh’s book, we conclude that ecomodernism should be dismantled through struggles that rebuild subsistence and durable collective self-determination and autonomy.