Bringing heterodoxy back into a world of pessimism

In this Extractivism Occasional Papers’ volume, we brought together two first-wave scholars working on structuralism, class and development, Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira and Hartmut Elsenhans, and upcoming scholars – Ingrid Harvord Kvangraven, Fernando Rugitsky and Johanna Siebert – who build on structuralist thinking to present their own take on the importance of revitalising it. Our project follows the Hegelian dialectics and seeks aufheben, in the sense of learning from the past, preserving what is valuable, and abandoning what is no longer suitable to elevate the sophistication level of our way of thinking about the world. In other words, we are not proposing a nostalgic return to long-buried times nor simply copying what has been said before; revitalisation means testing what can be used and emphasising what needs to be discarded.