Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction Under Late Capitalism
Planetary Mine rethinks the politics and territoriality of resource extraction, especially as the mining industry becomes reorganized in the form of logistical networks, and East Asian economies emerge as the new pivot of the capitalist world-system. Through an exploration of the ways in which mines in the Atacama Desert of Chile--the driest in the world--have become intermingled with an expanding constellation of megacities, ports, banks, and factories across East Asia, the book rethinks uneven geographical development in the era of supply chain capitalism. Arguing that extraction entails much more than the mere spatiality of mine shafts and pits, Planetary Mine points towards the expanding webs of infrastructure, of labor, of finance, and of struggle, that drive resource-based industries in the twenty-first century.
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Martín Arboleda is based at the School of Sociology of Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago de Chile. His research explores the role that primary commodity production performs in the political economy of urbanization and of global capitalism. His work has been published by international outlets such as Antipode, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Harvard Design Magazine, Geoforum, and Society & Space, among others.
--Christian Parenti, John Jay College CUNY and author of The Means Proper "Planetary Mine exquisitely excavates the network and relations that connect the lives of workers in extraction sites to global financial architectures, logistical assemblages, migrating bodies, hungry capitalists, and recalcitrant activists. It robustly debunks the myth of life in a post-material world and charts multiple paths to transforming the uneven and combined geographies of extraction in emancipatory directions. A real eye-opener and instant classic."
--Erik Swyngedouw, University of Manchester "This is a phenomenal book. Martín Arboleda has given us an illuminating work that traces the remaking of the global mining sector in an age of logistical machines, planetary circulatory systems, and Imperialism 'after the West'. With conceptual facility and an inspiring clarity, Planetary Mine offers an engrossing portrait of extractive supply chains and the infrastructures that underpin them. Working across networked front lines, and thinking with diverse and generative literatures, this landmark work insists that we must refuse the social and ecological destruction of extractivism, and shows us how and where that struggle is already underway."
--Deborah Cowen "A breathtaking account of the violence of - and resistance to - extractive capitalism. With Planetary Mine, Martin Arboleda has given us an extraordinarily provocative and original study of capital, power, and nature in an age of planetary crisis. It will be a point of reference for years to come."
--Jason Moore "In Planetary Mine, Latin America and Asia get closer together as they become entangled through the Pacific Ocean as the new axis of the world-economy. An entire geography of extraction--developed by Chile, the proverbial laboratory of the Chicago Boys--casts into new light the systemic question of the imperial technologies of the present, the dynamics of labor exploitation, and the machineries of everyday life that underpin them. In this book, the mine emerges as a strategic site in which port infrastructure, finance, urban development, and robotization come together, revealing the logics and extractive mechanisms that actualize contemporary neoliberalism. But this geography also enables further excavations: it demonstrates that the conflicts that sabotage and confront such an appropriation of knowledge and of social wealth can produce other types of value and challenge the frontiers of capital."
--Verónica Gago "Planetary Mine rethinks global development in terms of world political climate and geography."
--Kate Mazade, The Architect's Newspaper
