Planetary Mine. Territories of Extraction under Late Capitalism

Planetary Mine starts with a real story, one about subcontracted miners who decided to block the roads leading to one of the most important copper-producing mines worldwide, demanding better working conditions. Sadly, one of their co-workers was shot dead by heavily armoured police, sent by the central state to make sure production resumed as soon as possible, whatever the cost. This story took place in the Atacama Region of Northern Chile, but it has also happened—and will keep happening—in several other extractive places, as long as the planetary extractive machine gets threatened by the increasingly precarized working force. These introductory paragraphs effectively communicate the tone, focus, and ideas the book develops. Despite its global spread, the author shows, mining is a highly territorialized activity, and the extraction of value is usually done at the expense of those territories and their human and non-human inhabitants to ensure the wellbeing of distant shareholders and financial centres. Hence, the uneven developmental outcomes produced and reproduced by mining are extremely contested and its multi-scalar effects must be seriously considered.