MARTÍN ARBOLEDA: The literature on primary commodity production, or extractivism, tends to remain tethered to the site of extraction: the shaft, the mine, the pit. Which is so dazzling, of course. But it’s just the beginning of a much wider process that includes not only logistical infrastructures—ports, container ships—but also circuits of financial intermediation, networks of labor, manufacturing, cities, expertise, spaces of consumption. We cannot understand extraction dissociated from the smartphones we carry in our pocket.

My name is Martina Arboleda. I am based at the School of Sociology of Universidad Diego Portales, in Santiago de Chile. And I’m the author of the book Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction under Late Capitalism.

The planetary mine is the space of extraction that emerges as a result of two major world-historical transformations. On the one hand, a technological revolution manifested in advanced computerization of the productive process; increased functional integration via what is known in the literature as the logistics revolution. And on the other, a geoeconomic/geopolitical shift that has seen the rise or emergence of East Asian economies as the new pivot of the capitalist world system. So the shift from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean as the main corridor of international trade.

Actually the book began as a very traditional study of extractivism that looked at this region in Northern Chile, in the Atacama Desert, called Valle de Huasco—the Huasco Valley—which has been radically transformed during the last two or three decades as a result of massive investment projects for mining, thermoelectric energy production, some agro-industrial developments. But as I progressed in my research, I started to become aware of the role that many processes that seemed external to extraction were also shaping it in fundamental ways.

Processes that have enabled these new forms of interdependence between spaces of extraction in Latin America and spaces of manufacturing in China, or Asia, broadly, it’s basically the result of a new emphasis, or corporate approach, toward speed, homeostasis, and flow in primary commodity production. So the first technological and organizational underpinning for this were initiatives for mineral traceability. Traceability are technologies that enable the travel of the particular commodity, in this case copper, or any other metal, to be mapped from the point where it’s extracted, to where it ends up in spaces of consumption, right?

So, mineral buyers in Asia were becoming very interested in developing technologies for mineral traceability to have more accurate information about the purity, the grade of minerals extracted. So that made it much easier for them to detect where the minerals were coming from. And in terms of global governance and multilateral governance, the United Nations has also been trying to tell governments that it’s very important to implement frameworks for mineral traceability, especially in cases of so-called conflict minerals. And secondly, mining companies became aware that the information asymmetries between different phases of production were becoming very costly. So they started to invest money in the standardization of operational systems. And this means that they have created coordinated modes of engagement. Not only within primary commodity production as such—this means, you know, like, forecasting, blasting, haulage, crushing, smelting—but also within primary commodity production and other industries, such as the port industry and the shipping industry.

That’s one thing. Secondly, East Asian economies have been at the forefront of innovations in shipping technologies. A very rigorous and powerful study by Stephen Bunker and Paul Ciccantell, from the world-systems tradition, show that part of the so-called new international division of labor—the emergence of these Asian economies—has been a result of shipping technologies first developed by Japan in the 1980s and then improved by South Korea in the 1990s and then China, which, like, in the beginning of the 21st century, developed the largest maritime commercial fleet in the world. And basically, according to Bunker and Ciccantell, these technologies for accelerating the circulation of commodities across space was a result of Japan’s intention to access resource peripheries that were further away, such as iron ore in Brazil. And of course, with the rise of China, it created a huge turning point when it became the major investor in Latin America, the main commercial partner for several Latin American nations, including Chile.

A way for me to develop a more sort of nuanced understanding of global political economy was basically, to some extent, to stand on the shoulders of giants. One of the key inspirations for this book is Maria Mies’s classic, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, published in the late 1980s. She tried to develop a feminist understanding of the new international division of labor, saying, basically, that the spaces of production of the woman in the maquila or the manufacturing facility was apparently very different to that of the Western housewife working as a consumer, but actually these two different spaces were functionally imbricated and were part of a single totality, right? Coming from a feminist tradition, she wasn’t seeing that kind of either/or approach, or, you know, global or local. Do we focus on culture or do we focus on class? She was trying to develop a more dialectical reading of how these two different things are mediated by different socio-cultural contexts, but at the same time are woven together by the commodity relation.

I also took inspiration from other approaches within, especially, Latin American Marxism that think about indigeneity and class politics in a way that also tries to avoid that kind of either/or, global or local—as if they were, to some extent, mutually exclusive. One of the theoretical traditions that cuts across the book is a tradition of form-analysis Marxism that basically tries to supersede these divergences between structure/agency, local/global, the particular or the universal, and looks at social reality from the standpoint of these fetishized forms of social mediation of capitalist modernity—which are money, the commodity, labor—and how they contain or congeal, crystallize, these various networks of relations.

I’m very inspired by what Vivek Chibber says: that major theories of Imperialism start from the assumption that the political state is autonomous and Imperialism is, like, an expression of the moving outwards of the political sovereignty of a nation state. But what Chibber says is that what sometimes look like autonomous political projects are actually the surface appearance of deep, dynamic, economic, structural forces—and that we need to understand these forces. And of course, with the rise of China, the question of Imperialism has become quite chaotic, to say the least, because activists, governments have a hard time today pointing their fingers at Washington and saying that, you know, like, this is U.S. Imperialism. Yet sometimes they do. It’s difficult especially because China is not as politically interventionist, at least overseas. And maybe, internally, China is an authoritarian government, yes; but its foreign policy is characterized by a more horizontal, less hierarchical system of international relations. Pádraig Carmody refers to it as “flexigemony”—which is flexible, horizontal, but still hegemonic.

I’m quite inspired by the idea of Moishe Postone, a Marxist theorist that informs this tradition of form analysis, which is the idea that capital, by its own immanent determinations, creates forms of interdependence at the global scale, and these forms of interdependence come with social-spatial inequality, exclusion, oppression. But at the same time, he says that these alienated forms of social mediation also create possibilities for liberation and emancipation that are much more systematic than anything that has ever existed. And these possibilities are already laying there. We’ve seen, again, the rise of new mass movements: feminist, ecosocialist, postextractivist. Struggles against extraction have also inspired new political idioms: degrowth, postdevelopment, all these new categories to think about our own relation to the economy, the environment. And this is actually what the books tries to, to some extent, convey: that there’s already this sort of emerging global planetary consciousness.