Martín Arboleda, Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction Under Late Capitalism
Friday's Child Is Loving and Giving
Why did I get this book?
I’m always keen to read analysis of recent turns in the global political economy, particularly those that combine theoretical and empirical analysis in a dedicated way.
Is it what I thought it was?
I didn’t have strong preconceptions about what Arboleda’s analysis was going to look like, so it all felt fresh and engaging to me. I have read some of the key theoretical precursors that Arboleda draws on (Mbembe, Mandel) and some writing about the Anthropocene that works over some similar ground, so it wasn’t entirely unfamiliar or unexpected.
What continuing uses might I have for it?
I’ve immediately worked the book into one section of a manuscript I’m completing right now—it was very helpful. It makes me think of teaching a course on the history of mining and resource extraction. It certainly has an effect on how I think about the history of mining in southern Africa. I’m toying with pushing a chapter of the book into my upcoming course on world history as a genre—that’s going to be a last-minute decision if I do.
Quotes
“Although in the popular imagination mining is usually considered to be a rudimentary activity, the degree of technological sophistication that mediates the extraction of minerals from the subsoil in the twenty-first century is nothing short of astonishing.”
“This book argues that the mining industry’s recent technological and organizational modernization transcends mere shifts in the intensity and scale of mineral extraction. The planetary mine, I will argue, is the geography of extraction that emerges as the most genuine product of two distinct yet overlapping world-historical transformations: first, a new geography of late industrialization that is no longer circumscribed to the traditional heartland of capitalism (i.e. the West), and second, a quantum leap in the robotization and computerization of the labor process brought about by what I will term the fourth machine age.”
“The methodological nationalism that informs most studies of extraction is analytically debilitating because it obfuscates how deeply intertwined global supply chains and sprawling urban systems are in the sociometabolic production and reproduction of the mine; it is also politically counterproductive because it pits the workers and communities of the “resource-rich” countries against those of the manufacturing centers, when in fact they all share increasingly common conditions of extraction.”
“Perhaps most importantly, the metabolism of the supply chain of extraction is also objectified in those unspectacular, nearly imperceptible practices and habits that constantly weave together the fabric of everyday life in the twenty-first-century city: sending an email, driving to work, ordering groceries through the internet.”
“The notion of the planetary designates a convoluted terrain where fences, walls, and militarized borders coexist with sprawling supply chains and complex infrastructures of connectivity. This realm is traversed by deeply contradictory and yet complementary tendencies toward advanced functional integration of the world economy and toward radical ethnoracial and sociopolitical fragmentation.”
“A truly radical and emancipatory political project will not be universal but pluriversal, a unity of many worlds.”
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
This is one of those books where I found myself marking off the footnotes for future reading—it helped me a lot to catch up on several spaces of scholarly work that I used to read very actively but have drifted away from in the last decade or so.
I’m very taken by the discourse of the planetary that Arboleda uses (and is drawing from other works) as a replacement for a lot of the descriptive and metaphorical vocabulary applied to globalization and the global in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I also agree that plainly it is no longer even remotely accurate to envision extraction or any other dimension of planetary capitalism in nationalized terms, and that this re-envisioning not only shifts our attention in the present but ought to reorganize our thinking about the past as well. Part of the problem here, I have to confess, is not with the analytical framing or underlying conceptualization, it’s with the conditions of disciplinary labor in historical study. We work from nationalized archives and we use nations as a convenient device for making the scope of our analysis manageable. This is where the deep devotion of historians to specific evidence can become a weakness—since it’s incredibly expensive and exceptionally time-consuming to do genuinely transnational or planetary-scale work, we end up pushing historians at almost any stage of their career into producing analyses that are made tractable by ending at national or even local boundaries. This also applies to political scientists and other academic intellectuals because a lot of the data they consume is national and governmental—if you want to study the operations of corporations or capitalism, you’re often working with a hodgepodge of data that is partial, deceptive, fragmented and also that you have to painstakingly winnow out of the sources and archives where it is held. Most academic institutions have no patience with the idea that they might hire someone who works as some 18th and 19th Century intellectuals did (Marx, for example) in composing work patiently that actually deals with the scope of the world we’re living in. Frankly, so do most professors, whose first question on meeting a new professor is, “What are you working on?” with an implied undercurrent of, “And when is it coming out?” In my long career, I’ve seen endless amounts of pushing back on any younger social scientist, historian, or critical theorist who wants to get beyond “methodological nationalism” in their work on the grounds that this simply isn’t compatible with the demands of the tenure process or expectations for research productivity.
The second chapter focuses substantially on China (in a non-”methodological nationalist” fashion) that I think underscores another limitation of a lot of studies of global political economy conducted in American and European universities, which is both that the scope of Chinese involvement in the global political economy is protected by China’s tight controls on information both within its national borders and within sites of extraction around the world and by the fact that a lot of Western scholars don’t read or speak Chinese. If the early 21st Century world system can be said to have a center, East Asia seems closer to the mark than Europe or the U.S., but Western intellectuals by and large seem ill-poised to either grasp that or engage with it. I am not sure that Arboleda is correct, however, in saying that activists no longer look to blame Washington or Washington-based institutions for the “ills of the developing world”, whether we’re talking activists based in the West or activists in the developing world. Climate change activism all around the planet still tends to focus exclusively on Western countries, in part because they at least seem to offer an electoral pathway for political change or because they seem vaguely tractable to mass movements. It might be empirically true to say that China or Russia are more important centers or nodes in various global-scale networks doing damage to environments or accelerating climate change but they are hard nodes to affect short of some form of global-scale revolution or movement.
Chapter Three is a compelling analysis of contemporary urban formations and their multitudinous relations to the “planetary mine”, arguing in part that what is happening to property, cities, and residential life in North America or Western Europe is simultaneous with and fundamentally similar to what is happening in the expansion of shantytowns, informal settlements and townships across the global South. Arboleda connects this to transformations in the “mining proletariat” and material and technological shifts in how extraction and refinement happen. Again, I keep feeling overwhelmed emotionally as much as intellectually by how big this all is—it’s impossible to hold it all in mind at once and yet Arboleda is trying to create an intellectual infrastructure that facilitates that thinking. Look around your room and ask yourself how much you know about the extraction, refinement and manufacture of the materials in the things that surround you. I have on all sides of me here piles of physical books. There’s paper in them, made from a global-scale industry that starts with wood pulp but requires chemicals at several stages. Their covers are cardboard with color printing and a glossy finish. They have ink. I am typing on a laptop with a lithium battery: that’s a whole host of extractive processes involved, including the power I’m drawing from the electrical grid. There’s a microphone here and some headphones. There’s a stapler. A scanner. An older wireless receiver set for a landline phone. My cellphone is charging to my left. There are some lightbulbs on the bookshelf next to me, destined for the hall light. It would take me hours of study to know anything beyond the basics of how any of this material assemblage came to be, and even if I did that study, I’d likely know nothing of the specific sourcing of what I have, which is Arboleda’s point—our material worlds now come from everywhere, in shifting assemblies and combinations that cannot be traced back to some particular site of extraction or manufacturing that we could assess ethically. I can’t buy a fair trade laptop or a fair trade book or a fair trade microphone.
Arboleda does lay out a model for how to ground planetary analysis in local specificity in how he returns to Antofagasta, on the coast next to the Atacama Desert in Chile. That’s because of familiarity and access that he has as a Chilean citizen, but also because he thinks it illustrates what the “planetary mine” looks like in its assemblages and combinations. I think he’s successful in seeing Antofagasta not as “Chilean” but planetary at the level of his analysis, but there’s the usual thing that might come up as it does in all global-scale or world-systems writing where someone picks a different locality and insists on its difference as invalidating or challenging some characterization of planetary life derived from a particular place.
Speaking of which, I very much liked Chapter Seven, which imagines a “universal ayllu” for how it envisions “the universalization of difference” and uses the ayllu, a basic sociopolitical unit in the discourse of Andean cultures, as a demonstration of what “universal particularity” might be like, and how that might draw on the specificity of societies other than Western Europe—it’s an implementation of what Chakrabarty was thinking about in his call for the “provincialization of Europe”.