Capitalism and Robbery: The Planetary Mine – Marxist Education Project

LMN is delighted to announce the first Resisting Mining Book Club 2022 with guest speaker Martín Arboleda, who will be speaking about his book Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction under Late Capitalism (Verso Books, 2020).

To be able to attend this event, please visit the Eventbrite page and register there. When registration is complete, you will be sent a link to a pdf version of the book.

This is the first of a series of Resisting Mining book club events every two months during 2022. Details of the othert events will be published in due course.

About the book:

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.

Martín Arboleda will give an introductory lecture which will be followed by a Q&A. You do not need to have read the book to attend this meeting. However, if you want to read it, the book is available to buy in the UK, and all registered participants in the Book Club will be sent a PDF version via email. 

About the author:

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 AntipodeInternational Journal of Urban and Regional ResearchHarvard Design MagazineGeoforum, and Society & Space, among others.