Situating extraction in capitalism: Blueprints, frontier projects, and life-making

Abstract

“Mining (in) Capitalism” considers struggles over large-scale mining projects amid the multi-scalar politics of capitalism, bringing together articles analysing the articulation of national sovereignty over resources, protests over land, jobs and development projects, and individual and collective projects of life-making. This introductory article provides conceptual context, situating the collection within a discussion of what Nancy Fraser (2014) terms an “expanded conception” of capitalism, one that pays attention to multiple hidden abodes of “non-economic” processes and recognizes long-lasting legacies of variegated histories of extraction. The article begins by reviewing shifts in transnationally promoted blueprints for governing mineral extraction. It traces how, while mining projects power capitalism, they undermine its conditions of possibility, provoking struggles and requiring work to maintain extraction. Secondly, it calls for a contextualization of extractivist geographies of frontiers and enclaves that pays attention to older and intersecting projects of confiscation, domination, exploitation and neglect. Thirdly, it argues that such contextualization opens avenues for understanding diverse life projects and lived contradictions in the shadow of extraction. Contextualizing extraction within an expanded conception of capitalism helps illuminate the planetary politics that drive extraction while emphasizing place-specific trajectories of corporate power, distributive projects, protest and accommodation.