Colonial mining and the roots of Capitalocene: Extractivist habitus and mineralization of the human condition

Abstract

This article proposes an analysis of modern colonial mining as a fundamental trigger of the Capitalocene. It seeks to show how the eruption of this specific historical type of exploitation of the mineral "riches" of the Earth, born from the invasion and conquest of the "New World", triggered a series of great displacements not only geological but also anthropological (ecobiopolitical) that finally ended up leading to what we understand today as the Age of the Capitalocene.

As a key driver of the colonial enterprise, the mining of precious metals practiced intensively since the 16th Century has involved a drastic geosociometabalic alteration on the face of the Earth. The rate and volume of mineral flows mobilized, extracted (from some territories) and then displaced and processed (in other distant geographical destinations and social uses) has been creating not only the economic and political cartography proper to the colonial Modernity that we inhabit today; it has not only transformed the composition, morphology and dynamics of the geological layers and atmosphere of the planet, but also, it has decisively affected one’s own composition and (self-)understanding of the human; after all, also a component of the Earth.