I'm in Johannesburg, where half the world's gold was located at peak, at
the time the Bretton Woods conference reaffirmed a quasi-gold standard
in 1944 <https://vimeo.com/506745866>. That both aided and later
undermined settler colonialism and its 1948-94 apartheid form. It's one
reason why this claim from the Philippines is interesting, because gold
was also central in two other indigenous kingdoms a bit further north
from me, Mapungubwe (with 13th-c trade links to Tanzania)
<https://theconversation.com/meet-the-800-year-old-golden-rhinoceros-that-challenged-apartheid-south-africa-64093>
and Monomatapa
<https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/aug/18/great-zimbabwe-medieval-lost-city-racism-ruins-plundering>
(Great Zimbabwe, where "for three centuries, 40% of the world’s total
mined gold came"), with apparent Middle Eastern and even Chinese
precolonial trade relations.
On 4/16/2021 2:36 PM, Louis Proyect wrote:
https://cosmonautmag.com/2021/04/historicizing-climate-change-and-concretizing-resilience-the-case-of-loakan-itogon/
... the incident which the article first mentions was in 1623, and
occured in the course of the Spanish colonization. More notable,
however, is its focus on the communities’ concerted efforts to repulse
outside forces who have repeatedly taken aim at their gold-rich lands.
This tug of war between colonizers and indigenous peoples is reflected
as well in Geography Professor Lou Ann Ocampo’s statement that “the
gold-rich Itogon is host to the first modern mining in the country
which started operations in 1903, but indigenous mining was being
practiced even before the colonization period”.The year Ocampo marks
as the start of mining’s modernization in the Philippines already
falls under the American colonial period, marking the continuity, if
not intensification, of outsiders’ forays into mining...
I think a dialectical formulation of this sort of extractivism might
achieve a deeper society-nature analysis than just of 'outsiders'
(Spanish or U.S.), as vital as that is to our critique of unequal
ecological exchange - especially imperialism's role, as Luxemburg wrote
in 1913.
(For some early applications, I've been making first-cut attempts to
apply Luxemburg to African
<https://www.mattersburgerkreis.at/dl/rpOsJMJKOoOJqx4KooJK/JEP_1-2019_Rosa_Luxemburg_Bond.pdf>
and to South African
<https://www.cadtm.org/Measuring-Capital-s-Super-Exploitation-of-People-and-Nature-in-South-Africa>
extractivism, both of the super-exploited labour and natural resources
that follow from her assessment of capitalist/non-capitalist relations
in several African countries. I think she gets to the heart of the
problem with that framing, taking Marx's primitive accumulation concept
to the next level, as a permanent - not once-off - feature of expanding
capitalist relations of production.)
So what about indigenous 'resilience' when it comes to mining? I don't
have any data at hand on how and whether gold was used in this region -
Southern Africa - during a trading epoch long prior to the mid-19th
century Boer (now 'Afrikaner') and later Rhodes-era (1870s-90s) British
land grabs here on the Witwatersrand, where the depth of the seam
ultimately mined - still today - goes 4km deep.
The coercive dealings that Rhodes' agents had with the Ndebele king,
Lobungula, in the 1880s, convinced the lead British imperialist that
taking control of much more land north of the Limpopo River, for Queen
Victoria and his own British South Africa Company account, made sense.
(It didn't in the end; as Lenin observed in his 1916 /Imperialism,
/Rhodes then had to violently install 23,000 settlers - Rhodesians - as
ersatz commercial farmers on the land where he'd invested in railroads
and telegraphs, assuming the gold digs would pay off, which they hadn't.
That miscalculation, Giovanni Arrighi observed at the beginning of his
career when he lived in Zimbabwe's capital, was one of the greatest-ever
mistakes of geopolitics.)
But if you read on, here's a crucial claim by Labayne:
The paper wagers that the indigenous people of the Cordillera, and
particularly of Loakan, Itogon have already been practicing
resilience, long before this term became vogue in the humanitarian
and climate change discourses. These practices can be surmised to be
tied to their apprehension of their environment and the way they
relate to it—mainly through sustaining their livelihood by way of
agriculture.
No problem with the thesis that utilization of renewable agricultural
resources is sustainable - according to the 1987 Brundtland version of
the term, i.e., protecting natural wealth for future generations.
But what about indigenous gold mining? The essential problem is that by
drawing down non-renewable mineral resources (a major component of
Marx's "free gifts of nature") and by not reinvesting in various ways
that support next-generation wealth (through education, public
infrastructure, more advanced productive forces, stronger social
institutions and so on), the mining industry is not 'sustainable' in
that classic definition. (No, our ubiquitous 'zama-zama' artisanal
small-scale miners also don't qualify as sustainable.)
This idea is one of the weapons we're using in several different
struggles against minerals and gas extractivism: demanding that the
cost-benefit analyses of these projects properly assess the uneven
ecological exchange that occurs both /geographically (usually
South-to-Northwest but also to the BRICS) /and/temporally
(intergenerationallly) /so that the unsustainable character is unveiled.
This strategy is beginning to sting the enemies: mostly multinational
corporates, initially Western, now more from BRICS countries, especially
China.
The central premise is that while a few countries are succeeding in
converting their natural wealth into general social welfare - perhaps
Norway leads here, because Equinor is a state-owned oil company, albeit
ultra-destructive to the rest of us due to climate crisis - even the
latest conservative (World Bank) estimates of African countries is that
88% of their elites and transnational corporations extract minerals in a
manner that leads to net losses.
If that general concern about extractivism's economic damage were
applied to indigenous societies whose gold (and other non-renewable
resource) mining appears 'resilient' and sustainable at first blush, I'm
not so sure it would be, once we factor in what happens next. Anyhow,
deep history isn't my field, but an approach to social metabolism that
can handle the non-renewable resource depletion problem is ever more
vital, even transhistorically.
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