Antisystemic Effects of Antimining Andean Peasant Struggles

The metabolic structural processes of the capitalist world-economy have produced historical antisystemic resistances with world-scale effects over capital's extended reproduction. The history of the Andean indigenous and cholo peasantry struggles against colonial and imperialist mining constituted a new political identity in absolute contradiction with the dispossession and destruction of land and water as vital values for their social reproduction. While theory has been developed about the antisystemic effects of social movements created by the systemic processes of the world-economy, theorizing on their causal mechanisms is a work in progress, permeable to be developed broadly within a Marxist critique of imperialism political economy. In this article, a causal mechanisms hypothesis is built to explain the world-scale effects of antimining struggles over the finance capital reproduction circuit of mining imperialists bourgeoisies in competition under the gradual breakout conditions of shared imperialism in Los Andes from three case studies: i) the cholo-peasantry antimining struggles in Cajamarca (Peru) during the 2004 and 2011-2012 against the Newmont Gold Mining Corporation headed in the U.S., ii) the indigenous-peasantry mining struggles in Apurímac (Peru) during 2015 and 2019 against the MMG of China Minmetals Corporation (CMC), and iii) the indigenous-cholo peasantry antimining struggles in Cotopaxi (Ecuador) during 2023-2024 against the Atico Mining Corporation headed in Canada. The theory-building case studies conducted have been nurtured by fieldwork, archive research, and protest event data analysis to evidence the consistency of the hypothesis stated on the antisystemic effects of antimining struggles.