Neoliberal Capitalism, Extractivism, and the Politics of Dispossession of Indigenous People in the Philippines and Their Resistance
Neoliberalism’s constant search for new spheres for global capitalist expansion and extractivism go hand in hand. This is seen in the global expansion of corporate mining that results in the expulsions of indigenous people from their land and disrespect of their basic social, economic, political, environmental, and cultural rights necessary for their survival. Indigenous ancestral lands are the last frontiers of capitalist imperialism that destroys remaining elements of communalism in indigenous concept of land, production, and environment. In such a process, transnational capital and neoliberal nation-states allies. Extractivism in the periphery and the flow of extracted resources to the core feeds the global capitalist system, breeding global inequality and human rights violations. The Philippine case illustrates this. Embodying neoliberal policies, the Philippine Mining Act of 1995 serves the extractivist expansion of transnational capital for profit while plundering the environment, usurping the Filipino people’s sovereignty, and dispossessing the indigenous people of their ancestral lands and subsistence livelihoods. But Indigenous People and other human rights defenders challenge transnational corporate power, state violence in defense of capital, and bureaucrat capitalism. Their dialectic of resistance enlightens the need for an integrated framing of human rights and sustainability in development. Applying some principles of grassroots-oriented research that begins inquiry from the marginalized people’s experience, I gathered primary data by conducting fieldwork in the Philippines, visited a mining site, and interviewed indigenous people affected by corporate mining and their forms of resistance.