Mining Collapse: Life and labour on the Cerro Rico de Potosí

This dissertation analyzes the relationship between small-scale miners (called cooperatives) and a transnational mining company (Manquiri) as they work alongside one another in the nearly 500-year-old mines in Potosí, Bolivia. I argue that traditional small-scale miners are undergoing a process of dispossession as the metabolic relationships required by the capitalocene continue to accelerate on the mountain. As miners struggle to maintain autonomy from capital over their workspaces and lifeworlds, the historic mountain, their means of subsistence and so much more, is crumbling around them. I interrogate claims against the sector as the one responsible for the mountain´s demise, and demonstrate that, in the context of ecological collapse, small-scale cooperative miners resistance to being subsumed by predatory capitalist relations of production, sheds light on the kinds of post-capitalist ecological labour we need.