Economic elites and new strategies for extractivism in Chile

Abstract

Within the country’s strategic copper mining sector, economic elites are begetting new political technologies that reshape state, economy, and society relations, to better anchor capitalist domination at the local level. Two post-2012 initiatives, explicitly designed to overcome community-based resistances to mega-extractivist projects, are examined. Promoting “territorial dialogues,” they set private-public-social development corporations which take on the production of public goods, legitimacy, and social cohesion for entire provinces and regions, tasks previously performed by the state. Co-created by transnational capital and centre-left epistemic communities, these novel forms of political domination illustrate a broad variety in the types of state-capital-Left relationships emerging in Latin America during the so called Pink Tide and its aftermath.