Changes and permanence in the world of work: a critical political economy approach to the case of the Great Gold Mining in Colombia

Abstract

The category and historical developments analyzed in this article help to analyze the changes and permanence of the exploitation of the gold mining workforce. Emphasis is on the export standard of productive specialization, through which the business of the Great Gold Mining in Colombia finds niches of reproduction of the private capital intensifying forms of exploitation of both nature and manpower. The aim of the article is to contextualize and understand the workforce disqualification and deepening exploitation that reproduces, in the 21st century, private modes of appropriation of finite assets of a collective nature. Some categories of the field of critical political economy proposed by Marx are analyzed in a socio-historical perspective, such as: exchange value and use value, necessary labor and surplus labor, absolute surplus value and relative surplus value, making a brief characterization of the patterns of reproduction of capital that emerged in Latin America between the years of 1930 and 2016.