The cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo displays how green tech, instead of absolving the crimes we committed against nature, incriminates us anew.
Cobalt mining is crucial to green tech. The mineral is used in rechargeable batteries and usually comes from the south-eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo, DRC, wherein industries of resource extraction engender severe exploitation of miners, including deathly working conditions and human rights violations.
Cobalt is toxic. Touching or inhaling cobalt can cause a series of fatal illnesses, and mining communities also suffer the consequences of indirect exposure. Ultimately, cancers, respiratory illnesses, miscarriages, headaches, painful skin conditions, birth defects, developmental damage, vomiting, and seizures are prevalent industry issues affecting hundreds of thousands Congolese people.
The DRC is home to roughly 75 % of cobalt reserves worldwide. Furthermore, the nation is one of the richest in minerals. Yet, its people live in poverty and are forced to take part in hazardous work that enables the green energy transition in the Global North.
While electric vehicles, and other electronics, are fueled by lithium ion batteries, the question of who is responsible for the atrocities of cobalt mining prevails. In March, a federal appeals court found that the tech companies Google, Apple, Dell, Microsoft, and Tesla are not liable. The 5 major companies were accused of profiting from and abetting the use of child labour in cobalt mines.
Regardless, these companies implicate regular people in the ongoing humanitarian and environmental catastrophe in the DRC by ignoring – or abetting – the brutal exploitation of Congolese miners within their supply chain.
The Economics of Colonial Domination
Unanswered questions like these are symptomatic of a historical event, which supposedly ended many years ago. We are, however, still living through a colonial era, in which the power relations of colonizer and colonized is outlasting legal decolonisation. Today, economic relations also express the coloniality of power. In the capitalist economy, the formerly colonized nations remain dependent on their colonizers, who are continually exempted from legal responsibility.
Back in 1972, a young Walter Rodney wrote ‘How Europe Underdeveloped Africa’. In this book, he shows that capitalist investment upholding unequal exchange and exploitation[1] between Africa and its trading partners sustains colonial domination.
The DRC is no exception. In fact, by extracting living labour from the Congolese people and natural resources from their land, vast proportions of surplus were expatriated out of the African continent. This surplus benefitted not only the human profiteers but also the development of the European and American economies and state apparatuses, as Rodney lays out.
Rodney does go on, eventually, to unveil the essence of African trade relations, which center dependencies. Interdependence does not preclude independence, which he considers to be the capacity to exercise choice in external relations.[2] But, the deficit of economic self-determination within Africa fabricates an over-reliance on foreign exchange to conceal how essential (looting) the continent is to the global economy.
One distinction is particularly important in Rodneys work. While the DRC continues providing labour-power and resources to the global economy, the exploitation and unequal exchange actually underdevelop nations like the DRC rather than express their intrinsic underdevelopment.
This distinction shifts the viewpoint of global power relations and allows inferring that the authority of monetary institutions and the sacrosanctity of market relations feign a unilateral dependency, thus facilitating the ongoing extraction of surplus value from African nations.
In his 2023 publication ‘Red Africra’, Kevin O. Okoth explains:
“This surplus value fuels global financial markets. But without the super-exploitation of Africa’s labour or the plunder of its deposits of copper, cobalt, coltan, bauxite, platinum, diamonds or gold, the world economy would to a halt”.[3]
In other words, as Nancy Fraser, Professor of Philosophy and Politics, theorizes in a different 2023 publication titled ‘Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet – and What We Can Do about It’, capitalism’s “foreground economic features depend on non-economic background conditions” like racial oppression.[4]
She, too, writes about unequal exchange and colonial domination sustained by capitalist investment – and debt – and spells out that:
“Racism comes from history, politics, and culture, all of which are viewed as external to capitalism and as only contingently connected to it”, and proceeds with: “for structural reasons, capitalist economies require “non-economic” preconditions and inputs, including some that generate racial oppression. By failing to reckon with that dependence, this view obfuscates the system’s distinctive mechanisms of accumulation, domination, and cannibalization”.[5]
The point, here, is that capitalism is a system with economic features often viewed as separate from their historical, political, and cultural conditions. This economistic idea obscures the actual intertwinement of the capitalist economy and the injustices that it produces and reproduces. Capitalism is what fabricates African over-reliance on foreign exchange to conceal that economic features breathe life into oppression.
Legal decolonisation, today, might exempt the former colonizers from the liability of colonial domination; and tech companies from the liability of child labour in cobalt mines, but Congolese labour-power and minerals are, nonetheless, crucial to the green energy transition. As a result, tech companies implicate consumers in the ongoing humanitarian and environmental catastrophe in the DRC.
In reality, green tech should absolve the crimes we committed against nature but, instead, incriminate us anew.
Photo of cobalt: Paul-Alain Hunt Unsplash.com
[1] Page 27, Rodney, Walter: ’How Europe Underdeveloped Africa’, Verso (2018) [1972]
[2]Page 31, Rodney, Walter: ’How Europe Underdeveloped Africa’, Verso (2018) [1972]
[3] Page 104, Okoth, Kevin O.: ’Red Africa’, Verso (2023)
[4] Page 17, Fraser, Nancy: ’Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet – and What We Can Do about It’, Verso (2023)
[5] Page 31, Fraser, Nancy: ’Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet – and What We Can Do about It’, Verso (2023)
