Green Imperialism: The Latest Stage of Capitalism

From the forests of the Congo, to the salt flats of Chile, to the hills of central Idaho — the struggle for control of the minerals of the future heats up

By Sean Case

The mainstream US press does a lot of hand-wringing about China’s increasing market dominance of cobalt and lithium, two minerals needed to produce the batteries used in electric vehicles (EVs). Outlets like The New York Times frame that dominance through a new Cold War lens, fretting over the erosion of US hegemony. Socialists understand that whether mining operations are Chinese state-owned enterprises, US-based and funded conglomerates, or massive multinational corporations, they all run roughshod over the backs of working and poor people, especially in the Global South.

In order to achieve a green future worth living in, our energy transition must be democratic and free from profiteering. The mineral wealth — and indeed all natural resources — of any country must be controlled by its working and poor people, held to strict safety and environmental standards, and be managed on the basis of need, not profit.

Congolese Cobalt

The Democratic Republic of Congo is by some metrics the wealthiest country on Earth, as it sits on an estimated $24 trillion of untapped mineral deposits, including more than two-thirds of the world’s cobalt. China has all but cornered the market. In 2016, American mining giant Freeport-McMoRan sold two massive cobalt mines after, ironically, making some bad investments in fossil fuel projects. The buyer of both mines was China Molybdenum, a state-owned mining company. The sale was shepherded by an investment firm co-founded by Hunter Biden.

The average Congolese citizen lives on $2 a day. China Molybdenum, and Freeport-McMoRan before them, try to frame their operations as a win-win; they get massive profits from processing and selling minerals, and in return they promise much needed infrastructure for the Congolese in the form of wells, roads, and schools paid for the by the company, not to mention the jobs provided by the mine. But such gifts—many of which will likely never materialize—obscure the damage, both already done and ongoing. Villages, forests, and farmland were leveled to build mines like Tenke Fungurume. Lax regulations and poor enforcement make cobalt mining extremely dangerous, especially in the “artisanal” mining industry that thrives in the shadow of larger operations. 

In order to feed themselves and their families, many Congolese men (and children) dig for cobalt on the outskirts of Tenke Fungurume and other cobalt mines. Payment is far below market rate and collapses are common. Gécamines, Congo’s state-run mining company, which owns a partial stake in many of the country’s mining operations and is responsible for setting and enforcing safety regulations, has for decades lined the pockets of government officials at the expense of mine workers and the Congolese people at large.

Latin American Lithium

While the battle for the cobalt market seems destined to resolve in China’s favor, the battle over another essential mineral for green technology — lithium — is more complex. Some of the largest and most strategic reserves of lithium are in Central and South America; specifically, in Chile, Bolivia, and Mexico. Here, the companies vying for market dominance butt heads not just against one another, but against the established and emerging left-wing governments that run these countries. While these governments don’t truly challenge the capitalist system, their efforts to use at least some of their nations’ wealth for the benefit of their people is completely unacceptable to their nation’s ruling classes and corporations backed by imperialist states like the US and China.  

Over the past year, lithium prices have shot up over two-hundred percent, a trend that has foreign governments and corporations eager to extract and refine the salt-flat-embedded mineral salivating.

In Mexico, president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), recently introduced constitutional reforms that, if passed, would begin to reverse decades of damaging privatization in the country’s energy industry that has enriched multinational corporations and stuck working class Mexicans with expensive energy bills and unreliable service. The reforms call for lithium and other strategic minerals to be taken under state control. These reforms set up a tense battle between the various political parties in Mexico, not to mention foreign governments and corporations eyeing Mexico’s vast lithium stores. 

Unfortunately, AMLO’s nationalization plan has a wrinkle — a loophole for existing licenses for lithium extraction and production. A 250,000-acre concession, run jointly by Britain’s Bacanora Lithium and China’s Ganfeng Lithium, could prove a useful wedge for the forces of capital to roll back AMLO’s nationalization efforts, if they pass. Half-measures on nationalization are dangerous; leave an opening, and capital will claw its way back.

Though a relatively small and poor nation, Bolivia sits on twenty-five percent of the world’s known lithium reserves. Currently, eight foreign companies — half of them Chinese — are vying for government contracts to extract and refine the valuable mineral. Lithium is at the center of politics in Bolivia. The right-wing coup against democratically elected president Evo Morales in 2019, swathed in disingenuous concern about election fraud, was at its core about control over Bolivia’s mineral wealth. 

Morales’s Movement for Socialism Party is now back in control of the government, with president Luis Arce winning in a landslide election in October 2020. But the short-lived right-wing presidency of Jeanine Áñez had the likes of Elon Musk, whose company Tesla requires massive amounts of lithium-ion batteries to keep up production, chomping at the bit to gobble up Bolivia’s lithium. We’ve likely not seen the last of this power struggle.

Chile is perhaps the most hopeful — and most volatile — arena of struggle for the minerals of the future. On the back of a popular uprising in 2019 led by youth and the working class, a new, democratically elected constitutional convention has formed, with a draft constitution expected this summer. In December of 2021, Gabriel Boric of Social Convergence, a left-wing coalition party, won the presidency; he’ll take office in March. Once the workshop of neoliberalism, Chile now seems poised to be the leading edge of a new Pink Tide in South America. In both the drafting of the new constitution and the presidential transition, lithium looms large.

President-elect Boric has vowed to create a national lithium company. Currently, the Chilean lithium market is dominated by two private companies. The outgoing right-wing administration of Sebastián Piñera — hopefully the dying flame of the Pinochet era — is attempting to award 29-year lithium mining contracts to private bidders before Boric takes over. Both Boric’s party and their supporters are demanding such bids be suspended. Failure to win that demand could be a huge blow to Boric’s plans to nationalize the industry. Many members of the constitutional convention are also keenly focused on lithium and its potential for both national enrichment and environmental degradation. 

Chile has always built its economy on resource extraction; first through copper and coal, now through lithium. In the Pinochet era, the wealth produced by those resources enriched Chile’s ruling class and the multinational companies who supported them. The task for Boric, his party, and the constitutional convention is to forge a future in which any resource extraction benefits the Chilean working class and poor, and to balance that extraction against further environmental destruction. A successful effort to nationalize the country’s lithium reserves — not to mention other natural resources — is a crucial first step to realizing that future.

Resistance

But simple nationalization is not enough. Democratic control of all resources and industries is our best hope for averting climate catastrophe. Organized movements can bring this demand to the fore. From the Congo, to South America, to the South Pacific, and within the US itself, popular local resistance to greedy mining interests and national governments is a constant. 

In 2019, a protest movement in the Bolivian province of Potosí successfully forced the government to cancel a large lithium contract with a German company; the protestors’ central demand was greater local control of lithium projects. 

In January of this year, indigenous communities in Chile’s Atacama region won a court-ordered suspension of a $61 million lithium mining contract awarded to Chinese company BYD. 

In New Caledonia, the dangerous and environmentally destructive Goro nickel mine — which Elon Musk is currently seeking to purchase — has for decades been disrupted by strikes and sabotage from the indigenous Kanak community, who make up most of the mine’s workforce; they’re not buying Musk’s promises to clean up the industry.

In Yellow Pine, Idaho, an American mining company is seeking approval of an open-pit gold mine that would produce antimony for a Bill Gates-backed battery manufacturing startup. The local Nez Perce tribe opposes the mine, saying it threatens to further decimate an already struggling Chinook salmon population, an important animal to the tribe spiritually and economically. 

Similar stories accompany just about any mining operation.

A Just Transition

Barring unforeseen scientific and technological breakthroughs, minerals like cobalt and lithium will have to be extracted from the earth for humanity to transition to renewable sources of energy. But allowing that extraction to be controlled by profit-seeking corporations—be they private or state-owned—will further enrich many of the same people who got us into this mess, while further impoverishing and emiserating the working and poor people of the world.  A just transition requires working-class control of natural resources and democratic decision making about their use.

Downstream industries must also be democratically controlled. Car manufacturers — from China’s BYD to the US’s Tesla — pursue the expansion and ownership of mineral wealth in the Global South with the goal of putting an electric car in every driveway, regardless of the social and environmental devastation they engender along the way. Meanwhile, those same car manufacturers will fight tooth and nail against efforts to expand public transit.

Capitalism requires economies to expand in order to survive. Under such conditions, mining companies must extract as many minerals as quickly and as cheaply as possible to increase production, leaving little incentive to implement robust worker and environmental safety measures. Similarly, battery manufacturers must pump out as many batteries as they can to supply a rapidly expanding market for EVs, whose manufacturers must produce as many cars as they can to keep up with competitors.

Though the final product of this process is a vehicle that emits zero greenhouse gasses, an incredible amount of waste and pollution takes place along the way. Mining operations are inherently destructive to the environment and typically rely on massive gas-powered machines. Battery and car manufacturers are building huge factories and warehouses made from carbon-intensive materials like concrete and steel. Most of these buildings are connected to grids powered by gas and coal.

A socialist economy would replace the chaotic, competitive spiral of capitalism with collaboration. Rationally planned economies could prioritize public transportation, build energy grids powered by renewables, adopt emissions-cutting construction standards, and revolutionize our agricultural industries, all while recognizing that all these pieces fit together and are crucial to forging a livable future. Technology sharing — across industries and between nations — would replace capitalist notions of intellectual property. Perhaps most importantly, socialist economies would understand that the planet is not something be subjected to our wills, but rather a complex system of which we are merely a part, and which can provide all we need so long as we organize production sustainably.

Socialists must counter the myth that EVs and beneficent billionaires will dig us out of the hole headed to climate catastrophe. Imagine a world where the wealth and manufacturing capacities of private car and battery manufacturers, mining companies, and fossil fuel companies are taken over by the people to produce green public transit and energy infrastructure for all, rather than flashy commodities that generate profit for the ruling class. 

A world in which rural communities from the Congo to Idaho don’t rely on massive mining corporations for basic infrastructure like roads, electricity, and fire departments, but instead democratically determine their own vision of what their communities can and should be building with their own collective wealth. Such a world is possible, but will require local, national, and international movement building.

Leaders from Gabriel Boric to Bernie Sanders should use their status and power and foster these movements. Socialists and organized labor around the world must stand in solidarity with indigenous communities fighting mining interests that seek to recklessly rip minerals from the earth under the guise of powering the “green revolution.” A revolution waged by tech billionaires and monolithic corporations backed by bureaucratic governments isn’t a revolution at all; it’s greenwashed imperialism. As socialists, we seek a green revolution driven by the working class.