Image is from this Washington Post article, which shows the Shabara artisanal mine, where cobalt and copper are dug out by hand.
This preamble got much of its information from this article in ROAPE, and this article in People’s World.
Countries in the imperial core have increasingly advocated for Green New Deals, whose primary goal is to re-attract manufacturing capability to somewhat counter deindustrialization, and then export some of this renewable energy generation to other countries to gain profit. Just as the initial wave of industrialization was built on massive resource exploitation of coal and iron and then oil, this wave is being built on exploiting metals like lithium, cobalt, and rare earth elements. The DRC is one of the best case studies on the planet for understanding the new dynamic.
The DRC is, to your average Western country, a resource bonanza. It is the 11th largest country by land area, and contains lithium, copper, and cobalt in massive quantities, famously containing two thirds of the world’s known cobalt supplies. The Western world and their institutions swarmed the DRC like piranhas, dismantling the Congo’s sovereignty over its natural resources. China was not terribly involved in the privatisation process, but has stepped in to benefit from the West’s work - Chinese corporations account for 40% of the production of major Congo cobalt projects (and 15 out of 19 cobalt mines), with Switzerland at 30% via Glencore, and Kazakhstan at 22%. The US, for whatever reason, withdrew from majority ownership of some projects in the mid-2010s, but is now anxious about China’s position in the cobalt markets. Western countries in general have spent their time lately drawing up critical minerals strategies both to keep capitalism chugging along in their own countries, and attempt to weaken China, which invariably involves the Congo.
The Congo has attempted to resist imperialist encroachment. In 2018, the Kaliba administration asserted a new Mining Code which raised tax and royalty rates and increased state ownership in mining firms from 5% to 10%, and these changes were bitterly resisted by the West right to the end. Since 2019, under the Tshisekedi administration, the government established the state-owned EGC, which sought to take control over the processing and export of artisanal and small-scale cobalt production, which comprises 5-15% of cobalt production in the Congo. More recently, Tshisekedi is planning to move up the manufacturing chain - instead of merely mining cobalt, they want to refine it there and then make electric vehicle batteries and other such products with it, which would be an industry worth trillions of dollars. But so far, there hasn’t been much movement away from having mining exports as the backbone of the economy, and it’s doubtful that plans to just keep doing this until they get rich enough to build refineries and factories will work. The profits mostly go to Western countries and have failed to produce significant benefits for Congolese workers, nor resulted in the emergence of domestic industries so far. Reforms will help a little, but only a little, and they remain fundamentally constrained by the markets and the whims of the West.
Meanwhile, war and mass displacements have put immense stress on the country. There are 7.1 million displaced people in the DRC due to various conflicts and mass displacements - most recently, the war between the Congolese army and M23. Hundreds of thousands of people continue to be displaced every few months, and across the whole country, over 26 million require humanitarian aid. 6 million people have died in the eastern DRC in the last three decades, with hundreds of armed groups, both domestic and foreign, battling for resources and territory.
The COTW (Country of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific country every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied nations. If you’ve wanted to talk about the country or share your experiences, but have never found a relevant place to do so, now is your chance! However, don’t worry - this is still a general news megathread where you can post about ongoing events from any country.
The Country of the Week is the Democratic Republic of the Congo! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
Please check out the HexAtlas!
The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week’s thread is here.
Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA daily-ish reports on Israel’s destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia’s youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don’t want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it’s just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists’ side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR’s former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR’s forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster’s telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a ‘propaganda tax’, if you don’t believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
The general vibe of news and economics recently has me worried.
I always thought that my life would pass without a revolution in the “international community”. Now I’m not so sure. If things keep getting worse for western sphere countries at the same rate, as now, and China rises at the same rate as now, intense violence could kick off within a couple of decades. Openly bloody and fascist reaction in the crumbling of the old order. I didn’t expect the mask of “freedom and democracy” to drop as fast as it has, combined with the open acknowledgements that China is surpassing us.
Our century of humiliation will be us humiliating ourselves and I feel like it might be coming fast.
I honestly thought I might get through it all without living through the spicy times.
I’ve been of the view that this is happening much faster and unlike the 60s, there’s no economic release valve in sight - they’ve been smashing that button for decades. I don’t think it will take a couple of decades - if shit doesn’t hit the fan this decade, it will be barely. the rate of profit is collapsing (just look at the petit bourg scam epidemic) and no amount of fictitious capital injection can fix that. the number of possible outs dwindles and the climate wars have already started.
remember, the world will face the cliff of economic collapse with absolutely no political pressure sometime in the next 10-25 years, depending on which climate change trajectory we end up on and to date the estimates have only been revised for the worse - more drastically each time. a cyclic recession that hits only those worse off is radicalizing - especially if there’s no hope of pulling out without causing another collapse, this time from increasing carbon output.
so I think you’re still too optimistic about the next two decades lol
The decaying corpse of our dead bloated capital is feeding the rise of China like a whale fall after we maximally exploited the earnings and rent of our service-based economies.
As silly as it is, I comfort my existential dread by reminding myself that the coming decades will at the very least be an interesting read in the history books
The best time to be born is a hundred years from now, the second best time is now
I hope you’re right.
glad im not alone on this feeling lmao
It certainly feels like the 2016-2020 period was a Western referendum on “Will the bourgeoisie allow a reformist movement to redistribute some of the wealth contained in the top 0.1% to keep the system going for another few decades, or will we accelerate straight into a brick wall of fascist bloodshed which will consume tens of millions of lives if you’re feeling optimistic,” and the latter option won. There just aren’t any offramps anymore. There are massive quantitative changes (plummeting Western military reserves; China’s manufacturing rising; wealth inequality rising; etc) leading to sudden qualitative changes (Ukraine War, the Resistance gradually dismantling Israel, BRICS expansion) and these sudden changes will become more widespread and frequent and lead to a positive feedback loop of imperial collapse.
But the only thing the Western bourgeoisie (and many outside of the West, as we see with Bukele and several other leaders) can think to do is pump more and more resources into surveillance and policing and mass oppression, rather than improving conditions. It might delay the internal collapses of capitalist regimes, but it can’t prevent those collapses, and it’ll end up making them much more bloody than they would be otherwise. We’re gonna see a repeat of the very politically active and unstable 1914-1945 period, I think. Maybe in retrospect, historians will mark that period of global transformation as starting in 2022, and we’re just two years into a thirty year process. But I also think the global anti-imperialist forces are in a better position than during that time, and the capitalists have more exploitable weaknesses if a sufficiently courageous anti-imperialist country like China or Russia can take the leap of faith towards a very painful campaign of forcing dedollarization. The West is visibly struggling right now to keep all these plates spinning.
But hey, some poor motherfuckers have gotta live through the capitalist-socialist transition, and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be those poor motherfuckers. Sucks for us, but victory will mean thousands if not millions of years of post-scarcity existence for future humanity. I’m willing to fight for that.
I’m 3 parts worried, 1 part excited.
There hasn’t been a single year in living memory where a war was not happening somewhere. We may live to see the end of war. I’m looking forward to it…
Uhh… yeah things are just going to get worse and worse and worse. Like just global warming by itself will probably lead to a severe disruption of industrial society.
I’ve basically always considered that to be the ultimate ticking clock. Whether any real upheaval starts before then is up to 15 trillion different factors that may or may not play out, but at the end of it all, climate change will force SOMETHING and it will be drastic and it will be fucked and maybe just maybe kinda cool.
People can only ignore it until they really very super definitely can’t and when that reality hits it is going to go absolutely apeshit.
We had afaik two wet bulb events in the American South last year, decades before anything like that was supposed to happen, and people are still totally
convinced that we can just cut back on fossil fuels a little and everything will be okay. It’s… It’s a lot. Meanwhile I’m just over here trying to decide how badly I want to live through the apocalypse and, if I do, where I’m even going to store all these beans.l
People are convinced of that because believing the alternative would probably break their mind in half
:yea:
Well put. I knew the time would come eventually, but I naively and selfishly kind of hoped The Big One would happen behind the scenes or that “someone else” would deal with it, but alas. It seems it’s going to have to be me, after all. Reminds me of that saying “If not you, then who? If not now, then when?”
Funnily enough I’m much more worried about my cats than myself. little babies need their treatos more than I do