Tech innovation requires massive amount of resource extraction from African countries – it is a uniquely severe and violent form of imperialism

The continuation of relations of colonial underdevelopment and dependency in the Congo, despite ‘Flag Independence’, is key to understanding the position of Congolese labourers within international relations of production, and of the systemic obstacles that efforts to ameliorate their exploitation would encounter. Though direct colonial rule became foreclosed by a mass independence movement, imperialist influence in the Congo maintained its hegemony during the period of ‘decolonisation’ through the overthrow of the country’s first Prime Minister, the left-leaning Pan-Africanist Patrice Lumumba, by Congolese officers in 1961 (backed by the CIA and Belgian secret services) - a victory for international capital over anti-imperialist elements that had envisioned independence as a radical break with the imperialist super-exploitation of their country. For Kabamba, the post-colonial (or neo-colonial) Congolese state chiefly functioned to 50 maintain the security and profitability of predatory extractivism in the country, embodying “the persistence . . . of the Leopoldian project” through internal “guardians of colonial structures.” The 51 regime of General Mobutu (1967-1997), serving at the pleasure of Washington and international mining concerns, typified the Fanonist conception of an alignment of interests between imperialist capital and the post-colonial “national bourgeoisie” which, lacking indigenous capital, facilitates the operations of international corporations in their country and thereby fulfils “its historic mission . . . of [profiteering] intermediary.” The contemporary state retains this kleptocratic character, with 52 government posts providing opportunities for personal enrichment in exchange for political loyalty to mining interests - Baudoin Nzowo, a former government employee, claimed that “out of 50 billion dollars produced from Congo mining, only 6 billion dollars reach the state treasury, the rest goes to individual pockets.” 53 This nexus between political corruption and corporate extractivism has engendered a situation in which the state, rather than functioning as an arbiter between mining firms and mineworkers (or those affected by mining), acts as a partisan force on the side of international capital against its own citizens. A Katangese ‘Community Respondent’ interviewed 54 by Sovacool claims that: ‘The biggest threat to democracy . . . in the DRC is not war, or poverty, but mining. Mining prevents the capability of the Congolese people to be governed by those they like. The mining sector and the state capture of resources undermines development for the whole country. It allows them to run the show and buy off whatever they need to prevent real democracy, freedom of speech, and free and fair elections. Mining has undermined the whole nation.”55 This neo-colonial predation upon the DRC was exacerbated by the neoliberal turn in global capitalism following the Third World Debt Crisis and advent of IMF ‘Structural Adjustment’, recomposing the political economy of Congolese super-exploitation into the modes which prevail today. ‘Neoliberalism’ constituted an offensive by organised capital in response to the profitability crisis of the 1970s, intensifying the general tendencies of capital accumulation, including “the deepening of commodity relations, the privatisation of formerly public services, the search for cheaper and more productive labour . . . and the collapse of space and time . . . ” ‘Globalisation’ 56 represented the triumph of neoliberalism, championed by an American Empire systematically imposing an international ‘liberalisation’ of capitalism through the ‘Washington Consensus’. For 57 the DRC, this catalyzation of capitalist accumulation meant the deepening of the neo-colonial relationship. Mobutu’s DRC was “one of the first recipients in the early 1980s of a harsh structural adjustment regime,” with market reforms demanded by the IMF in return for debt rescheduling seeing the decimation of “public institutions and the formal economy through privatization and liberalisation . . . ” The erosion of formal employment across the DRC during this era threw 58 millions into ASM, while macro-economic transformations accentuated the dependence of the DRC upon primary-commodity exports. Under neoliberalism the Congolese working-class has entered 59 into new labour relations that “perpetuate and deepen conditions of chronic poverty”, with the explosion of ASM representing one of Sassen’s "alternative survival circuits.” It is within this 60 context that Lebaron and Ayers situate the emergence of the modalities of unfree labour found within Congolese mining today, seeing them as “rooted in fundamental shifts in social property relations associated with the neoliberal project, rather than as a continuation of the timeless institution of slavery separate from the otherwise ‘free market’ in which the ‘new slavery’ happens to take place.” 61 Neoliberalism compounded pathologies in the DRC through the ‘digital revolution’ that emerged with the mass-production of consumer electronics - consoles, laptops and smartphones. The ‘New International Division of Labour’ (NIDL) that emerged from neoliberal globalisation provided corporate multinationals with “new networks of integrated production” across the globe, outsourcing primary and secondary production to countries with lower values of labour-power than the Global North, thereby increasing the rate of exploitation (and profit) within production. 62 Consumer electronics represented an epitomic product of these GPNs - for Panitch and Gindin, the Apple iPod “illustrated well the competitive integration and international hierarchy of production in this sector.” For the DRC the emergence of the NIDL has “intensified exploitation within the 63 extant colonial division of labour,” with increased demand for Congolese minerals as components for digital commodities exacerbating both corporate predation and illicit extractivist ventures within the country - provided with a desperate labour-force, and a comprador state eager to facilitate such operations. The colonial subordination of Congolese labour within global 64 production is actively reproduced by the international neoliberal paradigm upon which electronics consumer-capitalism relies - as this continued “provision of cheap raw materials by the Congolese people allows global consumers to purchase electronic commodities . . . at affordable prices.” The relationship between the profits of electronics capital and super-exploitation in the DRC, then, is “almost linear”. 66 The political economy of super-exploitation in Congolese mining - a neo-colonial, neoliberal project of capitalist accumulation through the exploitation of impoverished, brutalised and racialised workers, facilitated by a kleptocratic comprador state - is inextricable from the historical and contemporary totality of global capitalism. The Congo was colonially constructed as a space where profitability could be maximised through immense violence and immiseration - a logic which persists into ‘post-colonial’ capitalism through the continued devaluation of Congolese labour-power. The survival of the Lumumbist challenge by imperialist influence and by the Leopoldian state, catalysed by neoliberalism, produced the contemporary situation, where Congolese labourers, working for a pittance under hazardous conditions within various relations of unfreedom, excavate minerals with instrumental roles in the GPNs of some of the world’s wealthiest corporations. Under neoliberalism, the Congo has become the “vast productive garden” of Stanley’s dreams. 67 If the contemporary DRC is the cumulative product of one ‘side’ of capitalism’s janus-faced historical development, then modern electronics multinationals are the other - produced and maintained by the GPNs, legal regimes, markets, and divisions of labour established throughout the construction of the capitalist world-system. Tech corporations that profit from super-exploited Congolese labour directly emerged from the same capitalist structures that historically colonised, plundered and underdeveloped the Congo. The systemic development of modern ‘Globalised Capitalism’ has produced Silicon Valley at one pole, and the DRC at the other. We will now examine the specific relationship between super-exploitation in Congolese mining and electronics capital, taking the processes and relations implicit within the production of the Apple iPhone as a touchstone from which to extrapolate a wider analysis of the infrastructures of accumulation that bind the suffering of the Congo and the wealth of Silicon Valley together. We will then undertake a critical evaluation of extant efforts to alleviate pathologies associated with these GPNs, identifying senses in which their limitations exemplify the inadequacies of reformist solutions to systemic problems. This investigation will conclude with a consideration of potential avenues for political action of the requisite scale and ambition for the enormity of the task facing those seeking transformative justice for the Congolese people.