Upstream - The Fight for The Congo w/ Vijay Prashad

Starting point is 00:00:00 This episode was produced in collaboration with EcoGather, a collapse-responsive co-learning network that hosts free online weekly eco-gatherings that foster conversation and build community around heterodox economics, collective action, and belonging in an enlivened world. In this collaboration, EcoGather will be hosting gatherings to bring some upstream episodes to life, and this is one of those episodes. Find out more, including the date and time for this 71% of the world's cobalt is mined in the DRC, just cobalt. Cobalt is a key property, key ingredient for most electronic goods including cell phones, tablets and all of that stuff, computers and so on. So if the DRC said we're not going to export cobalt, the prices of goods are going to rise

Starting point is 00:01:23 dramatically. You know, we did a text on the iPhone at Tri-Continental and we showed the rate of exploitation of labor to build the iPhone is over 2000%. It's about by a factor of 100 greater than the rate of exploitation in Karl Marx's time in the textile factories. I mean, it's incredible how exploitative the labor process is to build an iPhone. The key thing is that for an iPhone, a number of the ingredients are reduced prices, suppressed prices.

Starting point is 00:01:58 Cobalt should be more expensive. The DRC should be getting a better deal. You are listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics.

Starting point is 00:02:15 I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. The Democratic Republic of Congo, or the DRC, is, despite being in one of the most resource-rich regions on the planet, one of the poorest countries in the world. It sits atop a wealth of minerals that formed central components to much of our technology in the 21st century. And yet, none of this wealth remains in the country. Well, almost none of it. There is of course some that is skimmed off the top by local elites. But the vast majority of the wealth, along with the raw materials themselves, are exported from the country and end up not just lining the pockets of multinational

Starting point is 00:03:00 corporations and their shareholders, but of course the wealth ends up in the pockets of us Western consumers in the form of iPhones, for example, that should be priced much more highly than they actually are. In this episode, we're going to take a deep dive into the Democratic Republic of Congo, and in doing so, explore why this resource-rich country is as impoverished and as immiserated as it is.

Starting point is 00:03:30 And we've brought on the perfect guest to talk us through it all. Vijay Prashad is a journalist, political commentator, and executive director of Tri-Continental Institute for Social Research. He's also the author of Washington Bullets, The History of the CIA, Coups and Assassinations, and Red Star Over the Third World. In this episode, we explore the history of the Congo and situate it within a much broader framework of colonialism, neocolonialism, and imperialism,

Starting point is 00:04:06 which shaped both literally and figuratively the continent of Africa for hundreds of years. We explore the Congolese fight for independence and sovereignty as it manifested through their independence leader Patrice Lumumba, who was assassinated in 1961. We explore the current state of the country, what many refer to as the silent genocide with millions of Congolese having been killed, displaced and impoverished as a result of war, destabilization, super exploitation and voracious extraction. And finally, we explore how the Congolese are fighting for their sovereignty and independence. And before we get started, Upstream is almost entirely listener funded. We couldn't keep

Starting point is 00:04:55 this project going without your support. There are a number of ways that you can support us financially. You can sign up to be a Patreon subscriber, which will give you access to bonus episodes, at least one a month, but usually more, along with our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, at patreon.com forward slash upstream podcast. And you can also make a tax deductible recurring or one-time donation on our website at UpstreamPodcast.org forward slash support. Through this support you'll be helping us keep Upstream sustainable and helping keep this whole project going. Socialist political education podcasts are not easy to fund so thank you in advance for the crucial support. And now here's Robert in conversation with Vijay Prashad. Vijay, it is a great pleasure to have you on the show. It's really nice to be with you.

Starting point is 00:06:10 Thanks a lot. Thanks for that. So I guess just to start, I'm wondering if you can introduce yourself for our listeners and talk a little bit about how you came to do the work that you're doing. And if you'd like to say anything about the the Tri-Continental Institute for Social Research as well that would be awesome. So my name is Vijay Prasad I'm the director of Tri-Continental Institute for Social Research. We're coming up on I think about eight or so years of our existence. We've really been around for

Starting point is 00:06:41 ten years because it took a few years to conceptualize the Institute. The Institute is based in Asia, in Africa and Latin America. We have people working in each of the continents and we work closely with political movements. We accompany them to build research out of their understanding of the world and so on. And we work closely with political movements to get the research available to people. So it's widely distributed and so on, you know, there's no pay walls. I myself was born in India. I live in Santiago, Chile. I'm a historian and I suppose training, but I'm a journalist by trade.

Starting point is 00:07:29 So that's the kind of skill set I bring to this process. Incredible. Yeah. Thank you for that introduction. And so what I was hoping to do with our conversation today was to talk about US imperialism through the lens of a particular case study. So hoping to get a little bit more granular and bring some of the insights that we've had about the theories of US imperialism and whatnot down to eye level for our listeners. And so, yeah, with that being said, I'm wondering if you could give us a brief history of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the DRC, to better understand what is happening there right now. And just to sort of launch this with a couple of quotes in the excellent book of interviews,

Starting point is 00:08:17 which I actually found out through your Twitter feed, the book, The Case for the Congo, Asimba Ifange, evokes the words of Amy Cezaire that quote, the shortest path to the future is always one through the deepening of the past. As well as the famous line from the great French writer Balzac quote, behind every fortune lies a crime. So I'm wondering if you can tell us the history of the Congo, maybe with those two quotes in mind. Well, if Balzac was thinking about the Congo, the fortune that he would have had in mind is the fortune made initially by King Leopold II of Belgium. Belgium, but then very quickly of course the fortune made by multinational corporations, most of them domiciled in Europe or in North America. That's the fortune. Well then what's the crime? The crime is pretty simple. Imagine it's 1885, you have a meeting held in Berlin called by Leopold von Bismarck,

Starting point is 00:09:25 gathers together European leaders and people from the United States, and they sit around a large map of the African continent and they begin to divide it up. They say, well, the Zambia River will be mine, this will be yours, you get the access point and so on. It's like carving up the corpse of wealth and distributing it among a small set of people. You know, it's an absolute act of imperial arrogance that the powers could sit around this meeting room in Berlin and decide to, you know, carve up Africa. It's known as the scramble for Africa. It's not much of a scramble. It was really a kind of conspiracy. And now the interesting thing is this is in 1885. In fact, the European powers had already

Starting point is 00:10:14 effectively carved up Africa on the ground. This was just asserting boundaries that they had already carved up since the 16th century. They had started to carve up Africa. This central part of the African continent around the Congo River, which plays a very important role in this part of the continent, that central part had been quote unquote explored by, you know, David Livingston, the British explorer, Stanley, the American journalist and so on. And it had been taken possession of again, these are all in quotes, these words, explored, taken possession by not the Belgian government, but as the personal property of King Leopold II, he claimed that entire rich region around the Congo River, the actual basin of the Congo, you know, very, very lucrative part, enormous agricultural resources, enormous resources were just galvanized and brought into the possession of King Leopold II. Now what's interesting is Leopold takes

Starting point is 00:11:27 possession of this key part of the African continent and rather than just extract the resources which they do, large amounts of minerals and metals extracted, they also convert this enormously arable land into plantations and grow trees for rubber. Now rubber is important in the late 19th century because the more transportation of goods and services needed, you needed tires and the scientists had already discovered the pneumatic tire. That idea had already come into play. So rubber plays a big role and Leopold by having this monopoly over the rubber plantations of the central part of Africa was making enormous profits for his modest investment there.

Starting point is 00:12:21 And the rubber was both grown and extracted with enormous violence. So that for instance, they just slaughtered people in order to scare the other workers. They disciplined by slaughter. A Dutch historian said that rather than commodify labor, you know, that's what capitalism does. You commodify labor, you tell people, look, you can go out there and find any job you want, but you can't survive on your own, you don't have a plot of land anymore to grow your food, you can't make your own living, you need to go and sell your labor power to somebody else, that's a commodification of labor. But this Dutch scholar said in the Congo what the Belgians did, they animalized labor.

Starting point is 00:13:06 They basically terrified people into working by killing their kin, by surrounding their own homes with skulls. Very, very brutal architecture of colonial extraction. That was the setup from Leopold. Now interestingly, Leopold also plays a double game because he comes in as an abolitionist, you know he welcomes the abolitionists. 1927 in Brussels they allow the League Against Imperialism to meet and so on. They play this double game but really what they are doing is they're crafting this area, the Congo region, into basically a producer of wealth for the Europeans, despite the fact that he names it the Congo Free State. So it was a space in the world of pure extraction of wealth, pure extraction.

Starting point is 00:14:03 And can you bring us up a little bit more into like the 20th century? I want to ask you about the efforts for decolonization and Patrice Lumumba in a second, but maybe just sort of fill that gap there. What happened in the lead up to the movements for decolonization in the DRC? Well, it's important to recognize that no person who is entirely facing the brunt of oppression, no person accepts the oppression as normal. No person. This is not possible, you know. And so a couple of things happen. One is of course that in the 1940s, Belgium is conquered by the Germans and there is a great weakness apparent in Belgium. Belgium doesn't have the wherewithal to maintain its colony in Africa. So that's the first thing that is very important to recognize. The second thing which is interesting is that large number of

Starting point is 00:15:05 people in what is the Congo start to organize themselves into nascent trade unions and you know it's fortunate for the whole world of course that with the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 the Communist International sent around organizers all over the world, including into Belgium, including to argue the case of anti-colonialism. And so trade unions start to develop in the Congo. In the 1930s, 40s, you see protests happen at production sites because in a sense, capitalism and colonialism generate their own contradictions. You just take so much wealth from the people

Starting point is 00:15:49 that generates its own contradiction. So you have this trade union movement that develops in the Congo region, you have agricultural movements that develop, you have soldiers that had been taken by the Belgians to fight in Europe to defend Belgium. They returned after 1945 extraordinarily angry at how they were treated in Europe and also with the general view like look we went to defend you and now you're sending us back into a form of Nazism, you know, your colonial structures. So these protests of agricultural workers, of factory workers and then the soldiers that return into these sectors combined with the fact that Belgium had been weakened by its occupation during the war set in motion the creation of a independence movement now.

Starting point is 00:16:46 Important to remember, it's not just happening in the Congo. This is happening all over the world in the 1940s in India, in Indonesia. This is happening with a great deal of intensity in the Gold Coast, which becomes Ghana in 1957 when Kwame Nkrumah leads the Ghanaian people out of British colonialism and so on. So there are all these ferments taking place, these immense moves and pressures and what's happening in the Congo is part and parcel of that. In the middle of all this comes an extremely charismatic young person. You know, he is born in 1925. Next year will be his 100th birth anniversary.

Starting point is 00:17:31 Patrice Lumumba emerges in this period. He's about 30 years old in 1955. He goes to Accra, Ghana to the emerging independent Ghana. He becomes an important reference for the movement in the Democratic Republic of what will become the Democratic Republic of Congo. He leads the civic struggle, a movement that gathers together workers, agricultural workers, soldiers, intellectuals and others. So all of that is happening in the 1950s, leading up to the eventual collapse of Belgian dominion and the emergence of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Starting point is 00:18:16 And so, yeah, I'd love to spend a little bit of time talking about that period. And particularly, you know, Lumumba was, of course course assassinated in 1961. So, and as you outline in your book, Washington Bullets, assassinations are a common element in the US's manual for regime change. Now, I'm wondering if you can talk to us a little bit about the forces that sort of led to Lumumba's assassination, what forces were behind it, and what was Lumumba talking about and suggesting and fighting for that posed such a deep threat? Well, it's important to recognize that Patrice Lumumba was a highly educated person. He was inspired by enlightenment thinkers

Starting point is 00:19:07 as a young man in his 20s. He worked for Belgian academics. He was there, in a sense, person on the ground when Pierre Clement was doing his study of Stanleyville, Lamumba helped him. Lamumba in 1955 was a member of the Liberal Party of Belgium. That was his politics. He didn't come out of a Marxist tradition or anything like that. It's only in 1958 that Lumbar found the National Movement of the Congolese. That's 1958. He meets Nkrumah, he meets Panon. He is very inspired by what Nkrumah has done in Ghana. He recognizes that, in a sense, Belgian liberalism cannot advance the goals of the Congolese people, that Belgian liberalism was not going to be anti-colonial.

Starting point is 00:19:59 That's why he creates in 1958 the National Movement of the Congolese. It's very important that we understand that it's only three years between 1955 when he's in the Liberal Party of Belgium and 1958 when he creates the National Movement of the Congolese. But that period is important because that allowed him to see that Belgian liberalism could not do the task. It was not up to the task. Well, after he forms the National Movement of the Congolese, it draws together all these strands. And then he goes into negotiations with the Belgian government. There's round table meetings. It's not that Lumumba immediately decides to say we don't care what the Belgians say, it cares very much. They go into this prolonged process of debate and discussion.

Starting point is 00:20:49 Eventually the Belgians agree that what can we do, we can't hold on to this part of the world. It's eight times, seven times the size of Belgium, what becomes the Democratic Republic of Congo and then Congo gets its independence, you know, on the 30th of June 1960. That's the Independence Day. Now they have elections and Patrice Lumumba prevails, you know, without a doubt. I mean, it's not like he wins every seat in the Congo. That doesn't happen. But there's no doubt in the general election, Patrice Lumumba prevails. I mean, he gets about a quarter of the vote, but it's more than twice what anybody else has got. It's a fractured mandate, but you know, he wins fair and square. There's no question about that. Now the problem is that Lumumba then accelerates what's going on.

Starting point is 00:21:45 I said the problem. That's a problem from the Belgian standpoint, from the United States standpoint. What was the problem? Patrice Lumumba wanted to establish the national sovereignty of the Democratic Republic of Congo over all its resources, over its vast arable lands, over its population. He was essentially in that direction, established the sovereignty of the Congolese people over their territory. Now what did this mean in practice? What it meant in practice is when the Congos sold say copper from Katanga or if they sold rubber and so on, they should get to set the prices. You know, they don't have to accept the price of the multinational company buying it from them. Also, there was a large uranium mine

Starting point is 00:22:32 in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In fact, the uranium from that mine is used by the United States in the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And the US government said, look we need to control the mine, we can't allow them to be selling uranium to the Soviet Union. Okay, so there was actual practical capitalist problems that if you have sovereignty over your territory you can establish the prices of goods, you can say we are not selling copper at this price, too low, you want a higher price. So there were some capitalist direct confrontations and then because of the uranium, there was a direct confrontation with imperialism. The United States simply wouldn't allow the Congo to do what it wants with the mine. So for that reason, the US, the Belgian, British intelligence and sections of the Congolese military that had been bought and paid up

Starting point is 00:23:28 intelligence officers by and large for these Western governments colluded and in the arrest of Patrice Lumumba. Now, the richest province in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Katanga, threatened to secede and to basically put the entire new post-colonial project into disarray. And Lumumba was trying to prevent the secession. He was overthrown, he was killed, his body was dissolved in acid, some parts of his body, teeth and so on, were taken to Belgium, almost like a grotesque colonial artifact. And they didn't want a grave for Lumumba because they didn't want him to be seen as a martyr, a force for the next period. And a military officer by the name of Joseph Mobutu became the president.

Starting point is 00:24:23 Eventually he changes his name to Mobutu Seko Seke and Africanizes the country, calls it Zaire. This was a very interesting fake because you just delivered the sovereignty of your country to the West and then you claim a kind of cultural sovereignty by changing the name from Congo to Zaire. It was a false sovereignty, a fake sovereignty. It was a kind of curtain sovereignty. You're hiding the actual lack of sovereignty, which is that you are now going to deliver your minerals and metals to the Europeans and the United States without any real pressure. And the death of Lumumba, in a sense, was the last time that the Congo really had a chance

Starting point is 00:25:08 to establish sovereignty over its land and people. Thank you so much for that really deep and important history. And so I think most people listening right now at least have heard of the fact that there is a genocide happening in the DRC as we speak. It has been referred to as the silent genocide and I think you know there are a number of factors contributing to the genocide from competition over resources, multinational corporations, the compredore elite strata within the DRC itself, the neighboring states of Rwanda and Uganda, of course, the World Bank and the IMF and the thread that all ties it

Starting point is 00:25:50 together is, you know, the ever present tentacles of US imperialism. And I'm wondering if you can sketch a picture for us of what is happening in the DRC right now. And then maybe we can pull on some of those threads as we move along through the conversation. Yeah, I mean, the word genocide is a very particular word, and I generally don't use it unless I'm referring to the UN Convention 1951 on genocide, which is, for instance, what the International Court of Justice used to understand what was happening against the Palestinians

Starting point is 00:26:26 in their very important summary judgment and then now in their investigation. But I know that the term has been used, you're quite right. It has been used quite regularly to refer to what's been happening. And the reason is in the middle of Africa, there are a number of large lakes. That region is known as the Great Lakes region of Africa. Now, it of course is associated with a number of different countries. The DRC, being one of them, you named others Uganda and so on, Rwanda, and a number of other countries. In this region, there's been a basically an on and off war

Starting point is 00:27:04 that's been going on in which maybe six to eight million people have died. Nobody has a good number of how many people have died. This war goes all the way up deep into Uganda, some have even considered it goes further north into Nigeria and so on. At any rate it's around the Great Lakes region. Now, of special significance to our conversation is the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a mineral-rich, metal-rich area, where on a punctual basis, in order to establish the lack of sovereignty of the state institutions of the DRC, there have been invasions from over

Starting point is 00:27:46 a hundred armed groups coming from across the border in Rwanda, in Uganda, some of them even moving from Tanzania and so on. The most famous or notorious of these groups is the M23 rebel group, which some people argue, I I think with a lot of very good information, including by the way the US State Department, that the M23 is a cutout from the government of Rwanda. It's not really just an armed militia, it's in fact a Rwandan force. And that they have been coming in to basically undermine DRC sovereignty in the name of ethnic warfare and so on. And so once you undermine sovereignty, you know, large multinational corporations basically have an easy time coming in just taking the wealth away.

Starting point is 00:28:35 I mean, if you go to the Uganda DRC border, there is no border post, there is no real border guards. The whole situation is extremely open-ended. And why I say that is, it's to the advantage of smugglers, for instance, small-scale smugglers, but it's to the enormous advantage of large-scale corporations. Because the less state you have, the more busy the state is in this conflict that has been going on for over 20 years. The harder it is for these states to police the work of multinational corporations. And these corporations have just been basically stealing money hand over fist. They have trucks going

Starting point is 00:29:19 across the border. Nobody is monitoring anything. So there is a very serious issue happening in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Again, you know, whether we call it a genocide or not, millions of people have died, certainly. And in a way, this has become the normal form of functioning of businesses in places like the DRC, with a lot of extreme violence using paramilitary groups and so on to intimidate anybody who wants to build a trade union or to organize people. This is not just random ethnic violence. This is very much directed at preserving the ability of big firms to effectively make money at a

Starting point is 00:30:03 super exploitative level, you know, much higher than they would if there had been some sort of state available in the Congo. And what role do multinationals and say the United States and other western countries have in perpetuating this destabilization? I know it's quite complex and it might not always be like as direct as some other examples of this. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but I'm wondering if you can illustrate sort of the role that the West plays and that multinational corporations play in this sort of low intensity conflict in the destabilization of this region to make it easier

Starting point is 00:30:43 to sort of pluck out the minerals from? Well, everything was easy when Mobuto was in charge. Mobuto was the dictator from 1965 to 1977. And then after Mobuto came a series of dictatorial governments for 20 more years. I mean, the dictatorship doesn't really end till the late 90s. And in the late 90s, you have Lauren Cabilla coming into power, then his son Joseph Cabilla, and now Felix Chiquedis is the head of the government. But, you know, it's only from 97 till now that you have an established, some sort of democratic government in the DRC. So, before 1997 between the assassination of Lumumba 1961 and 1997, that's 36 years, it was a free run for corporations. They didn't have to start wars. They were just making money. It's very interesting. The dictatorship

Starting point is 00:31:39 ends and then the wars begin. And that's the destabilization of the Congo. Previously, you destabilize sovereignty by having a dictatorship and now you destabilize sovereignty by creating debilitating wars that people have to fight, which are not key to the political economy of the country. I mean, this war in Eastern DRC doesn't emerge from differences in the in the DRC. It's it comes from outside. And it's very convenient that M23 comes in and takes care of say a trade union leader. These things happen.

Starting point is 00:32:14 We know that they happen in Colombia, where Coca-Cola company colluded with local right-wing paramilitaries to take out their activists. We don't know the exact detail in the DRC. It's very hard to find that level of detail out, but we do know this stuff happens. You know, one day you hear that there's a new company that's emerged, and next day somebody's killed. And you know that these things are happening. It's not so easy to draw the straight line. The more instability, especially

Starting point is 00:32:46 in areas of resource extraction, you know, mineral extraction, the better for the mining company because the more problems you have there, the easier it is for you to bargain people down at the mine. Now, obviously there's a limit. There's a lot of instability in Afghanistan even now. The Chinese have the tender for a mind there. They can't get into it. There's a limit to chaos. But if you can manage chaos closer to normality, but you still scare the right people, you can actually make a killing in a country like that. We wanted to do a dossier from Tri-Continental called How to Make a Killing in Africa. And we decided not to because I was afraid that if I tell corporate people how to do it, they may do it and succeed.

Starting point is 00:33:35 And we may all get wiped out. So, you know, the point is that it's not that there's not these pathways and so on to experiment on the side against the reduction of sovereignty, but by and large, right through modern Congo's history, the subordination of its sovereignty has been a key principle of particularly Western governments and their foreign policy orientation. You're listening to an Upstream Conversation with Vijay Prashad. We'll be right back. African Jazz I'm African jazz African jazz. African jazz. African jazz. African jazz. African jazz. African jazz. African jazz. African jazz.

Starting point is 00:36:08 African jazz. African jazz. African jazz. African jazz. African jazz. African jazz. African jazz. African jazz.

Starting point is 00:36:16 African jazz. African jazz. African jazz. African jazz. African jazz. African jazz. African jazz. African jazz.

Starting point is 00:36:24 African jazz. African jazz. African jazz. African jazz. African jazz. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, African jazz. That was African Jazz by Joseph Kabasele, popularly known as Le Grand Kale. Now back to our conversation with Vijay Prashad. So in your excellent book, which I'd love to, you know, we'll have to have you back on the show at some point to just talk about this book, but I'm just going to read a passage from this book. It's about a paragraph just to set me up for the next question that I have, because I really do want to start talking about the minerals and the materials that are driving all of this. So you write in the book, quote, environmentally deleterious and inhumane practices of extraction are hidden away in forests and deserts where protests will be fought by the imperialists and their

Starting point is 00:37:47 subcontractors in the name of the war on terror or the war on drugs or some kind of war that allows the extraction to take place without threat. Both the subsidiary partners of the imperialist bloc and the emergent states rely upon exports of raw materials for their growth agendas, allowing the imperialist block to wash its hands of the harshness that takes place in the dark, outside its direct control. Hundreds of billions of dollars are lost to the countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America by the loot of precious resources, but at low cost, the resources

Starting point is 00:38:26 depleted. The earnings by the monopoly mining firms mispriced and siphoned out of the resource-rich but powerless countries. No proper account of the total annual theft of this wealth is yet available." And so that's a passage from the book Washington Bullets. And so I want to ask you, maybe tell us about the metals and the minerals that form the digitized global economy, particularly cobalt. And so we brought this up earlier, the Tri-Continental's excellent dossier on the DRC titled, The Congolese

Starting point is 00:39:02 Fight for Their Own Wealth, cites that by 2018, the DRC produced 71% of the cobalt used in cell phones, computers, and electric cars across the globe. The DRC is perhaps one of the most resource-rich regions on the planet, and yet the country ranks 180 out of 193 countries on the 2022 Human Development Index. So it's one of the poorest nations on the planet. Who is extracting these raw materials? What are the conditions like in these mines? And who is benefiting from all of this?

Starting point is 00:39:39 Yeah, I mean, my feeling is that first we have to just look at estimates of total wealth. So for the African continent total, the wealth now is about 6.5 trillion dollars. That's the estimate of total African mineral and metal wealth. I think it's undercount. I think it's much greater than that. I think it's over 10 trillion dollars. But let's let's stay at 6.5 trillion. It's way more than the debt that Africa owes to its creditors, way more. The illicit, illegal removal of finance per year is about 1.4 trillion dollars. That means

Starting point is 00:40:21 companies who use what I think of as illegal or should be illegal accounting practices take out about one and a half trillion dollars a year from their business enterprises on the African continent. You add all this up, it's a lot of money that is being plundered from Africa today. And we don't have really really good data on this because United Nations groups that used to maintain data on all this stuff had been shut down. The UN Center for Transnational Cooperations was shut down at the pressure of the Clinton administration in the 1990s. It was shifted from the UN as an autonomous body to becoming just a small part of the UN Conference on Trade and Development.

Starting point is 00:41:08 And then the UN Center for Transnational Cooperation goes from being a body that collects data on transnational corporations to a body effectively that promotes transnational corporations trade, liberalization of trade. So we don't have good numbers. That's a key issue. You can't change things if you don't understand how they are working and data is useful and it's not available. And that shutting down is an undemocratic exercise. Secondly, most of the raw materials for very key electronic goods are found in places that are quite remote from the big cities. For different reasons. There are mountains where you mine them and so on. Cobalt, 71% of the world's cobalt is mined in the DRC. Just cobalt.

Starting point is 00:41:58 Cobalt is a key property, key ingredient for most electronic goods including cell phones, tablets and all of that stuff, computers and so on. So if the DRC said we're not going to export Cobalt, the prices of goods are going to rise dramatically. You know, we did a text on the iPhone at Tri-Continental and we showed the rate of exploitation of labor to build iPhone is over 2000%. It's about by a factor of 100 greater than the rate of exploitation in Karl Marx's time in the textile factories. I mean it's incredible how exploitative the labor process is to build an iPhone. But the key thing is that for an iPhone a number of the ingredients are reduced prices, suppressed prices. Cobalt should be more expensive. The DRC should be getting a better deal and so on. But it's not just that. Then you have multinational

Starting point is 00:42:56 corporations which basically monopolize the purchase of the metals and minerals. They pay extremely low at the mine to so-called artisanal miners and they charge up the commodity chain a lot of money. They're making hand over fist. These are the kind of wholesaler cobalt companies or wholesaler metals and minerals companies that buy directly from the mine and sell it upwards. They make a lot of money. that buy directly from the mine and sell it upwards. They make a lot of money just in pricing, the arbitrage in pricing, the difference between buying something at the mine and selling it at the port.

Starting point is 00:43:33 Just that small movement, the markup is incredible. We've started to collect data on all this stuff, on what's the difference between the price paid to the artisanal miner and the price at the port. And the variance is enormous. They are making hand over fist. And you see, one assumption is, oh, these companies are all Chinese. It's not true. A lot of the cobalt is taken to China, but they are making phones for the Western market, not just for the Chinese market. Every Apple phone is manufactured

Starting point is 00:44:05 in China even now. It's not like now they are suddenly manufacturing it somewhere else. But the companies that are there running the mining operations are not all Chinese companies. There's Glencore, which is a US company owned by Mark Rich, who was pardoned by Bill Clinton for financial crimes, now is set up in Switzerland. It's not based in the US anymore. Australian mining companies, Canadian mining companies, knee-deep in the dirt of African soil, extracting wealth for themselves. These mining companies are enormously lucrative. So, the great gainer from all this is the consumer who is buying a phone with a cheapened price because you're not paying full price for the cobalt. But the real person who's losing is the person in the DRC. First the worker, then the country because the country is not able to get enough revenue from these firms

Starting point is 00:45:02 that then mine, you know, within their territory. They don't get enough revenue. If you don't get enough revenue from these firms that then mine within their territory, they don't get enough revenue. If you don't get enough revenue for your patrimony, for what you're exporting, how are you going to build schools, hospitals, transportation systems and what have you? And they simply don't have the funds available for all that. Do you think that there are any reforms that would enable sort of the levels of consumption of the goods that we sort of rely on here in the West and that rely on these materials? Like, is there any way to do this whole process that isn't riddled with immiseration and death and environmental destruction?

Starting point is 00:45:40 And if not, like, what does that mean about the trajectory of our global systems? I mean, you're asking a difficult question because the answer to the question can be simplified. And I can say, well, yeah, obviously under a capitalist system, this is totally exploitative. And the only answer is if we can change the entire motor production and create a socialist system. That's the silly, simple answer. The more complicated answer is within the structure of capitalism today what can be done. I mean one of the things you would have to argue for is that the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo basically established sovereignty over the territory, land, resources and so

Starting point is 00:46:21 on, bargained for a better deal from the mining companies, perhaps even reinforce the state mining company, rather than export raw cobalt, process the cobalt in the country, build manufacturing structures to process the cobalt and then consider exporting it up the commodity chain. The point is a country like the DRC isn't making the most of their situation. You know, they're just sort of giving it up without claiming a better royalty, without processing it and so on. That's just giving it up. I don't think that's going to be beneficial. Any new

Starting point is 00:46:58 development thinking has to be very clear in the need to establish sovereignty first and then everything else follows. And what you said makes me think of a lot of the work of under development that Walter Rodney illustrated is how a lot of these materials and they have for you know centuries now the process has been to extract from these extraction sites and then process and do the more sort of advanced industrial work around them in the West. And then you build industry, you build skills in the West, and then countries like the DRC are left underdeveloped. And they don't build the capacity to actually say, like, process the materials and then build the phones internally. So they really are just like viewed

Starting point is 00:47:46 as these pits of extraction and it has so many different impacts from poverty to also not developing the skills and the industry to be able to do that kind of stuff, which then gives those countries a bit of a leg up in their resistance against being dominated by the West. And you mentioned China a couple of questions ago. I'm wondering if you can talk about the Congo and if you disagree with this, also talk about that, but as a site that embodies the competition between the United States and China. I've heard that quite a bit in looking into this

Starting point is 00:48:22 and I'm wondering, yeah, is the West's war against the Congo also sort of a war against China? I mean, it's not a war against China. It's important. They are building up for some sort of war against China somewhere else in the South China Sea. Specifically here, the United States has been quite dismayed by the close connections made between the Chinese government and Chinese business and African governments. Now for almost a decade, the Chinese government has held a China Africa roundtable, an annual meeting, where leaders from the continent meet with the Chinese leadership and they discuss, you know, plans, needs and so on. Over the last couple of years, African leaders have gone to that structure, to that meeting

Starting point is 00:49:11 and have said, look, you know, you're just extracting our raw materials. This is not enough for us. So, in the last couple of years, the Chinese government has responded, I think very productively, by saying, we would like to help you industrialize. So rather than just build infrastructure for you to remain at the other end of the commodity chain, we want to help you skill up. We want to build processing units, we want to build the actual intellectual capacity to run, you know, with engineers and so on. So that's a big and interesting difference that's taken place. Now, United States worries about this. Like the Chinese are having what they consider overdue influence. So they've been trying to sabotage some of these Chinese projects. In fact, as a consequence they're even sabotaging African-only projects.

Starting point is 00:50:01 I'll give you an example. The government of Zambia and the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo, neither of them enormously progressive governments, nonetheless made an agreement to together build some sort of electric battery and then perhaps an electric car. Very good agreement. United States couldn't have this happening without its presence. Blinken summoned the two heads of government, they redid the agreement to include all three countries and said this is how it's going to be. Now these countries had started to, through the Belt and Road Initiative, export their goods and services out of the country.

Starting point is 00:50:37 Zambia is a landlocked country, it was valuable to have infrastructure that could carry its copper out and so on. They built structures for that. Well, as China and the Belt and Road started to build structure, the US insinuated itself with no real money on the table and said they will build the Lopito Corridor from Zambia into the DRC into Angola and then a port. But who's going to finance that? See, the US keeps talking about public-private funding because in fact, if you keep privatizing everything, the state doesn't have any money. So, the US government doesn't have money for the Lepito Corridor. They have gone with a begging bowl to get others to contribute. Meanwhile, the Chinese government, because there they don't privatize everything, has capital and is willing to invest it. So, this is a real

Starting point is 00:51:30 contest set in play. But I must say, if you talk to Chinese officials, they will disagree that there is a war going on or that there is even some sort of two-headed struggle. They believe that they are just there trading and they don't understand why the United States is so upset with China's presence there. I think it's a bit full naive. You know why they are upset. They're upset because they fear this will mean a loss of influence in Africa. And they have been dealing with that in one way or the other. So we're so accustomed to, you know, viewing the people of the global south as victims and not agents of their own destiny. And I think this was one of the major breakthroughs, so to speak, of the Al-Aqsa flood a year ago. You know, it did puncture the veil for many, especially liberals, I think, here in the United States and force them to kind of pick a side,

Starting point is 00:52:27 and hopefully, probably not most of them, but grapple with this idea of armed resistance and all of that. And so I'm curious, how are the people in the DRC fighting against the forces killing and immiserating them? Like what kind of political organizing or other liberation movements can you tell us about? I mean to be honest there's a million different movements you know there are movements community-based movements to defend a certain

Starting point is 00:52:56 town or village where there's you know where there are a hundred marauding armed bands people have set up self-defense units. There are trade unions that are still very active in the DRC. There are youth groups, some of them linked to churches, others independent and so on. I mean, the difficulty is because even under a president who is reasonably centrist, there really isn't the political space for people to do various things. There's a lot of repression still. People are afraid to come out in public sometimes. But suffice it to say there's a lot of organizing work that's happening. And again, where this will go, I cannot say. And how it will develop, I cannot say. But certainly, you know, people from earlier governments have made it clear that they don't like the direction the government is going.

Starting point is 00:53:48 They would like to join some sort of unity platform. I don't know how any of this will shape out, but it's worth watching and waiting because people are never going to be they never go to submit themselves, you know, to reality. They're going to fight to improve things. And that's what's happening. And so we've been really zoomed in on the Congo in this conversation on the DRC. And I think as we sort of close out, we only have a few minutes left,

Starting point is 00:54:16 I would like to broaden the conversation a little bit. And I know this is a pretty big question, and there's a lot of different angles that you could take it from. So I'm wondering, please go at it, attack it however you'd like. But I'm wondering if you can talk about how the DRC fits into a pattern of US imperialism

Starting point is 00:54:39 and the US-led bloc's imperialism of intervention, destabilization in the global south. Again, drawing from Washington Bullets, I was fascinated in reading that book. It just, I did not know how many countries, how many states were experimenting with socialist or socialist adjacent movements and anywhere from like smaller movements to actual, you know, winning power in the state after the Bolshevik revolution and the Red Star over the third world, I believe it is another book of yours that you talk about the influence of the Bolshevik revolution. And I just didn't realize how many countries the US intervened in somehow or another to fuck up those movements. And so I'm just wondering if maybe you can talk a little bit about that and situate, if it makes sense for you,

Starting point is 00:55:33 the DRC into this like broader anti-communist, anti-socialist world historical entity, the United States and its imperialist agenda. Well, it's really interesting. There's nothing in parallel between Haiti and the DRC, except the time periods. Just as in the DRC, you have this long dictatorship of the father, Papa Doc Duvalier from 57 out to the 1980s. Eventually his son, baby Doc Duvalier, a long period of repression. And then the country struggles to find its feet. Similarly in the DRC, struggles to find its feet. And now perhaps finding its feet a little more, trying to play the angles. The emergence of China has really opened space for countries like the DRC because now rather than being absolutely subservient to the International Monetary Fund,

Starting point is 00:56:37 they can go and talk to the Chinese, they can talk to, you know, the Indians, they can talk to with more actually ferocity, the economic commission of Africa and so on. I think this is important. You know, we are in a different period now than we were before. Now, where it will go, it's very hard to tell. I don't want to exaggerate things. But certainly this is a better time than the 1990s when things seem completely bleak on the continent as in other places as well. Yeah, do you think that China might be stepping into the role that the Soviet Union played in terms of supporting these countries that are trying to entangle themselves from the web of US imperialism? I mean it's hard to say, you know, it's true that US imperialism has lost a lot of its power.

Starting point is 00:57:30 It's lost its economic, science and technological, financial power. But it maintains military power and information power. Which is why a show like this is important. You know, this is part of the kind of internal descent of the kind of information that the state would like to feed people. That disjuncture between, you know, economic power and say information power or economic power and military power is enormous. I mean, the US is now driven, in my opinion, by its military and information power. It no longer has tried to recapture economic science and tech. It's in the past. I mean, recently President Biden talked to Elon Musk about entrepreneurship. If that's your references, good luck to you. You know, so I think that there is an acknowledgement that the United States cannot maintain control forever, but

Starting point is 00:58:25 yet it is using information as a vector and it's using arms as a vector to basically hold its position straight. Well, Vijay, thank you so much for coming on today. This was a really amazing conversation and yeah, expect to hear back from me. I'm going to see if you want to come back on the show. You're invited any time, but I'll hit you up at some point in the future. And yeah, any closing remarks or anything

Starting point is 00:58:55 that you'd like to leave us with? No, I really want to emphasize the point about a media such as this, you know, these podcasts, people's YouTube channels, all of this plays a very important role to highlight one of the two sources of power of the United States, information power, what they are trying to sell people. It's very important to effectively highlight the alternative. And this is just what you're doing. You've been listening to an Upstream Conversation with Vijay Prashad, journalist, political commentator, and executive director of Tri-Continental Institute for Social Research.

Starting point is 00:59:40 He's also the author of Washington Bullets, The History of the CIA, Coups and Assassinations, and Red Star Over the Third World. Please check the show notes for links to any of the resources mentioned in this episode. Thank you to Joseph Cavasele, popularly known as Le Grand Kale for the intermission music, and to Sanyika for the cover art. Upstream theme music was composed by Robert. This episode was produced in collaboration with EcoGather, a collapse responsive co-learning network that hosts free online weekly eco gatherings that foster conversation and build

Starting point is 01:00:22 community around heterodox economics, collective action, and belonging in an enlivened world. In this collaboration, EcoGather will be hosting gatherings to bring some upstream episodes to life, and this is one of those episodes. Find out more, including the date and time for this Eco gathering in the show notes or by going to www.eco-gather.ing. Upstream is almost entirely listener funded. We couldn't keep this project going without your support. There are a number of ways that you can support us financially. You can sign up to be a Patreon subscriber, which will give you access to bonus episodes, at least one a month, but usually more, at patreon.com forward slash

Starting point is 01:01:11 upstream podcast. You can also make a tax deductible, recurring, or one-time donation through our website upstreampodcast.org forward slash support. Through this support, you'll be helping us keep Upstream sustainable and helping keep this whole project going. Socialist political education podcasts are not easy to fund, so thank you in advance for the crucial support. And for more from us, please visit UpstreamPodcast.org and follow us on Instagram, Twitter, Blue Sky, Threads, and Facebook for updates and post-capitalist memes at Upstream Podcast. You can also subscribe to us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. And if you like what you hear,

Starting point is 01:02:02 please give us a 5 star rating and review. This really helps get Upstream in front of more eyes and into more ears. Thank you. You

Upstream - The Fight for The Congo w/ Vijay Prashad

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.