Process Stories in the green energy transition

 July 29, 2022

Every now and then something called a "process story" pops up. This usually means that the Powers That Be have been able to convince enough of the people in high office and positions of power that there is a bottleneck in the supply of something we need to achieve our goals, and they can sneak a bit of profiteering and bad intentions into the process of getting to an otherwise laudable goal, like, say, fighting climate change by switching to a green energy economy. 

I've already mentioned this, but it's worth mentioning again in this explicitly "process story" - type angle. A green-energy, high-tech economy is still going to have to take in raw materials to make some of the infrastructure - and in that economy it's going to be "critical mineral resources" that are basic fuel for the economy, especially lithium and certain rare earth minerals to make lithium-ion batteries and high-tech components for computing devices. It's also important to note that this period of acquiring and creating the infrastructure necessary for a green energy-based economy won't last forever, but rather is going to happen on the time scale of a construction project rather than permanent maintenance, so these bad faith efforts are mostly wasted.

Note here that "capitalism", overall, does not play by what we might suppose to be its own rules when it comes to acquiring these critical materials. If the big capitalists played by the rules of capitalism that they devolve upon us as gospel, you'd assume that they'd be trying to develop positive trade relations with countries like Bolivia, which has large and proven lithium reserves, the largest in the world. But they're not. Not too long ago, the democratically elected and popular, working-class president of Bolivia was deposed in a far-right coup with the covert backing of the U.S. intelligence and military "community". The coup didn't end up succeeding; President Morales returned to power shortly, but the attempted right-wing coup on Evo Morales was an open and blatant attempt to "secure" Bolivian lithium deposits for U.S. industry. This, mind you, happened before the U.S. establishment was really taking the goal of "securing a green energy future" (which is a militarist talking point) seriously, and the coup attempt on President Evo was perhaps tooblatant. Now, you can see clips of U.S. Southcomm officers doing press on Latin American natural resources, in a very pacifying tone as if trying to quash our understanding that they've transparently been pillaging in that region for ages, and they are gearing up to do it some more - not for Venezuelan oil this time but for Bolivian lithium. Look, I'm no Bolivarist, but they've got a right to run their own affairs. Sure, Bolivar demobilized most of the region after independence, but they've got the right to remobilize if they choose to without U.S. covert or overt interference. No MILF-y Southcomm commander at the Aspen Security Forum is going to convince anyone who knows even just a little bit of modern history that we've got some kind of stellar track record in Latin America or that U.S. capitalism deserves all of the resources of Latin America. The history of U.S. "involvement" in Latin American is a history of corrupt U.S. capitalism, whether it be carbon capitalism or this new Big Tech-driven technofeudalism, using the military wing of capitalism to acquire raw materials while disregarding the "rules" of capitalism that they keep preaching to us, on the side. 

So we've got on the one hand U.S. Southcomm trying to ensure favorable prices for lithium at the point of a sword, and on the other hand, Congress running "hearings" on "security in the Sahel" which is short for trying to "secure" the resources in the general area of the Democratic Republic of the Congo - the DRC, Uganda, Burundi and so on. The DRC is the largest source of refugees to the US by a large margin, but that doesn't mean we should pack up and try to take over that country. I don't care how they plan to get Africomm to shoot that apple off someone's head, because any objective observation will tell you that deploying the military to serve capitalist interests in the Sahel would be an utter boondoggle. You'd almost have to make Conrad's Heart of Darkness a "banned book" to keep U.S. soldiers from far too quickly realizing that "war is a racket" vis-a-vis deploying the "military wing of capitalism" to Africa. 

What should we be doing, and why are the U.S. capitalist classes doing this instead? First of all, it's important to note that the ruling class does these interventions to make profits for themselves. They're not capable of jacking up the final prices of goods on us enough to profit on, but they can cut costs for themselves by short-circuiting U.S. military aims. 

What we should be doing is clear. We should be developing fair and productive trade relations with countries that have these "critical mineral resources" on the governmental level, and on the personal level we should support when those countries in our own produce genuine working class movements for liberation and social equality. There are no shortcuts here. We should consult our memory and realize that every "quick fix" in the resource markets, through manipulating military aims or other routes, has always actually been about making a quick profit for no one but the billionaires.