Category Archives: miners

Mining The Future

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One way of thinking about debt is spending the future: a debt incurred today must be repaid with future earnings. In planetary terms, mining places us all in biosphere debt. To open a mine is to guarantee further primary extraction, incurring high energy use, new carbon emissions, destruction of the local environment, atmospheric and water pollution. It further sets in motion the commodity production process because new minerals will become new cars or girders or an iPhone. In short, any chance at moving away from neo-liberalism would have to begin with a slowdown or even cessation of mining. At present mining companies are all trying to expand, while also reducing still further their labor costs. It will take a co-ordinated global movement to push back.

Last week the transnational steel giant ArcelorMittal finally closed its Florange steel furnaces in France, having waited out the French elections and the Olympics (where ArcelorMittal was a major sponsor). 700 jobs were lost with the usual knock-on effects that such retrenchment entails. As in 1981, the Socialist administration is discovering that its room for maneuver is far more limited than they expected.

In South Africa yesterday, the Anglo-American Platinum corporation resolved a three-week strike by firing 12,000 workers. The standard pattern sees the company then hire back a fraction of its former staff and reduce output. At present, world platinum prices have recovered from their low-point of August, to 2011 trading highs of about $1700 an ounce, still far below 2008 levels of $2200. More than enough to pay the salary being demanded by the miners which, at 15,000 Rand is ironically about $1700, the price of a single ounce of platinum. Too much for Anglo-American. In a country where people are desperate for work, firing workers that have become militant and replacing them with a totally different workforce is an acceptable option.

Xstrata mining in Australia

Xstrata, the world’s largest extractor of thermal coal, is still trying to merge with a financial company called Glencore in a $32 billion deal. The Glencore-Xstrata merger is unusual in that it brings together financial capital with primary extraction in the same company:

Xstrata is very good at operating mines efficiently and at low cost, without upsetting local communities. Glencore is not.

But it does boast a global network of commodities traders who possess unrivalled intelligence on global demand trends that theoretically allows them to make money at any stage of the commodity cycle.

This will create what corporate-speak calls a “vertically-integrated” company. In fact, it will amount to a dramatic change in philosophy. Xstrata is a greedy, play-it-safe company that works cosy, inside deals in countries that are considered “safe,” meaning pliant to neo-liberal market world views. Glencore, according to business journalist Nils Prately, are altogether more aggressive:

The Glencore thesis is that the best returns come from extending so-called brownfield sites and that the political risk that goes with investing in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo is tolerable.

Translated into English, this means that expansion in under-regulated, low-wage regions is considered worth the risk of political upheaval. This is not to say that Xstrata are not in favor of biosphere devastation.

McArthur River zine mine, Australia

This August they won approval from the Australian government to convert an underground zinc mine into a massive open-cut operation in Northern Territory (above). It’s just that they like governments who can be relied on to jump to the precise height required with no foreseeable risk of change.

Ironically, it’s being held up not by concerns about the disastrous biosphere impact but about the egregious payday (even by Wall Street standards) that Xstrata management lined up for themselves. Merger and retention bonuses (cash for showing up on Monday to do the job you had on Friday) would amount to a whopping $233 million. Shareholders are now getting to vote on the compensation deal but the big investors like Qatar’s sovereign fund are now behind it.

So we can see that neither shareholder activism, as in the Glencore-Xstrata merger, or strikes by workers as in France and South Africa, have been able to restrain multi-national mining.

In Texas beginning on September 24, a group of activists have taken to the trees to prevent the Keystone XL pipeline from being completed. This pipeline is being built to bring the “carbon-bomb” of Alberta’s tarsands oil to the Gulf coast. If you look at the clear-cutting and construction going on, it’s hard to imagine that a “decision” seriously remains to be made after this kind of expenditure. After November, whoever wins the elections, this pipeline will be authorized. The Texas activists, like their predecessors in the logging struggles in Washington State, have taken to the trees.

So confident of their future are Big Oil, energy and mining that they’re not even giving that much money to Mitt Romney (relatively speaking). They rank only number nine, way behind the Wall Street firms and banks who have decided that the current docile administration is still far too hostile to them.
Nonetheless, there’s a palpable chance they have overplayed their hand. All the minerals were being mined for China, whose economy appears to be slowing down drastically. There are ongoing strikes in the diamond, iron, chrome, platinum and gold sectors of South Africa’s mining industry. They can’t replace all these people.. By placing their bodies in the way of the neo-liberal machine,  the tree-sitters have made the issues visible. If we want things to change, we have to make a similar effort.

Recolonizing Everyday Life

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I’m writing this post, like all the others, on a Mac computer that proudly advertises it is made from solid aluminum (or aluminium). That aluminum was probably mined from land belonging to indigenous people. Today workers for Spectra Energy began constructing a pipeline that will bring fracked natural gas and its accompanying radioactive Radon right into the West Village, close to where I live. Needless to say the swathes of land being destroyed by this extraction once belonged to the indigenous people here too. The once-heralded immaterial knowledge economy feels a lot less real than this recolonization of everyday life. Wherever you live, it’s right there in increasingly similar ways.

In the swirling moments around 1968, the Situationists declared that there was an ongoing “colonization of everyday life.” Perhaps it’s an indication of what McKenzie Wark has called the “disintegrating spectacle” that this drama can now be visualized. It’s a surprisingly material process, the physical extraction of energy and minerals displacing first the indigenous, and then whomever else happens to be in the way. We are reminded once again that, as Walter Mignolo has put it,

coloniality is modernity.

The endless process of accumulation is revisiting both places and materials that it has already used in a different way to produce this recolonization.

So what’s in my Mac? Making aluminum an incredibly destructive process. Three tonnes of bauxite is required to produce 1 tonne of alumina. It’s nearly all strip-mined because bauxite tends to close to the surface. Only half a tonne of aluminium can be extracted from 1 tonne of alumina. So it’s a six to one waste to product ratio. Mining regions are devastated.

The supply chain for a globalized material like aluminum is not transparent. The nations offering the largest supply include Australia, China, India and Brazil. You’ll be aware of the explosions in Apple’s China plants caused by aluminum dust.

Apple supplier in China after explosion

In Australia, 60% of all mines are either situated on land still recognized as Indigenous or adjacent to it. On the Burrup Peninsula, home to the extraordinary petrogylphs of the Yaburara people, some 90 of the 118 square kilometres has been zoned for industrial development.

 

The pattern in India is similar. India’s Center for Science and the Environment reports:

If India’s forests, mineral-bearing areas, regions of tribal habitation and watersheds are all mapped together, a startling fact emerges – the country’s major mineral reserves lie under its richest forests and in the watersheds of its key rivers. These lands are also the homes of India’s poorest people, its tribals.

The map below indicates mines with symbols and areas of poverty/Adavasi habitation with dark shading:

North-East India: minerals and poverty
The mines are mostly owned by multinational magnates like Vedanta, which generated $14 billion in revenues in 2011 and made a cool $4 billion in pre-tax profits on that. It produced 675 kilotons of aluminum, largely at Jharsuguda. Nonetheless, Vedanta is closing some of its processing plants because it says everything is gone from the ground. This may be taken with a pinch of salt because Vedanta were prevented from mining in the hills at Niyamgiri, a region sacred to the Dongria Kondh, the indigenous people of the area.

The reasons are clear. According to an Amnesty International report of August 2012:

Vedanta’s human rights record falls far short of international standards for businesses. It refuses to consult properly with communities affected by its operations and ignores the rights of Indigenous peoples.

We could generalize that statement to say that the recolonization of everyday life flatly ignores what it considers to be unnecessary restraints on profit generation like rights or existing law.

In Canada, according to a devastating piece by Andrew Nikiforuk, the neoliberal Harper administration has literally rewritten the law to enable the creation of a tar sands pipeline into and across the Great Bear Rainforest. The forest has hitherto been a model of sustainable development, combining:

ecotourism, renewable energy, sustainable forest products, shellfish aquaculture, and the restoration of First Nations’ access to fisheries.

In March 2012 the administration bundled together an extraordinary assemblage of deregulation into one package and passed it as an omnibus bill, undoing not only the rainforest protections but almost all aspects of environmental monitoring that might hinder the operations of Big Oil.

The distinguished marine ecologist Ragnar Elmgren of Stockholm University called it “an act of wanton destruction…the kind of act one expects from the Taliban in Afghanistan, not from the government of a civilized and educated nation.”

Leaving aside the cultural hierarchy implied in this statement, which is a tad unfortunate to say the least, what’s notable is that this recolonization–or perhaps more exactly, reversion to colonizing conditions–has no exception for the EuroAmerican “white” person.

The Fourth World can be permitted a wry smile. The West Village, home to Sarah Jessica-Parker and other glitterati, is now not only subject to the mad NYU expansion, which will put construction in the area for twenty years and leave it looking like downtown Omaha, but now it’s getting a fracking pipeline. So as much as the global city likes to present itself as an oasis from the actual conditions created by financial globalization, they have now returned to sender.

As I mentioned, it’s happened before. Nikiforuk calls the tar sands product by its traditional name: bitumen, also known as asphalt. It’s that filthy dark black stuff they use to coat roads. And in the beginnings of the industrial period, they used it as part of the immaterial labor of the day. For artists always searching for a true black, bitumen appeared to be a great discovery. So in museums all over the world you can see early nineteenth century paintings that are gloomily dark and cracked. Bitumen never fully dries, so it expands when warm and contracts when it cools, creating the cracks and allowing it to spread across a canvas. The great canvases of Romanticism in particular are literally smeared in oil.

The most famous example is The Raft of the Medusa by Géricault.

Géricault “Medusa”

The coal-smoke yellow and impenetrable gloom of the canvas are the gifts of fossil fuel painting. Ironically, the subject concerns a shipwreck of a colonial voyage to Africa that led the survivors to cannibalism. Once again, the recolonization of everyday life has us cannibalizing ourselves, dying for fuel in a tragic farce.

Arrest Yourself: Neocolonial Stalinism

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Police at Marikana

In South Africa, the mining crisis unfolds. What happened at Marikana, where 34 miners died at the hands of police? Prosecutors today charged all the miners arrested that day with causing their own killings, using an archaic piece of Dutch law often used under apartheid. Even the government Justice minister was taken aback and has demanded an explanation. Now the police say to us: “you have arrested yourself for failing not to see that there is nothing to see here.” It’s that absurd and authoritarian at once. Call it neocolonial Stalinism.

It’s becoming clear that controlling this narrative is about far more than the already-serious specific situation. This is about who tells the story of “globalization.” Is it about “wealth” or “life”? And whose wealth and whose lives count.

Announcing the extraordinary decision to prosecute all the miners, Frank Lesenyego, spokesman for the National Prosecuting Authority, said:

It’s the police who were shooting, but they were under attack by the protesters, who were armed, so today the 270 accused are charged with the murders.

The astonishing accusation is based on the charge of “common purpose,” a device of authority to reduce individuals to a mass. It explains why the NPA has kept the miners in jail for over two weeks without charge, against South African law. It’s sad to see the postcolonial government act so directly in the interest of the transnational mining company–and perhaps also its own client trade unions.

All of this bolsters the now-established media narrative that the miners charged police and it was in the ensuing chaos that people died. The South African government argues that the police acted in self defense, despite the fact that no police officer was injured on that day. It has also been argued that the miners were trying to evade tear gas and live ammunition fire.

Crucially, however, only ten of the 34 deaths occurred in this direct conflict. Where were the others? South Africa’s Mail and Guardian reports:

Some of the miners killed in the August 16 massacre at Marikana appear to have been shot at close range or crushed by police vehicles. They were not caught in a fusillade of gunfire from police defending themselves, as the official account would have it.

The analysis is based on a reconstruction of the scene at a location out of view of press cameras on the day of the massacre, using forensic analysis and interviews conducted by University of Johannesburg researchers. At least 14 death sites have been identified here, and witnesses talk of armored vehicles driving over people as they lay on the ground. It is impossible, then, to sustain an accusation of common purpose that retains any logical sense.

Greg Marinovich concludes at the end of his long article that what happened was

summary and entirely arbitrary execution at the hands of a paramilitary police unit.

Why use such force? The situation in South Africa, and indeed the global South, is at the brink. Even Zwelinzima Vavi, the head of COSATU, the official trade union group that has been seen as hostile to the radical miners’ breakaway union, pointd out

We have been warning about a ticking time bomb for years, saying that if we don’t address the current levels of unemployment, poverty and inequalities at some point, the poor and those who are feeling the pinch will march to our own boardrooms to demand that we do something about their circumstances.

Yesterday, Julius Malema spoke to miners at a gold mine, partly owned by President Zuma, who have not been paid for over two years:

Our leaders have lost their way and have been co-opted by mine owners and fed profits. They don’t care about you.

His stump speech now dwells on the disappointment felt by rank-and-file ANC members and black South Africans about the lack of progress since 1994. He calls for nationalizing the mines and the establishment of a living wage for all at R12,500, about $4000. The messenger may not be well liked but the message is powerful. At the Gold Fields Mine, the world’s fourth largest, a quarter of the miners are on wildcat strike as of today. All the Gold Standard discussion so common among monetary geeks forgets the appalling labor of colonial gold mines from the Spanish empire in the “New World,” via Africa’s so-called Gold Coast to present-day “neo-colonial” transnational mining.

US readers: remember that Ohio coal miners were not only required to attend a Mitt Romney rally, they had to lose a day’s pay to do so. Going for Obama then? As Republicans sing the praises of coal, Democrats drill for oil. Ken Salazar yesterday gave Shell the go-ahead to drill in the Arctic even though its own safety vessel isn’t finished. What could go wrong with that idea?

The so-called globalization of the past thirty years has allowed the global one per cent to treat the finite human and non-human resources of the planet as its own expense account. Can a decolonial, life-first counterimaginary be created? Doing so would mean not nationalizing mines but closing them and providing a living wage for all nonetheless.

Debt, Mining and the Global Reconquest

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From the perspective of the global South, the primary extraction of raw materials like coal, the subjugation of popular autonomy, the implementation of debt as a form of social control and the continued expansion of climate change are clearly intertwined. The repression of the miners’ strike in South Africa is part and parcel of mineral policy in Australia, oriented as both are to the expanding Chinese market. The intended consequences include ruinous African debt and the inevitable by-product is constantly accelerating climate change.

This interface has been perfectly visible from the South for some considerable time. In 1987, Thomas Sankara, then president of Burkina Faso spoke to the Organisation of African Unity (now the African Union) in Addis Ababa. Sankara called for the creation of a United Front Against Debt:

We think that debt has to be seen from the standpoint of its origins. Debt’s origins come from colonialism’s origins. Those who lend us money are those who had colonized us before. Under its current form, that is imperialism-controlled, debt is a cleverly managed re-conquest of Africa, aiming at subjugating its growth and development through foreign rules. Thus, each one of us becomes the financial slave, which is to say a true slave.

Sakara was assassinated a few months after making this call. His policies had also included the nationalization of the country’s mineral wealth. If Sarkana’s warnings had been heeded two decades ago, perhaps Africa would not be in its present crisis, forced to generate materials to produce foreign exchange revenues to pay down its debt.

Speaking at the memorial service for the miners killed by South African police (above), Julius Malema reprised these themes on Thursday, calling again for nationalization of the mines:

The democratically elected government has turned on its people. This marquee we are gathered under, the Friends of the Youth League paid for this. The government did nothing for you, we are helping you. Government ministers are just here to pose for pictures. We are here with you, you must soldier on – never listen to cowards. We mustn’t stop until the whites agree to give us some of the money in these mines.

The crowd responded by storming the stage, causing the rapid exit of government ministers and politicians. Police were barred from attending. As the national week of mourning continues, church leaders have spoken out against Lonmin and students at Wits University in Johannesburg are set to march. A national inquiry into the events has already been established but it is not clear if the ANC can contain the wave of radical protest the massacre has set in motion. Malema may be an opportunist, as some charge, but the grievances he articulates are all too real.

Here in Australia, mining companies are retrenching. Australia has done remarkably well out of the commodities boom, servicing the exploding Chinese economy. While officials continue to forecast a renewed peak in two years, hard-line mining executives have declared Australian coal “non-cash generative.” The blame is placed on the carbon tax introduced at enormous political cost by the current government. No credit is given in Australian media for the climate-positive aspects of the tax. The implication is clear: mining will relocate to countries with a less “burdensome” tax structure–like South Africa.

To understand this, you need to know that before 2005, coal sold for about A$30 a ton. At the height of the boom, it reached A$140. Paul Cleary, a journalist for the right-of-center Australian, writes:

Mining dominates our society, our economy, and even our political system.

Now it sells for “only” A$90, a 300% increase on the price seven years ago, which is apparently not enough. The business pages are awash with articles about the end of the mining boom.

Let’s be under no illusions as to who dominates the agenda in the U. S. The oil giant Shell has been reported to be determined to begin drilling in the Arctic this summer, even though its own safety procedures in case of a blowout are not finished. If this was a movie, you know what would happen: there’d be a blowout, only for the maverick hero to return and cap the well. There are no heroes any more. The drilling has to begin to make sure that, if Obama happens to be re-elected, he does not renege on his sell-out.

Sarkana was right, only he did not go far enough. The reconquest forced by the combination of debt and mining was not just of Africa: it was planetary. So are the consequences. Let’s hope that his heirs in South Africa can begin the resistance.

 

 

 

In Search of Wilderness

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The Three Sisters, Blue Mountains National Park. Credit: WikiCommons

A thousand feet down, a flight of cockatoos makes its way across the green canopy, clearly visible through the bright mountain air. Loud calls of unseen birds echo across the forest. The sandstone cliffs are steep and challenging, plunging the walker from time to time into rainforest, where the footing is damp and muddy, only for the trail to then climb almost vertically.

I’m a city boy, born and bred, and I’ve lived in London or New York for the greater part of my life. So why do I find such moments so appealing? Even though I know that they are fake? There’s a learned urban desire for mental renewal by being outside, a middle-class Disneyland.

In the past year, those of us in the Occupy movement have spent a great deal of time outdoors. Radical politics in eighteenth century Britain was known as “out-of-doors.” So if the presumed “public sphere” is in fact largely indoors, in coffee houses, theatres, meeting halls, and the like, its radical supplement is often outdoors. We’ve drawn much energy from being outside in the urban interior–for cities, as Benjamin taught us, are all interior.

For the most part, however, conservation has been, as the name suggests, a conservative movement. It was tied to the sense of nation as the land and a particular kind of embodiment that resulted from having been born on that land. The obvious contradictions in such views, such as the exclusion of indigenous peoples from that nationhood, never troubled conservationist nationalism.

It is perhaps, then, no coincidence that the realignment of the environment as a “left” issue was contemporary with the Civil Rights Movement. In the U. S., the 1964 Wilderness Act, defined the condition poetically rather than quantitatively and to the exclusion of questions of belonging:

A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.

Is there such a place? The Blue Mountains have been lived in by the Gundungurra, Darug, and Wiradjuri people for over 20,000 years. But when the British arrived in Australia, they declared the entire continent terra nullius, unclaimed or empty land–wilderness.

In 1813, a British surveyor noted coal in the region. Two years later, a group of convicts were compeled to build a road into the area. Actual mining began in the 1870s and continued until the end of the Second World War. The traces of mining are not apparent to the untrained eye but the shale oil formations give shape, I learned, to some of the distinctive topography. It was not until 1967 that the modern Aboriginal peoples gained full citizenship in what has become Australia around them.

Indeed, the walk that I took in the Blue Mountains was made possible by the Herculean construction of steps and paths in the cliffs, beginning with the Federal Pass walk created in 1900 to celebrate Australian Federation. While the Federal Pass is still celebrated, the “White Australia” policy that went along with it has been omitted from the story. Now the presence of the indigenous is well acknowledged and their account of the region’s history is presented to all visitors.

Like so many hilltops in colonized nations, the Blue Mountains were once a retreat for colonial administrators away from the summer heat of their domains. Recast as wilderness for tourism, the mountains still tell useful and important stories. Even the clear water that rushes past and falls so dramatically down waterfalls is, despite appearances, polluted with urban run-off and you are warned not to drink it.

Wilderness was a modernist fiction designed to create set-aside regions of physical space to provide mental contrast for urban workers. The very fact of its palpable “contamination,” its complex and challenging histories and consequent impossibility makes for a different kind of appeal. There’s no reason not to go, enjoy a walk or a climb. It’s just not “wilderness.” It’s outdoor Disneyland.

 

Undermining Neoliberalism

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It’s been one of the surprises of this project to see how often the subject of mining recurs. Miners have, of course, long been key figures in progressive and labor movements, but all that was supposed to be “old” capitalism. Today’s immaterial labor was not supposed to be affected by such issues. Only we’ve seen steel and coal strikes worldwide in the past year, from India to France, Spain and now South Africa. Given that the neoliberal solution to extracting primary resources has been to outsource them to developing nations, perhaps it is now caught in its own trap.

As you will know, striking miners at the Marikana mine owned by Lonmin in South Africa were fired on by police, leading to 44 deaths, 250 or more in hospital, and a further 259 under arrest. The issue here is that

rock drillers affiliated to the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU) demanded their monthly salary of R4 000 be increased to R12 500.

The rock drillers currently get paid a little over $300 a month for 12 hour days in which you are soaked by water from the drill heads. Other miners estimate that you can do this work for no longer than five years before your body gives out. By way of comparison, a US miner gets about $14.99 minimum for such work per hour, equivalent to $2500 a month, ranging up to $23 per hour, or about $3800 a month.

However, the South African National Union of Mineworkers, the official trade union, has not sanctioned the strike by the drillers. A new more radical union has arisen–the AMCU. The official union was at first even willing to endorse the company’s threat to the strikers that they must return to work by Tuesday morning or face dismissal. Now, following government intervention, dismissal has been taken off the table for the moment.

Julius Malema (left) at Marikana. Credit: Mail and Guardian.

What happens next? Given the militancy displayed in recent days, it’s hard to see how people just go back to work. At a meeting yesterday Julius Malema, a former ANC activist now expelled from the party, called for the mine to be nationalized and for a change of national president. Mourners wearing “Fuck Capitalism” T-shirts clearly agreed. A man using a pseudonym for fear of retaliation told South Africa’s Mail and Guardian:

It’s better to die than to work for that shit. People are coming back here tomorrow [Monday]. I am not going to stop striking.

Further confrontation is surely inevitable.

Once again, London-based capital is behind all this. The anonymous sounding Lonmin company is in fact the notorious Lonhro company, standing for “London and Rhodesian Mining,” under a new name. Once run by the appalling Tiny Rowland, even a Conservative British prime minister designated the racist and exploitative company “the unpleasant and unacceptable face of capitalism.”

The new company has done very well out of the post-apartheid state, as its own website acknowledges:

Our operations, consisting of eleven shafts and inclines, are situated in the Bushveld Complex in South Africa, a country which hosts nearly 80% of global PGM resources. We have been granted a New Order Mining Licence by the South African government for our core operations, which runs to 2037 and is renewable to 2067. We have resources of 175 million troy ounces of PGMs and 43 million ounces of reserves.

Platinum sells for about $1400 an ounce, so it’s not surprising that Lonmin made $148 million profit in the second half of 2011. Six men died underground during this period, named

Thamage Kgwatlha, Modisaotsile Edward Setlhare, Alfiado Maziwe, Hermanus Potgieter, Rafael Macamo and Alpheus Mokgano Moerane.

Mining remains what it has always been: dirty, dangerous, exploitative, destructive to the environment and highly profitable. Ironically, one of the most significant uses of platinum is in catalytic converters for vehicles, designed to reduce pollution and carbon emissions.

When the video footage of the shootings came out, all the comparisons were to apartheid-era policing. Certainly, like police forces from New York to Athens, overreaction appears to be the policy of choice here. What is being defended, however, is not the local racialized privilege that ruled in Southern Africa for centuries but the neo-liberal formula of low local wages for high global profit. Of course, the workers still tend to be people of color and those profiting tend to call themselves “white.”

The question now is whether the miners’ action sets off a wider discontent with the post-apartheid settlement, as Julius Malema is arguing it should. Too little benefit has accrued to the majority population in the past decade. A new elite cadre class is doing very well at the behest of traditional interests.

There’s just the chance that neo-liberalism has undermined itself. The “Troubles” in Northern Ireland resulted from one day of violence, as did the militant stage of the anti-apartheid struggle. It’s too soon to tell if the Marikana mine massacre will be the new Bloody Sunday or Sharpeville. But if not here, soon. And not before time.