Third World Problems
and our First World collaborations
I have been thinking about our role as consumers in America, the labor aristocracy of the world. Simply due to being born to the first world, our lives are infinitely, almost incomprehensibly ‘better off’ than the “accurséd lot1” shared by the countries dominated by Western imperialism. This week, news came to the West that a mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo collapsed, killing at least 200 miners. In search of coltan, a major ore necessary for key technology and defense sector production, at least two hundred human lives were swallowed into the earth, blood-sacrificed for higher profits.
I would be remiss to continue without acknowledging the sheer devastation of the loss of 200 people at once. It is something that I can barely even comprehend as I write this. A high school graduating class or some small town on the Eastern Shore — gone in a second. The magnitude of that kind of tragedy is almost unfathomable. But these tragedies occur regularly under the contemporary global capitalist regime.
The United States has increased its import of coltan and related ores by 15 times just in the 5 years from 2013 to 2018.2 At the same time, the bipartisan bourgeoisie backing both Obama and Trump solidified the end of the sanctions regime against Rwanda, the country occupying and smuggling the ore from the DRC.
By now, this type of lockstep evil should shock no one: the two parties feed from the same trough of billionaire slop, fattening up on profits extracted at home and abroad. The representatives of these two ‘opposing’ parties — opposing in the way the two sides of a coin are ‘opposite,’ yet remain the same coin — are even feted together in New York mansions or Caribbean islands by the world’s preeminent sex trafficker-slash-intelligence asset.
We may look on in disgust, shaking our heads in horror, but this problem is not as simple as identifying that the political leaders of the country are craven and morally destitute. The minerals mined are necessary for the production of our conveniences: coltan is refined to create capacitors necessary for our handheld electronics. Our ‘first world’ floats precariously on oceans of blood, as it always has. In Congo, this comes into stark relief, a land once ‘owned’ as the personal property of Belgium’s contender for world-historic villain, King Leopold. Coltan replaces rubber as the extractable resource du jour, and the international bourgeoisie — from Rwanda to the States — continues to exploit, continues to profit. The best part? Companies like Anduril3 can use the processed mineral to build better surveillance and repression technology to wield against those fighting back against ICE and DHS. It is a distilled alchemical transmutation of blood, in exchange for more blood.
McKay, C. (1919). If we must die. The Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44694/if-we-must-die. [I recently taught this poem at school and the students actually liked it more than other poetry we have studied this year.]
US imports of smuggled Congolese coltan | The Oakland Institute. Oakland Institute. (2025, October 21). https://www.oaklandinstitute.org/report/shafted/us-imports-smuggled-congolese-coltan
Yes, this is another Thiel-backed venture named after the Lord of the Rings (movies, I am assuming, as there is almost no chance he can sit still enough to read).