There is this common misconception that the downsides of consumer culture only exist in faraway places. I’m trying to clear up this fallacy, not just because this perceived distance feeds the ‘out of sight out of mind’ mentality which spatially stratifies our ability to care but also because this line of thinking absolves us from the need to question lifestyles on the “winning end” of global capitalism. I know it’s convenient to pretend that your phone came from a white box. But I want you to understand that there is no love in this life dedicated to commodities, that consumer culture kills on both ends of the equation, and that Congo isn’t far away because Congo is everywhere.
How do you talk about the malady of the consumer society? I often do, but in a manner that might seem self-absorbed - I’ll talk about how my perception swirls around trying to grasp for anything real, how we don’t have community but are supposed to feel happy because of the shit we get to buy, and I let Baudrillard, Adorno and Herman Hesse be the translators of my internal anguish, but ultimately I’m doing a great disservice - to the people whose non-freedom depends on my perceived one in liberal capitalism, to all the blood spilled and to truth - because if I talk about the consumer society I should be talking about the imperialist global economy and if I talk about the imperialist global economy I must talk about Congo.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard Europeans who haven’t opened a book on Congo in their lives and nonetheless fancy themselves qualified commentators thought-jumble something about how African leaders are just bad and that’s why this is happening. Of course, it only takes a slightly more knowledgeable person to know that ever since African countries officially decolonized, any good leaders with aspirations and love for their people have swiftly been taken out by Western secret services and replaced by more manageable ones who don’t dream of Pan African freedom. Congo of course has seen its fair share of puppet presidents, Mobutu for the US, the Kabilas for Rwanda and Uganda. But it’s not just the kleptocrats and tyrants, in every aspect of its apparent dysfunction Congo is made to be this way. For centuries, its entire institutional and infrastructural make-up has been designed, through the concerted efforts of colonizers, multinational corporations and ruthless investors, for the maximum extraction of value with the minimum consideration for Congolese’s lives. Countless industries worldwide rely on cheap minerals and metals and whether it is gold, silver, diamonds, zinc, tin, copper, uranium, cobalt or coltan, Congolese soil holds the supply. These industries can’t afford for Congo to be an autonomous, functioning state and in fact, Congo serves them best if it keeps existing as a violent operation for plunder masquerading as a state.
At the time I’m writing this, there are 7 million internally displaced people in Congo and 100 million people living in extreme poverty, 6 million people have been killed in the past 30 years and if that wasn’t already a living hell, women and girls are subjected to unthinkable rates of sexual violence by armed men. This conflict started as a spillover of the Rwandan Genocide, but don’t be fooled by any “ethnic tensions” framing - this is essentially a scramble by multiple militant groups, for mineral-rich territory.
Two resources are especially sought after in Congo today, cobalt and coltan, essential components of the lithium-ion batteries that go into electric cars and rechargeable electronic devices like laptops and smartphones - and although there is much talk of slave labor-like conditions when the Western press discusses the mining operations, there is little talk of slave masters, as if these things happened to nobody’s wrongdoing and as if there weren’t amongst the global tech oligarchy willing takers for the blood ores (there are and it's all of the major tech companies, Apple, Microsoft, LG, Samsung, Tesla, Dell etc). To reach us, the consumers, these resources are mined under inhumane, hazardous conditions by people who barely earn enough money to survive. Siddharth Kara paints a picture of absolute desolation in his investigative work “Cobalt Red”, telling the stories of the men, women, children and sometimes pregnant girls, who are working themselves to exhaustion to get by. There is no consideration for the worker's health or life in these mines. Miners often get heavily injured or permanently disabled working there, if not killed in one of the frequent tunnel collapses. On top of that the minerals they handle are toxic and the health implications are severe. A study conducted by the University of Lubumbashi showed that people living in mining areas, even if they weren’t miners themselves, were tested for having cobalt in their urine. There is additionally, exposure to nickel and uranium in and around the mines, so cancers and birth defects are on the rise. As Kara writes “The global economy presses like a dead weight on the artisanal miners, crushing them into the very earth upon which they scrounge.” (2022)
Of course, none of this is new. Congo has, ever since it was so to speak “invented” as a country, found itself at the center of an economic system, which the philosopher Achille Mbembe described as necropolitical, necropolitics being a mode of political power in which some entities have the capability to render others disposable and to turn “war and terror” into “modes of production” (2019). From first contact with the global economy during the transatlantic slave trade, to the atrocities of King Leopold’s forced labour regime to today’s mining crisis, Congo’s economy has never been anything but a system of gruelling exploitation, accelerated to the point that it becomes the imminent threat of death. Mbembe explores how the constructs of race and Blackness are used to legitimize this economic system, how the degradation of Africans as subhuman creates a sense of normalcy around their brutalization. While that holds true, I think that there is another legitimizing factor at play here and that is consumerism.
Consumerism creates this totalizing trade-off by which the freedom of the most exploited people on the planet is inextricably linked to a loss on our part. A loss of the material standards that we have become comically entitled to, in such a way that it doesn’t just make liberation appear less desirable to us, but that places it out of the realm of possibility. Consumerism is the mechanism by which the destructive forces of imperialism are incorporated into our understanding of normal life and made into the rationale of the prudent and reasonable. And it’s so incredibly effective. Even people who are more than easily convinced of the importance of supporting the Congolese struggle might feel deterred because once you realize how much of our consumer habits depend on Congo, it feels like an impossible hill to climb. Like I said before, Congo is everywhere.
This is, of course, not to make an overly simplistic argument of the “you criticize the system yet you participate in it” variety. I’m not interested in any argument that privileges individualism over system change (funnily enough that is exactly what the electric vehicle industry is doing, which uses 40% of the world’s cobalt and presents their products as a sustainable purchase people must make if they care at all about the planet). Rather I want to point out how insane it is that it is virtually impossible not to partake in the killing of Congo.
Today any citizen of the imperial core is functionally barred from participating fully in society without buying consumer goods that are made using blood cobalt and coltan. Smartphones have become a debilitating dependency at best and a deep-seated psychosocial addiction at worst. As life increasingly takes place online, asking someone to boycott Apple seems akin to asking them to burn their house down. Even if they know that these gadgets were sourced under dubious conditions and that they eventually, like all real and metaphorical waste, will be dumped in landfills in some other part of the world. But what does it mean to them, because they won’t have to experience this commodity in its past or future. When they experience it, no longer a clump of dirt dug out the ground by an underpaid child, not yet a piece of garbage that is totally recyclable for-sure-I-swear, they experience it in its presence and the peak of its material existence, an apparatus to fry brain cells in innumerable hours of screen time, and as such it feels like a net good. And in this presence, in its actuality, the smartphone actualizes them.
I’m not saying this to be preachy. I know this is true because my brain is similarly fried and because this isn’t the first time commodities fundamentally changed us. In the late 19th century, when Congo was the personal property of Belgium’s King Leopold II, Kauchuk, or natural rubber, was the main object of Western greed in Congo. It was used for the production of electrical wiring and rubber tires, which enabled the manufacture of automobiles, televisions and other household appliances for the mass market. Like smartphones, these products aren’t just tools valued for their utility, but rather signifiers for a way of life that is both aspirational and pregnant with ideas of conformity, normalcy and Bürgerlichkeit. The fact that the symbolic value of these commodities is more important than their use value becomes apparent in the way these products are regularly replaced by the newest, most fashionable iterations, even if they are hardly different in function. Cause what kind of person are you, if you didn’t own the newest television, car or stand mixer? What kind of person are you if you aren’t permanently plugged into cyberspace?
This is why consumerism is so potent as a legitimizing force for oppression because any ethical or ideological impulse shatters against the moral dead end that is consumer rationality. Even in 1890, Europeans knew that there was something fundamentally wrong about kidnapping the wives and children of Congolese villagers to force them into collecting rubber, mutilating and lashing their bodies if they didn't harvest enough of it fast enough. In 2024 we know that it’s wrong that entire communities have to leave their homes by the barrel of a gun because someone found cobalt heterogenite in their backyard. We also know that these tech companies wouldn’t have it any other way because this is the most profitable way to do it. And we accept this as an inevitability because we think that ultimately, outside of the collateral damage, these products still benefit us. I’m afraid we got this devastatingly wrong. This doesn’t benefit us. Anyone who still thinks that this wealth in shiny objects, stuff and distractions was desirable, despite the suffering and murder it is causing, also believes that a belly full of food should be satisfied even if it’s rotten.
Is it that radical of me to think that there is something fundamentally wrong with a product that children died to manufacture, not just because it is a product of slave labor and child labor but because it’s as much a product, and very distinctly so, of a society that has accepted slave labor and child labor as fair means to make a profit. The tech that is so ingrained in our lifestyles reflects these values in its functioning. The alienation, the self-absorption, the lack of care for one another, the endless longing for more, more stuff, more content, more dopamine. I’m starting to think that everything in this life cluttered with mass-produced planned obsolescence junk, is meant to feel just vapid enough that you keep buying and consuming more just to fill the void. The Marxist philosopher Guy Debord once claimed that “the colonizers themselves were colonized”, a sentiment that has been echoed by the Congolese artist Joseph M’Belolo Ya M’Piku, who explained that “the Belgians colonized the Congolese, but capitalism had colonized the Belgians at home”. M’Piku and Debord had met in 1966 when they were both part of the Situationist International. What they’re both getting at is that colonizing nations unleash violence and destruction on the colonies, wielding death for profit maximization, only to instill a way of life at home that is itself akin to death, a half-life driven by nothing but the desire to accumulate commodities, devoid of substance, authenticity or love.
At the same time, consumerism distracts people from the fact that they are lacking these things. People who get to indulge in the treat of buying the stuff that has continuously been assaulting their nervous system in the form of advertising, are less likely to think about how they don’t like their jobs, rarely see their friends or feel unfulfilled. According to Debord, this mode of mass consumerism is epitomized when the commodities become images, or in other words, mass media, an idea that is exemplified more than ever today by the way we use social media. This most addictive and immersive form of consumerism, keeps us obedient by disconnecting us from reality and by distracting us from just how soul-crushing life under capitalism feels. So we remain seated on this disorienting carousel of content and commodities that never stops long enough for us to see the world around us in shambles.
Occasionally, global social awareness does penetrate the bourgeois psyche, but rarely in any meaningful way. However sparingly images of poverty, wars and world-ending extractivism are invoked, whenever they are it’s only so that we can sigh in relief that it isn’t us, which in turn reaffirms the way of life on this side of empire, which seems more democratic, safe and protected in comparison. I want to get back once more to Achille Mbembe, to this quote from his book Necropolitics that I haven’t stopped thinking about:
What is this new condition? Hoping for a possible victory over the master is no longer appropriate. We no longer expect the master’s death. We no longer believe he is mortal. As the master is no longer mortal, a sole illusion prevails over us, namely that we ourselves participate in the master. We are now living only a single desire, increasingly so on screens, from screens. The screen is the new scene. The screen does not only seek to abolish the distance between fiction and reality. It has become reality-generating. It forms part of the conditions of the century.
This perfectly encapsulates how I feel about the Congolese struggle. The alliance that continues to bleed this country dry seems too large to conceptualize: the conspiring neighboring countries and their rebel armies, the US empire that uses Rwanda as a proxy for violence, the Mega Corporations that leave Congolese children to die in ditches, all of it seems overwhelming, like standing in front of a giant object that reaches so far and wide you could never see the end of it until it disappears completely in its sublime monstrosity. And now it’s no longer there, the forces of neocolonialism aren’t visible, the master is dead and we have replaced him. Because we are told again and again that capitalism is a zero-sum game that we are lucky enough to be on the winning end of. That means that we are the ones in control right?
The truth is of course that nobody benefits from this but the wealthy elites who get to fill their pockets. The rest of us get distracted from the overwhelming lack of control we possess as regular people, as employees, as citizens, as voters, with the spectacle of consumerism and increasingly so that happens online. These online worlds don't seek to “abolish the distance between fiction and reality” but rather create these escapist fantasy worlds in which our social needs are met and in which we have the opportunity to influence anything. The advocacy for Palestine online is a good example of this. The complete 180 in public perception over the past 10 months is obviously absolutely invaluable. But we should not let that distract us from the fact that the material conditions for Palestinians have not changed in any way. The fact that Western policymakers have not made any attempt to bring justice to Palestine, that most institutions and companies have not made any moves toward divestment to stop the killing, really calls into question the idea of real people power. We should not conceit ourselves into thinking that we participate in the master.
But that is what neoliberal capitalism does, it makes us feel like we are so free and so powerful. And consumerism, as a structure of neoliberal capitalism, presents us with the only arena where we actually experience being either of these things. You are totally in control when it comes to shopping. Do you want this or that? Your opinion matters. Don’t mind the fact that you are not even free to choose not to fund genocides with the money you spend. Even the most socially aware people seem to think of consumerism as a double-edged sword, that hurts people somewhere far away but that ultimately benefits us. Instead, we should start thinking of it as a sharp dagger inflicting the same wound on all of us. Consumer culture is a structure that benefits the capitalist class, billionaires-CEO and thieving governments, while exploiting the people of the global majority for their labor and land and exploiting the consumer society for its lack of genuine fulfillment or influence. That’s why none of us will ever be truly free until imperialism has vanished from this world. Free Congo so that one day we may be free as well.
thank you for writing this, it was an absolutely necessary read !!