The rapid ramping up of lithium production by two companies in Chile has successfully benefitted major electronic companies such as Samsung, Apple and Panasonic. In the automobile sector, Toyota, General Motors, Tesla, Volkswagen and BMW are some of the companies reaping economic advantages of the lithium sources of Chile. To satiate the vampire-like thirst of different companies for lithium, there has been a global increase in production and the role of Chile in catering to the lithium hunger of "white gold rush" is indicated by the contemporaneous expansion of Chilean lithium output with world lithium output: "The value of Chile's lithium carbonate production rose to US$200 million by 2007, to US$500 million by 2012 and to more than US$800 million by 2017. It exceeded US$1 billion in 2018. There was a parallel surge in the value of world first-stage lithium output reaching US$484 million in 2007, US$998 million by 2013 and US$2865 million in 2017."
With the demand for lithium expected to grow in the global market, indigenous people and the working class would start encountering greater difficulties in sustaining themselves as indigenous ecosystems are efficiently eradicated and labor productivity is ruthlessly increased. During the Fastmarkets' 11th Lithium Supply and Markets Conference in Santiago, "Producers Albemarle, SQM and Tianqi [which has a 23.77% stake in SQM]" agreed that flexibility in production remains vital for addressing diverse industrial and technological challenges." This was a colloquial way of saying that workers need to be ready to be exploited, discarded and denigrated as mere commodities. For the indigenous people in Chile, life would be wrung economically dry as energy transition occurs in the Global North and magnificent Tesla vehicles silently operate on their blood-stained lithium batteries.
We need to remember that this dystopia of EVs parasitically procuring lithium from the open veins of Chile is avoidable and as said by Thea Riofrancos, "A world buzzing with hundreds of millions of Teslas (or worse, e-Escalades), made with materials rapaciously extracted without the consent of local communities, manufactured under a repressive labor regime in polluting factories""in other words, a world not unlike our own, but powered by wind and sun""is not an inevitability." To move away from such lithium imperialism, we need to listen to the smothered voices of the Global South. An economic-ecological model based upon the anti-imperialist foundations of the Global South is radically different from capitalist models of extraction. Instead of conceptualizing a "development alternative", the oppressed masses of the Global South imagine an "alternative to development". In the interstices of this "alternative to development", one can locate the seeds of resistance to lithium imperialism.
Previously Published in Dissident Voice.
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