Just a few years ago, the energy transition and the associated uptake of electric vehicles was conceived as something of a boon for the implicated actors: carmakers, miners and battery groups. As the quote from the Financial Times (FT) above suggests, it is turning out to be a somewhat rockier ride than first envisioned. Rapidly changing battery technologies mean rapidly changing and dynamic market conditions and consequently, “a winner today could be a loser tomorrow and a loser today could be a winner tomorrow”, as a Belgian supplier of specialized chemicals for batteries put it in the same FT-article. Current dynamics in the electric vehicle (EV) supply chains therefore mirror the cut-throat competition of capitalism more generally, where individual companies form their profit strategies based on judgements about an indeterminate future that “remains to be constructed”. Carmakers, miners and battery groups are of course pivotal economic agents in the energy transition and hence through their investments decisions and control of commodity production play a significant role in constructing this future, however, they are not alone in this.
The Darwinian moment for the various capitalist actors is further complicated by the practices of different states that are also trying to construct the future of the energy transition through various industrial and trade policies. These policies are actively trying to shape and direct EV supply-chains in the midst of rising geopolitical tensions. So, for example, the Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act seeks to disentangle Chinese actors from the emerging EV-supply chains and instead spur on the localization of the different steps in the supply-chain either within the US (‘onshoring’) or within states that are considered geopolitical allies (‘friendshoring’). Amidst such tensions, states with natural resources that are significant in current decarbonization technologies as well as states trying to benefit from the emerging geo-political fault lines are also developing relations with specific nodes in the EV-supply chains so as to promote and facilitate capital accumulation within their territories.
As is well known and documented, while the current Darwinian moment may lead to ‘blood on the floor’ for capitalist actors, the expansion of mining activities historically and today has mainly been associated with peoples’ blood on the floor. Carefully scrutinizing and examining the emerging EV supply chains through the profit-strategies of the actors that underpin them along with state-practices trying to shape them is therefore crucial in the current moment of political-economic transformations around the energy transition, in order to inform the strategies of peoples’ movements. For good reason, anti-mining movements and their allies have typically focused on the mining companies and their direct activities in sites of extraction. However, in the vast transnational EV supply chains emerging today, mining companies are just one actor amongst many. In this piece, we seek to contribute to ongoing counter-strategy discussions by labour and broader social movements implicated in and/or impacted by the emerging EV-supply chains by zooming in on one of the actors that remain less well-studied: battery manufacturers.
We focus on the Chinese battery group CATL. CATL is the dominant global battery manufacturer with a 37% world market share in 2023 and with customers including Tesla, Geely Automobile Holdings (the China-based owner of Volvo, amongst others), BMW and Volkswagen.
