Child labour, cobalt and the London Metal Exchange: Fetish, fixing and the limits of financialization

This article considers the surprising, tentative, emergence of the London Metal Exchange as a quasi-labour regulator following persistent scandals over cobalt mined by child labour in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). It argues that this case offers us a useful window on the limits to financialization. The ‘financialization’ of cobalt here refers to the process by which cobalt has come to be traded as a speculative asset. Such processes have often been understood in terms of a ‘divorcing’ of value from the underlying material form. The persistence of controversies around child labour and cobalt highlights particularly clearly how fraught a process any such divorce is. Theoretically, the article develops these arguments through engagements with Marxian and Science and Technology Studies (STS) literatures on commodification.