Materialism and the {Critique} of {Energy

Materialism and the Critique of Energy Edited by Brent Ryan Bellamy and Jeff Diamanti Materialism and the Critique of Energy Materialism and the Critique of Energy Brent Ryan Bellamy and Jeff Diamanti Copyright 2018 by MCM' Publishing. Anyone may reproduce, store, and transmit any part of this publication in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, under the following conditions: you must give the original authors and editors credit; you must include original publication data; and you may not use this work for commercial purposes. Failing these conditions, all rights are reserved. Published by MCM' Publishing Chicago 60608 www.mcmprime.com Library of Congress Control Number: 2018949294 To Imre Szeman, for everything and more. For all those broken and exhausted by the impasse and for what yet may come. Materialism and the Critique of Energy ix Brent Ryan Bellamy and Jeff Diamanti: Materialism and the Critique of Energy Theories 1 Allan Stoekl: Marxism, Materialism, and the Critique of Energy 29 Peter Hitchcock: “Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink”: Accumulation and the Power over Hydro 51 Daniel Cunha: The Anthropocene as Fetishism 73 Katherine Lawless: Mapping the Atomic Unconscious: Postcolonial Capital in Nuclear Glow 95 George Caffentzis: Work or Energy or Work/Energy? On the Limits to Capitalist Accumulation 121 Elmar Flatschart: Crisis, Energy, and the Value Form of Gender: Towards a Gender-Sensitive Materialist Understanding of SocietyNature Relations Histories 161 Andreas Malm: Long Waves of Fossil Development: Periodizing Energy and Capital 197 Adam Broinowski: Nuclear Power and Oil Capital in the Long Twentieth Century 243 David Thomas: Keeping the Lights On: Oil Shocks, Coal Strikes, and the Rise of Electroculture 289 Gerry Canavan: Peak Oil after Hydrofracking 315 Daniel Worden: Oil and Corporate Personhood: Ida Tarbell’s The History of the Standard Oil Company and John D. Rockefeller 331 Jasper Bernes: The Belly of the Revolution: Agriculture, Energy, and the Future of Communism Cultures 377 Sheena Wilson: Energy Imaginaries: Feminist and Decolonial Futures 413 Amy Riddle: Petrofiction and Political Economy in the Age of Late Fossil Capital 443 Amanda Boetzkes: The Political Energies of the Archaeomodern Tool 471 Alberto Toscano: Antiphysis/Antipraxis: Universal Exhaustion and the Tragedy of Materiality Politics 501 Matthew T. Huber: Fossilized Liberation: Energy, Freedom, and the “Development of the Productive Forces” 525 Tomislav Medak: Technologies for an Ecological Transition: A Faustian Bargain? 547 Jonathan Parsons: Anarchism and Unconventional Oil 581 Warren Cariou: Oil Drums: Indigenous Labour and Visions of Compensation in the Tar Sands Zone 605 Dominique Perron (Trans. by Wafa Gaiech): The Oil Bodies: Workers of Fort McMurray 627 Contributors 635 Selected Bibliography 675 Index Materialism and the Critique of Energy Brent Ryan Bellamy and Jeff Diamanti The critique of energy sits between two fields that condition the present — environmental catastrophe and capitalist crisis. Marx wrote that the past “weighs like a nightmare” on the living.1 With global warming and the interminable crisis of capital, it is not just the past but the future, too, which strikes fear into the human mind. During the ongoing industrialization of the planet under capitalism, fossil fuels have been the dominant source of energy to power economic expansion and political domination.2 The very fabric of today’s climate crisis is knit from the exhaust of intensive and extensive waves of capital accumulation. Typically framed as a consequence of bad consumer habits, the environmental problem of energy is and always has been deeply bound to the material origins of the commodity form — what it takes to make a thing and what it takes to move it. Today, the lion’s share of emissions come from transportation and production sectors of the industrial economy. By almost every projection, the simple reproduction of existing systems of production and distribution, to say nothing of their growth, will doom the planet to a host of ecocidal developments — from rising sea levels and ocean acidification to desertification in some places and more intensely concentrated rainfall in others. Against the weaving of such catastrophic tapestries, pundits of the coming energy transition spread solace with the techno-future vision of a world that could be different than the one currently soaked in hydrocarbons. Yet these proponents of technologically smoothed energy transition miss the forest for the trees: the question is not simply one of engineering, but x Materialism and the Critique of Energy instead how to overcome the deep roots of capitalism’s ever-growing energy dependence. Whether for the requirement of aggregate economic growth or the expansion of new horizons of value, capitalism has been historically and logically bound to ever-increasing quantities of energy. The core contradiction of today’s economic system is and always has been tied to its facility with energy. A critical standpoint on the conditions of political, economic, and ecological possibility requires a new account of energy’s historical function, which is to say, a new account of energy’s relationship to the production, distribution, and accumulation of value. Materialism and the Critique of Energy develops this standpoint, first, by revisiting the entangled conceptual and material history of capital and energy at the foundations of materialism and, second, by clarifying the stakes of a critique of energy for contemporary critical theory and politics.3 Its core claim is that while the condition of climate change today has occasioned a groundswell of interest in energy regimes and environmental systems, only the materialist critique of energy found at the heart of Marxism can explain why capitalism is an energy system and hence offer a clearer sense of a way out of its fossil-fueled inertia.4 As a collection of research on the lineaments of energy in materialist thought, this book distills a form of energy critique both sensitive and hostile to the many forms of inequality, injustice, and exhaustion that populate the contemporary political landscape. Materialism has a long history. Though materialism’s roots as a philosophical project stretch further back than the nineteenth century, we are concerned with its turn toward the material structures that began shaping social life in a quickly industrializing Europe. Current understandings of both energy and materialism were forged in the furnace of coal-powered innovation. The coeval emergence of industrial capitalism and self-consciously materialist thought is not mere coincidence; nor can their historical emergence be explained as simple causal determination. Rather, we argue, their emergence must be understood dialectically, beginning with a critical recognition: Introduction xi the materialist tradition that emerges out of this moment is already terminologically and epistemologically connected to the industrial flares of a fossil-fueled world. From Ludwig Feuerbach, Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche to twentieth-century critical theory, Marxistfeminism, and the multiple post-humanisms and new materialisms emerging today, streams of different materialisms flow: each is historically shaped by the industrialization and globalization of fossil fuels.5 This is particularly urgent given that this materialist tradition, after Marx, remains the basis for the most viable critique of the political-economic system, capitalism, whose rolling crises appear increasingly indistinguishable from the looming problems of energy and climate. Materialism has developed two modes of tracking energy that demystify the force unleashed by fossil fuels: on the one hand, through the critique of political economy; and on the other, through a theory of materiality contoured by the access to deep history and cosmic space made available first by coal and eventually by oil and natural gas. There is a historical dimension to these trajectories. The methodological and theoretical development of Marxism, the tradition most strongly associated with the first of these two modes, begins in the 1840s within the contemporaneous surfacing of the theory of energy across Britain, Prussia, and France. What this means for materialism as it evolves from Feuerbach’s treatment of Christian reason to Marx’s critique of capital is that energy is dialectically bound to economic history — not a concept or variable independent of it, but a structuring force without which capital could not operate. Following this originary recognition, energy slipped away from materialist understanding until Walter Benjamin intervened to articulate a materialist revision of cosmic time. His dialectical apprehension would identify the stylistic force of energy over and above its positivistic or physicalist concept. Energy, through Benjamin’s gaze, becomes a materialist concept once more. The following three sections examine these developments in turn. xii Materialism and the Critique of Energy Marxism and the Origins of Energy Critique Marxism could be said to have two births. In the first, the fires of the Industrial Revolution breathe forth a concatenation of social conflict from which the labor movement and international communist movement emerge. But a different kind of Marxism is also nascent in the mature phases of the second scientific revolution. In the late-eighteenth century, from the principles of motion, Newtonian mechanics, and models designed to exhibit scientific discoveries came political economy, industry, and the tools of the industrialist’s trade. Sadi Carnot (1796–1832) famously drew up a theory of the caloric from simple observations of the steam engine, and Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894) refined his ideas about the conservation of energy in observations of muscle metabolism.6 The work of the body and the work of the machine, once ignited by the roaring furnace of fossil fuels, allowed for the redefinition of the conceptual constellations of science. In the collision of the industrial and scientific revolutions a new set of variables emerged: energy and work; wealth and value; labor and capital. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, developments in production and economy — mixed with increasingly sophisticated accounts of what in the eighteenth century was still called vis viva or living force — occasioned the simultaneous discovery of energy. By mid-century, Lord Kelvin (1824–1907), Julius von Mayer (1814–1878), Rudolf Clausius (1822–1888), and Hermann von Helmholtz arrived at more or less the same law of the conservation of energy. Thermodynamics emerged from this cauldron of scientific and industrial exchange as a key field of knowledge. Its theories stated that the total energy of an isolated system is constant and that energy can be transformed from one form to another but can be neither created nor destroyed. The theory of energy as it unfolded in this crucial decade did not descend from the heavens, but bubbled up from the hidden abode of industrial production. This is the remarkable insight offered by the twentieth-century historian of science, Thomas Kuhn, whose analysis Introduction xiii of the “simultaneous discovery” of energy conservation frames the paradigm through which energy would emerge — as much the effect of economic history as it is an outcome of scientific discovery. He opens his 1956 essay with a query: “Why, in the years 1830-1850, did so many of the experiments and concepts required for a full statement of energy conservation lie so close to the surface of scientific consciousness?”7 Kuhn approaches an answer to his question in the form of a threefold hypothesis. First, the scientific and industrial instruments of the 1830s made available multiple instances of the conversion process from water, wind, wood, and coal into motion or thrust.8 Second, the dominant investment driving scientific discovery was the economic “concern with engines.” And third, the “philosophy of nature” running through Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and their shared Naturphilosophie made German thinkers, but British and French scientists as well, “deeply predisposed to see a single indestructible force at the root of all natural phenomena.”9 When Kuhn makes reference to something like “scientific consciousness,” he means it as both a cause and an effect of — at least in the case of the doctrine of energy — an emergent mode of understanding the economic, technical, and philosophical coherence of force. Put differently, the “scientific consciousness” responsible for the doctrine of energy helps generate, and in Kuhn’s account is symptomatic of, the emergence of a new mode of production: industrial capitalism.10 The emergence of the doctrine of energy and Marx’s materialism in the mid-nineteenth century is not sheer happenstance. Rather, their emergence is mutually implicated in industrial phenomena. The decisive shift from the problem of alienation in Marx’s early writings to the more technical language of labor power of Capital signals a growing awareness of the historical and social specificity of energy flows bound to the worker’s exploitation. Terminologically, labor power is identical to Helmholtz’s word for the work of energy (Arbeitskraft), which, as Anson Rabinbach reminds us, had been rapidly popularized across public science circles since late 1840s in xiv Materialism and the Critique of Energy Western Europe.11 As a technical term for the value form of human work in the factory too, labor power simultaneously names the objective consistency between the worker’s caloric output, the coal power expressed in machinery, and the abstraction of both forms of Arbeitskraft by the value form of capital at a more general level. Arbeitskraft is the concept Helmholtz had been using in the 1840s to distinguish energetics from vis viva or living force still resonant with the scientific epistemology of the previous century. Between the 1840s and the 1850s, Marx had changed his thinking on the core concepts that would animate his critique by the time of Capital in 1867. Rabinbach argues that by positing Arbeitskraft Marx finally had access to the concept necessary to conceive of capitalism as a totality. This means that Marx’s more developed critique of political economy, sensitive as it is to the energic content and calibration of Arbeitskraft, already contains a critique of energy. By naming the commodification of human work labor power, Marx alerted his readership to the twofold abstraction taking place in the production process: human exertion becomes a flow of energy in the concrete, while at the same time being modulated by the value form of capital in the abstract.12 The calorie burners of a human body offer a relatively inefficient source of physical energy compared to even the heat and light released from burning a piece of coal. Yet no lump of coal ever got up and threw itself into the furnace of the steam engine. Capital thrusts human and fossil energy together to extract surplus value from the former but at a greater and greater magnitude due to the energic efficiency of the latter. Once the conditions for industrial capital are in place, neither coal power nor labor power can produce surplus value independent of the other, because each form of energy congeals unevenly into, and is in turn socially regulated by, what Marx calls the “organic composition of capital.”13 Marxism offers a developed concept of energy by taking note of just how entangled the capitalist compulsion to increase productivity and the generalization of coal power were. If capitalists could keep the factories open around the clock, then they might also seek to Introduction xv implement the ever-profitable “curtailment of the necessary labourtime” by implementing labor saving techniques and machines.14 Later, Marx adds that “[t]he same causes which develop the expansive power of capital, develop also the labour power at its disposal. The relative mass of the industrial reserve army thus increases with the potential energy of wealth.”15 In this sense, Marx’s notion of labor power and its social regulation are inextricably connected, via the dialectic of forces and social relations of production, to the energic capacity of a given place and time. Marx’s concept of labor as it evolves over the course of his writing registers, among other things, the radically disruptive and uneven process of fossil energy’s integration into the social relations of production. Both a familiar and a novel relation to energy is at work across industrial capital at this time — from muscle-bound forms of human and animal labor to productivity-lending machines in the factories. The energy innovations of water- and steam-powered production reduce the amount of labor time required to produce a given commodity by a worker of average skill and productivity. The influx of water- and coal-powered machines into the site of production shift the balance not only in labor’s intensity, but also in its worth. The environment through which labor was organized and sustained was submitted to constant revision as capitalists dug deeper into the dirt to build waterways for mills and unearth new sources of coal. In essence, the new regime of energy generates a radical transformation in the character of the labor-capital relation. Counter to orthodox histories of the industrial revolution that posit coal power as a cheaper and thus natural replacement to wind, water, and wood, Andreas Malm offers a unique account of this historical transformation into a fossil-fueled industrial economy. Malm outlines the ways in which coal-powered steam engines offered a solution to a labor problem plaguing British capitalists: namely, how to bring the site of production into the urban spaces where the newly dispossessed were gathering.16 Coal power, according to Malm, did not rise because of its relative cheapness, but because of the ease of transporting coal as compared to transporting xvi Materialism and the Critique of Energy water power, which had to remain proximate to the waterways. At its origin then, fossil capital increased the productivity of a newly minted proletariat in the same moment that it generated their class relation to the new mode of production. Put concisely, the proletariat became materially bound to the industrialization of fossil fuels; one becomes unthinkable without the other. Why Energy Needs Dialectics and Why Materialism Needs Energy Marx reconciles the critique of political economy with the otherwise positivistic concept of energy dominating scientific inquiry, yet he does so with a dialectical twist — showing energy and labor as immanent to one another — that turns energy into a moving target. Marx’s treatment of energy occurs shortly after Feuerbach inspired a new direction in materialism. Energy became a core component of historical materialism when Marx connected the surge of physical force in the production process to a twofold abstraction of human labor — on the one hand by coal-powered industrialization and on the other by the value form of capital. Yet the concept of energy developed along alternative genealogies in nineteenth- and twentieth-century materialism, becoming an index of how materialist thinkers imagine their relationship to the physical and the metaphysical. Briefly tracking one such genealogy, we offer an account of how the historical particularities of energy’s systematic usage inform its concept and figure. These particularities include the social, economic, ecological, and political environments in which energy is put to work. In the history of materialism in the twentieth century there are a number of vital encounters with energy, staged at different levels of abstraction. Consider for instance the figure of the eternal return so important to Nietzsche and troublesome to Benjamin: “What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you… ‘The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!’”17 Here, Nietzsche personifies the eternal return popularized Introduction xvii by thermodynamic theory. The idea being that a cosmic logic is independent of the ephemeral and self-involved history of human reason. In the person of the demon, the eternal return marks the irony of human finitude and the metaphysical tradition on which Nietzsche leans to make a point about cosmic infinitude. Turn to the famous section 1067 of Nietzsche’s notebooks, The Will to Power, and both the paradigm and promise for thinking this eternal return become more explicit: “And do you know what ‘the world’ is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself.”18 Nietzsche turns the law of the conservation of energy into a metaphysical conceit, a new concept of history divorced from the moral, ethical, and philosophical constructs he found so intolerable. Rather than as a flow made historically contingent, energy, for Nietzsche, is encountered as the world as such. When Nietzsche drew the thought experiment of the eternal return out of the law of the conservation of energy, he may or may not have had Frederick Lange’s monumental book History of Materialism (1866) in mind, but to Benjamin the connection to Lange verified a certain theoretical underdevelopment. Benjamin sees in Nietzsche’s words the traces of a mode of thinking that is taken with its own image. By the early twentieth century, energy had begun to emit a philosophical tendency contemporaneous with its industrialization and figured as ungraspable and inexhaustible growth.19 Both Nietzsche and Lange had certainly encountered the materialism of Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805–1881), even if their references to the communard were infrequent. Blanqui’s appearance in the first volume of Lange’s History of Materialism closes a poetic sequence opened by Lucretius in De rerum natura. Lange drew conclusions about the fate of materialism from Blanqui’s cosmic concept of the eternal return: It is interesting that recently a Frenchman (A. Blanqui...) has carried out again, quite seriously, the idea that everything possible is xviii Materialism and the Critique of Energy somewhere and at some time realized in the universe; and, in fact, has often been realized, and that too as an inevitable consequence, on the one hand, of the absolute infinity of the universe, but on the other of the finite and everywhere constant number of the elements whose possible combinations must also be finite.20 When Lange tied the (in)finitude of being to the fundamentals of materialism, he did so with what was only a faint expectation of its thermodynamic implications. Yet, Lange’s reading of Blanqui supplies the metaphysical coordinates that appear in Nietzsche’s eternal return. Moreover, this reading also defined the material elements in a way that would prove necessary for Benjamin’s materialist conception of the cosmic. As Benjamin conducted his research on Baudelaire, he uncovered a connection between Blanqui’s cosmic criticism and Nietzsche’s eternal return, and he did so, as we know, in the midst of the early rumblings of German fascism. Benjamin’s insight into the sociopolitical appearances of energy’s force comes first in the form of a preemptive critique of the fascistic cult of technology: It is the dangerous error of modern men to regard [ecstatic contact with the cosmos] as unimportant and avoidable, and to consign it to the individual as the poetic rapture of starry nights. It is not; its hour strikes again and again, and then neither nations nor generations can escape it, as was made terribly clear by the last war, which was an attempt at new and unprecedented commingling with the cosmic powers. Human multitudes, gases, electrical forces were hurled into the open country, high-frequency currents coursed through the landscape, new constellations rose in the sky, aerial space and ocean depths thundered with propellers, and everywhere sacrificial shafts were dug in Mother Earth.21 The great surge in forces available to twentieth-century military and industry forces and industry processes struck Benjamin as modern Introduction xix man’s contact point with the flux of the cosmos — a new “physis” consisting of rhythms, temporalities, and spaces previously reserved for the gods. In Benjamin’s critique, the internalization of that force did not express an inversion whereby technology dominated man, as the techno-utopian mastery of nature had in World War I.22 The surge in energy expressed in the war was conditioned by capital. To imagine otherwise was either to be entranced by the mystique of the cosmos or by the mystification of industrial capital. In Benjamin’s treatment, the way all three thinkers — Blanqui, Lange, and Nietzsche — were absorbed in the concept of eternal return was a feature of thinking about the world industrially. Benjamin, in other words, interpreted the conceptual apparatus of the eternal return as reified thinking — a failure to historicize that thus mistakes a perfectly consonant image of the present for being itself: a thought that bubbles up out of production so pure and unadulterated a product of its circumstances that its provenance (and thus historicity) becomes unrecognizable. It was as if they were looking at an autostereogram of factory smoke and seeing the birth of being. If for Nietzsche “the world” is “a monster of energy, without beginning, without end” whose only will is “the will to power,” then “the world,” for Benjamin, is still tied to what he called, following Baudelaire, the phantasmagoria of industry — a world too tied up with industry to recognize the historical specificity of thought.23 This realization defines the allure with which Benjamin archived Blanqui’s anticipation of Nietzsche’s eternal return and, in good Benjaminian fashion, tied it to the historical condition that binds both together. Cut from the same cloth, Benjamin says, the “cosmic speculation” that both men engage in signals a new stage of materialism — a critical state fully responsive to the energic content of history.24 Alas, both Blanqui and Nietzsche are, in Benjamin’s words, from a “century… incapable of responding to the new technological possibilities with a new social order,” which is to say a standpoint out of phase with the technological rush that rapidly overtakes political thought.25 By the time Benjamin took his own life at Portbou, it looked xx Materialism and the Critique of Energy like that incapacity had extended to the twentieth century as well. Benjamin was overcome on more than one occasion by matter, but this is not the same as saying that Benjamin was a new materialist, much less a new (or old) matter-ist. For in his account the problem with the eternal return of energy is that it provoked an unmediated image of industrial progress, rather than a dialectical one. Here we see the aesthetic force of capital’s facility with industrialized energy fully formed: the fossilized mode of production projects an image of itself as a world. In order to move from the phantasmagoric to the dialectical, we will always need one eye on value and one eye on the cultural modulation of nature, lest we turn to either a vitalist new materialism allergic to historical determinability or a thermodynamic desocialization of value immune to the political. The theoretical appearance of the eternal return as cosmic speculation is qualified by the rupture of fossil fuels, even if Benjamin does not yet fully grasp the systemic capacity that capital has drawn from them. It is clear enough to Benjamin that the war machine facilitated by capital drew unconscionable power from the earth’s depths, and that this power was dislocating, violent, and significant at a cosmic level.26 Neither Nietzsche nor Blanqui were wrong in their phantasmagoric image; rather, it is in their interpretation of the outcome that both skip over the historical conditions from which a reified concept of energy is made possible. Occasioned by the new concept of energy supplied by the industrial image of thermodynamics, these cosmic speculations verify the stylistic appearance of energy beyond any immediate experience of it and the incomplete project of critically grasping how it contours historical experience. That is, even if Benjamin is alert to the way in which fossilized energy itself leads to a materialist notion of cosmic time (or a geological time-scale, as we will later term it), his temptation by the cosmic is proximate to the deep time drawn up by fossil capital. This cosmological element in Benjamin’s thinking is sometimes seen as the aberration in his claim to materialism, a similar kind of idealism to that which he takes issue with in the “eternal return” as it appears in Nietzsche. Benjamin’s Introduction xxi “cosmic time” itself functions as another example of a kind of energy unconscious (like Nietzsche’s and Blanqui’s failure to historicize the concept on Benjamin’s account): Benjamin, in other words, does not fully grasp how the burning of crystallized cosmic-time in the form of coal undergirds industrialization; yet, as with Nietzsche before him, he somehow apprehends the consequences of energy’s historically specific stylistic expression, without yet knowing precisely how energy figures in the project of critical materialism. The burning of the fossilized carbon locked away in long-dead plant and animal matter generates a decidedly new, indeed unprecedented, historical situation. Yet this assertion does little to discredit Blanqui, Lange, Nietzsche, or Benjamin; instead, it simply situates the eternal return on a geologic time-scale. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, yet energy passes on for all of time. The problem, for us, is that we live in a fragile habitat, and that fragility is relative to a human standpoint already conjoined to radical social inequality. As Malm writes in Fossil Capital, “the causal power of the past inexorably rises” once capital becomes fossil fueled.27 One cannot separate the cosmic order made available as image to Blanqui and Nietzsche, and in Benjamin’s critique of them, from the economic order of the industrialized energy system. Fossil capital’s burning away of condensed energy from past eras, previously sequestered in the Earth, catches up with the present in the form of billowing emissions that wrap the planet in a warming blanket. The industrialization of energy also produces a vantage from which to assess the ontological status of energy and its residues. Energy’s economic elasticity and social plasticity in the form of fossil fuels, especially once oil becomes the dominant source of global energy in the 1950s is one kind of theoretical problem; its consistency — its unique immunity to creation and destruction — is yet another. Historical materialism was built for addressing this kind of challenge. Whence, then, a critical theory of energy? Where is energy in the critique of capital: an input on the side of labor; a force of production on the side of capital; or, is it somewhere else? Like most good questions, this one also has two sides. On one hand, if what interests xxii Materialism and the Critique of Energy us is the political economy of energy, we can turn to Marx’s own embedded critique of energy. Historical materialism is born in the same breath as the doctrine of energy conservation, not as a version of it, but as a rejection of its uncanny claim on value, history, and labor. For a political economic framing of energy and capital, one might search out the technical location and impact of energy in general on the composition and scientific critique of capital. One might look, for instance, to the human and animal calories per kilojoules of fuel extracted, to the length of the workday, to the organic composition of capital, and to the level of capital’s reliance on energy from fossil fuels to maintain intensive gains year after year. On the other hand, if what interests us is a critical theory of energy, we can follow the conviction that Marxism works best when it conducts immanent critique rather than an intransitive orthodoxy, and ask: how are the core concepts that Marxism takes as its own transformed by the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century experiences of energy substitution at the site of production and mounting impact of climate change everywhere else? This approach relies less on process and outcome. Turning to an ontology of energy, it points to a different order of question, and it has as much to do with the influence of Lucretius on Marx’s materialism as it does with Blanqui’s impact on the landscape of critical thinking in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Materialism and the Critique of Energy Patricia Yaeger has asked how humanists and social scientists might reconceive cultural history in light of the energy regimes that underwrite it. This same question might be asked of the history of theory: what is critical theory in the age of wood, wind, coal, and oil? Answering the question means clarifying the social structure of energy regimes offered across various traditions. Teresa Brennan, for instance, brings the work of Marx much closer to the economic and environmental impasse named by late fossil capital in her book, Exhausted Modernity (2000). Labor, Brennan insists, is an all too human category for Marxism’s critique of the labor theory of value. Introduction xxiii She argues that it moves too far in the direction of objectified nature to allow us to return to an ecological standpoint. To think the critique of the Gotha Programme while reading Capital provides one solution: against the orthodox position that only labor provides value — and the cult of the (masculine) body that flows from this position — the rejoinder that nature provides it too must be read back into the critique of the mode of production that depends upon labor power as well as labor’s minimization. For Brennan, arriving at this point entails adding the “law of substitution” to the Marxist critique of capital. The “law of substitution” follows from a critique of political economy without a subject, where labor power is an embodied force, but one that is nevertheless consistent with the other forms of energy: mechanical, chemical, electrical, atomic. Thinking about energy and labor in these terms achieves a kind of total mapping of what might be called the labor-energy relation. Brennan writes, “time is out of joint.… We smell this around us and know it in our bodies. We console ourselves with the myths of hybrids… while living the divide between a speedy fantasy that overlays us and a natural time that knows it is running out.”28 The rising organic composition of capital squeezes tiny quotients of labor from ever more immiserated and precarious bodies. The concrete and electrical world of fixed capital weighs heavy on the critical and ecological will of the polis. At the same time, for Brennan, labor becomes at once calories, carbohydrates, lipids, protein, and depletion as well as consciousness, language, and international and gendered division. Brennan figures labor as at once matter and materiality — its relation to the environments in which it finds itself embedded is exogenously and endogenously regulated by flows of energy. As such, value begins to disappear as it bleeds in the background of the various flows of the “law of substitution.” In this way, Brennan’s work risks folding labor power back into the world of nature. It stops short by tying capital’s use of energy to socially necessary labor time, threatened ever increasingly by the “violent conversions” of capital’s energic disposition. As Elmar xxiv Materialism and the Critique of Energy Altvater reminds us, nature is “not value-productive, because it produces no commodities to be sold on the market.… [I]t is labor which turns nature into commodities.”29 Moreover Anna Tsing argues that nature is instrumentalized all the time as use value necessary for exchange value — as resource and as standing reserve — though, at any one time, the vast majority of it never enters this relationship quantitatively.30 Instead, the standing reserve of nature gets reconfigured as either carbon sink or fuel in the age of fossil capital. Yet just as true for materialism and the critique of energy is the corollary claim implied by Brennan: namely, that labor power is itself a social relation produced out of capital’s economization of energy’s physical force, a relation that is suffused as much with electrical currents and data flows as it is with blackened carbon-full skies and bleached oceans. The question for today’s materialism would thus seem to pivot back and forth between the question of where value comes from, and how to locate energy in the production and destruction of economic, social, and natural environments. However detached, Marxism’s theoretical inversion of energy into the dynamic of capital’s reinvention of labor is not purely conceptual, and coming to terms with the entanglements of capital and energy regimes from the vantage of Marxism necessarily engages in a dialectic of historicity — a coming to terms with the present as a historical moment, rather than as an empty totality, a plurality of pluralities, or an eternal return. It is to historicize, as Benjamin did for Blanqui, the temptation to think the eternal return of energy — the seduction of metaphysical immunity from economic and ecological catastrophe. If Marxism is to stay true to one of its guiding insights — that “[humans] make their own history, but they do not make it as they please” — it must renew its habit of attending to the pivot located in the critique of energy.31 The central insight that historical materialism brings to a theorization of energy is that the relation we have to fossil fuels, and indeed to all forms of generating, capturing, and storing or distributing energy, is form determined by value. Edison’s major innovation was Introduction xxv not the filament that would illuminate a glass bulb, but the grid that would distribute electricity from the point of its generation to the point of its consumption. He created the mechanism whereby energy could be brought to market. In this way, market relations, and the capital-labor relation underlying them, came to effectively mediate not only the price and draw of energy, but also which energy source would dominate economic capacity, turnover time, and the technical composition of consumption.32 While renewable technologies are gradually displacing fossil fuels from electricity generation — though the jury is out on whether renewables could ever make up for future demand in a growth curve — the grid itself as social form is wired for the accumulation of value (i.e. the former is determined by the latter). The grid’s relation to the energy market, for instance, conceals the origin and source of the electricity, allowing for mixed modes of generation.33 Etienne Balibar claims that “Marx’s materialism has nothing to do with a reference to matter.”34 Following this line, one might say that Marx’s materialism has nothing to do with a reference to energy either, not because the concept and history of energy is not important to Marxism, but because it is essential to separate the sense of energy as eternal return from a dialectical sense of energy as social relation. In Malm’s words: No piece of coal or drop of oil has yet turned itself into fuel, and no humans have yet engaged in systematic large-scale extraction of either to satisfy subsistence needs: fossil fuels necessitate waged or forced labor — the power of some to direct the labor of others — as conditions of their very existence.35 You cannot see energy in the way that you can see a barrel of oil, because energy in the concrete is still abstract, and an energy system fueled by fossil fuels is more abstract still, even though it is determinate of virtually all economic and political capacities today.36 Energy has come to determine the future of capital development in a xxvi Materialism and the Critique of Energy profound way. This is not to say that, therefore, energy is capital and capital is energy: ubiquitous and allusive, forever leaving its mark but hiding under the cloak of appearances.37 Instead they bear a family resemblance, and not accidentally since capitalism’s global spread since the industrial turn — its very systematicity — has been an effect of its facility with fossil fuels. Energy thus does not merely name the capacity for doing work, as in physics, with a focus on potential, kinetic, thermal, electrical, chemical, nuclear, or other forms of energy, but instead makes vivid the ways any future beyond capital must reconceive both the capacity for work and the flows of value. The critique of energy is the critique of our structural dependence on an environmental relation inherited from the industrial revolution; it is a critique of the facile faith in a technological fix to climate change; it is a critique of the many barbarisms that flow from the contradictions of late fossil capital; and it is a critique of a fossil-fueled hostility to the very notion of social revolution — and hence of the very notion of structural dependence too.38 A Note on this Book’s Structure Today a number of critical positions on the importance of energy in social, environmental, and economic history are helping to address what was until very recently a blindspot in social science and humanities critique. This includes the historical work done by Timothy Mitchell, the economic critique developed by John Bellamy Foster and the Monthly Review Press, and the social-scientific inquiry into energy systems offered by John Urry. Many of the authors whose work is included here emerge from or have been in conversation with the Petrocultures Research Group in Alberta where, in the words of the co-authors of After Oil, a new approach to energy is today occasioned by the impasse of energy: “Oil is so deeply and extensively embedded in our social, economic, and political structures and practices that imagining or enacting an alternative feels impossible, blocked at every turn by conditions and forces beyond our understanding or control.”39 Hence many of our contributors look to unexpected traditions and Introduction xxvii thinkers in order to kick-start a more cohesive critique of energy. The collection opens with “Theories”: the pieces that comprise this grouping grapple with the categories provided by Marx’s critique of political economy and look for ways that energy might be properly integrated into such categories. Allan Stoekl begins this section by tracing the development of energy critique from a Marxist perspective, specifically addressing the quantification of labor and of energy that takes place in a capitalist system of accounting. He begins with a crystallized overview of Marx’s critique of the theory of value as it arrives in classical political economy and moves to consider how the expanded use of fossil fuels confirms Marx’s insight. Where Stoekl discusses oil and coal, Peter Hitchcock analyzes water as a vital resource in the reproduction of social relations characteristic of primitive accumulation, tied as it is to dispossession, energy generation, and the slow violence of capitalism’s crude realities. Moving into the territory of control, he asks what relation obtains between hydropower as electricity and hydropower as governing force. The Anthropocene externalizes alienated labor. This is the argument that Daniel Cunha develops in his essay, which posits the Anthropocene as an unfulfilled promise of humanity’s collective stewardship over the Earth and the well-being of all. The new geologic era represents the impacts wrought by capitalist social relations under the direction of less than 25 percent of the planet’s population. Cunha asks: what theoretical tools do we have in Marxism to critique the Anthropocene without fueling the conceptual fetishizations so dominant in environmental discourse? Likewise, Katherine Lawless considers the material and cultural memory of the nuclear era in relation to contemporary discourse on climate and energy. Radionuclides are said to be the key indicator that the Holocene has ended, and that the Anthropocene has begun. Taking up the nuclear as power generator and as radiation’s trace, Lawless suggests that as fields of inquiry energy humanities and memory studies have much to gain from a critical crossing of wires. She xxviii Materialism and the Critique of Energy develops work on the concept of an energy unconscious — the idea that energy systems implicitly structure habits of thought — through its hinge in trauma and latch with nuclear power. Then, moving from residues to the point of no return, George Caffentzis reconsiders the “limits to growth” thesis through an analysis of Saral Sarkar’s EcoSocialism or Eco-Capitalism? (1999) and The Crises of Capitalism (2012). Caffentzis finds much to be admired in Sarkar’s analysis, even as he engages its problematic relationship to history and class struggle. In the final paper of this section, Elmar Flatschart binds a form of value-critique to the conceptualization and politicization of energy relations. Building from his work with the German journal EXIT! Krise und Kritik der Warengesellschaft, Flatschart masterfully weaves what he calls “societal-nature relations” with a Marxist-feminist and an energy-critique analysis. Flatschart demonstrates that to take energy as a materialist category, theorists must problematize the “patriarchal, androcentric, and sexist model of the Othering of feminized (first) nature,” which dominates so much critical work on climate and energy. The contributions in the “Histories” section of the book track problematics crucial to entwining the twin foci of the collection: the impact of fossil fuels on materialism and materialism’s critical apparatus for conceiving of energy and a collective politics responsive to its capacities and contradictions. Andreas Malm, whose Fossil Capital has been so central to the left critique of fossil fuels in recent years, develops here a theory of “Long Waves” of capitalist development. Deploying the work of Ernest Mandel, Malm periodizes waves of capitalist development around technological advances and energy advances, developing a periodization proper to fossil capital. The framework he provides here interfaces with world-systems theory and cultural analysis, offering a much-needed framework for historicizing energy. The book’s focus returns to nuclear power with Adam Broinowski’s history of nuclear development in the world system. Broinowski’s analysis ranges to Russia, the United Kingdom, India, and Japan. In “Keeping the Lights On,” David Thomas narrows Introduction xxix the historical frame and geographic scope to the United Kingdom during the 1970s to furnish a sense of the impact of what he dubs “the rise of electroculture.” In Thomas’s essay, it’s not the oil that’s at stake; it’s the machines, and forms of dispossession, that oil can power. Tracing a history of class struggle and state violence, Thomas deepens a critical frame indispensable to conceiving of labor politics and energy politics as mutually expressive, even as they appear to drift apart in today’s climate discourse. The problem of oil for collective and revolutionary politics has been nearly eclipsed in the postwar period by the “peak oil” thesis. Gerry Canavan asks what are we to make of so-called “peak oil” arguments in light of alternative extraction techniques and natural gases. Canavan engages the question of what to do when the crisis becomes not too little oil, but too much. Going back even further, Daniel Worden traces the cult of personality associated with corporate entities to the life and attitudes of John D. Rockefeller. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil laid the groundwork for how corporate oil would dominate transportation and communications industries. Worden unpacks the social and cultural genres of big oil through Ida Tarbell’s The History of the Standard Oil Company (1902), showing that energy critique has wide resonance across histories and genres. The final piece in this section is Jasper Bernes’s “The Belly of the Revolution,” which traces the long history of agricultural development from before the birth of capital to the present. Bernes makes a political argument as well as a historical one: food will be a (if not the) primary concern for a revolutionary movement to come. The contributors to the section of the volume entitled “Cultures” move the scope of analysis from that of theory and history into cultural form: that of books, art exhibits, and the lived relations of energy capital. Sheena Wilson engages with the utopian dimensions and crucial absences of Jonathan Porritt’s The World We Made (2013) — a book as emblematic as it is absurd in its projection a greenwashed capitalist future. Wilson insists that critical thinkers of energy need to also be critical thinkers of gender, race, and indigeneity, the cultural xxx Materialism and the Critique of Energy histories of which are entangled to the asymmetries of fossil fuels and fossil capital at every stage. Greenwashing the technological base of the world after oil does more work to mask social inequalities than it does to urge us toward a renewable future. Moving deeper into the novel form, Amy Riddle demonstrates what a Marxist-oriented literary analysis and energy critique have to offer one another. Reading Helon Habila’s novel Oil on Water (2010) and Abdelrahman Munif ’s novel Cities of Salt (1984), Riddle contrasts Habila’s use of oil as content with the way oil works behind the scene in Munif ’s novel. She asks, “Why the abundance of physical descriptions of oil in the more contemporary novel?” Turning to the realm of contemporary artistic production, Amanda Boetzkes circles the figurative use of energies in both political struggle and the work of machines. Taking up work from the 2015 Venice Biennale and Fredric Jameson’s Representing Capital, Boetzkes argues for a reading of this art through Benjamin’s use of the archaeomodern tool — in which political energies can be gauged in their representation as petrified objects. The final piece in this section had to come at the end — it would be too devastating to come at the beginning. Alberto Toscano develops a cultural theory of what he calls “universal exhaustion.” Engaging Rabinbach’s The Human Motor, Engels’s Dialectics of Nature, and finally Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, Toscano posits a powerful rebuttal to Jason Moore’s concept of “double internality” that hinges on the dialectics and tragedy of depletion, exhaustion, and the limits to both nature and capital. The essays in the final section of Materialism and the Critique of Energy (“Politics”) take up the question of “what is to be done?” The thickness of our atmospheric haze and the social consequences of near-negative rates of profit, when stitched together, occasion new forms of struggle. “Politics” features infrastructural assessments, a call for direct action, and self-reflexive writing. Matthew T. Huber argues for a revision of Marx’s “Development of Productive Forces.” Huber tracks his argument through David Shwartzman’s call for “Solar Communism.” While careful not to pose a definitive answer, Introduction xxxi Huber situates his analysis as a weighing of the options with the claim that “[h]istorical materialism is nothing else if not a commitment to understanding the political possibilities that exist given certain material conditions.” Jonathan Parsons’s contribution, “Anarchism and Unconventional Oil,” could not agree more with Huber’s insistence on gauging material conditions, yet Parson’s political conclusions insist on the importance of direct action in the struggle against hydraulic fracturing, bitumen mining, and other intensive processes of alternative extraction. Finally, taking on questions of biocapacity and surplus labour, Tomislav Medak interrogates the role of technology in energy transition. At its conclusion, Medak’s piece outlines a model for degrowth premised on the process, focus, and governance of technological development. The two pieces that end this section push against the conventions of an academic collection, though their form as personal essays ought to be recognizable and refreshing. Warren Cariou offers a story about Indigenous labor in tar sands and the complicated overdetermination of work, life, land, and struggle that emerges from the tar sands of Northern Alberta and Saskatchewan. Dominique Perron’s piece offers another twist to the story of oil workers in Northern Canada. Her essay reflects on the migration of laborers from the far reaches of the country and discusses the effects of working in bituminous sands. Perron offers a Marxian-inflected Bourdieusian reflection on the workers and a coda on the May 2016 wildfires that ravaged Northern Alberta. This book presents no single answer to the twin fields of social anguish that characterize the present: environmental catastrophe and capitalist crisis. Yet, it recognizes that these fields cannot be eliminated, reconciled, or transformed without thinking them together. The collected essays of Materialism and the Critique of Energy present starting points for carrying out the work of making energy into a conceptual category for the critique of capital and for figuring the dynamics of historical change crucial to understanding the role of energy in human development. Today, as the annual consumption xxxii Materialism and the Critique of Energy of fossil fuels lurches upward, emerging economies industrialize and postindustrial economies automate. The vague promise of a clean transition to a renewable economy rings out as capital’s own false consciousness of its material structure. With a projected increase of 45 percent global energy consumption by mid-century in order to maintain current growth rates, we are no doubt on the brink of a major transition.40 Without a materialist critique of energy, the transition will almost certainly exacerbate, rather than alleviate, environmental and economic anguish. Notes The authors are enormously grateful for sustained, challenging, and exacting feedback from Justin Sully, Imre Szeman, Nicholas Brown, and Marija Cetinić on this essay. 1. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx/Engels Internet Archive, 1995, 1999 (1852), https://www.marxists.org/archive/ marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ 2. Energy names both the strength and vitality required for sustained physical or mental activity and the power derived from the utilization of physical or chemical resources. It is also true that fossil fuels have been the dominant source to power revolutions, the overthrow of colonial rule, and many of the imaginings of alternative social orders, which is not to mention the USSR, PRC, Yugoslavia, or other communist nations (each of which relied heavily on fossil fuels). 3. This collection responds to a set of challenges and questions posed by the emergent field of study called the energy humanities. For an introduction to the field, see Imre Szeman and Dominic Boyer’s “Introduction: On the Energy Humanities in Energy Humanities: An Anthology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017); Bellamy and Diamanti’s special issue of Reviews in Cultural Theory titled Energy Humanities (2016); the short Introduction xxxiii treatise After Oil (2016; available in full at afteroil.ca); and the website of the Petrocultures Research Cluster (www.petrocultures.com). 4. See Brent Ryan Bellamy, “The Inertia of Energy: Pipelines and Temporal Politics,” Time, Globalization, and Human Experience, eds. Paul Huebener, Susie O’Brien, Tony Porter, Liam Stockdale, and Rachel Zhou (New York: Routledge, 2016) 145–159. 5. For an account of how Marxism anticipates, and is in the unique position to critique, the proliferation of materialisms today see Kimberly DeFazio, “The Spectral Ontology and Miraculous Materialism,” Red Critique 15 (Spring 2014) http://redcritique.org/WinterSpring2014/ spectralontologyandmiraculousmaterialism.htm 6. Howard Caygill, “Life and Energy,” Theory, Culture & Society 24.6 (2007) 21; Russell Kahl, Introduction to Selected Writings of Hermann von Helmholtz (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan UP, 1971) xvi. 7. Thomas Kuhn, “Energy Conservation as an Example of Simultaneous Discovery,” The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1977 [1956]) 72. Kuhn observes that without naming energy as such, William Grove (1811–1896) and Michael Faraday (1791–1867) in England, as well as C.F. Mohr (1806–1879?) and Justus von Liebig (1803–1873) in Germany, simultaneously observed both the convertibility of force across electrical, thermal, and kinetic forms, and more importantly that this force could neither be created nor destroyed. 8. Here we are referring to scientific instruments such as James Prescott Joule’s (1818–1889) apparatus for measuring the mechanical equivalent of heat and industrial mechanisms for converting energy such as the wind mill, water wheel, and steam engine. 9. Kuhn, “Energy Conservation” 73, 96. 10. By the mid-nineteenth century, the manufactory system had taken hold of Britain. Though the timing of this development is a hotly contested historical debate, the long transition from feudalism was now nearing its completion. T.H. Aston and C.H.E. Philpin, eds, The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987) and Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origins xxxiv Materialism and the Critique of Energy of Capitalism: A Long View (London: Verso, 2002). 11. Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Los Angeles: U of California P, 1990) 55. 12. For a compelling political argument modeled on the poetics of entropy see Karyn Ball, “Losing Steam After Marx and Freud: On Entropy as the Horizon of the Community to Come,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 20.3 (September 2015) 55–78. 13. Though Marx rarely speaks of “energy,” he does when discussing the industrial reserve army in Chapter 25 of Capital: “It is capitalist accumulation itself that constantly produces, and produces indeed in direct relations with its own energy and extent, a relatively redundant working population…” Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume I, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books, 1976 [1867]) 782, 798. 14. Marx, Capital Vol. I 432. 15. Capital Vol. I 798. 16. Andreas Malm, “The Origins of Fossil Capital,” Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 32. 17. Friedrich Nietzsche, “§341: The Heaviest Weight,” The Gay Science, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008) 194–195. 18. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (New York: Random House Books, 1967) 549–550. 19. We’re grateful for Tyrus Miller’s treatment of the concept of the eternal return and Benjamin’s fascination with it in “Eternity No More: Walter Benjamin on the Eternal Return,” Given World and Time, ed. Tyrus Miller (Budapest: CEU Press, 2008). 20. Frederick Lange, History of Materialism Volume 1 (London: Trübner & Co., Ludgate Hall 1877) 151. The Blanqui Lange writes of is indeed the Blanqui after whom Blanquisme, a particular revolutionary attitude, gets its name. As Friedrich Engels wrote in Der Volksstaat: “Blanqui is essentially a political revolutionist. He is a socialist only through sentiment, through his sympathy with the sufferings of the people, but he has neither a socialist theory nor any definite practical suggestions for social remedies. In his political activity he was mainly a ‘man of Introduction xxxv action,’ believing that a small and well organized minority, who would attempt a political stroke of force at the opportune moment, could carry the mass of the people with them by a few successes at the start and thus make a victorious revolution.” Friedrich Engels, “The Program of the Blanquist Fugitives from the Paris Commune,” Marxists.org, trans. Ernest Untermann 1908, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/ works/1874/06/26.htm 21. Walter Benjamin, “To the Planetarium,” The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, eds. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Harvard: Harvard UP, 2008) 58. 22. Benjamin, “To the Planetarium” 59. 23. Nietzsche, Will to Power 550. 24. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1999) 15. 25. Benjamin, The Arcades Project 26. 26. Tyrus Miller contends that Benjamin understands eternal return socially and meta-historically as a critique of progress. Benjamin finds a fellow traveler in Blanqui on this investment. “Blanqui conjoins a temporality of crisis with a temporality of repetition,” Benjamin claims, but he goes one step further and gives the shared time of crisis and repetition historical weight by situating what Miller calls the “privileged crisis point” in history—the very moment when this “cosmic order” becomes intelligible to Blanqui (“Eternity No More” 288). 27. Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (New York: Verso, 2015) 9. 28. Teresa Brennan, “Why the Time is Out of Joint: Marx’s Political Economy Without the Subject,” South Atlantic Quarterly 97.2 (1998) 278. 29. Elmar Altvater, “The Social and Natural Environment of Fossil 30. Anna Tsing, “Sorting out Commodities: How Capitalist Value is Made 31. “…they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under Capitalism,” Socialist Register 43 (2007) 41. through Gifts,” Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3.1 (2013) 21. circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” xxxvi Materialism and the Critique of Energy Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire. 32. For a discussion of grids, futurity, ruin, and politics see Karen Pinkus, “Intermittent Grids,” South Atlantic Quarterly 116.2 (April 2017) 327–343. 33. These components shift, behaving differently in varied historical contexts as well. The energy of the center is not the energy of the periphery. Moreover, the varied historical contents also have to be taken into account in different national contexts. 34. Quoted in Alberto Toscano, “Materialism without Matter: Abstraction, Absence and Social Form,” Textual Practice 28.7 (2014) 1222. 35. Malm, Fossil Capital 19. 36. In tracking the lineaments of capital as a real abstraction, Benjamin Noys suggests there is “no image of capital, capital itself is a kind of pure relationality, a pure abstract relation of value, labour and accumulation, which can only be ‘seen’ in negative.” Benjamin Noys, The Persistence of the Negative (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2008) units/cppe/seminarpdfs/2005/toscano.pdf. 37. See also, “[m]oney is both abstract and real; it is a real abstraction that, even if it does not really exist, produces effects in reality.” Oxana Timofeeva, “Ultra-Black: Towards a Materialist Theory of Oil,” e-flux 84 (September 2017) http://www.e-flux.com/journal/84/149335/ultrablack-towards-a-materialist-theory-of-oil/ 38. Timothy Morton, like other object-oriented-ontology enthusiasts, takes global warming as the final nail in the coffin for anything resembling revolutionary will: “We were perhaps expecting an eschatological solution from the sky, or a revolution in consciousness — or, indeed, a people’s army seizing control of the state. What we got instead came too soon for us to anticipate it. Hyperobjects have dispensed with two hundred years of careful correlationist calibration. The panic and denial and right-wing absurdity about global warming are understandable. Hyperobjects pose numerous threats to individualism, nationalism, anti-intellectualism, racism, speciesism, anthropocentrism, you name it. Possibly even capitalism itself.” Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 2013) 76. Introduction 39. xxxvii Imre Szeman, et al., After Oil (Morgantown, WV: West Virginia UP, 2016) 16. 40. International Energy Agency, World Energy Outlook (Paris: OECD, 2008) Marxism, Materialism, and the Critique of Energy Allan Stoekl Marxism and the Question of Value In all the discussions of economic crisis in recent years, there hovers an uncanny specter: that of the problem of energy. It’s relatively easy to link rapacious capitalist exploitation of the earth to the contemporary ecological crisis; it’s much harder to see beyond capitalism to another economic regime, one that would address not just economic and social injustice, but ecological exploitation and destruction as well.1 Of course intuitively these injustices go together, but how precisely can one imagine a society respectful of both labor and the environment arising out of the collapse or destruction of capitalism in its current, not so novel form? Is the Marxist critique of an economic regime intimately linked to a fundamental critique of an energetic regime? How? Or is the Marxist critique opposed to an energetic one? And, finally — a question I will develop in the final section of this essay — is there a way of conceiving the “commodity” (the product, one can argue, of both human labor and energetic inputs) that leads to a revision of the notion of value as elaborated in the Marxist and energetic traditions? The path of ecological economics and energetics is attempting, of course, a linkage that seeks broadly to reintroduce environmental and energetic concepts back into accounts of growth. I would argue, however, that there is an important contradiction between a Marxist critique of capitalism and the critique of capitalism carried out by ecological economists and energeticists. In the first case, from the 2 Materialism and the Critique of Energy classic Marxist perspective, the final crisis of capitalism will be an essentially economic one: the falling rate of profit will render the larger capitalist economy unworkable and ripe for proletarian revolution. In the second model, capitalism’s vulnerability is due above all to the fallibility of the growth model itself — the principle that the world’s economy can indefinitely “grow” its money supply and its profits on the basis of a fundamentally finite world of energy resources and materials. The first model — Marx’s — focuses on labor, falling profit, and the fallacy of the infinite expansion of capitalism through profit; the second — that of, among others, Frederick Soddy, M. King Hubbert, and Richard Heinberg, which I’ll call here the energetic argument — highlights the material basis for the unworkability of capitalism: the finitude of the earth and its resources.2 These are, one can argue, two very different propositions. Nevertheless, I will argue that, in the end, each theory provides something the other lacks and that, moreover, there is even a certain kind of complementary relation between them. And I will also argue, finally, that the Marxist and energeticist models are not only connected, but that future models of value must go beyond their seemingly inevitable dyad. Let’s look at Marx’s model first. Marx is forced to separate out the material basis of the “commodity” (the thing produced through human intervention) in a thoroughgoing way. This is a somewhat contentious point, and has been debated practically since Capital was first published. Certainly recent commentators, such as John Bellamy Foster, have underlined the fact that Marx stressed the double genesis of the commodity: “labor is the father of material wealth, the earth is its mother.”3 But one sees very little of mom in Marx’s analysis in Capital I. The economic analysis is all important; the ecological — and Marx certainly never used the word — not at all.4 In N. Scott Arnold’s (rather problematic) summary, three basic theses characterize Marx’s analysis of the value of the commodity: Marxism, Materialism, and the Critique of Energy 3 (1) The Law of Value (LV): Commodities that exchange in the market have equal value. (2) The Identity Thesis: The value of a commodity is identical to the quantity of socially necessary labor required to produce it. (3) The Theory of Surplus Value (TSV): The profit that accrues to the capitalist is the difference between the value of the labor power he employs and the value embodied in the product he sells.5 The second, “Identity Thesis” is, I think, the basis for the others, and for Marx’s entire argument in Capital. The value of an object consists, quite simply, in the amount of work, done by a person, or persons, that went into it. And when a commodity is exchanged, there is, absent the ephemeral fluctuations in the market, an equivalence based on the inherent labor contained in the object. But if value is identified with labor, then the question of what is and what is not labor looks like an important one for Marxists to ask. Arnold’s second and third theses in fact conflate “socially necessary labor” (thesis 2) and “labor power” (thesis 3). But are “socially necessary labor” and “labor power” the same thing? Arnold seems to assume that they are, but the argument can be made that they are in fact quite different. First, one should note that Marx indeed does distinguish between “labor” and “labor power.” Marxist critic Duncan Foley notes that labor can produce products, which are “bought and sold as commodities.” But, again quoting Foley, “it is impossible to give an exact sense to the idea of buying and selling labor itself, productive activity.”6 Why? Foley does not dwell on the point. Perhaps the problem is that labor itself is not a quantifiable element but an activity that cannot simply be reduced to a presence in a thing. What the laborer sells is not labor, but his labor power, which is, again according to Foley, not the product of labor but the promise “to expend labor in the interest and under the direction of the purchaser, in exchange for a sum of money, the wage.”7 It’s almost as if labor in and of itself both founds and escapes the economic relation; it is a differential, a social relation 4 Materialism and the Critique of Energy that makes possible an equivalency (the value of two commodities, compared) while itself remaining intangible. It is, on the other hand, labor power that can be quantified, but not in and of itself. Labor is doubled, and has to be, in other words, in labor power, and through this doubling labor is identifiable with any physical object whose value can be measured and compared — a physical object, in other words, a commodity, which can just sit there and have a comparable and convertible value. It’s through the quantification and abstraction of labor power that the capitalist makes his money: in surplus value there is a temporal differential between, as Marx writes, “that part of the working day necessary to reproduce the value of the laboring power, and the surplus-time or surplus-labor performed for the capitalist.”8 Labor power is something that is sold, and that goes to reproduce itself (by allowing the worker to live). Labor under capitalism reproduces itself through labor power, in other words. Labor can be abstracted, quantified, promised, represented, and misrepresented only in and through labor power, which is strictly speaking not labor. Labor power’s performative is labor’s misrepresentation. When it is represented or projected forward as a speech act — the constative and performative aspects of the speech act, in other words — labor is inevitably misrepresented: it is held to have a certain value, which is not, cannot be, its true value (under capitalism, at any rate). The value of labor power is inevitably double for this reason, and a double falsification: it is the power to reproduce a certain amount of labor (the worker receives money to eat, clothe, and house himself and his family) and an extra quantity of obfuscated labor — misrepresented labor — that is stolen from the laborer. The quantification of labor power under capitalism allows this to happen. Representation, quantification, and abstraction are thus obfuscation; labor is wrapped up in the promise to expend (labor power), met by the (deceptive) promise to pay (in full, anyway). Labor itself floats at the margin, beyond representation, beyond category, beyond quantification, absolute, only what it is not: if labor Marxism, Materialism, and the Critique of Energy 5 is somehow alive, intimately connected with the person, and with the necessary social activity of the laborer, it is known only through the exchange value of commodities, objects, which are themselves inert, passively sitting there, waiting to be compared. Dead, really, just quantified stuff. Labor can only be known, under capitalism, through this misrepresentation. It is capitalism that has transformed the activity of labor to a quantified, abstract thing, a thing that allows the capitalist to unjustly take his share. My labor is inalienable; my labor power can be stolen. But how are the two conjoined? I think there is a passage in Capital that gives us an idea of what Marx was getting at with labor (as opposed to labor power), although the passage in itself doesn’t help us think about how to quantify it. Marx writes: [T]he commodity-form, and the value-relation of the products of labor within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material [dinglich] relations arising out of this. It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There, the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labor as soon as they are produced as commodities.9 Note that Marx is concerned here above all in identifying labor as the source of value in commodities, with distinguishing labor as a “social relation” from the sheer thing status of the exchangeable commodity. Marx seems to be thinking of social relations as a kind of deep sociability, which one could argue is profoundly resistant to quantification. A commodity, in other words, is not a thing that 6 Materialism and the Critique of Energy somehow has an independent life separate from human social relations. It is not a fetish, in the religious sense, an idol that exists above and beyond human society, blissfully alone in its realm of the absolute. Rather, it is defined as the concretization (the “crystallization”) of relations between people. Labor is a social relation, it is the social relation: it is the one that really counts, the one that is embodied in the commodities upon whose use value we depend to live, and thus to continue in our social relations. The fetishized commodity — that which exists as does a god, more alive than the laborers who produced it — is also the quantified commodity: it becomes autonomous when there is a definitive number attached to it (exchange value) that lets it exist independently of producers and their labor. From this perspective, while labor is the “definite social relation” par excellence, labor power is the ultimate fetish, the sheer quantification that opens the possibility, so to speak, of all other fetishes, all traded commodities that seem to have lives of their own. The paradox of this is that Marx’s materialism, which grounds value in labor, is nevertheless at a loss to account for any value, since labor itself — as opposed to labor power — is precisely not quantifiable. Labor power is a travesty of labor, just as the fetishized commodity is a travesty of labor. Labor is fundamentally resistant to quantification and hence representation. I would even go so far as to argue that Marx, the famous materialist, has largely disavowed the materiality of the commodity. The true commodity cannot incarnate labor power, for which a laborer is paid, but rather the labor that somehow eludes representation and quantification themselves, a kind of absolute labor. For this reason we still don’t understand how labor entails value, or how that labor is conjoined — through the misrepresentation of labor power — to a calculable economic relation. Is quantifiable labor power just primordial capitalist ideology, which will fall away after the final Revolution? Or might there be something more to it, beyond ideology? How then can Marxist economic analyses of surplus value (and the concomitant final crisis of capitalism) be Marxism, Materialism, and the Critique of Energy 7 carried out with scientific certainty? Perhaps labor is only part of the story. The non-quantifiable social relation alone cannot explain how products are produced through a process that involves quantification: of labor inputs, of value that inevitably entails comparison of values. But if labor cannot be “fetishized” in quantifiable production and products, it nevertheless enters into relation with a quantification process. It does so, I would argue, through a kind of holy or unholy alliance with fossil fuels. Labor as the “social relation between men themselves” cannot accomplish anything without the add-on of energy derived from fuel. Value, one could argue, is clearly dependent not just on human labor power, no matter how it is defined, but on the inputs of energy derived from sources external to the human body or human consciousness. Raising beams in construction, heating ore to make steel, transporting goods in trucks or trains: all require massive inputs of energy deriving, for the most part, from the combustion of fossil fuels. Marx, in passages other than the one I cited above, most certainly notes the importance of “two elements, the material provided by nature, and labour.”10 Stuff, provided by nature, is always part of any commodity. We always need stuff, and it comes, ultimately, from the earth. Yet energy in the form of both bodily and machinic fuel is not the same as mere stuff, as “material provided by nature.” Fossil fuels not only provide materials to make other things out of — plastics from petroleum and natural gas, for example — they also provide the energy inputs without which humans could not produce “commodities” on the scale required by modern industrial society. The energy derived from fossil fuels, in other words, contributes to the value of finished products. But from the standpoint of Marxism, what does it mean to contribute to the value of the finished products, if the orthodox claim is that labor is the sole source value? This energy, one could say, is a supplement to human labor, but it is nevertheless distinct from that labor. It is inanimate, and in its lifelessness it recalls the nightmare of commodity fetishism: the “the fantastic form of a relation between things.”11 Without externally derived energy, labor 8 Materialism and the Critique of Energy (however one defines it) could accomplish only a tiny portion of what it does in the current fossil-fueled economic and industrial regime — or even in a non-capitalist one. Yet Marx does not seem to recognize the importance of this difference between the materials used to make things and the materials that make labor possible. He notes it only to then ignore it. Consider the following quotation from Capital I: Raw material may either form the principal substance of a product, or it may enter into its formation only as an accessory. An accessory may be consumed by the instruments of labor, such as coal by a steamengine, oil by a wheel, hay by draft-horses, or it may be added to the raw material in order to produce some physical modification of it, as chlorine is added to unbleached linen, coal to iron, dye to wool, or again it may help to accomplish the work itself, as in the case of the materials used for heating and lighting workshops.12 Note here the fact that Marx does not distinguish between what today we would call adjuncts (chlorine to linen) and uses of materials such as coal and oil that provide inputs to “accomplish the work itself.” The addition to or modification of a material, in Marx’s view, is no different from the energetic input of coal or oil which fuels an engine or heats a workshop. And yet the nature of these “accessories” is clearly quite different. Adding coal to a steam engine — or hay to a horse — makes the work it does possible; adding chlorine to linen, or oil to a wheel (to grease the wheel, I take it) merely facilitates a process that is powered in some way not disclosed.13 Marx here, without making it explicit, provides a distinction between “work” and “labor”: “accomplishing the work itself ” presumably indicates the entire work process, incorporating both human labor and the supplemental energy of coal or oil (or hay). Marx, however, does not elaborate on this distinction, perhaps for fear of clouding the primacy of labor — the purely human and social component — in the constitution of value. This ignoring of the component provided by energy sources (coal, Marxism, Materialism, and the Critique of Energy 9 oil, hay) is perfectly consonant with what I earlier indicated as the nature of Marxian labor, found in the awareness of the labor process itself, as concretized in the commodity. If labor is essentially the social relation and our knowledge of it, while performing it, the component of “work” added to the production process by burning oil or coal will be largely irrelevant, or at least fundamentally external to what really matters in the creation of value. Labor is the living social relation; work, derived from fuel, is the offshoot of the calculable energy inputs derived from stuff (oil, coal, natural gas, whatever). Once used, the energy derived from fossil fuels— the contribution of the energetic “accessory” to “work” — can never be returned. It does not fit into an economic model of restitution that is fundamental to Marxism: the worker regains control of his labor. A gallon of oil burned to power an engine in a communist regime would be no more and no less used — but not exploited, one can’t exploit a thing — than under the worst capitalist regime. The thingness of oil bears no relation to the profound humanity of labor. Oil’s energy is not somehow crystallized in the commodity, as labor is held to be. I will go further: if labor is profoundly resistant to quantification and even representation, then, on the other hand, energy resources are profoundly quantifiable. In fact, that is all they are: matter quantified, matter not somehow indicating a social relation, but matter (fuel) destroying itself, in order to make possible a kind of supplement to labor, namely, work: a certain number of watts, horsepower, or BTUs produced. Energy resources, after the admixture of labor, nevertheless are a gifted resource of the earth, they help laborers labor, but they are fundamentally alien to labor; they are the finite (“non-sustainable”) adjunct that comes from the earth, that is taken from it. No human has labored to put them there. Can one argue that considerations of energy expenditure must play no role whatsoever in considerations of the stagnation or ultimate crisis of the capitalist system? Should we assume that energy use is neutral and that there are no economic consequences to various fossilfuel regimes? That the oil used to power an engine is no different from 10 Materialism and the Critique of Energy the grease used to lubricate a wheel? If we turn this line of questioning around, we can see another possibility: that human labor is only part of the story and that considerations of energy must play a fundamental role in any model of the stagnation, and hence ultimate fall, of the capitalist system. But the question remains, how? We might even argue that the rather bizarre connection between labor and labor power — between that which fundamentally resists quantification and abstraction and that which is the very ground of that abstraction — is made possible by another and more fundamental connection: between labor as source of value and energy expenditure as source of value. If labor is, finally, “living” and thus social — not an inanimate and overweening fetish — then fuel for its part is dead — the residue of life on earth from millions of years ago. Labor only becomes effective when it is conjoined with inanimate energy. Labor in its social essence (if we can speak of such a thing) might remain fundamentally non-quantifiable, with “no connection with the physical nature of the commodity,” and yet once labor in capitalism (and one assumes under some future communism) is intensified by energetic inputs from fuels it is somehow conjoined with “relations between things.” Thus the true source of value may be found not in a Marxian unquantifiable labor, which in a mystical fashion conjoins with quantifiable energy inputs to create value, but rather in the energetic inputs themselves. In this case economic crisis finds its origin not in a “falling rate of profit” (ultimately based on inadequate restitution of profits to a hazily conceived labor), but instead in a crisis of growth tied to the ever-greater expense of energy derived from fossil fuels. But basic questions remain: how is the monstrous hybrid of nonquantifiable labor and the quantification of energy inputs possible? What is their point of conjunction? And what then is the role, and fate, of labor? And beyond that, of sociality itself? Marxism, Materialism, and the Critique of Energy 11 Energetics and the Matter of Critique Another tradition exists, which posits another source of value, another scenario of economic stagnation and collapse, and another solution to the fundamental problem of social inequality. As in the Marxist model, this one stresses the idea that modern capitalism is doomed and that a more just regime will arise through the correction of the fundamental problem(s) that plagues modernity. And here, too, as in the Marxist theory of value, some reckoning is missing in the old order: a necessary reckoning that will account for the missing (or, in the Marxist case, stolen) component of value creation. If the Marxist model posits surplus as the invisible element that makes the system function — the share created through the worker’s labor that disappears into the capitalist’s pocket — in this one that element is energy provided by external (so-called natural) sources. To be sure, oil is pumped (sometimes fracked), refined, and transported — all elements of its value that “crystallize” human labor inputs. But oil’s value ultimately rests on the energy it releases that has not been added (and cannot be) through human effort. The crucial element here is Energy Return on Energy Investment (EROEI). Oil is of no value if its use value is only the embodiment of the energy (human and otherwise) invested in its production. The whole point is to get a kind of surplus value, not from the laborers themselves, but from nature. Of course Marx, as we have seen, anticipates the addition of a certain value to any commodity that would come as a “gift” from nature. But here the gift is what makes the entire operation of advanced capitalism function — it’s a lot more than just the gift of passive materials like wood or iron ore, which are things given form through human intervention. Here the contribution of nature’s “gift” is active. And indeed we can hardly call it a “gift,” since there is nothing voluntary about nature giving it up. An energetic theory of value makes possible an economic critique of the capitalist economy as it is currently constituted. This theory is associated with thinkers such as Frederick Soddy in the 1920s, and, 12 Materialism and the Critique of Energy in the 1930s, an American economic and political group that styled itself “Technocracy Inc.”14 One of the key thinkers of Technocracy was M. King Hubbert, whose later work in the 1940s and 1950s came to greatly influence “peak oil” debates in the early 2000s. A contemporary follower of Hubbert, Richard Heinberg, presents the problem straightforwardly: the American economy is a growth economy: if it does not grow, it stagnates, and stagnation is inseparable from economic crisis. Prosperity is growth. But how is growth under capitalism possible?15 Heinberg writes: Currently all nations have a type of financial system in which virtually all money is created through the making of loans. Thus, nearly all of the money in existence represents debt.… [M]oney is not a physical substance kept in a vault, but a fictitious entity created out of nothing by bankers in order to facilitate the keeping of accounts.16 Here again, as in Marx, we have the concept of a value that is a fiction: in the case of Marx, we saw that the wages paid to workers were a fiction, in the sense that they represented only a portion of the true value of the work “crystallized” in the commodity. In this analysis as well money is a fiction, because it is arbitrarily created to obfuscate — once again — the true source of value. Heinberg goes on: All of this being so, a problem arises: From where does the money come with which to pay back the interest on loans? Ultimately, that money has to come from new loans, taken out by others somewhere else within the financial network of the economy. If new loans are not being made, then somewhere in the network people will be finding it impossible to pay the interest on their existing loans, and bankruptcies will follow. Thus the necessity for growth in the money supply is a structural feature of the financial system.17 Nevertheless, one could object that the economy has continued to expand, and spectacularly so, for a hundred years — with, of Marxism, Materialism, and the Critique of Energy 13 course, the occasional downturn. How was this almost continuous expansion — this growth — then possible? The answer is simple: from a continuous growth in energy supplies. Again, Heinberg: Until now, this loose linkage between a financial system predicated upon the perpetual growth of the money supply and an economy growing year by year because of an increasing availability of energy and other resources has worked reasonably well.… Productivity — the output produced per worker-hour — has grown dramatically, not because workers have worked harder but because workers have been controlling ever more energy in order to accomplish their tasks. …With less physical economic activity occurring [due to the decrease in the availability of energy], businesses would be motivated to take out fewer loans. This might predictably trigger a financial crisis.18 The basic energeticist theory, then, from Soddy, the Technocrats, to Hubbert and Heinberg and many others, is consistent: increases in productivity derive ultimately from the energy provided by fossil fuel inputs. In fact all of the growth in the system (of “total economic activity, population, and money supply”) derives from ever-increasing supplies of energy resources: coal, natural gas, and, above all, oil. A decline in the availability of these resources will mean a decline in the performance — and most certainly the growth rates — of the economy. Beyond stagnation, bad enough already, one can foresee social crisis of the worst sort. “Cornucopians”19 on the other hand, argue against the energeticists that “the stone age didn’t end for want of stones,” and that the oil age won’t end for want of oil: in other words, shrinking supplies of fossil fuels will be replaced by technological wizardry and the development of other energy resources.20 This argument is distantly related to that of Marx: energy supplies are fully dependent on human labor — in human technological advances — not just in the production and refining of supplies (crude oil to refined oil and gasoline, for example), 14 Materialism and the Critique of Energy but in the very development of previously unknown or unknowable supplies. From this perspective the possible growth of energy supplies is limitless and is fully dependent on human labor.21 If, however, we continue to posit with Heinberg the eventual limits to growth — the earth is, after all, finite in its energy resources — we still have a problem. Labor is a secondary component in this model of value: it comes down, finally, to the control of energy supplies. Labor in this sense is pretty much just the expenditure of energy: it’s the calories put out by the worker in the production of commodities, or, much more likely, in the work done to control the energy derived from external sources. There are “ecological” or “carbon footprint” models that purport to demonstrate the exact amount of carbon-based energy that must be expended to make a given product.22 They at least offer the promise of the calculation of energy inputs in all products and activities. On the simplest level we can say that as energy costs rise — the price of oil and natural gas, for example — there will be less money to spend on other goods and services produced in the economy. Of course more money can always be issued (printed), but then the result will just be greater inflation. This is indeed what happened during the energy crisis of the 1970s. Or, since profits can no longer be derived from the continuous increase in the production of actual goods and services, profits will be derived, more and more, from speculative instruments (derivatives, sub-prime mortgages, pyramid schemes, and so on). And this is what happened in the late 2000s. In either case severe economic contraction results: the recessions in both the 1970s and late 2000s. Even if calculating the exact numbers behind the carbon footprint is extremely difficult, one could say that the effects of the shrinking supply of energy inputs would manifest itself in a precisely calculable way. How to address the economic crisis resulting from ever more expensive energy? The simplest method would be, instead of issuing ever more money, and debt, the restraining of debt production by tying the economy directly to available oil resources. This is another way of saying that the amount of money in circulation must reflect the Marxism, Materialism, and the Critique of Energy 15 currently available energy resources. As less energy resources become available, the economy too will have to contract (but in a controlled, well managed way!).23 In the words of Colin Campbell, oil geologist and “peak oil” exponent: To achieve [price stabilization], producing countries would not produce oil in excess of their present national depletion rate: i.e., roughly speaking, the oil burnt, expended or exported must equal the oil produced or imported. Furthermore, it would be required that importing nations stabilize their imports at existing levels. This would have the effect of keeping world prices in reasonable relationship to actual production costs and let Third World countries afford their oil imports.24 Note that the price of oil here is tied not only to production but to consumption: “the oil burnt, expended or exported must equal the oil produced or imported.” With consumption tracking production (which will be in decline), runaway inflation will be prevented: in other words, excess demand over supply will be eliminated, and economic collapse averted. But how will consumption be limited? How will restraints or constraints be imposed? Improvements in efficiency can go only so far. Under an energetics model, where the labor value will be monitored and surplus value tracked (and presumably returned to the workers from whom it was stolen), oil production will be monitored carefully, and the economy constrained from outrunning available energy resources. In both cases — tying money to available resources or a resource-minded command economy — the fictions of economic skullduggery will be stripped from the system. The only problem is one that is found in most versions of communism as well (at least those versions that shy away from some form of anarchism): some specialized body or authority will be necessary to administer this economic and social transformation. But here there is a major difference: in the case of regimes inspired by Marxist analysis the 16 Materialism and the Critique of Energy vast majority — the working class — will presumably be better off. The transformation of the economic system will result in a freeing of energies and minds and a more egalitarian distribution of wealth. In the case of the post–fossil fuel regime, however, fewer resources will be available, given that the true source of value is to be found in an ever-shrinking quantity of available fossil fuels. Life for many, in the first world at least, will become more constrained, not less. And, despite Campbell’s best intentions (that is, provisions for stabilizing the import cost of oil for Third World economies noted above), one can hardly imagine that things will improve in the Third World, either. Perhaps more important, the result of this “Powerdown” (as Richard Heinberg calls it), is not in principle one of egalitarianism, freedom, and so on.25 While Marx’s model has at its core the promise of a future egalitarianism — the equalization of compensation, depending on one’s needs — Campbell’s is finally a technocratic one, with distribution to be decided by self-selected experts. It certainly could be more democratic or egalitarian than the current regime, but it could also continue to reinforce an unequal distribution of resources. What will count above all will be the stabilization of the currency, and the rate of depletion of natural resources, along with the end of the fiction of infinite growth and hence the forestalling of revolution, none of which necessarily implies the elimination of social injustice. What’s missing in the energeticist model is clearly a strong sense of social justice. While lip service might be paid to a more egalitarian social structure, the energy-based theory of economy ultimately relies on sheer quantification: EROEI, social systems designed to be adequate to the quantities of fossil-fuel derived energy available. One has the sense that this model recognizes what Marx’s misses — the deep connection between quantification and value — but that it lacks precisely what Marx’s provides: a strong theory of labor, and hence value, as social relation. If unquantifiable labor promised an ethical grounding for value without a way of precisely determining how stolen labor inputs were to be restituted, quantified energy inputs Marxism, Materialism, and the Critique of Energy 17 provide a technical measure without ethical coherence. How value is to be grounded in both labor and abstract energy remains the crucial question. What is the articulation point, their point of connection? How can a future economy be imagined that would respect both the fundamental social bond and the energetic inputs necessary for the establishment and elaboration of that bond? Marxism, Energy: Rethinking Economy In both cases, value is embodied, contained, crystallized, in things. Stuff. And in both cases the truth of things reveals the way forward for economic stability, and, hopefully, justice. But what is the truth of things? The Marxist model contrasts the “fetishism” of the bad commodity under capitalism with the “social relation” of the good commodity under communism. The Soddy/energetics model contrasts the obfuscated value of fuel under the old growth regime (though the word “capitalism” is generally avoided) with the new, fully accounted-for value of fuel in the new; fuel is now fully human, not just combustible matter from the ground, but an inherent, comprehensible part of the new society that we will build. In Marxism, the new, transparent commodity in which value is “crystallized” is, in principle, fully social, and not in any sense autonomous from human wants, needs, and labor. But, one has to point out, the commodity is still a thing. It is still something that always threatens to escape our complete and conscious control. We act on it, but it acts on us, in ways that are not always foreseeable. Some commodities are (or can be) sexual fetishes: they trouble us, and we can become their slaves. Some are great new “disruptive” inventions: they both make our lives easier and dislocate them. The commodity’s needs sometimes seem to be greater than our own (this is certainly the case with the automobile). To say that one fully socializes an object by simply comprehending the labor it “crystallizes” seems, well, premature. The object is never just “us.” It comprehends us as much as we comprehend it. It grasps our lives and turns them around, for better and for worse. The dream of labor and its products as sheer 18 Materialism and the Critique of Energy social relation is always haunted by the autonomy of the object. The thing escapes our grasp, does what it was not supposed to do, and in its materiality resists one social relation while triggering another. It thwarts or arouses our desire; it quantifies itself, resisting the simple sociability of an evanescent but concrete “labor.” Labor, finally, is inseparable from its crystallization, which defies us in abstraction: our world is composed, whether we like it or not, of substitutable objects, things we value (and depend upon) inordinately and which always confuse us with sexy, quantifiable significance. How big is it? How many can I have? What do others think of it? Can I make them want what I have? Conversely, has any Marxist ever been able to suggest what a non-fetish object would be? What would it look like? How would it be used? How would it embody the extirpation of all those nefarious human religious drives (not to mention the desiring ones)? And oil is always oil, and coal coal, and gas gas — they are never simply tamed, their origin as value is never simply known, their unintended effects (climate change, fracking devastation) never simply under our control. We can never fully master through quantification or abstraction the inputs and outputs of fossil fuel. Even a single quart of gasoline burned results in the release of a small amount of carbon dioxide, a tiny movement in the direction of harmful climate change. Fossil fuels are always the energy slaves that resist us, that revolt against us, even when we think we have fully mastered them. Their objecthood defies our purposes: they interpellate, call to us to spend, to involve ourselves in modes of often socially destructive consumption and often asocial fantasies. They defy us by challenging us to calculate an incalculable (because of its scale) ecological footprint. We can always coordinate models of social crisis and attempt to see how our mastery will ameliorate our lives and the lives of those living in the future. But just as one theory narrowly misses what the other theory accounts for, one has the sense that they function together in a strange chiasmus, the Marxist model both proffering a purely Marxism, Materialism, and the Critique of Energy 19 social labor that nevertheless inevitably betrays itself in measurable objects, and the energetics model proffering sheer calculability with objects that relentlessly attempt to impose themselves as social beings, indeed as the dominant social beings, and the dominant purveyors of sociality, of the planet. Perhaps it is less a question of trying to imagine the strange and monstrous conjunction of sheer sociality on the one hand and sheer abstraction on the other, and instead realizing that the opposition itself is dependent on a certain model of selfhood that characterizes our modernity: a self that is absolute, absolutely self-conscious, absolutely social, but that knows itself and exercises its mastery (both individually and as an overweening social presence) through proxy objects that have meaning only when they’re counted, compared, ogled, and assigned value. One can in fact make the argument that both the Marxist and the energetic models are creatures of capitalism. This might seem obvious in the case of energetics, but Marxism itself is haunted by the specter of a fetishism that it correctly associates with capitalism but that comes to mark its own approach.26 For Marxism too is concerned with a return of value to a true (originary) possessor (this time around the proletariat, labor, and so on), the appropriation of “natural” products and their utilization (which necessarily depends on quantification), and the exploitation of literally non-sustainable resources that are conceived as the sole property not of an individual but of a now liberated humanity. Perhaps the dyad labor-fuel is itself at fault in the sense that it either blankets the earth with a transcendent and ineffable humanity, or reduces it to a “mother” that does nothing more that give birth to great quantities of pumped and dumped stuff. Perhaps an economic model can be conceived that neither celebrates labor as the ultimate origin and valuation of things, nor one that celebrates energy as something that we can only measure in the act of using it while using it up. Such a model, one could argue, relies more on voluntarism, gift giving, and the like. J.K. Gibson-Graham, for example, has attempted to work out the parameters of a “community economy” in the wake 20 Materialism and the Critique of Energy of economic disinvestment: despairing, laid-off workers were encouraged to see their involvement in the economy not as one of passive dependence (“I need a job…”) but rather one of active giving (“what can I contribute to the community?”). The economy, in other words, was recast as a movement much larger, and more profound, than that of the capitalist engine of investment, profit, and banking, with “jobs” — and workers — fully dependent on those things. The central question is no longer what can be taken from the earth (and what value to give it and the work it does), but rather how less stuff can be “used” and more can be freely distributed (the circulation of things given, loved, and repurposed). This is an economy, one could argue, more profound than one in which labor, resources, and prices are allocated from above. Perhaps most importantly, labor itself, resistant to quantification and hence comprehension, is replaced by other economic modes that are inherently outside the orbit of abstraction: sharing. The result was the development of a number of community organizations that helped foster a “non-market” economy where we find, for example: The woman who tithes (meaning giving away fully one-tenth of her income) but not to the church — to friends and neighbors who need it; The depressed single mother who volunteers twenty-four-hour counseling and support services to drug addicts; The retired insurance adjustor who does dowsing as a gift, a way of opening people to their powers of intuition and connecting them to the environment (he is also a spiritual counselor and gives away counseling and writings on grieving); The woman who raises “found” children (in other words, not her own), usually high-school aged boys.27 This is an economy where labor and energy as measurable terms are eclipsed by an involvement that gives rather than labors and that certainly uses energy, but not an energy dependent on fuels for which land is destroyed through pollution and wars are fought to assure supplies. And perhaps not even energy tied to the specter Marxism, Materialism, and the Critique of Energy 21 of the depletion of fossil fuels. Renewable energy, tied to the smallscale economics of the sharing (and shrinking) economy, might even sound the death-knell of the capitalist economy so dependent on processing the stuff of personal possessions and the fuel that makes them possible.28 Energy, perhaps, can even be reconceived as vibrancy, as Jane Bennett calls it, which entails not so much the measure of the profitloss (in all senses) profile of fuels and the carbon footprint of inanimate but fetishized toys as the active engagement of stuff as it works, as an agent, in and for a society that respects both people, animals, plants, and things (the “living” and the “inanimate”). Bennett, rethinking Lucretius’s model of materialism in De rerum natura, writes: A primordial swerve [as in Lucretius] says that the world is not determined, that an element of chanciness resides at the heart of things, but it also affirms that so-called inanimate things have a life, that deep within is an inexplicable vitality or energy, a moment of independence from and resistance to us and other bodies: a kind of thing-power.29 In a world where things can labor and create, where energy is an “inexplicable vitality” that defies counting or exhaustion, where people can give and share, perhaps the economic crises analyzed in the Marxist and energetic traditions will have to be reconceptualized as opportunities, in which the social relation and the physical relation are seen not from the perspective of lack — never enough energy and possessions, always too much unremunerated labor — but of fullness, of excess. With all that said, the questions of labor and energy remain. Both will continue to be quantified — they will have to be quantified — but perhaps from now on more in the context of gift-giving or sharing rather than exclusively in the mode of jealous accounting. After the fictions of value in capitalism (fictions that occlude the “true” value of labor and energy inputs), we might posit other, larger, fictions — 22 Materialism and the Critique of Energy or at least colorful narratives. These might entail the decline of the exclusive and overweening self and the rise of resistant and active objects in variable and joyous communities. Such fictions could serve not as representations, but as markers for the futures of a society that has learned to question the omnipotence of the labor-energy dyad. Notes 1. See Adrian Parr, The Wrath of Capital: Neoliberalism and Climate Change Politics (New York: Columbia UP, 2013). 2. Here I am using the term “energetics” to indicate an economic and social structure based in a very specific type of energy use, in this case (modern industrial capitalism) mainly involving the burning of fossil fuels (coal, natural gas, oil). This follows from the official definition of energetics: “Energetics (also called energy economics) is the study of energy under transformation.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energetics) 3. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume I, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books, 1976 [1867]) 134. 4. Here I differ with John Bellamy Foster, the thrust of whose work is to maintain that for Marx the physical and natural inputs are as crucial to value as are those of human labor (see, for example, John Bellamy Foster, The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the Planet [New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009]). While I certainly agree with Foster that Marx acknowledges the inputs of “nature” and the dependence of humans on the “gifts” of nature, at the same time I recognize that Marx’s analysis is concerned solely with determining how labor inputs determine value. 5. N. Scott Arnold, Marx’s Radical Critique of Capitalist Society: A Reconstruction and Critical Evaluation (New York, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990) 70. Marxism, Materialism, and the Critique of Energy 6. 23 Duncan Foley, “Labour Power,” in Tom Bottomore, ed., A Dictionary of Marxist Thought (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983) 265–267; 265. 7. Foley, “Labour Power” 265. 8. Karl Marx, “Value, Price and Profit,” in John F. Sitton, ed., Marx Today: Selected Works and Recent Debates (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) 99–122. 9. Marx, Capital Volume I 165. 10. Capital Vol. I 133. 11. Capital Vol. I 165. 12. Capital Vol. I 288. 13. Note here that a horse does the work, for which a human would take credit. How to separate a horse’s “work” from a human’s “labor”? Is a horse capable of providing “labor”? Why not? Is a horse exploited when it provides it, even though it doesn’t consciously sell it? Or is a horse no different from a machine? Does its consciousness (or lack thereof ) preclude its participation in the human paradigm of labor, value, and ultimately, liberation? What if a horse has a consciousness? Does it not count because it is not a human consciousness, an awareness of the sociability of the horse in human society? Could on the other hand a horse have a consciousness in general, or an awareness of its own sociality, in relation to human society? Or horse society? What is the difference between the exploitation of a horse laborer and the exploitation of a human laborer? Or, following Descartes, would Marx argue that a horse is only a sentient machine? One has the sense that if one could somehow answer these questions one would have a much better understanding of what “labor” is. But horses are hardly the only “animals” that work, either for humans or for themselves… Could there be a larger ecological theory of labor? 14. At least in the English speaking world, the link between economic value and energy was put forth most forcefully by Frederick Soddy (in, for example, The Role of Money: What It Should Be, Contrasted with What It Has Become [New York: Harcourt Brace, 1935]); in the German speaking world the chemist Wilhelm Ostwald had propounded it already in the late nineteenth century (see Wilhelm Ostwald, Energetische Grundlagen 24 Materialism and the Critique of Energy der Kulturwissenschaft (Leipzig: W. Klinkhardt, 1909). 15. The Technocrats, in their era (the 1930s), were sometimes taken as a right-wing or even pseudo-fascist group (see Howard Scott, Introduction to Technocracy [New York: John Day, 1933]). The recent reappropriation of Hubbert and his “peak” theory — by Richard Heinberg and others — glosses over the intellectual history, and politics, behind the theory and practice of “Technocracy Inc.” It is also true, though, that Stalinist communism, like fascism and Nazism, and even Roosevelt’s New Deal, were seen by many in the 1930s and 1940s to be variants of Technocracy; the social movements were therefore conflated. A prime example of this position is James Burnham’s laudatory The Managerial Revolution: What Is Happening in the World. (Westport, CT: Greenwood P, 1972 [1941]); George Orwell’s dystopian view of the future (in Nineteen Eight-Four) stands as perhaps more of a rehash and virulent critique of Burnham’s conflation of Technocracy and power across the political spectrum (Orwell was quite familiar with Burnham’s book) than it does as a simple criticism of Stalinist communism (the usual reading of Nineteen Eighty-Four). 16. Richard Heinberg, The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 2003) 170. 17. Heinberg, The Party’s Over 170. 18. The Party’s Over 171. 19. See Peter Huber and Mark P. Mills, The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy (New York: Basic Books, 2006). “Cornucopians” are generally politically conservative commentators who see energy resources, and indeed all usable resources, not as finite, but as potentially infinite. One can forget the “limits” to growth; the earth is, on the contrary, a cornucopia producing endless quantities of goodies, given the infinite brilliance of human technical innovation. A notable cornucopian, besides Huber and Mills, is John Tierney of the New York Times. See, for example, the Simmons-Tierney bet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simmons– Tierney_bet 20. On the ultimate value of this analogy, see “The ‘Stone Age’ Analogy Is The Dumbest Analogy Overused By Smart Energy People,” in the Marxism, Materialism, and the Critique of Energy 25 blog of D. Ray Long: http://raylong.co/blog/2013/10/17/the-stone-ageanalogy-is-the-dumbest-analogy-overused-by-smart-energy-people. The “smartness” of the “energy people” who use this analogy is, however, not entirely evident. 21. A view contradicted by many recent works, especially ones that focus on the inevitability — and menace — of global climate change. See for example, Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future (New York: Columbia UP, 2014). Works of this genre are slowly trending in the direction of a deep pessimism. 22. See Mathis Wackernagel and William E. Rees, Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 1998). 23. One can argue that the cost of energy will rise not just because of “peak” production, but because of the ever-greater externalized costs of continued fossil fuel energy use — global climate change and so on. These costs will inevitably be reflected in the increase of the overall costs of doing business — and hence the crisis of the “growth” model would remain the same. 24. See Colin Campbell, “The Rimini Protocol, 2003” at http://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Rimini_protocol 25. See Richard Heinberg, Power Down: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 2004). 26. The Technocrats in the 1930s argued that the government, and the economy, should be run with the same efficiency and competence as the telephone company (in those days a nationwide monopoly). See Scott, Introduction to Technocracy. 27. See J.K. Gibson-Graham, A Postcapitalist Politics (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2006) 151. 28. See, for example, Jeremy Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society. The Internet of Things, The Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), where the connection is made between the rise of the sharing economy (Uber, Airbnb, and so on) and the decline of traditional capitalism, based as it is upon high “marginal cost” (the costs of production and transfer), the personal possession 26 Materialism and the Critique of Energy of objects, and the heavy use of fuels to subsidize their cost. In Rifkin’s future people will share and give, much less stuff will be made (think of all the cars that will not be needed when self-drive Uber cars become ubiquitous), and what’s left of capitalism (if anything) will be decoupled from the production of commodities and the necessities of growth. The economic model that started with the enclosure, in England, of previously collectively held lands — the appropriation by the few of previously shared resources — will be reversed, with a corresponding rise in communitarianism respectful of those shared resources. 29. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham and London: Duke UP, 2010) 18. “Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink”: Accumulation and the Power over Hydro Peter Hitchcock I begin by adapting Adam Smith’s thoughts on what will be discussed as the social division of a primary resource: “the accumulation of water must, in the nature of things, be previous to the division of labor.”1 This formulation would seem less controversial than the idea of original accumulation that Marx criticizes in Smith and other purveyors of classical political economy. For the human, water is always and everywhere a basic component of life, a natural need of being, and its social division decides how living proceeds — that is, life as species being. Yet accumulation, of course, has specific meanings within the history of capitalism, and the provision of water cleaves to every variation in its formations. As a primary resource, water’s role in the political economy of neoliberalism has become an intense arena of contestation; nature, as an accumulation strategy, is now pivotal to the endgames of accumulation per se. Globalization has greatly intensified state and non-state activity over water and the number of institutions, sub-disciplines, and water authorities has increased exponentially. For instance, in 2015 the World Water Forum, the flagship product of The World Water Council (that describes itself as an “international multi-stakeholder platform”) held its seventh tri-annual conference in South Korea with attendees from over 150 countries and hundreds of panels on everything from water security to climate change and of course, the business of water.2 The governance and management of water is paramount among these discussions, whose subtext is necessarily political and economic (which is why the 30 Materialism and the Critique of Energy forum is often the occasion for protest). While oil maintains a central (if arguably diminishing) role in the geopolitics of capital circulation, water’s place is clearly pivotal to a neoliberal logic of power. Indeed, when we think of hydropower, for instance, we should maintain its meaning as both the ability to produce power from water and as a distinctive logic of power over water. Here I will focus largely on the latter as a means to understand more fully the dialectical impasse in the former. The greater the power over water, the greater the power from water undermines equitable modes of socialization. Indeed, for all of the abundance of water (71 percent of the Earth’s surface) the problem of its accumulation under capitalism is also, whatever else it is, a question about the sustainability of/by accumulation itself. Indeed, in the following I am interested in addressing the aura of such representation and its constitutive limits, at the edge, as it were, of water rationality. Water may not be possessed in the conventional sense but we always have it. Thinking about water in terms of dispossession then is an accumulation struggle over having rather than possession itself. Wherever water accumulates, we can have it without owning it, or we can collect (accumulate) it without taxation (a human has to reservoir water at some scale) unless some entity (state, corporation, private individual, etc.) claims ownership. The struggle over water is about different modes of accumulation — as Marx tells us, capitalism has no monopoly over accumulation. To have water is a necessity that preexists any and all regimes of its possession. The comparative scarcity and abundance of water remains crucial not just because it is overdetermined by forms of economic desire, but because water itself seems to slip free of the capitalist paradigms of commodification that are brought to it. If water is both free and finite, hydropower and hydration, atmospheric and remote, then the regime of accumulation built on water’s multiplicity pivots on a doubled and self-eliminating logic of accumulation. Perhaps in the limit case of an “uncooperative commodity” we may witness the ways in which the commodity’s function for capitalism can be overreached. Accumulation and the Power over Hydro 31 For the most part, I will address the problem of original accumulation in understanding the meaning of water for Marxist critiques of neoliberalism.3 Clearly the struggle over water is most pressing in the Global South and more so under actually existing conditions of “adjustment” and modernization. The question at issue is not about policy necessarily, but instead about how the narrative of the provision and privatization of water asks important questions within a Marxist critique of globalization. In the last part of the essay I will examine the edge of such materialism by articulating the place of both water wars and hydropower in counter-hegemonic practices. As Arundhati Roy puts it in her discussion of activism around the Maheshwar Dam, “We were not just fighting against a dam. We were fighting for a philosophy. For a world view.”4 There is no magical key to the Weltanschauung of water, but the fighting over it is also and always already an engagement with the primary terms of political economy. Original Accumulation For Marxism, critiquing neoliberalism has renewed attention to the concept of primitive accumulation, although, as I will detail, its elaboration is no less a reinvention than the continuing dynamic of capitalism. Before considering work like Karen Bakker’s on water privatization (which highlights the difference between having and owning water), and Adrienne Roberts’s on the primitive accumulation of water (which differentiates this process in the Global South), it is important to address the valences of primitive accumulation as a theoretical lever. To begin, one notes that Marx refers to the concept in Capital Vol. I as “so-called primitive accumulation” (“die s.g. [sogenannt] ursprüngliche Accumulation”). 5 Two points are immediately germane. First, Marx’s critique of Adam Smith on accumulation starts with his challenge to Smith’s aforementioned assumption that “the accumulation of stock must, in the nature of things, be previous to the division of labor.” This claim is, says Marx, mythical in its pretensions since accumulation of capital is coterminous and 32 Materialism and the Critique of Energy continuous with the division of labor. Second, Marx reads “previous” as ursprüngliche, original, initial, or unspoiled, rather than as earlier or prior. This has the advantage of avoiding simple stagism (there are other possible meanings in Ursprung, not least as water source), but it has tangled translation ever since. Thus, faced with the prospect of “so-called original accumulation,” Marx’s English translators decide to gloss the term with a little mythology of their own and call it “primitive accumulation” (some French editions of Le Capital acknowledge Smith’s term “previous” only to privilege the English translation as “primitive” — since the French edition is perhaps the most corrected by Marx himself, it is noticeable that in its current “definitive” version “ursprüngliche” becomes “initiale” — not quite “previous” [although the word “anterieure” is also added] but certainly not “primitive”).6 Just as the English version of Capital has resisted including key revisions of the definitive text in French (subsequently restored to the German), so few have tended to confront the terminological knot created by Marx in his enthusiastic debunking of the Smithian idyll. The use of “so-called” is meant to draw attention to the category error of Smith’s political economy, but it has also mystified Marx’s reading (his “so-called” rendering of “previous”), and this has tended to conspire in the isolation of original accumulation as a finished historical occurrence. Thus, when Marx notes, “[p]rimitive accumulation plays approximately the same role in political economy as original sin [Suddenfall — the Fall] does in theology,” the observation cancels through his own assessment, for the attribution of “primitive” in the analysis of accumulation has become nigh talismanic, an original sin of almost incontrovertible proportions.7 What was once a means to displace Smith from within a tradition of political economy might now be said to displace Marx from within his own, to the extent that “primitive” obfuscates the actual logic of accumulation in play. This displacement, as we will see later, is also operative in materialist discourses on water. In his detailed exegesis of “primitive accumulation” Michael Perelman has approached such waywardness in terminology as Accumulation and the Power over Hydro 33 a means to readdress the concept’s relevance for the present.8 He correctly notes how Marx’s understanding of primitive accumulation both shows the inadequacy of confining its operations to the past while yet preserving the advantage of this distance at other moments in his writing. Primitive accumulation is based on a violent separation in which workers become “free” (free from their ties to the land and especially from “any means of production of their own”). Historically, this state of freedom for workers has been won by forcible eviction, land enclosures, the diminution of the commons, and, as Marx underlines, more or less straightforward brutality: “the history of their expropriation is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.”9 Primitive accumulation prepares the ground for capitalism proper by violently codifying worker dependency on the selling of their labor. As this commodification of labor goes, so goes all commodification under the sign of capital. The difficulty has been thinking this accumulation strategy as a contemporary component of capitalist dynamism, what Massimo De Angelis has referred to as “the continuous character of capital’s ‘enclosures,’” particularly in finding new markets, in displacing the contradictions of over-accumulation, and in confronting the continuing irksome relationship of labor to its operations.10 Original or “primitive” accumulation can function at the edge of capital’s reach, like the tips of a claw attempting to grip. Since not every space of socialization is capitalist, this mode of accumulation is both a historical process and an active one in the present, for the work of division never ends if such difference can be measured in capital accumulation itself. It is also important to emphasize that the “originality” of such accumulation also lies in its work at the heart of “so-called” mature capital markets — this is where core features of neoliberalism like asset-stripping and privatization are relevant, and the continuing legal struggles over, for instance, intellectual property become new frontiers of accumulation. From the beginning of The Invention of Capitalism, Perelman makes clear what is at stake in “original” accumulation: 34 Materialism and the Critique of Energy The brutal acts associated with the process of stripping the majority of the people of the means of producing for themselves might seem far removed from the laissez-faire reputation of classical political economy. In reality, the dispossession of the majority of small-scale producers and the construction of laissez-faire are closely connected.11 Non-market measures (enclosures, violence, and so on) might be required to further this process in the countryside. Perelman continues: Formally, this dispossession was perfectly legal. After all, the peasants did not have property rights in the narrow sense. They only had traditional rights…. Simple dispossession from the commons was a necessary, but not always sufficient condition to harness rural people to the labor market.12 In addition to separating people from a sustainable relationship to the land, original accumulation developed a legal structure to enforce such separation: “A host of oftentimes brutal laws designed to undermine whatever resistance people maintained against the demands of wage labor accompanied the dispossession of the peasants’ rights, even before capitalism had become a significant economic force.”13 Thus, in Perelman’s analysis of the process Marx elaborates, so-called “original” accumulation was none other than violent expropriation, or what David Harvey has termed “accumulation by dispossession.” Again, it is important to emphasize that original or “primitive” accumulation is not fixed in the past but understood as an active component of capitalist activity. Perelman does point out, however, that Marx sometimes presents original accumulation as a “presupposition” for developed capitalism (he quotes Lucio Colletti on Grundrisse in this regard), so, depending on who you read, such expropriation might be distanced from the present.14 Nevertheless, to consider the chapter on primitive accumulation alongside the previous one on “The General Theory of Capitalist Accumulation” lends credence to the idea that Accumulation and the Power over Hydro 35 Capital represents a dynamic collocation of components that are never simply mutually exclusive. The becoming of capitalism is more about the intensities of historical emphasis, contingent accumulation, than it is the culmination of one aspect to the expiration of others. Whether growing or shrinking, capitalism moves in its febrile totality. Understood from this vantage, the central elements of original accumulation can be seen all over the map of contemporary capitalism. Perelman, for instance, remarks on the destruction of small-scale farming in the United States in the twentieth century which indeed bears the hallmarks of primary dispossession. The largest migration in human history, the movement of some three hundred million peasants from the countryside to the city in China in the last thirty-five years, features substantial evidence of theft and expropriation of land for primary subsistence and subsequent levels of proletarianization that easily surpass the breadth and intensity of such transformation in early modern Europe. Even within the city, the curbing of self-provision continues apace (Perelman uses the example of high-density living reducing the space for washing and drying clothes, which makes the population dependent on private laundry facilities). As work like Silvia Federici’s clearly shows, the social divisions of labor in the production and reproduction of life use unpaid labor to enforce the wage as a basic condition of socialization in general. Indeed, it is less that original accumulation precedes capitalism proper but that it mediates its continuing possibility. Federici’s book, Caliban and the Witch (2004), focuses primarily on the transition from feudalism to capitalism and explores the tension within accumulation as primitive, original, and prior.15 Her critique of capitalist accumulation as always already based on women’s production and reproduction of labor power extends along modernity’s reach. As she discovers in her research in Nigeria in the 1980s, adjusting decolonization to fit neoliberalism pivots around attacks on social reproduction, whether in the attempt to force new enclosures of agricultural land, or via direct attacks on procreation rates as a means to discipline labor and labor power. As in another 36 Materialism and the Critique of Energy key Federici work, Revolution at Point Zero, women’s struggles over land are not an adjunct to regimes of accumulation but are written into discourses of subjugation and profound resistance to the same.16 The question of hydropower at this level is crucially linked to women’s struggle over the commons and a power over resources that stands against, for instance, the management of state assets promoted by the World Bank, or the ease through which privatization becomes privation. The reclamation of lands and water from avatars of neoliberal original accumulation is ongoing and particularly energetic in the Global South where what Federici calls the “commercialization of nature” is most acute.17 The power over clean water is at the heart of social reproduction and explains why feminist praxis within accumulation is crucial to the future of the commons and the fate of the capitalist mode of production itself. But is neoliberalism actually an intensification of such original dispossession and how might this process be more conceptually elaborated? Four years after Perelman’s intervention on accumulation by what he calls “primary dispossession,” David Harvey published his now definitive essay on this very question.18 After a detailed exegesis of how capitalist crises emerge and move in the contemporary world system, Harvey suggests such spatio-temporal fixes cannot be adequately understood according to the norms of classical political economy, nor by the superseparation of primitive accumulation from capitalism proper. Now, it is true Harvey has to underplay the contiguous framework Perelman outlines, but his intervention is to make of original or “primitive” dispossession a conceptual clue to the workings of neoliberal capitalism as a whole. For instance, if financialization manipulates money supply and the pricing of asset classes, it is a process that complements a similarly feverish desire to control basic elements of social sustenance, or what Marx calls species being. Harvey’s critique of this dynamic combines a trenchant reading of Capital around Marx’s interrogation of “so-called” primitive accumulation with an assessment of how this ostensibly distant process drives a new imperialism in the present. It is important to note Harvey’s analysis is Accumulation and the Power over Hydro 37 not formulaic but attempts to address aforementioned symptomatic solutions to long-standing limits to capital accumulation like overproduction, a falling rate of profit, and various spatio-temporal fixes that constellate the appearance of capitalism in a specific form. Pondering the “projection of power over space,” Harvey argues through specific examples that “free trade does not mean fair trade.”19 How does primitive accumulation fit within this picture? The attempted maintenance of U.S. power beyond the nostrums of the “Washington Consensus” reveals a highly complex and networked structure of financial and governmental interests across the globe, in which the U.S., through the World Bank and IMF, but also through coordinated activities of the U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve, is able to create new levels of crisis management in the reassignment of accumulation. Such accumulation by “other means” is what Harvey terms “accumulation by dispossession,” a powerful heuristic that shows the ways in which Marx’s conceptualization can be rethought and reframed in the present. In part, Harvey’s attention to the “predation, fraud, and thievery” of the credit and finance industries indeed highlights an intensification of such activities, particularly after the economic crisis of the early 1970s (which precisely called for “accumulation by other means”).20 All kinds of stock promotions, speculative bubbles, mergers and acquisitions (with attendant asset stripping) illuminate the period and reveal processes of financialization that appear relatively autonomous in their prescriptions and effects. New mechanisms of dispossession include WTO-inspired patenting and an expanded monetizing of intellectual property rights, biopiracy, the privatization of public assets like state universities, and the reappropriation of hard-won public goods like health care, pensions, and welfare. The level of rapacity in these areas is extraordinary and together they constitute defining elements of what neoliberalism has come to mean. Again, Harvey’s point is about recognizing the amplification of such processes, rather than seeing them as an absolute break with accumulation practices of the past. But he also usefully links such active accumulation to periodic imperialist 38 Materialism and the Critique of Energy adventures when the normal business cycles of production and reproduction seem unlikely to offer quick or sufficient return. This is both about a scramble for resources according to the price volatility of core commodities and a realignment of inter-state relations through structural adjustment often limned to the dictates of hedge fund or other speculation associated with the power brokers of finance. There is little argument about the broad picture of the new financial architecture that Harvey paints and, since the critique is prefaced by long-standing connections outlined by Luxemburg and Arendt, the place of “accumulation by dispossession” in a genealogy of radical theorization seems both warranted and secure.21 In the voluminous literature that has followed Harvey’s essay, however, the specificities of accumulation by water have raised important caveats about its sweep. For instance, Adrienne Roberts notes that the commodification and “market governance” of water complicates the picture of neoliberalism and “new imperialism” Harvey is at pains to identify.22 Like Federici, Roberts focuses on relations of social reproduction, which offer a particular valence on accumulation strategies of the Global South. What Roberts details is a “growing disjuncture between the scales and geographies of production and social reproduction” as a complementary critique to, for instance, Neil Smith’s stress on the implications of the social reproduction of nature itself.23 This, I believe, holds crucial lessons for how we understand the role of water as a distributed good and its meaning as a source of power. The “neoliberalization of socio-nature” is not just a matter of crass monetization but of a transformed logic in what we claim as sustenance. Sustainability How does water signify this changed relation while yet demonstrating that it is, as Karen Bakker avers, an “uncooperative commodity”?24 Within colonialism, the provisioning and distribution of water clearly favored the colonizers and their surrogates not just for personal use but for irrigation that boosted cash crops and agricultural exports. Accumulation and the Power over Hydro 39 Part of the process of decolonization emphasized a redistribution of water resources as a sign that newly-independent states were sustainable at local and national scales. Yet increasingly, development under neoliberalism has meant the bracketing of more equitable sustainability, as even basic resources are factored into asset portfolios and debt servicing. Thus, on one hand, the development of a sustainable hydro-infrastructure links water security to state stability; on the other hand, the growth of water as an industry also means social discontent is weighed against the privatization of the social itself. Whereas water crises might have once signaled difficulties in sourcing supply, they now mean the extent to which accumulation races ahead of sustainability as such. “Market environmentalism” has never been so stark as it is in the business of water in which basic metrics of affordability and access have been overwritten in order to maximize prices and margins. In this sense, the power over hydro has become a primary arena of social contestation (not just over resources, but how the social itself is constellated). How does water change the understanding of original accumulation outlined by Marx and deepened in the work of Perelman and Harvey? If Marx emphasizes the ways in which primitive or original accumulation presages qualitative transformations of the social that we now associate with capitalist dynamism tout court, is the privatization and monetization of water simply an expression of this process in the present, or does the “primitive accumulation of water” as Roberts terms it, challenge the socioeconomic logic in play? Much of the debate shows that privatization increases water rates, eliminates utility subsidies for the poor, and raises cut-off rates for the most disadvantaged. Roberts augments this view by including water’s relationship to social reproduction, all of those elements of daily life that provide the constitutive conditions for capital accumulation in the wage (a focus that has the advantage of understanding the gendered division of such processes). As part of the retreat from Keynesianism, the idea of the social provisioning of water has been recast as one about access to capital. Water may be a 40 Materialism and the Critique of Energy fictitious commodity, as Polanyi describes it, but its effects are all too tangible at differing scales, particularly the local.25 Roberts notes, for instance, a disjunction between the transnational dimensions of contemporary water authorities and the understanding of local needs. When “full cost recovery” produces mass disconnections from a stable water supply, populations can be driven to water sources of dubious quality, with all of their attendant health risks. (Cholera outbreaks in South Africa, for example, have been linked to this crass rationalization of nature.) Overall, the power over hydro has shifted the economics of the social provision of water from the state and local authorities to the needs of families and associated communities who are then compelled to recalibrate the terms of social reproduction to maintain as best as possible water security’s role in everyday life. As Arundhati Roy has argued to great effect, this displacement of responsibility over social provision has dramatically changed what counts as “the cost of living.”26 If original accumulation institutes the power relations for class hierarchy, the rethinking of primitive accumulation under neoliberalism has also produced vital critiques about how modes of dispossession exacerbate inequalities of race and gender. Indeed, the importance of the struggle for water foregrounds the antinomies of combined and uneven development in its social divisions; water, in this sense, is thus not an adjunct to globalization as a world system but is instead a central heuristic in understanding the latter’s maturity, limits, and contradictions. The reapportioning of responsibility in contrast to the affirmation and protection of rights is a key feature of the colonization of a social logic by an economic one and emphasizes the metonymic reach of neoliberal priorities. The reduction of socialization itself to the abstractions between price and value is not necessarily new (as the long history of original accumulation affirms), yet water power has distinct demands and reveals what is at stake in, for instance, the new social movements and in modes of resistance that seek to undo the meaning of globalization in its local instantiations. While the fight against the deleterious effects of water power Accumulation and the Power over Hydro 41 (“hydropower as also the power over water”) provides a strong sense of empowerment, the nature of the latter is itself uneven and often hinges on perceived national prerogatives and the self-image of the state. Neoliberalism, however, also promotes forms of empowerment, specifically those that encourage a stakeholder mentality with market characteristics, that is, that paying for water at higher rates is really only a sign of greater participation and that markets secure such social responsibility. It is true that the relative scarcity of clean, potable water necessitates “responsible” distribution, but here the question of “responsible” consumption is preempted by price points irrespective of demonstrable need. Water therefore becomes a structural antinomy in contemporary accumulation as such. The place of water in globalization signifies a distinct “liquidity crisis” in capitalism: what is original to species being is no longer originary within a system of dispossession as exchange. This presents significant difficulties for both mavens of monetization and for those who reject and resist attempts to recolonize the commons. Ostensibly, for capitalism, water offers all kinds of niche market and branding opportunities: why drink from a fountain when you can both carry water with you and mark it as a lifestyle with singular prestige? Using the paradox “natural means commodity,” premiums can be gleaned from “original sources” — Ursprung indeed — and branded differences (because water is transparent, its appearance as a commodity for marketing often comes down to names and the shapes or quality of the container). At this level, however, water margins are thin because every player in the business knows that creating scarcity in a consumer market is never an easy gambit, and especially so when an item is otherwise considered “naturally” abundant. If the market for branded water is commodification at its loudest, the appropriation of water within processes of social reproduction is neoliberalism’s signal power, a seemingly quiet dispossession (because rational or rationalized) that has yet produced the greatest resistance. Water’s logical resistance to commodification is tempered by the economic and political power available from its energic capacities. 42 Materialism and the Critique of Energy Because accumulation as privatization has been prominently vexed over the provision of water, it has offered a significant window onto the processes of contemporary capitalism and the forms of opposition that interrupt them. Karen Bakker’s extensive research on water privatization cautions against reproducing a public/private binary in this regard because both necessitate rethinking when it comes to the meaning of water and power in socialization.27 In part, Bakker recognizes the significant emergence of the environmental commons, whose advocates see the limits of market and state rationalization as an impetus to seek viable community alternatives. The energy of water on this level is its power as a discourse of the commons which creatively negotiates water’s various roles as an agricultural necessity, energy potential, and basic resource for life. According to Bakker, the commons is not just a broad-based bottom up approach to the redistribution of social goods but also has an institutional imprimatur that renders the concept quite similar if not identical to governmental structures it might otherwise be read to subtend. Seen in this light, Bakker offers a different reading of the water wars of Cochabamba, Bolivia — a celebrated struggle against water privatization (initiated by IMF structural adjustment contingencies in 1998) that sought community-based distribution. As is well known, when large corporate conglomerates like Bechtel and United Water enter local markets, prices often rise sharply, and water metering becomes the standard model of distribution. Without recounting the complex turn of events surrounding the struggle over water control in Cochabamba, there is little dispute that the principle of water privatization was dealt a significant rebuke by a broad popular movement.28 The problem has been converting strong local support for communal ownership of water resources into a viable public-to-public model across Bolivian society, one that would require a transformation of the public utility as an institute of government. Just as the scale of water supply necessitates different strategies regarding its use, so the antinomies of accumulation interlace strategies of resistance and change. Communities of self- Accumulation and the Power over Hydro 43 help preexist the nostrums of neoliberal monetization, but one mode of social provision does not simply cancel out the other: they exist in different logics of need. Bakker suggests that both the public/ private and local/transnational oppositions need to be mediated or mutually implied rather than idealistically overreached. This is not a defense of privatization but an acknowledgment that elements of its efficiency (in contrast to more embedded forms of governmentality) might be learned rather than ignored or discounted in advance. More than this, however, Bakker argues that water is not in fact a “global commons” or even a scarce resource (scarcity is “produced”) but a basic management problem.29 It is true that appropriately scaled management models can improve the sourcing and distribution of water, but this seems to obviate the actually existing conditions of accumulation that inform the power structures such management embodies. This conditionality in and over water is most explicit when the power over hydro is in the service of hydropower. Hydropower While the history of hydropower is long, its specific role in the production of electricity is coterminous with industrial development and expansion. The same question of scales of accumulation applies in order to understand the conflicting needs of specific communities in relation to others and, just as the difference between water sourcing and place of consumption creates inequalities of access, so the infrastructural control over an electrical grid greatly affects how and where hydropower ends up being used. Whether a location can be optimized for the production of hydropower depends on a complicated web of factors, but here let’s think of them in specific relation to the logic of original accumulation. It is quite possible to elaborate hydropower economics without reference to capitalism or indeed specific strategies of accumulation, but this can be understood not as an evasion of political economy but as a confirmation of its saturation.30 Mega-dam projects in particular announce a kind of inexorable inertia in their financing, labor-intensive production, 44 Materialism and the Critique of Energy architectural monumentalism, and social impacts — all without seeming to question the primary principles in their manifestation. But surely, water power is a renewable resource? It is cleaner to produce than anything fossil fuels can manage and is much safer than any nuclear option. Like the sun and the wind, water at this level is vital to any future premised on environmental sustainability. The complexity of large scale hydropower projects requires formidable capital inputs, contracts, feasibility studies, legal reviews, environmental analysis, infrastructural build out, management and maintenance networks, and expansion potential. In short, if the source of water for the project involves local communities these are often disproportionately arrayed before the massive interests that mega-dams and generators represent. Whereas a water war may develop because of a necessary intimacy in exploitation — for example, Bechtel, in order to assure sufficient margins, must act locally — the struggles against any deleterious effects of a megadam are violently abstract. Both the privatization of water and the business of hydropower have their advantages: the former can improve supply volumes and potability for instance, while the latter can provide electricity in the absence of viable alternatives. Yet largescale dam projects in particular offer the developmental logic of water management as a structural contradiction of capitalist history as a whole. Thus, while it shares with water sourcing and distribution a marked tendency to original dispossession — the displacement of 1.3 million people for the Three Gorges project and at least 200,000 people for the Sardar Sarovar Dam are strong indicators in this regard — the grand scale of modernization seems to trump a corresponding passion for justice, equity, and responsibility. In her trenchant critique of the Sardar Sarovar project, Arundhati Roy asks the big questions: “Who owns this land? Who owns its rivers? Its forests? Its fish?”31 This not only invokes the fate of the Adivasi, “original” inhabitants who have faced the brunt of displacement and dispossession, but the future of social organization itself when theft is legalized for “the greater common good” (which is also the title of Accumulation and the Power over Hydro 45 Roy’s essay). Defenders of such modernization say “not to worry” because the age of the mega-dam is drawing to a close and that the shift to small, minimal-impact energy producing dams is a kinder, gentler, and environmentally friendly neoliberal protocol for the new millennium. Perhaps. The problem is that the combined and uneven development of the world system calibrates the commons according to distributable harm (and not just benefit). The principled sourcing and allocation of water provides a litmus test of how the power over social being is not just imagined but instantiated. Even if the crude rationalizations for capitalism are to be expected, the structural logic of water exploitation is complex and contradictory precisely because of water’s imbrication in “the cost of living.” The plethora of institutions of water management is in part a multi-pronged approach to “manage” original accumulation as capital’s constitutive desire. Since for humans water is not primarily a discretionary purchase, its role as a commodity is inexorably unstable as a market metric. Monopolistic pricing and the creation of scarcity might seem opportune, yet locally such accumulation by dispossession has engendered intense protest and struggle, as if what is primary in resources is coterminous with what is paramount for social division. At this level at least, we must say that hydropower means both a laudable element of a future defined by renewable resources and a primary arena of power over water that decides what is “original” in accumulation. Who wins this power decides the power of accumulation itself. 46 Materialism and the Critique of Energy Notes 1. Of course, Smith ponders the accumulation of stock, not water, but his notion began all sorts of disputation about the “origins” of capitalism. Here I am concerned to explore resources held in common, rather than in common stock. See, Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Vol. 2, eds. R.H. Campbell and A.S. Skinner (New York: Oxford UP, 1976) 277. 2. See Water for Our Future: Seventh World Water Forum, April 12–17th, Republic of Korea. The program can be accessed at http://eng.worldwaterforum7. org/introduce/program/program.asp. 3. See, for instance, David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005). The brevity of this tome should not detract from the critical global issues it addresses and the polemic it advances. 4. Arundhati Roy, The Algebra of Infinite Justice (New York: Penguin, 2001) 180. A notion of infinite justice for infinite water is a complicated algebra, not least because solidarity is mediated by competing equations about climate, the commons, and geopolitics. 5. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Vol. I, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books, 1976 [1867]) 873. Chapter Twenty-Six is devoted to this subject. 6. The point here is not to settle debate by deferring to the French edition over the English or German, despite Marx’s editorial interest in the French text. It is less a problem of mistranslation or editorial authority and more a distinct conceptual difficulty that, for instance, reaches into what we mean by the time of capital and the fraught connection of labor and production. 7. Marx, Capital Vol. I 873. 8. Michael Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2000). See also, Michael Perelman, “A Short History of Primitive Accumulation,” Counter Punch, April 16, 2013, http://www.counterpunch. org/2013/04/16/a-short-history-of-primitive-accumulation. 9. Capital 875. Accumulation and the Power over Hydro 10. 47 See, for instance, Massimo De Angelis, The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capital (London: Pluto Press, 2007). Among other crucial points in De Angelis’s rearticulation of autonomist thought, he finds forms of enclosure all over the contemporary maps of capitalism and a burgeoning and creative resistance to its manifestations. From this perspective, “primitive accumulation” is not part of some Marxian “prehistory” but is a lived distillation of capitalist processes. One doesn’t begin history after the revolution but within the material struggles against capitalism, vibrant alternatives already posed inside and outside its reach. 11. Perelman, Invention 2. 12. Invention 13–14. 13. Invention 14. 14. See Lucio Colletti, Marxism and Hegel, trans. Lawrence Garner (London: Verso, 1979) 130. When Marx talks in terms of serfs with “the presuppositions of their becoming which are suspended in their being” he suggests that peasants are locked into pastness as process, which grates with the interpretations of Perelman, Federici, and Harvey, who find the logic of capital active in its present. See, Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin, 1973) 459–460. 15. See Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004). Federici’s work here reaches back to earlier research, particularly feminist interventions on social reproduction that appeared in the 1970s (the Wages for Housework movement, for instance). The project reframes the history of capitalism, especially the transitional phase in early modernity. While Federici uses the word “primitive” this is as much about the ironies and contradictions of “witch hunts” as it is a nod to notions of a less-developed capitalism. 16. See Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero (Oakland: PM P, 2012). The title is an allusion to another pivotal feminist text, the novel translated as Woman at Point Zero by Nawal el Saadawi. 17. Federici, Revolution 143. 18. David Harvey, “The “New’ Imperialism: Accumulation by Dispossession,” Socialist Register 40 (2004) 63–87. Although Harvey builds on the work of 48 Materialism and the Critique of Energy Perelman and Federici, he is much more concerned to figure “primitive accumulation” within contemporary articulations of imperialism so that the concept becomes a touchstone in understanding political economy and geopolitics after the end of the Cold War. 19. David Harvey, “The ‘New’ Imperialism” 71. 20. “The ‘New’ Imperialism” 74. 21. The relevant texts are Hannah Arendt, Imperialism: Part Two of the Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968) and Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, trans. Agnes Schwarzchild (New York: Routledge, 2003). 22. See Adrienne Roberts, “Privatizing Social Reproduction: The Primitive Accumulation of Water in an Era of Neoliberalism,” Antipode 40:4 (2008) 535–560. Roberts’s article provides an excellent bridge between the theoretical discussions of primitive accumulation and the political questions hydropower, the power over hydro, compels. 23. Neil Smith, “Nature as Accumulation Strategy,” Socialist Register 2007: Coming to Terms with Nature, eds. Leo Panitch and Colin Leys (London: Merlin Press, 2007) 16–36. 24. See, Karen Bakker, An Uncooperative Commodity: Privatizing Water in England and Wales (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004). 25. The concept of fictitious commodities comes from Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (New York: Farrar & Reinhart, 1944). The idea here, of course, is that water is a social necessity and therefore does not “cooperate” with the prescriptions of the commodity form. 26. See Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living (New York: Modern Library, 1999). In this book Roy analyzes power as production and domain through India’s development of dams and nuclear reactors. “The Greater Common Good” in particular, is a searing critique of the Sardar Sarovar Dam project and a template for resistance, fighting the power of hydro as an accumulation strategy. 27. In addition to An Uncooperative Commodity, see, for instance, Karen Bakker, “Archipelagos and Networks: Urbanization and Water Privatization in the South,” Geographical Journal 169:4 (2003) 328–341; Accumulation and the Power over Hydro 49 “A Political Ecology of Water Privatization,” Studies in Political Economy 70 (2003) 35–58; “The ‘Commons’ versus the ‘Commodity’: ‘Alter’Globalization, Anti-Privatization and the Human Right to Water in the Global South,” Antipode 39:3 (2007) 430–455; and “The Ambiguity of Community: Debating Alternatives to Water Supply Privatization,” Water Alternatives 1:2 (2008) 236–252. 28. The Cochabamba water war has been extensively debated. A good introduction is Oscar Olivera, ¡Cochabamba!: Water War in Bolivia (New York: South End Press, 2004). The story of how transnational conglomerates like Bechtel and United Utilities extend the reach of World Bank structural adjustment in the Global South is central to an understanding of primitive accumulation in neoliberalism. Here water becomes a frontline over conditions of socialization and sustainability. For more on the continuing struggles over water in Bolivia see Emily Achtenberg, “From Water Wars to Water Scarcity: Bolivia’s Cautionary Tale,” ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America 7:2 (2013) 39–41. The entire issue is dedicated to the problem of water in South America. 29. Bakker, Uncooperative Commodity 216. 30. See Finn R. Førsund, Hydropower Economics (New York: Springer, 2015). It is both distressing and hardly surprising that “management science” can so insistently disconnect its calculations from what Roy calls “the cost of living.” Power politics begins in the space of this disconnection. 31. See Roy, The Cost of Living 45. The Anthropocene as Fetishism Daniel Cunha A society that is always sicker, but always stronger, has everywhere concretely re-created the world as the environment and decor of its illness, a sick planet.1 The “Anthropocene” has become a fashionable concept in the natural and social sciences.It is defined as the “human-dominated geologic epoch” because in this epoch of natural history it is humanity that is in control of the biogeochemical cycles of the planet.2 The result is catastrophic: the disruption of the carbon cycle, for example, leads to a global warming that approaches tipping points that might be irreversible.3 The exponential growth of our freedom and power, that is, of our ability to transform nature, is now translated into a limitation to our freedom, including the destabilization of the very framework of life. It reaches its highest degree with the problem of global warming. 4 In this context, it becomes clear that the Anthropocene is a contradictory concept. If the “human-dominated geologic epoch” is leading to a situation in which the existence of humans might be at stake, there is something very problematic with this sort of domination of Nature that should be investigated. Its very basic premise, that it is human-dominated, should be challenged — after all there should be something inhuman or objectified in a sort of domination whose outcome might be human extinction. What is claimed here is that, exactly as for freedom under capitalism, the Anthropocene is an unfulfilled promise. Freedom in capitalism is constrained by fetishism and class relations — capitalist 52 Materialism and the Critique of Energy dynamics are law bound and beyond the control of individuals; the workers are “free” in the sense that they are not “owned” as slaves, but also in the sense that they are “free” from the means of production, they are deprived of their conditions of existence; the capitalists are “free” insofar as they follow the objectified rules of capital accumulation, otherwise they go bankrupt. Likewise, the social metabolism with Nature is constrained and objectified: I claim that the Anthropocene is the fetishized form of interchange between Man and Nature historically specific to capitalism, the same way that the “invisible hand” is the fetishized form of “freedom” of interchange between men. Since primitive accumulation, capital has caused a metabolic rift between Man and Nature. It was empirically observable at least since the impoverishment of soils caused by the separation of city and countryside in nineteenth century Great Britain.5 In the twentyfirst century, though, this rift has become globalized — critical disruptions of the carbon cycle (global warming), the nitrogen cycle, and the rate of biodiversity loss — in a way that implies that humanity is already outside of a “safe operating space” of global environmental conditions.6 The Anthropocene, appears, then, as the globalized disruption of the natural cycles of the Earth, not as a planned, calculated, and controlled disruption, but, crucially, as an unintended side effect of social metabolism with Nature that seems to be progressively out of control. Perhaps the most striking example is the massive burning of fossil fuels at the root of climate change. The motivation for it was for industrial capital to access plentiful cheap labor in cities with the use of a mobile energy source (coal) during the Industrial Revolution. This was impossible with the use of hydraulic energy, which limited industrial activity to the vicinity of waterfalls, often located in depopulated rural areas, and increasingly so as industrial production grew and the exploitation of new waterfalls was needed.7 This transition from hydraulic to fossil energy, therefore, was determined by the valorization of value; there was no intention The Anthropocene as Fetishism 53 to manipulate the carbon cycle or to cause global warming, nor, indeed, were such eventualities recognized as possibilities prior to the mid-twentieth century. The result, though, is that, in the twentyfirst century, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration is already beyond the safe boundary of 350 parts per million (ppm) for long-term human development. As for the nitrogen cycle, it was disrupted by the industrialization of agriculture and fertilizer production, including the fixation of atmospheric nitrogen with the Haber-Bosch process. Again, there was no intention or plan to control the nitrogen cycle, to cause eutrophication of lakes, or to induce the collapse of ecosystems. Nevertheless, the boundary of sixty-two million tons of nitrogen removed from the atmosphere per year has already been surpassed, with 150 million tons in 2014.8 A similar story can be told about the rate of biodiversity loss, and the phosphorous cycle and ocean acidification are following the same pattern. The “human-dominated” geologic epoch, in this regard, seems much more a product of chance and unconsciousness than of a proper control of the global material cycles, in spite of Paul Crutzen’s reference to V.I. Vernadsky’s and Teilhard de Chardin’s “increasing consciousness and thought” and “world of thought” (noösphere).9 “They do not know it, but they do it” — this is what Marx said about the fetishized social activity mediated by commodities, and this is the key to a critical understanding of the Anthropocene.10 In fact, Crutzen locates the beginning of the Anthropocene in the design of the steam engine during the Industrial Revolution.11 Instead of seeing it as an unmediated effect of technology, however, the determinants of the “human-dominated” geologic epoch should be conceptually investigated in the capitalist form of social relations. With his analysis of fetishism, Marx showed that capitalism is a social formation in which there is a prevalence of “material relations between persons and social relations between things,” in which “the circulation of money as capital is an end in itself.”12 Capital is the inversion where exchange value directs use, abstract labor directs concrete labor: “a social formation in which the process of production 54 Materialism and the Critique of Energy has mastery over man, instead of the opposite,” and its circulation as money and commodities for the sake of accumulation constitutes the “automatic subject,” “self-valorizing value.”13 Locating the Anthropocene in capitalism, therefore, implies an investigation into the relation between the Anthropocene and alienation, or, as further developed by the late Marx, fetishism.14 According to Marx, the labor-mediated form of social relations of capitalism acquires a life of its own, independent of the individuals that participate in its constitution, developing into a sort of objective system over and against individuals, and increasingly determines the goals and means of human activity. Alienated labor constitutes a social structure of abstract domination that alienates social ties, in which “starting out as the condottiere of use value, exchange value ended up waging a war that was entirely its own.”15 This structure, though, does not appear to be socially constituted, but natural.16 Value, whose phenomenal form of appearance is money, becomes in itself a form of social organization, a perverted community. This is the opposite of what could be called “social control.”17 A system that becomes quasiautomatic, beyond the conscious control of those involved, and is driven by the compulsion of limitless accumulation as an end in itself, necessarily has as a consequence the disruption of the material cycles of the Earth. Calling this Anthropocene, though, is clearly imprecise, on one hand, because it is the outcome of a historically specific form of metabolism with Nature, and not of a generic ontological being (antropo), and, on the other hand, because capitalism constitutes a “domination without subject,” that is, in which the subject is not Man (not even a ruling class), but capital.18 It is important to note that fetishism is not a mere illusion that should be deciphered, so that the “real” class and environmental exploitation can be grasped. As Marx himself points out, “to the producers... the social relations between their private labors appear as what they are, i.e., as material relations between persons and social relations between things”; “commodity fetishism... is not located in our minds, in the way we (mis)perceive reality, but in our social The Anthropocene as Fetishism 55 reality itself.”19 That is why not even all scientific evidence of the ecological disruption, always collected post festum, is able to stop the destructive dynamic of capital, showing to a caricatural degree the uselessness of knowledge without use.20 The fact that now “they know very well what they are doing, yet they are doing it” does not refute, but rather confirms that the form of social relations is beyond social control, and merely changing the name of the Anthropocene (to Capitolocene or whatever) would not solve the underlying social and material contradictions.21 Value-directed social production, that is, production determined by the minimization of socially necessary labor time instead of by the conscious satisfaction of social needs and desires, results in an objectified mode of material production and social life that can be described by “objective” laws. Time, space, and technology are objectified by the law of value. Of course the agents of the “valorization of value” are human beings, but they perform their social activity as “character [masks],” “personifications of economic relations”: the capitalist is personified capital and the worker is personified labor.22 The fetishistic, self-referential valorization of value through the exploitation of labor (M-C-M') with its characteristics of limitless expansion and abstraction of material content implies the ecologically disruptive character of capitalism, wherein “the development of productive forces is simultaneously the development of destructive forces.”23 Self-expanding value creates an “industrial snowball system” that is not consciously controlled, but “a force independent of any human volition.”24 In this context, it is not a surprise that the disruption of global ecological cycles is presented as the Anthropocene, that is, as a a natural process. That Man is presented as a blind geologic force, such as volcanic eruptions or variations in solar radiation, is an expression of the naturalized or fetishized form of social relations that is prevalent in capitalism. In this sense, the technical structures with which Man carries out its metabolism with Nature is logically marked by fetishism. As Marx notes, “technology reveals the active relation of man to nature, the direct process of the production of his life, and thereby 56 Materialism and the Critique of Energy it also lays bare the process of the production of the social relations of his life, and of the mental conceptions that flow from those relations.”25 In capitalism, production processes are not designed according to the desires and needs of the producers, ecological or social considerations but according to the law of value. Taking as an example the world energy systems, it has been demonstrated that there is no technical constraint to a complete solar transition in two or three decades if we consider the use-value of fossil and renewable energies (their energy return and material requirements), that is, it is technically feasible to use fossil energy to build a solar infrastructure to provide world energy in a quantity and quality sufficient for human development.26 This transition, which from the point of view of use value or material wealth is desirable, necessary, and urgent, is not being carried out, though, because fossil energy is still more prone to capital accumulation, to the valorization of value: capital went to China to exploit cheap labor and cheap coal, causing a strong spike in carbon emissions on the eve of a climate emergency, in a clear display of fetishistic irrationality.27 More generally, the American ecologist Barry Commoner has shown that in the twentieth century many synthetic products (such as plastics and fertilizers) were developed that took the place of natural and biodegradable products. However, the new products were no more effective than the old ones; the transition was only carried out because it was more lucrative to produce them, although they were much more polluting and environmentally harmful — these new technologies were, in fact, the main factor for the increase of pollution in the United States, more than the increase in population or consumption.28 Of course the law of value does not determine only the final products, but also the production processes, which must be constantly intensified both in terms of rhythms and material efficiency, if not in terms of the extension of the working day. Already, in his day, Marx highlighted the “fanaticism that the capitalist shows for economizing on means of production” as they seek the “refuse of production” for reuse and recycling.29 However, under the capitalist form of The Anthropocene as Fetishism 57 social production, productivity gains result in a smaller amount of value created per material unit, so that it fosters enlarged material consumption.30 This general tendency is empirically observable in the so-called Jevons Paradox, in which efficiency gains eventually result in a rebound effect, increased material production.31 This paradoxical effect was first shown by William Stanley Jevons, who presented data that demonstrate that efficiency gains in coal consumption to fuel steam engines during the Industrial Revolution resulted in increased aggregate coal consumption.32 What in a conscious social production would be ecologically beneficial (increased efficiency in resource use), in capitalism increases relative surplus value, and therefore reinforces the destructive limitless accumulation of capital and a technological system that is inappropriate in the first place. It is astonishing that many environmentalists still preach efficiency as an ecological fix, without noticing that the capitalist social form of wealth (value) turns productivity into a destructive force. Even the way capitalism deals with the problem of pollution is configured by alienation: everything can be discussed but the mode of production based on commodification and maximization of profits. Since production is carried out in competing isolated private production units, socio-technical control is limited to external control, through state regulations that enforce end-of-pipe technologies and market mechanisms. The Kyoto Protocol is the best example of the contradictions of market–based approaches to environmental issues. It represents the commodification of the carbon cycle, establishing the equivalence principle, the very form of commodity fetishism, in a sort of stock exchange of carbon. Therefore, it implies a whole process of abstraction of ecological, social, and material qualities to make possible the equivalence of carbon emissions, offsets, and carbon sinks located in very different ecological and social contexts. The abstraction process includes the equalization of emission reductions in different social and ecological contexts, of emissions reductions carried out with different technologies, of carbon of fossil origin and biotic origin, the equalization of different molecules through 58 Materialism and the Critique of Energy the concept of “carbon equivalent” and a definition of “forest” that does not include any requirement of biodiversity.33 However, as with any commodity in capitalism, use value — carbon emissions reductions in this case — is governed by exchange value. The fetishistic inversion of use value and exchange value that characterizes capitalism implies that the effective goal of the whole process of emissions trading comes to be money, not emissions reduction. Empirical examples abound. The trading scheme set out by the Kyoto Protocols does not present any incentive for long-term technology transition but only for short-term financial earnings. In practice, offsets allow polluters to postpone a technological transition, while the corresponding Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) project probably generates a rebound effect that will foster fossil fuel deployment in developing countries.34 Easy technological reductions, such as burning methane in landfills, allow the continuation of carbon emissions by big corporations. Some industries earned more profits mitigating emissions of HFC-23 than with the commodities they produced, while generating huge amounts of offsets that again allow polluters to keep up with their emissions.35 And the comparison of projects with baseline “would be” scenarios even tragically allows the direct increase of emissions, for example, by financing coal mines that mitigate methane emissions. And more examples could be cited. The fact that global warming is determined by cumulative emissions in any meaningful human time-scale reveals the perverse effects of this exchange value–driven scheme: delays in emissions reductions today constrain the possibilities of the future.36 Again a simple Marxian critique reveals how exchange value comes to dominate use value, as the allocation of carbon emissions is determined not by socioecological criteria, but according to the valorization requirements or by “the optimized allocation of resources.” Thus, when the global carbon market hit the record market value of $176 billion in 2011, the World Bank said that “a considerable portion of the trades is primarily motivated by hedging, portfolio adjustments, profit taking, and arbitrage,” typical jargon of financial speculators.37 Kyoto, with The Anthropocene as Fetishism 59 its quantitative approach, does not address, but rather hampers the qualitative transition that is necessary to avoid a catastrophic climate change, that is, the solar transition. Even though substantial amounts of capital are mobilized with the trading schemes, global carbon emissions continue to increase. Under current conditions, it is increasingly likely that the application of an end-of-pipe technology might be necessary. With the rise of the welfare state and ecological regulation, a myriad of such technologies were used to mitigate industrial emissions to water, air, and soil — air filters, wastewater treatment plants, and so on. The problem is that these technologies can only be applied in particular corporate units if it is feasible in the context of value-driven production, that is, only if it does not jeopardize the profitability of corporations. It happens, though, that carbon capture and storage (CCS) is still too expensive to be used in production units or transport systems. Therefore, what comes to the fore is geoengineering, the ultimate end-of-pipe technology applied on a planetary scale to mitigate the effects of carbon emissions: the direct manipulation of world climate itself with processes such as the emission of aerosols to the stratosphere to reflect solar radiation or the fertilization of oceans with iron to induce the growth of carbon-sequestering algae.38 The origins of these processes can be traced back to the Vietnam War and Stalinist projects, one of its first proponents being Edward Teller, the father of the atomic bomb.39 There are huge risks involved in this approach, as the climate system and its subsystems are not fully understood and are subject to non-linearities, tipping points, sudden transitions, and chaos. Moreover, climate system inertia means that such geoengineering techniques would have to be applied at the time-scale of a millennium or longer, effectively implicating dozens of future generations.40 In case of technological failure of the application of geoengineering, the outcome could be catastrophic, with a sudden climate change.41 Considering the relatively low cost of geoengineering, though, it is likely that capitalism assumes the risk of business as usual in order 60 Materialism and the Critique of Energy to preserve its fetishistic quest for profits, keeping geoengineering as a sort of silver bullet of global warming.42 Of course there is the frightening possibility of combining geoengineering and trading schemes, so that geoengineering projects could generate carbon credits in a competitive market. That was the idea of Planktos Inc. in a controversial experiment of ocean fertilization, that alludes to a dystopian future in which world climate is manipulated according to the interests of corporate profits.43 It is clear that capitalist control of pollution, either through market mechanisms or state regulations, resembles the Hegelian Minerva’s Owl: it only (re)acts after the alienated process of production and the general process of social alienation. However, if the core of destructiveness is the fetishistic process itself that is reproduced by trading schemes, and end-of-pipe technologies are subject to failure and complex dynamics that are not rationally accessible to the time scales of human institutions (at least in their current forms), both market and state mechanisms might fail in avoiding a catastrophic climate change. Future projections of global warming by neoclassical economists reveal the alienated core of the Anthropocene in its very essence. In integrated climate-economic models such as the ones developed by William Nordhaus and Nicholas Stern, the interest rate ultimately determines what is acceptable in terms of atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases and its related impacts (coastal inundations, biodiversity loss, agricultural disruption, epidemic outbreaks, and so on), as “cost-benefit analyses” discount future impacts and compound present earnings.44 But as shown by Marx, the interest is the part of the profit that the industrial capitalist pays to the financial capitalist that lent him money-capital in the first place, after the successful valorization process.45 Interest-bearing capital is value that possesses the use value of creating surplus value or profit. Therefore, “in interest-bearing capital the capital relationship reaches its most superficial and fetishized form,” “money that produces money,” “selfvalorizing value.”46 Interest-bearing capital is the perfect fetishistic representation of capital, as the automatic geometric progression of The Anthropocene as Fetishism 61 surplus value production, a “pure automaton.”47 Correspondingly, the determination of future social metabolism with Nature by the interest rate is the ultimate expression of the fetishistic character of this historical form of social metabolism with Nature, that is, of the fetishistic core of the so-called Anthropocene, no matter the magnitude of the interest rate. In capitalism the interest rate is determinant of investments and allocation of resources, and overcoming this is not a matter of moral restraint or of a lower interest rate (as in Stern) but of overcoming the capitalist mode of production itself.48 Future scenarios determined by the interest rate ultimately negate history, since only in capitalism is the interest rate socially determining, as it is capital in its purest form. While in capitalism interest-bearing capital becomes totally adapted to the conditions of capitalist production, and fosters it with the development of the credit system, in precapitalist social formations, “usury impoverishes the mode of production, cripples the productive forces.”49 This is so because in capitalism credit is given in the expectation that it will function as capital, that the borrowed capital will be used to valorize value, to appropriate unpaid “free” labor, while in the Middle Ages the usurer exploited petty producers and peasants working for themselves.50 The determination of future social metabolic relation with Nature by the interest rate is thus an extrapolation of the capitalist mode of production and all of its categories (value, surplus value, abstract labor, and so on) into the future, the fetishization of history. Nowhere is this fetishization of history better crystallized than in the term Anthropocene, which depends upon a ahistorical concept of Man. The sort of cost-benefit analysis that Nordhaus and Stern carry out tends to negate not only history, but matter itself, as the tradeoff of the degradation of material resources with abstract capitalist growth implies the absolute exchangeability between different material resources, and hence between abstract wealth (capital) and material wealth. For example, the most basic natural synthetic process necessary for life as we know on Earth, photosynthesis, is 62 Materialism and the Critique of Energy not technologically substitutable, that is, no amount of exchange value could replace it.51 Synthesizing the complex interactions and material and energy fluxes that constitute ecosystems of different characteristics, scales and path-dependent natural histories is not at all a trivial task on its own terms; doing so under the condition of capitalist social relations, where material interactions and specificity are exactly what exchange value abstracts from, appears doomed to failure. What the analysis found in Nordhaus and Stern takes for granted is the commodity form itself, with its common substance (value) that allows the exchange between different material resources in definite amounts, detached from their material and ecological contexts. But it is this very detachment or abstraction that leads to destructiveness: “The dream implied by the capital form is one of utter boundlessness, a fantasy of freedom as the complete liberation from matter, from nature. This ‘dream of capital’ is becoming the nightmare of that from which it strives to free itself — the planet and its inhabitants.”52 Last but not least, capital is also trying to increase its profits exploiting the very anxiety caused by the prospect of the ecological catastrophe, as an extension of the production of subjectivity by the culture industry.53 For example, Starbucks cafés offer their customers a coffee that is a bit more expensive but claim that part of the money goes to the forest of Congo, poor children in Guatemala, and so on. In this way, political consciousness is depoliticized in what is called the “Starbucks effect.”54 It can also be seen in commercial advertisements. In one such advertisement, after scenes depicting some kind of undefined natural catastrophe intercalated with scenes of a carpenter building an undefined wooden structure and women in what seems to be a fashion show, the real context is revealed: the models are going to a sort of Noah’s Arc built by the carpenter, so that they can survive the ecological catastrophe. The purpose of the advertisement is finally disclosed: to sell deodorant — “the final fragrance.” The slogan — “Happy end of the world!” — explicitly exploits the ecological collapse to sell commodities.55 Opposition and political will themselves are The Anthropocene as Fetishism 63 being seduced to fit into the commodity form, even pervading climate science itself. Climate scientists appear increasingly aware of this pervasive pressure of economic fetishism over science when they state: “liberate the science from the economics, finance, and astrology, stand by the conclusions however uncomfortable,” or “geoengineering is like a heroin addict finding a new way of cheating his children out of money.”56 Decarbonization is always challenged to be “economically feasible.” What is necessary, though, is that a more radical critique come to the fore in the public debate, an explicitly anticapitalist stance that refuses the requirements of capital accumulation in the definition of socio-environmental policies — not the least because it seems it is already impossible to reconcile the limitation of global warming to two degrees Celsius and simultaneously keep “economic growth.”57 It must be highlighted that the fetishization here described and its ecological destructiveness are a historical development, specific to capitalism, and that is why it can be overcome: there is nothing necessarily destructive about the social metabolism with nature. Commodity fetishism and labor as the social-mediating category (abstract labor) are historically specific to capitalism, and began with primitive accumulation.58 As the globalized disruption of Nature, the Anthropocene is the externalization of alienated labor, its logical material conclusion.59 Overcoming it requires the reappropriation of what has been constituted in alienated form, that is, the decommodification of human social activity or the overcoming of capitalism.60 Technology so reconfigured and socialized would no longer be determined by profitability, but would be the technical translation of new values, and would tend to become art.61 Instead of being determined by the unidimensional valorization of value, social production would be the outcome of a multiplicity of commonly discussed criteria, ranging between aesthetic, ecological, ethical, and social considerations and beyond. In other words, material wealth should be freed from the value form. Technologies such as solar energy, microelectronics, and agroecology, for example, could be used to shape a world of abundant material wealth and a conscious social 64 Materialism and the Critique of Energy metabolism with Nature — a world with abundant clean renewable energy, abundant free social time due to the highly automated productive forces, and abundant food ecologically produced, under social control.62 Then and only then could humanity be in conscious control of planetary material cycles and could use this control for human ends (even if deciding to keep them in their “natural” state). In fact, this proposition means taking the promise of the Anthropocene very seriously, that is, humanity should take conscious control of planetary material cycles, extend the terrain of the political hitherto left to the blind mechanics of nature and, in capitalism, to commodity fetishism.63 And this not only because the productive forces developed by capitalism allow it — although up to now we do it without conscious social control — but also because it might be necessary. Civilization is adapted to the Holocenic conditions that prevailed in the last ten thousand years, and we should be prepared to act to preserve these conditions that allow human development or mitigate sudden changes, because they could be challenged not only by human (fetishized) activity, but also by natural causes, something that has already occurred many times in natural history (such as in the case of glacial-interglacial cycles triggered by perturbations in Earth’s orbit, or the catastrophic extinction of dinosaurs due to a meteor impact).64 The (fetishized) “invisible hand” and the (fetishized) “Anthropocene” are two faces of the same coin, of the same unconscious socialization, and should both be overcome with the communalization of social activity, that is, the real control of planetary material cycles depends on conscious social control of world production. It should be emphasized that what is here criticized as “fetishism” does not merely describe the imprecise naming of the Anthropocene, but the form of material interchange itself. And yet what emerges here is a truly utopian perspective, the promise of the realization of the Anthropocene, not as an anthropological constant or a “natural” force, but as a fully historical species-being that consciously controls and gives form to the material conditions of the planet. If, as the The Anthropocene as Fetishism 65 young Marx puts it, alienated labor alienates humanity’s speciesbeing, the liberatory reorganization of social-material interchange would unleash the species potential that is embedded, though socially negated, in the Anthropocene.65 Freed from value form and the instrumental reason that reduces nature to a “substrate of domination,” geoengineering and advanced technology in general could be used not only to solve the climate problem, but also, as Theodor Adorno wrote, to “help nature to open its eyes,” to help it “on the poor earth to become what perhaps it would like to be.”66 Advanced forces of production imply that Fourier’s poetic utopian vision recalled by Walter Benjamin could be materialized: [C]ooperative labor would increase efficiency to such an extent that four moons would illuminate the sky at night, the polar ice caps would recede, seawater would no longer taste salty, and beasts of prey would do man’s bidding. All this illustrates a kind of labor which, far from exploiting nature, would help her give birth to the creations that lie dormant in her womb.67 Even the elimination of brutality in nature (predation) and the abolition of slaughterhouses through the production of synthetic meat seem today within theoretical reach with developments in “genetic reprogramming” and stem-cell technology. All this goes beyond the wildest Marcusean utopian dreams.68 Of course, this requires a social struggle that subverts the production determined by the valorization of value and frees, first of all, human potential. On the other hand, with business as usual, we are likely to see our material future on Earth being determined by the interest rate, emergency geoengineering, and chance. 66 Materialism and the Critique of Energy Notes I would like to thank Cláudio R. Duarte, Raphael F. Alvarenga, Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro, Justin Sully, and the anonymous reviewers for the valuable suggestions. 1. Guy Debord, The Sick Planet, trans. Not Bored (2006 [1971]) http://www. notbored.org/the-sick-planet.html 2. Paul Crutzen, “Geology of Mankind,” Nature 415 (2002) 23. A note on terminology: I use both “Man” and “Nature” throughout to keep with the way the discourse surrounding the Anthropocene operates and to indicate when I am referring specifically to that discourse. They correspond to real social (and violent) abstractions. 3. David Archer, The Global Carbon Cycle (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2010), and James Hansen, Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009). 4. Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times (New York: Verso, 2010) 333. 5. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Vol. III, trans. David Fernbach (London: Penguin, 1991 [1894]) 949, and John Bellamy-Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review, 2000). 6. Johan Rockström, et al., “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” Nature 461 (2009) 472–475, and Will Steffen, et al.(2015), “Planetary Boundaries: Guiding Human Development on a Changing Planet,” Science 347: 6223 (February 13, 2015) http://www.sciencemag.org/ content/early/2015/01/14/science.1259855. 7. Andreas Malm, “The Origins of Fossil Capital: From Water to Steam in the British Cotton Industry,” Historical Materialism 21:1 (2013) 15–68. 8. Steffen, et al., “Planetary Boundaries” 9. Crutzen, “Geology.” 10. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Vol. I, trans. Albert Dragstedt (n. d. [1867]) http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/ works/1867-c1/commodity.htm. 11. Crutzen, “Geology.” The Anthropocene as Fetishism 67 12. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Vol. I, trans. Ben Fowkes 13. Marx, Capital Vol. I, 175, 255. 14. For a discussion of the continuity between the Marxian concepts of (London: Penguin, 1990 [1867]) 166, 253. alienation and fetishism, see Lucio Colletti’s introduction in Karl Marx, Marx’s Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (London: Penguin, 1992 [1844]). 15. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone, 1994 [1967]) 46. See also Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993), and Anselm Jappe, Les aventures de la marchandise: Pour une nouvelle critique de la valeur (Paris: Denoël, 2003): 25–86. 16. Postone, Time 158–160. 17. Jappe, Les aventures. 18. Robert Kurz, Subjektlose Herrschaft: zur Aufhebung einer verkürzten Gesellschaftskritik, EXIT! (1993) http://www.exit-online.org/textanz1. php?tabelle=autoren&index=22&posnr=135&backtext1=text1.php. 19. Capital Vol. I 166 (emphasis added), and Žižek, End Times 190. 20. Debord, Sick Planet. 21. Slavoj Žižek, Mapping Ideology (New York: Verso, 1994) 8. 22. Capital Vol. I 179, 989. 23. Paul Burkett, Marx and Nature: A Red and Green Perspective (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999) 79–98, and Robert Kurz, Schwarzbuch Kapitalismus (Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn, 2009 [1999]) 10. 24. Kurz, Schwarzbuch 218, and John Holloway, Crack Capitalism (New York: Pluto, 2010) 146. 25. Capital Vol. I 493n4. 26. Peter D. Schwartzman and David W. Schwartzman, A Solar Transition Is Possible (London: IPRD, 2011) http://iprd.org.uk/wp-content/ plugins/downloads-manager/upload/A%20Solar%20Transition%20 is%20Possible.pdf, and Mark Jacobson and Mark Delucchi, “A Path to Sustainable Energy by 2030,” Scientific American (Nov. 2009): 58–65. 27. Andreas Malm, “China as Chimney of the World: The Fossil Capital Hypothesis,” Organization and Environment 25:2 (2012) 146–77, and Daniel 68 Materialism and the Critique of Energy Cunha, “A todo vapor rumo à catástrofe?” Sinal de Menos 9 (2013): 109–133. 28. Barry Commoner, “Chapter 8: Population and Affluence” and “Chapter 9: The Technological Flaw,” The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology (New York: Knopf, 1971). 29. Marx, Capital Vol. III 176 30. Claus Peter Ortlieb, “A Contradiction between Matter and Form,” Marxism and the Critique of Value, eds. Neil Larsen, Mathias Nilges, Josh Robinson, and Nicholas Brown (Chicago: MCM’, 2014 [2008]) 77–121. 31. John Bellamy-Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, The Ecological Rift: 32. William Stanley Jevons, The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Capitalism’s War on the Earth (New York: Monthly Review, 2010) 169–182. Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal Mines (n. d. [1865]) http://www.econlib.org/library/YPDBooks/Jevons/jvnCQ.html 33. Larry Lohmann, “The Endless Algebra of Climate Markets,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 22:4 (2011) 93–116, and Maria Gutiérrez, “Making Markets Out of Thin Air: A Case of Capital Involution,” Antipode 43:3 (2011) 639–661 34. Kevin Anderson, “The Inconvenient Truth of Carbon Offsets,” Nature 484 (2012) 7. 35. Lohmann, “Endless Algebra.” 36. Damon Matthews, Nathan Gillet, Peter Stott, and Kirsten Zickfeld, “The Proportionality of Global Warming to Cumulative Carbon Emissions,” Nature 459 (2009) 829–833. 37. Jeff Coelho, “Global Carbon Market Value Hits Record $176 Billion,” Reuters (May 30, 2012) http://www. reuters.com/article/2012/05/30/ ozatp-world-bank-carbon-idAFJOE84T04R20120530. 38. ETC Group, Geopiracy: The Case Against Geoengineering (Manila: ETC Group, 2010) http://www.etcgroup. org/content/geopiracy-caseagainst-geoengineering. 39. Eli Kintisch, Hack the Planet: Science’s Best Hope—or Worst Nightmare—for Averting Climate Catastrophe (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2010) 77–102. 40. Susan Solomon, Gian-Kasper Plattner, Reto Knutti, and Pierre Friedglinstein, “Irreversible Climate Change Due to Carbon Dioxide Emissions,” PNAS 106:6 (2009) 1704–1709. The Anthropocene as Fetishism 41. 69 Victor Brovkin, Vladimir Petoukhov, Martin Claussen, Eva Bauer, David Archer, and Carlo Jaeger, “Geoengineering Climate by Stratospheric Sulfur Injections: Earth System Vulnerability to Technological Failure,” Climatic Change 92 (2009) 243–259. 42. Scott Barrett, “The Incredible Economics of Geoengineering,” 43. Martin Lukacs, “World’s Biggest Geoengineering Experiment ‘Violates’ Environmental and Resource Economics 39:1 (2007) 45–54. UN Rules,” The Guardian (October 15, 2012) http://www.guardian.co.uk/ environment/2012/oct/15/pacific-iron-fertilisation-geoengineering 44. William Nordhaus, A Question of Balance: Weighing the Options on Global Warming Policies (New Haven: Yale UP, 2008), and Nicholas Stern, The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review (London: HM Treasury, 2007) http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/sternreview_index.htm. 45. Capital Vol. III 459–524. 46. Capital Vol. III 515. 47. Capital Vol. III 523. 48. Stern, Economics. 49. Capital Vol. III 731–732. 50. Capital Vol. III 736. 51. Robert Ayres, “On the Practical Limits to Substitution,” Ecological Economics 61 (2007) 115–128. 52. Time 383. 53. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments,. trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002 [1947]) 6; cited in Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon, 1972) 66. 54. Slavoj Žižek, Catastrophic But Not Serious. Lecture video (2011). http:// fora.tv/2011/04/04/Slavoj_Zizek_ Catastrophic_But_Not_Serious. 55. Axe, Happy End of the World! Advertisement video (2012) http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=n_hnZgEjJD4 56. Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows, “A New Paradigm for Climate Change: How Climate Change Science Is Conducted, Communicated and Translated into Policy Must Be Radically Transformed If ‘Dangerous’ Climate Change Is to Be Averted,” Nature Climate Change 2 (September, 70 Materialism and the Critique of Energy 2012) 639–40, and Kintisch, Hack 57. 57. Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows, “Beyond ‘Dangerous’ Climate Change: Emission Scenarios for a New World,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 369 (2011) 20–44. 58. Postone, Time; Holloway, Crack Capitalism; Krisis Group, Manifesto Against Labour (1999) http://www. krisis.org/1999/manifesto-againstlabour. 59. Sick Planet. 60. Time. 61. Commoner, Closing Circle; Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon, 1964); Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon, 1969). 62. Robert Kurz, “Antiökonomie und Antipolitik. Zur Reformulierung der sozialen Emanzipation nach dem Ende des ‘Marxismus‚„ Krisis 19 (1997): 51–105. http://www.opentheory.org/keimformen/text.phtml; Schwartzman and Schwartzman, Solar Transition; Miguel Altieri, Agroecology: The Science of Sustainable Agriculture (Boulder: Westview, 1995). 63. Eric Swyngedouw, “Apocalypse now! Fear and Doomsday Pleasures,” 64. Hansen, Storms, and Rockström et al., “Safe Operating Space.” 65. Marx, Marx’s Early Writings. 66. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment. Capitalism Nature Socialism 24:1 (2013) 9–17. 67. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938-1940, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Belknap, 2003) 394. 68. See David Pierce, Reprogramming Predators (2009) http://www. hedweb.com/abolitionist-project/ reprogramming-predators.html, and BBC, World’s First Lab-Grown Burger Is Eaten in London (5 Aug. 2013), http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-23576143. Marcuse’s skepticism about the “pacification of nature” is expressed in Counterrevolution and Revolt 68. Mapping the Atomic Unconscious: Postcolonial Capital in Nuclear Glow Katherine Lawless During his visit to Hiroshima on May 27, 2016, the first ever to be made by a sitting U.S. president, Barack Obama claimed that “the memory of the morning of August 6, 1945, must never fade.”1 Not only did he seek to preserve the memory of the dropping of the first atomic bomb beyond the last voices of the hibakusha, he framed this call for preservation in moral terms: “The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires a moral revolution as well.” If his explicit claim is that the role of science in human atrocity can be mitigated by a renewed moral framework, the implicit message is that the practice of commemoration provides a symbolic ground for this renewed morality. Accordingly, the president’s discourse of moral revolution not only affirms the largely apolitical, ahistorical nature of global memory culture, which tends to translate historical forms of exploitation into universal narratives of suffering, but it also obscures the slow violence of nuclear energy regimes by reducing nuclearity to the moment of explosion. In seeking to preserve the memory of atrocity, the moral revolutionary, however unwittingly, preserves the colonial logic of nuclear energy regimes by transforming the material exploitations of energy production into the universal grammar of commemoration. Against the idealism of the moral revolutionary, I want to recuperate the material dimensions of cultural memory and suggest that it might serve a different purpose in the context of postcolonial capital: to elucidate the materiality of an energy unconscious 74 Materialism and the Critique of Energy embedded in memory media.2 Postcolonial capitalism here signifies the ways in which immaterial forms of accumulation and material forms of labour intersect in the colonial landscapes of global memory culture. My utilization of the term is meant to reflect the complex ways in which enclosures of knowledge and labor reinforce one another while contributing to new forms of accumulation through the aestheticization of colonial capital’s material remains.3 In my elaboration of the atomic unconscious of postcolonial capital, I adapt Michael Niblett’s question regarding the mapping of energy regimes in relation to cultural media. Suggesting that patterns of capital accumulation might be embedded in cultural forms, Niblett asks: “What happens if we map the flow of energy regime transitions in relation to cultural manifestations?”4 In other words, what can specific cultural media (Niblett uses the example of Gothic narratives) tell us about the flow of energy during the transition between regimes (for example, from coal to oil)? Following Niblett’s lead regarding this link between material inputs and symbolic forms, I ask: What happens if we map the emergence of global memory cultures alongside the transition to nuclear energy? And, consequently, how does memory media register not only cultural anxieties about repeating the past but also the “energy invisibilities” that accompany the emergence of nuclearity as a “green alternative” to fossil fuels?5 I begin by tracing the entwined histories of memory studies and energy humanities and identify the vital role discourses of rupture have played in both the preservation of memory and conceptions of nuclearity. I follow this brief historicization by tracking the ways in which the energy unconscious works across different cultural mediums tasked with doing memory work, beginning with the example of the modern museum. Drawing on the concept of resource aesthetics, I argue that the atomic unconscious, closely associated with the history of photography, registers a new regime of dispossession in the uneven landscapes of postcolonial capitalism in which commemoration becomes not only an aesthetic practice but also a cultural resource. Finally, I assert that the materialities at work Mapping the Atomic Unconscious 75 in nuclear photography — including its status as a physical object that circulates within and through various cultural institutions; its manifestation as the effect of light on a chemically specific surface; and its subjection to environmental impacts that result in fading, tearing, annotating, archiving, destruction — register contradictions between the brute materiality of nuclear inputs and cultural representations of nuclearity in the form of an atomic unconscious whose relationship to memory differs significantly from the carbon unconscious. I conclude by claiming that memory can serve as a critical methodology for the energy humanities. Discourses of Rupture As emergent disciplines of the atomic age, memory studies and energy humanities share a common genealogy: both arise from a series of ruptures — technological, historical, moral — accompanying the postwar condition. While the origin of global memory culture is varied, and contested, American historian Jay Winter argues that it proliferated after World War II due to shifting social and economic conditions that increased both leisure time and disposable income.6 Despite this socioeconomic basis, memory studies often uses the atrocities of the Holocaust as a touchstone, a tendency that has been harshly criticized by Kerwin Lee Klein, who sees the memorial turn in historical discourse as a form of cultural re-enchantment deriving from the intersection of the therapeutic and the avant-garde.7 As a result of this re-enchantment, memory is falsely lauded as a site of emancipation. Memory scholar Andreas Huyssen proffers a similar critique. In addition to the criticism of Holocaust as touchstone, he claims that the conception of “history as trauma” that permeates memory studies does very little to elucidate the political and material dimensions of cultural memory.8 The effect is to reduce memory to yet another version of identity politics.9 Indeed, affirming memory as the organizing principle of twentieth-century historical study par excellence, Winter asserts that “the hyphen of identity is strengthened by commemoration.”10 However, the main difference between 76 Materialism and the Critique of Energy memory and other expressions of identity is that memory movements pose a temporal disruption rather than a simple re-signification. This concept of temporal rupture is central to literary theories of trauma and memory, which locate emancipatory potential in repressed counter-narratives that speak back to and against dominant historical narratives.11 Here, traumatic memory signifies a disruption of the proper ordering of experience. Representations of historical trauma stand in for an original encounter, analogically signifying the return of the repressed, where repressed memory disrupts official historical narrative.12 Postcolonial scholars, however, have criticized this version of trauma theory for its colonial constitution: “following feminist psychologist Laura Brown, they argue that the ‘event’ or ‘accident’based model of trauma associated with [Cathy] Caruth assumes the circumstances of white, Western privilege and distracts from ‘insidious’ forms of trauma that involve everyday, repeated forms of traumatizing violence, such as sexism, racism and colonialism.”13 Put differently, Western trauma theory fails to address the slow violence of colonial logics, which include forms of sexual and racial exploitation.14 In nuclear discourse, the emancipatory potential of rupture is tied to postwar instantiations of the twin movements of human rights and decolonization. This relationship is best represented in the work of Gabrielle Hecht, who states: “In the beginning, there was The Bomb. It ended The War. Splitting the atom ruptured human history.”15 Connecting scientific discovery and morality (albeit very differently than Obama), she explains that the historical rupture taking place around the time of detonation was not only scientific but moral as well; alongside the power of nuclear technology, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in line with movements of decolonization, promised to emancipate those populations exploited under colonial rule.16 Mediated by discourses of historical rupture, however, decolonization did not lead to emancipation; rather, colonial power was simply reoriented along the lines of the nuclear (colonizer) and the non-nuclear (colonized).17 In a separate article, Hecht departs Mapping the Atomic Unconscious 77 from the usual polarizing categories of nuclear scholarship to examine the ways in which the intertwining “rupture-talks” of nuclearity and decolonization play out in the lives of uranium miners in colonial Africa.18 By making the miners and not technoscientific innovation the focus, she exposes the “power effects” of nuclear ontologies. By mapping the reorientation of French colonial power onto the revolutionary imaginary of nuclear technology, she argues that discourses of rupture had material effects: “Nuclear and postcolonial rupture-talk combined in shaping sociotechnical practices, but what mattered most to [the uranium miners] was how these practices conjugated colonial power relations into real and imagined futures.”19 What becomes evident in Hecht’s work on nuclear ontologies is the ways in which the discourses of moral and historical rupture that underwrite contemporary forms of commemoration eclipse the slow violence structuring the everyday labor of the uranium miner. Elsewhere I have argued that memory is implicated in the forms of exploitation that accompany the new global enclosures; and that the dispossession of knowledge reinforces material dispossessions. Sites of memory, in other words, are also sites of enclosure, operating according to a logic that conceals cycles of accumulation and dispossession through the preservation of the material remains of previous stages of accumulation. In this way, enclosures of knowledge fortify the outward thrust of capitalist expansion. This relationship is exemplified in popular interpretations of the Harper government’s actions toward knowledge-producing institutions, such as the closure of seven of nine Fisheries and Oceans Libraries whose destruction has been referred to in popular media as both “libracide” and a “knowledge massacre.” These practices emerge alongside a cultural paradigm I have named the preservationist aesthetic, which frames the new global enclosures in moral terms as sites of historical and cultural preservation and emphasizes memory’s property form in the post-crisis cultures of late capitalism. It also places the drive for preservation in the form of collective memory at the heart of both new forms of enclosure and new practices of 78 Materialism and the Critique of Energy resistance. Mediated by this ideology, social, political, and economic exploitation are reframed as aesthetic problems in terms of loss, erasure, and ruin. Hence, alongside the proliferation of memory culture we see the corresponding proliferation of aesthetic trends such as ruin porn. In general, the preservationist aesthetic has a dual function: on one hand, it recovers and preserves those aspects of common history under the name of heritage that are threatened with erasure by the innovations of capitalist production, including nuclear technology; on the other hand, it produces new spheres of enclosure by colonizing those spheres previously excluded from the production process, transforming them into aesthetic experiences. In short, the preservationist aesthetic is an ideological mechanism for translating material exploitations into symbolic terms (that is, forms of extraction into forms of cultural representation). As a result, we are faced with a paradox: in defending against the threat of erasure, of “obsolescence and disappearance” that characterizes late capitalism, preservationist aesthetics contribute to the creation of new spheres of colonization and enclosure.20 In this way, the forms of representation specific to this aesthetic regime facilitate neocolonial sensibilities by mediating capital’s social and material resources.Thus, despite the mandate to educate, the function of memory museums and similar memory media is to conciliate and disarm while at the same time commodifying and incorporating the social and material remains of previous stages of accumulation.21 Memory media, however, are not only sites of primitive accumulation but also resource aesthetics across which different materialities are at work. Outlined by Brent Ryan Bellamy, Michael O’Driscoll, and Mark Simpson in the introduction to a special issue of Postmodern Culture, the concept of resource aesthetics provides a framework for linking modes of exploitation (like uranium extraction) with modes of representation (Hecht’s concept of rupture-talk, for example).22 Beginning with the “amnesiac history” of Fort McMurray as a storage site for radioactive waste, Bellamy et al. define the resource aesthetic as a site of contradiction between the figural and Mapping the Atomic Unconscious 79 the material that requires a dialectical understanding of the relation between “the aesthetics of resources” and “the aesthetic as resource.” Elaborating this constitution, Imre Szeman identifies the dual aspect of resources, their simultaneous materiality and unrepresentability, stating: “Resources are material in ways that, in part, evade aesthetics, evade representation. There’s a double movement in thinking about aesthetics and resources that I want to keep alive: one in which we recognize their sheer necessity and blunt reality, and another in which we try to bring them into representation.”23 In these terms, the “blunt reality” of uranium extraction doesn’t show up in popular discourses of nuclearity, which feature The Bomb or forgotten heroes like the nuclear operator. Hecht, among others, has even suggested that knowledge of the relationship between uranium extraction and nuclearity has, in fact, been withheld from uranium miners.24 Resource aesthetics facilitate this dispossession of knowledge in support of accumulation practices like uranium extraction. The Slow Violence of Nuclear Memory Mediating contradictions between cultural narratives of atrocity (or accident-based trauma) and the slow violence of exploitation, memory media are therefore part of an apparatus of erasure that participates in material forms of dispossession. The modern museum is a prime example. While museums have long played an important role in the production of cultural value, contemporary museums take an active role in this process in the context of late capitalism, as Rosalind Krauss has shown.25 According to Wolfgang Ernst, museums are “memory-producing machines” that, unlike their historical predecessor, are “transformers” rather than mere “receptacles.”26 No longer mere spaces for the sedimentation of historical memory, they are vehicles through which collective memory as a cultural resource is both produced and transmitted.27 As cultural transformers, they are exemplars of a new mode of enclosure that converts the material remains of previous stages of accumulation into aesthetic objects under the auspices of cultural preservation. Take the United States 80 Materialism and the Critique of Energy Holocaust Memorial Museum, for example. As the inaugural memory museum, it not only helps to elucidate the conversion of mundane everyday objects into shrines of dispossession, it also serves as a microcosm of the new experience-based economy in which memory becomes a cultural resource. According to Alison Landsberg, one of the most striking exhibits in this museum, which spans three floors and incorporates both historical artifacts and personal possessions, is the room on the second floor filled with “survivor shoes.”28 Drawing on Fredric Jameson’s comparative analysis of Van Gogh’s peasant shoes and Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes, where the latter “embod[ies] the logic of the commodity” and the former retains a sense of “lived individuality,” each shoe “bears a trace of the absent body” and in doing so recreates a “whole missing object world.”29 These “survivor objects,” in which religious and commodity fetishes seem to merge, resist the alienating logic of the commodity while contributing to a fantasy of immediacy in which the mediating object is rendered invisible. Despite the resistance to erasure that underwrites memory’s preservation, the preservationist aesthetic nevertheless participates in the slow violence of nuclearity by reinforcing a series of elisions, beginning with the elision of Hiroshima as the origin of global memory culture.30 Further elisions include: Hiroshima’s overshadowing of the long-term nuclear testing on the Marshall Islands, which saw sixty-seven tests over a period of twelve years (and whose explosive power and radioactive fallout far surpassed that of Hiroshima); the banalization of petro-crises, such as oil spills, against the atrocities of nuclear meltdown; an emphasis on atrocities (spills and meltdowns) that fail to acknowledge the everyday forms of exploitation that support these wide-scale atrocities. In the nuclear museum, these elisions take the shape of nuclear exceptionalism, which Hecht defines as “a technopolitical claim — emerging immediately after the end of World War II — that there was something radically unique about nuclear things. From 1945 onward, both cold warriors and their activist opponents cultivated this nuclear exceptionalism. Atomic Mapping the Atomic Unconscious 81 weapons were portrayed as fundamentally different from any other human creation.”31 In “Nuclear Ontologies,” Hecht elucidates the stakes of such exceptionalism in the following way: “Asserting the ontological distinctiveness of ‘the nuclear’ carrie[s] political, cultural, and economic stakes amplified by morality-talk, which tend[s] to boil down to a simple duality: nuclear technology represent[s] either salvation or depravity.”32 The response to the radical uniqueness of the destructive capacity of atomic weapons is, of course, the radical uniqueness of the potential salvation offered by forms of nuclear energy. However, the other side of this exceptionalism, as she points out, is the rendering banal of nuclear power, where nuclear power is represented “not as a life-saving technology for the human race, but as simply another way to boil water. Radiation [is] just another industrial risk. Such representations seek to banalize nuclear things.”33 Along with the sensational discourses of nuclear atrocity, the banalization of nuclear power serves to elide the slow violence of such energy regimes, in addition to the reality that other similar energy regimes (such as coal and oil) perform similar routine elisions through the polarization of the mundane and the spectacular.34 Put differently, in the production of nuclear memory, the slow violence of global energy regimes (which includes both climate change and the new global enclosures) is eclipsed by the spectacle of nuclear atrocity and re-presented as the preservation of nuclear memory. The preservation of nuclear memory then is not a question of morality but a problem of representation. Linking the erasure of memory to processes of slow violence, Rob Nixon writes: “In the long arc between the emergence of slow violence and its delayed effects, both the causes and the memory of catastrophe readily fade from view as the causalities incurred typically pass untallied and unremembered.”35 Slow violence — “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight” as opposed to a violence that is “immediate in time” and “explosive and spectacular in space… erupting into instant sensational visibility” — is also, then, a form of forgetting.36 For Nixon, the question becomes one of how to represent this slow 82 Materialism and the Critique of Energy violence of the everyday that is effaced by the spectacular violence of atrocity. Accordingly, he asks: “In an age when the media venerate the spectacular, when public policy is shaped primarily around perceived immediate need, a central question is strategic and representational: how can we convert into image and narrative the disasters that are slow moving and long in the making, disasters that are anonymous and that star nobody, disasters that are attritional and of indifferent interest to the sensation-driven technologies of our image-world?”37 In other words, how can we represent the everyday forms of violence that fail to register as violence without reducing them to spectacle? In the context of nuclear memory, the question becomes: how can we represent the everyday violence of nuclearity characterized by uranium extraction and related forms of exploitation without reducing them to the spectacular violence of Hiroshima? The answer lies (at least in part) in Patricia Yaeger’s concept of the energy unconscious, to which the concept of narrative erasure is central. Drawing on Jameson’s notion of the political unconscious, Yaeger defines the energy unconscious as not only a “cultural code or reality effect” but also a “field of force” whose causality lies elsewhere and shows up as an “energy invisibilit[y]” that constitutes a “particular kind of erasure.”38 Building on Yaeger’s definition, Brent Ryan Bellamy describes it as a “structuring presence” that lies “outside the narrative” of energy; in Vivasvan Soni’s words, an “unsignifying opacity,” which Szeman describes further as an “incapacity to name the social, political and cultural significance of energy.”39 As sites of accumulation, memory media are also registers of the energy unconscious, which take different forms in different media tasked with the work of remembering. Literary critic Stephanie LeMenager, for example, describes the energy unconscious of oil literature as a form of “embodied memory and habitus for modern humans, insofar as everyday events such as driving or feeling the summer heat of asphalt on the soles of one’s feet are incorporating practices, in Paul Connerton’s term for the repeated performances that become encoded in the body.”40 Following Marshall McLuhan’s Mapping the Atomic Unconscious 83 description of “infrastructure as media,” she argues further that infrastructure as embodied memory is also “a meeting point of ecology and history.”41 Bob Johnson makes a similar claim regarding petroculture’s embodied memory in his work on the role of fossil fuels in the production of American culture, arguing that forms of cultural production featuring carbon derivatives not only structure both an experience and understanding of the world, but also the ways in which the suppression of carbon dependency drives its reappearance as embodied memory.42 In LeMenager’s and Johnson’s treatments, embodied memory signifies the return of a repressed energy infrastructure. A Methodology of Exposure The materialities at work in nuclear photography which register contradictions between the brute inputs of nuclear fallout and cultural representations of nuclearity — highlighted, for example, by the “atomic shadows” left by exposure to nuclear fallout — constitute an energy unconscious that looks quite different from that of carbon. The atomic unconscious that emerges in nuclear photography is less structural and more iconic, less embodied and more diffuse, relating to questions of visibility, invisibility, and exposure rather than habitus or embodiment.43 Barbara Marcon, for example, talks about “atomic shadows” as a form of testimony; Ned O’Gorman and Kevin Hamilton refer to Atomic Age aesthetics as a “performance of collective memory” in which the forgotten origins of nuclear hegemony are buried within a cultural icon; and Lippit refers to the x-ray as “a kind of living remnant, a phantom subject” that “retains the dimension and shape of its object while rendering its inside.”44 What each of these characterizations has in common is the “problem of exposure,” which elin o’Hara slavik argues is central to both photography and the history of the atomic age.45 Nicole Shukin affirms this historical interdependency, stating that “in both their means and their ends photography and nuclear science share a history as well as material resources and techniques, particularly ‘exposure’ of bodies to light, 84 Materialism and the Critique of Energy either in the form of visible or invisible rays.”46 Accordingly, as Thomas Pringle suggests, this allows photography to serve as a material index or “early variety of Geiger counter” that “repurpose[es] aesthetics into a functional diagnostic tool for the general barometry of light.”47 slavik, and other theorist-practitioners of nuclear photography, utilize this methodology of exposure to “make visible the unseen, to reveal what is denied and hidden.”48 What, exactly, does this methodology, which is so intimately connected to discourses of rupture, promise to reveal? In trauma theory, it promises, of course, to reveal repressed memories, which contribute to the broader cultural movement toward the re-valuing of forgotten histories. In the context of nuclearity, however, it promises to reveal the persistent materiality of nuclear exposure. Following the dialectic of the resource aesthetic, it takes two related forms: one material, the other figural. In the former constitution, the methodology of exposure reveals the material exposure of the photograph to the invisible rays of nuclear energy. In the latter, it emerges in conjunction with discourses of testimony and witnessing that render nuclear photographs, in Yaelle S. Amir’s words, “material witness[es] to the effects of nuclear energy.”49 In her curatorial statement, Amir describes the material persistence of nuclear traces in the following way: “The exhibition Reactive Matters explores the ways in which nuclear energy permeates our surroundings — its presence lingers in the soil we tread, the water we consume, and the roads we often travel.” While this statement sounds similar to LeMenager’s description of oil infrastructure as embodied memory, there is a clear distinction between the constitution of the carbon unconscious and that of the atomic. Instead of registering as a performance encoded in the body, atomic infrastructure registers as alienated memory through which the remains of nuclear disaster are animated as material witnesses. Fetishized, these material witnesses perform a double elision: first, they stand in as substitutes for the living witness, the hibakusha; second, as substitutes for the social relations of spectacular violence, they elide the social relations of Mapping the Atomic Unconscious 85 slow violence underwrite the spectacle of atrocity. This brief account of the relationship between nuclear memory and postcolonial capital demonstrates that memory is not just an object of analysis; it is also a methodology of exposure that promises to reveal the materiality of the energy unconscious at work within and across memory media. In elaborating its usefulness as a critical methodology for the energy humanities, I have demonstrated at least three things: (1) by placing the entwined histories of memory and energy alongside one another, with particular attention to the nuclear, I have demonstrated how each corresponds to colonial discourses of rupture; (2) by framing memory media (such as nuclear photography) as resource aesthetics, I have posited memory as both an aesthetic practice and a cultural resource that is embedded within cycles of accumulation, as well as a form of materiality and a mode of figuration where the former is eclipsed by the latter; and, finally, (3) by positing memory as a site of dispossession, I have suggested that the analysis of various memory media might help to track different expressions of the energy unconscious, which registers, in the case of the atomic unconscious, not only the energy invisibilities that accompany the transition to nuclearity but also the forgotten materiality of nuclear memory itself. Without such a materialist perspective, we are left with the false radiance of a moral revolution whose advocates sit on the winning side of nuclear history and whose discourses serve the interests of postcolonial capital. 86 Materialism and the Critique of Energy Notes 1. The full transcript of Obama’s tribute speech was reprinted by The New York Times the day of the commemoration. “Text of President Obama’s Speech in Hiroshima, Japan,” The New York Times, March 28, 2016, http:// www.nytimes.com/2016/05/28/world/asia/text-of-president-obamasspeech-in-hiroshima-japan.html 2. Patricia Yaeger, “Editor’s Column: Literature in the Ages of Wood, Tallow, Coal, Whale Oil, Gasoline, Atomic Power, and Other Energy Sources,” PMLA 126.2 (2011) 305–326. 3. For a broader discussion of postcolonial capitalism and its relation to labor and knowledge, see Sandro Mezzadra’s “How Many Histories of Labour? Towards a Theory of Postcolonial Capitalism,” Transversal: Unsettling Knowledges, European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, 2012, http://eipcp.net/transversal/0112/mezzadra/en. 4. Michael Niblett, Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment (New York, NY: Fordham UP, 2017) 138. 5. The concept of “energy invisibilities” belongs to Patricia Yaeger. I am using it in relation to the atomic unconscious to suggest that the atomic unconscious is comprised of energy invisibilities that accompany the transition to nuclearity. 6. Jay Winter, “The Memory Boom in Contemporary Historical Studies,” Raritan 21.1 (2001) 52–66. 7. Kerwin Lee Klein, “On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse,” Representations 69 (2000) 136. 8. Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford UP, 2003) 9. Memory scholars such as Shoshana Felman discuss the relationship between Freud’s work on trauma and the idea of “history as trauma” discussed by Huyssen. In her remarks on Cathy Caruth’s analysis, Felman suggests that Freud was responsible for the transformation of all history into trauma: “In an exemplary analysis of Freud’s as yet uncharted legacy of trauma in his last work Moses and Monotheism, Caruth remarkably, paradigmatically, shows how the book itself — Freud’s testament on history as trauma — is the site of Mapping the Atomic Unconscious 87 an inscription of a historical trauma: that of Freud’s dramatic departure from Vienna, then invaded and annexed by Hitler’s Germany.” Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York, NY: Routledge, 1992) 174. Indeed, though Caruth doesn’t pen this phrase exactly (history as trauma), in her reading of Freud she asks: “What does it mean, precisely, for history to be the history of a trauma?” (15). Her answer to this question is: “For history to be a history of trauma means that it is referential precisely to the extent that it is not fully perceived as it occurs; or to put it somewhat differently, that a history can be grasped only in the very inaccessibility of its occurrence” (18). She concludes with the claim that “history, like trauma, is never simply one’s own, that history is precisely the way we are implicated in each other’s traumas” (24). History, in Caruth’s analysis undergoes an essential transformation; the history of trauma in particular is transformed into history as trauma in general. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore: John’s Hopkins P, 1996). 9. Both Winter and Huyssen have argued this perspective. Winter, in particular, claims that “[t]he creation and dissemination of narratives about the past arise out of and express identity politics” (Winter, “The Memory Boom” 54). 10. Jay Winter, Remembering War: The Great War Between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century (Yale UP, 2006) 36. 11. In Unclaimed Experience, Cathy Caruth emphasizes the logic of rupture not only in her references to trauma’s belated representation but also to its appearance as a “break in the mind’s experience of time” (61). Transferring the language of psychic experience (in which the symptom is inscribed on the body as text) to narrative representation, Caruth argues that the trauma text is “the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available,” a wound that “is experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known” (4). 12. The problem with such a model is not only that it relies on the analogical importation of an individual model of psychic trauma into the order 88 Materialism and the Critique of Energy of cultural representation, but also that it is based on a fundamental assumption that history proceeds chronologically. Walter Benjamin and Guy Debord, as well as a number of contemporary theorists of primitive accumulation, including Tony C. Brown and Massimiliano Tomba, are critical of this abstract, linear historical time for its complicity with not only the accumulation of capital but, in Debord’s words, “the victory of the bourgeoisie.” Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Ken Knabb (New York: Zone Books, 2006) 51. See also Water Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968) 217–252; Tony C. Brown’s “The Time of Globalization: Rethinking Primitive Accumulation,” Rethinking Marxism 21.4 (2009) 571–584; and Massimiliano Tomba, “Historical Temporalities of Capitalism: An AntiHistoricist Perspective,” Historical Materialism 17 (2009) 44–65. 13. Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust 14. This postcolonial critique of trauma theory is echoed by Slavoj Žižek’s in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford UP, 2009) 89. materialist critique of trauma. Following Catherine Malabou in her elaboration of a “material unconscious,” Žižek argues that the Freudian model of trauma is Western-centric and cannot account for experiences of trauma that do not take the form of a sudden, unexpected event (such as chronic civil war). Departing from Malabou, however, he maintains that even her critique focuses to specifically on content rather than form. Traumatic shock, he suggests, should not be understood as a repetition of substance, but of the very act of erasure. Such a position is useful in articulating the atomic unconscious. In this model, the methodology of exposure would reveal not the erased content, but this very act of erasure. Slavoj Žižek, “Descartes and the Post-Traumatic Subject,” Filozofski vesting 29.2 (2008) 9–29. 15. Gabrielle Hecht, “Nuclear 2,” Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment, eds. Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel, and Patricia Yaeger (New York: Fordham UP, 2017) 246. 16. Gabrielle Hecht, “Nuclear Ontologies.” Constellations 13:3 (2006) 322. 17. Hecht, “Nuclear Ontologies” 323. Mapping the Atomic Unconscious 89 18. Gabrielle Hecht, “Rupture-Talk in the Nuclear Age: Conjugating Colonial 19. Hecht, “Rupture-Talk” 720. Power in Africa,” Social Studies of Science 32.5–6 (2002) 691–727 20. Andreas Huyssen, “Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia,” Public Culture 12.1 (2000) 33. 21. The modern prison system is one such example of the incorporation of the remains of previous stages of accumulation. With the abolition of slavery, which Marx argues is one of the five forms of extra-economic violence (alongside conquest, robbery, murder, and land enclosure) through which the processes of primitive accumulation take place, former slaves that could not be incorporated into the wage-labor system compose a large percentage of the prison population. See Karl Marx, Capital Vol. I, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1990 [1867]), and Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories P, 2003). We see a variation of this situation in the closure of former political prisons, such as Robben Island, that have been transformed into museums — the former inmates are often reincorporated as tour guides. 22. Brent Ryan Bellamy, Michael O’Driscoll, and Mark Simpson, “Introduction: Toward a Theory of Resource Aesthetics,” Postmodern Culture 26:2 (2016). 23. Imre Szeman, “When Energy is the Focus: Methodology, Politics, and Pedagogy — A Conversation with Brent Ryan Bellamy, Stephanie LeMenager, and Imre Szeman,” Postmodern Culture 26.2 (2016). 24. In the Canadian context, Peter C. Van Wyck claims that the Sahtu Dene of Great Bear Lake, who mined uranium used in the development of the bombs detonated in Japan, suffered a similar eclipse of knowledge. Tracing the trade routes of fissionable uranium in Britain, Canada, and the United States, he states: “Until the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, virtually all of this was carried out in secret. Workers at the mine site were apparently unaware of the purpose of the ore, or at least this is the claim one finds most frequently.” “The Highway of the Atom: Recollections Along a Route,” Topia 7 (2002) 100n2. 25. Rosalind Krauss, “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum,” 90 Materialism and the Critique of Energy October 54 (1990) 11. 26. Wolfgang Ernst, cited by Susan A. Crane, ed. Museums and Memory (Stanford UP, 2000) 27. 27. Walter Benjamin and Rosalind Krauss both anticipated this emerging role of the museum as processor by situating it in the context of the capitalist mode of production, elucidating transitions in the functions of the art object under its industrial mode and the exhibition within its later logic respectively. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin illustrates the ways in which technologies of mass reproduction transformed the work of art from religious to commodity fetish (replacing the divine with the social relations of production), which results in the tipping of the scales in favor of exhibition rather than cult value. And, in “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum,” Rosalind Krauss elucidates a similar transformation of the exhibition itself during capital’s later stages. Accordingly, Krauss demonstrates the ways in which the synchronic or encyclopedic museum, under the influence of minimalism, “would forego history in the name of a kind of intensity of experience” (9). In short, it would become “a space from which the collection has withdrawn” (4). This new cult of experience represents the generalization of exhibition value, or the exhibitionist properties of the modern museum extended to their logical conclusion. Thus, while the space of exhibition was from the outset a space for working through social and political tensions (a role already evident in the seventeenth-century French salon), its institutionalization within the context of contemporary capital points to the specific role it would come to play in the processing of social and political life, particularly in terms of aesthetic experience. 28. Alison Landsberg, “America, the Holocaust, and the Mass Culture of Memory: Toward a Radical Politics of Empahty,” New German Critique 71 (1997) 79. 29. Landsberg, “America, the Holocaust, and the Mass Culture of Memory” 79–80. 30. In his historical revision, Ran Zwigenberg places Hiroshima at the center of global memory culture. Arguing that the role of the Holocaust Mapping the Atomic Unconscious 91 was, from the outset, intertwined with Hiroshima, he demonstrates how Hiroshima not only served as a reference point for the factors leading to the Holocaust but also provided the moniker “holocaust” which originally signified “nuclear anxieties”; Hiroshima: The Origins of Global Memory Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014) 12–13. 31. Maximillian Mayer, “Nuclear Ontologies, Technopolitics in Postcolonial Spaces, and the Cold War as Transnational History: An interview with Gabrielle Hecht,” The Global Politics of Science and Technology — Vol. 1: Concepts from International Relations and Other Disciplines (Berlin: Springer, 2014) 277. 32. Mayer, “Nuclear Ontologies” 321. 33. “Nuclear Ontologies” 278. 34. Ned O’Gorman and Kevin Hamilton, “The Diffusion of an Atomic Icon: Nuclear Hegemony and Cultural Memory Loss,” Rhetoric, Remembrance, and Visual Form (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2012). 35. O’Gorman and Hamilton, “The Diffusion of an Atomic Icon” 8–9. 36. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: 37. Nixon, Slow Violence 3. 38. Yaeger 309. 39. Brent Ryan Bellamy, “Into Eternity: On Our Waste Containments and Harvard UP, 2011) 2. Energy Futures,” Paradoxa 26 (2014) 145–158; Vivasvan Soni, “Energy,” Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment 133; Imre Szeman, “On Oil and Philosohy,” Contours Journal (2015), 36–40n. 40. Stephanie LeMenager, Living Oil (Oxford UP, 2013) 104. 41. LeMenager, Living Oil 27, 193. 42. Bob Johnson, Carbon Nation (Lawrence: UP of Kansas, 2014). 43. Despite my claims, the clear alignment of literature with the carbon unconscious and photography with the atomic unconscious is necessarily overdetermined. Their polarization is not so clear. Demonstrating the role of photography in the production of a carbon unconscious, LeMenager suggests that Dick Smith’s images of dead shore birds after oil spills recall “photography as itself memory practice — a means of taking something into the self, repurposing it for the self, giving it a story 92 Materialism and the Critique of Energy and place” (38). Foregrounding the role of literature in the production of an atomic unconscious, science fiction writers such as H.G. Wells, who included descriptions of nuclear explosions, were read by Leo Szilard long before he began working with Oppenheimer and anticipated the invention of the atomic bomb. Nevertheless, in our present moment the embodied memory of the carbon unconscious is more deeply aligned with a literary consciousness and the atomic with the photographic. For further discussion on the development of a photographic consciousness, see my article “Memory, Trauma, and the Matter of Historical Violence: The Controversial Case of Four Photographs from Auschwitz,” American Imago 71.4 (2014) 391–415. 44. Barbara Macron, “Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the Eye of the Camera: Images and Memory,” Third Text 25.6 (2011) 792–793; “The Diffusion of an Atomic Icon” 189–190; Akira Mizuta Lippit, “Phenomenologies of the Surface,” Qui Parle 9:2 (1996) 39. 45. elin o’Hara slavick, “Hiroshima: A Visual Record,” The Asia-Pacific Journal 7:30 (2009) http://apjjf.org/-elin-o’Hara-slavick/3196/article.html 46. Nicole Shukin, “The Biocapital of Living — and Art of Dying — After Fukushima,” Postmodern Culture 26.2 (2016). 47. Thomas Pringle, “Photographed by the Earth: War and Media in Light of Nuclear Events,” Necsus: European Journal of Media Studies (2014) http:// www.necsus-ejms.org/photographed-earth-war-media-light-nuclearevents/. 48. slavick, “Hiroshima” 310. 49. Yaelle S. Amir, “Curatorial Statement,” Reactive Matters (Newspace Center for Photography, Portland, OR, 2016). Work or Energy or Work/Energy? On the Limits to Capitalist Accumulation George Caffentzis Introduction: The Limits to Growth Paradigm Will capitalism end in the coming decades? What are the material conditions for its end? What, if anything, can slow the juggernaut of capitalist accumulation and then stop it? These questions have perturbed historical materialists since Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto. Since the crisis that began in earnest in 2008, they have left the strictly Marxist parochial political environs, becoming the veritable “talk of the town.” Historically there have been two kinds of answers to these questions. One approach takes the internal contradictions of capitalism — especially the tendency of the falling rate of profit brought about by the increasing organic composition of capital — to be the key to an answer. The other approach takes the intensity of class struggle as its starting point. It is a class struggle generated by the combination of the inequality of social wealth and a proletariat increasingly sophisticated and trained in cooperation and militancy by the development of large-scale industry. Historical materialism has tacked from one side to the other, sometimes attempting to bring them together. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, for instance, use a combination of both explanations. In their account, “immaterial workers” bring “cognitive capitalism” to its conclusion, which is a historically specific development from the picture of industrial capitalism and its “material workers” (to coin a phrase).1 Of course, 96 Materialism and the Critique of Energy “the end of capitalism” does not necessarily equate with the coming of a revolution that will bring about a new, morally, and ecologically superior form of production that is not based on capitalist accumulation. After all, the end of capitalism could just as easily lead to “the common ruin of the contending classes” as Marx and Engels noted long ago.2 Since the 1960s, literature has developed arguing that capitalism will end neither because of its internal contradictions nor because of working-class revolt. Rather, some argue that its end will have a natural twist. According to this view, Mother Nature has been stingy with capitalists. She did not leave them enough easily accessible fossil fuels in the cupboard of the planet’s crust. Some predict that the rising cost of production will constrict output to a crawl when the discovered stocks of fossil fuels have peaked.Other theorists make “parallel” claims (on the basis of a somewhat different and more elaborate model) which anticipate not just a peaking of fossil fuel production but a total depletion of available fossil fuels.3 The corollary of these views is that the physical or monetary exhaustion of these resources will destroy accumulated wealth and the capitalist mode of production with it. These allied socio-geological claims are often popularly called the peak oil hypothesis and the Limits to Growth hypothesis respectively. They are very attractive to many anti-capitalists because they seem to provide an objective limit to capitalism’s expansion. God might not be on the anti-capitalists’ side, from this perspective, but Mother Nature is! In this essay I analyze these hypotheses and find them problematic based upon an “energy fetishism” that attributes value creation to processes outside the ambit of human work. In a previous essay, I offer a critique of the peak oil theory supporters.4 So, in this one I will concentrate on the Limits to Growth argument. There have been many presentations of the limit to growth hypothesis. In particular, I take Saral Sarkar as the primary spokesperson of this position. I do this because Sarkar has presented a straight-forward Limits to Growth argument based on the role of increasing entropy in Work or Energy? 97 limiting not only capitalism but any industrial society. He is to my mind the most logically precise proponent of the Limits to Growth view. Thus my argument begins with an exposition of Sarkar’s core argument in Eco-Socialism or Eco-Capitalism? (1999) and The Crises of Capitalism (2012) — two clear sighted books that reject the apocalyptic hyperbole of many in the peak oil and “Limits to Growth” camps.5 Then, I turn to a critique of Sarkar’s account of energy, labor, and the ends of capitalism.6 His is a wise voice addressing the anti-capitalist movement. Let us listen. Peak Oil and Limits to Growth In his latest work especially, Sarkar concludes that we are in the midst of a crisis of capitalism, instead of another crisis in capitalism. For Sarkar, this crisis is wholly other than the one plaguing the financial system: A defective mechanism can be both patched up and repaired (which process has already been started), but an ineluctably eroding foundation cannot. As long as the foundation can remain strong, the system can remain alive. The foundation of today’s capitalism is its material resource base. And this base is eroding fast and irreparably.7 Put simply, in Sarkar’s analysis the base and superstructure of modern capitalism is not the economic and the cultural, but is rather the material world itself and the economic system that depends upon it. Sarkar argues that the fundamental source of labor productivity in all ages (from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age to the Industrial Revolution) is energy. At first it was derived from human bodily and animal power, then from wind and water, then from the burning of wood, then coal, and then oil and gas combustion. He concludes his chronology with what he calls our contemporary Industrial Civilization: “its enormous labor productivity, and its prosperity are mainly based on fossil energy sources.”8 But though they have supported this superstructure, fossilized energy resources “are a once 98 Materialism and the Critique of Energy only gift of nature. They are exhaustible. Their stock is continually diminishing.”9 This key insight of the Limits to Growth Hypothesis has brought about a paradigm-shift in anti-capitalists’ understanding of capitalism. In Sarkar’s eyes, this paradigm shift condemns all social theories that ignore it to irrelevance. For example, he criticizes Marx’s labor theory of value (LTV) for taking human labor as the sole determinant of the value of a commodity. He retorts that there are two value producing areas that Marxists have ignored to their peril. First, natural conditions like the weather affect the socially necessary abstract labor time required to produce a commodity. Second, the scientific and technological knowledge produced by people who do not labor is crucial to the production of a commodity.10 In fact, he seems to find human labor a negligible part of the value created in capitalism. Consequently, he arrives at the political conclusion that the refusal of labor does not disrupt the value accumulating process. Worth noting up front, however, is that his understanding of surplus value differs from a Marxist take on the subject. In Sarkar’s account, surplus value has three sources: (1) easily exploitable natural resources; (2) the ability of nature to absorb human-made pollution (“sinks”); and (3) scientific and technological developments that increase labor productivity and increase the quantity of new useful products.11 There is no mention of the labor process at all in Sarkar’s analysis of the sources of the surplus. For Sarkar, since capitalism depends on an eco-surplus for its profits and accumulation, its three sources already name the Limits to Growth: (1) the exhaustion of natural sources of energy, especially oil and gas; (2) rising toxicity in the form of poor soil, smog, and so on when natural “sinks” begin to fail; and, finally on the question of energy, (3) we have reached an entropic limit and no scientific or technological breakthroughs can overcome the loss of the fossilenergy resource base. The optimism attached to renewables is therefore preempted in this model. He argues that there is much flawed optimism about renewable technology from those who cannot Work or Energy? 99 distinguish between technical feasibility and economic viability.12 All three limits lead to capitalism’s destruction, in Sarkar’s theory, and they are already far advanced. However, in Sarkar’s schema there is a process that seems to be irrelevant to the end of capitalism, the labor process, for there is again no mention of the labor process or, more precisely, the refusal to labor, in Sarkar’s account of the reduction of surplus. The first two blockages to surplus are obvious enough and have been documented extensively, but the third depends upon a more elaborate argument since it seems to be violating Karl Popper’s maxim: “if there is such a thing as growing human knowledge, then we cannot anticipate today what we shall know only tomorrow.” 13 (Though Popper was, of course, an archenemy of historical materialism, his maxim does have a point. We should never be afraid of learning from our enemies what could be used for our struggle!) In particular, how can we know today that there will never be a scientific breakthrough that devised an inexpensive and environmentally safe process to create useful energy on a large scale using a relatively cheap common substance like tap water?14 Sarkar’s violation of Popper’s maxim is based on Nicholas GeorgescuRoegan’s efforts to apply the Second Law of Thermodynamics to the whole economic process. Georgescu-Roegan argues: (1) both energy and matter come in two states: available and unavailable; (2) in an isolated (closed) system, available energy and matter gets continuously and irreversibly transformed into unavailable energy and matter; (3) the only source of energy on the planet that is not facing continual degradation is sunlight, but the problem with using sunlight directly as a source of energy is that, in Sarkar’s words, “it reaches us in a very high entropy state... its energy density is very low. It is therefore not readily available for most purposes of industrial production, which require high temperatures or electric power,” and, therefore, (4) the probability that an economically viable substitute for fossil fuels will be found is negligible.15 A corollary to this conclusion is that since capitalism depends upon the energy created by the combustion of 100 Materialism and the Critique of Energy carbon fuels and the stock of these fuels is rapidly diminishing, industrial capitalism will come to an end (though what will follow is an open question). In other words, Sarkar assures us that there will be no “energy transition” in the twenty-first century of the sort that went from water, wind, and animal power to carbon-based, fossil-fuel power in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Sarkar presents a wonderfully clear critique of Marxist theories of capitalist crisis as well as a well-argued explanation of why this crisis is a crisis of capitalism. In fact, his critique of Marxism, especially of the LTV, is essential to his explanation. I am, however, at odds with both his critique as well as his explanation. In my view as a historical materialist, Sarkar’s Limits to Growth misses a crucial element in any account of the end of capitalism, since his dismissal of the importance of labor for the reproduction and accumulation of capital misses, too, the importance of its refusal for the dis-accumulation and eventual abolition of capital. I appreciate the frustration evoked in anti-capitalist writing when assessing the record of working class struggle with its divisions, retreats and frequent racist, sexist and anti-ecological accommodations with capital. But working-class struggle against exploitation, not the diminishing stocks of oil and gas, is the only definitive logical limit to capitalist accumulation, “subjective” though it may be, as I argue below.16 First, however, I will deal with Sarkar’s rejection of labor as the primary source of value. A Critique of Sarkar’s Argument against Marx Sarkar’s critique of Marx’s LTV has two elements: (1) natural conditions like rainfall, climate, and weather can have a visible and profound effect on the value of an agricultural commodity — for example, “[t]he value (i.e. exchange value) of wheat is, in this case, partly determined by nature”; (2) scientific and technological knowledge congealed in machines increases the labor productivity and hence affects the value of commodities that are in the production process; but scientific and technical knowledge is not produced through labor: “[i]t is not correct to subsume the activities of scientists, inventors and developers under Work or Energy? 101 the general category of labor.”17 Let me take each in turn. First, I should point out that Marx recognizes the importance of nature in in the production of commodities from the first chapter of Capital I: When man engages in production, he can only proceed as nature does herself, i.e., he can only change the form of the materials. Furthermore, even in this work of modification he is constantly helped by natural forces. Labour is therefore not the only source of material wealth, i.e., of the use-values it produces... As William Petty says, labour is the father of material wealth, the earth is its mother.18 But material wealth is not value. Value is not a material thing, nor even a relation among material things. Rather, it is a social form that can be represented — unlike something like natural wealth, which is more like an environmental condition of possibility rather than an exchangeable quantity — and needs a socially determined equivalent of time to circulate as value. Thus, though more rainfall might affect the amount of socially necessary labor time for the production of a pound of wheat, the rainfall does not create the value of that pound of wheat. In other words, capitalism in its appearance as a commodityexchanging society is extremely “humanistic” in the sense that its major concern is to expand its control of human life as much as possible in order to channel that life into exploitable labor. Capitalism requires a value-creation process that must be reproducible and whose results can be accumulated. The idea that you could accumulate the natural wealth of rainfall, and that you could in turn toss the accumulated wealth of rainfall into a market where it could magically yield more of itself without further accumulated rainfall, makes no sense. And the reason it makes no sense is because the version of value we are speaking about with natural wealth is use value, and not exchange value, since it is useful for the human labor that is employed by capital, but could never itself circulate as exchange value, let alone beget more of itself in the style of M-C-M'. One must be careful, in other words, 102 Materialism and the Critique of Energy not to commit a “naturalistic fallacy” in considering value to be on par with the natural, for though a use value (a food that tastes sweet) might be analyzed chemically, value cannot be analyzed chemically. I fear, however, that Sarkar does commit that fallacy. For it is not that nature isn’t useful, in Marx’s estimation; it is just that it doesn’t create values. Capital literally has a “lust for labor” (which can also be called a “lust for value”).19 We can see that lust animated recently in the mobilization of nearly a billion Chinese and Indian workers to become part of the global working class in a period where many were arguing we were on the verge of a “post-industrial era,” when workers are supposed to be superfluous for capitalism! Sarkar’s second objection to Marx’s LTV is that scientists and technological inventors are “not workers in the Marxian sense,” but they are crucial to the increase of labor productivity. Marx definitely was aware of the importance of science and technology for the increasing productivity of labor, and he definitely appreciated the difference in the productivity of an hour of labor in a modern shoe factory versus the productivity of an hour of labor in an early modern shoe workshop.20 Be that as it may, scientists and technological innovators hired by corporations today are skilled workers who apply their knowledge and capacities to satisfy the requirements of the company (for example, Claude Shannon, the innovator of Information Theory, worked for Bell Labs, and his theoretical labors were part of his job). We now have a large category of workers who are involved in “knowledge production and communication” from schoolteachers to computer programmers to movie actors to shoe designers. They might be “immaterial workers,” in the terminology of theorists of “cognitive capitalism,” but they operate as workers in the past did. They must negotiate labor contracts, meet deadlines, and confront real bosses and are under the same pressure to increase productivity as industrial workers in manufacturing economies. Almost any contemporary production process is a complex one, with many different concrete forms of labor of a variety of skill levels, but every level requires Work or Energy? 103 human intellectual and disciplinary capacities in abundance and the result of the work of the shoe designer is factored into the social necessary labor time required to produce the shoe. Sarkar seems to think that a decisive argument for his view is that the work of immaterial workers gets paid even “for their fruitless activities” and their payment “comes from the results of the labor of the rest of the work of the corporation.”21 But this situation is not unique for socalled “immaterial workers.” (For a critique of this term see my book, In Letters of Blood and Fire.22) After all, even on an assembly line a worker is paid when the quality control check at the end of the line rejects a certain percentage of the products s/he worked on. Who pays for the “fruitless activity”? In most cases the payment comes from the results of the labor of the rest of the work of the corporation. This is especially true in product liability law where the corporation is responsible for damages caused by defective products it sells, not the workers who produced them. The fundamental point I want to make here is that the LTV has political importance, but also explains logical inconsistencies in the physiocratic and classical value theories Sarkar inadvertently reproduces for the contemporary era. If labor was not central in the creation of the surplus value, then capital would be anxious to shrink both the quantity and quality of the class of workers, but that is not happening in the twenty-first century. On the contrary, billions are being added to the working class and on all levels of skills (from agricultural workers to nuclear scientists). The capitalists seem even more concerned about locating reserves of “low entropic” workers (to mix categories!) than in finding oil and gas deposits. For example, between 1990 and 2014 the labor force participation in BRICS countries — Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — increased from 1115 million to 1510 million, roughly a 35 percent increase.23 Moreover, the powers of science and technological innovators have been largely incorporated into the capitalist assembly line. 104 Materialism and the Critique of Energy Critique of the Notion of the Natural Limits of Capitalism The power of Sarkar’s Limits to Growth deduction of the end of capitalism is that it claims to find natural limits to capitalism in the material resource base of industrial capitalism. According to Sarkar, as the stock of easily available petroleum and natural gas becomes exhausted, the whole superstructure of production, circulation, and consumption called capitalism is mortally threatened, since collective capitalists do not have any alternative but to burn its material base up in smoke. This process will lead to a continuous contraction of capitalism until it faces its doom. Indeed, Sarkar argues that the present crisis is an anticipation of the final shrinkage of the resource base.24 Though elegant, I find Sarkar’s explanation of the crisis problematic for a number of reasons. First, his theoretical dismissal (and consequent empirical neglect) of what is central to capitalism and its opponents: labor and its refusal. Sarkar is not alone with this attitude to labor, of course. Most Limits to Growth proponents shift the political focus from class relations to the limits of nature. Thus, in a period of intense workers’ resistance to capitalism in France, the United States as well as in the colonized world in the early 1970s, there was an increased study of the Limits to Growth and the threats to affluence arising literally from nature. The mathematical models of Jay Forrester and the Club of Rome had the resource-hungry economy machine driving straight into the brick wall of Not Enough (exactly the opposite of the Zapatistas’ “Ya Basta!”) that had nothing to do with class struggle.25 According to them, there was simply not enough oil, not enough natural gas, not enough uranium, not enough coal, and even not enough air to keep up the pace of post-WWII capitalist growth, so they suggested a steady-state form of capitalism. Sarkar, of course, has no interest in reforming capitalism, steady-state or not (as was the political intent of the members of the Club of Rome) since he concludes that an eco-socialist government would be a way to at least ameliorate the harsh conditions that will follow the collapse of Work or Energy? 105 capitalism due to the exhaustion of the energy resources that is now becoming evident. All of this sounds more or less palatable from the standpoint of environmental politics, except for a key feature of the entire economic structure Sarkar is interested in theorizing the ends to: the social and energic content of surplus value upon which growth is categorically, logically, and historically built upon. My first retort is that capitalism in its history has had a number of energetic resource bases and, in fact, it began in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with a “solar” base (wind, water, wood, animal, and human power). The conquest of the Americas, the formation of the global market, the creation of the banking system, the expansion of the slave trade, and the enclosures of the European commons were all realized without heat engines and their material fuel basis (coal, oil, and gas). This original period of accumulation was followed by a capitalism with other energy resource bases. Roughly we call them by their substance names: from coal to petroleum and natural gas to, in some places like France, nuclear power. Two things should be pointed out about these bases: (1) much more than energy was required for production, for it required quite different kinds of proletarians to become creators of surplus value; and (2) the basic components of capitalism were not changed in going from one energy base to another. I will elaborate on both points. A. Proletarians and Energy: Work/Energy A proletarian on a ship driven by oarsmen, by sails, by coal, by oil, or by a nuclear reactor is not the same proletarian as the one rowing, rigging, firing, stoking, or monitoring. A different set of rules apply to exploit their labor and a different logic of refusal applies to different forms of motive power. So, for example, an enslaved proletarian is hardly a crewman that would be appropriate to a nuclear submarine or to a space colony (for the latter, see “Mormons in Space,” an essay coauthored by Silvia Federici and myself ).26 Similarly, an assembly line staffed by artisans would be problematic as well. This connection between workers and the technological means of production 106 Materialism and the Critique of Energy was understood by the political economists of the eighteenth and nineteenth century like Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill whose critique of slavery was based on its inefficiency, for no reasonable capitalist would want to have slaves tending machines that cost many times the slaves’ value. In other words, slave production could only be compatible with the lowest technological level because the slave could be expected to “labor as little as possible” and be “inefficient and unproductive” respectively.27 So whenever there is a change in the energy resource base of capitalism, there is a necessary change in the social character of the proletariat that will make the new base productive of surplus-value. What is crucial for capitalism, then, is neither work nor energy alone, but work/energy, that is, the ratio between the amount of work that creates surplus-value and the quantity of enegy produced by the resource base.28 The chain of causation also goes the other way. For changes in the work/energy ratio are caused by proletarian action. As Timothy Mitchell has powerfully argued and documented, the reason why there was a shift from coal to oil was not due to the superiority of the latter substance for industrial production, but it was because miners and their strikes began to pose a serious challenge not only to their immediate bosses, but to the entire capitalist system by creating a new level of class power: Workers were gradually connected together not so much by the weak ties of a class culture, collective ideology or political organisation, but by the increasing and highly concentrated quantities of carbon energy they mined, loaded, carried, stoked and put to work…. More than a mere social movement, this socio-technical agency was put to work for a series of democratic claims whose gradual implementation radically reduced the precariousness of life in industrial societies.29 The move to oil was an attempt by capital to find an energy resource base that was able to undermine this power of the working class in the coal circuit. Many features of oil provided much more control over Work or Energy? 107 the energy resource base: The ability to weaken the labour force by dividing it into separate racial groups, with managers, skilled workers and unskilled workers housed and treated separately, reflected the different distribution of oil production across the world compared to coal, and its development after rather than before the rise of moden industry.30 This analysis is an example of why it is important to understand the class dynamics that motivate many of the energy resource base transitions, for they are not determined by questions of scarcity and energy density, as the Limits to Growth theorists would have us believe today. B. Capital’s Historical Consistency Throughout these many work/energy transitions since the sixteenth century, capitalist accumulation continued unabated. This demonstrates that the basic categories needed to constitute a capitalist society are not determined by the energy resource bases of the day. Profit, wage, rent, interest, value, surplus value, constant capital, and so on do not require a particular technology with an accompanying energy resource base. This is not to say that “anything goes,” or that, for example, capitalism can point-for-point “return to a solar past,” since capitalism at its dawn confronted a world population the fraction of the present size and a circulation process operating at a fraction of the present speed. But these differences do not affect the fact that capitalism is a very old social system that has been able to launch and survive many energy resource transitions due, in part, to the inability of its oppositions to generate the social power necessary to overthrow it. Though the energy resource bases can change, what is crucial is that there will always be workers who have no direct access to the means of subsistence and production whose work can be exploited and turned into the many forms of revenue: profit, interest, and rent. As long as these workers are willing to accept a much lower energy 108 Materialism and the Critique of Energy density in the means of production (that is, a return to an archaic technological level), then it is possible for capitalism to continue the accumulation process, for what is accumulated is not energy, but work. Will they? This is not clear, but there are indications of the terrain of struggle to come is the refusal of “extractivism” — the doctrine that roots economies on the extraction and export of natural resources — especially by Indigenous people in Latin America.31 To go further into my critique of Sarkar’s view of the determining character of the energy resource base, it is worthwhile asking the naïve question: for what purpose is this energy resource base being used? In most cases energy’s major purpose is to power machines (from trucks and tractors to electric power plants). So this brings us to the machine and to another naïve question: for what purpose is the machine to be used in capitalist society? Machines are certainly not introduced in order to reduce the pain and danger of the labor process. On the contrary, they are introduced to increase the profitability of the capitalists who own them via the productivity of the workers they exploit. More to the point, machines are themselves not simply accumulated energy from fossil fuels, but are rather the products of past labor — dead labor, in the historical materialist idiom — full of an accreted form of human labor waiting to be employed by new living labor. Machines, Marx reminds us, don’t wake up and decide to go to work of their own accord. The key issue for the individual capitalist is that s/he purchases a machine to use in the production of a commodity in order to keep up with the competition. But that does not answer the question; it simply defers it to the initial adopters of the machine in question who did not have competitive pressures to motivate the change. The key view that opens up the possibility of an answer is that machines are instruments in class struggle, since the boss can threaten to replace workers who are successful in increasing wages, reducing the workday and making claims on the productive apparatus. Of course, the substitution is also mathematical. For the cost of the machine (with its energy costs and its depreciation) must be less than the “savings” in the wages and other costs connected with Work or Energy? 109 workers’ struggles (e.g., sabotage). There are additional attributes of machines that are useful in the class struggle, as Renfrew Christie pointed out many years ago: Dead labor in the shape of machinery has another advantage over living labor. It does not talk back. It does not go on strike. It does not steal. It does not resist the designs of capitalists…. Capitalists, therefore, use the disciplines and skills of machines as substitutes for the withdrawable skills and calculated indisciplines of their class enemies, the workers.32 This connection between work and energy was well known to Marx and it helped structure Capital Vol I. For it is no accident that Part 4, “The Production of Relative Surplus-Value,” which is comprised largely of a discussion of the role of machines in capitalism is followed by Chapter 11 on the successful struggle to reduce the working day. For the more effective the class struggle is at the point of production, the greater is the tendency of capital to increase mechanization and hence there is an increased need for power generated by energy resources. And here we can see that this energy resource base is crucial in replacing labor power (if it is full of struggle) and intensifying its exploitation. Let us examine the relation between energy needs and class struggle in a schematic way by assuming that the sum value of the totality of commodities (T) is constituted by constant capital (C), value of labor power (V) and the surplus-value (S) (T=C+V+S) and the rate of profit of the whole system is S/V+C. A successful class struggle is one that increases the value of labor power and reduces the rate of profit. How can the capitalists react to increase the rate of profit? One answer is: to increase C in order to reduce the required number of workers and their wages (the wage bill, as it was known in nineteenth-century political economy) V, and also increasing S. In general, therefore a response to increased and successful class struggle is via an increase in mechanization and hence power requirements. Indeed, one might 110 Materialism and the Critique of Energy say that in a capitalist society increased class struggle would tend to accelerate the use of energy resource base. Consequently, as long as the struggle is kept under control, the drive to increase the pace of mechanization is reduced and hence the need for more energy is reduced. This is the capitalists’ version of conservation! But the struggle that escapes control (increasing V and decreasing S) and successfully resists the substitution by machines (keeps C level) is the workers’ ecological path away from capitalism. No wonder why there has been “a struggle between worker and machine”! As the Luddites taught Marx, “The instrument of labor strikes down the workers.”33 This struggle not only puts a brake on the accumulation process but, in the tradition of historical materialism, is the only formal path to anti-capitalist transition. What does this excursus into capitalist mathematics mean for the Limits to Growth? It demonstrates that class struggle has a profound effect on the use of energy in capitalism. It is only the “subjective” aspect of the work process that is a limit to capitalism, not the “natural” aspect (which at first glance to the Limits to Growth supporters appears to be the decisive factor). The problem with this subjectivity is that it does not have clear limits! How much working class “patience” can capitalists count on? This is a quantity (like future knowledge) that cannot be known in the same way that the amount of petroleum in a given volume of subsoil. Thus, a drama is proposed by this way of formulating the question of the end of capitalism. For it is perfectly possible for the wage and working conditions of workers to shrink to unprecedented levels without bringing about a revolutionary response. Indeed, we are seeing such a development in Greece right now where more than a century of struggles to guarantee a less precarious life to the working class has evaporated without a fundamental break with the system (yet). Consequently, the Limits to Growth response to the end of capitalism seems to avoid dealing with the decisive question: when (if ever) will class struggle reach a point of refusal in the face of deteriorating natural conditions? One way to answer this question is to examine it historically. In this Work or Energy? 111 article I will examine only one case — that of Nazi Germany — but it embodied an extreme case of ecological breakdown. It faced a classic “energy crisis,” its cities became ecological hells, and it had revived the slave mode of production. The German working class in 1945 was definitely a prime candidate of one that had been pushed to the limits. Case Study of the Limit to the Limits to Growth: Nazi Germany Berlin... has great hopes for these secret weapons as well as the productive capacity of Dora. Upper Nazi circles think the rockets can and should lead to a redressing of the military situation. In a sense, then, the slaves of Dora have become the potential saviors of Hitler’s Third Reich! — Yves Beon, a slave on Planet Dora34 In order to best understand my critique of Sarkar’s explanation and my insistence on the subjective limit of capitalism it is worthwhile to look at the experience of Nazi-ruled Germany during World War II as an “extreme case” that proves the norm. When we examine this experience we see that the so-called natural, ecological, and resource limits that the Nazi regime faced were not final determinants of its end. Rather we see the subjective limits presented by workers are the primary ones. For example, ecological limits are not given. The question, “how much ecological degradation would the working class of the planet accept before revolting against the agent of this degradation?” cannot be answered with any definitive certainty. Using the standard parameters like air quality, German cities like Dresden in World War II experienced a level of ecological degradation at an unprecedented pace under the British and U.S. bombing campaigns; however this degradation did not lead to the mass exodus of the German citizenry from the Nazi regime. Let us remember that the level and pace of the ecological degradation in Dresden during World War II was much more severe than the climate changes that are being predicted by the 112 Materialism and the Critique of Energy projectors of climate change for Dresden in the near future. After all, the firebombing of Dresden (and the major cities of Japan) increased the average temperatures in the city into a realm far beyond the heat projections for cities of the north of the Tropic of Cancer. The record of the population of Nazi Germany under bombardment puts the issue of limits into focus. The assumption of the Allied military planners was that the massive bombing campaign would lead to an equally massive defection from the regime. However, both the British and the U.S. Bombing Surveys noted that though the campaign clearly had an effect on morale, it did not lead to the insurrectionary consequences they wanted to instigate with the firebombing of Dresden and other cities to “dehouse and demoralize”! It shows us that there is no inevitability that can be deduced from ecological conditions, especially extreme and rapid changes. After all, as mentioned above, modern war is an ecological catastrophe. On the one side, in the midst of llied bombing, German industrial production (defined both in terms of military hardware and the profits of companies like Daimler-Benz) increased. On the other hand, Germany faced a dramatically reduced material base, especially with the defeat at Stalingrad (which was the main obstacle to the Nazi march on the Baku oil fields). In effect, Nazi Germany was suffering a classical “energy crisis.” Paradoxically, the Nazis made up for this lack of a material energy base in two ways. One by looking to the past and the other by looking to the future: As for the past, the Nazis introduced slave labor instead of bringing German women into the factories. For as Bernard Bellon notes, “keeping women in the home was also intended to prevent the kind of social unrest which led to the revolution of November 9, 1918, and the ‘stab in the back’ of conservative and Nazi legends.”35 The Nazis also experimented with violating the advice of Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill in their desire to test the extreme limits Work or Energy? 113 of capitalism when the Nazi regime put slave workers to the job of assembling high-tech V-2 rockets between 1943 and early 1945 in mine tunnels near Nordhausen. For though the ceiling of the cavern where the rockets were produced was lined with the hanging bodies of recalitrant slaves, still, as Smith and Mill predicted, the missiles were sabotaged, many of them landing harmlessly in fields and seas miles away from their targets. Approximately 6,000 people were killed by the V-2s, while more than 12,000 slave laborers died in the production of 3,000 V-2 missles. Thus the V-2 was one of the first weapons in history where more people were killed in its production than by its use. Thousands of these slaves died of exhaustion and disease, but 350 were hung (including 200 who were explicitly executed for acts of sabotage). As Michael Neufeld writes in his Introduction to Yves Beon’s Planet Dora: Sabotage naturally remained a centeral concern, the usual punishment was a gruesomely slow hanging on the roll call square.... [S]abotage... had some indeterminate but significant effect on missile quality.36 This situation confronted the Nazis with the problematic produced by mixing a slave mode of production with a high organic composition industry. In the interest of keeping production going: [T]he preservation of the prisoner workforce became a higher priority, as many now possessed semiskilled training in various assembly line jobs. The Mittelwerk company made limited efforts to improve clothing and good rations, and [chief engineer] Rudolph was involved in the creation of a premium wage system that allowed some prisoners to earn prison scrip that could be used to buy a few extras at a canteen.37 The correlations between organic composition of a branch of industry and the composition of the working class involved in that industry, however, is not fixed. As for the future, the Nazis deployed an extensive use of coal 114 Materialism and the Critique of Energy liquification that would turn coal (mined in a more traditional manner by the use of slave labor) into liquid fuel for internal combustion engines. This is a technology that is still being explored in our day. And many like Sarkar would point to its thermodynamic inefficiency, since it takes an enormous amount of energy to transform hydrocarbons in solid form into carbohydrates in liquid form. But for the Nazi regime, it was efficient on another dimension, the polemodynamic (literally, “the war force”) dimension. For in the “blitz” strategy, speed was essential, with tanks and fighter-bombers being its prime movers (and both demanded liquid fuel). In both these cases, the limits of the process of accumulation the Nazi regime instituted (which included the revival of slave labor in Europe and the deployment of the most advanced technological means to produce fuel for its war machines) were not determined by the natural environment, but rather by subjective limits (to use a short-hand term). Of course, the Nazi regime did not last for its muchtrumpeted millennium-long existence; it only existed for twelve years. But did it inevitably have to fail? That is not clear to me now, and it was certainly not clear to most people then. There were limits to both the “patience” of the German citizenry and the divisions of the slaves among them, but what they were is a mystery since, though courageous, the number and effectiveness of collective slave and citizen revolts in Germany against the regime were not sufficient to overturn it. That required the combined military forces of the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom to literally occupy the country (unlike the denouement of World War I). Defenders of the limit to growth hypothesis like Sarkar might object that the Nazi regime was not a “normal” capitalist regime and the war made extreme its already deviant non-capitalist tendencies. But the Nazis were intent to preserve and expand the reach of the fundamental structures of modern capitalism around the world, just as long as it was German capital that took the best plums. For example, Daimler-Benz built a good portion of the V-2 rocket for the German military for a profit. Moreover, if a large military industry disqualified Work or Energy? 115 a country from joining the ranks of capitalist states, then the United States would be the first to be ousted. The whole point of this short reminiscence of Nazi Germany, however, is to show that energy and ecological crises of the most devastating sort alone will not directly lead to the abandoning of a socioeconomic system like capitalism unless there is an alternative available and a political force united enough and massive enough to achieve it. Conclusion: Refusing the Bargain of Green Capital In conclusion, I find Saral Sarkar’s defense of the Limits to Growth paradigm explanation a major challenge to Marxist conceptions of the limit to capitalism, but ultimately it is problematic. Let us review a number of reasons for such a conclusion. First, the only limit of capitalism arises from a subjective form of energy — work — that intrinsically is open to refusal and, via its negative capacity, creates value. 38 It is value that capitalists accumulate; not material use values. Second, there have been many changes in the energy bases of the capitalist mode of production without a change to the fundamental, categorical structure of capitalism. There is no reason to see the present energy and ecological state as more threatening to the continuation of capitalism than previous transitions, for there is still an enormous pool of labor power available for exploitation, certainly more than in all the history of capitalism. Third, capitalists are willing to unleash enormous destruction to preserve their system of accumulation and class power as has been demonstrated time and again in the last century. But they speak in shrouded words. Think of the messages sent in the language of the nuclear bombs exploded in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the hundreds of “tests” of nuclear bombs, both atmospheric and subterranean, that were meant to remind the world population of capital’s power. The capitalist class appears to hold the world hostage. Unclear, however, is whether the average rate of profit will be increased by investing in reversing climate change and preventing the complete 116 Materialism and the Critique of Energy depletion of carbon-based natural resources or by sustaining energy intensive growth that has defined capitalism since the industrial revolution. In “climate summits” the Green faction of capital, at least, looks to the world working class and asks of it whether a deal is possible: “Are you willing to buy our ‘stranded asset,’ oil in the soil, to the tune of tens of trillions of dollars and so face a long period of a sort of indentured servitude-with-increased work and decreased wages? In other words, do you agree to satisfy our need for surplus value in exchange for us doing what is necessary to ‘save the planet’?” A revolutionary retort to this “deal” will not be provided by those who depend upon nature’s limits, but by those who organize to refuse capital’s blackmail. Notes 1. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2009). 2. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967). 3. Ugo Bardi, “Peak Oil and ‘The Limits to Growth’: Two Parallel stories,” 4. George Caffentzis, “The Peak Oil Complex, Commodity Fetishism and 5. Sasha Lilley, et al. Catastrophism: The Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and The Oil Drum, www.theoildrum.com/node/3550 Class Struggle,” Rethinking Marxism 20 (2008) 313–320. Rebirth (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012). 6. Saral Sarkar, The Crises of Capitalism: A Different study of Political Economy (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2012), and Saral Sarkar, Eco-Socialism or Eco-Capitalism?: A Critical Analysis of Humanity’s Fundamental Choices (London: Zed Books, 1999). 7. Sarkar, The Crises of Capitalism 352. 8. The Crises of Capitalism 278. Work or Energy? 9. 117 The Crises of Capitalism 278. 10. The Crises of Capitalism 280. 11. The Crises of Capitalism 282. 12. The Crises of Capitalism 284. 13. Karl Popper, “Preface,” The Poverty of Historicism (London: Routledge and Kagan Paul, 1957). 14. Frankly, we cannot know for sure at this time where the science of the future will lead any more than we can know the status of an afterlife. But giving Sarkar the benefit of the doubt, we can reckon by the reliability and durability of a limit law like the Second Law of Thermodynamics — a “law” that puts clear limits on the efficiency of heat engines and “decrees” that perpetuum mobiles are impossible — that the suspension of Popper’s maxim is justified in this case. Indeed, a half-century before the first formulation of the Second Law the French Academy decided (anachronistically) to violate Popper’s maxim when it refused to consider any correspondence with people claiming to have invented perpetuum mobiles in 1775! 15. The Crises of Capitalism 289. 16. “Subjective” in this context is not an antonym of “objective,” but it is its dialectical complement. Here I follow a Hegelian usage: “...the term subjectivity is not to be confined merely to the bad and finite kind of it which is contrasted with the thing (fact). In its truth subjectivity is immanent in the fact, and as a subjectivity thus infinite is the very truth of the fact.” William Wallace, The Logic of Hegel (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1892) 270 17. The Crises of Capitalism 278, 280. 18. Karl Marx, Capital Vol. I, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books, 1976 [1867]) 134. 19. Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive 20. Marx, Capital Vol. I 432. Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004). 21. The Crises of Capitalism 280. 22. George Caffentzis, “A Critique of Cognitive Capitalism,” in Letters of Blood and Fire: Work, Machines, and the Crisis of Capitalism (Oakland, CA: PM P/ 118 Materialism and the Critique of Energy Common Notions, 2013) 95–126. 23. The data on “Labor force, total” was accessed on March 20, 2016 at data. worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.TOTL.IN?page=5. 24. The Crises of Capitalism 341. 25. Donella H. Meadows et al.,The Limits to Growth: A Report of The Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind (Washington D.C.: Potomac Associates, 1972). 26. Caffentzis, In Letters of Blood and Fire 58–65. 27. Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 1998) 438, and John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy with Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy (New York: Augustus M. Kelly, 1961) 251. 28. For a discussion of the Work/Energy ratio see George Caffentzis, “The Work/Energy Crisis and the Apocalypse,” Midnight Oil: Work Energy, War, 1973-1992, eds. Midnight Notes Collective (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1992) and George Caffentzis, “Introduction and Glossary,” No Blood For Oil! Essays on Energy, Class Struggle, and War (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2017) 41–43. 29. Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil 30. Mitchell, Carbon Democracy 36. 31. Raul Zibechi, “Extractivism Staggers,” accessed at compamanuel. (London: Verso, 2011) 27. com/2015/06/04zivechi-extractivism-staggers; Patricia I. Vasquez, Oil Sparks in the Amazon: Local Conflicts, Indigenous Populations, and Natural Resources (Athens GA: The U of Georgia P, 2014); George Caffentzis, “The Petroleum Commons: Local, Islamic and Global,” Counterpunch December 15, 2004. ww4report/105/planetwatch/petroleumcommons. 32. Renfrew Christie, “Why Does Capital Need Energy?” in Oil and Class Struggle, eds. Petter Nore and Terisa Turner (London: Zed Books, 1980) 14. 33. Capital Vol. I 559. 34. Yves Beon, Planet Dora: A Memoir of the Holocaust and the Birth of the Space Age (Boulder, CO: Westview P, 1997) 25. 35. Bernard P Bellon. Mercedes in Peace and War: German Automobile Workers, Work or Energy? 1903-1945. (New York: Columbia UP, 1990). 36. Michael Neufeld, “Introduction,” in Planet Dora xix. 37. Neufeld, “Introduction” xvii. 38. Letters of Blood and Fire 161–163. 119 Crisis, Energy, and the Value Form of Gender: Towards a Gender-Sensitive Materialist Understanding of Society-Nature Relations Elmar Flatschart What is the relevance of a gendered perspective on crisis developments located at the intersection of nature and society? How does energy matter for such a perspective? Critics and theorists typically approach society-nature relations from a strictly economic perspective. This approach tends to situate the subjectivity that appropriates nature as masculine. Uncovering the gendered character of nature relations involves a critique of this form of reductionism and the development of a perspective that incorporates gender as a value relation. From the standpoint of gender, we will be better suited to explain the core mechanisms of society-nature relations, and to reconstruct the conceptual and material conditions of today’s overlapping crises of labor, capital, and energy. The type of matrix my claim is meant to test will revise the core conceptual commitments that drive theories of economic and environmental crisis. By understanding gender as a value relation to nature, rather than an attitude towards or essence extracted from nature, I show that critiques of so-called anthropocentric (or anthropocenic) history appear to be only partially capable of overcoming the primary social contradictions that lead to our current impasse. Moreover, they seem much less capable of mediating the energy content of capital, let alone the value form of gender. Conceptually, I build on a materialist framework that retains arguments about the real character of nature relations, but 122 Materialism and the Critique of Energy significantly expand its scope by turning to approaches developed in Marxist feminism and the Frankfurt School tradition. I thereby introduce scholarship from the German debate that has hitherto not been (sufficiently) received in the Anglophone debate. In the first part, I take the categorical critique of mainstream economic theory as my point of departure. I propose to expand the scope of economic contradictions towards an integral and ultimately more substantial perspective that historicizes the economy. This approach unveils a distinctive conceptualization of the relations to nature that take the form of “second nature,” which both obscures nature and produces it anew in a doubly social manner. Consequently, these relations of second nature can only be grasped in terms of a “negative ontology,” a condition that has to be critiqued for its dominating character. Such a venture is closely linked to Marxian critique of political economy. New readings of Marx’s economy-critical work, as they have flourished in the German debate since the 1970s, contributed significantly to an understanding of abstract domination that is buttressed by the economic forms we find in value-form analysis. Combining these readings with a perspective on nature relations paves the way for an understanding of crisis beyond the economical and unveils how the latter is itself the outcome of what I call the fetishized materiality of modernity. The crisis inside the fetishized materiality of modern relations to nature is the main topic of the second part of this essay, starting with the contradiction of use and exchange value. Here we shall see that the modulation of use and exchange value constitutes the foundational mechanism behind the relations of natural and social matter, and I shall show how its dialectical logic can itself be in a state of crisis. Against “externalist” ecological and eco-Marxist takes on this issue, which restrict crisis to pure material determinations, I advance a categorical critique following the theorem of societal nature relations (GNV), which differentiates between “first nature” (passively constituted, apparently “pre-given”) and “second nature.”1 I will furthermore show that capitalist nature relations are facilitated Crisis, Energy, and the Value Form of Gender 123 by a specific energic system that combines the abstract human energy represented in abstract labor and fossil energy in a fetishized energic fix. I expand the argument and show how crisis is internal to the social forms of value, money, and capital and their mediation by the predominant energic system. We cannot discern a distinct causal basis for either economic or ecological crisis phenomena as it is the dialectic of both sides that matters ultimately for the processing decay we call crisis, and this dialectic requires a take on energy relations. I eventually draw on the work of the German Marxist Robert Kurz and conclude that an understanding of crisis that scrutinizes the development of the energic fix that characterizes capitalism is essential for critical theory. In the third part, I introduce the gender-critical approach of this paper. This section departs from the above-developed perspective of a Marxist take on GNV. I argue that the radical categorical critique of GNV ultimately remains economicist and androcentric. The apparently neutral and closed logic of production requires a mode of reproduction that is not wholly immanent as it builds on a (first) nature that is never represented as such, but only as “the Other.” A dialectical approach thus has to theoretically account for the (historical) grounds of this process of abjection or Othering. The key to this is the uncovering of a male bias in the economic that can be structurally related to the character of its materiality: modern GNV boasts a binary gendered hierarchy in fetishized second nature in which male aspects are attributed to the social and cultural side and female aspects are Othered as pertaining to nature. I propose a twofold itinerary to address energy as key materialist category: the patriarchal, androcentric, and sexist model of the Othering of feminized (first) nature should be problematized by means of a deconstructive critique. However, we must not remain there; the deconstructive take on the Other has to be adjoined with a reconstructive mode of critique. I then connect what I call the energic fix to a “male” rationale of production and this gendered energic system relates to a feminized reproductive side, which is linked to first 124 Materialism and the Critique of Energy nature. The dialectic at work is chiefly hierarchical, gendered, and depends on the differentiation between a “closed” synchronic matrix of second-order forms, which are chiefly found in the economic and diachronic ruptures of this matrix. This dialectic is aligned with the production and reproduction of the GNV and expresses the energic mediation and its fix. The work of Roswitha Scholz provides a strong foundation for my endeavors to approach energy and gender. Her theorem of value-dissociation develops a promising version of an integral gendered dialectical approach and can fruitfully be expanded so as to tackle problems of crisis, energy, and the value form of gender. GNV — A Critical Materialist Perspective The financial and consequently world economic crisis that started in 2007 has profoundly reshaped the social sciences. Not only are studies on the origins and pathways of crisis phenomena becoming more and more prominent, but we are also witnessing a more general change of perspective. This change is reflected in concrete research agendas, for example, the renewed interest in questions of material reproduction as in the debate on care economy2 and in abstract trends, like the rise of a new materialism that is currently shaking epistemological debates in fields that were formerly dominated by poststructuralist thought.3 All this new social scientific thought has however had surprisingly little effect on orthodox economic theory, just as crisis itself does not seem to have spurred significant controversy in what pass as theories of crisis. After all, economics seems to remain a self-referential science that is not capable of two operations crucial for every science related to humanity — reflecting on itself and relating to its social subject matter. As it has been argued by critical scholars, economics does in fact not deal with “real economy” as it is produced and reproduced by human beings, but resorts to mathematical sophistries coupled with a formalist dogmatism when it comes to questions of historical foundations of its models.4 What it most clearly lacks is a deliberate take on both aspects that define the economy and matter most in times of crises — the social and Crisis, Energy, and the Value Form of Gender 125 the substantial dimension of the reproduction of the human species. I would argue that the methodological individualism of orthodox economics remains pivotal to its critical incapacity. If we want to counter these “fairy tales of the market” in order to ask the question that really matters — what is done by whom in which way? — we must look for a completely different framework, a new approach that understands the material and social content of what economists take as self-explanatory categories.5 Such a venture includes a deconstructive and a reconstructive take on the subject matter. As Marx argued, the materialist mode of inquiry should both encompass a critical reference to customary notions of (political) economy, thus yielding a categorical critique and providing a better, critical understanding of the actual social reality or, as Marx put it, “produce at once an exposé and, by the same token, a critique of the system.”6 Reading Marx’s Critique of Political Economy in this vein — and not just as another theory of economics — leads in a new direction of categorical critique. At its heart is the dialectical relationship of the subject of change and the subjective factor in relation to its objective foundations and its objective factor. As such, this perspective finds but its origins in Marx’s own work and has since been elaborated in new directions. One of the most important elaborations, which also informed a wide range of philosophical and scientific studies, is the Frankfurt School tradition of Critical Theory. But it is not its most renowned protagonists like Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, or Herbert Marcuse that have contributed most to the questions at hand; it is the late Alfred Schmidt — assistant of Adorno and professor of philosophy in Frankfurt — who offers a critical starting point. In his foundational work The Concept of Nature in Marx, Schmidt develops an understanding of the modern metabolism of society and nature that led to the theory of GNV.7 GNV has been discussed mostly with respect to socio-ecological questions, but its perspective is more general in outlook and in actual fact should be understood as the most basic answer to the abovementioned twofold reformulation of the 126 Materialism and the Critique of Energy economic question.8 GNV critiques the economy by embedding it in a broader understanding of how society and nature are interrelating and is thereby showing the historically specific character of modern economic categories. In Schmidt’s account, the interrelation of society and nature in modern capitalism establishes a peculiar materiality, which he terms pseudophysis:9 The “materialist” character of Marxist theory does not amount to a confession of the incurable primacy of the economy, that anti-human abstraction achieved by the real situation. It is rather an attempt to direct men’s attention towards the ghostly internal logic of their own conditions, towards this pseudophysis that makes them commodities and at the same time provides the ideology according to which they are already in control of their own destinies.10 At the heart of this notion, we find a deconstructive approach to economy as a category — its separation into an abstracted sphere with its own “laws” that are beyond human intervention is turned into an appearance. Following Hegel’s terminology, but putting it in a critical materialist framework, Schmidt argues that “first nature” and the genuinely capitalist second nature fall apart.11 They separate in an oppressing way, conflating social and natural history without people’s knowledge and control thus establishing a false identity of nature and society.12 The highly distanced “natural laws” of economics are thus understood as pertaining to a “natural history” that is to be overcome in order to establish a free society.13 The ideological realm of “necessities” that is so dominant in economic thinking and the economy itself thus can be subverted if we look at the origins of a society that produced these necessities in the first place. They then appear as doubly historical categories — once as a principal historical constitution and once as a specific ramification of modern society’s second nature. This does however not mean that one should be so naïve as to believe that a genealogical deconstruction by means of ideology Crisis, Energy, and the Value Form of Gender 127 critique would make the second nature of capitalist GNV obsolete. To the contrary, they are shaped in the form of a very durable, fetishized materiality — a pseudophysis apparent in the commodity form, which inseparably welds exchange and use value in an objectivity that (in this historic formation) is as real to people as the external natural world around us is. The demi-reality of capitalist nature relations thus has to be grasped by means of a negative ontology, in which the negative has a dual meaning: meta-theoretically it stands for the fact that reality is not sufficiently graspable in a formal (positive) methodology; and normatively it indicates the fact that humans cannot directly access their own social structures.14 It is the mode of meditation (Vermittlung) that matters, and hence — in the last instance — society’s role in shaping itself and nature. The critique of this mode of mediation goes in line with Marx’s critique of (economic) fetishism, which he developed in Capital. It is already in the first section of volume one that he uncovers the fetishism of commodities as he reveals their “mystical character,” which encompasses the twisted form of men’s relation to nature via labor. In abstract labor, social interaction with nature appears not as such, but only via exchange of commodities in the economic sphere (the market).15 In turn, value — a genuinely social quality — appears to stem from this economic domain, hence seems to be already “inside” the commodities — natural and naturalized things — in the first place. In fact, commodities do have their own “quasi-social” life — second nature — while relations between men are naturalized. On the genuinely human, social side, (abstract) labor is exemplary for the way activities are conducted in capitalism — their actual and purported determination go astray, forming a dialectical contradiction processing through time and space and alienating people. Understood this way, a critique of energy as a social relation to nature begins to take shape. Although Marx hardly ever mentions energy in Capital, this does not mean that it is not there. The concept of abstract labor has two sides, one related to nature as an externality, 128 Materialism and the Critique of Energy the other internal to the (social) second nature of capital. Abstract labor produces both a use value and an exchange value. In fact both are conjoined in reality and only theoretical analysis can distinguish between the concrete aspects of labor and labor’s value abstraction. The mediation that links the internality of social forms to the externality of substance, second nature to first nature, is neither the specific value-abstraction nor the fact that something useful or physical is produced; it is the energic dimension of abstract labor as a totality category: the concept of abstract labor in Marx does not ultimately make sense in the singular, but only as a universal category that relates to total capital as the “automatic subject” that propels GNV. Capitalism collectivizes labor although it privatizes the labor relation. The character of labor as a social form is different from the other peculiar social forms (such as value, money, capital) that build upon it because it is all about the exhaustion of human energy, yet not in any concrete, but in an abstract way. The abstract “expenditure of human brains, nerves, and muscles” establishes the fetishized metabolic fusion represented by second nature.16 Abstract labor as a totality-category is necessary to understand how societal synthesis (and consequently nature relations) is established. Expanding on Marx, I suggest that much closer attention should be paid to the character of abstract human energy. The form of the labor abstraction is one determined by capital, namely, the tautological self-perpetuation of surplus value production. M-C-M' — money that accumulates — is nothing but the peculiar fusion of qualitative and quantitative aspects. Capital is an entity and, at the same time, only a quantity of something else (money); it is a relation and the relation of relations. As such, Capital is akin to energy. Energy is the name that we give to the capacity to perform work, but it is also intimately tied to (physical) entities facilitating this capacity. Energy has relational and thing-like qualities and thus matters for the way we approach nature qualitatively and quantitatively. The connection between social and natural determinations of energy matters for every societynature relation: energy is not only natural; it is a social relation, as the Crisis, Energy, and the Value Form of Gender 129 emerging energy humanities tell us.17 The capitalist form of GNV is however unique as it produces a quasi-natural fetishized energic fix that deprives human energy of its social character once it is homogenized under the imperatives of value and ultimately capital. This energic fix constitutes the materiality of GNV as it mediates the relation of substance and form in terms of capital’s teleology, the qualitativequantitative self-propulsion of the fetishized system we live in. It is more than a historical coincidence that the energic fix we find in capital manifests in the fossil energy system that drove capitalism from the beginning — the very character of the value form of energy requires a spatiotemporal determination that has hitherto only been provided by fossil energy sources. Only fossil energy is able to compress time and space in a way compatible with the (technologically advanced) exertion of abstract human energy via abstract labor and it is amongst the few forms of energy that is perfectly suited to “outsource” ecological costs, so as to increase the immediate performance in value-production. Modern GNV cannot be imagined without fossil energy; but the latter can only be meaningfully understood if it is also seen as a social relation, that is, one that has its roots in abstract labor as abstract exhaustion of energy. Abstract labor and fossil energy conjoin in the broader society-nature relations and it seems nearly impossible to disentangle them, but this does not mean that the relation is static or ahistorical. It can change from the inside. GNV and crisis In light of the above developed, crisis manifests not only in the “economic” or “financial” sphere, but must be rooted in a crisis of societal materiality as such. In order to get there, I want to pinpoint the oppressive character of the economic forms that are manifest in their second nature character. For this purpose, it is necessary to acknowledge that fetishized relations (as evidenced in economic categories) are not forming mutually homologous relations, but always imply an unequal, hierarchical split. Society — the sphere of second nature — is the dominant engine of social mediation, premised 130 Materialism and the Critique of Energy under capital on a universal mode of domination of nature and natural substantiality. The capitalist value abstraction as “automatic subject” approaches and (co-)constitutes first nature as the Other. Eventually, capitalism is all about the production of surplus value, hence also “surplus materiality” in terms of an extended perpetuation of (qualitative and quantitative aspects of) the energic fix. Christoph Görg, a scholar who heavily draws on Schmidt and the Frankfurt School tradition, formulates the problem as follows: In Capitalism, mankind has not yet reached its potential to design and control its societal and natural relations, it exists in detached [verselbstständigt] relations, which confront mankind as “second nature.” The specific purpose of these detached capitalist production is however not the production of use values, but the production of surplus value. The specific determination of aims ultimately defines the process of appropriation of its inherent “natural substance” [Naturstoff]: the relations of production dominate the nature relations.18 Relations of production dominate nature relations — this means that economic categories as well as real economic development are not only indifferent towards natural necessities, but indeed form a closed system, a synchronic matrix that reverberates in the perfect mathematical models of neoclassical economics but also materially manifests itself in the real world. As a universal model, it knows neither error nor crisis. If we understand how this demi-reality of a synchronic, error-free universality is only real as it stems from the fetishized realm of second nature, it becomes evident that this apparent universality is always a ruptured one, as there exist various issues that are Othered and exempted — first and foremost nature and substantiality proper. This “Othered” first nature could be interpreted in line of a simple “nature-kicks-back argument,” an ecological critique of capitalism and natural limits. In fact, there always is some truth to this kind of externalist critique, as it has for example been formulated by German Crisis, Energy, and the Value Form of Gender 131 eco-Marxists like Elmar Altvater.19 But as we have seen, substantiality is — pivotally evidenced by the economical category use value — never accessible as such in modernity, since it is intrinsically related to the exchange-value form, which is dominating it. This tension between use and exchange value, which expresses and instantaneously obscures itself in the “actually existing” incarnation of value, money, must be seen as the deep core of all economic crises.20 Both the exchange of goods on the market (in Marx’s terms “circulation”) and their production thus aim at the ever-increasing generation of value, hence money that moves perpetually in the form of capital. As such, the system is autopoietic and knows no external restraints or ends. Nonetheless, behind this seemingly synchronic, closed system of capital circuits, we find a hidden subtext that is only accessible if we understand that the economic sphere is truly an outcome of the materiality of nature-relations — one that abstracts from the real relationality and conjures it away in fetishized second nature, thereby ignoring the substantiality of the use-value side. To carry the categorical critique of economy to its end then means that we have to understand that economic crises have their origin in the historical development of the contradiction of use and exchange value, which never expresses itself as such, but only via the “synchronic” realm of value and the ultimately prevailing form of money. The synchronicity of value is concealing the diachronic character of first-nature determinations, which are mediated by the capitalist “energic fix.” Even the apparently most contingent crisisborne events — financial meltdowns and more general ruptures in what Marx called “fictitious capital” — do relate to the specific materiality that capital produces in relation to nature.21 As such, crisis is a feature of the synchronic core of capitalism. The most basic crisis phenomenon — the chance that a produced use value does not manage to “attach” itself to an exchange value on the market, hence a commodity remaining unsold — has been prevalent throughout capitalism’s history. But this basic understanding of crisis is not all. As capitalism is a historically developing system, the contradiction and its 132 Materialism and the Critique of Energy material basis do not remain the same. Even though the phenomenal appearance seems to be unchanged, its dialectical core can change as relations of production and productive forces alter the nature relations and their energic mediation. Behind the “usual” cyclical bursts of overproduction-driven crises and their connection to the generation of unbacked fictitious capital, there is a more substantial reason for crisis. This cause can be located in the contradictory relation of substance and form that only manifests itself in a crisis of money, a development that has been grasped by the German theorist Robert Kurz as the continuous growth of “money without value.”22 It is not possible to develop the whole depth of Kurz’s argument in just a few words, but I shall try to delineate aspects that are of interest for a critical take on GNV. It is perhaps best to start with the theme of substantiality or materiality. Following a materialist framework, authors like Robert Kurz have argued — in line with the abovedeveloped Frankfurt School lineage — that the “real-abstract” source of capital — money — increasingly loses its basis in value-substance. Value-substance, the form-determined exhaustion of human labor, requires a foundation in nature via the energic mediation. If the “mass” of use value doesn’t correspond with the mass of exchange value, the contradictory energic mediation between substance and form, nature and society becomes more and more strained.23 Due to fetishism, this contradiction does not become manifest immediately or as such, but only via a representation that is mainly visible inside the really existing (second-nature) form, money. A development in the substantial and social domains obfuscates its specific relation: the increasing productivity — as evident in scientific and technic potentialities — yields a vast stock of produced raw materials that doesn’t correspond with the human energy exhaustion in the specific capitalist (second-nature) form, that is, abstract labor and the value produced by it.24 With respect to a value perspective — and this is the (only) one that ultimately receives social validity — Kurz argues the finitude of this contradictory development has to be acknowledged: Crisis, Energy, and the Value Form of Gender 133 This contradictory development is only graspable from the perspective of value, which is situated solely on the level of societal totality and can only be ascertained by critical theory. This perspective, which is not accessible to agents in their everyday practice, constitutes the objective and elementary self-contradiction of the “automatic subject,” which must by necessity of its blind dynamic historically culminate. This means that surplus value cannot grow “infinitely” on the level of societal totality (and the category is only valid on this level), while only problems of the “realisation” of value come to matter; to the contrary, the long-term historic result of the capitalist dynamic is the erosion of value as such and thus a drying up of surplus value production in absolute quantity.25 Now if the basis of value production in the exhaustion of abstract human energy “melts away,” this leads to a friction in the money form on a societal level — the actually existing mass of value does not correspond with the mass of value substance. This misrepresentation of forms leads inter alia to the meltdowns at the stock exchange, where money as fictitious capital “devaluates.” The problem cannot be solved by devaluations, as its core mechanisms are not to be found in the strictly economic sphere but relate to GNV. Hence, the societal-substantial potentials and their capitalist formal confines are not corresponding anymore, while the energic fix in mediation of substance and forms disintegrates too. This incoherence “inside” the dialectical energic mediation is hard to grasp as such, but it can be approached via its substantial and social consequences. Detrimental effects of the fossil determination of the energy fix are very obvious — climate change, for one, but also price volatility across energy, capital, and commodity markets. Yet it is the form that matters. Crisisinduced social phenomena are more multifarious as they are mediated by the complex social forms and their proper logic. Many social crisis phenomena can be understood as indicators of the social energic limits to further development if the above thesis of the fetishized energic fix is accepted. The value form is losing its energic momentum and 134 Materialism and the Critique of Energy thereby obstructs even the limited potentials that are offered by the capitalist GNV. If abstract labor as substance of value is the necessary (but not sufficient) basis of social synthesis, its energic crisis must be accompanied by crisis phenomena outside of the economy. There is no immanent solution to this “entropy of crisis”; a change in social relations as such is necessary if anti-crisis measures are to be more than ephemeral containment measures. It should be evident by now that this change cannot only be economic in the strict sense; it has to be wider in scope. I will now suggest that an understanding of the gendered character of GNV, and by extension the diremption of energy as force of production from gender as force of social reproduction is necessary in order to see that the crisis affects society as a whole and not just the economic sphere. The Gendered Subtext of GNV In order to approach the deeply gendered subtext of GNV, we must return to the above-developed characteristics of its materialist theorization. In my critique of economical categories, I problematized the synchronic character of the approach inasmuch as it produced the impression of a closed system. As I have shown, materialist critique proves that the synchrony in theory represents a misled picture of the historical development of nature relations. So far, its critique is a purely negative one and therefore thoroughly focused on the encountered economic categories. While this theoretical procedure is not wrong, as it uncovers the force of fetishism surrounding its subject matter, it can merely indicate that the universalist framework is insufficient for a comprehensive understanding of reality. It can however not be shown why this is the case. In its theoretical modus operandi, much of materialist theory by necessity clings to a categorical understanding that even in its critique reproduces the implicit functionality of thought systems which represent a societal reality that actually yields this functionality as a contradiction in the first place. This does not mean that such critique is mistaken in itself — to some degree, a materialist approach cannot but relate to a reality Crisis, Energy, and the Value Form of Gender 135 that manifestly produces these kinds of universalist frameworks. There are however two problems, if materialist critique remains purely negative in this sense. (1) Critique’s immanence vs. its normativity If critique were purely negative, hence solely (immanently) referring to the subject matter’s functionality, it would not be able to defend its own normative impetus (as critique). One could for example argue that fetishism is good because it takes responsibility away from people and establishes a functioning system. (2) Critique’s particularity vs. universality If the mechanism of Othering of all aspects outside the universal functional (economic) system is thus only implicitly uncovered (as a product of the immanent critique) and not explicitly framed as such, the historical critique of the oppressive character remains opaque. If all kinds of things remain exempt from the theoretical core and if there is no way to give meaning to the “logic” of exemption, then its simple recognition does not tell us very much. Both problems are obviously interrelated — the normative momentum is deduced from the (critical) understanding of the specific oppressive character of the relations that are critiqued. Materialist critique however asks for the (dialectical) “logic” that determines the connection of both sides. A powerful thesis to understand the specific oppressive character of modern GNV is to see them as expressions of a patriarchal rationale. Understanding the dialectics of critique through a gender-critical framework not only means that gender is considered as just another “issue.” It helps us to denominate the apparently contingent diachronic breaches in the synchronic field of social relations — the Other, that which remains exempt from the “closed” system we find in economic forms, is then not only just another issue. By unraveling its gendered determination, the Other’s implicit character as just a “subtext” can be turned into an explicit 136 Materialism and the Critique of Energy problem. A good starting point for such a venture is the debate around female reproductive activities. This debate was pursued mainly among Marxist feminists beginning in the late 1960s and focused on the question if and to what degree “domestic labor,” as it was called, made its way into the value form male counterparts were struggling over in the factory. It uncovered how the particular female character of reproductive activities was crucial for defining those activities as it explained their categorical and real subordination. When women remain outside social production, that is, outside the socially organized productive cycle, they are also outside social productivity. The role of women… has always been seen as that of a psychologically subordinated person who, except where she is marginally employed outside the home, is outside production; she is essentially a supplier of a series of use-values in the home.26 Female contributions to economic activities — or, taking it one step further, their critical contextualization in terms of GNV — has seldom been held in high esteem both in the public debate and its critical Marxists counterparts. Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James, Silvia Federici, and others consequently argued for a more gender-sensitive approach that tried to give the family as a mainly feminized domain of reproduction a larger role in materialist critique. Others have argued against this and held that it is exactly the patriarchal nature of capitalism that yields the stark separation, hence the unproductivity of female domestic work.27 Here is not the place to follow all the intricacies of this controversy, but what remains important is the use-value orientation that Dalla Costa mentioned: namely, that women are thought to be “closer to nature” not only qua childbearing and the purportedly natural role in family that goes with that, but also through the gendered concept of use-value orientation in economics in general.28 The character of so-called feminine attributes like sensuality, unintermediateness, genuineness, and immediate utility Crisis, Energy, and the Value Form of Gender 137 are specifically ascribed to use-value dimensions. They are sometimes ideologically praised as “non-identical” and “essential” residuum of emancipation.29 But these are different ascriptions then those we usually find in capitalism, where (any) use value is just the bearer of exchange value. It is only in the last-instance that use value as immediate consumption is ultimately falling out of the capitalist realm — but even here it is associated with female activities in the family.30 This is also where immediacy and apparently direct contact to the natural are situated most strikingly — the private domain of the family operates as the Othered opposite to all public enterprise and the role of women as “natural inhabitants” of this domain is clearly assigned.31 The argument is not that this kind of use-value orientation in the private domain is completely outside of GNV. To the contrary, capitalist relations co-produce this patriarchal domain. As pertaining to the logic of modern fetishist forms, the naturalization relevant in the private, “female” domain and hence the attributes assigned to women qua allegedly “natural” and “biological” necessities are historically produced. This did not happen by mere volition or direct (patriarchal) institutionalizations of power, but as a consequence of the “doubly historic” second nature of a universalizing system that needs to relinquish everything natural — the closed economic world — just in order to secretly project it onto something that is completely Othered, outside the box, and apparently not of relevance for the second-nature sociality proper. The naturalizations that have ever since permeated the rise of “enlightened modernity” are thus ultimately co-functional products of modernity’s nature relations: as the dialectic of substance and form can only process in the secondnature domain, it is dependent on constantly emitting motives of “false nature” that serve as the substantial basis for abstract universal forms. This model can be traced back to a patriarchal basis that was however thoroughly transformed in modernity — patriarchy and abstract domination (qua capital) have been conjoined in a binary logic that is starkly hierarchical and thus constantly producing 138 Materialism and the Critique of Energy master-slave-type dialectics as they have initially and brilliantly been uncovered by Simone de Beauvoir.32 Naturalizations are not limited to gender-issues in the strict sense, though it may be argued that they originated from the above developed separation of labor and the concomitant constitution of nature in the early phase of capitalist-patriarchal evolution.33 The “other Others” that matter so much when it comes to an assessment of the oppressive character of modernity are thus not reducible to gendered oppression, but they have a common basis in the patriarchal model of GNV as they yield a symbolic yet real core of hierarchical power-relations. Looking at energic mediation, this can symbolically be framed as the domination of an abstract energy system over contextualized and reflexive (“renewable”) energy relations that exhibit a non- or less contradictory society-nature relation. The currently prevailing dialectics of energy parallel the dialectics of productive (abstract) labor and reproductive activities, just as the symbolical representations of production are masculinized and those of reproduction feminized. This means that the energic mediation at the core of GNV is itself gendered — the fetishized energic fix that combines fossil energy and abstract human energy is symbolically “male” as it pertains to a patriarchal way of appropriating and creating nature. This energic regime produces a universalizing matrix that is at the same time nature-blind and producing nature. It appears “neutral” — hardly anyone considers gendering energy as such — but is not neutral, if we accept that energy relations are always constitutively social. I want to argue that energy relations, nature relations and value relations are only possible if we see behind the capitalist abstractions that obscure the substantial symbolic determination of these naturalized categories. I am convinced that such an endeavor can only prevail if the patriarchal dimension of society-nature relations in general and energy relations in particular is highlighted. The character of the dialectical argument changes once we incorporate the substantial gendered determination into our critique. This means acknowledging Crisis, Energy, and the Value Form of Gender 139 that neutrality is actually male and everything female is Othered. The universalist capitalist subsumption of first nature in second nature can only prevail if is accompanied by an Othering/Othered patriarchal naturalizing mode of dissociation. Society-nature relations represent neither a monist fusion nor a “neutral” dialectical duality; they form a hierarchical dialectic in which a universal (male, second-nature, capitalist) side subsumes the Other. This Other is pivotally (first) “nature.” The patriarchal energy fix that mediates energy relations is related to this dialectic; in fact, energy is a way to express this hierarchical dialectic that, in its processing, must relate to first nature but ultimately “ends” with second nature. First nature is not neutral or a-social; it was originally produced in early modernity as something at odds with culture/society. In this phase, (white, western) men and the “male” symbolic logic they represent are developing on the basis of their opposition to everything female that has consequentially been naturalized.34 Thus, I hesitate to connect the primordially gendered and patriarchal character of modern domination to sexual difference as such. Rather, I argue, it was construed as a “functional” part of society-nature relations. In order to grasp the character of the kind of functionality at stake, it must be acknowledged that it can only be (totally) understood when its symbolic subtext is highlighted. The modern development of patriarchal relations — which indeed completely altered the meaning of “patriarchy,” as it was subordinated to the apparently “neutral” abstract domination of value — has a beginning that corresponds with capitalist “primitive accumulation,” as Silvia Federici showed so impressively in her study of early modern ideologies and subjugating practices.35 Abstract (capitalist) and concrete (patriarchal) domination have been intricately conjoined in a system that on a less general, subjective level yields so many ideologies and exclusions that at times, it seems as if there is no cohesive logic. On the most abstract level of the functionality of modern GNV, we have to assume reciprocity between capitalist and patriarchal logics, as it is the only relation that can ultimately explain the dialectical character of the materiality 140 Materialism and the Critique of Energy with which we are confronted. The principle of domination between abstraction and reciprocal (false) concretion is thus to be conceived of as a ubiquitous gendered symbolic imaginary and it is grounded in the relation of first and second nature still prevailing in modern society. What does this mean for the critical assessment of GNV? Following a materialist perspective, we must differentiate between two different modes of critique: (1) A deconstructive critique that directs itself against the naturalizations of and ideological ascriptions to women/ the female. (2) A reconstructive critique that depicts the specific functionality that the Other plays in relation to the universal one. Both issues are certainly interrelated and on a very general level. It can however be legitimate to split them apart in order to focus on one issue. The first critique is not new — it has been frequently employed since the rise of theoretical feminism and is a hallmark of current poststructuralist approaches. Thus I will move on to the second. A first step for any reconstructive critique must be the reassessment of nature as something produced and already encountered. In this, the female (as prototypical Other of the universal male) is connected to a (partly imagined/socially constituted) first nature, that is the ostensibly “static” basis for the “male dynamic” attributed to the universalizing system of (second nature) functionality and subjugation of nature.36 This can (metaphorically) be understood as a relation of a symbolically male materiality of a “machine” — in relation to a “natural” body37 — the body standing for the quasi-autonomous and quasi-natural “automatic subject” of second nature, which is symbolically male.38 It is hence clear why the female side is Othered — as symbolic-functional representation of nature, it has to be subdued in order to substantiate the (male) hegemonic body of the capitalist-phallic machine. In the realm of second nature, everything “female” is, as representation of nature, always bound to be inferior — not due to some essential aspect of femininity, but to the genuinely produced character of modern nature relations in which it assumes the functional role of reproducing; restoring, not creating (right down to the denial of the capacity to create life itself).39 Seen from an inverted perspective, it Crisis, Energy, and the Value Form of Gender 141 is therefore crucial for the functioning of the whole system that the female is just like nature — in the last instance — always appearing as passive and something static that can be appropriated, used, and depleted. The capitalist-patriarchal energic fix mediates the creation of passive nature, as it homogenizes energic regimes so as to make them conform to the value abstraction. This explains why energy is always approached from a resource-perspective — the actual, energic metabolism remains fetishized and inaccessible for social actors. The phallic capitalist machine is driven by abstract energy relations, but it requires some concrete determination, which it finds in feminized first nature. Just as it should be evident that capitalist productive labor cannot survive without the kind of reproductive work that is usually attributed to women/feminized subjects, it is obvious that nature eventually reproduces the energy system that propels the production of surplus value. If this reproduction fails, form-immanent contradictions must increase. It is important to see that the relation to nature that energy mediates is not one sided, but dialectical. This means that the patriarchal appropriation is never ultimate, but also implies that nature is not conceivable without its determination. Analyses of natural limits have to encompass the character of the society-nature dialectic and it is crucial to understand its gendered symbolic to really grasp the dialectic’s logic. I propose to engage the German theorem of value dissociation (Wert-Abspaltung) in order to attain such a renewed theoretical perspective. The germinal theorem was first coined by Roswitha Scholz, who formulated it in critical reference to the dialectical approach of value critique (Wertkritik) that itself developed out of the shadows of orthodox German Marxism in the 1980s. Roswitha Scholz’s main idea was to conceive the basic logic of societal development in modernity as one ruled by value and its dissociation.40 Scholz started from the materialist feminist insight that there exists a plethora of reproductive activities that supplement and substantiate abstract labor relations.41 The alignment of this understanding with an 142 Materialism and the Critique of Energy advanced critique of fetishism extends it greatly. This presupposes that the above shown category-critical mode had already found its way into the usage of Marxist categories. “Value” thus means more than just an economic category as “dissociation” is from the outset integrated. Societal totality is not only defined by the fetishist self-movement of money and the tautological character of abstract labour in Capitalism. A gendered dissociation takes place, which is dialectically mediated with value. The dissociated is not just a “subsystem” of this form… but essential and constitutive for societal totality. This means that there is no immanent relation of logical deductibility between value and dissociation. Dissociation is value and value is dissociation. Both partake of another, but don’t become identical.42 The reciprocal causation, hence the dialectical relationality is very important, as it demarcates a totality-category that — unlike Adorno’s identity logic — is explicitly encompassing the Other in its framework and doesn’t regress to a partial or positive account of the historically real second-nature universalism. In this, Scholz’s emphasis on a radical category-critical take on questions of theory construction is of utmost importance, as it demonstrates how such a perspective needs to partly discard the scientific rationality of “closed objects,” as its very subject matter — that which is dissociated — is to some degree only attainable via “non-logically” and “non-conceptually” envisaged categories.43 This paves the way for a re-reading of dialectical theory of society which gives the “cultural-symbolic” a novel place in theory — its relative and metaphoric semantic and general approach have to be included in the “grand theory.”44 The cultural-symbolic imaginary it associated with certain (feminized) sectors, spheres, and practices in everyday life and social structures and thus not only equivalent with general delimitations of a societal “logic” on a totality level. It has its own foundation “in” society. It is value dissociation’s central achievement that considerations about gender do not remain at this Crisis, Energy, and the Value Form of Gender 143 “concrete” level. Unlike many perspectives on gender or the social, it aspires to integrate apparently concrete and particular insight into an abstract materialist theoretical apparatus. This means that the “hard” political-economic categories are somewhat “softened” and thus expanded in light of the awareness that the universal aspects need to be understood as primordially dovetailed with the dissociated aspects. Scholz encourages us to read the “hard” categories symbolically without dissolving the critique of political economy in culture, as the dissociation is understood to effect the theory construction itself. Exactly because its “hidden” dialectical connection is a materially real one, value dissociation requires the preservation of the gendered dualism and the relative autonomy that it prompts for both the universalist “male” side and the Othered “female” side and its theoretical problems. The material, symbolic, and historical operations of value dissociation make imperative a gendered perspective on GNV, which affirms that (first) nature “has” a gender and as such, is relevant for the very functionality of (second) nature-relations as it represents the subsumed substance of the (value) abstraction that characterizes modern patriarchal capitalism. Totality emanates from the categories of the critique of political economy, but is not restricted to it: thus, the relations of production dominate nature-relations. This means that we can now understand the relation of synchronicity and diachronicity in the GNV as one that depends on a functional relation between value and dissociation, symbolically “male” and “female” aspects. The proposed perspective encompasses the relationship of production and reproduction, which can explain — and not only deconstruct — the categorical problems of modern economic understandings. Production of (second) nature, the value principle (as universalist meta-logic) and male symbolic/structural connotations then go together, just as reproduction of nature, dissociation and a female symbolic connotation are connected. The first side produces a synchronic matrix, the second its diachronic rupture, and it is exactly this exempted rupture, the reproductive “in-between” which 144 Materialism and the Critique of Energy constitutes the real solidification of the formal-synchronic closure that we encounter as “economics.” The dialectic of synchronicity and diachronicity is in crisis. The energic dimension of the dialectical mediation foregrounds this crisis. It is incorrect to argue that an energy crisis is only about the depletion of (fossil) resources. This would imply an acceptance of the synchronic argument that either the internality in economic forms (i.e. market mechanisms) or a static (externalized) nature determines limits. If energy is approached as a mediating relation, the crisis cannot be reduced to “either/or,” it must encompass both aspects at the same time. The second-nature character of the energic fix produces nature and nature reproduces this energic mediation. Limits like peak oil are not natural in a simple sense; first nature must be seen as co-produced by second nature. A picture of the economy and the nature cannot account for this, only a consideration of the diachronicity produced by and reproducing those synchronic understandings can help here. This means confronting determinist naturalist arguments by pointing to the historical contingency that the diachronic production of nature engenders. It equally means attacking the naturalized economic determination that arguments about the self-regulation of oil markets harbor. Bearing in mind the fetishistic energic fix should lead us to see how the gendered dialectic of synchronicity and diachronicity is fueling a crisis in the mediation of energy itself. Crisis then is gendered in two ways. On the one side, the energic fix is destabilized and its subjugation of first nature aspects is endangered. It cannot continue to (re-)produce nature in its “usual” way, which leads to a friction inside the synchronicity of capitalist forms. The “male” energic appropriation of nature is in crisis. On the other side the character of the diachronic side changes. It loses its relation to the synchronic side, as the dialectic is destabilized. This means an increase of contingency, unpredictability but also plurality of expressions — some of which are radically changing the character of first nature and the dissociated aspects of the naturalized “female” side. The latter development may seem as if it encompasses Crisis, Energy, and the Value Form of Gender 145 positive aspects, but ultimately, both sides still belong together. The dialectical process that is mediated by the energy system will not disappear as such, just as the energic fix will very likely persist even if its contradictions increase. I will now conclude with an attempt to deduce rough historicalanalytical conclusions by giving a few examples of how the gendered GNV and their energic mediation have come into crisis. Gender-Dimensions of Crisis The functional relation of synchronic and diachronic moments in the GNV can only prevail if a certain “ideal average” in the reciprocal relationship is safeguarded. Crises are accordingly to be sought in the (gendered) dialectical synthesis itself, but by tendency they will become rampant only in actual bursts visible on the synchronic side, namely, the apparently contingent diachronic “rupture” of a structural ensemble understood to be of relative stability. The synchronic side of capitalist forms and its appropriation of nature is “in crisis,” as it is the only observable articulation of the dialectic. For example, financial meltdowns appear to us as crises. Rising contradictions in reproductive work or even first nature cannot be processed as systemic crises, even if at some instance we might believe that they are problematic. These diachronic aspects can only be understood as crisis prone when approached via the synchronic form, like in emission trading or “care work.” This however does not mean that there is no substantiality to the diachronic side of crises — to the contrary, it is ultimately this side that is foundational for the rupture, as it constitutes the (hidden) criteria for the reproduction of totality. We need to embrace a perspective that thinks both aspects at the same time together — as they are really intertwined in the process of reproduction — and apart — as they necessarily appear in social reality. In light of the above-developed enrichment of critical economic categories, the synchronic dimension of social synthesis in the GNV should be approached via the above-developed symbolic-imaginary 146 Materialism and the Critique of Energy reading. The economic crises we are facing are not gender-neutral as much of the GNV, the foundation of the economic sphere, are themselves gendered. This means that crisis phenomena at first sight ultimately mostly relate to the “male” domain of value. As such, they represent an actual rupture in the equilibrium, a disruption of the necessary telos of modern economy — the abstract and self-related process of growth as such, that is to say accumulation of capital. Symbolically articulating this relation reveals that the capitalistphallic machine has run out of steam. Framing this in terms of energy means to see that it is crucially the dominant energic fix and the “male” domain of value-productive activity associated with it that is losing momentum. Energy is a social relation and not only a substantial one; hence, the “running out of steam” must not be reduced to resource crises. The steam I talk about is not only propelling engines, it is propelling people who are themselves acting according to machinic imperatives. Following its automatic and objective machine-nature, economic disruptions are unfolding without social control. Crisis is one of fetishistic mediation, just as the system is itself fetishized. Still, it represents a diachronic breach that the logic of capitalist real abstractions cannot tolerate. The machine “needs” to run infinitely, it has to perpetuate the energic fix that fuels it, which becomes harder and harder to accomplish. This affects both the “reality” of its real-abstract categorical apparatus and its theoretical representation in science. Not only neoclassical theory, but even much of Marxism cannot envisage an internal decay of economic categories. Causes of crisis are thus typically understood as “external.” Symbolically, the refusal to accept anything but the machine’s functionality represents a defense of an androcentric perspective that ultimately stems from an insufficient theorization of gendered GNV. The reproductive element is omitted — crises call upon (political) regulation and containment, which always aims to reestablish the former order of synchrony. Moreover, reproduction’s imbrication in crisis is completely off the table, just as nature and gendered aspects of its appropriation — the sublime Crisis, Energy, and the Value Form of Gender 147 natural body of the machine — remain excluded. This very abstract functional obstruction of (large-scale) conscious alterations in the society-nature relations and their energic fix explains why it is so hard to achieve energy transition. As long as no new energic fix compatible with the value abstraction is in sight, changes in the existing energy system are always imposed and require complex interventions that need to stand against the broader energic momentum. They cannot build on a systematic (synchronic) basis that is necessary as long as capitalist forms prevail.45 When it appears evident that reproduction is becoming more and more difficult as the secular crisis of fetishistic materiality is unfolding, the limitations to diachronic interventions, the possibility of an internal stabilization of the synchronic rational are revealing themselves blatantly. Taking into account the gendered character of GNV then means to see that crisis-bound change — manifest in the increasing impossibility of a synchronic and neutral “subjugating” perspective on nature due to first nature (i.e. “ecological,” reproductive) restrictions — is always also one in the implicit patriarchal residue of the system’s apparently neutral logic. Crisis then indeed has a gendered subtext — it is the destabilization of a patriarchal system that becomes evident in the apparently most neutral and “natural” guise of the economic.46 This destabilization doesn’t indicate that the patriarchal system — hence the domination of everything that is Othered as non-universal — becomes less relevant. To the contrary, as crisis is taking place in the realm of second nature, it must rather be conceived of as a “hollowing out” than a “shrinking.” Struggles to safeguard an (imagined) status quo ante bellum are increasing just as real and categorical synchrony is harder and harder to maintain. Roswitha Scholz has labeled this Verwilderung des Patriarchats which may best translate as barbarization or confusion of the system. That something is “getting out of order” becomes evident not only in the economic domain; it is apparent on a global, national, and individual level of societal relations. As I have shown, the problem is that bourgeois consciousness will never see how the plurality of diachronic aspects are combined and form a 148 Materialism and the Critique of Energy larger systemic crisis — for official discourses, science, media, and also the everyday life perspective, only economic crises count. Against this, critical theory must insist that crisis is a broader and complex phenomenon related to problems of societal synthesis as such. The consequences for the Othered aspects — foremost first nature materiality — are then in general detrimental ones, as strategies of regulation — the reestablishment of systemic synchrony — are turning into an unpredictable and accelerating juggernaut wheel.47 The “new insecurities” in society thus represent a transformation of the patriarchal mode of domination that is concealed behind the economy’s neutrality, as the metaphorical “objective capitalist machine” begins to break apart and brings disorder in relation to the subjugated (subjective) aspects of nature.48 The functionality inscribed to modern gender relations is breaking apart. This unquestionably affects the side of the ones who are exercising domination and thus — if not every single “man” as an individual or every masculinity — masculinities in as much as they are necessary buttresses of patriarchal domination. Speaking of a crisis of masculinity is thus not wrong, but needs qualification, as it is often normatively turned into a legitimizing ideology for reactionary (masculinist) positions.49 Marxists should read this discourse as a symptom of a larger confluence of crisis points. Crisis of masculinity as understood in the here-developed theoretical context does not refer to a normative but to a functional domain. From this new Marxist perspective, the energy crisis was always going to produce a crisis of masculinity. As such, the market and climate crisis generated by the fossil fuelled content of contemporary capitalism stands for a certain loss of control that has long been tied to a male subject position as expression of the patriarchal, synchronic side of domination. Without its energic fix, capital’s social structure, divisions, and historical fabric withers into a wasteland of former subject and object positions. The theoretical thesis stemming from a GNVperspective — we are dealing with a crisis of masculinities as such and not just one of masculinity — implies that transformations are Crisis, Energy, and the Value Form of Gender 149 encompassing all sorts of masculinities. Yet this crisis of “functional masculinity” is not necessarily to be welcomed as it often enough results in the kind of barbarization that Scholz was attributing to crisis developments in general.50 We are finding both examples of “re-masculinization” in terms of a return to traditional types and new “hyper-masculinities” that can be understood as a way to cope with the crisis of masculinity as patriarchal position of domination.51 But not only hegemonic masculinities are struggling and thus radicalizing in many ways, subaltern masculinities are maybe even more affected and changing towards a new “necropolitical” model of open violence and oppression.52 This development however does not only have detrimental effects, if we look beyond the male side, and hence embrace the questions of the subjective determination of dissociation that is feminized. In fact, the crisis of patriarchal value production has correlated with a considerable emancipation of women inside the functional, “male” side of the value domain, which appears to be not only temporal (as, for example, in war times) or subaltern (as in the poorest parts of the population).53 It involves serious changes in the cultural and symbolic logics of gender. Crisis thus somewhat paradoxically entails positive consequences for some women and certainly helped to crack the old patriarchal order just as it confused the “ideal average” of gendered societal relations to nature. It did however not provide alternatives to the symbolical masculinity of functional systemic synchrony in the GNV. This means that women now can — to a certain degree — perform within this male realm (when at least partly accepting male rationales). They are however not free from their functional role in the gendered dialectic. Being female thus still implicitly engenders the requirement to be closer to nature, reproduction, and so on. The new opportunities for (some) women thus imply the hardships of a “double socialization.”54 Just as for many, they are simply not in reach. For the less privileged femininities, the insecurity that crisis brings about reduces them to their “natural” role (in modern patriarchal relations) — one of reproduction and stabilization, hence 150 Materialism and the Critique of Energy something like a buffer of crisis phenomena. I would parallel this to problems of the energic mediation — renewable energy sources may have certain place, but they must conform to the general energic fix that is instituted by the value form and its abstract energic human substance. Even if profitable in individual cases, they will not be able to replace fossil energy as long as the fetishist systemic logic behind GNV’s energy system remains intact. If we take the insights of gendered GNV seriously, we must realize that crisis cannot be stopped by the new pluralization and “barbarization” of capitalist-patriarchal nature relations. In the end, the machine loses its fuel and substance — abstract labor as materialized form of fetishized synthesis. And its natural body is equally stressed, as the hitherto functional equilibrium of synchronic and diachronic aspects is more and more in turmoil. This status quo will not cease to perpetuate unless it is consciously overcome. In the current landscape, nothing could be more urgent than the political task of getting our theory right, which is to say that only from a critique calibrated to the energy content of gender, and the gendered materiality of the value form, does anything like an emancipatory position look feasible moving forward. Crisis, Energy, and the Value Form of Gender 151 Notes 1. The term “societal nature relations” that derives from the German gesellschaftliche Naturverhältnisse is certainly unwieldly and foreign to English. As this somewhat reflects its origin and as seminal scholars publishing in English keep using this or an akin term. See Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen, “Crisis and Continuity of Capitalist SocietyNature Relationships: The Imperial Mode of Living and the Limits to Environmental Governance,” Review of International Political Economy 20 (2013) 687–711; Egon Becker and Thomas Jahn, “Societal Relations to Nature. Outline of a Critical Theroy in the Ecological Crisis,” Kritische Theorie Der Technik Und Der Natur, eds. Gernot Böhme and Alexandra Manzei (München: Wilhelm Fink, 2005) 91–112; Christoph Görg, “The Construction of Societal Releationships with Nature,” Poiesis & Praxis 3 (2004) 22–36; and Ulrich Brand, Christoph Görg, and Markus Wissen, “Second-Order Condensations of Societal Power Relations: Environmental Politics and the Internationalization of the State from a Neo-Poulantzian Perspective,” Antipode 43 (2011) 149–175. I stick to an abbreviation of the German original (GNV) as it is found in the literature (Brand and Wissen, Second-Order Condensations 689) in hope that a discussion on a better canonical translation will take place. A thorough explanation of this key concept is presented in the first part of this paper. 2. Hans Baumann, Iris Bischel, Michael Gemperle, Ulrike Knobloch, Beat Ringger, and Holger Schatz, Care Statt Crash. Sorgeökonomie Und Die Überwindung Des Kapitalismus. Denknetz Jahrbuch 2013 (Zürich: Denknetz, 2013); Alex Demirovic and Andrea Maihofer, “Vielfachkrise Und Die Krise Der Geschlechterverhältnisse. Arbeits- Und Geschlechtersoziologische Perspektiven,” Krise, Kritik, Allianzen, eds. Hildegard M. Nickel and Andreas Heilmann (Weinheim/Basel: Beltz Juventa, 2013) 30–49; Julia Dück, “Krise Und Geschlecht. Überlegungen Zu Einem FeministischMaterialistischen Krisenverständnis,” Prokla 174 (2014) 54–70; International Labor Organization, Global Employment Trends for Women 2012 (Genf: ILO, 2012); Audrey Podann, “Der Lohn Ist Die Arbeit. Die 152 Materialism and the Critique of Energy in-Wert Setzung Weiblichen Arbeitsvermögens Als Emanzipatorisches Dilemma,” Prokla 173 (2013) 563–571; Melissa W. Wright, “Necropolitics, Narcopolitics and Femicide. Gendered Violence on the Mexico-U.S. Border,” Signs 36 (2011) 707–731. 3. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham: Duke UP Books, 2010); Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway (Durham & London: DU Press, 2007); Manuel De Landa, A New Philosophy of Society. Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (London/New York: Continuum, 2006); Elmar Flatschart, “Matter That Really Matters? New Materialism und kritisch-dialektische Theorie,” Critical Matter. Diskussionen Eines Neuen Materialismus, eds. Tobias Goll, Daniel Keil and Thomas Telios (Münster: edition assemblage, 2013) 96–112; and Tobias Goll, Daniel Keil, and Thomas Telios, Critical Matter. Diskussionen eines neuen Materialismus (Münster: edition assemblage, 2013). 4. Edward Fullbrook, Real World Economics: A Post-Autistic Economics Reader (London: Anthem, 2007); Michael Krätke, “Neoklassik als Weltreligion,” Realitätsverleugnung durch Wissenschaft. Kritische Interventionen 3. Die Illusion der neuen Freiheit, eds. Loccumer Initiative kritischer Wissenschaftler und Wissenschaftlerinnen (Hannover: Offizin, 1999); and Claus Peter Ortlieb, “Markt Märchen,” EXIT. Krise und Kritik der Warengesellschaft (2004) 166–184. 5. 6. Claus Peter Ortlieb, “Markt Märchen.” Karl Marx, Letters, Marx and Engels Complete Works Vol. 40 (New York: International Publishers, 1998) 268 7. Alfred Schmidt, Der Begriff der Natur in der Lehre von Marx (Frankfurt a. M.: Europäische Verlagsanstalt 1978). 8. Egon Becker and Thomas Jahn, Soziale Ökologie. Grundzüge einer Wissenschaft von den gesellschaftlichen Naturverhältnissen (Frankfurt a.M.: Campus, 2006); and Alfred Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx (London: NLB, 1971). 9. The patriarchal character of this pseudophysis was not considered, but plays a crucial role, as I will show. 10. Alfred Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx (London: NLB, 1971) 41. Crisis, Energy, and the Value Form of Gender 153 11. Alfred Schmidt, The Concept of Nature 43. 12. It is precisely this false identity that is uncritically reaffirmed by recent debates on a “new materialism.” Building on a Spinozist monism and a poststructuralist contingency thinking, they fall prey to the very mechanisms that should be at the heart of critique of society. These approaches must be blamed for their uncritical reproduction of societal modes of domination, as in them, the oppressive materiality of the identity of natural and social aspects is not problematized (by means of historic and materialistic critique) but praised. A more elaborate discussion of this argument can be found in Elmar Flatschart, “Matter That Really Matters?” 13. The Concept of Nature 45. 14. Alfred Schmidt, Der Begriff der Natur 74, 209. 15. Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume I in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Vol. 35 (New York: International Publishers, 1996) 82. 16. Marx, Capital Vol. I 54. 17. Jeff Diamanti, “Aesthetic Economies of Growth: Energy, Value, and the Work of Culture after Oil” (Dissertation: University of Alberta, 2015); Matthew T. Huber, “Energizing Historical Materialism: Fossil Fuels, Space and the Capitalist Mode of Production,” Geoforum 40 (2009) 105–115. 18. Christoph Görg, Gesellschaftliche Naturverhältnisse, Einstiege (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 1999) 55. All translations from German original sources are my own. 19. Elmar Altvater, Das Ende des Kapitalismus wie wir ihn kennen (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2007); Elmar Altvater,“Die kapitalistischen Plagen. Energiekrise und Klimakollaps, Hunger und Finanzchaos,” Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik H. 3 (2009); Elmar Altvater,“Viele Krisen in einer. Die Finanzmarktkrise mit Geldspritzen zu bewältigen, heisst neue Krisen auslösen. Denn wer wird wie Rettungspläne bezahlen - und wie?” (2009) http://www.die-linke-bs.de/index. php?option=com_content&view=article&id=361:elmar-altvater-vielekrisen-in-einer-&catid=65:krise-2009&Itemid=189; Elmar Altvater and Birgit Mahnkopf, Grenzen der Globalisierung. Ökonomie, Politik, Ökologie 154 Materialism and the Critique of Energy in der Weltgesellschaft (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot 2004). 20. Money has to be the necessary incarnation of value because an external, fully social entity is required in order to express the fact that in the relationality of two commodities (namely, their respective equivalent and relative value forms), use value is not as such present but only functions as bearer of the equivalent value form: “the opposition or contrast existing internally in each commodity between use value and value, is, therefore, made evident externally by two commodities being placed in such relation to each other, that the commodity whose value it is sought to express, figures directly as a mere use value, while the commodity in which that value is to be expressed, figures directly as mere exchange value” (Capital I 71f). Money therefore is the expression of formal developments that are instituted by the real existence of a total value form. It is in other words money that articulates the abstract character of social synthesis central for capitalist totality. 21. Marx, Capital Volume III, Marx and Engels Complete Works Vol. 37 (New York: International Publishers, 1998) 397. 22. Robert Kurz, Geld ohne Wert. Grundrisse zu einer Transformation der Kritik Der Politischen Ökonomie (Berlin: Horlemann, 2012). 23. Kurz, Geld ohne Wert 294. 24. Claus Peter Ortlieb, “Ein Widerspruch von Stoff und Form. Zur Bedeutung der Produktion des relativen Mehrwerts für die finale Krisendynamik,” Exit — Kritik und Krise der Warengesellschaft, 6 (2008) 25. 25. Kurz, Geld ohne Wert 263 and following. 26. Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, “Women and the Subversion of the Community,” Materialist Feminism: A Reader in Class, Difference and Women’s Lives, eds. Rosemary Hennessy and Chrys Ingraham (New York/London: Routledge, 1997) 47. 27. In Germany, the debate was waged quite controversially amongst Ursula Beer and Claudia von Werlhof. See Claudia von Werlhof, “Lohn ist ein ‘Wert.’ Leben Nicht? Auseinandersetzung mit einer ‘Linken Frau.’ Replik Auf Ursula Beer.,” Prokla, 50 (1983), and Ursula Beer, “Marx auf die Füße gestellt? Zum Theoretischen Entwurf Von Claudia V. Werlhof,” Prokla, Crisis, Energy, and the Value Form of Gender 155 50 (1983). 28. Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex (New York: William Morrow, 1972) 7 and following. 29. Kornelia Hafner, “Gebrauchswertfetischismus,” Gesellschaft Und Erkenntnis, ed. Diethard Behrens (Freiburg: ca ira, 1993) 69. 30. Robert Kurz, “Geschlechtsfetischismus. Anmerkungen zur Logik von Weiblichkeit und Männlichkeit,” Krisis (1992) 139 and following. 31. This hasn’t changed much, although the clear separation “public-male/ private-female” has somewhat eroded in many western countries during the last decades. Women may not enter the public (although they still virtually never have the same privileges and can never rely on a takenfor-grantedness as men do). But they still haven’t lost their symbolic attribution to the private, which is ultimately cemented by biological arguments akin to the kind “reproduction of the species.” 32. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (London: Vintage, 2009) 76 and following. 33. Roswitha Scholz, “Der Wert ist der Mann. Thesen zu Wertvergesellschaftung und Geschlechterverhältnis,” Krisis 12 (1992) 44. 34. Carolyn Merchant, Der Tod der Natur. Ökologie, Frauen und neuzeitliche Naturwissenschaft (München: Beck, 1987) 142 and following. 35. Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch. Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (London: Turnaround Publisher Services, 2004) 61 and following. 36. Silvia Bovenschen, Die imaginierte Weiblichkeit (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2003) 27. 37. Christine Woesler de Panafieu, “Das Konzept von Weiblichkeit als Natur und Maschinenkörper,” in Mythos Frau. Projektionen und Inszenierungen im Patriarchat, eds. Barbara Schaeffer-Hegel and Brigitte Wartmann (Berlin: publica, 1984) 244–68. 38. This model shares many similarities with Lacan’s understanding of the psychical apparatus. With Lacan, the male “has” phallus and the female “is” phallus (Jacques Lacan, Ecrits [New York: W.W. Norton, 1999] 583). He however doesn’t sufficiently highlight the relevance of the female in the dialectical relationship that “post-festum” always appears as male 156 Materialism and the Critique of Energy supremacy. 39. The fact that this symbolic imaginary is at odds with the very “creative” role that women take in birth-giving has produced many ideological compensations like the systematic underrepresentation of the female body in anatomy (which is partly still prevailing) or the infamous “penis envy” in psychoanalytic theory that can be seen as a diversion towards an androcentric oedipal imaginary. 40. In many ways, the (Hegelian) term “diremption” would have been more suitable to express the intended meaning, as the — originally psychoanalytical — concept “dissociation” can be misleading. It might convey the understanding that something is essentially dissociated from the hegemonic body. This however is not the case — aspects that are dissociated are not strictly “outside” of the universal value form, they are a rupture within the form that produces an idiosyncratic “internal externality” as illustrated in the process of Othering. The essence of this figure may be better grasped if we (also) refer to the concept “diremption,” the actual status of breaking-in-two of a thing, which articulates the rupture-in-sameness more adequately. 41. Roswitha Scholz, Das Geschlecht des Kapitalismus. Feministische Theorien und die Postmoderne Metamorphose des Patriarchats (Bad Honnef: Horlemann, 2011) 21. 42. Roswitha Scholz, Das Geschlecht des Kapitalismus 21. 43. Das Geschlecht des Kapitalismus 24 and following. 44. Roswitha Scholz, “Die Theorie Der Geschlechtlichen Abspaltung Und Die Kritische Theorie Adornos,” in Exit — Kritik und Krise der Warengesellschaft (2005). 45. This does certainly not mean that investment in renewables is never profitable. To the contrary — in light of the crisis and the frictions it brings about, alternative energy agendas may prove very profitable for individual capitals and even succeed against fossil ones in some spatial fixes. My argument is targeting a very abstract level of systemic determinations and at this level, a general transition (without prior substantial transformations of the GNV) is very unlikely due to the functional limits the energic fix brings about. Crisis, Energy, and the Value Form of Gender 46. 157 It must be evident by now that the natural character of crises (both as phenomenon inside capitalist patriarchal development and as indicator of its very demise as such) is in the last instance only true insofar second nature as a social constitution remains historically true. Economic crises — however uncontrolled and thus un-social they may seem — are indeed a proof of the social character of second nature, as they elucidate the historicity of the economy. 47. This can however not be evidenced in every single instance — this would be an overstretching of propositions which — by their nature — are valid only on an abstract level and thus by tendency. Even though “Green Capitalism” will never be possible, is somewhat of a contradictio in adjecto (Ulrich Brand, “Green Economy and Green Capitalism. Some Theoretical Considerations.,” Journal für Entwicklungspolitik 28 [2012]; and Ulrich Brand, “After Sustainable Development: Green Economy as the Next Oxymoron?,” GAIA — Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society 21 [2012]), we are witnessing minor steps towards a partial ecological modification of tiny fragments of our societal nature relations. This doesn’t contradict the fact that the destructive usage of natural resources persists and indeed still grows on a global scale. 48. See Ulrich Beck, Weltrisikogesellschaft. Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Sicherheit (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2008). These insecurities are nothing new, although they have certainly increased since the beginning of the new millennium. This corresponds with the thesis of Kurz et al. that the crisis in fact roots back to the end of Fordism and has ever since just increased its momentum. 49. John Beynon, Masculinities and Culture (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 2002) 76. 50. Examples for this can be found in many ways and plural global localizations. The theoretical thesis that we are dealing with a crisis of masculinities as such and not just a (hegemonic) masculinity implies that transformations are encompassing all sorts of masculinities. 51. You could think of manifold cultural expressions, but also the hazardous executive-type “leader” kind of masculinity that is running finance capital (Alex Demirovic and Andrea Maihofer, 158 Materialism and the Critique of Energy “Vielfachkrise und die Krise der Geschlechterverhältnisse. ArbeitsUnd Geschlechtersoziologische Perspektiven,” Krise, Kritik, Allianzen, eds. Hildegard M. Nickel and Andreas Heilmann (Weinheim/Basel: Beltz Juventa, 2013, 42). Another example would be the new “strong-men” type of masculinity that attracts many frustrated (male) voters in politics. 52. This is especially evident in the (global and internal) peripheries, where failing state intervention and economic dismay is fostering clans, gangs and other forms of male-societies — with often disastrous effects for women See, for example, Wright, “Necropolitics, Narcopolitics and Femicide.” 53. Here, one may ask the question of periodization. As mentioned above, a meaningful time frame for the beginning of crisis as discussed here would be the end of Fordism, which certainly demarcated a break in so many ways that the social sciences still struggle to demarcate them. Ultimately, the problem of a (exact) periodization doesn’t really matter for this article´s research focus, as it advances the thesis of its tendential, yet teleological, unfolding, which starting point is by now certainly to be situated in the past. 54. Regina Becker-Schmidt, “Die Doppelte Vergesellschaftung — Die Doppelte Unterdrückung: Besonderheiten Der Frauenforschung in Den Sozialwissenschaften,” Die andere Hälfte der Gesellschaft, eds. Lilo Unterkirchner and Ina Wagner (Wien: Österreichischer Soziologentag 1987 [1985]). Long Waves of Fossil Development: Periodizing Energy and Capital Andreas Malm Only those who most stubbornly hold fast to their ideological blinders would today deny that there is a link between capitalism and emissions of carbon dioxide. The latter have grown in tandem with the former, not coincidentally but constitutively. But it was not always like that. Originally — and this holds however one wishes to date the birth of this mode of production: to the fourteenth, sixteenth, or late eighteenth century — capitalism relied on what would today be called renewable energies: wood, muscle, wind, and water. It then adopted fossil fuels, coal first of all. By this step — surely one of the most fateful in its history — capitalism sired a peculiar formation I describe as the fossil economy, most simply defined as an economy of self-sustaining growth predicated on the consumption of fossil fuels, and therefore generating a sustained growth in CO2 emissions.1 Picture a pair of bellows. If one of the handles is the ceaseless growth that defines capitalism, the other is made up of coal and oil and gas; out of the nozzle comes a blast of CO2 that fans the flames of the fire of global warming. The more growth you have, the more forceful the push will be, and the stronger the blast. This observation, however, does not solve the question of how exactly capitalist growth has been linked to fossil fuel consumption over the course of its history; it merely poses it. The easiest way to describe the correlation of the two would be to conceive of capitalism as a smooth, linear curve of perpetual expansion, emitting a stream of CO2 just as steadily enlarged. But this would be inaccurate. 162 Materialism and the Critique of Energy Capitalist growth is a singularly turbulent process. It moves in spurts and slowdowns, creates and destroys, accelerates and decelerates, clears the ground of established structures for the building of higher stages and tumbles, without fail, into depressions.2 To be sure, growth as such rarely ceases; rather it sticks to a secular trend, the many deviations and fluctuations moving around an upward curve.3 But the process of growth proceeds through upsetting contradictions rather than an even, incremental addition of output, which impel the expansion and renew the momentum again and again, and it might be these contradictions and the convulsions they generate that do most to produce and reproduce the fossil economy on ever greater scales. The dents in the curve may hold the secrets to its direction. The Energy in the Waves One way of conceptualizing this history of dynamic non-equilibrium, which seems to have a promising but surprisingly overlooked potential for our purposes, is the theory of long waves of capitalist development. Commonly traced to the foundational contribution of Russian economist Nikolai Kondratieff in the early 1920s, the theory proposes that capitalism moves in waves of forty to sixty years’ duration.4 Each wave has two phases: an “upswing” characterized by boom conditions, succeeded by a “downswing” of persistent stagnation. The exact periodization has been a matter of endless controversy, but a standard chronology would look something like this5: Upswing Downswing First long wave c. 1780–1825 c. 1825–1848 Second long wave c. 1848–1873 c. 1873–1896 Third long wave c. 1896–1914 c. 1914–1945 Fourth long wave c. 1945–1973 c. 1973–1992 Fifth long wave c. 1992–2008(?) c. 2008– (?) Long Waves of Fossil Development 163 When Kondratieff first proposed the wave movement, he claimed to have discovered it through sheer observation: no economic theory predicted such a rhythm to growth.6 Ever since, the most compelling argument for the existence of long waves has been empirical.7 Few economic historians would dispute that growth in the advanced capitalist countries has generally been faster in the periods designated as upswings and slower in the downswings: some sort of alternation appears undeniable.8 But why would capitalist economies develop in this jerky fashion? One part of the answer, on which most theories of long waves build, is the rhythm of technology diffusion. Truly revolutionary technologies, with the power to electrify economies both literally and figuratively, change the way goods are produced and open up fresh venues for general expansion, do not come online gradually. They come in bundles and bursts and thrive on dislocation; only if a crisis has weakened previous technological systems can they break through and advance.9 Each wave is consequently associated with a certain set of technologies, and the consensus as to their identities is wide and well-supported.10 A typical list would look like this:11 Constellation of technologies Leading branches and core inputs First wave Water-powered mechanization of industry Cotton and iron Second wave Steam-powered mechanization of industry and transport Railways, machine-tools, cotton, iron, and coal Third wave Electrification of industry, transport, and households Electrical equipment, engineering, chemicals, and steel Fourth wave Motorization of transport and other parts of the economy Automobiles, aircraft, refineries, petrochemicals, oil, and gas Fifth wave Computerization of the economy Computers, software, telecom equipment, and microprocessors 164 Materialism and the Critique of Energy Two things strike the eye here. First, the emergence of the fossil economy appears to have occurred in the shift from the first to the second long wave: from one based on water to one picking up steam. This is the conjuncture where it all began.12 Second, each subsequent wave — with the curious exception of the fifth — seems to have surged forward on the basis of technologies producing or transmitting fossil energy in novel ways. Students of long waves have not failed to notice this pattern. “In each wave dominant technologies can be identified that are associated with primary energy sources such as coal, oil, and natural gas,” states one; Kondratieff himself saw one of the clearest signs of an upswing in “the rapidity in the increase of coal production and coal consumption”; in a short paper inspired by the oil crisis of the early 1980s, George F. Ray argued that major innovations sparking off long waves were “either directly originating in, or closely connected with, the production of energy, such as steam engines or the railways,” always boosting the demand for energy, always dependent on “the abundant supply and almost unlimited availability of fuel.”13 The implication of this statement is significant: capitalism has moved out of its recurring downswings and revived growth on a higher level, first by starting, then by stoking and augmenting the fire. Picture the pair of bellows being blown every fifty years or so, each time with greater force, each time generating a new pulse of CO2 that rises towards the sky for the full duration of capitalism and, most likely, beyond. At first sight, the fifth wave is anomalous. Computers are one step removed from fossil energy, at least when compared to steam engines or automobiles, and yet the wave which their generalization appears to drive has generated the most extreme explosion in global CO2 emissions ever recorded. I will return to this apparent paradox below. It seems, however, that, following the original switch, every downswing has been overcome through a deepening of what is often called “carbon lock-in.” The alloy of fossil fuels and self-sustaining growth has been consolidated in three consecutive revivals (late nineteenth century, mid-twentieth century, late twentieth century), which reconfirm combustion as the venue for expansion and suffuse Long Waves of Fossil Development 165 the economy with coal, oil and natural gas on a progressively larger scale. In the process, each wave has also produced its own “technomass,” to speak with Alf Hornborg: an infrastructure of the (for the moment) most advanced technologies, as in railroads, electrical grids, highways, oil platforms, tankers, airports, data centers… the ever-growing bag between the handles, as it were.14 Some fossil technomass is flushed away by subsequent waves — Joseph Schumpeter’s famous “creative destruction” — and deposited in the earth’s crust. Some is incorporated by the new eras. Old railroads, electrical grids, highways, and other infrastructures still in use can be seen as material legacies from previous long waves, the body of the fossil economy swelling and solidifying throughout its history; they represent technologies bequeathed to the present.15 No wave has, as yet, displaced any fossil fuel; coal has been a mainstay since the second.16 Urban sprawl is an inheritance from the end of the third and onset of the fourth.17 Coal mines and airports currently under construction to connect the nodes of globalized production will weigh down on future generations: and so on. The history of the fossil economy takes the concrete form of a sedimentation of layers upon layers — not through gradual accretion, but through successive alluvial deposits from discontinuous, often violent long waves. Carlota Perez, the most influential wave theorist of the early twenty-first century, who stands on the shoulders of Schumpeter, writes: So each great surge [her preferred term for waves] represents another stage in the deepening of capitalism in people’s lives and in its expansion across the globe. Each revolution incorporates new aspects of life and of production activities into the market mechanism; each surge widens the group of countries that conforms [sic] the advanced core of the system and each stretches the penetration of capitalism to further corners of the world, inside and across countries.18 166 Materialism and the Critique of Energy Exactly the same thing could be said about the fossil economy, because it has been at one with capitalism. The long waves have been capitalist and fossil bound, diffusing new combustive technologies without which business-as-usual would still be stuck in the steam age. Each upswing has been punctured by a signal crisis, marking the arrival of a structural crisis of the capitalist economy, resolved — so it seems — by the adoption of innovative fossil fuel-based technologies across the board, until the globe as whole resembles a bag in the bellows. Why? By what fossil mechanism has capitalism leapt from wave to higher wave? To be able to search for answers to these questions, I need to engage more closely with some theory of long waves. Among the very many proposed since the days of Kondratieff, I select one, nowadays virtually forgotten, that of Ernest Mandel. A Dialectic of Profits and Prime Movers A revolutionary Marxist and leader of the Fourth International, Ernest Mandel pioneered the resurgence of scientific interest in long waves from the 1970s onwards. His own idiosyncratic theory was first outlined in Late Capitalism (1972) and then elaborated in Long Waves of Capitalist Development: A Marxist Interpretation (1995).19 Long waves, in Mandel’s definition, are a cycle of “successive acceleration and deceleration” of capital accumulation.20 Given that such accumulation originates in the production and realization of commodities, upswings will manifest themselves in high rates of growth in industrial output and world trade and downswings in a slackening of both, a rhythm Mandel claimed to be able to demonstrate with statistics.21 Contractions do not vanish in the upswing, but are relatively short and mild, while years of feverish prosperity predominate; conversely, fleeting booms are interspersed between the long and severe recessions characteristic of the downswing.22 For Mandel, however, long waves are not only or even primarily statistical phenomena. They are real segments of capitalist history. On this point, he took a leaf from his maestro Leon Trotsky, who censured Kondratieff in the early 1920s for imputing a law-like regularity to Long Waves of Fossil Development 167 the waves, modeled on the shorter business cycle. No ticking clocks automatically set off upswings and downswings, Trotsky argued; instead, the turning points between the phases are determined by such unforeseeable events as wars and revolutions, the colonization of new countries, or the discovery of new resources — “those external conditions through whose channel capitalist development flows.”23 Moreover, the two phases correspond to “entire epochs,” in economics but just as much “in politics, in law, in philosophy, in poetry [!]”: “in all spheres of social life.”24 They are qualitative totalities, not quantitative artifacts, to be studied in all their complexity and, as one would say today, contingency.25 Writing on the other side of one full wave, Mandel could add new material to Trotsky’s picture. The first upswing coincided with the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars; the second with the heydays of free competition and Victorian progress; the third with classic imperialism and finance capital; the fourth with the golden era of mass production, Keynesianism, consumerism, the welfare state; to which one can now easily append neoliberalism, globalization, bourgeois triumphalism, “end of history,” network society, digitalization, and all the other trappings of the fifth.26 In between lay no less distinctive periods of social upheaval and strife. Others have made similar observations, among them Eric Hobsbawm: Each of the “Kondratievs” [sic] of the past not only formed a period in strictly economic terms, but also — not unnaturally — had political characteristics which distinguished it fairly clearly from its predecessor and its successor, in terms both of international politics and of the domestic politics of various countries and regions of the globe. That is also likely to continue.27 It follows that the waves cannot be perfectly symmetrical oscillations of the same length.28 Since they move “in zigzags, looping up and down,” with Trotsky; shaped not by any single factor but “by a series of social changes,” with Mandel; playing out on “the social, political 168 Materialism and the Critique of Energy and cultural scenes,” with Hobsbawm, there is no reason to expect any fixed periodicity.29 To this argument, however, Kondratieff presented a powerful rejoinder. If the waves are conditioned by random shocks — wars, revolutions, conquests, discoveries — why would there be any discernible sequence to capitalist development? Why would such events cluster around the turning-points — think of the revolutions of 1848, the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the oil crisis in 1973, the final collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 — if not because they are symptoms of the waves, rather than their causes?30 Accidents make for bad pacemakers. Trotsky never offered a reply, leaving it to Mandel to try to fuse the two views: long waves are indeed epochs bound by political struggles (Trotsky), but they are also the products of endogenous tendencies in capital accumulation (Kondratieff ).31 How could that possibly be true? To solve this theoretical conundrum, Mandel introduced the concept of “partially independent variables” acting upon the capitalist laws of motion.32 Put in the simplest possible terms: suppose inventors have developed a major new technology, lying in wait in workshops until massive investment will diffuse it. Suppose capitalists remain hesitant, because the expected profits are too low to merit the outlays — then all of this falls within the modus operandi internal to the mode of production itself. Now suppose that the main trade unions suddenly fall apart. A piece of anti-union legislation may have been rammed through; ideological infighting, choked funding, or military occupation might have caused the unions — hitherto mighty enough to block all wage cuts — to crumble. None of these factors can be derived from any intrinsic logic of capital. As a result, the profit expectations receive a shot in the arm, capitalists rush to invest in the new technology, and soon a full upswing is underway. In Mandel’s theory, this would be a perfect case of how “partially independent variables” — here, the change in union power — interact with the systemic laws of motion, first holding accumulation back and then letting it loose as the historical stage is rearranged. In itself, such an event cannot open up a new epoch, but if it is combined with trends Long Waves of Fossil Development 169 growing out of the system itself — and this is what happens at the turning points — all the components might fall into place for a step change.33 The accumulation of capital has certain inbuilt tendencies — to maximize profits, to ratchet up the rate of exploitation of labor, to raise the productivity in the struggle against competitors, as well as to search for improved technologies, larger markets, cheaper raw materials, and so on — that give the capitalist mode of production its general “push.”34 But these tendencies never operate alone in the world. Capital confronts an environment where foreign and often volatile influences are at work: classes with varying degrees of capacity to advance their interests, states with shifting alliances and geopolitical ambitions, ideological traditions with long lifetimes and irregular breaks, remains of feudalism or actually existing socialism or the welfare state, all with their own forces of gravity.35 Such variables, and the list could be extended endlessly, are partially independent or autonomous, in the sense that they have roots in historical soils not endemic to capital itself, yet cannot fail to be entangled with capital in a world dominated by it.36 These variables are not fully inside capital, but not fully outside it either. Capitalist laws of motion therefore assert themselves through an interaction between intra-economic and extra-economic forces, and it is here, in the “concrete dialectic of the subjective and objective factors,” that the long waves arise, their epochal essences being, so to speak, amalgamations of innumerable variables with a certain temporal solidity, eventually cracked by new contradictions.37 There is reason to ask if this amounts to a theoretical solution. Is it anything more than a blank check for analytical eclecticism? What else does it achieve than reformulating the Trotsky/Kondratieff antinomy on a higher level?38 A Mandelian response might be that no formulation, however subtle and intricate, can reflect the real jumble of causal pathways between the mechanisms of capital accumulation and their “external conditions”: only historical inquiry can disentangle it.39 For such an endeavor, Mandel put up certain 170 Materialism and the Critique of Energy signposts. First of all, he urged close attentiveness to ups and downs in the rate of profit, the safest indicator of how well the accumulation of capital fares. Since the production of commodities is motivated by the quest for profit, it will grow fast and slow as profits rise and fall; in times of declining profitability, capitalists will be less inclined to invest, and vice versa.40 As new technologies are introduced in an early upswing, avant-garde investors who avail themselves of the higher productivity will reap super-profits exceeding the average and pulling it up in the process.41 Further into the upswing, however, clouds will sooner or later gather on the horizon, in the shape of any number of contradictions: too much installed machinery might turn into a burden; too many factories might have been built for the market to absorb the output; full employment might inflate the power of the unions; high demand might drive up raw materials prices — with any amount of input from the partially independent variables.42 Whatever the exact nature of these contradictions, they will feed into the rate of profit and lower it. Be it expensive machines, driedup markets, militant labor, expensive fuels, or any other affliction, the capitalists will experience it as a downward pressure on the rate of profit. Here is the “synthetic index of the system’s overall performance,” the “seismograph of history” recording and expressing “all the changes to which capital is permanently subject”: the single point in which endogenous and exogenous factors converge.43 It is also the most important measure for practicing capitalists — that which “makes the system tick.”44 Consequently, a declining rate of profit will announce the approaching terminus of the upswing; the signal crisis might see it in free fall; throughout the early downswing, it will stay flat or even fall further. “Only when specific conditions permit a steep rise in the average rate of profit” will capitalists regain their appetite for investment and, if all goes well, launch a new upswing.45 The moment of steep rise registers the (if only temporary) resolution of the contradictions: afflictions eliminated, profits spike. In other words, movements in the rate of profit set the rhythm of deceleration and acceleration by summing up the general conditions and regulating Long Waves of Fossil Development 171 the motivations for capital accumulation.46 No upswing can transpire, however, Mandel argues, unless any working-class resistance threatening to smother profits is defeated. The eruption of a structural crisis is usually attended by high unemployment, deflation or inflation, deteriorating working conditions, aggressive wage-cuts as capital seeks to dump the costs on labor and widen profit margins — all conducive to intensified class struggle. Integral to the brew of the downswing, the contest between the classes is an inherently unpredictable component. Here, more than anywhere else, “subjective factors” come into play: the organizational strength of the working class, the degree of its self-confidence and autonomy, its militancy or propensity to compromise and the equivalent factors in the camp of the bourgeoisie determine the outcome.47 Capital can lay the foundations for a new epoch of expansion only if it prevails against all enemies and social impediments, including, but not limited to, organized labor. 48 How does such a victory materialize? What does capital do when it triumphs? It starts a technological revolution, concentrated to one particular sphere. Mandel explains it this way in Late Capitalism: In order completely to reorganize the technical process new machines are needed, which must previously have been designed.… [Q]ualitative leaps forward are necessary in the organization of labor and forms of energy…. The fundamental revolutions in power technology — the technology of the production of motive machines by machines — thus appears as the determinant moment in revolutions of technology as a whole. Machine production of steam-driven motors since 1848; machine production of electric and combustion motors since the 90s of the 19th century; machine production of electronic and nuclearpowered apparatuses since the 40s of the 20th century — these are the three general revolutions in technology engendered by the capitalist mode of production since the “original” industrial revolution of the later 18th century.49 172 Materialism and the Critique of Energy If each wave marks a new phase in capital’s capacity to recover profits after crisis, the magnitude and structure of “forms of energy” relative to forms of labor are here isolated as the sine qua non of the long waves. Power technology, in other words, is the key to the upswing. “Once a revolution in the technology of productive motive machines” — or prime movers, in common parlance — “has occurred, the whole system of machines is progressively transformed.” Each of the three historical revolutions, between the first wave and the fifth, has remolded “the entire economy, including the technology of the communications and transport systems. Think, for example, of the ocean steamers.”50 If new life is to be breathed into sagging capitalism, it must come in the most basic, most universal guise: energy.51 Only power technology pervades every nook and cranny of the mode of production, impelling, conveying, lifting, hauling, heating, pumping, communicating, fetching goods of all conceivable kinds. If a rise in profits is the economic precondition for the upswing, a new generation of prime movers is its material embodiment. But the links between profit and prime mover are more complex than that. As an economic fact if not an ideal invention, the new set of motive machines has its immediate origins in the “attempts by capital to break down growing obstacles” to a rise in the rate of profit: on the shop floor, first and foremost.52 When capital desperately seeks to restructure the labor process and put it on a more profitable footing, nothing can be more useful than a truly revolutionary power technology. It is the battering ram, the generalizable device with which capital destroys resistance and swings into renewed expansion. Victory over labor, then, does not so much precede as come about through the energy revolution, the two working hand-in-glove as the downswing nears its end. In a two-way process so typical for Mandel’s thinking, however, the prime mover not only assists in raising profits but also spreads throughout the economy as a result of those same raised profits: a positive feedback loop, one might say, propelling capital out of its long crisis. Moreover, the new technology can sustain the momentum of Long Waves of Fossil Development 173 the upturn only if it is powerful and pervasive enough to maintain high profits, neutralizing any threats in the short term — which, in turn, induces capital to invest deeper in it.53 In sum, the prime mover is: (1) adopted to remove barriers to higher profits, primarily those erected by labor; (2) widely diffused when and as profits increase, partly as a result of its own exploits; and (3) used for as long as possible to ride the upswing phase of the wave, stimulating accumulation on a grander scale. In all three moments, energy constitutes the material solution to the contradictions of the structural crisis. Working its first wonders in the downswing, it comes into full bloom after a positive turning point, usually precipitated by some concatenation of victories — not only on the shop floor, but on the world arena as a whole. Any regularity of the long waves, pace Trotsky, is laid down by the constellation of prime movers and their auxiliary machines.54 Even if the activity of inventors and engineers followed a linear, continuous rhythm, capitalism would still move in jolts and jerks, because the rise of a new constellation could only be coterminous with a sharp rise in profits — always a singular event, determined by the collision of all sorts of variables, in the class struggle above all — and only permeate the economy in heavy chunks, the shift from one power technology to another an exceedingly massive undertaking.55 But the effects of the energy injection are not everlasting, of course. They seem to last somewhat longer than five years, but never as long as half a century, the span of the upswing approximating — but no more — that of a human generation. Then contradictions resurface again. Power technology thereby forms the materialist endpoint for Mandel’s attempted fusion of endogenous laws and exogenous shocks, Kondratieff and Trotsky, accumulation and politics: a highly original sketch of a theory, identified by the author of Late Capitalism as his own special contribution to the field.56 In Long Waves, however, the theme of energy disappears from sight.57 Other wave scholars pass over it in silence. No one seems to have picked up this particular thread from Late Capitalism and followed it backwards and forwards through history; Mandel himself let it fall from his hands.58 Left to 174 Materialism and the Critique of Energy gather dust, its potentials are quite unlike those of any other longwave theory, as will be clearer upon a brief comparison with the foremost neo-Schumpeterian version: that of Carlota Perez. Driving the Bulldozer “Technology is the fuel of the capitalist engine,” writes Carlota Perez.59 Mandel would have had it the other way around. True to her master Schumpeter, Perez regards technological development as a virtually unmoved mover, advancing in the workshops and laboratories of innovators, always working to improve efficiency; “once a truly superior technology is available,” its breakthrough is “practically inevitable.”60 But it demands adjustment from its surroundings. A groundbreaking innovation craves new financial systems, new governmental policies, new forms of education, habits, behaviors, “mental maps of all the social actors” matching its own logic: the computer cannot stand the rigidities of the conveyor belt or the nation state.61 It compels society to reorganize into networks. Society, however, is slow in adapting, for unlike technology, social relations are characterized by inertia, resistance, vested interests pulling the brakes, always lagging behind the latest machines.62 When new technologies appear on the scene — “received as a shock” — society is tied to the old ways.63 These must be pulverized. The period of installation is the time when the new technologies irrupt in a maturing economy and advance like a bulldozer disrupting the established framework and articulating new industrial networks, setting up infrastructures and spreading new and superior ways of doing things.64 Like a bulldozer without a driver, technology uproots all the inadequate institutions and cart away the hurdles for its own self-realization.65 “Each technological revolution inevitably induces a paradigm shift” in society at large, forcing through rejuvenation in every sphere — from economy to mentality — in a process both necessary and painful.66 At Long Waves of Fossil Development 175 the moment of the bulldozer’s first appearance, society is rooted in the manners of obsolete technologies: a crisis of “mismatch” ensues. The whole fabric is ripped apart, until, after two or three decades, society has learned to behave as technology expects: an upswing follows.67 Since Perez’s waves — or “great surges of development,” as she likes to call them — start with the “big bang” of a revolutionary innovation, she has to turn the established chronology on its head: first comes the crisis of mismatch, then the “full expansion.”68 Normally, a Kondratieff wave is understood to begin with an upswing (that is, starting in 1945) and end with a downswing (that is, until 1992), but Perez pairs the halves in the opposite order and, for instance, identifies the early 1970s as the onset of the crisis-ridden first stage of a surge induced by the coming of the computer.69 Unsurprisingly, she singles out the usual five protagonists — water-powered mechanization, steam, electricity, motorization, information and communications technologies (ICT) — but considers each the instigator of crisis, while Mandel, again, would have it the other way around: each as the creation of crisis. In the slightly esoteric debate over how to date and define waves or surges, profoundly different views of causality are thus on display. For Perez, technology drives capitalist development; for Mandel, the reverse. Perez’s theory has its counterpart in the productive force determinism of old-school Marxists, in which social relations are motionless fetters on technology, to be burst apart by a relentless progress; for Mandel, the most mercurial substance of history is the class struggle. Social relations of power, in Mandel’s view, act as “the ultimate determination of the process of undulatory development”: the driver steers the bulldozer so that it levels his obstacles, not the other way around.70 In passing, Perez notices that a technological revolution tends to center on “a source of energy,” calling forth a novel “techno-economic paradigm” encompassing all of society — whereas in Mandel, tensions between multiple social variables usher in new energy technologies.71 While Perez essentially proposes an extension of technological determinism to the history of industrial capitalism in 176 Materialism and the Critique of Energy toto, Mandel can inspire a radically different agenda for research on the history of the fossil economy, guided by two overarching questions in necessary dialogue with each other: (1) Have the contradictions of the downswings generated and fashioned new fossil fuel-based technologies, and if so, how? And, (2) Have those technologies served to resolve the contradictions and fuelled the upswings, and if so, how? In wave theory á la Mandel, that which takes place in one phase is always linked to that which happened in the former. The neoliberalism of the fifth wave can only be understood as a way out of the impasses of the fourth, the Keynesianism of the fourth as a response to the imbalances and catastrophes of the third, and so on — and the same would go for the defining constellations of technology. This appears to be a singularly promising approach to the study of long waves of fossil development, particularly since it allows for free and full reciprocal action between capitalist laws of motion and all manner of partially independent variables: “Interplay: that was what it was about for Mandel.”72 His theory, as I have rendered it here, gives ample room for the struggle between capital and labor, but this is only one battle among many to be brought into the picture; indeed, the theory is open for almost anything: “Averse to determinism, Mandel advocated an integrated analysis of the entire societal reality.”73 That was both his greatest strength and greatest weakness. As a recent critic points out, Mandel ended up adding variable to variable to variable to variable… until the analytical synthesis threatened to spill out into chaos.74 On the other hand, “the great advantage of his method consists, above all, in its openness to historical contingency.”75 The explanation of one wave must be unlike that of any other, since each wave — as a bounded historical period, not an interval in a predetermined rhythm — is peculiar to itself.76 But it is also an instantiation of a recurrent phenomenon. Mandel’s theory is messy and labyrinthine Long Waves of Fossil Development 177 and intended to be so, because it is, first and foremost, a guide to the study of “actual historical dynamics.”77 What, then, can it tell us, more concretely, about the past, present and future of the capital-energy nexus? This is a question for any number of other studies, but at least a couple of signposts for further research are in order here. I offer some brief reflections on the turns from the first to the second, from the fourth to the fifth and from the fifth to a possible sixth wave yet to come. To make a long story told elsewhere very short, British industrial capitalism surged forth on a first wave of water-power.78 But in 1825, a signal crisis erupted in the form of a financial crash, followed by a succession of painful, protracted depressions. Extraordinary profits had attracted too much capital to the cotton industry in particular, causing an over-establishment of factories and, consequently, a massive overproduction of commodities, under whose weight the rate of profit now plunged. At the very same time as the banks collapsed — setting the typical pattern of interplay with partially independent variables — the British working-class rose, relieved from the criminalization of all trade union activity when the Combination Laws were repealed, and for the next two decades, the manufacturing districts were shaken by one near-revolutionary uprising after another. It was then that the shift to steam occurred. The combativeness of key segments of the British working-class — cotton-spinners, handloom-weavers, machine-makers, woolcombers — blocked the path to resuscitated profits. Fortunately for the capitalists, however, they possessed a weapon to do away with them all: automatic machinery. Rolled out in the two decades after 1825, an army of self-acting mules, power looms, machine tools, and other machines effectively wiped out the insurgent collectives, cleared the way for wage reductions and speed-ups and brought the class to the subdued, domesticated state of the high Victorian era. That mechanical army was powered by steam. Fully developed and familiar to manufacturers since the mid-1780s, the new power technology, and I mean power in the dual sense of the term (as in energy and 178 Materialism and the Critique of Energy dominance), overtook cheap water only after 1825, when the pressure of the contradictions of the first downswing made the transition imperative. Steam alone could impel the offensive against labor. Water was embedded in the landscape and integrated in the weather, virtually free to use but located outside of towns, subject to fluctuations in river levels, incapable of running a concentrated mass of accelerating machines. Steam engines, on the other hand, could be put up anywhere and used at anytime: for their fuel was severed from the landscape, detached from weather cycles, brought up from underground as a dead still relic of ancient photosynthesis. Setting it on fire, capital released a completely new source of energy to destroy the resistance of labor. A steep rise in the rate of profit followed, allowing for an upswing in which steam-power opened all sorts of venues for fresh accumulation and remolded the economy in toto: a huge blast from the bellows. Needless to say, the shop floors of Britain constituted but one, albeit crucial, frontier in this turn from the first to the second long wave. The full role of steam remains to be specified in detail. To follow the guidelines of Mandel, one would need to take into account all the buttons that must be pushed for capital accumulation to exit a structural crisis and revive on a higher level — not only a rise in the rate of surplus value, but also a broadening of markets, a reduction in turnover time, a cheapening of raw materials, and other elements of constant capital, to name some. How did steam power contribute to the mid-nineteenth century victories along these frontiers? A study of the origins of the fossil economy in this first full wave movement would need to delve deeply into the empirical data of the period and subject it to that type of open, pluralist, exuberantly complex analysis Mandel pioneered.79 Yet the outline of the core elements underwriting each successive wave may nevertheless be established as early as the first. Now jump straight to the apparent paradox of the fifth wave. Unlike steam engines, electricity, automobiles, or petroleum, Long Waves of Fossil Development 179 computers are neither prime movers or transmitters nor sources of energy in themselves, and yet the upswing they carried caused the most extreme CO2 blast in the history of industrialized capital. How can one shed light on that link? Perhaps by accepting Mandel’s view that a major contradiction of the fourth wave was a perilously strong labor movement in the core. As the reserve armies of labor were depleted over the course of the 1960s and the self-confidence of the working class soared towards the wild heights of 1968–73, the high rate of surplus value of the previous two decades could no longer be maintained, and a “fall in the rate of profit became unavoidable.”80 To resolve that crisis, some profound restructuring was exigent. Among the many preconditions for a fifth long wave, Mandel proposed the following: “In order to drive up the rate of profit to the extent necessary to change the whole economic climate, under the conditions of capitalism, the capitalists must first decisively break the organizational strength and militancy of the working class in the key industrialized countries.”81 Did computer technology assist them in that battle? If so, how was it connected to the increased combustion of fossil fuels? An exhaustive inquiry is far beyond the scope of this essay: here I offer a crude hypothesis. It runs something like this: (1) The globalization of production broke the strength of labor in the advanced capitalist countries. By pitting workers there against workers in Mexico, Brazil, the post-Stalinist Eastern European economies, but primarily in China, they all became mutually substitutable to an extent never seen before. Armed with the capacity to shift commodity production to distant countries and export from there, within the framework of integrated cross-border supply chains, employers could push unions to the wall, by threatening that “unless you accept our demands, we will relocate.” Beginning in the late 1970s, culminating with the admission of China into the WTO in 2001, the globalization of production removed one of the main hurdles to a capitalist renaissance. It gave a critical contribution to the relative rebound of the profit rate after the dismal lows of the 1970s. 180 Materialism and the Critique of Energy (2) The very same process caused an unprecedented explosion in CO2 emissions. In China, the quest for cheap and disciplined workers, with whom all other workers of the world had to compete, set off the largest spree in fossil fuel consumption in history: cross-border chains extending into the People’s Republic and, indeed, the four corners of the world demanded fresh infrastructure for the supply of energy, which, incidentally, mostly came from coal. They were held together by the transportation of goods, components, raw materials and personnel in vehicles fuelled by petroleum.82 Overall, the globalization of production extended the logic of the fossil economy to new territories, giving the main impetus for the epochal boom in combustion outside the traditional core. (3) Information and communications technology, or ICT, made the globalization of production possible. One of the most revolutionary services of this technological paradigm consisted in linking, coordinating, lubricating world-encompassing production chains: without ICT, globalization as we know it would have been unthinkable. As one geographer notes, the opening of the gates to China from the late 1970s onwards coincided with the rise of virtual bridges: “In the West, the combination of two industries, computers and communications, began providing the enabling technology for industrial capital to seek out and manage cheap labor on a global scale.”83 By allowing it to create transnational circuits, ICT turned into a battering ram against the defenses of labor, realizing the substitutability of industrial workers and unleashing the full force of existing power technologies across borders. Finally yet importantly, humanity is now faced with the imminent prospect of catastrophic global warming, the sum of all the CO2 blasted into the air since the Industrial Revolution. At the same time, since the financial crash of 2008, central components of the capitalist world economy — the European Union, the United States, the People’s Republic of China — appear mired in relative stagnation of various Long Waves of Fossil Development 181 degrees of depth and volatility, with some attendant symptoms of political crisis: a pretty good match for a fifth downswing. That conjunction gives rise to an intriguing possibility. Could capitalism swing itself into a sixth long wave by casting off fossil fuels and switching to renewables — just what humanity needs to stave off the most intolerable scenarios of climate change? Every nook and cranny of the world economy urgently needs to be disconnected from coal and oil and gas and filled with substitutes that come close to zero emissions: a grand transition to impelling, conveying, lifting, hauling, heating, pumping, communicating, doing everything with the power of sun, wind, water. Might such a universal rollout of new power technology breathe fresh air into languishing capitalism and ensure that we collectively back off from the cliff in time? Probably the most elaborate case for such a future has been made by John A. Mathews, who builds directly on the work of Perez. He believes that the crash of 2008 signaled the descent into the crisisridden stage of yet another “surge,” which will usher in a sweeping adoption of the renewable energy technologies (abbreviated RE) already in store and under development, leading, via a bumpy ride over the next couple of decades, into a rich green Kondratieff. These beneficent technologies perfectly fit the profile of a wave-carrying paradigm: they enable, first of all, “costs and prices to be drastically reduced.” They are of virtually unlimited supply. They have “massive potential for applications and so for becoming pervasive,” causing productivity to spike, spurring other novel technologies — electric vehicle charging systems, smart grids managed online, cities filled with intelligent green buildings — opening up unimagined channels for the accumulation of capital. The bottom-line is never in doubt. “The point is,” Mathews writes, “to demonstrate that the new technology provides superior performance and profits”: only by dint of this quality can it be expected to trigger a proper surge.84 Hence the agent of the transition in this new wave of capital shed of carbon will be capital itself. “It is capitalist emulation and drive for profits that will accelerate the uptake of renewable energy sources,” 182 Materialism and the Critique of Energy the spirit of creative destruction harnessed for the most virtuous goal, firms scrambling to satisfy consumer demand with the lowest possible emissions and enriching themselves fabulously in the process. 85 More precisely, it is the financial sector that will drive the switch. Applying another model from Perez — the arrival of new technologies are accompanied by financial bubbles (think of the British railway mania in the 1830s and 1840s or the more recent dotcom boom) — Mathews predicts that the profit potentials of RE will attract frenzied investment from venture capitalists, the whole pack of adventurous speculators following the scent of super-profits. “If the last decade has seen REs emerging from out of their long (prolonged) gestation phase and into the installation phase, then we can anticipate a ‘Renewable Energy bubble’ some time perhaps around 2015–2020” — this was written in 2013 — “reflecting the surge of financing and credit creation into the field of REs and green technologies.”86 In this prognosis, the future is bright green like a budding leaf. “Through direct market connections, and through the aggregating effects of financial instruments, the entire economy will be brought within the ambit of new capitalist eco-calculations that bring ecological limits to the center of concern.”87 Now what would happen were one to choose Mandel instead of Perez as a source for speculation? The first lesson of his theory is clear: never underestimate the ability of capitalism to reinvent itself.88 Never stick to orthodox formulas that always proclaim the end of the road. Prepare to be taken aback by capital, whose flexibility and resourcefulness have confuted so many prophecies of breakdown so many times before. That said, there are a number of question marks to be jotted down alongside Mathews’s storyline. First of all, it might be a category mistake to conceive of a conversion to renewable energy as analogous to any of the technological leaps experienced since the mid-nineteenth century.89 Going from fossil fuels to renewables — completely, no delay — is quite unlike adding automobiles, airplanes, and petrochemicals to the arsenal of capitalist productive forces. Since the original switch between the first and the second waves, when the Long Waves of Fossil Development 183 fossil economy emerged in full, the upswings have been predicated on technologies for more extensive consumption of fossil fuels: but this time, we are talking about a reversion to qualitatively different type of energy. If, since the high Victorian era, every “great surge of development,” to use the sanguine neo-Schumpeterian terminology, has materialized through fossil energy, this one would have to break out of that mould and re-embed itself in the kind of energy the very first structural crisis jettisoned. The adequate analogy would rather seem be that singular transition — now in reverse, and on an unfathomably larger scale. The question to ask, then, is if capital accumulation in general and a phase of renewed expansion in particular are compatible with an exclusive use of sun, wind and water. Or is there something in fossil fuels that make their energy indispensable for capital? As much as ever, the currents that make up “RE” remain integrated in landscapes and subject to fluctuations in weather. Can capital survive if fettered to the places and hours where the sun happens to shine and the wind to blow? More to the point: can it thrive within such fetters? They would seem to contravene the logic of globalized and lean production — a problem Mathews conveniently ignores, when he posits the sixth surge as essentially a renewable continuation of the fifth (whereas it has to remove carbon lock-in inherited from the fourth wave, in the form of inter alia the oil industry).90 But perhaps some sort of reconciliation can come about. Perhaps several different renewables from many topographic regions can be connected in overarching mega-grids that elevate them above the concrete determinants of landscape and weather, making them available practically anywhere anytime. Now that obviously requires comprehensive planning, most probably by other agents than venture capitalists, quite likely by states interfering deeply into the flow of energy. Can capital reconcile itself to such meddling — let alone gain from it? I have offered some more detailed, though rather skeptical reflections on these issues elsewhere.91 Here I note one further complication: all upswings so far have rested on the freedom to 184 Materialism and the Critique of Energy consume vastly greater quantities of energy than the previous wave. There has never been any other way to feed growth in commodity production. If this history is anything to go by, a sixth upswing would not only have to replace the current total consumption of fossil fuels by an equal amount of renewable energy: it would have to add a significant margin for growth — not 100 percent of oil and coal and gas, but 120 or 150 or even more would need to be extracted from unfossilized energy within the course of a few decades. It seems a tall order. The alternative, of course, would be to reduce energy consumption, beginning with its wastage: something no previous upswing has ever had to worry about. Growing by slimming seems alien to the workings of capital. But, again, one should not discount its capacity for miraculous reinvention. Then there are some straightforward empirical problems in Mathews’s assessment. The evidence for the emergence of an RE bubble is, to put it mildly, mixed. Total capital invested worldwide in renewables fell by 23 percent between 2011 and 2013. It rebounded in 2014, by some 17 percent over the previous year.92 Total investment in fossil energy was some four times larger, meaning — it bears repeating — that for every dollar used to build up RE capacity, four other dollars were ploughed into oil, coal, gas. The International Energy Agency predicts a similar distribution until 2035 — no world-saving speculative binge in sight — and notes matter-of-factly: “Getting the world on a 2°C emissions path would mean a different investment landscape.”93 So far, the money does not quite seem to roll into the green Kondratieff corner. Mega-projects for concentrated solar power in deserts — notably Desertec — “promise as many associated investment opportunities as there are entrepreneurs to find them,” Mathews has declared, but in reality the entrepreneurs have fled that ship like rats.94 By the time of this writing, the Desertec project appears to have utterly failed. The eco-Schumpeterian storyline is built on the premise of secularly falling prices for renewables — entirely realistic — and just as secularly rising prices for fossil fuels, which, however, are directly contradicted by the present collapse in Long Waves of Fossil Development 185 the price of oil. And then it hasn’t even considered the possibility that it might not be very lucrative to market a fuel that is practically gratis. Where will the profits to the energy supplier come from when the price of solar power approaches zero?95 Finally, Mandel leads me to a rather different set of questions. How could investment in renewable energy not only deliver profits but underpin the steep rise in the average rate of profit required for capital to embark on a new upswing? In what sense could it constitute the solution to the contradictions of the fifth structural crisis? Could it serve capital as a bulldozer by which to break down the growing obstacles? It does not seem to be a self-driving bulldozer, not a force advancing on its own, spreading “new and superior ways of doing things” while society adapts more or less pliantly. Mathews seeks to distance himself from technological determinism, but he never poses the profoundly social question of a Marxist perspective on energy in the waves: what source could help capital to defeat its enemies, including itself? The answer depends, of course, on the exact nature of the contradictions of the present conjuncture. Let us, for the sake of argument, accept the proposition that capital now, in a reversal of the situation in the 1970s, suffers from too weak labor, unable to purchase all the commodities churned out, so that over-production, over-capacity, over-accumulation have become near-chronic maladies of the world economy. Then perhaps giant public — note public — investment programs in renewables could provide just the injection of demand capital so desperately and impotently craves. But that remains pure speculation. So far, no capitalist class has taken any initiatives in the direction of climate Keynesianism on an epochal scale. Under the banners of free trade and austerity, that class rather continues to push states further away from influence over investment and squeeze out the last drops from public budgets and working-class earnings, and as Naomi Klein has eloquently argued, such strategies for renewed accumulation run exactly counter to the prerequisites for a switch.96 To speak in the terms of Mandel, climate Keynesianism 186 Materialism and the Critique of Energy seems to necessitate a subjective factor, some sort of social force more external and hostile than internal and congenial to capital. It has yet to appear on the stage. But then one should not forget the partially independent variables. This time, the climate system itself might prove one such externality. An extreme climate emergency could shove this mode of production in an unforeseen direction. Indeed, if any prophecy about the next phase of capitalist development can be made with anything like certainty, it is that global warming will be a determining external condition through whose channel it must flow. Once in there, all known wave patterns might eventually — this sort of breakdown cannot be excluded — come to an end along with everything else. However, before we reach that point, and to make it slightly less likely, a rediscovery of Mandel’s method and painstaking application of it to the realities of our day, always with an eye on the subjective factor, might be of a little help. Long Waves of Fossil Development 187 Notes 1. Under this definition, non-capitalist fossil economies are perfectly possible and have indeed existed in the shape of Stalinist formations. For some reflections on them, see Andreas Malm, “Who Lit this Fire? Approaching the History of the Fossil Economy,” Critical Historical Studies, 3.2 (Fall 2016) 215–248. 2. As pointed out by, for example, Leon Trotsky, The First Five Years of the Communist International (London: Pathfinder, 1973) 226; Michael Storper and Richard Walker, The Capitalist Imperative: Territory, Technology, and Industrial Growth (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 202; Ernest Mandel, Long Waves of Capitalist Development: A Marxist Interpretation (London: Verso, 1995) 120; Chris Freeman and Francisco Louçã, As Time Goes By: From the Industrial Revolutions to the Information Revolution (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002) 43, 55; Carlota Perez, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2002) 162. “The stage on which capitalist history is played out is always on the move.” Anwar Shaikh, “The Falling Rate of Profit as the Cause of Long Waves: Theory and Empirical Evidence,” New Findings in Long Wave Research, eds. Alfred Kleinknecht, Ernest Mandel and Immanuel Wallerstein (London: Macmillan, 1992) 174. 3. As emphasized with particular clarity by Trotsky, The First Five 252; Leon Trotsky, “The Curve of Capitalist Development,” article originally appearing in Russian in Vestnik Sosialisticheskoi Akademii, 1923, available at marxists.org. 4. N. D. Kondratieff, “The Long Waves in Economic Life,” Review of Economic Statistics, 17 (1935) 105–115. On Kondratieff, his theory, and the theories of his many predecessors, see Freeman and Louçã, As Time 66-92. Klas Eklund “Long Waves in the Development of Capitalism?” Kyklos 33 (1980) 383–419, remains an excellent survey of long wave theories. 5. Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1978) 122; Mandel, Long Waves 1; Freeman and Louçã, As Time 141; Phillip Anthony O’Hara, Growth and Development in the Global Political Economy: Social Structures of Accumulation and Modes of Regulation (London: Routledge, 2006) 188 Materialism and the Critique of Energy 6; Tessaleno Devezas, “Crises, Depressions, and Expansions: Global Analysis and Secular Trends,” Technological Forecasting and Social Change 77 (2010) 739–761; Chris Freeman, “Technology, Inequality, and Economic Growth,” Innovation and Development 1 (2011) 11–24; Andrey V. Korotayev & Leonid E. Grinin, “Kondratieff Waves in the World System Perspective,” Kondratieff Waves: Dimensions and Prospects at the Dawn of the 21st Century, eds. Leonid Grinin, Tessaleno Devezas & Andrey Korotayev (Volgograd: Uchitel, 2012) 48–51. 6. Kondratieff, “The Long Waves.” It speaks to his scientific vision that Kondratieff discerned the wave pattern only on the basis of the first two-and-a-half waves. 7. This is not to say that the existence of long waves is empirically uncontroversial — to the contrary — but overall, it has been easier to point to an actual rhythm of alternating upturns and downturns corresponding approximately to the chronology above than to theoretically explain it. See, for example, Eric Hobsbawm, On History (London: Abacus, 1998) 36–37, 66. For recent collections of an impressive array of data showing relatively high levels of growth of world GDP in the upswings and low ditto in the downswings, see Devezas, “Crisis, Depressions,” and Korotayev & Grinin, “Kondratieff Waves.” 8. Eklund, “Long Waves” 412–413. Even Angus Maddison, who sets out to refute the theory of long waves, ends up endorsing a (somewhat diluted) version of it under the force of the data: “There have been five distinct phases of economic performance in the capitalist epoch, each with its own momentum.” Angus Maddison, “Fluctuations in the Momentum of Growth within the Capitalist Epoch,” Cliometrica 1 (2007) 171. (This is gleefully noticed and discussed by Devezas, “Crisis, Depressions” 752–753.) 9. Freeman & Louçã, As Time, 139–142. Long wave theory is thus based on the crucial distinction between invention and diffusion: “Scientifictechnical inventions in themselves, however, are insufficient to bring about a real change in the technique of production. They can remain ineffective so long as economic conditions favorable to their application are absent.” “The Long Waves,” 112. Long Waves of Fossil Development 10. 189 As noticed by Espen Moe, “Energy, Industry and Politics: Energy, Vested Interests, and Long-Term Economic Growth and Development,” Energy 35 (2010) 1732. 11. Based on Freeman & Louçã, As Time 141. Similar lists, with slight variations, can be found in, for example, Mandel Late Capitalism 120–121; Mandel Long Waves 33; Perez, Technological Revolutions 10–11, 14; George F. Ray “Energy and the Long Cycles,” Energy Economics 5 (1983) 5; Arnulf Grübler and Helga Nowotny, “Towards the Fifth Kondratiev Upswing: Elements of an Emerging New Growth Phase and Possible Development Trajectories,” International Journal of Technology Management 5 (1990): 437; Peter Dicken, Global Shift: Transforming the World Economy. Third Edition (London: Paul Chapman, 1998) 148; Bo Göransson and Johan Söderberg, “Long Waves and Information Technologies: On the Transition towards the Information Society,” Technovation 25 (2005) 205; Chris Papenhausen, “Causal Mechanisms of Long Waves,” Futures 40 (2008) 789; Carlota Perez, “Technological Revolutions and Techno-Economic Paradigms,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 34 (2010) 192, 195–197. 12. For an analysis of this conjuncture, and more precisely of the shift from water to steam in British industry, see Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (London: Verso, 2016). 13. Craig S. Volland, “A Comprehensive Theory of Long Wave Cycles,” Technological Forecasting and Social Change 32 (1987) 127; “The Long Waves” 109; Ray, “Energy” 5. See further W. Seifritz and J. Hodgkin, “Nonlinear Dynamics of the Per Capita Energy Consumption,” Energy 16 (1991) 615– 620; Patrick Criqui, “Energy Crises and Economic Crisis: A Long-Period Perspective,” Energy Studies Review 6 (1994) 34–46; Bruce Podobnik, “Toward a Sustainable Energy Regime: A Long-Wave Interpretation of Global Energy Shifts,” Technological Forecasting and Social Change 62 (1999) 155–172; Jonathan Koehler, “Long Run Technical Change in an Energy-Environment-Economy (E3) Model for an IA System: A Model of Kondratiev Waves,” Working Paper 15, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, 2002; João Carlos de Oliveira Matias and Tessaleno Campos Devezas, “The Fifth Kondratieff Wave: The Fossil Fuel Apogee,” Workshop Presentation, IV International Workshop on Oil and Natural 190 Materialism and the Critique of Energy Gas, Lisbon, May 10–20, 2005; Göransson and Söderberg, “Long Waves” 207–208; Robert U. Ayres, “Turning Point: The End of Exponential Growth?,” Technological Forecasting and Social Change 73 (2006) 1196– 1197; A. T. C. Jérôme Dangerman & Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, “Energy Systems Transformation,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (2013) E554–555. 14. For the concept of technomass, see Alf Hornborg, The Power of the Machine: Global Inequalities of Economy, Technology, and Environment (Walnut Creek: AltaMira, 2001) 11, 17, 85, 94. On the construction of energy infrastructures in the long waves, cf. Bruce Podobnik, Global Energy Shifts: Fostering Sustainability in a Turbulent Age (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2006) 61–62. 15. “Railway systems originating in the middle of the nineteenth century are still very important today. Electrical technology is the essential foundation for electronic systems and the automobile has certainly not disappeared.” As Time 145. 16. The relative shift from coal to oil after World War II coexisted with continued absolute increases of coal output, as pointed out, importantly, by Podobnik, “Toward a Sustainable” 157. 17. See George A. Gonzalez, Urban Sprawl, Global Warming, and the Empire of Capital (Albany: SUNY Press, 2009). 18. Perez, Technological Revolutions 20. Note that Perez is by no means an anti-capitalist: these insights do not depend upon opposition to the system. 19. Mandel, Late Capitalism; Mandel, Long Waves. A brilliant biography of Mandel is Jan Willem Stutje, Ernest Mandel: A Rebel’s Dream Deferred (London: Verso, 2009). 20. Late Capitalism 109. Emphasis in original. The waves are said to be most obvious in advanced capitalist countries, as opposed to the lagging peripheries of the system. Long Waves 2. 21. On the role of these two indicators, see, for example, Late Capitalism 141; Long Waves 6. 22. Late Capitalism 122; Long Waves 21. See also “The Long Waves” 111, and The First Five 253–254. Long Waves of Fossil Development 23. 191 Trotsky, “The Curve.” An excellent rendering of the debate is Richard B. Day “The Theory of the Long Cycle: Kondratiev, Trotsky, Mandel,” New Left Review no. 99 (1976) 67–82. 24. “The Curve.” 25. See also, Eklund, “Long Waves” 389. 26. Long Waves 82. See further, for example, 76–81, 99, and Late Capitalism 128–9. 27. Hobsbawm, On History 37. 28. For example Late Capitalism 133, and Long Waves 76. 29. The First Five 252; Late Capitalism 129; On History 66. 30. “The Long Waves” 112–113. 31. See also Day, “The Theory” 81. The third main source of inspiration for Mandel’s theory of long waves was, of course, Joseph Schumpeter. See also Francisco Louçã, “Ernest Mandel and the Pulsation of History,” The Legacy of Ernest Mandel, ed. Gilbert Achcar (London: Verso, 1999) 104. 32. Ernest Mandel, “Partially Independent Variables and Internal Logic in Classical Marxist Economic Analysis,” Social Science Information 24 (1985) 485–505. 33. Ernest Mandel, “Explaining Long Waves of Capitalist Development,” Futures 13 (1981) 336. 34. Mandel, “Partially Independent” 489. 35. “Partially Independent” 490–495. 36. “Partially Independent” 492. 37. Long Waves 133. See also, Louçã, “Ernest Mandel” 107; William Hamilton Sewell Jr., Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005) 11. One could of course argue that these types of factors are so interwoven as to be virtually impossible to separate — as is so often the case with an analysis informed by the dialectical method. 38. As argued in “The Theory” 81–82. 39. See also Marcel van der Linden and Jan Willem Stutje, “Ernest Mandel and the Historical Theory of Global Capitalism,” Historical Materialism 15 (2007) 39–41. 40. For a powerful restatement of this classical view and demonstration 192 Materialism and the Critique of Energy of its validity, see Andrew Glyn, “Does Aggregate Profitability Really Matter?” Cambridge Journal of Economics 21 (1997) 593–619. 41. Long Waves 20, 110. 42. For a stylized scenario, see Long Waves 44–46. 43. Mandel, “Explaining” 335; Stutje, Ernest Mandel 190; Late Capitalism 133. Emphasis in original. See also, Minqi Li, Feng Xiao and Andong Zhu, “Long Waves, Institutional Changes, and Historical Trends: A Study of the Long-Term Movement of the Profit Rate in the Capitalist WorldEconomy,” Journal of World-Systems Research 13 (2007) 33. 44. “Explaining” 335. 45. Late Capitalism 145. See also 108–9, 114, 120; Long Waves 7, 16. 46. Late Capitalism 110. In the rate of profit, then, Mandel fuses all the multiple endogenous and exogenous variables in a single factor so “close to the system’s heart as to make one understand why changes in that factor can precipitate a change in the way in which the system as a whole grows or does not grow.” “Explaining” 335. 47. 48. Long Waves 33, 36–37, 118–19, 123, 128, 137. In the midst of the fourth downswing — the first edition of Long Waves appeared in 1980 — Mandel listed the conditions for a new upswing, among them “a qualitative increase in the degree of integration of the USSR and China into the international capitalist market,” a decisive break of “the organizational strength and militancy of the working class in the key industrialized countries,” “radical rather than marginal changes in the transformation of some key areas in the so-called third world into large markets,” “radical defeats of national liberation movements.” Long Waves 87–90. 49. Late Capitalism 112, 118–119. See also 116–117. All emphases except the first added. Note that the selection of key technologies in this schema deviates from the modern consensus. See also Louçã, “Ernest Mandel” 117. The point here, however, is not the identity of the technologies singled out by Mandel, but the historical role he ascribes to them. 50. Late Capitalism 118–119. 51. Late Capitalism 112. 52. Long Waves 33. Long Waves of Fossil Development 193 53. Late Capitalism 115–116, 119. 54. Late Capitalism 137, 143–144; Long Waves 19. 55. Late Capitalism 145. 56. Late Capitalism 145. 57. With very rare exceptions, for example, the statement that each wave is associated with “new machine systems, based on different sources of energy” (Long Waves 112). In this book, however, the main theme and purported original contribution is the theory of asymmetry in the long waves: the turn into a downswing — the outbreak of depression — is exclusively caused by the laws of motion of capital itself, whereas the upturn is precipitated by a beneficial outcome of class and other political struggles. See for example 104. This theory is dubious: there appears to be no a priori reason to deny exogenous shocks a role in the outbreak of crises. Be that as it may, it is the power theory of Late Capitalism, not the asymmetry of Long Waves, that is of value to us. 58. The analytical poverty of energy theory in the Marxist school of long waves is on full display in Matthew Edel, “Energy and the Long Swing,” Review of Radical Political Economics 15 (1983) 115–130, written at a time when Mandel’s influence was at its peak. It contains no discussion of the above passages from Late Capitalism. 59. Perez, Technological Revolutions 155. 60. Technological Revolutions 38. See also 15. 61. Technological Revolutions 20–32, 41–43. “Mental maps” 20. 62. Technological Revolutions 6, 26, 153, 155; See also Perez “Technological Revolutions” 198. 63. Technological Revolutions 23. 64. Technological Revolutions 36. Emphasis added. See also, for exmple, 145. 65. Technological Revolutions 41–43, and “Technological Revolutions” 188, 194–195. 66. Technological Revolutions 15. Emphasis added. 67. Technological Revolutions 26. 68. Technological Revolutions 29–30, 48. On the “big bangs” — unexplained events of an almost cosmological character — see 11–12, 29. 69. Technological Revolutions 11, 57. 194 Materialism and the Critique of Energy 70. Louçã, “Ernest Mandel” 113. 71. Technological Revolutions 8; “Technological Revolutions” 191. 72. Stutje, Ernest Mandel 191. Emphasis added. On the importance of the concept of partially independent variables for opening up long wave theory to history, see also Louçã, “Ernest Mandel” 111; As Time 58. John McNeill contends that long waves can shed no light on environmental history — the discipline whose doyen he is — since they are unrelated to the temporalities of nature. “How can one harmonize this outlook with the rhythms of climate change, which in any case are not uniform around the world, and are surely quite independent from any economic cycles that may derive from human affairs?” J. R. McNeill, “Observations on the Nature and Culture of Environmental History,” History and Theory 42 (2003) 38. But this is to conflate the issue of how natural processes impact on society with that of how social processes impact on nature: if the latter is in focus, long waves might very well be central to the explanation. 73. Ernest Mandel 187. Emphasis added. 74. Michael R. Krätke, “On the History and Logic of Modern Capitalism: The Legacy of Ernest Mandel,” Historical Materialism 15 (2007) 126–128. 75. van der Linden & Stutje, “Ernest Mandel” 41. 76. See also Freeman & Louçã, As Time 111, 131, 150; Rodney Edvinsson, Growth, Accumulation, Crisis: With New Macroeconomic Data for Sweden 1800–2000 (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 2005) 31, 167–168, 285–286, 289–290; Rainer Metz, “Do Kondratieff Waves Exist? How Time Series Techniques Can Help Solve the Problem,” Cliometrica 5 (2011) 235–236. On Mandel’s different explanations for each wave, see Late Capitalism 130–132, 145. 77. Eklund, “Long Waves” 414. Emphasis in original. See also Late Capitalism 145; Stutje, Ernest Mandel 169, 194. 78. See Malm, “Who Lit?” 79. This task will be taken up in Fossil Empire, the sequel to Malm, Fossil Capital. 80. Long Waves 73. 81. Long Waves 88. Long Waves of Fossil Development 195 82. For a more detailed analysis of this dynamic, see Fossil Capital 327–366. 83. Peter J. Taylor, “Thesis on Labour Imperialism: How Communist China Used Capitalist Globalization to Create the Last Great Modern Imperialism,” Political Geography, 30 (2011) 175. Emphasis added. 84. John A. Mathews, “The Renewable Energies Technology Surge: A New Techno-Economic Paradigm in the Making?” Futures 46 (2013) 12–16. Emphasis added. 85. John A. Mathews, “Naturalizing Capitalism: The Next Great Transformation,” Futures 43 (2011) 872. 86. Mathews, “The Renewable Energies” 17. 87. Mathews, “Naturalizing Capitalism” 874. Emphasis added. 88. Late Capitalism 92-93. 89. This mistake is also made from a Marxist standpoint by Podobnik, Global Energy Shifts. 90. “The Renewable Energies.” 91. Fossil Capital. 92. Bloomberg New Energy Finance, Global Trends in Renewable Energy Investment 2014; Bloomberg New Energy Finance, Global Trends in Renewable Energy Investment 2015, bnef.com. 93. Figure and quotation from International Energy Agency, World Energy Investment Outlook 2014 Factsheet Overview, www.iea.org, 1. Emphasis added. 94. “The Renewable Energies” 16. 95. See further Fossil Capital. 96. Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (London: Penguin, 2014). Nuclear Power and Oil Capital in the Long Twentieth Century Adam Broinowski Over more than sixty years since the 1953 Atoms for Peace program was launched, the dominant tendency in public discourse to separate nuclear power into peaceful and military uses has obscured the fact that both aspects of nuclear power (pithily known as “dual-use”) are mutually dependent and inextricably tied. Moreover, the commanding presence of nuclear weapons in the high-stakes nuclear brinkmanship that has dominated the post-1945 strategic and geopolitical landscape has masked the important interlocking relationship between fossil fuel and nuclear energy industries that has been central to the consolidation of a U.S.-led global power bloc. If we are to properly understand the dynamics of energy within contemporary geopolitical formations, I argue in this chapter that we must include considerations of both oil and gas (“black” and “blue gold”) and nuclear in an interoperable system of power relations. This system not only informs an international hierarchy of states, but it also is based and derived from control over access, flows, and distribution of energy and its capital accumulation. The primacy of energy in capital power relations and the ensuing conflicts to secure control over it that have been integral to the accumulation process suggests that alternative methods of renewable energy generation, distribution, pricing, and use may completely undermine the perpetuation of this system. The maturation of U.S. unilateralism in the twenty-first century follows two centuries of various Euro-American liberal imperialist maneuvers to make it safe to do business, as it were, in and with 198 Materialism and the Critique of Energy the resources from foreign territories. As U.S. General Colin Powell admitted in 1998, terrorist attacks (referring to al-Qaeda’s guerrilla attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania) were “the cost of doing business” in today’s world.1 As I will discuss in the following section, U.S. imperialism is founded on binding military and economic securitization, or geostrategic and geo-economic control, largely through military, political, energy, and financial instruments. The post–World War II division and alliance system, continuing on from previous U.S. imperialist exploits and colonial occupations, was established to ensure the hegemony of the United States, a maritime power, through a permanent U.S. forward presence on geostrategic “land nodes,” “geographical pivots,” and “choke points” around the world.2 These have been used to advance U.S. national and so-called free-world interests and those of its allies, which are said to be dependent on the “free flow of oil at stable and reasonable prices” and the “freedom of navigation and access to commercial markets.” This means, in short, control over wells and pipelines, refining, pricing, and trade routes (mainly sea lanes).3 This imperialist formation can be seen as the continuation of geopolitical strategy as put forward by British geographer Halford Mackinder in 1904 and developed with other European geographers (Mahan, Ratzel, Kjellan, Spykman): the encirclement and containment from the “Rimlands” by a dominant maritime power of any rival emergent economic and military power from the Eurasian “Heartland.”4 In 2016 world politics seems locked into a full “great game” scenario on the global chessboard, in which attempts by rising powers from the Eurasian Heartland are seeking to establish some autonomy in fossil-fuel pricing, energy supplies and distribution and to slice through U.S.-led containment to gain control over access points in the Rimlands and shipping lanes on the blue oceans.5 In this system, given that energy, and hydrocarbons in particular, is so crucial to meet social and economic needs and improve conditions; it is at the core of global political economy as well as geostrategy. As I conclude in this chapter, the potential for an emergent multi- Nuclear Power and Oil Capital 199 polar world as represented by Eurasian energic, financial, political, and military infrastructure initiatives to sustain sovereignties amid aggressive destabilization, could represent a major alternative to the largely maritime control of resource distribution and the last seventy years of Cold War bipolarity and post–Cold War neoliberal unipolarity. This could be a positive step given intensifying militarization, erosion of international legal standards, weakening of multilateral institutions, destabilization of state sovereignty, and acceleration in extreme environmental disruption in this transitional period. It is necessary, therefore, to begin with an overview of the interimperialist competition for accumulated capital and power with oil-based energy at its center through the acquisition of colonial pieces in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Second, I trace how nuclear weapons and a military alliance system added a new dimension to the game of oil and global finance in the post– World War II formation of U.S. hegemony through to the oil shocks of the 1970s. Third, through pertinent details in the Persian Gulf War, Color Revolutions, the Iraq War as part of the so-called Global War on Terror (GWOT), and the destabilization of Syria and Ukraine as proxy wars, I explore the intersections of oil and gas, nuclear energy and nuclear weapons. Fourth, touching on the cases of India and Japan, I explain how this (nuclear and oil) energy-military-finance system compels states to ignore crucial economic, social and environmental indicators that would logically demand a turn to large-scale renewable energy programs. I argue that these power relations in late capitalism (including a return to forms of primitive accumulation) as they produce and thrive on systemic crisis are at the root of present tensions and conflicts and their resulting ecological and human chaos. Clearly the mode and underlying purpose of inter-state relations must be reframed as, together with other important considerations, they are proving to be incompatible with the health of the planetary commons that sustains human and non-human existence. 200 Materialism and the Critique of Energy Energy and Twentieth-Century Imperialism With U.S.-Soviet tensions already manifest during World War II, if not since 1917, the Cold War began with the U.S.-led introduction of atomic weapons into the geopolitical arena, anthropogenic nuclear materials into the environment, and the concomitant development of nuclear energy technologies. As world energy consumption grew 179 percent between 1950 and 1972, nuclear power altered previous forms of empire building through colonial acquisition and augmented the competition for resources in the accumulation of capital through new technologies, military staging platforms, and strategies of dominance, intimidation, and deterrence.6 While an ideological program based on existential threat of nuclear war extending from President Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” speech of January 6, 1941 served to inculcate a sense of righteousness, veil, confuse, and intimidate public consciousness, American corporate actors in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, research laboratories, and other government agencies accrued influence and enormous discretionary budgets through financing and development of these weapons systems. So much so that U.S. President Eisenhower, who held significant responsibility for its making, was moved to label this the “military-industrial complex” in his final presidential address in January 1961. The division system which redrew the globe in sectors under U.S. command and determined as either pro-Communist or “free-world” allied seemed to justify the rapid development and deployment of nuclear weapons on land and on ships, planes and submarines, as well as sharing and hosting agreements with alliance countries, contributed to a system of U.S. military bases, which officially number 737 but which are estimated to exceed 1,000.7 How and why this preponderance of overwhelming U.S. military power came to be is directly related to the control of energy in fossil fuel and nuclear forms. Together with the U.S. occupation of Cuba and the Philippines as a result of its victory in the U.S.-Spanish war of 1898–1899, the Nuclear Power and Oil Capital 201 policy initiative signified in Secretary John Hay’s “Open Door Note” of 1899–1900 addressed to China during the Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901), was designed to extend U.S. moral, economic, political, and military power through the creation of zones conducive to Anglo-American trade.8 By lengthening the chain of islands where U.S. ships and personnel could refresh, refuel, and replenish supplies, the United States established monopoly oil cartels (such as Standard Oil) and their dynastic oligarchies as central to imperial expansion. Abundant Indigenous oil supply in the United States fueled its rise to become the world’s leading industrial power by the 1890s. Further augmented by the entrenchment of U.S. oil companies in the oil-rich Gulf of Mexico — Caribbean region (Mexico and Venezuela, or the “Western Hemisphere”) — to which Great Britain had been forced to concede control shortly after 1900 — provided an advantage over other great powers (Great Britain, France, Germany, Japan, and Russia). Such cartels accumulated power to the extent that many were broken up. Even so, they diversified their projects over the course of the twentieth century to become even more powerful multi-nationals. When the British discovered oil in Persia in 1908, Great Britain, with the strength of its Royal Navy, was the dominant power in the Middle East and the Mediterranean. As ocean-going navies of the great powers switched from coal to oil with the use of new engines, machine weapons, and manufacturing systems prior to World War I, both Britain and France had to draw on U.S. oil suppliers (roughly 80 percent) and also U.S. navy flotillas to secure sea-lanes for oil tankers en route to Europe. This enabled the United States to further expand its significant naval force by the end of World War I. Oil production in the Russian empire which had accounted for more than half of the world’s oil production in 1900 dropped during the disruptive upheavals of World War I and the Russian Revolution. In the 1920s, with the appropriation and use of oil infrastructure and technologies initially established by western companies and financiers, expansion of its Indigenous reserves mainly in Siberia and access to oil in the newly unified Russian, Transcaucasian, Ukrainian, 202 Materialism and the Critique of Energy and Byelorussian republics, oil production recovered, and, by 1939, the Soviet Union was the second-largest oil producer in the world, slightly ahead of Venezuela. Unlike the United States, which continued to secure holdings and take concessions in the Middle East and the Dutch East Indies, the Soviet Union devoted almost all of its oil production to the formation of an alternative political economic system and social organization within its borders. In the Sykes-Picot agreement signed in May 1916 and revised at San Remo in 1920, the Arab provinces formerly under the Ottoman Empire and important for oil distribution routes to Russia during World War I were reshaped by British and French powers into artificial administrations rather than diversified national economies to ensure the flow of oil to the centers of capital. Against the wishes of various political minority groups who sought to realize greater political independence, these states heavily depended on foreign powers for extraction technology and oil revenue in exchange for local goods and services. By the 1920s, with cheap and abundant oil supplies and revenue from security provided for its concessions and transport corridors, the United States economy equaled the combined economies of the next six great powers (Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the Soviet Union, and Japan). U.S. companies made up five of the seven largest oil corporations (“the Seven Sisters”) in the world. In 1925, U.S. oil production accounted for slightly more than 70 percent of world oil production, with 40 percent coming from regions in which it had holdings outside the United States.9 With this accumulated capital and the development of its petrochemical industry, the United States rapidly developed its automobile and transportation industry, agricultural industry for feedstock, fertilizers, and pesticides, and further invested in its military industry. With control over one million barrels per day (bpd) by 1941, the United States accrued significant leverage over its allies as it could fuel both itself and its allies’ demands. In World War II, Anglo-American control over oil sites in the Middle East and the Western Hemisphere and sea routes Nuclear Power and Oil Capital 203 to them forced German and Japanese imperialist powers to seek alternatives, in the Caucasus and North Africa and the Dutch East Indies respectively. These failed, as the Soviet forces shouldered the overwhelming responsibility to eventually repel the German forces from the Caucasus and Volga-Urals regions and the U.S.-led Allied forces cut Japanese supply lines in the Pacific, contributing in large part to their defeat. Post-1945 New Oil-Nuclear Order With the Bretton Woods international financial institutions established (at the New Hampshire conference in June 1944) to form the basis of the post–World War II monetary system, the U.S. controlled 70 percent of world monetary gold, and the U.S. dollar was fixed as the world currency reserve secured at $35 per ounce of gold against other national currencies. Mirroring the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (producing over 100,000 barrels per day in the early 1930s), in 1933, Standard Oil (Socal) discovered and secured oil concessions in Dharan in 1938 and founded the California Arabian Standard Oil Company (Casoc). Socal had merged with Texaco to form Caltex in 1936 for operations east of Suez, and then formed the Arab American Oil Company (Aramco) in January 1944. In the same year, the U.S. diplomatically recognized Saudi Arabia and shortly after transformed Dharan into a U.S. military base at the beginning of 1945 in order to better compete with British interests in Aden, Iran, Jordan and to vie for control over the Persian corridor (established to supply the Soviet effort against Nazi Germany). On February 14, 1945, in a famous verbal agreement between President Roosevelt and King Abdel Aziz Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia (made aboard the U.S.S. Quincy), U.S. protection of and noninterference in Saudi Arabian society and support for its regional hegemony was guaranteed in return for ensured U.S. access to Saudi oil supply. In August 1945, it was observed in a U.S. State Department memo that “the oil resources [of Saudi Arabia and the Middle East] constituted a stupendous source of strategic power and one of the greatest material prizes in world history.”10 Further, 204 Materialism and the Critique of Energy the Kingdom agreed not to oppose the Jewish homeland in Palestine (future state of Israel) as long as the United States did not support an increase of Jewish peoples in Palestinian territories. After World War II the United States was estimated to have briefly possessed 50 percent share of global GDP (economic output as compared to six other major powers), largely due to its late entry into the European theater and the negative impact of the war on Europe and the Soviet Union.11 From a $2.2 billion budget for the Manhattan Project begun in 1942, the United States became the first nation to conduct an atomic weapon test on July 16, 1945. After having further demonstrated its military prowess and intentions with two atomic bombs dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (and in possession of a data-monopoly over the results), the United States then sought an international ban on atomic weapons through the United Nations. The U.S. failed in this mission, and, in 1945–1946, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, denied access to U.S. nuclear technology, launched an independent atomic program to develop and test its own atomic weapons. While the U.S., as the sole power in demonstrated possession of such technology, then established the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in 1946, a civil agency that oversaw nuclear energy research through the Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory run by commercial company Westinghouse, it continued to develop mainly nuclear military applications which led to the launch of the Nautilus, the first nuclear submarine in 1952. The first atomic test by the Soviet Union only came in August 1949. Contrary to popular understanding, the U.S. possessed a vastly superior nuclear weapons stockpile as compared to the Soviet Union until well into the 1970s. Nuclear weapons presented a major new dimension in strategic thinking. Yet the underlying core of U.S. objectives remained to assume Britain’s former hegemonic role as dominant maritime power and guarantor of access to oil from the Middle East and Africa to drive the engines of transnational capital (including Japanese) and military operations. Amid the slow decolonization of former British, Dutch, French, Portuguese and U.S. colonies into sovereign nation Nuclear Power and Oil Capital 205 states from the late 1940s on, under cover of fighting communism, the United States designed a Cold War alliance architecture formalized in the San Francisco Treaty of 1951, which eventually led to the official division of the world into distinct sectors of U.S. military protection (NORTHCOM, SOUTHCOM, CENTCOM, EUCOM, PACOM, AFRICOM). It used its military bases to threaten, undermine, coopt, and/or overtly attack self-determinist national movements, authoritarian or otherwise, that were not aligned to U.S. interests (for example, access to resources, territory and markets). Increasingly U.S. agencies used methods at the sub-imperial level: proxy wars often based on aggravated pre-existing ethnic, religious, and historical tensions, economic warfare through bilateral and multilateral sanctions on resources and pricing, and information/psychological warfare through dominant media channels. Through the alliance system, the Marshall Plan and other bilateral military and economic arrangements, the U.S. also bolstered client states such as West Germany, U.K., Japan, Italy, the Republic of Korea, the Republic of China and the Philippines. That some were former Axis powers with political leaders guilty of war crimes who were rehabilitated and reinstated seemed to hold less significance as compared to their geopolitical and geo-economic potential. Heavily dependent on the supply of foreign energy sources, Japan and West Germany in particular were assured of a steady supply of oil by the United States (among other necessities, infrastructural support, and technologies) as their economies and labor forces continued to transition from coal. During rapid economic growth in the 1950s–1960s, together with deep and coordinated political interference and inducements (and the profits from procurements during the Korean War for Japan), this afforded Japan and West Germany welfare state systems while serving to suppress popular demands for independent unionism, socialism, real democratic reforms, and national independence in foreign policy. Similarly, as the Soviet Union consolidated its eastern and central European nations in a federation as agreed at the Yalta Conference in 206 Materialism and the Critique of Energy February 1945, it enlisted their resources to rebuild from significant wartime damage (for example, oil from Romania, coal from Poland and Ukraine, uranium and coal from the German Democratic Republic, subsidized oil supplied to Cuba and North Korea). In parallel, over a period of unmitigated nuclear testing between 1945 and 1963 in the first cold war arms race, all five of the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council (United States, the Soviet Union, U.K., France, and China) obtained nuclear weapons. These nuclear tests were mainly conducted on “proving grounds” in internal and Third World peripheries, which were also sourced for raw uranium, infrastructure, labor, and technical support. Effectively, these test sites became “sacrifice zones” wherein the harmful effects of long-lived radioactive fallout were deemed remote enough to be ignored and denied by host governments and perpetrator states and multilateral institutions. At the same time, these tests were part of a psychological campaign to intimidate and/or deter the enemy. As with the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. then threatened to use nuclear weapons many times against North Korea and PRC during and after the Korean War, and against Vietnam during that nation’s long wars for self-determination.12 Similarly, in the U.S. Single Integrated Operation Plan (SIOP-62, 1960), in the event of an “attack,” the U.S. threatened most Soviet and Chinese cities with massive, near-simultaneous nuclear “retaliation” and long-lived consequences. This was based on the notion that nuclear war(s) could be won and reflected the U.S. aim to obtain nuclear primacy.13 After the Armistice Agreement to the Korean War was signed in July 1953, in December that year the U.S. Atoms for Peace program was launched (by President Eisenhower and promoted by the United States Information Agency [USIA]). The program stressed the distinction between commercial and military uses of nuclear energy and promised to its own population and to aspirant nations a magical uranium elixir. This superior “third fire,” it was claimed, could fuel a “second industrial revolution” (although it would appear one was already underway) to create a utopian paradise of cheap and eternal Nuclear Power and Oil Capital 207 energy self-sufficiency to power cities, shrink distances (ships, planes, power electronic communications), distribute electricity and water to rural areas, transform deserts into fertile fields, improve crop yields and strains, cure the sick, and provide industry jobs.14 In 1957, a nuclear regime was institutionalized through the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), mandated to promote the ‘peaceful’ (commercial) use of nuclear power. In this regime, newlyemergent nuclear aspirant nations found it increasingly difficult to develop this technology free of conditions. Unlike highways, trains, hydroelectric dams, and mines, the special dual-use properties of nuclear power plants meant that reactor types and degrees of fuel enrichment were now controlled by the IAEA and U.N. Security Council, thus entrenching an asymmetry between “nuclear haves” and “nuclear have-nots.” Often described as a Faustian bargain, nuclear energy symbolized the potential for greater independence (for example, to mitigate nuclear and/or other types of blackmail), leverage, and elevated stature in a cold war hierarchy, while binding the aspiring state to huge capital, construction, technical engineering, finance, resource, and time investments. This made new nuclear states vulnerable to coercion from the supplier or from hegemonic states in case they chose a route of greater military and economic independence. While tantalized by the modernizing dream of energy self-sufficiency that nuclear energy seemed to promise to developing states, nuclear power tied them ever closer to power relations through interrelated technological, fossil, geopolitical, institutional, and capital path dependencies, unless they “went rogue” and developed a clandestine nuclear weapons capability (as was the case with India, Israel, Pakistan and North Korea). The Defense of “Vital Interests”: Oil, Nuclear Power, and Petro-dollars By the early 1970s, the long-term structural impact of profitability and over-accumulation produced crisis in the form of recessions, inflation, and monetary instability in the domestic economies of 208 Materialism and the Critique of Energy developed capitalist nations. Oil primarily supplied from the petrostate monarchies and secured by the U.S. Navy constituted 47 percent of U.S. energy consumption, while Western Europe accounted for 64 percent and Japan accounted for 80 percent.15 U.S. domestic oil production alone could no longer supply national demand. By the late 1960s, pressure had intensified on the U.S. economy from military spending and oil consumption from U.S. absorption in Vietnam and demands were being made by nations like Germany, France and Japan, flush with trade surplus dollars, to return their gold security deposits from the U.S. Federal Reserve. As the U.S. refused to devalue the dollar, its Federal Reserve was drained, and, in August 1971, following the April 1971 Tehran-Tripoli Agreement which raised the price of oil and consolidated the OPEC nations, the Nixon administration created an international shock when it announced the decision to withdraw the United States from the gold standard, ending the Bretton Woods system. A strong nuclear lobby in the United States took advantage of economic crisis to push nuclear generated electricity as a cheap supplement to fossil fuels leading to seventy-five nuclear reactors built between 1966 and 1975 (eventually reaching 104 plants). The cost overruns were enormous and acted as a significant brake on further construction. A spike of $10 to $12 per barrel in oil prices, anticipated at the Bilderberg Group meeting of May 11–13, 1973, was announced by King Faisal of Saudi Arabia in September, just prior to the Yom Kippur War (October 6–25, 1973) between Israel and an Egypt-Syrian coalition.16 In the October 1973 OPEC oil embargo, OPEC countries raised oil prices by 70 percent, and the Shah of Iran called for a 400 percent oil price increase in December. Consumers in the United States, western Europe, and Japan were hit with high inflation and oil price spikes while huge profits flowed to OPEC and Seven Sisters oil cartel members. To turn a cost into a benefit, on June 8, 1974, U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who had been negotiating with Golda Meir on Israel’s tactics prior to and during the Yom Kippur War, signed Nuclear Power and Oil Capital 209 the US-Saudi Arabian Joint Commission on Economic Cooperation. In July 1974, William Simon, newly promoted from energy secretary to U.S. Treasury Secretary, and his deputy Gerry Parsky (later Aurora Capital Group Chairman), met with Saudi officials in Jeddah to confirm the details of Saudi Arabia’s financing of America’s widening deficit with its new-found petrodollar wealth. By December of that year, Kissinger, Assistant Treasury Secretary Jack F. Bennett (later Director of Exxon) and David Mulford (of Credit Suisse-First Boston and White Weld & Co) had arranged a financial mechanism with the Saudi Arabia Monetary Agency (SAMA) to recycle OPEC petrodollars through the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Bank of England by purchasing new US Treasury securities.17 The Saudis would plow billions of their petrodollar revenue (roughly $117 billion which is only 20 percent of its $587 billion of foreign reserves in 2016) back into the U.S. economy by purchasing Treasury bonds, making it one of America’s largest foreign creditors.18 These were creatively concealed from official auction totals through “add-ons” and by aggregating Saudi holdings together with fourteen other “oil exporter” nations. In 1975, Bennett was sent to Riyadh to fix the agreement with the monarchy that Saudi and all OPEC oil would be exclusively traded in U.S. dollars (and not the Deutsche mark, Japanese yen, or French franc), after which he moved to an executive position at Exxon. In return, the United States agreed to continue military protection (including with nuclear weapons) and to boost weapons sales from U.S. arms manufacturers to a cash-rich Saudi Arabia to further its regional control (and to other Gulf states). By 1975 all OPEC members agreed to sell oil only in U.S. dollars, and Gulf petroleum replaced the Federal gold reserve as security against the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency.19 As long as oil has been the world’s largest commodity in dollar terms, its sale denominated in dollars maintained demand for dollars from world central banks for their currency reserves to back foreign trade. The flood of petrodollars to OPEC nations from loans from big London-New York banks and from the World Bank and IMF and 210 Materialism and the Critique of Energy repayable in dollars has fed back large commissions to U.S. and U.K. banks ever since. Essentially, while price hikes in petroleum and inflation impacted negatively in the polls in the United States, western Europe, and Japan, for corporate executives of major banks, oil companies, armament contractors, and their political representatives, as well as OPEC nations, higher oil prices were a boon. Turning point: 1980s–1990s In 1979, strategic shifts altered the tactics of imperialist capital. As a rash of nuclear reactors in large oil consumer countries (Japan, the U.S., and western Europe) came online in reaction to the oil price shocks of the 1970s, China’s Open Door reform under Deng Xiaoping was underway following U.S. rapprochement and PRCUSSR antagonism. With the Soviet Union embroiled in Afghanistan while the U.S. funded and supplied (weapons and training) Islamist insurgents (Afghan Mujahedeen as progenitors of al-Qaeda) to fight them (instigated in the CIA’s Operation Cyclone) in 1979–1980, as per the Carter Doctrine, the U.S. continued to fund and supply weapons to Israel, which signed an armistice with Egypt (the Egypt-Israel Camp David accord). It also imposed harsh sanctions on former close ally Iran (a Saudi rival) due to its Islamic revolution to further IsraelSaudi-U.S. control over hydrocarbons in the Middle East. By contrast, the parallel ascension of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath party to power in Iraq and the shift toward radical Wahabbism due to the Saudi Islamic uprising at Mecca did not seem to attract U.S. opprobrium. Wahabbism spread to Pakistan, where Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was executed under orders from General Muhammed Zia-al-Haq. The subsequent Iranian hostage crisis between 1979 and 1981 would then fatally undermine Carter’s presidency, mark the beginning of the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988), and usher in the Reagan administration which engaged in a second superpower arms race. To support another boost in military expenditure, in the early 1980s, following a decade of domestic stagnation and inflation, the Reagan and Thatcher administrations targeted domestic organized Nuclear Power and Oil Capital 211 labor through new privatization, deregulation, and austerity measures, and instrumentalized through the IMF and the World Bank.20 This method of economic crackdown had been tested in Chile under the Pinochet regime after the coup d’etat and removal of the Salvador Allende government on September 11, 1973. This was augmented by the innovation of futures oil trading (“paper oil”) introduced by Goldman Sachs in the mid-1980s. By detaching physical oil from oil contracts so as to better manipulate and determine its market value via American and British benchmarks on all exchanges, major Wall Street banks used insider knowledge of traders’ motivations to further manipulate the growth or slowdown of the world economy. With the dollar as world reserve currency, this more efficient financial leverage over oil prices alongside greater control over fossil fuel refinement and distribution through U.S. military basing and operations permitted ambivalence toward endless inflation in U.S. federal debt ($18.6 trillion, or 111 percent debt to GDP in 2016, up from 55 percent before the War on Terror). Iraq War I The priorities of this oil-military-dollar complex fortified by nuclear weapons was clearly demonstrated in the Persian Gulf War. On July 25, 1990, President Hussein notified U.S. Ambassador Glaspie of Iraqi intentions to invade Kuwait due to the oversupply of oil and theft through slant-drilling by Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates (economic warfare in Hussein’s view), which were protected by U.S. security agreements and hosted U.S. troops.21 Glaspie recommended negotiations and assured noninterference, which was followed up by a friendly letter from President George H.W. Bush, the credibility of which was supported by a legacy of over ten years of U.S. financial and military support to Iraq. Negotiations collapsed when Iraqi forces invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990. Hussein offered the United States a privileged position in energy exploitation in Kuwait.22 Bush then condemned Iraq’s actions as a contravention of the United Nations Charter, the Arab League Charter, and the Iraqi Constitution. 212 Materialism and the Critique of Energy While implementing an embargo on Iraqi trade (“economic sanctions”) and building up U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia over five months, the Bush administration provided three main reasons to justify U.S. invasion of Iraq to Congress and the broader public: to protect cheap oil supplies to the U.S., to avoid a precedent of larger nations annexing smaller ones (invoking Nazi Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia and the Soviet invasion of Hungary and following the Carter doctrine), and to intervene and stop a dictatorship that was (falsely) accused of killing babies in Kuwaiti hospitals.23 The general public exposed to mainstream media narratives was not informed that the CIA had aided Saddam Hussein’s return from hiding in Egypt after his failed attempt on President Qassim’s life (who had sought to nationalize Iraqi oil) in 1959 and his eventual assassination in 1963, and assisted Hussein’s Ba’athist Party to take power in 1979.24 Nor was it widely discussed that during the IranIraq War (1980–1988), fought primarily over borders, Shiia-Sunni influence, and regional power, the U.S. supplied weapons, logistics and precursors for chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons to Iraq, as well as weapons, covertly, to Iran (the Iran-Contra scandal).25 Along with being accused of orchestrating a string of domestic bombings to exacerbate diplomatic tensions for the Assad government in Syria in the 1980s, in 1983, the CIA pushed the U.S. government to pressure the Hussein government, along with Israel and Turkey, to threaten to invade Syria, which had closed off an oil pipeline to Iraq due to its war with Iran.26 The U.S. launched the Persian Gulf War on January 17, 1991. The Iraqi Army, depleted from its eight-year war with Iran, could not resist Operation Desert Storm, a U.S.-Saudi forty-two-day intensive bombing campaign followed by a massive ground offensive that included the use of depleted uranium shells. This led to the deaths of roughly 130,000 Iraqis. While continuing sanctions and military strikes caused the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children, true to form, in 1997–2000 U.S. oil corporations like Halliburton sold oil production equipment to Iraq paid for by the Hussein government through Nuclear Power and Oil Capital 213 misallocated U.N. Oil for Food Program funds. Such corporations later recouped on this “investment” when the Hussein government was forced to sell them cheap oil on the black market after the Iraq War II. Rather than to ensure cheap oil supply to domestic U.S. markets, however, U.S. actions and policy in these wars demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice civilian lives in the Middle East for greater control over revenue from oil from Iraq, Kuwait, UAE, and Saudi Arabia through extraction, distribution, pricing, and associated armament sales and foreign purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds to maintain the primacy of the dollar. As Shimshom Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan argue, while energy control is certainly central to U.S. military interventions in the Middle East, these have done little to keep the real price of oil low, and that its inverse is more likely. Instead, they claim that capital, rather than primarily an economic entity, is a quantitative measure of organized power. They find that capital wealth is better measured in the differential profits accumulated by a corporation backed by state organs relative to those of rival corporations. So the capacity for capital control via energy and military operations is at the core of power relations — or, capital toward monopoly control as power.27 Color Revolutions Activity related to U.S.-centered capital power relations were not limited to the Middle East in this period. As indicated in a 1984 United States policy directive (U.S. National Security Decision Directive 54) to promote :silent revolutions in communist countries,” the U.S. exerted pressure, both covert and overt, to aggravate internal tensions in communist countries and pull them from the Soviet orbit. Due to low GDP growth, a war of attrition in Afghanistan, intense arms race expenditure, the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear meltdown, tightening military and economic encirclement, and divisions between ruling factions in Moscow, Presidents Bush and Gorbachev agreed to an end to the Cold War at the Malta Summit in December 1989. The Warsaw Pact was disbanded in February 1991 based partially on a commitment 214 Materialism and the Critique of Energy made on February 10, 1990 by West German foreign minister HansDietrich Genscher to Eduard Shevardnadze that NATO would not expand any further to the east. Proclamations of the end of history and post–Cold War globalization that followed did not dampen the enthusiasm of the United States government and its NATO allies for covert action, destabilization, coercion, and outright invasion of sovereign states that sought national control over energy reserves (among other resources). Under the neoliberal Washington Consensus, a string of Color Revolutions throughout the 1990s and 2000s (such as Yugoslavia [1992–2000], Georgia [2003, and Southern Ossetia’s secession in 2008], Ukraine [2004–2014], Kyrgyzstan [2005], Moldova [2009]) saw the use of strategies to foment tensions along ethnic, religious, and linguistic divisions. Against U.N. Security Council resolutions, Yugoslavia was broken up and tensions created along ethnic and religious lines, and Kosovo was annexed by NATO powers, which then expanded into central Europe. With policy advice from U.S. think tanks and local NGOs, similar tactics were extended to the North Caucasus and Central Asia (and the Far East), the prize being access and control of the bounty in these oil- and gas-rich areas and geostrategic corridors. Post 9/11 With the pretext of hunting the perpetrators of the September 11, 2001 attacks, the United States invaded and occupied Afghanistan, and currently maintains nine major bases and at least 400 smaller bases and installations with NATO coalition partners excluding those operated by joint command with Afghan government forces. This includes the enormous Bagram Air Base, from which the U.S. could seek to facilitate operations to strengthen control over the QatarBaluchistan-Pakistan and Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) oil and gas pipelines (U.S.-Saudi backed).28 This has provided further leverage to the U.S. to back Pakistani “rebels,” for example, to obstruct the rival Russia-China sponsored Iran-Pakistan (IP) pipeline through Baluchistan. Underway since the 1990s, such pipeline projects Nuclear Power and Oil Capital 215 promise to expand as multinational rivalry intensifies for control over the geostrategic trade corridors in Central Asia. As the Tengiz field oil reserves were discovered in the Caspian Sea in 1979, U.S. bases, already present in Afghanistan and in the region, facilitated the U.S. military and oil corporations to vie for a share over licenses and pipelines that pump Kazakh oil with five regional nation-states (Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Iran, Azerbaijan). Pipelines are planned or already pass through Russia to the Black Sea in the west, to Iranian clients in the south, and to China’s Xinjiang province in the east. China’s considerable assistance to develop Pakistan’s Gwadar port as a regional oil-gas sea-land transport hub and India’s assistance (together with a railway) to develop Iran’s south coast Chabahar port in the Gulf of Oman (72 km from Gwadar) further complicate these capital power relations in Central and South Asia.29 Together with the occupation of Afghanistan, it was no coincidence that in 2002 the Bush II administration withdrew from the AntiBallistic Missile (ABM) Treaty of 1972 while maintaining the U.S. nuclear first-use policy. The U.S., NATO and Japan (followed by others) then began deploying jointly developed Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) shields and radar in strategic areas of Europe and Northeast Asia. Despite repeated demands by Russia and China for the withdrawal of U.S.-NATO installations of tactical nuclear weapons, as they violated the 1968 treaty on Nuclear Weapons Non-Proliferation, these alliance partners dismissed these concerns as irrelevant as the systems were “defensive” and were intended to protect against missiles from Iran and North Korea. Instead they then accused China and Russia of protecting these so-called rogue state targets. The latest example of this scenario is the 2016 Seoul-Washington agreement to install the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile batteries deployed in the southern region of South Korea. Bush II’s sequel Operation Enduring Freedom (2003) saw the complete removal of the Ba’athist government based, ironically, on a pretext of Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD or, nuclear weapons). General Colin Powell provided false evidence (with U.K. 216 Materialism and the Critique of Energy support) at the United Nations Security Council, and advanced the vaguely defined Global War on Terror to target the same Islamist “terrorist groups” (such as al-Qaeda) that the U.S. had been funding to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and Russia in Chechnya and Dagestan.30 In lieu of protecting Israel and the U.S.-Saudi (and Gulf Cooperation Council states) oil-finance mechanism and hegemony in the Middle East, only later was it revealed that a U.S.-led program to recruit mercenary jihadi fighters (including former Ba’athists and Sunnis in but not limited to Iraq) was set up to help “take out seven countries in five years” (Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Iran) and to further prize open strategic territories to Capital energy interests. Syria and Ukraine: Recent Regime Change Plans for Pipeline Hegemony The conflicts in Syria (since 2011) and Ukraine (since 2014) are also indicative of the centrality of oil and gas to U.S.-led aims for monopoly control. In the legacy of CIA-led attempts to control oil supply (Trans-Arabia [Oil] Pipeline) running through Syria to Europe since 1949 by the destabilization of elected governments (namely, assassinations, insurgencies, and political interference), and in contrast to the dominant mediations of the “Arab Spring,” Syrian “civil war” and “drought” as primary causes of this conflict since 2011, a foreign-sponsored insurgency (loosely known as ISIS/ISIL/IS in part comprised of former Iraq Army soldiers laid off under orders from General Paul Bremer and asembled into Al Qaeda Iraq (AQI), Al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat Al-Nusra renamed as Jabhat Fatah Al-Sham and Hayat Tahrir al Sham, Jaysh al Islam, and the Free Syrian Army brigades among others) has been central to creating favorable conditions for the U.S. and its allies.31 In 2009, the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad rejected a $10 billion Qatari gas pipeline project proposed in 2000 to run from Qatar (North Dome field shared with Iran’s South Pars field) through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, and Turkey (Qatar-Turkey Gas Pipeline) to Europe. Nuclear Power and Oil Capital 217 Similarly, plans have been long underway for the construction of an oil pipeline from Saudi Arabia through Syria to Europe continue. The construction, saving costs, and expanding volume as it would be cheaper and faster than sea transport, would be carried out by a U.S. corporation such as Halliburton and marketed to Europe by firms like Exxon. Iran, seeking to use Syria as a corridor for its gas, has intervened to defend the Assad government against the U.S.-SaudiQatari-backed jihadi insurgency to weaken and overthrow and replace Assad with a government. If they cannot replace the government with one more favorable to their interests, rather than occupy Syria, they seek to secure control over a strip in former Syrian territory through which to run the pipelines. This oil-gas link would position GCC states to dominate world natural gas and oil markets; accrue power to Qatar, host to two U.S. bases, and Saudi Arabia, host to a drone base and several “units”; deliver huge revenues to U.S. corporations that refine and distribute the oil and gas to Europe and to Ankara through transit fees as a transect hub; and to U.S.-U.K. banks through dollar commissions. It would undercut Russia’s major share (70 percent of Russia’s gas supply goes to Europe) of Europe’s gas supply (Nord Stream to Germany and the planned South Stream pipeline through Turkey), providing a further means to isolate that nation. This could also contribute to a long-planned greater Middle East territorial project and a NATO corridor from Turkey to India as an alternative to the Strait of Hormuz supply route in case of war with Iran. Instead, with conflicts sparked from the cooption of initially nonviolent protests in Syria and Libya in 2011, in 2012 Syria signed off on a pipeline from Iran’s South Pars through Syria to the ports of Lebanon, giving influence to Iran at the expense of Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Israel, and leaving Iran and Russia to negotiate without U.S. involvement. In 2012, having supplied funding and intelligence to Syrian opposition groups since 2009, the United States joined France, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the U.K. to form the Friends of Syria Coalition and demand and conduct operations for the removal 218 Materialism and the Critique of Energy of Assad. From around this point, a multinational force of Islamist Sunni mercenaries (as listed above) were armed, trained, and funded primarily by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, the United States, NATO, and Israel to destabilize and gain partial control of Syrian territory and ultimately replace the Assad government.32 Again, to justify this intervention, in 2013 the Syrian government was widely accused of using its chemical weapons (sarin) on Syrian civilians in the Ghouta chemical weapons attack which left 1,400 dead. Later, numerous investigative journalists revealed a secret agreement in 2012 between the Obama administration and leaders from Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar to set up a sarin gas attack and blame it on Assad to provide further justification for the “moderate rebels” and pretext for U.S. invasion and regime change in Syria. In 2013, Russia persuaded Syria to relinquish its chemical weapons stockpile, which it duly did. Several investigative journalists then found and corroborated that the sarin came from Libya’s stockpile, along with many other weapons, which were being run in “rat lines” through Turkey.33 These accusations and counter-accusations of chemical weapons attacks have continued since. As this chapter goes to press, yet another chemical weapons event in Khan Sheikhun on April 4, 2017 was blamed on the Syrian government and used to justify a U.S. unilateral retaliation with tomahawk missiles on the Shayrat airbase and further discredit the Assad government. The United Nations Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) confirmed that traces of sarin gas found in the attack were not linked to the Syrian government’s former stockpile of chemical weapons. The report corroborates the assertions of the Syrian government that armed insurgents were responsible for the chemical attack, along with the preceding attacks.34 In October 2013, Russia then sent a flotilla to confront U.S.-NATO naval and air forces to back down from a planned attack on Syria from the Mediterranean. Russia provided further military assistance at the request of the elected Syrian government since September 2015 following ISIS’s control of transit corridors and major town centers Nuclear Power and Oil Capital 219 including Raqqa, northeastern Syria and Mosul (and Erbil and Kirkuk) in northern Iraq, which have oil fields (matching a possible pipeline route). Although motivated by its strategic interests — to protect its naval base in Latakia, one of only ten Russian foreign military bases and facilities, its share of the European gas market, and to curb a long-term internal Islamist insurgency — Russia’s operations remained within international law. By contrast, the U.S.-led coalition has claimed to be fighting ISIS while demanding that the Syrian government negotiate to share power with non-ISIS “moderate” groups who seek to establish a “federal system.”35 While Damascus has largely been brought under control, bitter fighting continues with major flashpoints in Raqqa, Aleppo, Deir Ez-zor, Manbij, Idlib, Ramadi, Homs, and Hama. As if in revenge for Russia’s intervention to protect Syria, a “civil war” in Ukraine was also triggered through an illegal coup d’état to overthrow the elected Yanukovych government in February 2014. When the Yanukovych government defaulted on its loans to Russia and chose to honor a Russian repayment agreement instead of accepting an IMF austerity package, preexisting tensions were aggravated between energy-rich (coal) but politically neglected eastern provinces (Donetsk, Donbass, Lugansk) which favored ties and trade with Russia and more privileged western provinces where populations favored joining the European Union and signing on for IMF loans. As a traditional energy transit zone and buffer state between Russia and Europe, Ukraine has long been a target for multinational corporations assisted by U.S. and E.U. intelligence vying for shares of Ukraine’s resources. In 2008, for example, nuclear conglomerates in western-Ukraine (Tōshiba-Westinghouse/Energoatom, AREVA/ VostGOK) attempted to exclude Russian involvement in Ukraine nuclear power by converting Russian nuclear reactors (VVER WaterWater Energetic Reactors) to uranium and plutonium fuels (MOX Mixed-Oxide).36 Mediated as a color revolution against an unpopular and corrupt pro-Russia government, the new government was constituted with 220 Materialism and the Critique of Energy members favored by the U.S. “Ukraine hands” (such as U.S. State Department Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt) including the former Prime Minister (Arseniy Yatsenyuk) and several Ukrainian émigré or foreign-born parliamentary members (such as former Georgian President Saakashvili as Governor of Odessa). Russia assumed control of Crimea to defend its access to the Black Sea following overwhelming electoral support for secession (over 70 percent in favor by western polls). Labeled an annexation, Russia was punished with several rounds of economic sanctions and banned from the G8 summit. As Russia attempted to uphold the terms of the subsequent Minsk Protocol (no foreign interference in Ukraine), Russian-speaking populations in eastern Ukraine, Odessa, and Crimea were attacked and besieged on numerous occasions by government and hard-right paramilitary forces (Right Sector, Svoboda, Azov Brigade, Maidan, Bandera) on anti-terrorist and even anti-Communist pretexts.37 The Poroshenko government also blocked energy supply to Crimea (recovered with an energy bridge from Russia), while natural gas and heating prices doubled in 2016 in Ukraine under an IMF shock therapy program. Coalition allies such as Australia ignored Ukraine’s declared intentions to develop nuclear weapons in the next ten years and a significant accident in late 2014 at the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant which has leaked radioactive material into the environment on several occasions, and blocked uranium supply to Russia while signing uranium export agreements with Ukraine.38 This agreement has since been ratified. The U.S. “Asia Pivot” and Nuclear Build-up As befitting a global hegemon, U.S. efforts to control the world economy have not been limited to the Middle East, Central Europe, and Central Asia. In a new doctrine informally known as the Asia Pivot devised in 2009 and announced by President Obama in Canberra in 2011, the intention was declared to deploy 60 percent of U.S. military forces along an arc extending from Northeast Asia to the Philippines and Vietnam to Australia and India. Intended to contain and encircle Nuclear Power and Oil Capital 221 China and Russia in the Indo-Asia-Pacific regions, the U.S. called on regional allies to increase their military expenditure to more than 2 percent of GDP. India and Japan, two central nodes in this arc, demonstrate how nuclear and energy supply chains are inextricable from this strategy of military positioning and presence. In stark contrast to the public opprobrium, heavy sanctions, and military threats to Iran and North Korea for their nuclear programmes, U.S.-led efforts in 2004–2005 (brokered since the mid 1990s) led to an agreement in 2008 to bequeath India, a non-NPT member, with a waiver to trade with members of the forty-eight member Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG). Although India was finally denied formal membership of the NSG in 2016 as it would breach its mandate not to include non-NPT states, India will likely apply again. It was also able to use the waiver to sign with NSG members in bilateral agreements for supplies of raw and enriched uranium and nuclear power technologies (from United States, France, including parts from Japan, Russia, and likely Japan). In contrast, others (such as Pakistan) continue to be denied either a waiver or full admission to the NSG. In return for this U.S. leveraging, India signed up to a “global security partnership” with the United States to counter, encircle, and contain Chinese military reach and energy supply routes, including in the Bay of Bengal and South China Sea. Against its typical position of independence, building on its “Look East” policy of 1991, India also launched its “Act East” policy of more proactive engagement in Asia, part of which is its closer security alliance with the U.S. and Japan. India’s increased nuclear generating capacity would contribute to boosting power for military manufacturing (such as blue-water navy) while surplus uranium allows it to divert Indigenous uranium to Indigenous reactors and reprocessing facilities (ten out of twenty are beyond IAEA scrutiny) for high-grade fuel for nuclear warheads.39 These weapons would supply the new nuclear armed and fueled attack submarine fleet (four or five Arihants) in development since the 1980s, and which would make India the sixth nation to possess a credible socalled second-strike deterrent (with U.S., U.K., France, Russia, China) 222 Materialism and the Critique of Energy and places India behind U.S. and Russia in nuclear triad capacity (tactical, intermediate, or multiple nuclear warhead delivery from land, sea, and air). The Arihants are also intended for anti-submarine warfare capability against China in the Indian Ocean.40 At the same time, Prime Ministers Singh and Modi both framed India’s contracts for fabulously expensive foreign nuclear reactors as an attempt to avert a “power crisis” and provide for “energy-starved” populations (roughly four hundred million) who lack modern cooking and heating. In fact, while national energy consumption is expected to double in the next twenty years, Modi’s “Make in India” campaign will exploit the nation’s vast supply of cheap labor and growing middle-class appetite for electricity for a transnational capitalist class of investors.41 Instead of social uplift, these reactors will increase electricity bills for Indian taxpayers while raising electricity capacity by only a few percent. The real burden of this “atomic revolution” is borne by urban working classes in the form of high electricity bills and farming-fishing and tribal communities residing near uranium mines and nuclear power installations in the form of radiation exposures and contamination, who have sought to protect their subsistence economies from nuclear operations since 1988.42 Special concessions for India is a familiar story in Northeast and Southeast Asia. While Washington has often called the United States the “indispensable nation” (presumably to “keep the peace”) it has long aggravated regional divisions to justify its forward deployments. The United States is the only nation that has agreed to protect favoured states through extended nuclear deterrence which either store/d U.S. nuclear weapons or agree/d to host U.S. nuclear weapons carriers (for example, latent or de facto nuclear states such as Japan, ROK, the Philippines, Australia, Canada), and the only country to “share” its nuclear weapons (in U.S. bases and mounted on delivery platforms) with other states (Belgium, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Turkey, U.K.). As a recipient of U.S. extended nuclear deterrence, Japan is also the only non-nuclear NPT member state to date to possess a significant nuclear stockpile via nuclear fuel reprocessing. While it claims to seek Nuclear Power and Oil Capital 223 energy self-sufficiency by closing the nuclear fuel cycle (particularly after the 1974–1976 oil shocks), key political leaders and strategists have long claimed Japan’s right to develop tactical nuclear weapons in defense of the nation under the U.N. Charter. In the 1980s, during the U.S. Star Wars (SDI) program and Soviet deployment of SS-20 intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs), Japan committed research and development to missile defense technology. In fact, Japan has maintained a “hedge” capacity to produce high-enriched uranium, plutonium, and tritium for construction and maintenance of nuclear weapons, including for miniaturized warheads.43 It has used aggressive-defensive North Korean rhetoric and DPRK missile testing since 1998 (nuclearized since 2006) to justify its acquisition of BMD on par with NATO powers and boosting interoperable capacity for U.S.-Japan “collective defence” forces further enabled by the Abe government’s forceful reforms of Japan’s constitution. The U.S. Asia Pivot is only a step behind U.S.-NATO military posture in Europe. Since a U.S.-NATO missile umbrella ranging from Greenland to the Azores in Portugal was first announced by Bush II in 2007, in May 2016 a new anti-missile shield (MK 41) facility in Romania was opened and another planned for Poland in 2018 to join those in Turkey and Spain. Russian President Vladimir Putin issued a series of candid statements on this matter. In 2016, for instance, Putin pointed out that the nonexistent “Iranian threat” was a front to carry out the implementation and loading of the NATO Missile Defense (MD) System positioned in Europe. This uses sea-based mid-range Tomahawk subsonic cruise missile rocket launchers that can penetrate territories within 500 kilometers. With advances in U.S. missile technologies these are expected to increase to 1,000 kilometers and further. As Putin elaborated, the MD system is only one component in a larger system of offensive military potential: “one complex blocks, the other launches a high-precision weapon, the third blocks a potential nuclear strike and the fourth sends out its own nuclear weapon in response.” Although this system is non-nuclear, as the nuclear element was put on hold in the 1980s, Putin’s expressed concern is twofold. First, these 224 Materialism and the Critique of Energy missiles could be used to target Russia’s nuclear potential, taking out its retaliatory capability and therefore its deterrent function. The second is the inability of Russian intelligence to determine whether or not these missiles are nuclear, potentially forcing Russia either to launch nuclear weapons in correct or mistaken retaliation for an apparent nuclear attack or to launch in anticipation of a nuclear attack (preemptive or first-use nuclear strike). If this is correct, then Putin is correct to assert that rather than a “defense” system, this system is an “offense” system that is intended not to “prevent aggression” but to enable it. Putin considers this as a disruption to the strategic balance of power underwritten by a system of mutually assured destruction as it allows the U.S. nuclear primacy.44 Russian and Chinese concerns appear to have been accurate, as these systems could not only potentially neutralize their offensive missile capabilities, they could also be reequipped with cruise missiles with significant reach into Russian and Chinese territories to be used in a “limited nuclear war.” The U.S. also withdrew from the U.S.-Russia megatons to megawatts program and New START treaty signed in 2010, and committed $355 billion for smaller yet more powerful nuclear weapons over ten years. Between 2011 and early 2016, the United States launched fifteen unarmed nuclear missile tests (including Minuteman 3 ICBMs from California to Kwajalein atoll).45 The Obama administration committed $1 trillion to an overall nuclear weapons upgrade over thirty years (long-range bombers, nuclear submarines, ICBMs, cruise missiles, F-35 fitted B61-12 bombs, nuclear plants, and laboratories).45 The Trump administration has confirmed this and added an extra $54 billion to defense. With NATO-Russia military communications cut since the Ukraine crisis in 2013, U.S.-NATO forces have run multinational “rapid reaction” drills (40,000 troops), pre-positioned strategic bombers, tanks, and bases and rotated troops (four battalions or 4,000 U.S., U.K., German) in the Baltic states (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia), Poland, Norway, and also Jordan.46 While trading accusations of violations of the 1987 Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), Russia Nuclear Power and Oil Capital 225 refused to join the 2016 Nuclear Security Summit. It deployed Iskander nuclear-capable short-range ballistic missiles in Kaliningrad and other sites within Russian borders, and also committed to new missile complexes for Russian Strategic Missile Forces (SMF), including a multiple-warhead ICBM (RS-24 Yars) and a new heavy ICBM (Sarmat). Since 2014, China and Russia have been developing new hypersonic intercontinental missiles (China-DF-ZF, Russia-3M22 Zircon) intended to maintain nuclear deterrent capability by breaking through U.S. missile fence systems on their borders, and avoid U.S. monopoly in the Baltic and South China Seas. On April 12, 2016, Beijing tested a DF-41 ICBM missile with multiple warheads that can reach the United States in thirty minutes.46 At the time of writing, Russia and China are considering building a joint missile defense system comparable to the joint operated U.S. equivalent. None of this should be surprising. In 2010, a telegram leaked from the U.S. State Department signed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, outlined a NATO plan for attacking Russia. In 2016, an election year in the United States, while U.S. think tanks targeted their rhetoric on Russian aggressive “adventurism” in Europe and Beijing’s push for “hegemony in East Asia,” economic warfare was ongoing to provoke and/or break Russia.47 With the Iranian oil export and nuclear energy embargo lifted in late 2015, Saudi Arabia glutted the world oil market by overproduction, forcing down oil prices from $103 per barrel in June 2014 (compared to an $80 per barrel average) to below $30 per barrel in February 2016 (up to $50 per barrel in June).48 Characterized as “cancer treatment,” Saudi Arabia gambled that it would suffer less than the world’s other largest oil producers — Russia and Venezuela.49 Alternatives to Interlocking Unipolarity After more than seventy years, the U.S. division and alliance architecture is stressed from “imperial overreach” with a military budget greater than the next twelve nations combined and increasing every year to fortify strategic territories and energy corridors to maximize control over supply and finance. The Beijing-Moscow “anti- 226 Materialism and the Critique of Energy system” of Belt, Road, and Pipelines (Belt and Road Initiative) across the Eurasian heartland and supported by a complex of multilateral financial and trade institutions (such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization [SCO], Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank [AIIB]) indicates the emergence of a potential alternative. As oil output in the North Sea declines, in 2016 Russia detached Russian crude oil from the U.S. dollar to trade in ruble on the St. Petersburg Exchange (SPIMEX). Russia further agreed to be paid in yuan in 2017 for its oil and gas pipeline supplies (ESPO pipeline and also Northeast Asia) to China which is the world’s largest oil importer at 8.9 percent (6.6 million bpd, November 2015).50 China also launched an independent yuan oil benchmark on the Shanghai Exchange (INE). A multi-polar world could be the most significant alternative to the dominant power system established at the end of World War II. On one hand, as attrition of infrastructure and public services and precarity in lower- and middle-income working classes grow more acute in advanced capitalist societies, denying the dominance of the dollar fixed to the world’s biggest commodity of black and blue gold (both finite non-renewable resources) could at least expose this systemic production of self-perpetuating and opportunistic crises to fairer competition. Instead of the neoliberal shock tactics of proxy wars, military intervention and “regime change”; financial manipulation; foreign loans with heavy interest; austerity, deregulation, outsourcing, integrated robotics (to replace labor); and extreme and excessive resource extraction (coal seam gas, seabed mining, supertrawler driftnet fishing, water privatization, trafficking), long-term macro and micro, local and transnational energy and infrastructure projects could foster greater trust through cooperation and could boost real employment, tax revenue, technology-access, new markets, and industries. If there is a significant and coordinated push to adopt renewable energies and reduce carbon-based dependence it could mean avoiding desperation as vital resource depletion hits harder as well as a cleaner environment. This could positively strengthen supranational institutions and sovereign states to rein in Nuclear Power and Oil Capital 227 a transnational executive class through the universal ratification and enforceable execution of international legal standards to create more equitable opportunities for development and less uneven distribution of wealth. Conclusion: Fukushima Daiichi as Exhaustion by Capital The spread and diversification of capitalism has depended on the military and economic (including energy) organizational capacities of a succession of global hegemons which have sought to foster accumulation and control on a progressively expanding and penetrating scale.51 In 2016, as in 1945 and throughout the intervening decades, nuclear energy and nuclear weapons remain instrumental in and inextricably bound to the operations and ambitions of nation states, transnational corporations, alliances, and power blocs within the global power apparatus. Nuclear power structures bind nation states within a regional and global security calculus and institutional order, while commercial or “peaceful” nuclear energy, although not completely fictitious, has provided a “fig-leaf ” for military uses. Not limited to chessboard security, however, nuclear weapons states, defacto nuclear weapons states, nuclear energy states, and non-nuclear states are simultaneously entangled in a web of energy-financialmilitary power relations. The nuclear power industry represents some of the starkest class divisions due to its centralized and concentrated system operated by a transnational power elite and insulated within exclusive domains of decision making and information access while disempowered communities bear most of its weight in the form of dispossession, loss of political agency, corruption, cheap labor, radiation exposures, and a contaminated commons. For decades in Japan, for example, informal laborers from the most vulnerable parts of society are picked up by labor brokers, often with yakuza connections, for labor on power plant construction, maintenance, and cleaning.52 As nuclear reactors grow older they become more contaminated and corroded (average forty-year life span) and these workers, vulnerable to a regime of misinformation, 228 Materialism and the Critique of Energy become increasingly exposed to radiation. They develop chronic illnesses, cancers, and leukaemia, and shortened life spans, which also have generational impacts in the form of mutagenic effects.53 Five years after the Tokyo Electric (TEPCO) Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster began on March 11, 2011 (“3.11”) it would appear that recovery, reconstruction, and revitalization is underway in Fukushima Prefecture. With the dominant narrative under control, the mainstream public assuaged, high radiation levels normalized, and a planned return to nuclear power generation (with twenty-five reactors expected to be supplying 20 percent total energy by 2030), as distinct from the response to the Chernobyl disaster the Japanese government and TEPCO have continued to vent, dump, incinerate, and redistribute radioactive materials into the atmosphere, onto land and water in Japan, and into the Pacific Ocean. To maintain a semblance of legality, the Japanese government institutionalized an armature of plausible deniability by raising its legal limits for radiation exposure.54 With the support of the international nuclear regulators, the authorities also deployed a “risk-communications” narrative by trivializing radiation danger and diverting focus from scientific understandings of available data to psychological responses so as to facilitate community acceptance and resilience in contaminated areas. To return capital loss to economic profit for the major corporations involved and their shareholders and investors, these social costs are being externalized and mostly “informal labor” is being employed to convert this once high-yield organic region of Fukushima into decommissioning and radiation research and waste storage and incineration hubs. Meanwhile the radioactive waste continues to be distributed around the country and recirculated in various forms. “Debt” in the form of radiation burden has been forced on human and non-human biota inside and outside Japan, while those who attempt to protect their fundamental rights to good health, well-being, and safety have been suppressed. As graphically reinforced in Fukushima Daiichi and more recently the Kumamoto earthquakes on July 14–16, 2016 (1,026 earthquakes Nuclear Power and Oil Capital 229 including two of seven-plus magnitude) and close to two nuclear power stations, it is painfully obvious that no safety measures are adequate to protect nuclear power plants against seismicity and other extreme weather events (not to mention neglect, sabotage, or military attack). Together with many other nuclear energy related accidents, these systemic conditions outlined above indicate that utility profits, regulatory capture, and “cheaper” electricity are only some of the drivers of Japan’s nuclear power program. As I have discussed above, the influence of the transnational nuclear industry (particularly Japan-U.S.) together with other factors such as oil pricing and distribution, financial exchange rates, and a geopolitical alliance apparatus that includes nuclear security, means that nuclear power in Japan is an energy and weapons hedge. When all costs are included, however, particularly in the local economic, social, health, and broader environmental sectors, nuclear power is symptomatic of the deep violence of late capitalism as an apparatus of capital power relations. In its colonization of the most intimate bio-ecological bonds over several generations relative to different species and its large-scale destructive capacity, it mimics Indigenous dispossession and erosion of precapitalist economic and social relations in abrogation of their rights to shared resources at the base of production and sustainable environments and living standards. In the neoliberal state-corporate accord for unlimited exploitation of “cheap nature,” externalizing costs and risk, protecting private assets, and emptying out public institutions to facilitate their financial growth margins, in the aim to own and commodify almost anything, Capital as subject is exhausting the planetary commons (as manifest in carbon emissions, heating, ocean acidification, biodiversity loss, accelerated consumption, and human population growth, among other things).55 Triggering profits through energy conflicts which stimulate price fluctuations, hydrocarbons access, weapons sales, stock investment, financial commissions, reconstruction contracts, and weakened regulation, its irrational kernel is exposed as it suppresses the same social and ecological forces which repair and regenerate 230 Materialism and the Critique of Energy conditions for life’s flourishing.56 If the planetary commons are to be recognized as a common inheritance and to be legally held in public trust for for collective and sustainable use by all people as necessary for the continued thriving of planetary life, then understanding the mechanisms of the nuclear-oil-dollar-weapons complex may be a strategic step toward this goal.57 A multipolar system may offer one of the few realistic interim alternatives to the current U.S.-U.K.-led petro-nuclear corporate state model of “cheap” fuels, permanent war, privatized public institutions, tax insulation for an executive class, mass incarceration, immiserated and exposed labor, and religious and political fundamentalisms. Over the longer term, however, reinvigorated forms and praxes of trans-local social organization for worker-communities deploying renewable energy systems and subsistence economies on a mass scale could be more viable to remain within planetary boundaries. In the present interregnum, avoiding the cooption of “mixed economies” by neoliberal Capital and its political representatives remains a challenge.58 Nuclear Power and Oil Capital 231 Notes 1. Jay Hughes, “Terrorism targets citizens, Powell says,” Newsok, August 12, 1988, http://newsok.com/article/2622322. 2. Control points of the U.S. maritime power (5th and 7th Fleets) include the Strait of Hormuz, Strait of Malacca, Panama Canal, Turkish Straits, Danish Straits, the Bay of Bengal, as well as land-bases in the Gulf states, Central Asia, east Europe, India, the Philippines, Japan, South Korea and northern Australia. 3. See USCENTCOM, “Shaping the Central Region for the 21st Century,” Strategic Plan II 1997–1999 (MacDill Air Force Base, Florida: Office of the Commander-in-Chief, 1997) 5. 4. Halford Mackinder, “The Geographical Pivot of History,” The Geographical Society, 23-24 (April 1904) 421–437. 5. This fulfills the geostrategy formulated by Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives, (New York: Basic Books, 1997). 6. David Painter, “Oil and World Power,” Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy, 2002, http://www.americanforeignrelations.com/O-W/Oil-Oiland-world-power.html. 7. The United States supports 737 U.S. bases officially recognised in sixtythree countries as of 2005 and a likely total of 1,000 bases worldwide (including domestic military bases). See Chalmers Johnson, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006) 139. 8. See “Commercial Rights in China (‘Open Door’ Policy): Declarations by France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, Japan, and Russia accepting United States proposal for ‘open door’ policy in China,” September 6, 1899–March 20, 1900, 1 Bevans 278, http://www.loc.gov/law/help/ustreaties/bevans/m-ust000001-0278.pdf. 9. Painter, “Oil and World Power.” 10. Coordinating Committee of the Department of State, “Draft Memorandum to President Truman,” Foreign Relations of the United States, Diplomatic Papers, The Near East and Africa, 8 (1945) 45. Prepared by the Chief of 232 Materialism and the Critique of Energy the Division of Near Eastern Affairs (Merriam) and submitted to the Director of the Office of Near Eastern and African Affairs (Henderson) early in August 1945. 11. William Wohlforth, “The Stability of a Unipolar World,” International Security 24 (Summer 1999) 14–15. 12. See for example, Jon Mitchell, “’Seconds away from Midnight’: U.S. Nuclear Missile Pioneers on Okinawaa Break Fifty Year Silence on a Hidden Nuclear Crisis of 1962,” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, 10.1 (2012) http://www.japanfocus.org/-Jon-Mitchell/3800/article.html; Steve Rabson, “Okinawa’s Henoko was a storage location for nuclear weapons: published account,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, 11.1 (2013) http:// apjjf.org/2013/11/1/Steve-Rabson/3884/article.html. 13. Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War (New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1960); Henry Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957). 14. This was argued, for example, in a report written in 1957 by M. Louis Armand, Franz Etzel, and Francesco Giordani entitled “A target for Euratom” cited in Roy Herbert, “Progress in Euratom,” New Scientist, 282 (April 12, 1962). In Japan, from as early as 1945 through to the mid-1950s, media commentaries focused on nuclear power as a “vital technology” and a benchmark of civilization. See Takekawa Shunichi, “Drawing a Line between Peaceful and Military Uses of Nuclear Power: The Japanese Press, 1945–1955,” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, 10.37 (2012) http://apjjf. org/-Shunichi-TAKEKAWA/3823. 15. “Oil and World Power.” 16. Founded in 1954 by Jozef Retinger and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, the Bilderberg Group invited a conservative and liberal representatives from the United States and Western Europe to find ways to promote Atlanticism and bolster free market western capitalism through political, economic, and military means. The group continues to comprise some of the major stakeholders in the world’s largest oil corporations. 17. F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (London: Pluto P, 2004) 153, 162. Nuclear Power and Oil Capital 18. 233 Andrea Wong, “The Untold Story Behind Saudi Arabia’s 41-Year U.S. Debt Secret,” Bloomberg, May 30, 2016, http://www.bloomberg.com/ news/features/2016-05-30/the-untold-story-behind-saudi-arabia-s-41year-u-s-debt-secret. See also David Spiro, The Hidden Hand of American Hegemony: Petrodollar Recycling and International Markets (New York: Columbia UP, 1999). 19. See, for example, Robin Rowley, Shimshom Bichler, Jonathan Nitzan, “The Armadollar-Petrodollar Coalition and the Middle East,” Working Papers 89:10 (1989) 1–54, http://bnarchives.yorku.ca/134/01/890101RBN_ ADPD_Coalition_and_the_ME.pdf. 20. Alan Freeman and Boris Kagarlitsky eds., The Politics of Empire: Globalisation in Crisis, (London: Pluto P, 2004); Leo Panitch and Steve Gindin, Global Capitalism and American Empire, (London: Merlin Press, 2012) 50. 21. Stephen M. Walt, “Wikileaks, April Glaspie and Saddam Hussein,” Foreign Policy, January 9, 2011, http://foreignpolicy.com/2011/01/09/ wikileaks-april-glaspie-and-saddam-hussein/, and Joseph Wilson, The Politics of Truth: A Diplomat’s Memoir: Inside the War and the Lies that Betrayed my wife’s CIA identity (New York: Carol and Graf 2004) 101–104. 22. Editor, “Text of Bush’s Letter to Saddam Hussein,” LA Times, January 12, 1991, http://articles.latimes.com/1991-01-13/news/mn-412_1_u-nsecurity-council-resolution, and Editor, “Confrontation in the Gulf: Excerpts on Iraqi Document on Meeting with U.S. Envoy,” The New York Times, September 23, 1990, http://www.nytimes.com/1990/09/23/world/ confrontation-in-the-gulf-excerpts-from-iraqi-document-on-meetingwith-us-envoy.html. 23. This testimony by fifteen-year-old “Nayirah” (only first name provided) before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus was mediated on American prime-time television. Only later was she revealed to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the United States Saud al-Sabah, supported by the Citizens for a Free Kuwait. Amnesty International’s corroboration was later retracted and the testimony was exposed as fabricated by PR firm Hill and Knowlton. Susanne Roschwalb, “The Hill & Knowlton Cases: A Brief on the Controversy,” Public Relations Review 234 Materialism and the Critique of Energy 20:3 (1994) 267–276. 24. Andrew Cockburn and Patrick Cockburn, Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein (London: Verso 2000), and Patrick Cockburn, “How the West Set Saddam on the Bloody Road to Power,” The Independent, June 29, 2007, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/revealedhow-the-west-set-saddam-on-the-bloody-road-to-power-1258618.html. 25. For more detail see, for example, Douglas Frantz and Murray Waas, “U.S. Loans Indirectly Financed Iraq Military: Foreign Aid: Baker Pushed through Agriculture Credits that Helped Hussein Free up Money for Arms,” The Los Angeles Times, February 23, 1992, http://articles.latimes. com/1992-02-25/news/mn-2628_1_foreign-policy. 26. See for example, Central Intelligence Agency. Government of the United States. “Bringing Real Muscle to Bear Against Syria,” September 14, 1983, Approved Release Date May 17, 2008, CIA Reading Room, https://www.cia. gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP88B00443R001404090133-0.pdf. 27. Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan, “The Weapondollar — Petrodollar Coalition: Still about Oil?” Philosophers for Change, December 16, 2014, https://philosophersforchange.org/2014/12/16/the-weapondollarpetrodollar-coalition-still-about-oil/ 28. See for example, “Politics: U.S. Policy Towards Taliban Influenced by Oil — Authors,” Inter Press Service News Agency, May 6, 2016, http://www. ipsnews.net/2001/11/politics-us-policy-towards-taliban-influencedby-oil-authors/, citing Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie, Forbidden Truth: U.S. Secret Oil Diplomacy and the Failed Hunt for Bin Laden (New York: Nation Books/Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2002), and Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven: Yale UP, 2001) 145. 29. Government of the United States, Department of Defense, “Nuclear Posture Review Report,” April 2010, http://www.defense.gov/npr/ docs/2010%20nuclear%20posture%20review%20report.pdf. 30. Wesley Clark, Winning Modern Wars (New York: Public Affairs, 2003) 130. 31. This pattern has a long legacy. Since 1949, the CIA began interfering in the politics of the newly recognized sovereign state of Syria which, with the aid of the British and Australian forces, had expelled the French Nuclear Power and Oil Capital 235 Vichy colonial rulers. Flush with success from the engineered coup in Operation Ajax that oustered Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, in 1956–1958, for example, Allen Dulles, Frank Wisner, and the CIA together with MI6 (such as the prototypical Friends of Syria Association) arranged support for a series of assassinations by the Muslim Brotherhood and others in the name of “holy jihadism” against Arab nationalism putatively to hold off communism in Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, and Iraq. Actually it was to establish governments that would support American oil, gas, weapons and geostrategic interests. See Robert F. Kennedy Jr., “Why Arabs Don’t Trust America,” Politico, February 22, 2016, http:// www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/02/rfk-jr-why-arabs-donttrust-america-213601, and Frank Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York: Random House, 2008). This CIA “kingmaking” activity is sharply criticized in the U.S. Bruce Lovett Report, 1956 on covert actions by the CIA/Operations Coordinating Board (OCB), https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_reports_by_the_U.S._Government_on_ the_CIA#1956_Bruce-Lovett_Report. U.S. funding for Syrian opposition groups at least since 2005 when the Bush administration froze diplomatic relations with Syria. The U.S. State Department provided $6 million to Barada TV (U.K.) to promote an anti-government message. See Craig Whitlock, “US secretly backed Syrian opposition groups cables released by Wikileaks show,” Washington Post, April 14, 2011, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/us-secretly-backed-syrianopposition-groups-cables-released-by-wikileaks-show/2011/04/14/ AF1p9hwD_story.html. 32. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton indicated as much in an email in which she advocated the overthrow of Assad in order to undermine Iran and strengthen Israel’s regional nuclear hegemony. Hillary Clinton, December 31, 2012, U.S. Department of State Case No. F-2014-20439 Doc No. C05794498, Wikileaks, https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/ emailid/18328. See Tim Anderson, The Dirty War on Syria: Washington, Regime Change and Resistance (Montreal: Global Research 2016) 102–103. See also, Editor, “Turkey is key supplier of weapons, military hardware to ISIS — Russian envoy to UN,” Russia Today, April 1, 2016, https://www. 236 Materialism and the Critique of Energy rt.com/news/338038-isis-weapons-turkey-churkin/. 33. Seymour Hersh, “Whose Sarin?,” London Review of Books, 35:24 (December 19, 2013) 9–12, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n24/seymour-mhersh/whose-sarin; Seymour Hersh, “The Red Line and the Rat Line,” London Review of Books, 36:8 (April 17, 2014) 21–24, http://www.lrb.co.uk/ v36/n08/seymour-m-hersh/the-red-line-and-the-rat-line; Johnlee Varghese, “Libya: ISIS takes over Gaddafi-era chemical factory, steals tons of mustard gas, sarin,” IB Times, February 23, 2015, http://www. ibtimes.co.in/libya-isis-takes-over-gaddafi-era-chemical-factorysteals-tons-mustard-gas-sarin-624301; “ISIS stole gas from Libya stores and has used it, Gaddafi’s cousin tells RT,” Russia Today, December 19, 2015, https://www.rt.com/news/326497-gaddafi-cousin-isis-sarin/; Chrisof Lehmann, “Top US and Saudi Officials responsible for chemical weapons in Syria,” MSNBC International, October 7, 2013, http://nsnbc. me/2013/10/07/top-us-and-saudi-officials-responsible-for-chemicalweapons-in-syria/; Richard Lloyd and Theodore Postol, “Possible Implications of Faulty US Technical Intelligence in the Damascus Nerve Agent Attack of 21 August 2013,” January 14, 2014, http://www. voltairenet.org/IMG/pdf/possible-implications-of-bad-intelligence.pdf. 34. Theodore Postol, “Assessment of White House Intelligence Report of April 11, 2017 About the Nerve Agent Attack in Khan Shaykhun, Syria,” public correspondence, April 17, 2017, available at http://imgur.com/a/ W4zQx 35. A declassified 2012 U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency document made several clarifying revelations that included that Al-Qaeda Iraq drove the opposition in Syria from the beginning; external and Western powers identified with this opposition; the establishment of ISIS would derive from the Syrian insurgency comprising Salafists, Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI; the establishment of a “Salafist Principality” or a “Sunni Islamic State” in East Syria was desirable to desired to “the West, Gulf Countries, and Turkey,” “safe havens” (or “no fly zones” permitting “humanitarian intervention”) were recommended in areas conquered by Islamic insurgents; this could destroy a unified Iraq and could renew re-entry of terrorist elements into Iraq. http:// Nuclear Power and Oil Capital 237 www.judicialwatch.org/document-archive/pgs-287-293-291-jw-vdod-and-state-14-812-2/. This point has been followed and examined, in varying degrees, by numerous journalists, authors, and analysts. See, for example, Stephen Gowans, “The Pentagon’s Plan to convert the Islamic State Caliphate into a US-backed Syrian Rebel puppet regime,” Global Research, May 5, 2016, http://www.globalresearch.ca/ the-pentagons-plan-to-convert-the-islamic-state-caliphate-into-aus-backed-syrian-rebel-puppet-regime/5523653?print=1. Further, it is important to recognize that Israel, in the aim of weakening the SyriaIran-Hezbollah alliance, has strengthened its ties with Saudi Arabia and other Sunni states contravening traditional alignments. 36. Rosatom produces MOX fuel in Beloyarskaya in direct competition with French producers in the Rhone and Languedoc-Roussillon regions, with U.K. producers in Sellafield (and possibly Hinkley Point) and U.S. producers (potentially at Savannah River). 37. Paul Moreira, “Ukraine: Le Masques de la Revolution: Reponse au critiques,” Mediapart, January 30, 2016, https://blogs.mediapart.fr/ paul-moreira/blog/300116/ukraine-les-masques-de-la-revolutionreponse-aux-critiques, and Phil Wilayto, “Eyewitness Odessa: Anti-Fascist Resistance in Ukraine,” Counterpunch May 13, 2016. 38. “Radioactive leak at major Ukrainian nuclear plant — report,” Russia Today, January 1, 2015, https://www.rt.com/news/218807-ukrainenuclear-plant-leak/. The Ukrainian Defense Minister Valerie Geletei stated that it would develop nuclear weapons to protect itself. “Ukraine may create nuclear bomb in 10 years — experts,” September 17, 2014, ITAR-TASS, http://en.itar-tass.com/world/749875. 39. Just hours after India signed an agreement with Canada to buy 3,000 tons of uranium in 2015, India tested an Agni III nuclear-capable ballistic missile. Evan Dyer, “Arms control experts say Canada sends the wrong signal to countries that play by the rules,” CBC News, April 17, 2015, http:// www.cbc.ca/news/cbc-news-online-staff-list-1.1294364. 40. N.C. Bipindra, “India close to first nuclear-armed submarine,” Sydney Morning Herald, February 27, 2016, http://www.smh.com.au/world/ india-close-to-first-nucleararmed-submarine-20160226-gn54ja. 238 Materialism and the Critique of Energy html. Sangeev Miglani and Greg Torode, “Wary of China’s Indian Ocean activities, US, India discuss anti-submarine warfare,” Reuters, May 2, 2016, http://in.reuters.com/article/india-usa-submarinesidINKCN0XT059. 41. The World Bank estimates that nearly four hundred million Indians have no access to electricity. See “Energy,” World Bank, http://go.worldbank. org/6ITD8WA1A0. 42. The U.S.-Japan amalgams Tōshiba-Westinghouse and Hitatchi-General Electric are contracted for six AP1000 nuclear reactors, while France’s AREVA (with parts from Mitsubishi) are contracted for several European Pressurised Reactors (EPRs). They are intended for Mithi Virdi in Gujarat, Kovvada in Andhra Pradesh, and in Jaitapur. Russia’s Rusatom already built reactors in Koodankulam since 1988. Indian Indigenous reactors are in Chutka and Fatehad. See also, MV Ramana, “India’s nuclear power failures warn against exports,” The Conversation, October 16, 2012, https://theconversation.com/indias-nuclear-power-failureswarn-against-uranium-exports-10131. 43. See Adam Broinowski, “Sovereign Power Ambitions and the Realities of the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster,” Fukushima: Dispossession or Denuclearization, eds. Nadesan, Boys, McKillop and Wilcox (The Dispossession Publishing Group, 2014) 24–52. 44. Vladimir Putin, “Putin’s Warning: Full Speech. Vladimir Putin speaking to journalists of the world’s leading news agencies on the sidelines of the 20th St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF 2016),” June 17, 2016, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqD8lIdIMRo. 45. David Alexander, “US test-fires its ICBMs to stress its power to Russia, North Korea,” Reuters, February 26, 2016, http://www.reuters.com/ article/us-usa-defense-nuclear-idUSKCN0VZ02R. 46. Editor, “Russia’s, China’s real hypersonic gliders able to break US THAAD system,” Sputnik, April 30, 2016, http://sputniknews.com/ world/20160430/1038881534/russia-china-hypersonic-gliders.html, and Minnie Chan, “China, Russia ramping up tests of hypersonic gliders to counter new US strategy: analysts,” South China Morning Post, April 28, 2016, http://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy-defence/ Nuclear Power and Oil Capital 239 article/1939580/china-russia-ramping-tests-hypersonic-gliderscounter. 47. Atlantic Council, “Alliance at Risk: Strengthening European Defense in an Age of turbulence and competition,” Atlantic Council, February 2016, http://publications.atlanticcouncil.org/nato-alliance-at-risk/allianceat-risk.pdf; and CSIS, “NATO Summit and Energy Security in light of the Ukraine crisis,” CSIS, September 17, 2014, http://csis.org/multimedia/ audio-us-europe-transatlantic-alliance-assessing-nato-summit-andenergy-security-light-u-0. 48. F. William Engdahl, “Russia breaking US oil price monopoly,” New Eastern Outlook, January 9, 2016, http://journal-neo.org/2016/01/09/ russia-breaking-wall-st-oil-price-monopoly/. 49. Engdahl, “Russia breaking US oil price monopoly.” 50. According to William Engdahl in “Russia breaking US oil price monopoly,” Russia exports 75 percent of 10.5 million barrels per day (bpd) (2013) of oil (Urals Blend mixture) of which Europe (mainly Germany, the Netherlands and Poland via the Nord stream) buys 80 percent (3.5 million bpd), as compared to Saudi Arabia (890,000 bpd), Nigeria (810,000 bpd), Kazakhstan (580,000 bpd), and Libya (560,000 bpd). 51. Nancy Fraser, “Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode: For an Expanded Conception of Capitalism,” New Left Review, 86 (March-April 2014) 55–74, and see also Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of our Times (London: Verso 1994) 66. 52. 88 percent of 83,000 workers in Japan’s nuclear sector and 89 percent of 10,303 workers at Fukushima Daiichi in subcontracting service positions. See Editors, “Radiation Doses 4 Times Larger for ‘Outside Workers’ at Nuclear Plants,” Asahi Shimbun, July 26, 2012, http://ajw.asahi.com/ article/0311disaster/fukushima/AJ201207260071. 53. For more detail, see Adam Broinowski, “Informal Labour, Local Citizens and the Tokyo Electric Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Crisis: Responses to Neoliberal Disaster Management,” eds. T. Morris-Suzuki, E. Soh, New Worlds from Below: Informal Life Politics and Grassroots Action in 21st Century Northeast Asia (Canberra: ANU Press, 2017) 131–166. 240 54. Materialism and the Critique of Energy 1 mSv/y to 20 mSv/y for civilians; 20 mSv/y to 100 mSv/y and 250 mSv/y in emergencies for nuclear workers; 100 Bq for food and liquids in general, 50 Bq for infant foods, 50 Bq in milk, 10 Bq in water; 8000 Bq/kg for waste. 55. For a detailed explanation of this concept see Jason Moore, “Putting Nature to Work: Anthropocene, Capitalocene and the Challenge of World-Ecology,” Supramarkt: A Micro-Toolkit for Disobedient Consumers, or How to Frack the Fatal Forces of the Capitalocene, eds. Cecilia Wee, Janneke Schönenbach, Olaf Arndt (Gothenburg: Irene Books, 2015) 69–117. 56. The uranium by-product (spent fuels and nuclear waste) must be cooled in storage pools on site for roughly a hundred years before it is to be relocated to storage caskets and/or underground vaults for storage periods that far exceed the human species’ planetary existence (100,000 year average). This material is insecurable as it is beyond the capacity of human society to safely contain it from the environment, considering extreme weather, political and economic instability, conflict, and other effects. 57. Similar struggles include protecting farmers and small producers from seed patenting under WTO intellectual property provisions, open source software, and free internet information. 58. Due to renewable energy nuclear power is declining. France plans to reduce from 80 percent to 50 percent nuclear-generated electricity. Post 3.11, the German government transitioned from 30 percent to 24 percent renewable energy of total electricity supply. Subsidized at €16 billion, new businesses are estimated at €40 billion per year and additional employment at 400,000 people. Although nuclear energy is 20–30 percent of electricity supply in East Asia (Japan still near zero in 2016), 20 percent in U.S., 2 percent in South Asia, 1 percent in Latin America, and near zero in Africa and the Middle East, several nations including the U.S. are forced to close old plants due to age limit. See also Emily Steward, ABC, October 29, 2014, https://au.news.yahoo. com/vic/a/25372077/germanys-renewable-energy-incentives-andregulations-attracting-australian-companies/ Keeping the Lights On: Oil Shocks, Coal Strikes, and the Rise of Electroculture David Thomas Writing as the belle epoch drew to its acrimonious conclusion amid a hail of pickets and truncheons, Raymond Williams took issue with a stagist model of social analysis that has remained a stubborn feature of historiographic writing into the present. Williams complained that a scholarly preoccupation with “epochal” social formations often occluded recognition of the historical movements and tendencies that were concurrently active “within and beyond” the “dominant” regimes.1 Intent on moving beyond this kind of blinkeredness, he prompted cultural sociologists to focus more intently on the effects of “residual” and “emergent” forces, thereby attempting to grasp historical and cultural processes in all their contingent and mutually determining dynamism.2 In this chapter I apply Williams’s triadic conceptualization of social process — one attentive to the effects of residual, dominant, and emergent forces — to the study of energy systems and their attendant “energy cultures.” I attempt to draw out the political implications of these imbricated systems’ different technological and social compositions. Repurposing the term “electroculture,”3 I claim that a distinctive set of social formations and relations of production emerge in the wake of the 1970s energy crisis, as policymakers start to develop electricity into the signature fuel — and material medium — of a sweeping cybernetic restructuration of the global energy system.4 Yet, in accord with dynamics that Williams found to be typical of historical process, the mainlining of these new technologies not only changed the structural practices 244 Materialism and the Critique of Energy of the dominant petroculture, it also served to reactivate residual modes of class struggle that had first been developed in the heyday of steam. As Britain’s miners attempted to assert their interests in the context of a changing energy system they used modified versions of their old steam-era tactics to force the British government into an embarrassing series of political capitulations. The short-term success of their struggle hinged on the historical irony that the U.K.’s electricity — the lifeblood of the cybernetic turn — was in large part a product of domestically mined coal. In discussing “energy cultures” in this fairly loose and expansive fashion, I define “culture” in the broadest possible sense, and again I follow Williams in considering it as the shared experience of “the institutions, manners, habits of thought, and intentions” that together constitute a way of life.5 Yet in focusing on energy I also take up Imre Szeman and Dominic Boyer’s claim that “[w]e can no longer fully understand developments in culture, society, politics, and economics without paying attention to the role played by energy in each domain.”6 I build on this contention by attempting to parse the distinct forms of life and modes of struggle that arise through the socio-ecological production of the different — and overlapping — energy systems that are concurrently operative in a given time and place. For energy systems do not simply “power” life in a hidden or subterranean fashion. They are instead lived in such a complete way that we can begin to identify “the institutions, manners, habits of thought, and intentions” that are proper to each. Despite the near self-evident truth of this claim, however, it has taken a surprising amount of time for historiographic analysis to acknowledge how fully questions of energy have determined the unfolding of political struggle and technological development. Indeed, as I review key materialist accounts of the miners’ strikes and the cybernetic turn, it is clear that — with the notable exception of George Caffentzis — contemporary commentators have a tendency to overlook energy’s central significance. Thus at the same time as this paper seeks to revive some of the central categories of Williams’s historiographic theory, it Keeping the Lights On 245 also seeks to address the energy lacuna that reside at the heart of his account of this cycle of struggles. The Body Electric — Defining Electroculture The logic of understanding steam and petroleum systems as “residual” and “dominant” is perhaps obvious enough not to warrant too much explanation. But the idea of petroculture being slowly modified and displaced by the emergence of electroculture is arguably more contentious. Can electricity even be said to be a fuel? There is something inherently ambiguous about the abundant and precisely controlled electron flows that now mediate and animate so many facets of life and work in the present day. For one thing, we can never be entirely sure of their provenance. Though “noiseless and, at the point of conversion, absolutely clean,” we know that electricity is produced through diverse means.7 Some, such as nuclear fission and coal combustion, threaten titanic forms of ecological misadventure. Others, such as solar and hydro, promise to help the world system evade the grim prospects of climate change and nuclear disaster. No such ambiguity surrounds the combustion engine. We have but to turn the key to see the chemical agents of anthropogenic climate change escaping from the tailpipe. Yet in activating an electrically powered device we are left unsure if the current that supplies it is carrying us into a cleaner future, or a hotter, darker, and dirtier tomorrow. Electricity’s ambiguity stems from the fact that — unlike the other fuels that we routinely use in the course of a day — it cannot be traced back to a signature raw material such as natural gas or oil. In the bulk of its industrial and commercial forms, we encounter electricity as a flow of electric current produced through the turbine-driven rotary stimulation of electromagnetic fields. Channeled through the conductive mediums of wires and cables, traveling at somewhere between 50 to 99 percent of the speed of light, electricity is deployed on a planetary scale with industrial force. Moved with infinitesimal precision through silicon microchips in the near instantaneous interplay of billions of mutually responsive transistors, electricity 246 Materialism and the Critique of Energy serves as the universal medium of late capital’s social-machinic cognition. This comprehensive range of applications has allowed developers and policymakers to use electricity as a terraforming agent, a means of propulsion, and an unrivaled means of informational production and exchange. Energy historian Vaclav Smil writes that the “precise control” of electrical delivery now ranges “from less than one watt for the most efficient microchips to multi-gigawatt flows in large national or regional grids,” while its “focused applications” can be found “on any conceivable scale… from micromachining to powering the world’s largest excavators and the world’s fastest trains.”8 The near universal range of the potential use values of electricity — even commercial electric flight now seems within reach — allows global governance to countenance the possibility of a wholesale transition to a post–fossil fuel economy.9 Yet although the distinct features of what I define as electroculture begin to predominate in the wake of the 1970s energy crisis, it can of course be argued that electroculture began its emergence much earlier. Key breakthroughs in electrical engineering — including the development of experimental electrical trains — were made throughout the nineteenth century, and the world’s first electrical supply network was operational by the century’s close. The rapid pace of technological innovation that characterized the two world wars also led to key electromagnetic communicational developments such as radio, sonar, and the proto-computer, the Turing machine. In the immediate postwar period, electric lighting and consumer electronics such as refrigerators and radios began to wind their way into the vast bulk of households in high-income countries, while state subsidized research and development departments established the foundations of what Ernest Mandel describes as a “third industrial revolution.”10 It was not, however, until the oil shock of the 1970s that global governance began in earnest to build toward deploying electricity as its signature fuel and its key instrument of worker control and production management. Doubtless, much of the groundwork had been laid in the immediate postwar period. Written at the close of the Keeping the Lights On 247 1960s, Mandel’s magisterial Late Capitalism had already identified the harbingers of a “third industrial revolution” centered on computing technology and the intensified automation of the productive process. Yet Mandel’s work, so pioneering and prescient in its vision, was still in some respects the fruit of a more energy-innocent age, one that had not yet been compelled to fully countenance the complex socio-ecological contingencies and consequences of capital’s everdeepening dependency on fossil fuels. Indeed, from our own vantage, it is genuinely surprising that the 1975 English translation of Late Capitalism declines even to index the word “energy.” Historiography’s apparent reticence to grasp the historically determinative significance of energy is, however, in no way characteristic of attitudes in policy making circles of the era. Arriving only a few years after the first publication of Mandel’s magnum opus, the 1970s energy crisis brought the matter of energy to the forefront of policy making agendas. And as the initial computational research that Mandel so exhaustively documented concurrently issued in the development of the microchip — Intel launched the world’s first commercial microchip, the 4004, in 1971 — the stage was set for the full emergence of electrocultural policymaking. After Oil? — The Energy Crisis and the Electrical Fix The emergence of electrocultural policymaking in key economies such as the U.S. and the U.K., unfolds through two key initial phases. In its first phase the dominant concern of policy makers — spooked by the prospect of peak oil — is that of energy efficiency. Yet, in time, the immediacy of concerns over the burgeoning stagflation crisis begin to override the initial long view. In the U.K., electrocultural policymaking enters its second phase at the cusp of the new decade as Tory party think tanks begin to consider redirecting information technology as a means of improving the “economic efficiency” of the entire productive process. As other governments plotted a similar course, and as the original goal of energy efficiency was made increasingly subordinate to the concept of cost efficiency, the total energic inefficiency of 248 Materialism and the Critique of Energy the world system increased dramatically. Commodity production became a fully globalized phenomenon, distributed across immense intercontinental tracts of time and space. The search for deeper profit margins (“cost efficiency”) saw capital reaching out beyond the old industrial zones, undertaking kilowatt-hungry logistical projects whose end goal was the exploitation of less politically enfranchised workforces. As this tendency became increasingly normative, the effect of this cybernetically orchestrated, just-in-time productive process was to make global GDP contingent on a globalized energy system that relied on continually escalating levels of electrical input. Concurrently, under the ideological banner of “globalization,” shipping lanes and supply lines multiplied and proliferated, leading to the consolidation and expansion of a global seaborne petroculture. This restructuration led to massive carbon outputs, and dependency on coal (and, ironically, oil) has only substantially increased year over year in the aftermath of the oil crisis. In their initial attempts to improve capitalism’s energic efficiency, planners accelerated carbon emissions as they increasingly redesigned the global energy system around coal, an energy-dense fuel whose combustion is now regarded as the single greatest source of global carbon emissions.11 The proximate causes of our own climate quandaries are, then, in evidence in the “fixes” that capital’s developers and policymakers supplied to an earlier series of problems that first erupted around the so-called energy crisis. The “oil shock” had been very keenly felt in the United States; indeed, disquiet rippled throughout oildependent economies of the global north. With oil production in the U.S. in apparently terminal decline, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) began to flex its new-found political clout, enacting an oil embargo in response to the U.S.’s support of the Israelis during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. The resulting shortfalls in oil supply had complex and varied consequences, helping to destabilize the already sluggish global economy, and forcing the Global North to reconsider the geopolitical ramifications of its oil dependency. A new “energy security” discourse emerged in key policy making circles of Keeping the Lights On 249 high income countries.12 Oil companies began to diversify, investing in coal production in low-income countries, while governments began to consider how they could lessen their dependency on OPEC. In addition to the immediate geopolitical considerations, the jarring prospect of fossil fuel exhaustion — prefigured by the depletion of the U.S.’s vast oil reserves — lurked in the background, and determined the subsequent strategizing by elites. The response of planners and experts was more considered than a simple reshuffling of their primary fuels. As elites began to consider the prospect of transitioning away from “the oil-auto assembly line economy of the post-war era” their emphasis was not just lessening oil dependence, it was also on increasing the efficiencies of the entire energy system.13 In 1975, key U.S. energy advisor — and one time member of the Manhattan Project — Edward Teller drafted a document that exemplified this logic. Moving away from the rough parity that had been established between oil and electricity consumption in the U.S.’s postwar years, Teller’s “Energy: A Plan for Action” “envision[ed] a radically new system where electricity would demand 50 percent of the total energy, with transportation reduced to 11 percent.”14 Though anti-nuclear activism and concerns over profitability hindered the development of the nuclear generators that Teller saw as crucial components of this plan, and though electricity use has yet to overshadow transportation to the extent that Teller projected, his roadmap for energic consumption proved influential. The erstwhile dominance of oil slipped into decline as coal began to regain its market share. And as the planners’ IT-driven restructuration began to unfold, the British coal industry, which had been in constant decline in the postwar period, temporarily regained political traction. But to supply this emergent electro-economy it would initially be necessary to once again ramp up coal production and bring a new generation of nuclear reactors online. Britain was at the forefront of these developments, with the publishing the government white paper the Plan for Coal in 1974, and the commissioning of a new series of nuclear reactors the following year. At the heart of the Plan for Coal 250 Materialism and the Critique of Energy was a new cybernetic flow monitoring system, dubbed MINOS (Mine Operating System), a “highly centralized, hierarchically organized system of remote control and monitoring in mines comprised [of ] a series of computerized systems, which allowed control room operators, as remote supervisors, to collect data and monitor the work of the miners.”15 This system offered an exemplary instantiation of the strategy that Teller proposed, in which cybernetic systems were mainlined as a means of pushing back against the “inefficient” depletion of the earth’s reserves of usable energy: Computers have been introduced in central control stations to control inertia for the purpose of optimizing the use of energy by drawing at any time on the cheapest available source of electricity. These computers are also beginning to be used to store and display data about the state of the major components of the generating plants and transmission lines.16 In the British context — and extending somewhat beyond the plan Teller proposes here — cybernetic technology would be used to manage the energy commodity chain’s every stage, from extraction of raw materials, to distribution of the final product. Faced with the contradictory demand to ensure economic growth while reducing inefficient energy expenditures, the precision with which electricity could be delivered and monitored helped establish it as the informational medium and preferred fuel of the cybernetic restructuration. The functioning of the global economy’s fixed capital rapidly became, in Smil’s words, “universally” contingent “on electronic monitoring and automation” as “electricity’s role as the controller, regulator, and enabler of materials and information flows became… fundamental” to every aspect of the productive process.17 From this juncture onward capital became more and more irreversibly dependent on electrical current, to such an intrinsic and intensive extent that it would soon become easier to imagine the end of the combustion engine than the end of computing. Keeping the Lights On 251 By increasing efficiencies, engineers hoped to forestall the danger of resource depletion. Yet in a historical irony that was intrinsic to this particular strategy, the very methods used to ward off the danger were themselves dependent on electrical current. Planners found themselves locked into a recursive loop in which they improved energy efficiency at the same time as electrical demand underwent ongoing expansion. Smil identifies the essential fallacy at the heart of this “anti-limitationist” approach by repeating “Jevons’s venerable paradox” that “it is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth.”18 But despite its apparent contradictions, the anti-limitationist strategy helped to kick-start the frenzied pace of innovation that has defined the tech industry since the early 1970s, leading to the “rapid doublings of performances” and “relentless decline in prices” that has characterized the industry in the intervening decades.19 A relatively simple material strategy underlies the subsequent complexification of computational technology, in which developers sought an “ever-denser” concentration of transistors on microchips, in order to accelerate the number of multiple inter-transistor exchanges that could be executed in increasingly tiny fractions of time.20 Innovations within this sector reshaped the productive process, and its attendant social relations, to such a comprehensive extent that it became difficult to grasp the full scale of their impact. Importantly, however, it has thus far proved all but impossible to replicate the technological gains made in the area of microprocessing in the domain of energy production itself. While consumers in highincome countries have been acclimatized to exponential growth rates in the speed and complexity of information technology, we have yet to find “any established energy production or conversion technique” capable of following the “path of improving performance” that characterized the “microchip era” that was initiated in 1971.21 One way to conceptualize the divergent technological tendencies that have subsequently defined electroculture is to distinguish 252 Materialism and the Critique of Energy between the system’s “input” and “output” sectors. In the latter sector, microprocessing technology spearheaded a massive cybernetic transformation of the productive process, one that was premised on unlocking the unique material properties and use values of electricity. Although the effects of these developments were certainly felt in the former sector — most notably in management’s deployment of cybernetic flow-managing technologies in mines and power plants — no comparably radical revolution of electricity generation actually materialized. Instead, as the projected transition to nuclear stalled it could even have been said to have undergone a prolonged regression, as policy makers and investors increasingly fell back on technologies whose fundamental operational principles were known to the nineteenth century. Identifying this problem, while critiquing the key fallacy at the heart of capital’s stubborn attachment to its antilimitationist energy strategy, Smil writes: Any expectations that the future performance gains of renewable energies in general, and solar PV [photovoltaic] electricity generation in particular, will resemble the post-1971 record of packing transistors on microchips are thus a consequence of succumbing to what I have called Moore’s curse, an unfortunate categorical mistake that takes an exceptional performance as a general norm of coming technical innovation.22 In referring to this “categorical mistake” as “Moore’s curse,” Smil alludes to Gordon E. Moore, the computer developer who first forecast microprocessing’s decades of exponential developmental growth. Writing in 1965, Intel’s cofounder correctly anticipated the annual to biannual doublings of transistor density that defined technological advance in the coming decades. This phenomenon — which has only begun to wane in very recent years — was subsequently dubbed “Moore’s law.” Smil’s somewhat classicist recasting of Moore’s prediction is designed to illustrate that the cultural experience of these Keeping the Lights On 253 developments fatefully warped popular understanding of technological innovation. In contrast to Teller’s hopes, it has thus far proved all but impossible to reconcile the conservation of usable energy with the rapid development of an ever-more automated and energy-hungry productive process. In Smil’s estimation, the only reason that this situation surprises us is that consumers in highincome countries have been habituated to the lived experience of Moore’s law, and have thus come to mistake an exception set of circumstances for a universal norm. A more sober appraisal of the underlying dynamics forces us to confront the fact that planners are given little scope to reduce absolute energy consumption when energy demands are at the same time being universally expanded in order to sustain the continually rising organic composition of capital. From “Energy Crisis” to “Climate Crisis” — The Developmental Arc of Electroculture There are, however, some signs of progress in the domain of renewable energy generation. Peter Simon Vargha — Chief Economist at Hungarian oil and gas company MOL — avers that there is good reason to anticipate a more rapid and economically viable energy transition than agencies such as the IEA (International Energy Agency) have tended to project. Indeed, highlighting “collapsing” renewable energy installation costs, Vargha argues that we are fast approaching a crucial “tipping point” in an emerging energy transition.23 Writing in 2015, Vargha noted that rapidly changing energy markets have seen the IEA compelled to modify its renewable energy outlooks in a more favorable direction, with every recent report heralding a progressively larger market share for the emerging technologies. His reading of this overall trajectory was apparently confirmed as the IEA’s 2016 WEO (World Energy Outlook) report recently trumpeted the “decoupling” of global emissions and economic growth.24 An encouraging, but by no means, specular development lay behind the sweeping rhetoric: The IEA had found that global carbon dioxide emissions had held steady at 32.1 billion tons, “having remained essentially flat since 254 Materialism and the Critique of Energy 2013.”25 The institution’s “preliminary data” suggests that emerging renewable energy markets played a key role in these developments and attributes much of the apparent success to progressive Chinese policy making initiates. They concluded that China’s “restructuring towards less energy-intensive industries and [its] government’s efforts to decarbonize electricity generation pushed coal use down.”26 To what extent this reduction of carbon emissions and coal usage simply indexes the much-storied slowdown of the Chinese — and, indeed, global — economy is something that the report declines to address. Yet however capital’s energy future actually unfolds, thanks in no small measure to Smil’s decades of research, the basic outlines of electroculture’s historical development are now clear. While the development of electricity’s potential applications unfolded with intensifying velocity, the technologies used to produce electricity stagnated and became increasingly dependent on fossil fuel driven turbines. While decades of climate science struggled to divert policy making attention from “energy crisis” to “climate crisis” these divergent trends continued to ramify leading to a contemporary situation in which capital’s championing of the apparently “immaterial” tech industry manages to both mask and exemplify its underlying and ongoing dependency on the carbon-driven engines of anthropogenic climate change. For the time being, the net effect of these dynamics is that the signature products of the tech industry — the microchip, device, server, automaton, and network — form a complete postindustrial circuit with the power plant and the strip mine. The situation in which we find ourselves is not, as I have already begun to suggest, simply a product of random contingencies or inadequate foresight on the part of planners. The conflicted developmental arc of electroculture was determined as capital’s general laws of motion — specifically the tendency of the organic composition of capital to rise — became embroiled with the complex material structures and feedback loops of the world’s ecological Keeping the Lights On 255 systems. Compelled by its inner laws of motion to intensify the automation of the productive process, capital has become more and more deeply dependent on electricity, the indispensable fuel of its most sophisticated technologies, and the effective material lifeblood of its key monopolies in the tech industry. It is no accident that it is within these fields that capital’s postindustrial circuitry works at the highest rate of profit. Indeed, as the viability of the entire postwar valorization process became increasingly contingent on more and more rapid cycles of technological renewal, innovators in key sectors were well placed to effectively monopolize the “technical process.” As Mandel demonstrates, in the postwar period “technological rents” become a key means of profit extraction as “discoveries and inventions which lower the cost of commodities but cannot be generalized (at least in the mediumrun) become generalized throughout a given branch of production and applied by all competitors.”27 The structural dynamics that underlay the exercise of “technological rent” are facets of the general functioning of monopoly capital itself, where “difficulties of entry, size, of minimum investment, control of patents, cartel arrangements, and so on” allow key players to function as the gatekeepers of economic survival.28 George Caffentzis identifies a similar set of fundamental patterns at play within the energy sector. In a key essay from the early 1980s, Caffentzis argued that utility companies and extractive industries were now effectively extracting a “power tribute” from a vast network of consumers who depended on electricity for the very reproduction of life.29 It was not only the productive process that demanded escalating energy inputs, but the reproduction of human bodies was now a predominantly electrocultural phenomenon.30 Yet while this deepening electro-dependency resulted in an intensely sophisticated productive process, capital has yet to evolve a means of generating electricity that has proved capable of freeing it from the prospect of massive ecological blowback. In understanding this divergence it helps to recall there are two very different kinds of material and infrastructural challenge under discussion here. 256 Materialism and the Critique of Energy Microprocessing — the beating heart of the automotive turn — relies on the construction of tiny, intensely complex, channels and gates for electrical current. To give an idea of the current complexity of the technology we could look to the Xilinx, which chip boasts the largest FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array), containing more than twenty billion transistors. Energy production entails the massive planetaryscale harnessing of the world’s contingently concentrated animate forces. The different scales of magnitude on which these tasks are necessarily pursued should not be overlooked, for as the mathematical biologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson demonstrated in his study of organic life forms, the intrinsic potentialities of material enterprises are always in key respects determined by the divergent ways in which physical forces impact material structures of different size.31 Indeed, the scale of fixed capital’s energy appetite has increasingly forced planners into a corner. As governments backed away from fission generators — in deference to public fears over the potential scale of nuclear disasters, and in response to unpromising returns on their investments in nuclear power — they retreated to the use of fossil fuels, a familiar set of energy sources that still, in time, served as the causes of a wholly unfamiliar set of world-ecological quandaries.32 Yet in many respects the apparently divergent prospects of nuclear disaster and climate crisis simply recognize the same fundamental problem: postindustrial capital’s energic appetite now necessarily plays out on a fully planetary scale, with fully planetary consequences. Lights Out — Syndicalist Struggle in the Age of Microprocessing With these far broader considerations in mind, I want now to return to the case study that anchors this essay. For despite the conflicted and confounding outcomes of the anti-limitationist turn to electricity, for the British coal miners of the 1970s the changing policy-making climate arrived as an unanticipated boon. In the golden age of Fordist petroculture, oil cut radically into coal’s market share, but in the years following the oil crisis of 1973 this transition slipped into reverse. Keeping the Lights On 257 In the immediate postwar period, British coal supplied more than 90 percent of Britain’s inland energy consumption: “This coal was priced below what it would fetch on the market, in order to subsidize the profits of the rest of British industry. Miners were constantly exhorted to produce, first by the 1945–51 Labour government, then by its Tory successors.”33 But in 1957 the industry went into steep decline as cheap oil began to displace coal as heavy industry’s chief fuel. Things worsened in the 1960s as the development of the North Sea gas fields and the use of diesel engines on the railways deprived Britain’s National Coal Board (NCB) of two of its key markets: “Coal dropped from 85.4 per cent of inland energy consumption in 1955 to 46.6 per cent in 1970.”34 As demand slowed, the NCB looked for ways to cut production costs, inaugurating a period of rapid mechanization. Here, the “most important development was the spread of power loading, which involved coal-cutting and loading in one single mechanical operation.”35 By 1968, 92 percent of British coal was power loaded, a dramatic rise from only 23 percent in 1957. As Alex Callinicos and Mike Simons write, “[t]he result of these changes for the miners was catastrophic. In 1955 there were 698 collieries. By 1971 the number had fallen to 292.”36 Concerns over global oil supply thus arrived at a particularly opportune moment for Britain’s miners. As electricity emerged as the indispensable medium of capital’s postFordist restructuration, some of King Coal’s old luster returned. The emergent energy economy’s intensifying reliance on the signature raw material of the steam era had the effect of revitalizing the residual strategies of Britain’s trade union movement. Thus rather than a simplistic sequential development of energy infrastructures and corresponding modes of struggle — in which new political and technological modalities simply displace the old — we instead observe complicated interrelations between residual forms of class struggle and newly emergent productive forces. The decade’s definitive conflict arrived in 1974. Yet prior to the 1974 strike, global elites and labor unions had already begun to sense the slowdown that prefigured the oncoming global recession. In 258 Materialism and the Critique of Energy the years immediately prior to the oil crisis both parties had grown restive. On the cusp of the technocrats’ full-fledged summons to postFordist electroculture, trade unionists had begun a return to modes of combative self-assertion not seen in Britain since the prewar period. In a pattern that would define British coal worker militancy in the aftermath of the belle epoch, the miners’ first strike in 1972 — the first in some fifty years — targeted the nation’s power stations. Arthur Scargill — the leader of the NUM during the famous 1984 strike — was then a rising force in the NUM’s newly militant wing. Looking back on the successes of the early 1970s he describes the miners’ methods: “We produced a thousand pickets in an hour and a half on Ipswich dock, and stopped the dock in an hour. We left a token picket at the docks, moved on, and closed down the power stations one by one. Within two days we’d shut the whole of East Anglia.”37 In tandem with the cessation of coal production, the miners’ picketing strategy allowed them to choke off the coal supply to East Anglia’s power stations. On the ground, the conflict played out as an essentially logistical struggle that relied on identifying crucial chokepoints in the country’s energy distribution systems. Yet these logistical struggles ultimately took their bearings in relation to a more theoretically grounded appraisal of the coal industry’s changed structural position in Britain’s real economy. The miners had ascertained that the circuit of money capital was now in key respects dependent on the electrical circuits of Britain’s domestically powered grid. With this knowledge in hand, and against the backdrop of a waning oil supply, the miners exerted their new found political clout. Faced with energy shortfalls in oil and coal, Heath capitulated to the miners’ demands, leading to a bump in pay rate that would set the terms for the subsequent strike of 1974. Only a year after the miners’ successful strike, Heath responded to escalating levels of inflation by freezing pay levels throughout the public sector. This policy produced a pushback from workers who had seen real wages fall into decline under the very same set of economic pressures. By 1973 the NUM was squaring up for another strike. In preparation, union leaders mandated a work-to-rule policy, eating Keeping the Lights On 259 into the nation’s coal stocks. When the miners finally struck again in 1974 Heath put in motion a contingency plan that proved one of the most comprehensive political miscalculations of recent British history. In response to the threat that the miners now posed to the viability of Britain’s coal-fueled power stations, Heath returned to the kind of emergency measures that Britain had relied upon in the course of the Second World War. In an attempt to manage consumption, and preserve the nation’s scanty coal stocks, Heath mandated a “ThreeDay Work Order” which dictated that commercial use of electricity be restricted to only three consecutive days in a week. The policy — popularly known as the Three-Day Work Week — revived the concept of rationing which had been such an entrenched part of the besieged islanders’ wartime psyche. Yet as “the lights went out” across the country, the Three-Day Work Week served as a punctual and spectacular demonstration of how contingent the postwar economy had become on electricity. This was an ill-designed form of political theater that effectively functioned as a monumental illustration of the miners’ resurgent power at the heart of Britain’s emergent electroculture. Compounding his first mistake Heath then called a snap election, proposing that it would determine “Who governs Britain?” The conservative government lost, returning Labour to power with a mandate to lessen industrial tensions. In the miners’ conflict with Heath it had become evident that the question of “who governs” — the question of sovereignty and popular legitimacy — was now in part contingent on who controlled “the lights.” In the course of the strike of 1974, in their attempts to stake their claims to energy sovereignty, Pierre-François Gouiffes writes that “[b]oth parties deployed quasi-military resources during these conflicts.”38 It should be no surprise, however, that the government’s and the miners’ different assemblages of strategies and tactics should be recognized as “quasi-military resources” for, as Deborah Cowen has demonstrated, the very concept of logistics originated in the context of military planning. Indeed, the militaristic rationale of logistical practice has remained a crucial feature of its exercise, even in its most 260 Materialism and the Critique of Energy superficially benign applications.39 The same field of conditions that produced the planners’ turn to electricity had thus presented Britain’s miners with a complex confluence of pitfalls and opportunities. The bitter experience of contraction in the postwar years left the miners acutely aware of the threats that technological developments posed to the workforce. Yet taking heart from the new centrality of coal, and fired by the resentments of workers who were increasingly feeling the pinch as global boom turned to global downturn, the miners aimed to redefine how the Plan for Coal was implemented. For, while the miners could scarcely stand to reject the government’s plans to revitalize their industry, it was clear that the cybernetic project at its heart promised to erode worker autonomy. Given this field of conditions, what subsequently ensued was a struggle between the residual steam-era political strategies of a resurgent syndicalism and the new strategies of elites who increasingly repurposed electrocultural technologies in reactionary fashion. In their subsequent negotiations with the newly incumbent Labour government the mining unions attempted to hold ministers to their commitment to expand coal development while resisting the fully fledged implementation of MINOS. This strategy was still in effect in 1983, on the cusp of the confrontation with Thatcher. At the national level, the NUM’s Interim Assessment of MINOS “focused upon the job loss projections which confirmed the existence of a major pit closure programme.”40 Yet “[r]ank-and-file miners who were experiencing the impact of MINOS upon the labour process… were equally concerned with the issues of deskilling and control.”41 In the course of the miners’ discussion of the subject the NUM’s South Kirby branch put forward a motion that was ratified at the union’s 1983 conference: The draft agreement sought to establish a procedure for negotiating technological change with the status quo prevailing until agreement is reached. The agreement would have preserved jobs through reductions Keeping the Lights On 261 in working time… Moreover, it would have eliminated computer-based work-monitoring systems like FIDO which would be unlawful under the Swedish and Norwegian Work Environment Acts.42 Miners had long been famed for their success in holding Taylorist management techniques in abeyance. In 1925, Cater Gooderich argued “the very geography of the working place inside a mine” underpinned the miner’s longstanding capacity for autonomous self-assertion. The characteristic technique of pit mining in the early days — the room and pillar method — saw men working in small teams, compelled to determine “where to cut and how much rock to leave in place to prevent cave-ins.”43 As Gooderich puts it “the miners’ freedom from supervision is at the opposite end of the spectrum from the carefully ordered and regimented work of the modern machine-feeder.”44 The miners’ evasion of full-bore Taylorist working conditions had thus been contingent on the ways in which their remote working environment — deep pits sometimes saw teams of men working over a kilometer underground — insulated them from the prying eyes of management. It was now evident, however, that innovations in the microprocessing sector threatened to considerably expand the surveilling capacities of management. As computer monitoring and data collection techniques penetrated into the full depth of the mine, pit miners found themselves exposed, for the first time, to the possibility of constant real-time remote supervision. Moving information at near light speed from periphery to center, new cybernetic technology would allow management to vault the informational distance between coalface and command center. Harnessing the material properties of electricity, engineers furnished management with the capacity to assess situations and dictate actions in the most remote locations. Under such conditions, miners could no longer count on maintaining the modes of autonomous self-management that they had exercised in the days prior to the microprocessing revolution. The precision and speed with which electricity could be controlled promised to become 262 Materialism and the Critique of Energy the speed and precision with which workers could be managed. As we already have seen, in the postwar period, Taylorist production methods had already made some significant incursions into the miners’ workspace. Yet, relative to other sectors, miners continued to enjoy high levels of workplace autonomy, and indeed, though in decline, the old room-and-pillar method was still in use in many quarters. As Timothy Mitchell observes “[t]he militancy that formed in these workplaces was typically an effort to defend this autonomy against the threats of mechanization, or against the pressure to accept more dangerous work practices, longer working hours or lower rates of pay.”45 The miners drew on this residual set of concerns and tactics that as they assessed the proposed introduction of MINOS. Of particular concern was FIDO (Face Information Digested Online), a crucial component of the larger system, one “that would allow extensive levels of [coalface] supervision over and above that which had previously existed.”46 In forestalling the implementation of this fully electrocultural environment the miners attempted to revitalize a second set of strategies that were, in Timothy Mitchell’s view, the most effective feature of their old modes of militancy. Mitchell argues that while the autonomous nature of their working experience had given miners a taste for self-determination, they were only able to exercise and defend this autonomy as they came to understand their crucial position at the heart of the steam economy’s commodity chains. Strikes in the energy sector proved unusually powerful political tools because of the dispersed and widespread impact of energy shortfalls: “the flows of carbon that connected chambers beneath the ground to every factory, office, home or means of transportation that depended on steam or electrical power.”47 The outcome of these dynamics was that “[t]he flow and concentration of energy made it possible to connect the demands of miners to those of others, and to give that argument a technical force that could not easily be ignored.”48 For a time, electroculture’s full emergence actually amplified the potential reach of the old methods. For in the decade or so that stretched from Keeping the Lights On 263 the oil crisis to the 1984 strike, control over domestic coal flows effectively acted as a proxy for control over the nation’s electricity. The strikes of the early 1970s not only reminded the miners of how effective these residual methods could still prove to be, they also served to underscore how essential electrical circuits had become to the smooth functioning of the valorization process — to the circuits of investment, production, circulation and consumption that lay at the heart of capital’s real movement. But just as the unions were reviewing the ways in which the Plan for Coal could be turned to their advantage, so too with the Conservatives intent upon regaining the upper ground. These were the years that geographer Matthew Huber defines as the incubation period of neoliberalism.49 In Britain, a chastened and radicalized conservative movement licked its wounds and began to await the opportunity to outmaneuver the miners. In particular, the conservative think tank the Selsdon Group had learned from the miners’ successes. They mirrored the miners’ strategies, drafting a new playbook of logistical tactics that explicitly understood political power in relation to the nation’s grid system. Thus as the Conservative party began to draft a new economic strategy, one of its keys concerns was circumventing the miner’s control of the British economy’s energy inputs. “The Enemy Within” — The Ridley Plan and the Changing Face of Energy Security The Ridley Plan was circulated in 1977, and it proposed to reverse the British recession through the application of a new mode of quantheavy corporate governance.50 The first step toward the marketization of Britain’s nationalized heavy industries was obtaining and publishing “unit costs.” Ridley spelled out his rationale in the terms of new “cost efficiency” protocols: “any attempt to improve efficiency must start from unit costs.”51 Obtaining this information would allow the government to measure the economic efficiency of every sector, breaking each field down into its smallest constituent units in the hope of isolating, and expelling, elements that were punching below their 264 Materialism and the Critique of Energy weight. This was, of course, an atomizing discourse, which inherently subjected industries and workers to a panoptic mode of surveillance. Not for nothing was this process defined, by its exponents, as one of “fragmentation.” Ridley was explicit that this mode of economic rationality marked a departure from the kinds of industrial management that had prevailed in the postwar period, in which production costs had been determined by a “mixture of the political pressures and the union pressures.”52 In such a context “striving after efficiency” had tended to be “fruitless — because the financial inputs and the financial outputs were the product of political determination.”53 Informational analysis would play a key role in restoring industry to market “rationality.” The shift of emphasis — from concerns over energy efficiency, to concerns over cost efficiency — is key to understanding the subsequent shape of Britain’s economic reorganization, and defines two of the initial phases of the emergent electroculture. In laying the ground work for the British energy sectors’ entry into a more fully “globalized” energy market — a project that entailed restructuring the large publically owned industries that had prevailed since the postwar nationalizations — Ridley argued that the new Tory government’s “principal instrumental of control should be to set each concern a financial obligation to achieve.”54 This new mode of “financial discipline” — government by audit — was tasked with establishing that “the required rate of return was entirely inflexible.”55 Spelling out this facet of his plan, Ridley deployed a phrase that was to serve as the Tory’s primary cudgel of the mining sector: “If the required rate of return on capital was not achieved, either management must demonstrate that it was taking effective action to rectify the omission, or it must be replaced. Effective action might mean that men would be laid off, or uneconomic plants would be closed down, or whole business sold off or liquidated.”56 The goal of unit cost analysis was to identify and expel cost inefficient — or “uneconomic” — units. It should also be noted that audit management and computational technology were natural bedfellows, and the drive Keeping the Lights On 265 to render the productive process in the terms of unit costs was in key respects also a way of making it legible to the fast emerging computational matrix. It is in the context of these cost efficiency discourses — which emerge in dialectical interaction with declining rates of profit, and the renewal of syndicalist struggle — that the Conservative government finally proved able to push the domestic energy market into completion with emerging extraction industries in low-income countries, many of which were in the Global South. The rise of electroculture’s second, reactionary phase is crucial in the development of what we might term the last and largest phase of the fully dominant petroculture, a moment that arrives as the emergent force of microprocessing helps to orchestrate and stabilize the expansion of the just-in-time process’s seaborne, and petroleum-powered, distributive matrix. Cowen describes the intensified relationship that subsequently developed between information technology, audit governance, and the logistical management of increasingly far-flung supply lines: At least as important as the rise of computer technologies that enabled new kinds of cost calculation… total cost analysis itself identifies for a firm the “opportunity to increase its profits that it could not have identified or taken advantage of in any other way.” Total cost analysis produced new sources of profit with very different kinds of effects on corporate strategy, and this strategy was inherently spatial. Whether a firm invested in more warehouses, changed the location of production, or invested in more transportation infrastructure would all be decisions made relationally in the broader interest of total cost, or overall profitability.… Because of the “interdisciplinary” nature of the analysis, senior executive support was necessary to undertake total cost analysis, thus propelling logistical questions to a much higher level of management. In fact, with the adoption of total cost, corporate strategy became ever more defined by logistics. 266 Materialism and the Critique of Energy Electronic technology’s capacity to effectively collapse the informational distance between core and periphery would prove an indispensable material instrument of this new mode of governance. The spatial expansion of the productive process, the multiplication and coordination of supply lines, production plants, and distribution centers, would all be synchronized through the key electrocultural command centers of the newly emerging logistical giants. Yet before British policymakers could begin to initiate this project it proved necessary for them to break the power of the trade union movement. In managerial circles the preferred term for this undertaking was “modernization,” a phrase that implicitly consigned the objectives and commitments of the trade unionism to a now obsolete past. Roughly seven years after the Ridley report’s first circulation, the Thatcher government began to follow through on its recommendations, announcing its ambition to “modernize” Britain’s mining industry. The appointment of infamous union-breaker Ian MacGregor as head of the NCB signaled the government’s turn to a more confrontational industrial strategy. As the first details of the plan began to hit the presses the government declared that it intended to close twenty “uneconomic” pits. The language was that of the Ridley Plan, and as the government prepared for inevitable strike action, they drew on the contingency plans that Ridley had outlined almost a decade ago. The report itself had actually been leaked to the press in 1978, and The Economist accurately summarized its contents in the following terms: (1) The group believes that the most likely battleground will be the coal industry. They would like a Thatcher government to: (a) build up maximum coal stocks, particularly at the power stations; (b) make contingency plans for the import of coal; (c) encourage the recruitment of non-union lorry drivers by haulage companies to help move coal where necessary; (d) introduce dual coal/oil firing in all power stations as quickly as possible. Keeping the Lights On 267 (2) The group believes that the greatest deterrent to any strike would be “to cut off the money supply to the strikers, and make the union finance them.” But strikers in nationalized industries should not be treated differently from strikers in other industries. (3) There should be a large, mobile squad of police equipped and prepared to uphold the law against violent picketing. “Good nonunion drivers” should be recruited to cross picket lines with police protection.57 The strategic core of the plan entailed circumventing the strategies that the trade union movement had employed to exert control over crucial energy flows. And as the Ridley Plan made clear, the Conservative’s government’s new energy strategy was not directed at engineering energy efficiency, it was instead designed to accomplish cost efficiency. In exercising this approach, the Ridley Plan instructed Conservative policymakers that they would be compelled to find new methods of ensuring a docile and compliant workforce. By this juncture, the Tellerist goal of energy efficiency was already utterly subordinated to economic considerations, and the energic and environmental cost of outmaneuvering the miners accordingly gave the Selsdon group little pause for thought. Instead, the ensuing struggle coalesced around the miners’ claim to not only have a say in wages and working conditions but to actually collectively determine the nature of their work. Essaying the fundamental stakes of the conflict, Raymond Williams unequivocally took the side of the miners, arguing that “to deny it or even qualify” the miners’ claims to self-determination was to “subordinate a whole class of men and women to the will of others.”58 Williams writes that, as the struggle unfolded, “the term management mutated in the eyes of miners into a label defining the desire of the powerful to run a business for solely financial, rather than social, profitability.”59 As we have seen it was not only the miners that took this view of cost efficiency discourses, the Ridley Plan itself understood the stakes in precisely the same terms. 268 Materialism and the Critique of Energy Yet the same logic that declared that an enterprise would be run “for solely financial, rather than social, profitability” also played out in an ecological register.60 Indeed from today’s vantage it is perhaps best to rethink Williams’s contention in the terms of Jason W. Moore’s world-ecology — audit governance proved to be a way of organizing not just the input and outputs of production, but nature itself.61 In their attempts to revive the ailing economy, technocrats subordinated the industrial working class — and the energic flows of the worldecology — to a managerial calculus that gave little consideration to socio-ecological “costs” that could not be rendered in the terms of “economic rationality.” It is curious that this dimension of the struggle largely escaped Williams’ notice. Indeed in his contemporary commentary on the 1984 Miners’ Strike, Williams outlines the four “keywords” that, to his mind, defined the fundamental stakes of the struggle. The word “energy” is not found among them.62 Although the vying parties were focused of the foundational role that energy played in the struggle, even contemporary observers as astute as Williams found it hard to conceptualize how radically emerging technologies were changing the socio-ecological praxis of political struggle. Part of the explanation for Williams’s uncharacteristic oversight is perhaps found in the fact that although elites would conclude this series of struggles through a vast cybernetic reorganization of socio-ecological forces, the final event in Britain’s postwar mining struggles was internally structured around the question of worker autonomy. MacGregor understood the full dimensions of the miners’ claim to self-determination. He was on record as stating that his primary concern over the mining sector was not the depletion of coal reserves, or the threat of cheap imports, it was rather that the miners had “evolved a feeling that [they] can be isolated from the benefits to the community as a whole — [they] can operate in a vacuum if you will, and set [their] own conditions for… operation.”63 The concern, then, in the 1984 strikes was explicitly that of worker autonomy, but it was at the same time clear — at least to the parties engaged in the struggle — that the effective exercise Keeping the Lights On 269 and maintenance of this autonomy was now contingent on control of electricity’s circulation. Cost efficiency management and worker self-management were thought, by both sides, to be fundamentally incompatible. It was precisely for this reason that the two parties assessed the value of cybernetic technologies in inverse terms. In the context of a sluggish economy, information technology offered social planners access to data that could be used to squeeze additional surplus value from their workers, a project that would entail fragmenting the effective exercise of solidarity, allowing managers to isolate and pick off the weakest members of the herd. From the miners’ vantage it was evident that these technologies would decisively disable the material conditions on which the effective exercise of their autonomy was contingent. Yet in forestalling these developments the miners had at their disposal an array of techniques that had very recently proved capable of unseating the nation’s government. As the final decisive strike loomed into view the miners and the government found themselves at opposite ends of electroculture’s divergent “output” and “input” sectors. For the government to bring the full weight of its emerging electrocultural apparatus to bear, it was necessary for them to first wrest control of the nation’s electricity generation from the miners’ hands. The events of the 1984 strike itself are well documented. The Ridley Plan’s tool box of strategies and contingency plans finally prevailed over the miners, in the course of a year-long struggle that was waged at greater length and cost than either party had originally thought possible. In addition to the modes of logistical cunning that the Thatcher government employed, the unvarnished use of brute force became an increasingly integral element of their strategy as the confrontation came to a head. The effectiveness of the NUM’s pickets was countered with the newly militarized police force that Ridley had first proposed in 1977. In preparing the public for these televised displays of state force, Thatcher infamously characterized the miners as “the enemy within,” a phrase that bought the quasi-military nature of the conflict entirely to the fore, as the uninterrupted flow of 270 Materialism and the Critique of Energy energy supply lines was explicitly redefined as a matter of national security. According to the same logic NUM senior management also became the target of Britain’s security establishment. MI5’s assistant director Stella Rimington personally oversaw “the most ambitious counter- subversion operation ever mounted in Britain,” a project that saw MI5 launch “the country’s largest-ever bugging and telephonetapping effort.”64 By this juncture, mining communities found themselves threatened with surveillance, cybernetic discipline, and a militarized police force. It is no accident that that these politically oppressive conditions so nearly foreshadow the experience of “surplus populations” in the post-Fordist economy. The experience of immiseration and disenfranchisement that has characterized life in the postindustrial rusts belts has been maintained through a fortification of the repressive arm of the state that has in many instances relied on the signature technological capacities of the cybernetic turn. Currents of Capital — Electroculture in the Wake of Syndicalism Yet although many features of the mining disputes were products of new dynamics brought into play by an emergent electroculture, other features were as old as what Andreas Malm calls “fossil capital.”65 Nothing better illustrates the paradigmatic aspects of the miners’ struggle than the fate of Britain’s mining industry in the aftermath of the failed strike. Reviewing the consequences of the wholesale implementation of MINOS, David Allsop and Moira Calveley observe that in tandem with the rise of “immaterial laborers” tasked with managing and “informating” the productive process, the same restructuration also produced a more highly-surveilled and datadisciplined coalface workforce: “[The] technology has allowed for the creation of information systems that have become ‘information panopticons,’ which are so all-encompassing that they ‘do not even require the presence of an observer.’”66 The material properties of electricity were instrumental in effecting Keeping the Lights On 271 this state of affairs, allowing for the construction of vast “surveillent assemblages” that afforded management greater — and more centralized — control over a “fragmented” and globally distributed workforce.67 The fragmenting impact of this electrical apparatus was evident to sociologists who surveyed working conditions in British pits of the mid-1990s who found that “the predominantly Taylorist design philosophy, with its emphasis on the removal of workers’ skills and autonomy, has a negative impact on workers and serves to limit the potential of the new technologies, as well as stifling worker ingenuity.”68 Here, then, was the lasting impact of the emergent electroculture in Britain’s mining sector. Britain’s “rank-and-file” miners had clearly offered a more incisive appraisal of the long-term consequences of automation and cybernetic flow monitoring systems than was proffered by the techno-utopian theorists of immaterial labor. To paraphrase E.P. Thompson, the British working class was present at its unmaking. The handful of workers that managed to keep their jobs now told of working conditions that proved less emancipated than scholars such as Maurizio Lazzarato had once anticipated: [Y]ou have got Big Brother watching from upstairs, so if you have a stand down, they will know up there and questions are asked (Tailgate, underground supervisor). They sometimes put the brake on if I am cutting too fast for them to cope with the coal that is coming off (Mechanics, face worker). They know what we are doing all the time and sometimes they slow down the machine (Winders, face worker). We are easily clamped and easily got at (Tailgate, face worker).69 The techno-utopians were not wrong, however, to identify the vast technical ambition of the new age of automation. Among managers in 272 Materialism and the Critique of Energy the mining sector it has now become fairly commonplace to anticipate the development of entirely unmanned coalfaces: We have the technology to take the men off the face, we haven’t done that yet. They have coalfaces in Australia that have no men on them, but they have a different union system and union agreements. It is only on the coalface and in the headings, where machines are operated underground. Everything else is operated from the surface, conveyors, bunkers and stage loaders are all automatic (a U.K. Coal automation engineer).70 The end result of these kind of strategies has been the widespread blackboxing of the energy production process. The trajectory inherent in the energy security discourse of the early 1970s arrived at a strange apotheosis in which the energy production system was increasingly rendered secure, not against the depletion of fossil fuel reserves or the machinations of petrostates, but against workers themselves. In truth, the need for wholesale automation is largely moot. Manned by small corps of engineers and technicians, heavily automated fixed capital allows for a workforce so small that it can be kept compliant with a handsome salary. As Nick Dyer-Witheford has recently demonstrated, in the post-Fordist economy elites have increasingly relied on automation to ensure the docility and security of key sectors of the economy.71 In the decades prior to its recent dissolution, the fate of the U.K. mining sector provided an exemplary case of a broader tendency that continues to play out on a global scale.72 These considerations draw attention to another facet of the turn to microprocessing that has perhaps been underplayed in the course of this discussion; for the microprocessing revolution has not only facilitated the precise remote management of workers, it is also — in tandem with the ongoing refinement and miniaturization of the electric motor — allowing for the machinic reduplication of even the most complex and highly-skilled forms of human labor. In the face of automation on this kind of scale, the characteristic Keeping the Lights On 273 modes of self-assertion that the miners had once so successfully practiced have dwindled. Yet the net result of the rise of electroculture has not been to universally draw workers into the informational sector, as Lazzarato and others had once proposed.73 Instead, alongside new crops of engineers and informational managers there has arisen an increasingly vast vulnerable sector of precariously employed service workers, who have as yet not successfully asserted their interests. As George Caffentzis puts it “[t]he burly, ‘blue collared’ line worker seems to blur in the oil crisis, diffracted into the female service worker and the abstracted computer programmer”:74 And it all feels so different! Your wages go up but they evaporate before you spend them, you confront your boss but he cries that “he has bills to pay,” and even more deeply, you don’t see your exploitation any more. On the line, you literally could observe the crystallization of your labor power into the commodity, you could see your life vanishing down the line, you could feel the materialization of your alienation. But in the service industries, your surplus labor seems to be nonexistent, even “non-productive,” just a paid form of “housework,” cleaning bedpans, massaging jogger’s muscles, scrambling eggs.75 Yet those that have managed to hang on to a wage in the service sector seem by some measures to be in a more favorable position than others among the growing numbers of people unable to access either a viable legal income or a stable means of subsistence. Many of those expelled from the industrial sector have had to contend with what we now know as characteristic features of life in the post-Fordist rustbelts, the triple-fronted trap of “destitution, drugs, and prison.”76 It is salutary to note that elites are hardly in a position to welcome this increasingly volatile state of affairs. Indeed, in Marx’s terms, we can see that capital has again emerged as a limit to itself. Yet the present form of its self-limitation proves in key respects particular to our own historical moment, and proper to the socio-ecological characteristics and energetic demands of post-Fordist electroculture. 274 Materialism and the Critique of Energy Contemporary capital’s rising organic composition has not only left it entangled in a toxic, and climatically disruptive, coal dependency, it has also seen it unable to reincorporate living labor back into the productive process. As the research collective Endnotes write: [C]omputers not only have rapidly decreasing labour requirements themselves (the microchips industry, restricted to only a few factories world-wide, is incredibly mechanised), they also tend to reduce labour requirements across all lines by rapidly increasing the level of automation. Thus rather than reviving a stagnant industrial sector and restoring expanded reproduction — in line with Schumpeter’s predictions — the rise of the computer industry has contributed to deindustrialisation and a diminished scale of accumulation — in line with Marx’s.77 In short, the success of elites in countering the threat of worker militancy has also undercut their capacity to secure adequate rates of return on capital; the same strategies that secured the energy production process against sabotage and disruption have also spurred, rather than rectified, the ongoing freefall in rates of profit. Clearly, the emergence of electroculture — and the signature capacities and technologies that define it — has been instrumental in producing this field of conditions. Yet in contrast to the original forecasts of Marx and Engels, Bue Rübner Hansen finds that “[w]hat is interesting and challenging” about today’s situation “is that, unlike the immiseration thesis of the Communist Manifesto, [today’s political strategy] is not predicated on a thesis of the gradual embourgeoisement of the world, or on the homogenization of the proletariat. The reality of surplus populations poses instead the issue of a generalized crisis of reproduction, and the multitude of survival strategies that arise from it.”78 The practices of Britain’s mining communities during the year of the strike actually anticipated many of these “survival strategies.” As the Thatcher government struggled to render Britain’s mining communities Keeping the Lights On 275 superfluous to the functioning of the nation’s economy — as they cut off the supply of money, and rerouted crucial goods and energetic flows from increasingly far flung corners of the globe — mining communities were thrown back onto the kinds of hard-scrabble survival tactics that have come to define the globe’s burgeoning “surplus” communities in the aftermath of the informational turn. Electroculture “After Oil” — Conclusions and Conjectures Looking to the future as the global economy generates larger surplus populations, and as the energy demands of fixed capital continue of necessity to rise rather than decline, capital faces two key threats to its popular legitimacy that it has as yet no means to combat. The success of the British government in the early 1980s, and the experience of Britain’s mining communities in those decades, ironically prefigured these dual dilemmas. Having once managed to cut off the monetary supply to mining communities while at the same time ensuring a steady supply of coal, elites now seem unable to incorporate increasingly large numbers of their surplus populations into the wage relation, and are as yet unable to wean the global economy off the coal dependency that serves as the primary engine of anthropogenic climate change. As we have already noted, significant moves have been made toward a transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources, and in recent months the IEA’s newest report has offered solace to those venture capitalists and governments that remain blithely optimistic that “innovation” can supply capital with adequate carbon neutral electrical inputs. Yet even analysts such as Vargha, who adopt a relatively optimistic stance, tend to concede that Smil’s more circumspect appraisal of renewables is founded on a formidable body of scholarship. Indeed, in course of his critique of the IEA’s historically cautious appraisal of renewable energy markets, Vargha poses a rhetorical question that lies near the heart of contemporary energy policy debates and investment strategies: “[S]o will solar and wind energy become dominant in a few years in 276 Materialism and the Critique of Energy energy demand?”79 He answers by deferring to Smil: “Of course not. As Vaclav Smil has argued convincingly, such transitions are generally slow, because energy investments are capital intensive — we need a large new infrastructure to supply it.”80 In the course of the paper that Vargha cites, Smil explains why — despite robust government subsidies and widespread public support — the renewable energy industry still meets such a small fraction of global energy demand: “The slow pace of this energy transition is not surprising. In fact, it is expected. In the U.S. and around the world, each widespread transition from one dominant fuel to another has taken 50 to 60 years.”81 The fundamental challenge is infrastructural. Of the various renewable alternatives on offer, Smil finds that only solar energy can hope to match the quantitative heft of fossil fuels. But even allowing for the abundance of solar energy, Smil argues that a key impediment to a rapid solar transition is the fact that contemporary energy systems are contingent, not just on vast quantities of energy, but on vast quantities of densely concentrated energy. Developers have thus far only discovered this energy density in fossil fuels and nuclear fission. Consequently, a wholesale transition to renewable energies will “necessitate a fundamental reshaping of modern energy infrastructures.”82 Before it is able to collect and concentrate sufficient quantities of energy in the world’s metropolitan zones and production plants, a post–fossil fuel energy system will have to compensate for the relatively low density of renewable energy dispersal, casting a wider net, and spreading a new photovoltaic apparatus over large expanses of the earth’s surface. The kind of dispersed energy input infrastructure needed to accomplish this feat is poorly served by our own fossil fuel system which is presently dominated by the need to globally distribute highly concentrated fossil fuel energies, extracted at a relatively small number of key input nodes.83 It is here that the attempt to engineer an anti-limitationist response to anthropogenic climate change seems set to encounter profound challenges. The rapidity of information processing advance was in part premised on unlocking the intense energy density of Keeping the Lights On 277 the raw materials — coal, in particular — that fueled it. The pace of change that defined this era serves as no guide at all to the speed with which technology will develop if it is made to rely on weaker energy streams. In truth, however, such considerations seem for the time being entirely theoretical concerns, for, under capitalism, the viability of a renewable energy infrastructure will always remain contingent on its capacity to meet the ever-expanding demands of the planetary assemblage of fixed capital. Should innovations within the renewable energy sector fail to meet this demand, we can anticipate a return to nuclear power and intensified investment in geoengineering technologies such as carbon capture. Although the IEA’s newest report tenders a more promising appraisal of the nascent capacities of renewables that the agency had thus far adopted, it remains the case that the end goal of a wholesale energy transition extends beyond simply arresting the ongoing expansion of fossil fuel demand pushing out toward the more distant prospect of actively reversing it. Whether this latter goal is actually compatible with “business as usual” remains the fundamental conundrum of all contemporary anti-limitationist energy policy. Still, caveats aside, as global governance attempts to transition to a renewable energy base — leveling increasingly punitive legislation against the oil and coal industries — we can clearly observe electroculture moving into a third phase, one that sees it consolidate its new position as the dominant field of force within which other residual and emergent energy cultures now make their way. Naturally, the old petroculture infrastructure will continue to exert a profound residual influence in the decades to come. Indeed, as Kate Gordon remarks, “[e]ven if they’re now, finally, cost-competitive at the point of sale, low-carbon technologies are still working within an infrastructure — a utility regulatory system, a power grid, a highway system, a combustion engine-centric fueling system — built for a world powered by fossil fuels.”84 Yet as capital attempts to supply itself an anti-limitationist fix to the problem of anthropogenic climate change, and as it remains apparently irreversibly locked into its 278 Materialism and the Critique of Energy self-defeating attempt to evade secular stagnation through an everintensifying automation of the productive process, there can be little doubt that its assemblage of electrocultural technologies and research hubs will remain indispensable tools. Here a word of caution regarding the political potentialities of the transition to renewable energy infrastructure is in order. It has become a cliché to point out that fossil fuels are a form of solar power — one condensed, through the contingencies of the geological past, into locally distributed deposits of fossil-stored energy. The cliché is worth repeating, to the extent that it helps us conceptualize the full scope of this nascent infrastructural project. The size of the terraforming projects required to synthetically replicate this geologically-scaled process of energy concentration — one that took place over the course of five hundred million years — should at least lead us to raise the question of how benign renewable energy infrastructure would prove to be under the anti-limitationist prerogatives of electrocultural capital. It is quite conceivable that utility-scale solar facilities would in time — and in the course of attempting to not simply supplement but actually supplant and replace the existent fossil fuel dependent apparatus — develop a sprawling and uncanny resemblance to the Athabasca tar sands, those sites of late petrocultural sublime that Edward Burtynsky’s aerial photography helped to make infamous.85 Though the development of such utility-scale projects would help to significantly reduce carbon emissions, while releasing fewer toxins and pollutants, their vast scale would also threaten to transform the ecological dynamics of large tracts of the earth’s surface, rendering them less hospitable to Indigenous life forms, and setting in motion a series of socio-ecological aftereffects that would in all likelihood serve as the proximate causes of a new set of ecological quandaries. In Moore’s terms, we must remember that all energy systems and human economies are “co-produced” with nature, and that in our understanding of the contemporary moment — and the emerging “futures” that it bears within it in potentia — “[o]nly a conception of historical nature will suffice.”86 With these qualifications in Keeping the Lights On 279 mind, I offer two tentative conjectures about the likely outlines of a “renewable-driven” electrocultural capital. (1) Even if the transition proves economically viable, fixed capital’s demand for solar-rich space is likely to follow a similar pattern to its voracious appetite for the time-condensed energy of fossil fuels. The IEA estimates that world energy consumption is due to rise thirtyseven percent by 2040,87 a figure that seems somewhat conservative in light of the doubling of global energy consumption since 1971.88 During the same decades conservative estimates see the global population projected to rise by two billion, to over eleven billion total. The amount of arable land required to sustain this population will expand accordingly, and as the land footprint of a renewable energy infrastructure also rises — the projected square mile to megawatt ratio is still hotly contested, but a 2013 NREL (National Renewable Energy Laboratory) report puts the figure at 8.3 acres per MW — it becomes harder and harder to imagine a scenario in with an anti-limitationist strategy can perpetually prevail.89 (2) A “successful” transition to a renewable — or, for that matter, nuclear — energy base seems unlikely to have immediately propitious political consequences for the world’s burgeoning surplus populations. For, under capital, such a transition would effectively guarantee the ongoing technical viability of the electrocultural apparatus that currently subjects them to surveillance, immiseration, and digital control. The one caveat to add here is that the project of constructing the sprawling infrastructure of a photovoltaic energy system would — in the initial years of its construction — likely demand a significant uptake of labor, though only in the very short term. Whether capital’s beleaguered financial system and cash-strapped governments are actually capable of coordinating such a feat remains to be seen. 280 Materialism and the Critique of Energy However these political and technological questions are ultimately resolved, it seems safe to conclude that there is no end to capital’s electro-dependency in sight. While it is now technologically and politically conceivable that capital could entirely transition away from the combustion engine, there is no prospect of it departing from electricity, which functions as the material medium of its digital brains, and which is capable of being repurposed into its allbut-universal fuel. Just as the concept of petroculture has proved an important means of understanding how the world-system found itself in its contemporary climactic predicament, the concept of electroculture exposes key features of how capital will attempt to sustain its anti-limitationist energy strategy in the face of climate change. Yet as Williams first pointed out decades ago, if these kind of periodizing concepts are to remain incisive — and if our analyses are to “connect with the future as well as the past” — it is crucial that we avoid abstracting them into static systems.90 We must instead remain attentive to the residual and emergent forces that are even now attempting to make the way within and beyond electroculture’s newly consolidated dominance. Keeping the Lights On 281 Notes 1. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1977) 121. 2. Williams, Marxism and Literature 121. 3. The term “electroculture” was first coined to describe a set of techniques that employ electromagnetic technology to stimulate plant growth. My differing use of the word takes its bearings in relation to the concept of “petroculture,” an analytical concept that was developed to explore how oil use has shaped technological, political, and cultural practice. In the spirit of Williams’s historiographic intervention, I suggest that we can understand petroculture and electroculture as distinct but mutually determining socio-ecological forces. I argue that as electrocultural social formations emerge we can see them modifying and at last displacing the signal social forms and material practices of the dominant petroculture. 4. George Caffentzis, In Letters of Blood and Fire (Oakland: PM P, 2013) 11. 5. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (London: Penguin, 1958) 313. 6. Dominic Boyer and Imre Szeman, “The Rise of Energy Humanities,” University Affairs (February 12, 2014) http://www.universityaffairs.ca/ opinion/in-my-opinion/the-rise-of-energy-humanities/. 7. Vaclav Smil, Energy Transitions: History, Requirements, Prospects (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2010) 39. 8. Smil, Energy Transitions 39. 9. Michael Cruickshank, “Siemens Develops Most Powerful Electric Aircraft Motor Ever,” The Manufacturer (March 25, 2015) http://www. themanufacturer.com/articles/siemens-develops-most-powerfulelectric-aircraft-motor-ever/. 10. Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1978) 192. 11. International Energy Agency (IEA), Excerpt from World CO2 Emissions from Fuel Combustion (2015 Edition) (Paris: International Energy Agency, 2015) https://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/ CO2EmissionsTrends.pdf. 12. Matthew T. Huber, “Foreign Oil and the Territoriality of Dependence,” in Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital (Minneapolis: U of 282 Materialism and the Critique of Energy Minnesota P, 2013) Kindle edition. 13. In Letters of Blood and Fire, 16. 14. In Letters of Blood and Fire 17. 15. Chandler in David Allsop and Moira Calveley, “Miners’ Identity and the Changing Face of the Labour Process within the U.K. Coal Mining Industry,” Qualitative Research in Accounting & Management 6 (2009) 61. 16. Edward Teller, “Energy: A Plan for Action,” Power & Security, eds. Edward Teller, Hans Mark, and John S. Foster Jr. (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1976) 1–82. 17. Energy Transitions 39. 18. Energy Transitions 150. 19. Energy Transitions 121. 20. Energy Transitions 121. 21. Energy Transitions 121. 22. Energy Transitions 124–25. 23. Peter Simon Vargha, “Does the IEA’s New World Energy Outlook Miss the Global Transition?” Energy Post (November 30, 2015) http://www. energypost.eu/ieas-new-world-energy-outlook-miss-global-transition/. 24. “Decoupling of Global Emissions and Economic Growth Confirmed,” International Energy Agency (March 16, 2016) http://www.iea.org/ newsroomandevents/pressreleases/2016/march /decoupling-of-globalemissions-and-economic-growth-confirmed.html. 25. “Decoupling of Global Emissions and Economic Growth Confirmed.” 26. “Decoupling of Global Emissions and Economic Growth Confirmed.” 27. Late Capitalism 192. 28. Late Capitalism 192. 29. In Letters of Blood and Fire 30. 30. See Jasper Bernes’s piece in this collection for an account of how energy-intensive agriculture and the reproduction of the body become foreshortened as form of energy capital. 31. D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and Form (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1945). 32. Vaclav Smil, “The Long Slow Rise of Solar and Wind,” Scientific American (January 2014) http://www.vaclavsmil.com/wp-content/uploads/ Keeping the Lights On 283 scientificamerican0114-521.pdf. 33. Alex Callinicos and Mike Simons, “Towards Confrontation,” Marxists Internet Archive https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/ callinicos/1985/miners/chap2.html. 34. “Towards Confrontation.” 35. “Towards Confrontation.” 36. “Towards Confrontation.” 37. Arthur Scargill, “The New Unionism,” New Left Review 92 (1975) 12. 38. Pierre-François Gouiffes, “Margaret Thatcher and The Miners: 1972– 1985 Thirteen years that changed Britain,” PFG Pierre-Francois Gouiffès http://pfgouiffes.net/uploads/files/091231%20Margaret%20Thatcher%20 and%20the%20miners.pdf. 39. Deborah Cowen, The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2014) Kindle edition. 40. Jonathan Winterton and Ruth Winterton, Coal, Crisis, and Conflict: The 41. Winterton and Winterton, Coal, Crisis, and Conflict 20. 1984-85 Miners’ Strike in Yorkshire (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1989) 20. 42. Coal, Crisis, and Conflict 20. 43. Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (London: Verso Books, 2011) 20. 44. Carter Goodrich, The Miner’s Freedom (Boston: Marshall Jones Co., 1925) 14. 45. Mitchell, Carbon Democracy 20–21. 46. Allsop and Calveley, “Miners’ Identity” 61. 47. Carbon Democracy 20–21. 48. Carbon Democracy 20–21. 49. Huber, “Toward a Historical Ecology of Neoliberalism,” Lifeblood. 50. Nicholas Ridley, “Economy: Report of Nationalised Industries Policy Group,” Margaret Thatcher Foundation. http://www.margaretthatcher. org/document/110795. 51. Ridley, “Report of Nationalised Industries Policy Group” 3. 52. “Report of Nationalised Industries Policy Group” 3. 53. “Report of Nationalised Industries Policy Group” 3. 54. “Report of Nationalised Industries Policy Group” 3. 284 Materialism and the Critique of Energy 55. “Report of Nationalised Industries Policy Group” 3. 56. “Report of Nationalised Industries Policy Group” 4. 57. “1978 Economist on the Ridley Plan,” Marxist Arborist Group (March 5, 2009) http://www.marxist. org.uk/2009/03/05/1978-economist-on-theridley-plan/. 58. Raymond Williams, “Mining the Meaning,” Resources of Hope (London: Verso, 1989) Kindle edition. 59. Williams, “Mining the Meaning.” 60. “Mining the Meaning.” 61. Jason W. Moore, “Cheap Food & Bad Money: Food, Frontiers, and Financialization in the Rise and Demise of Neoliberalism,” Review: A Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center 33 (2012) 227. 62. “Mining the Meaning.” 63. Quoted in Katy Shaw, Mining the Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012) 31. 64. Seumas Milne, “What Stella Left Out: The Truth About MI5’s Role in the Miners’ Strike Will Not Come Out In Rimington’s Memoirs,” The Guardian (October 3, 2000) http://www.the guardian.com/comment/ story/0,3604,376455,00.html. 65. Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (London: Verso, 2016). 66. “Miners’ Identity” 59. 67. Kevin D. Haggerty and Richard V. Ericson, “The Surveillant Assemblage,” British Journal of Sociology 51.4 (2000) 605–622. 68. Jonathan Winterton, “The 1984–85 Miners’ Strike and Technological 69. “Miners’ Identity” 64. 70. “Miners’ Identity” 63. 71. Nick Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Proletariat (London: Pluto Press; 2015) Change” The British Journal for the History of Science 26.1 (1993) 13. 170–173. 72. Stephen Chen, “Coal Mining ‘Robots’ Cut Costs and Risks but Threaten Jobs,” South China Morning Post (September 23, 2014) http://www.scmp. com/news/china/article/1598242/coal-tunnelling-machines-cut-minerisks-also-threaten-pit-jobs. Keeping the Lights On 73. 285 Maurizio Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labour,” Generation Online http://www. generation-online.org/c/fcimmateriallabour3.htm. 74. In Letters of Blood and Fire 26. 75. In Letters of Blood and Fire 26–27. 76. Benjamin Noys, Malign Velocities (Croydon, Zero Books: 2014) 54. 77. Endnotes and Aaron Benanav, “Misery and Debt” Endnotes 2 (2010) http://endnotes. org.uk/en/endnotes-misery-and-debt. 78. Bue Rübner Hansen, “Surplus Population, Social Reproduction, and the Problem of Class Formation,” Viewpoint Magazine 5 (2015) https://viewpointmag.com/2015/10/31/surplus-population-socialreproduction-and-the-problem-of-class-formation/. 79. “Does the IEA’s New World Energy Outlook Miss the Global Transition?” 80. “Does the IEA’s New World Energy Outlook Miss the Global Transition?” 81. Vaclav Smil, “The Long Slow Rise of Solar and Wind,” Scientific American (January 2014) 54. 82. Energy Transitions 119. 83. Energy Transitions 119. 84. Kate Gordon, “Why Renewable Energy Still Needs Subsidies,” Wall Street Journal (September 14, 2015) http://blogs.wsj.com/experts/2015/09/14/ why-renewable-energy-still-needs-subsidies/. 85. See also Petropolis, directed by Peter Mettler, NTSD, (Toronto: Mongrel Media, 2010) DVD. 86. Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life (London: Verso Books, 2015) 296. 87. International Energy Agency (IEA), World Energy Outlook 2014: Executive Summary, International Energy Agency (Paris: International Energy Agency, 2014) 1. https://www.iea.org/ publications/freepublications/ publication/WEO_2014_ES_English_WEB.pdf. 88. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Climate Change 2007: Mitigation of Climate Change, Contribution of Working Group III to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, eds. Bert Metz, et. al. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007), and British Petroleum, BP Statistical Review of World Energy June 2015 (London: British Petroleum Co, 2015) 42. https://www.bp. com/content/ 286 Materialism and the Critique of Energy dam/bp/pdf/energy-economics/statistical-review-2015/bp-statisticalreview-of-world-energy-2015-full-report.pdf. 89. Sean Ong, Clinton Campbell, Paul Denholm, Robert Margolis, and Garvin Heath, Land-Use Requirements for Solar Power Plants in the United States, National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), (Golden: National Renewable Energy Laboratory, 2013). http://www.nrel.gov/docs/ fy13osti/56290.pdf 90. Marxism and Literature 121. Peak Oil after Hydrofracking Gerry Canavan The nightmare, in good nightmare fashion, has something absurd and nearly inescapable about it: either we will begin running out of oil, or we won’t.1 “What happens,” Brent Ryan Bellamy asks, “when the apocalypse, correctly foretold by the right portends, does not come to pass?”2 Leftists in the United States have had to contend with multiple versions of this problem since the end of the Bush administration and the election of Barack Obama signaled the collapse of the Left’s alliance with the Democratic Party around 2009 — but nowhere is this sense of deflated apocalypticism more pointed, I would suggest, than in the complicated and intertwined double helix of energy and climate politics. For a time in the mid-2000s the urgent union of these two crises seemed to offer a sort of silver-bullet argument against late capitalism. At times the question of “peak oil” matched or even exceeded the salience of climate change as a driver of pessimistic futurological projection; the petroleum energy basis on which contemporary capitalism depended was not only radically destabilizing the climate of the planet (which, bizarrely, was by itself an insufficient argument for change) but was actually running out altogether. There simply was no future for petroleum-based capitalism. As Imre Szeman’s crucial articulation of the “oil ontology” of twentieth-century capitalism suggests, oil has undergirded the production chain of everything in the twentieth and twenty-firstcenturies, from agriculture to worker mobility to transportation and 290 Materialism and the Critique of Energy distribution to the boundless creation of plastic consumer goods — and so the prospect of an imminent oil-less future seemed at the time to suggest an inevitable near-term endpoint to capitalism as such.3 The moment of reckoning was finally at hand; things simply could not continue on as they had. Civilization still faced the old choice between socialism and barbarism — but, either way, something would have to change. The energy boom of the 2010s, coupled with the Democrats’ retaking of the White House and the consequent retreat of the party apparatus from oppositional rhetoric, completely upended these ideological assumptions. First, Obama was popularly taken to be the wise guarantor of the future just as Bush was taken to be its idiot destroyer; the focus of liberal (as opposed to leftist) activism consequently shifted away from issues that might counter or threaten that position. More importantly, however, the discovery of a major new fossil fuel energy source in hydrofracking (as well as new ability to utilize oil reserves once thought inaccessible through such practices as deep-sea drilling and oil-shale extraction) suggests that the true moment oil “peaks” may yet be many decades or even centuries in the future. Meanwhile the location of many of these new reserves within the geopolitical boundaries of the United States has inverted the familiar, moral-panic rhetoric around “energy independence” to remap the U.S. itself as the globe’s leading petrol state. The seesaw of Kunkel’s “nightmare” seems now to have tipped permanently in the “we won’t” pole of the dialectic. The wish has been granted: there is plenty of oil after all, so much oil in fact that at time of writing consumer gasoline prices had plummeted to prices so low they have not been seen since the 1990s.4 But this is the sinister sort of wish granted by the monkey’s paw or by an evil genie: there is plenty of oil for us to permanently raise the temperature of the planet, drastically raising sea levels around the globe, while threatening to toxify the freshwater-table of huge portions of the U.S. in the bargain. A green Marxism which had allowed itself to become invested in peak oil as proof of capitalism’s incipient vulnerability now faces a very Peak Oil after Hydrofracking 291 different sort of futurity, one in which capital seems more vital and more energized than ever. This chapter thus looks back at the ideology of peak oil and the impending energy scarcity it implied alongside the emergence of hydrofracking as a hydrocarbon-extraction technology and the cultural dominance of post-Obama liberal optimism in order to situate a new Marxist politics of energy. I use peak oil’s example of apocalypse-gone-wrong to show the pressing need for Marxist ecological critique that is not predicated on a logic of impending collapse but which is rather able to challenge capitalism in a moment of triumph: a moment like our era, when renewed possibility of rapid economic growth goes hand-in-hand with horrifying prospects for new and permanent ecological devastation. Marxists must find ways to confront the new energy “normal” — glut over scarcity, expansion over decline — that now structures the global economic system, as it rapidly and recklessly generates new financial, legal, and social forms around the fracking industry with which liberal politics is already too complicit to critique, control, or oppose. Whatever Happened to peak oil? As a concept, “peak oil” is organized around a number of claims that are not only valid on an abstract theoretical level but which have been empirically — if somewhat problematically — confirmed in the historical decline of actual oil production in different localities (most famously in the United States in the 1970s). (1) The natural processes that produce petroleum in the Earth’s crust take place on a million-year geologic timetable far exceeding the timetable of human use (or, indeed, the world-historical lifespan on the human species as such), rendering petroleum by definition a finite, nonrenewable resource. (2) Oil within a bounded geographic region (whether local or global) will tend to be produced in a roughly bell-shaped curve, as rapid discovery and extraction first cause exponential growth in the rate of 292 Materialism and the Critique of Energy oil production which reaches a peak and then declines, as discoveries of new reserves peter out and what oil remains in the ground becomes harder, and thus more expensive, to extract. The bell-curve model was generated famously by M. King Hubbert in 1956 and accurately predicted oil production patterns in the U.S. in the late 1960s and 1970s, among its other confirmations. The pre-hydrofracking peak for oil production in the U.S. occurred at 9.6 million barrels in 1970, precisely in Hubbert’s predicted range between 1965 and 1971, and oil production declined along a Hubbert curve for the following four decades, also as he predicted.5 Peak oil is not, of course, the day oil “runs out” altogether — the United States is still producing oil using traditional drilling methods to this day. Peak oil represents instead the moment when oil production in the locality ceases to grow — the apex of the curve when you are, roughly speaking, halfway through your total extractable reserves. Hubbert’s theory of peak oil — implicit, in some sense, in the notion that oil is a finite resource that must run out eventually — suddenly rose to great cultural prominence in the U.S. and elsewhere during the 2000s, as multiple production indicators seemed to predict that global peak oil was imminent or even perhaps had already been reached. (The uncertainty derives in part from lack of reliable data around oil reserves, especially in OPEC nations.) In the mid-2000s it was common to see predictions that global peak oil had already been reached, often around 2006, with various academics, lobbying groups, the International Energy Agency (IEA), and even the Texas oil magnate T. Boone Pickens coalescing around that date. Other predictions and studies placed the supposed deadline around 2010, with an even wider consensus approaching universality if one expanded the locus of concern to “in the next few decades”; relatively few observers believed peak oil was further off than that, or indeed that it would never be reached, with those advocating for this Panglossian, “cornucopian” position typically associated with either oil companies or oilproducing states. Peak Oil after Hydrofracking 293 The global peak is obviously quite different, and much more disastrous, than any local production peak; oil can be transported from this locality to that locality relatively easily — but if the oil production of the entire globe has peaked without any novel energy form on the horizon to take oil’s place at the heart of capitalist production, that would appear to augur permanent economic recession and longterm civilizational decline, even, perhaps, a rapid and permanent collapse. The threat posed by global peak oil, in other words, exposes something fundamental about the nature of the global economy. The capitalist world market is predicated on permanent year-overyear growth — small declines in the rate of growth are considered economically catastrophic, much less actual declines in GDP — and growth has historically corresponded closely with increased energy consumption. Consequently, an inability to continue growing the total amount of oil available to the system suggests a permanent constraint on the possibility of permanent economic growth forever (the fantasy logic on which the entire financial system is predicated).6 Even a relatively small shortfall (which, post-peak, would grow larger each year) would upend this foundational assumption of contemporary global capitalism, threatening the stability of the entire system and presaging economic catastrophe in both the short and long term. Even supplemented with new sources of renewable or non-renewable energy, nothing like the total energy available during the golden age of oil is likely to ever return without new oil.7 The prospect of global peak oil was thus a vision of an imminent end of the world at least as we have come to know it. Alongside and often in concert with other 2000s-era apocalyptic fears, the popularization of peak oil as a concept contributed to widespread mass anxiety about the shape of the near-term future, as well as spawned marginal survivalist, or “prepper,” discourse communities (facilitated by online media), in which people concerned about peak oil attempted to prepare, now, for the harsh struggles coming in the post-oil world. One of many figures gaining international notoriety on the strength 294 Materialism and the Critique of Energy of peak oil fears — perhaps, indeed, its most globally influential prophet of doom — has been James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century. The extended title alone suggests how seamlessly different anxiety categories could be integrated within the panicked ideology of post-9/11 America; Kunstler’s book is itself quite self-conscious about this phenomenon, inviting its readers on the first page to see peak oil as the ontological equivalent of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a crisis for which the country is similarly unprepared: Even after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, that collapsed the twin towers of the World Trade Center and sliced through the Pentagon, America is are [sic] still sleepwalking into the future. We have walked out of our burning house and we are now headed off the edge of a cliff. Beyond that cliff is an abyss of economic and political disorder on a scale that no one has ever seen before. I call this coming time the Long Emergency.8 Peak oil loomed this large because The American way of life — which is now virtually synonymous with suburbia — can run only on reliable supplies of dependably cheap oil and gas. Even mild to moderate deviations in either price or supply will crush our economy and make the logistics of daily life impossible.9 Popular documentaries like The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream (in which Kunstler appears as an expert) similarly linked oil with the very idea of America itself. The cultural narratives Kunstler attaches to oil — the dialectic between abundance/prosperity/progress vs. deprivation/catastrophe/collapse — and the vision of America as a sleeping nation poised on the brink of its own destruction is predicated on the same foundational assumptions that underscore the larger politics of the period, drawing Peak Oil after Hydrofracking 295 on images of imminent disaster that were deployed both on behalf of, and as critique of, the Bush administration. The idea of peak oil is thus revelatory of how America understood itself in the Bush-era mid-2000s: a fragile superpower living on borrowed time, facing a moment of final reckoning. Such fears cut to the heart of U.S. self-perception, inverting the techno-utopian optimism that had historically structured its popular culture — an optimism that was itself the ideological by-product of the nowsputtering fossil fuel economy, as Chad Harbach writes: America and the fossil-fuel economy grew up together; our triumphant history is the triumphant history of these fuels. We entrusted to them (slowly at first, and with increasing enthusiasm) the work of growing our food, moving our bodies, and building our homes, tools, and furniture — they freed us for thought and entertainment, and created our ideas of freedom. These ideas of freedom, in turn, have created our existential framework, within which one fear dwarfs all others: the fear of economic slowdown (less growth), backed by deeper fears of stagnation (no growth) and, unthinkably, contraction (anti-growth). America does have a deeply ingrained, morally coercive politics based in a fear that must never be realized, and this is it. To fail to grow — to fail to grow ever faster — has become synonymous with utter collapse, both of our economy and our ideals.10 Peak oil likewise became, from the perspective of the peak oil community, the secret paranoiac key to explain everything that was happening in the mid-2000s: the sometimes inscrutable behavior of the Bush administration (first and foremost the disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq) becomes perfectly comprehensible, the argument goes, when understood as an attempt to establish a permanent American military presence on top of the world’s largest remaining oil reserves in an attempt to manage the coming decline, over and against hostile imperial competitors like Russia and China.11 It was even understood by many such thinkers to be the hidden truth 296 Materialism and the Critique of Energy lurking behind the global Great Recession that began in 2007. The central idea was that we were already living with peak oil, whether or not it was technically already here: on the level of speculation and preparation, the world was already adapting to the miserable constraints peak oil would soon place upon us all. Moreover, regardless of the concrete production data or the actual timetable, the math of peak oil was said by its proponents to be implacable: nothing could prevent the collapse of industrial civilization and the return to a generally pre-twentieth-century standard of living, as visualized in multiple media, including Kunstler’s own prognosticative science fiction novel, World Made By Hand [2008], set “sometime in the not-distant future” (as well as its sequels The Witch of Hebron [2012] and A History of the Future [2014]).12 The novel depicts the breakdown of civil society in the United States — the collapse of electricity, mass media, and consumer capitalism; military coups; a “fiasco in the Holy Land”; the abolition of Congress; brushwars with Mexico; a return to religious fundamentalism — and the necessary return to hyperlocal production of food and other goods.13 Implicit in that return to a nineteenth-century standard of living was the prospect of a mass die-off of the human race; it was a common observation of peak oil proponents that the population of the earth was approximately one billion people in the pre-oil age, which Kunstler and others posit is “about the limit that the planet Earth can support when it is run on a nonindustrial basis.”14 Only a seventh of the people alive today would even survive the transition to the poverty-stricken, disease-ridden Long Emergency, almost a full decimation of the human race. And the prize of survivorship would disproportionately go, in a cruelly Social Darwinist logic, to the meritorious few who heeded Kunstler’s warning and prepared now. “The future sure isn’t what it used to be, is it?” one of Kunstler’s characters asks another in World Made By Hand.15 Whereas once technological progress was imagined to transcend all possible technical or ecological limits — the happy Star Trek future — the ideology of peak oil saw the energy limit as transcendent above all considerations, Peak Oil after Hydrofracking 297 and soon humanity would come crashing cataclysmically down. What’s worse, oil replenishes in the Earth’s crust far too slowly to ever give humanity a second chance at a techno-utopian future, having squandered this one. Not only the American nation, but the entire species, would be extinct many millennia before the oil came back. Oil after Peak Oil It would be perhaps a bit unfair to say that Kunstler and his acolytes — and I would certainly have counted myself among them, at least intellectually — were wrong, exactly. The peak oil prophets of doom were right in the sense that technological modernity really has been radically dependent on oil as what Matthew Huber calls its “lifeblood”: oil is essentially stored-up free energy, releasing far more energy than it costs to extract, allowing tremendous amplification of mankind’s powers and fueling all the technological wonders of the twentieth century.16 They were also correct that it would not take a large decrease in our ability to extract and produce oil to send the world spiraling into severe economic depression. If that decline increased year over year and became permanent we really would be looking at a steep permanent decline in the global standard of living, likely including severe dislocation, wars, deprivation, and hardship as people attempted, in crisis mode and under new conditions of austerity, to retrofit local production to replace what has become a global marketplace. All this without even mentioning the knockon social catastrophes promised by carbon-sourced climate change, which would themselves be harder to respond to in the austerity mandated by a slowed-down post-oil economy. What’s more, oil is still a finite resource and will begin to run out eventually; the clock is still ticking on generating an alternative source of energy to power civilization before that happens. Something like peak oil is a necessary and inevitable consequence of the natural conditions that produce oil and the economic forces that govern our extraction of it; an economy that never transitions away from oil onto some other form of energy storage (whether renewable, like solar or 298 Materialism and the Critique of Energy wind, or, ecologically disastrous, some substitute derived from our still-ample coal reserves) will eventually experience a peak oil event. It is clear, however, that despite these caveats the concept of peak oil no longer has much political salience as an apocalyptic prediction about the future. We’ve stopped worrying about it. What happened? I suggest a number of factors have collided to make peak oil proponents lose the influence they had garnered over the liberal-left in the mid2000s. First, as suggested, the election of Barack Obama as president in 2008 reorganized the liberal left around a politics of optimism rather than pessimism, as well as around a politics of continuity rather than resistance. One can note a similar deflation not only in other wings of the environmental movement but in the antiwar movement, which largely evaporated following his election even as the wars continued. The global economic collapse of 2008 masked oil scarcity significantly by causing demand to plummet; the crisis was severe enough that global carbon emissions declined for the first time in decades (as well as causing a significant crash in oil prices that have still not returned to their mid-200s peak). In the years since 2009 there have been genuine social investments in alternatives to oil, especially in a rapidly expanding solar market, that have allowed some of this declined reliance on carbon energy sources to become permanent. But one of the major factors in the decline of peak oil as a culturalideological phenomenon is the fact that peak oil has, seemingly counter to Hubbert’s logic, actually been reversed within the United States. Hubbert’s model explicitly excluded petroleum derived from oil shale and oil sands, focusing exclusively on conventional drilling. This assumption was justified in part by the longstanding technical difficulty and inefficiency of extracting oil from such sources, which had suggested that they may never be tapped in any significant way. However, recent technological innovations have turned these geological formations into important sources of both petroleum and natural gas hydrocarbons; a side-drilling technique called Peak Oil after Hydrofracking 299 “hydrofracking” in which oil shale formations are dislodged with a blast of water and chemicals, developed by a Texan driller named George Mitchell in the late 1990s and refined in the decade following, has now made them viable as oil and natural gas reserves. The effect of the so-called “shale revolution” on the market since 2010 has been so significant as to allow the United States to regain its pre-1970s historical position as the top producer of hydrocarbons in the world (overtaking Russia). In 2013 and 2014, the last year data was available at the time of my writing, the United States had even overtaken Saudi Arabia as the top producer of petroleum hydrocarbons. Figure 1. U.S. Crude Oil Production versus Hubbert Curve. Wikipedia. 300 Materialism and the Critique of Energy The unexpected return of the United States to the position of the world’s leading petrol state — at least for the time being — has sparked an economic boom in many otherwise economically isolated or depressed areas, most famously in the Bakken oil fields of western North Dakota, a state which was able to sustain economic growth even through the catastrophic Great Recession of 2007–2009 (as well as through the following period of very slow growth that followed elsewhere in the early 2010s). Similar periods of outsized or countercyclical economic growth have been seen in regions of Texas, Wyoming, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and other U.S. states as well. Increased and improving extraction of unconventional oil from the “tar sands” of Alberta in Canada — said to match the conventional oil reserves of the entire rest of the world — have similarly fueled outsized economic growth in that region. Figure 2. Estimated U.S., Russia, and Saudi Arabia petroleum and natural gas production. U.S. Energy Information Administration. The fevered “gold rush” atmosphere of the current hydrocarbon revolution has induced a race to legalize and promote hydrofracking across the country and indeed across the world, oftentimes with little or no public debate or oversight. Indeed, as I was finishing this chapter, Britain was just beginning to award licenses for shale exploration Peak Oil after Hydrofracking 301 across England and Great Britain. As Mother Jones has recounted, promotion of oil shale extraction by U.S. oil firms was a major priority of the Clinton Department of State following the election of Barack Obama in 2008, leading to development projects across Eastern Europe and Africa, and continued to be so under John Kerry’s tenure.17 While not all of these development projects have been successful — in part due to nuances in property law that make the United States an especially attractive place for fracking projects, and in part due to local anti-capitalist and anti-U.S. resistance movements — the amount of currently recoverable global shale gas resources numbers in the thousands of trillions of cubic feet while the amount of shale oil (or “tight oil”) is estimated to constitute over four hundred billion barrels, constituting decades of fossil-fuel consumption at current levels.18 Hydrofracking has, in just a few years, utterly reversed the moods and discourses previously associated with oil capitalism: rather than seen as the exhausted token of a capitalism whose internal vitalism is slowly wearing down — the harbinger of a coming collapse — oil is once again seen as plentiful and ubiquitous, both a source of economic growth and the guarantor of a consumer-capitalist with a long future ahead of it. While something like a peak oil event still awaits industrial civilization if no successor energy source is ever developed, the combination of oil shale and oil sands development now places this event significantly into the future, well beyond the typical scope of planning or political struggle in the present. Capitalism has been saved. Energy, Law, and the Monkey’s Paw The good news, then, is that peak oil seems to have been something of a false alarm: a genuine threat to global safety and to the future of industrial civilization that has been averted, at least for now, through the development of new sources of energy. But the bad news implicit in the Benjamin Kunkel quote with which I began remains just as crucial: while the fracking of natural gas provides an energy source that releases less carbon and fewer pollutants into the air than coal 302 Materialism and the Critique of Energy plants, and is likely at least part of the reason for the decline in U.S. carbon emissions since 2005, it is still a fossil fuel and will nonetheless contribute to the climate crisis going forward. (Indeed, multiple studies indicate that when methane leaks at the site of extraction are taken into account, natural gas fracking may be as bad for global warming as coal.19) Moreover, to the extent that hydrofracking corporations gain political influence as a result of both their growing wealth and their ability to create local economic booms, they will likely use this power not only to combat their own regulation but to prevent state support for noncarbon and renewable sources of energy, a so-called “lock-in” effect that could stymie environmentalist efforts to finally move beyond hydrocarbons.20 Additionally, to the extent that hydrofracking lowers energy costs, it also lowers the potential market value of new battery and energy-efficiency technologies, disincentivizing private investment in these sectors even as the fossil fuel industry consolidated the political power necessary to block publicly funded research.21 Hydrofracking also poses significant environmental risk simply in its own terms. The years since the beginning of the fracking boom have seen countless studies on the negative consequences of fracking on public health, including a Yale University study that indicates people living close to fracking sites are twice as likely to develop respiratory illness as people living further away; another from the University of Missouri ties fracking to disruption of the endocrine system a phenomena that has been linked to heightened risk for cancer; another shows a risk to newborn babies born near fracking sites; still another links fracking to premature births and high-risk pregnancies; and on and on.22 According to a 2013 estimate, more than fifteen million Americans lived within a mile of a fracking well — a number that will inevitably climb as more and more oil shale begins to be extracted.23 The water table may represent fracking’s worst environmental and public health threat. Despite a recent report from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) claiming “we did not find evidence that Peak Oil after Hydrofracking 303 [hydrofracking has] led to widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources in the United States,” there have in fact been thousands of cases of new well-water contamination confirmed in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Texas, and elsewhere since the fracking boom began — though government complicity and nondisclosure agreements following lawsuits often prevent a direct link between fracking and well-water contamination from being confirmed.24 (In North Dakota, the state is not even required to tell the public about oil spills, meaning 300 spills and 750 “oil field incidents” went unreported just between January 2012 and October 2013, according to an an Associated Press report.25) A University of Texas study discovered extremely high levels of arsenic near fracking sites, above EPA limit for safety, in 2014.26 Even the EPA’s own exculpatory study confirmed the presence of fracking chemicals and wastewater in multiple sites while denying the problem was systematic: In fact, at the five sites EPA selected for its retrospective studies, they found problems everywhere and most of the time, the only available explanation was fracking. An aquifer was contaminated with wastewater and tert-butyl alcohol in North Dakota and EPA concluded that the only possible cause was a blow-out during fracking; in Northeastern PA, where gas is often naturally found in water supplies, 9 out of the 36 wells EPA analyzed were newly contaminated due to fracking activities (25%); salty groundwater contamination in Southwestern PA likely came from a fracking wastewater pit; in two of the drinking wells EPA studied in Wise County, TX, the only explanation consistent with the EPA found contamination was brines from fracked rock layers and a third drinking well may have also been similarly polluted; and in Raton Basin, CO, EPA found pollution but couldn’t “definitively” link it to the coalbed fracking done in the area.27 In California, state officials allowed fracking companies to pump wastewater directly into its underground aquifers, in defiance of EPA standards, at the height of its current historic drought; 304 Materialism and the Critique of Energy another California firm was found and fined for simply pumping its wastewater into an unlined pit, making groundwater contamination extremely likely.28 Public access to water is threatened by fracking in another sense as well: as the American southwest battles unprecedented drought, the oil industry’s new demands on water for its fracking wells have contributed to water scarcity; in some counties in Texas, for instance, the fracking industry alone is responsible for 25 percent of local water use, exhausting reservoirs and underground aquifers.29 Elsewhere in the country fracking firms have sued to gain access to water over and above local residents.30 In light of the extreme toll hydrofracking takes on local water resources it would perhaps not be too extreme to describe fracking as a process for turning water into natural gas and oil. Meanwhile the fracking rush has made North Dakota the most dangerous state in the country to work in: 17.7 deaths per 100,000 workers, five times and the national average and far and away the highest rate of any state in the United States. The rate was 7 in 100,000 before the fracking boom began.31 Since a 2015 study, it has also been linked to a steep rise in earthquakes in fracking zones, including a day in August 2014 where Oklahoma registered twenty earthquakes in a single day.32 Despite an obviously pressing need for study and regulation of this new industry, localities, states, and the federal government have not only pushed for deregulation of drilling and fracking but have even made it impossible to acquire necessary information about fracking or publicly discuss its possible negative consequences. California, for instance, does not track the use of chemicals in fracking at all, and as of July 2015 has performed only a single water contamination study.33 In a court case in which the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection has admitted severe misreporting and multiple errors in its determination about the contamination of a local well, even the drilling company itself “was unable to provide information to the court about what chemicals it uses, despite being Peak Oil after Hydrofracking 305 requested by the court to do so multiple times.” The chemicals were provided to them by third-party manufacturers, and so even the drillers don’t know what they were using.34 Many states have either passed laws or developed regulations that conspire to keep fracking chemicals secret. A well-known and well-litigated “gag” law in Pennsylvania even prevents doctors from discussing fracking chemicals with their patients in pursuit of treatment; the state Department of Health has also instructed its employees not to discuss the negative health effects of fracking with residents, according to whistleblowers.35 This logic of obfuscation and secrecy has been extended even, absurdly, to a lifetime ban on two children aged seven and ten from ever talking to anyone about fracking, even other children, for the remainder of their lives, as part of a settlement between their parents and the drilling company that allegedly destroyed the family farm.36 The United States’ federalist system of government, in which legal authority is vested across multiple overlapping levels of government, is being mobilized to help the fracking industry grow. In cases where localities have attempted to ban fracking, the overawing state government can overturn such bans, as has already happened in Texas and Oklahoma. When individual states require disclosure or regulation burdens on drillers, the federal government can neuter or obviate those requirements, as bills currently under consideration in the Republican-led Congress would. Only three states — New York, Vermont, and Massachusetts — have permanently banned fracking; of these, only New York is known to actually have natural gas reserves. Meanwhile hydrofracking projects are currently underway in over twenty-five states, at more or less every location in the country where such shale reserves are known to exist. The future prospects for the current boom vary: some indications exist the shale revolution may be relatively short-lived, a “resource curse” like that seen in oil-rich countries in the Global South that enriches absentee drilling billionaires while leaving behind pollution, abandoned wells, and ghost towns in its wake, while other projections 306 Materialism and the Critique of Energy suggest that some major oil shale and natural gas formations in the U.S. alone may in fact be viable drilling sites for decades (to say nothing of the prospects for hydrofracking the rest of the world). Either way, fracking provides the Marxist left with an important object lesson about the immense power and flexibility of the contemporary neoliberal state, and the radical difficulty of intervening against the total capture of the local, state, and federal agencies ostensibly meant to regulate drilling in the name of the public interest. Hydrofracking has in just five years become a major part of both the U.S. economy and the global energy marketplace without any significant legal or regulatory challenge at all, with government officials at all levels frequently intervening to undo or preemptively prevent any oversight whatsoever. The allure of an energy-sector economic boom is simply too attractive to risk being left behind — especially insofar as the negative effects (in accordance with the typical patterns of environmental racism and environmental classism) have thus far typically been felt on isolated and impoverished localities, rather than felt in rich and politically influential suburban enclaves or across the state as a whole. To the extent that liberals and the left took up peak oil as a slogan, they have therefore missed entirely the much more significant threat to the common good originating not from having too little oil, but from having too much. Indeed, hydrofracking has been misleadingly presented to the public as the quasi-miraculous answer to both horns of the crisis Kunkel named, a supposedly environmentally friendly solution to the coming energy scarcity disaster. In promoting an atmosphere of crisis, the left has in some sense done the drillers’ advance PR for them. But hydrofracking has a more generally applicable lesson for the left as well, beyond the particularities of the energy field. I cannot help but think of a response from a Marxist economist I received several years ago after giving a talk on ecological Marxism and the concept of ecological debt at the Center for 21st Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. My respondent thought the Peak Oil after Hydrofracking 307 environmental critique of capitalism had certain merit, but worried that it was being taken up from a position of fear; the Left, he said, had been so traumatized by the catastrophic failure of the Soviet project and by the triumph of neoliberal capitalism that followed, it was turning to environmentalism out of the wounded desire to never be wrong again. He saw ecological Marxists like myself as making the fundamental ideological error of wishful thinking, committing the analytic sin of inevitabilism — as well as signaling a retreat from the pressing issues of labor and exploitation we no longer believed we could win on in favor of an ostensibly scientific certainty on which we believed we could never lose. David Harvey has issued a similar warning. In a 1998 debate with John Bellamy Foster in The Monthly Review, Harvey argues that “the invocation of ‘limits’ and ‘ecoscarcity’ as a means to focus our attention upon environmental issues makes me as politically nervous as it makes me theoretically suspicious.” This kind of apocalypticism, Harvey said, risks becoming a depressive anti-humanism that both disempowers political work in the present and is fundamentally at odds with the Marxist project of human liberation.37 But it also, perhaps most crucially, misleads the left into trusting that natural limits and automatic historical processes will somehow passively do the work of opposing capital for us. In fact, as Harvey notes in a later 2010 essay: The history of capitalism is replete with many phases when “nature” is held to be an ultimate limit to growth. But the Malthusian scenario has never as yet really grabbed hold. This history is a very good example of how capital, when it encounters limits, exhibits considerable ingenuity is turning them into barriers that can be transcended or circumvented (by technological changes, opening up new resource regions and the like).38 This is, it goes without saying, a precise anticipation of the way the hydrofracking boom of the 2010s has completely dislodged and 308 Materialism and the Critique of Energy discredited the apocalyptic futurity of mid-2000s peak oil proponents, written in advance of its imminent happening. Naturally, Harvey qualifies this proclamation immediately: “Because capital has successfully done this in the past does not necessarily mean, of course, that it is destined to do so in perpetuity. Nor does it imply that past episodes of supposed natural limits were negotiated smoothly and without crises.”39 There are still limits; the technological power of humankind is by no means total or absolute. But all the same the collapse of the pessimistic ideology of peak oil in the face of hydrofracking suggests that the radical flexibility and adaptability of capitalist technological innovation in the face of apparent hard limits can never be underestimated. The true site of “limit” is not material or natural, but social — and thus inevitablism of any sort, whether positive or negative, remains the left’s most seductive and dangerous cognitive trap. After peak oil — exactly as before it — the future is a site of class struggle: over the rights of workers, property owners, and municipalities to resist the exploitative, bottom-line thinking of privately held energy corporations; over the possibility of collective or governmental action to shape economic markets; over the rights of citizens to protect the integrity of their own water supply; over the constitution of the regulations, laws, special protections, and public expenditures whose terms will define our environmental and energy future. If hydrofracking indeed saved America from a deep depression — or from some even worse nightmare future after oil — that fact only registers the ongoing radical dependence of contemporary capitalism on its fossil fuel energy basis. The deep vulnerability made visible by that ecstatic swing from peak-oil panic to hydrofracked prosperity thus proves the field of energy production as a crucial strategic target for the resurgent socialist left. What capital has admitted it can’t live without, the left must seek to control. Peak Oil after Hydrofracking 309 Notes 1. Benjamin Kunkel, “Forum: War on Global Warming/War on Terror,” n+1 6 (Winter 2008) https://nplusonemag.com/issue-6/politics/forum-waron-global-warming-war-on-terror. 2. Brent Ryan Bellamy, “World Building and World Destroying in the PostApocalyptic Mode,” unpublished manuscript. 3. Imre Szeman, “System Failure: Oil, Futurity, and the Anticipation of Disaster,” South Atlantic Quarterly 106.4 (Fall 2007) 806. 4. For brief primers on the global market forces that have driven this price collapse, see Karl Grossman, “How Fracking Is Driving Gas Prices Below $2 Per Gallon,” EcoWatch, (December 16, 2015) http://ecowatch. com/2015/12/16/fracking-gas-prices, and Brad Plumer, “Why Crude Oil Prices Keep Falling and Falling, in One Simple Chart,” Vox.com, (February 8, 2016) http://www.vox.com/2016/1/12/10755754/crude-oilprices-falling. 5. See M. King Hubbert, “Nuclear Energy and the Fossil Fuels,” presented at the American Petroleum Institute (March 1956), http://www. hubbertpeak.com/hubbert/1956/1956.pdf. The oil production numbers confirming Hubbert’s peak at 1970 and the decline since are available from the U.S. Energy Information Administration at http://www.eia. gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=mcrfpus1&f=a. See also Fig. 1. 6. Critics are calling this structural need for continuing expansion of the energy basis for capitalism “energy deepening.” See Jeff M. Diamanti, “Energyscapes, Architecture, and the Expanded Field of Postindustrial Philosophy,” Postmodern Culture 26.2 (2016). 7. Vaclav Smil, “The Long Slow Rise of Solar and Wind,” Scientific American 282.1 (January 2014) 52–57. 8. James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Grove Press, 2005) 1. 9. Kunstler, The Long Emergency 3. 10. Chad Harbach, “The Politics of Fear, Part III: Business as Usual,” n+1 310 Materialism and the Critique of Energy (December 4, 2007) http://nplusonemag.com/politics-fear-part-iiibusiness-usual. 11. See, for instance, Kunstler, The Long Emergency, chapter two. For an in-depth discussion of Kunstler and other peak-oil pundits see Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, Peak Oil: Apocalyptic Environmentalism and Libertarian Political Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 12. James Howard Kunstler, World Made By Hand (New York: Atlantic 13. Kunstler, World Made By Hand 15, 142. 14. Long Emergency 6. 15. World Made By Hand 142. 16. Matthew Huber, Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital Monthly Press, 2008). (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2013). 17. Mariah Blake, “How Hillary Clinton’s State Department Sold Fracking to the World,” Mother Jones (September/October 2014) http://www. motherjones.com/environment/2014/09/hillary-clinton-frackingshale-state-department-chevron. 18. U.S. Energy Information Administration, “World Shale Resource Assessments,” eia.gov (September 24, 2015) http://www.eia.gov/analysis/ studies/worldshalegas. 19. See Joe Romm, “Methane Leaks Wipe Out Any Climate Benefit of Fracking, Satellite Observations Confirm,” Climate Progress (October 22, 2014) http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/10/22/3582904/methaneleaks-climate-benefit-fracking. 20. See M. Lazarus et al, “Natural Gas: Guardrails for a Potential Climate Bridge,” Stockholm Environmental Institute (2015) http://www.seiinternational.org/publications?pid=2762. 21. Chris Mooney, “Why Cheap Natural Gas is Thwarting the Battery and Energy Storage Revolution,” Washington Post (October 2, 2015) https:// www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/10/02/ the-surprising-factor-thats-holding-back-the-energy-storagerevolution/. 22. Emily Atkin, “People Who Live Near Fracking More Likely To Become Sick, Study Finds,” Climate Progress (September 2, 2014) http:// Peak Oil after Hydrofracking 311 thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/09/10/3565610/fracking-health-studyyale; Christopher D. Kassotis et al, “Estrogen and Androgen Receptor Activities of Hydraulic Fracturing Chemicals and Surface and Ground Water in a Drilling-Dense Region,” Endocrinology 155.3 (December 2013) http://press.endocrine.org/doi/abs/10.1210/en.2013-1697?rss=1&; Emily Atkin, “Preliminary Studies Show Potential Health Risk for Babies Born Near Fracking Sites,” Climate Progress (August 28, 2014) http:// thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/08/28/3476467/risk-to-babies-fromfracking; Samantha Page, “Study Links Fracking To Premature Births, High-Risk Pregnancies,” Climate Progress (October 9, 2015) http:// thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/10/09/3710635/fracking-linked-topreterm-births. 23. Katie Valentine, “More Than 15 Million Americans Now Live Within One Mile Of A Fracking Well,” Think Progress (October 26, 2013) http:// thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/10/26/2841841/15-million-americanslive-near-fracking. 24. Environmental Protection Agency, “Executive Summary of the Draft Report, Assessment of the Potential Impacts of Hydraulic Fracturing for Oil and Gas on Drinking Water Resources” (June 4, 2015) http://www2. epa.gov/sites/production/files/2015-07/documents/hf_es_erd_jun2015. pdf, and Lindsay Abrams, “Water pollution confirmed in multiple states,” Salon (January 6, 2014) http://www.salon.com/2014/01/06/ water_pollution_from_fracking_confirmed_in_multiple_states. 25. Kiley Kroh, “Nearly 300 Oil Spills Went Unreported In North Dakota In Less Than Two Years,” Climate Progress (October 27, 2013) http:// thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/10/27/2843021/oil-spills-unreported. 26. Emily Atkin, “Scientists Find ‘Alarming’ Amount Of Arsenic In Groundwater Near Texas Fracking Sites,” Think Progress September 2, 2014) http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/09/02/3477823/texasarsenic-fracking-study/. 27. Sharon Kelly, “EPA’s New Fracking Study: A Close Look at the Numbers Buried in the Fine Print,” Truth-out.org, (July 3, 2015) http://www. truth-out.org/news/item/31717-epa-s-new-fracking-study-a-close-lookat-the-numbers-buried-in-the-fine-print. 312 28. Materialism and the Critique of Energy Stephen Stock, Liza Meak, Mark Villarreal, and Scott Pham, “Waste Water from Oil Fracking Injected into Clean Aquifers: California Dept. of Conservation Deputy Director Admits that Errors were Made,” NBC (November 14, 2014) http://www.nbcbayarea.com/investigations/WasteWater-from-Oil-Fracking-Injected-into-Clean-Aquifers-282733051. html, and Associated Press, “Calif oil firm illegally discharged fracking fluid,” (November 16, 2013) http://www.mercurynews.com/california/ ci_24539816/calif-oil-firm-illegally-discharged-fracking-fluid. 29. Suzanne Goldenberg, “A Texan Tragedy: Ample Oil, No Water,” The Guardian, (August 11, 2013) http://www.theguardian.com/ environment/2013/aug/11/texas-tragedy-ample-oil-no-water. 30. See for instance Samantha Page, “A $600-Million Fracking Company Just Sued This Tiny Ohio Town For Its Water,” Climate Progress, (March 24, 2015) http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/03/24/3637048/frackingall-the-water-away. 31. Tim McDonnell, “North Dakota Is the Deadliest State to Work In,” Mother Jones (May 8, 2014) http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/05/ north-dakota-nations-deadliest-state-work-fracking. 32. Kate Sheppard, Jaeah Lee, and Brett Brownell, “Confirmed: Fracking Triggers Quakes and Seismic Chaos,” Mother Jones (July 11, 2013) http:// www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2013/07/earthquakes-triggeredmore-earthquakes-near-us-fracking-sites, and Emily Atkin, “Oklahoma Gets Hit with Twenty Earthquakes in One Day,” Climate Progress (August 20, 2014) http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/08/20/3473502/ oklahoma-hit-with-20-earthquakes/. 33. Samantha Page, “California Has No Idea What’s In Its Fracking Chemicals, Study Finds,” Climate Progress (July 11, 2015) http://thinkprogress.org/ climate/2015/07/11/3679027/fracking-chemicals-largely-untested/. 34. Emily Atkin, “Pa. Official Admits Errors In Investigation Of Whether Fracking Waste Spoiled Drinking Water,” Climate Progress (September 30, 2014) http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/09/30/3573768/pafracking-drinking-water-investigation-errors. 35. Andrew Breiner, “Pennsylvania Instructed Its Employees To Ignore Residents Sickened By Drilling,” Climate Progress (June 20, 2014) http:// Peak Oil after Hydrofracking 313 thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/06/20/3451311/pennsylvania-frack-gaghealth. 36. Suzanne Goldenberg, “Children Given Lifelong Ban on Talking about Fracking,” The Guardian (August 5, 2013) http://www.theguardian.com/ environment/2013/aug/05/children-ban-talking-about-fracking. 37. David Harvey, “Marxism, Metaphors, and Ecological Politics,” Monthly Review (March 1, 1998) https://monthlyreview.org/1998/03/01/marxismmetaphors-and-ecological-politics. 38. David Harvey, “The Enigma of Capital and the Crisis this Time,” davidharvey.org (August 30, 2010) http://davidharvey.org/2010/08/theenigma-of-capital-and-the-crisis-this-time. 39. Harvey, “The Enigma of Capital.” Oil and Corporate Personhood: Ida Tarbell’s The History of the Standard Oil Company and John D. Rockefeller Daniel Worden The evil oilman is a powerful and recurring figure in twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture. Perhaps most widely disseminated in the character of J.R. Ewing on the TV series Dallas from 1978 to 1991, and then again from 2012 to 2014, the evil oilman exerts his shadowy power over both the extraction and transportation of oil, seeking to corner the market, inflate prices, and consolidate his power over producers and consumers alike. The real-life precursor to this often fictionalized oilman figure — not just J.R. Ewing, but also Jett Rink in Giant (1956), Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood (2007), Tex Richman in The Muppets (2011), and Hap Briggs in the TV drama Blood & Oil (2015), to name just a few — is John D. Rockefeller, especially as he is portrayed in Ida Tarbell’s The History of the Standard Oil Company (1904). A central text in the history of investigative journalism, Tarbell’s History represents Rockefeller as a monomaniacal, secretive, and pernicious businessman, a man who crushes independent and small oil businesses and repeatedly seeks to, and eventually does, establish a criminal monopoly. While notable for its role in the history of investigative journalism, Tarbell’s History is also a petrofiction, one that fuses individual desire to corporate structure and personal emotions to fossil fuel. While Tarbell’s intent in narrating Rockefeller and Standard Oil’s intertwinement was most certainly to critique this monopolistic consolidation of corporate power in one individual, it also problematically provided a model and rationale for thinking 316 Materialism and the Critique of Energy of corporations as individuals. What this has accomplished, today, is a set of ideologies that endow corporations with the imagined personalities of their chief officers, and this is particularly acute in representations of the petroleum industry where chief executives are often represented as oil workers, thus rendering invisible the laborers and structures that make oil available as fuel and that naturalize the refined petroleum that powers much of our society. Indeed, by thinking of Tarbell’s representation of Rockefeller and Standard Oil through Marx’s account of how civil society, sovereignty, and personhood function in capitalism, I will argue that the figure of the oilman and the corporation he embodies function as the major mode through which personhood overwrites and occludes ways of thinking of capitalism as a structure or system. As Tarbell’s representation of Standard Oil makes clear when viewed dialectically, oil facilitates the ideological slippage from the inhuman to the human — oil as natural substance gives way to entrepreneurial individualism as natural substance, gives way to corporate structure as equivalent to individuality. A more literary way to think of this is as a series of tropological shifts. The personification of a corporation is a metaphor, as is oil’s routine figuration as “blood” in American culture, most recently rendered overt in the 2015 television series Blood & Oil, set in the Bakken oil fields of North Dakota, but familiar in other petrofictions such as There Will Be Blood (2007) and the negative formation of “No Blood for Oil” common in protests against the 2003 Iraq War.1 These metaphors become metonyms in Tarbell’s history, as Rockefeller is figured as the whole out of which oil and the corporation emanate as parts. The breakdown of distance between personhood, oil, and corporateness signals a collapse from metaphor to metonymy, a collapse that occludes our ability to think of corporations as nonhuman agents and, therefore, as objects without human rights and subject to other kinds of regulation. As Joshua Barkan argues, the allowances granted to corporations that would result in corporate personhood were initially meant to make the corporation “a tool, enabling the state and individuals to deal with Oil and Corporate Personhood 317 problems of government under conditions of scarcity.”2 As Barkan notes, the corporation’s unique status as an entity safeguarded from the free market by its claim to personhood even led Marx to posit that the corporation was a precursor to socialism, yet that possibility of an escape from the logic of the free market has, in a perverse dialectical maneuver, become not an alternative to subjecthood under capitalism aimed at the public good but instead the ideal form of subjecthood within capitalism.3 Being able to think of corporations — and of oil — as objects, not subjects, must be central to any critical project committed to imagining modes of life without either — modes of life, in other words, where both corporations and oil can be discarded, neglected, and left behind. The collapse of the inhuman into the human, and especially of natural substances into the products of human labor, is a central ideological position of capitalism. In the first section of “Critique of the Gotha Program,” Marx critiques the social democratic platform in Germany, shorthanded “the Gotha Program,” for its anti-dialectical claim that “[l]abour is the source of all wealth and all culture.”4 Marx counters that “[l]abour is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labour, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labour power.”5 The elision of nature’s own contribution to value allows “the bourgeois” to “falsely [ascribe] supernatural creative power to labour,” thus forcing others to become subservient to those who have simply claimed ownership over nature.6 This supposition is key to a Marxist critique of oil, for in our cultural imaginary, the oilman takes on the primal value associated with oil itself. The oilman becomes, then, the carrier of “supernatural creative power” — he (and it is always a “he,” it seems) has not just found oil; he has made oil and, in turn, made nature valuable. Yet what is made external from this formulation is both the work of nature and the wage labor paid to facilitate and enable the extraction, transportation, refinement, and delivery of oil. As Ross Barrett has noted in his reading of the Drake Memorial commissioned by Standard Oil at the turn 318 Materialism and the Critique of Energy of the twentieth century, which features Charles Henry Niehaus’s primitivist sculpture The Driller, “the collective and technologically mediated process” of oil extraction is figured as “a Spartan struggle between the individual body and the natural landscape.”7 The chief oilman, then, not only exploits but subsumes and renders invisible both laborers and economic structures, casting oil’s extraction and availability as a magical act of individual exertion. Oil, and its prototypical character, helps fetishize both the sources of and figures for value as such. This confusion of nature with labor is compounded by the confusion of personhood with corporations. In a dialectical shift, the oilman who creates value from nature also comes to embody not just an individual but a corporation. This corporation, however, exists not only as a political entity, but as an individual as well. To draw from another moment in Marx, his “On the Jewish Question,” one of the contradictions inherent to the capitalist state is the division of civil society from politics, a division that has produced a sense of the corporation as both political sovereign and mere individual. In the passage below, Marx describes the way that the divide between politics and civil society functions as a divide between the sacred and the profane: [M]an leads, not only in thought, in consciousness, but in reality, in life, a double existence — celestial and terrestrial. He lives in the political community, where he regards himself as a communal being, and in civil society where he acts simply as a private individual, treats other men as means, degrades himself to the role of a mere means, and becomes the plaything of alien powers. The political state, in relation to civil society, is just as spiritual as is heaven in relation to earth. It stands in the same opposition to civil society, and overcomes it in the same manner as religion overcomes the narrowness of the profane world; i.e. it has always to acknowledge it again, re-establish it, and allow itself to be dominated by it. Man, in his most intimate reality, in civil society, is a profane being. Here, where he appears both to himself Oil and Corporate Personhood 319 and to others as a real individual he is an illusory phenomenon. In the state, on the contrary, where he is regarded as a species-being, man is the imaginary member of an imaginary sovereignty, divested of his real, individual life, and infused with an unreal universality.8 This schism between the individual as “profane” and the individual as belonging to an “unreal universality” matures into a mode of economic regulation in the figure of the oilman where the corporation itself appears worthy of human rights despite its nonhuman status: another name for an individual that also possesses sovereign authority. An outgrowth of the oilman who forges value out of nothing, or so we believe, the oil corporation populates the political imaginary as a rational individual, representing the will of the oilman, and is excused as a “profane” actor because everyone behaves badly sometimes, makes mistakes occasionally. Because we cannot think of human beings as merely profane beings, this passage from Marx implies, we can certainly not think of imaginary entities like corporations as merely profane things. Instead, we endow them with supernatural powers. This tension between the supernatural and the profane marks not just people, but also corporations. And, as I will argue through Ida Tarbell’s The History of the Standard Oil Company, John D. Rockefeller occupies this tension, a tension between the supernatural and the alltoo-human that projects the oil tycoon as a personal embodiment of the corporation. Through Tarbell and her construction of corporate power, the oil magnate and his corporation become a target for criticism but also, more importantly, a site where we expect to encounter another human, rather than a system. Because of this, the oilman and the oil corporation that he represents come to embody not just a facet of capitalist production, but also the state and civil society, insofar as those entities stand as external arbiters of capitalism that are nonetheless fully enmeshed in capitalism’s modes of production. Because the corporation is figured as human, society itself takes on its qualities and modes of consolidation, thus refiguring the very concepts of subjecthood and sovereignty.9 320 Materialism and the Critique of Energy The right to endow a corporation with human properties was fully ratified in the recent Citizens United Supreme Court decision. Though not “natural persons,” corporations nonetheless have the right to free speech, as agents in a democracy.10 Like so many maneuvers in neoliberalism, this understanding of corporate rights takes a Left critique of corporate power and negates it. Just as conservatives and creationists use the discourses of tolerance and identity politics to assert their right to representation in public school curricula and university faculty, the granting of human rights to corporations takes a long-standing criticism of corporate power — that it acts as an agent in the social and political world, thus overpowering individual and other collective agencies — and affirms it, finding in corporate personhood a reinforcement of, rather than an infringement upon, basic freedoms. As Jane Bennett has argued in her analysis of the U.S. electrical power grid, we lack the ability to think of nonhuman entities as possessing agency. Instead, she argues, “wherever it looks, social science tends to see only the social activity of humans… The agentic power of human-nonhuman assemblages… appear as merely an effervescence of the originary agency of persons.”11 Bennett goes on to argue that the 2003 blackouts in North America trouble this androcentric view of agency, because the blackout was not the fault of one, or even a set of, individuals, but instead the fault of an electricity assemblage, including human traders, executives, and engineers, but also electrical current, wires, transfer stations, and computer programs. Coming up with ways to think nonhuman agency could, she argues, allow us to “detach ethics from moralism” in our responses to the multifaceted energy crisis.12 Bennett’s new materialist critique of anthropocentrism comes at the end of the long twentieth century, however, while Tarbell’s intervention reads as a prologue to the fossil-fueled anthropower of the twentieth century’s sovereign figure. In the United States, Ida Tarbell played a major role in developing the terms of the Left critique of corporate power. Relatively moderate in her politics, and certainly not as leftist as her fellow journalists on staff at McClure’s Magazine Oil and Corporate Personhood 321 in the early twentieth century — Lincoln Steffens and Ray Stannard Baker — Tarbell applied the biographical approach that she had developed in her early magazine studies of Lincoln and Napoleon to her most famous contribution to McClure’s, The History of the Standard Oil Company, originally published from 1902 to 1904.13 In Tarbell’s account, John D. Rockefeller is indistinguishable from Standard Oil. Indeed, the personal qualities that Rockefeller biographer Ron Chernow cites in his subject — “The life of John Davison Rockefeller, Sr., was marked to an exceptional degree by silence, mystery, and evasion” — are also the qualities that made Standard Oil such a promising target for Tarbell’s profile of a trust.14 Standard Oil hid behind shadow companies, was notoriously secretive in its operations, and was the subject of constant rumors in the oil press. For example, after the Spindletop oil field started producing in Texas, a state in which Standard Oil would be severely limited in its operations due to the state’s strong antitrust legislation, a rumor circulated in the state’s newspapers: “[T]hese papers printed as fact an incredible account of an alleged Standard Oil project to build, under cover of darkness, a pipeline from the Gulf of Mexico to the Spindletop field. The reported purpose of this secret project was to pump salt water from the Gulf of Mexico into the field, thereby stopping production by Standard [Oil]’s competitors.”15 While inaccurate, claims of this sort were nonetheless believable because of Standard’s secretiveness and, moreover, the sense that Standard Oil was, ultimately, an expression of a single individual’s will. Tarbell’s description of Rockefeller further supported the collapse of the man into the corporation: If Mr. Rockefeller had been an ordinary man the outburst of popular contempt and suspicion which suddenly poured on his head would have thwarted and crushed him. But he was no ordinary man. He had the powerful imagination to see what might be done with the oil business if it could be centered in his hands — the intelligence to analyse the problem into its elements and to find the key to control. 322 Materialism and the Critique of Energy He had the essential element of all great achievement, a steadfastness to a purpose once conceived which nothing can crush.... [H]e was willing to strain every nerve to obtain for himself special and unjust privileges from the railroads which were bound to ruin every man in the oil business not sharing them with him. He was willing to array himself against the combined better sentiment of a whole industry, to oppose a popular movement aimed at righting an injustice, so revolting to one’s sense of fair play as that of railroad discriminations. Religious emotion and sentiments of charity, propriety and self-denial seem to have taken the place in him of notions of justice and regard for the rights of others.16 Standard Oil and Rockefeller are conflated here; they both “creep” and “burrow.” And, most tellingly, Rockefeller’s own concerns have been far too personalized, just as Standard Oil is too monopolistic of a corporation. A well-known Baptist and supporter of religious charities, Rockefeller, according to Tarbell, is focused too much on himself, ignoring the more altruistic moral imperatives, such as “justice” and “regard for the rights of others.” In Tarbell’s account, Rockefeller himself was the shadowy, controlling force behind Standard Oil’s operations. Following the oil war of 1872, which saw the forcible dissolution of the South Improvement Company, one of Standard Oil’s first trust incarnations, Tarbell writes, “[i]t was the Standard Oil Company of Cleveland, so the Oil Regions decided, which was at the bottom of the business, and the ‘Mephistopheles of the Cleveland company,’ as they put it, was John D. Rockefeller” (History 41). Rockefeller appears to have “a power verging on the superhuman — a power carrying concealed weapons, fighting in the dark, and endowed with an altogether diabolic cleverness... The Oil Regions as a whole looked on Mr. Rockefeller with superstitious awe... [as] a dread power, cruel, omniscient, always ready to spring” (History 125). These passages figure Rockefeller as a demon, a superhuman being. Tarbell’s History, though, finds the practical realities behind these oil field myths, showing the processes, for example, by which Oil and Corporate Personhood 323 Standard Oil gathers data on other oil producers. This deflation — Rockefeller is not, in fact, Mephistopheles but instead a mere mortal — has been appropriated by the celebratory discourse of corporate personhood. What was, for Tarbell, an exposé of monopolistic power has now become a justification for the inherent validity of corporate agency. The fact that a single man can amass such power, and appear to have such supernatural control over a vast industry, is broadcast through popular oilmen antiheroes like J.R. Ewing as menacing but aspirational, as the natural outcome of the petroleum industry and the target of entrepreneurial fantasies. In Tarbell’s History, Rockefeller’s hands are a recurring metonym for the corporation. Unlike Adam Smith’s invisible hand of capitalism and its benevolent regulation of the marketplace, Rockefeller’s hand is tyrannical; independent oilmen are caught in “Mr. Rockefeller’s steel glove” (History 127); “the oil is in Mr. Rockefeller’s hands, and he, not the producer, can decide who is to have it” (History 213). Rockefeller is also compared to Napoleon, as a leader with imperial ambitions: “Mr. Rockefeller again bent over a map of the refining interests of the United States. Here was the world he sighed to conquer... [W]e may suppose him to have begun his campaign as a great general with whom he has many traits in common — the first Napoleon” (History 62). Rockefeller’s role as sovereign is reinforced here with Tarbell’s reference to Napoleon, the subject of one of her earlier works for McClure’s magazine. Just as the sovereign’s body famously illustrated in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan extends outward to his lands, so does Rockefeller’s own body and consciousness extend below and above ground, subsuming oil, pipeline, railroad, worker, and refinery into his sovereign claim. Granting personhood to corporations also entails the corporatization of people, it seems. This vision of Rockefeller, then, entails a biopolitical revision of the subject. The body itself gets recast as the capitalist mode of production. The “hands” imagery would be reiterated in the Supreme Court’s 1911 decision that forced the dissolution of Standard Oil, where the phrase “hands of Standard Oil” is used to describe the company’s 324 Materialism and the Critique of Energy holdings.17 The slippage in the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, the basis for the Court’s decision, between a corporation and a person — the court clarifies that a “corporation” is a “person” in the act — points to the tradition of granting corporations rights, especially the right to enter into contracts. Enforcing the Anti-Trust Act, Standard Oil argued, was a slippery slope; after all, couldn’t any contract appear to be a step toward monopoly? Today, in an increasingly neoliberal environment, this logic is clearly ascendant, over and against its dismissal by the court as violating the principle of “reason” by which any judge, or the public, could distinguish a monopoly from a mere business. What this amounts to, then, is that no matter how much an illusion we know corporate personhood to be, the granting of emotions, desires, character, even political perspectives is common and even natural in our understanding of corporations. Standard Oil is miserly and domineering, and therefore John D. Rockefeller is, too, or vice versa, just as Chick-Fil-A is homophobic or Whole Foods Market is environmentalist. Just as commodities take on the qualities of personhood in capitalism, so do corporations. In the History, Standard Oil has “not a lazy bone in the organization, nor an incompetent hand, nor a stupid head” (History 152). This personification serves to give form to an organization that otherwise seems to have “no legal existence. It was a force powerful as gravitation and as intangible” (History 160). A critique of capitalism should not only acknowledge how, for example, a corporation like Whole Foods exploits prison labor in order to deliver purportedly “sustainable” products, but also how the personal qualities associated with corporations are structural components of their ability to project profit-making as a social good.18 Throughout Tarbell’s History and in her later two-part profile of John D. Rockefeller, published a year after The History of the Standard Oil Company in McClure’s, Rockefeller is cast as a miserly figure, someone who rejoices at the slightest rebate or saving: [Rockefeller] watched the details with a hawk’s eye — not a cent must go astray — not a pint of oil be lost — not a rivet or bung be wasted. Oil and Corporate Personhood 325 “Pay a profit to nobody,” he began to say, and it was he and his partners who, themselves, went to Oil Creek for oil, and so saved commissions; he who made his own barrels and so saved a middleman’s profits; he who hauled and loaded, bought and sold. Nobody but him must make a cent on his oil, from the well to the lamp. It was combine, save, watch. A sort of mania for saving seemed to possess him. It was over this he brooded from morning to night, and it was the realization of this alone which awakened in his face, already grave with incessant reflections, a sign of joy. Indeed, the men who worked there in Cleveland at his elbow will tell you to-day that the only signs of hilarity John D. Rockefeller ever showed in those days were over a good bargain. This would make him clap his hands. Let it be a very good bargain, and he would throw up his hat — kick up his heels, hug his informant. This was joy for him, this was the satisfaction of passion — this good bargain.19 Once again, this personification of Rockefeller is both critical — his Scrooge-like behavior makes him a ridiculous, even pathetic, figure — and also humanizing. By demystifying Rockefeller and by so closely associating his own personal traits with Standard Oil’s corporate practices, it becomes difficult to see where the corporation ends and the man begins. The unfortunate byproduct of this, today, is that it is difficult to conceive of corporations as mere objects. Doing so seems to connote some kind of harm, a denial of rights, when in fact this points out how metaphor has collapsed into metonymy, rendering the ascription of agency to non-human entities hard to fathom. The illustrations of Rockefeller included in the History and in Tarbell’s subsequent character study also emphasize his shadowy, secretive character. Among these illustrations, one of which is captioned ironically as a “casual portrait”; this “casual portrait” nonetheless portrays a stoic Rockefeller in a business suit, gazing seriously and directly at the viewer. In the History, Tarbell quotes an independent refiner from Titusville’s description of Rockefeller’s behavior during a meeting between independent refiners and Standard Oil: 326 Materialism and the Critique of Energy Everybody talked except Mr. Rockefeller. He sat in a rocking-chair, softly swinging back and forth his hands over his face. I got pretty excited when I saw how those South Improvement men were pulling the wool over our men’s eyes, and making them believe we were all going to the dogs if there wasn’t an immediate combination to put up the price of refined and prevent new people coming into the business, and I made a speech which, I guess, was pretty warlike. Well, right in the middle of it John Rockefeller stopped rocking and took down his hands and looked at me. You never saw such eyes. He took me all in, saw just how much fight he could expect from me, and I knew it, and then up went his hands and back and forth went his chair. (History 47) This omniscience and muteness signals an alternative to figuring Standard Oil as an extension of Rockefeller’s person. Instead, Rockefeller here appears as a cipher, more mechanical than human. This nonhuman quality is perhaps the starting ground for thinking of corporations — especially those vested in energy — as other than human. The flows, desires, knowledge, and actions of such entities merely appear, at first glance, to be reducible to human agents. As Roger and Diana Olien summarize Tarbell’s History in their book Oil and Ideology, Standard Oil is portrayed as a ruinous force in the otherwise Edenic days of the early oil industry.20 Privileging and romanticizing individual producers, Tarbell, for the Oliens, is one of a series of writers in American culture who fundamentally misunderstand the oil industry, making the public skeptical of it and its profit margins; ultimately, they argue that federal regulations have been by and large dysfunctional because of unfairly negative representation of the oil industry, and they cast oil companies as victims of nefarious pubic discourse. The Oliens’ apologist account of the oil industry, though, is blind to the ramifications of the oil industry and oil culture for any conception of the future. And, arguably, this is where any question of oil must inevitably arrive. Any understanding of petroculture must ask not just historical questions about oil culture’s formation, but also future-directed questions about Oil and Corporate Personhood 327 the effects and residues of those formations. The Oliens fail to see, for example, that the history of negative representations of the oil industry is not a record that should be corrected but a record that, instead, needs to be reaffirmed, over and against constructions of corporate agency as somehow beset in our contemporary, neoliberal moment. The corporate personhood that violated Anti-Trust laws in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century is, today, vindicated in the Supreme Court and viewed as a natural way of constructing the public. If we think of corporations not as speaking agents, as Citizens United asks us to, but instead as cagy, silent, secretive agents, as Standard Oil and Rockefeller were, then corporations might seem to be outside of the bounds of human rights. Corporate personhood is embodied not by the benevolent, invisible hand of the marketplace but the monstrous, ever-grasping hand of Standard Oil, a figure that is best thought of not as an affective body but as a material object or assemblage. Leftist politics have long found promise in personification; in identity politics movements, imagining “liveable lives” is a political act, and the denial of personhood — or, some parallel to personhood for animals, even plants and objects — a violation of human rights. Just as we must struggle to imagine a future without oil, we must also struggle to depersonalize corporations, to depersonalize entities that might have been initially personalized to be better dissolved. Moreover, we must recognize how civil society itself has been figured according to the logic of corporate personhood documented so influentially by Tarbell at the beginning of the twentieth century and later codified into law in the United States in the early twentyfirst century. Since the turn of the twentieth century, oil corporations have been represented as subjects engaged in the primal magic of producing oil, and therefore fostering the possibility of civil society. Today and in the future, as we engage in the necessary work of finding alternatives to petroculture and the logic of capital it underwrites, we must seek to undo the elision and invisibility of the labor and exploitative structures that underlie petroculture and that render its conveniences difficult to resist. 328 Materialism and the Critique of Energy Notes 1. For an account of how this process worked in Victorian England, in a way that also privileged the individual as the focal point of what were otherwise structural shifts in capital, see Anna Kornbluh, Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form (New York: Fordham UP, 2013). 2. Joshua Barkan, Corporate Sovereignty: Law and Government Under Capitalism (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2013) 64. 3. As Barkan argues, corporations “are one of the primary institutions by which states, social groups, and individuals regulate, channel, and direct life toward value” (12, emphasis in original). 4. Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Program,” The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978) 525. 5. Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Program” 525, emphasis in original. 6. “Critique of the Gotha Program” 526, emphasis in original. 7. Ross Barrett, “Picturing a Crude Past: Primitivism, Public Art, and Corporate Oil Promotion in the United States,” Oil Culture, eds. Ross Barrett and Daniel Worden (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2014) 56. 8. Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” The Marx-Engels Reader 34. 9. This is in keeping with the way that Antti Salminen and Tere Vadén describe oil’s function in capitalism, as a “surrogate God with very straightforward utility” (2). What this implies, similar to my claim here, is that the qualities of sovereignty and personhood are laid onto the oilman and the oil corporation, thus placing these figures and their products outside of the realm of profane, or the changeable, and into the realm of the seemingly eternal and sacred. Therefore, oil extraction, refining, and consumption is naturalized. See Antti Salminen and Tere Vadén, Energy and Experience: An Essay in Nafthology (Chicago: MCM', 2015). 10. Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010), No. 08-205, Supreme Court of the United States (January 21st, 2010) Legal Information Institute, https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/08-205. ZS.html Oil and Corporate Personhood 11. 329 Jane Bennett, “The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout,” Public Culture 17.3 (Fall 2005) 455. 12. Bennett, “The Agency of Assemblages” 464. 13. For more on muckraking journalism and McClure’s, see David Chalmers, The Social and Political Ideas of the Muckrakers (New York: Citadel, 1964), and Ellen F. Fitzpatrick, ed., Muckraking: Three Landmark Articles (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1994). 14. Ron Chernow, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (New York: Random House, 1998) xiii. 15. Joseph A. Pratt, “The Petroleum Industry in Transition: Antitrust and the Decline of Monopoly Control in Oil,” The Journal of Economic History 40.4 (Dec. 1980) 821. 16. Ida M. Tarbell, The History of the Standard Oil Company, ed. David M. Chalmers (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003) 42, 44. Hereafter cited in parentheses as History. 17. Standard Oil Company of New Jersey v. United States, 221 U.S. 1 (1911), Supreme Court of the United States, (May 15, 1911) Legal Information Institute, https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/221/1 18. See Allison Aubrey, “Whole Foods Says it Will Stop Selling Foods Made with Prison Labor,” npr.org, (October 1, 2015) http://www.npr.org/ sections/thesalt/2015/09/30/444797169/whole-foods-says-it-will-stopselling-foods-made-by-prisoners. Thanks to this volume’s editors for bringing this story to my attention. 19. Ida M. Tarbell, “John D. Rockefeller: A Character Study,” McClure’s 25.3 (July 1905) 235–238. 20. Roger Olien and Diana Olien, Oil and Ideology: The Cultural Creation of the American Oil Industry (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2000) 83–118. The Belly of the Revolution: Agriculture, Energy, and the Future of Communism Jasper Bernes In the days when man’s members did not all agree amongst themselves, as is now the case, but had each its own ideas and a voice of its own, the other parts thought it unfair that they should have the worry and the trouble and the labour of providing everything for the belly, while the belly remained quietly in their midst with nothing to do but to enjoy the good things which they bestowed upon it; they therefore conspired together that the hands should carry no food to the mouth, nor the mouth accept anything that was given it, nor the teeth grind up what they received. While they sought in this angry spirit to starve the belly into submission, the members themselves and the whole body were reduced to the utmost weakness. Hence it had become clear that even the belly had no idle task to perform, and was no more nourished than it nourished the rest, by giving out to all parts of the body that by which we live and thrive, when it has been divided equally amongst the veins and is enriched with digested food — that is, the blood.1 Many on the left still subscribe to a view of technology that G.A. Cohen, in his reconstruction of Marx’s thought, called “the fettering thesis.”2 From this perspective, the technological forces that capitalism employs in its quest for productivity-driven profit are the foundation upon 332 Materialism and the Critique of Energy which an emancipated humanity will erect its new dwelling. Humane cultivation of these forces is, however, “fettered” by capitalist social relations. Capitalism is pregnant with what could be, a deployment in the conditional tense of given productive forces. In a resonant moment of triumphal phrasing at the end of the first volume of Capital, Marx describes capitalism as tending toward a moment of crisis, its property relations an “integument… burst asunder” by the maturation of increasingly centralized and concentrated productive forces. The consequences, for Marx, are clear: “The knell of capitalist property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.”3 At a critical point in the development of capitalism, the fragmented, unplanned allocation of wealth that characterizes production for profit in competitive markets no longer conforms with the complex, industrialized labor process of modern workplaces: only socialist planning and the supervision of the direct producers themselves can make effective use of the technology whose adolescence the bourgeoisie oversaw. Today, many will advance these arguments only with significant caveats, avoiding some of its more embarrassing iterations. Few would argue, for instance, that the deskilled, socialized labor of the factory system contains the germ of a new world in the making. They will not hesitate, however, to pour new wine into old bottles and say much the same thing about 3-D printers and self-driving cars. The fettering thesis appears throughout Marx’s mature writings, especially in those rare, speculative moments when he considers the transition to communism. It sits uneasily, however, with a view developed most pointedly in his writing on large-scale machinery, in which the factory system actualizes capital’s control over labor, confiscating “every atom of freedom, both in bodily and in intellectual activity.”4 For much of the twentieth century, the fettering thesis dominated Left thinking about technology. Beginning in the postwar period, however, numerous Marxists set to work developing a critical theory of technology. Herbert Marcuse, Raniero Panzieri, and Harry Braverman, as exponents of the critical insights offered by the Frankfurt School, operaismo, and labor process theory, respectively, The Belly of the Revolution 333 revealed the many ways in which the productive forces of capitalism were saturated with the political imperatives of capitalism. 5 Today, few people can fully ignore this critical legacy. Even the “accelerationist” authors of Inventing the Future (2015), whose primary hypothesis consists of a hyberbolic deployment of the fettering thesis, acknowledge that contemporary technology is sometimes inextricable from capitalist function at the level of design.6 Their solution seems to be a sort of mix-and-match theory of transition, in which we discard unusable technologies (nuclear weapons: bad) and cultivate useful ones (antibiotics: good). Such a view is possible, however, only if one thinks of technology as a series of discrete tools, rather than an ensemble of interconnected systems. I have attempted elsewhere to intervene in this discussion by providing a different way of looking at the problem.7 Rather than assume the Olympian point of view and ask ourselves what we would do with given technologies if we were allowed to rearrange things as we wish from one end of the earth to the other, we need to start with a much more difficult question: how do revolutionary struggles beginning in the here and now find a way to meet their needs, survive, and grow, while producing communism? Looked at from this perspective, there may indeed be arrangements of given productive means that are impossible because there is no way for them to unfold as the result of class struggle. History is, in this sense, like a board game in which there are appealing configurations of pieces that the rules render impossible. These arrangements can never result from a sequence of play.8 The standard assumption among Marxists and many others is that, despite its toxic excretions, the more developed technology becomes, the easier it will be to produce communism. But what if these technologies actually make it harder? What if they are also fetters, blocking attempts to break free from class society? This is obvious when it comes to the technologies for repression, surveillance and warfare, which have effectively removed certain revolutionary strategies from play. But consider, for example, the energy system upon which industrial and postindustrial capitalism is built. Few 334 Materialism and the Critique of Energy people doubt that fossil energy use drives climate change by packing the air with greenhouse gases, and that these effects will massively constrain human and extra-human life over the course of the twentyfirst century and beyond. The problem is that the energy system and the technology it powers is not at all modular; it is not possible to swap out dirty energy and swap in clean energy, even if all political obstacles were removed and some polity found itself able to rearrange the building blocks of industrial society as it saw fit. The technology they would inherit works with and only with fossil fuels. This lack of modularity is clearest in the case of the more than one billion vehicles built around combustion engines; these can be replaced by non-fossil energy only by manufacturing batteries through highly energy- and resource-intensive processes. At present, even if one were to ignore everything but the arithmetic of greenhouse gases — and given the highly destructive mining processes these batteries require, this means ignoring quite a bit — the benefits of such an energy transition are uncertain, especially if overall energy use continues to grow year on year. As for electricity itself, while one can generate it from cleaner, renewable sources such as wind and solar, the inconsistency of these sources means that, if people want continuous, on-demand energy (and most current technology requires it) they would need to invest massively in resource- and energy-intensive technologies for storage and transmission that would render the emissions-reducing benefits of such reconfiguration uncertain. The technologies of capitalism fit together into technical ensembles that exhibit a strong degree of path-dependency, meaning historical implementation strongly influences future development, precluding or making difficult many configurations we may find desirable. The authors of Inventing the Future are, by contrast, path autonomists. Their blindness to the way that technological systems fit together into non-modular ensembles is what leads them to assert, incredibly, that “clean energy technologies make possible virtually limitless and environmentally sustainable forms of power production.”9 The fettering thesis continues to manacle thinking about revolution The Belly of the Revolution 335 and technology in part because no alternative perspective has been consolidated. In the pages that follow, I build upon my previous work and consider the obstacles, infrastructural and technological, that a twenty-first-century revolution will encounter. I take as my primary object of inquiry agriculture and the food supply chain, the belly of the revolution, as I call it, not only because revolutions will either provision themselves or die but because agriculture and food supply depend upon all the other technical systems of industrial capitalism: energy supply, manufacturing, and logistics. In the ancient political fable I use for my epigraph, the belly admonishes the rebellious organs of the body, reminding them that if they revolt they die, since all nourishment passes through the belly before being distributed outward. This is the counterrevolutionary lecture that capitalism continually whispers into the ears of would-be rebels; its words are the technical arrangement of the means of production, the organization of the land and its powers.10 The two “revolutions” capital effected in the last half of the twentieth century — the green revolution and the logistics revolution — are really counterrevolutions. Together, they have reorganized agriculture and the food supply system in such a way that real revolutions must break with them or perish. Furthermore, as I will show, although many leftists continue to believe that these technologies provide the basis for an ecological reorganization of industry capable of warding off the worst effects of capital’s ecological destabilization, whether within capitalism or beyond it, these hopes are misplaced. Our best hope is communism, and communism means, as we will see, breaking the spine of this industrial infrastructure and ending the tyranny of the belly. In order to respond to these old agrarian fables, we need a new theory of technology, one that reckons with path dependency. We also need to return to an insight that has been lost but which was at the center of Marx’s thinking — technology is nature, an organization of natural elements and powers.11 The productive forces are social forces through and through, determined by the social relations of capitalism, but they are also natural forces. Technology utilizes, reconfigures, 336 Materialism and the Critique of Energy and shapes nature, but part of what a path-autonomous view of technology overlooks is that the qualities and characteristics of natural forces themselves, along with social relations, determine the range of possible uses a technology affords. Here I find two new contributions to Marxist ecology, Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capital and Jason W. Moore’s Capitalism in the Web of Life, quite helpful.12 Malm argues that the direction of capitalist development and industrialization was influenced by the difference between coal-fueled steam power and the water power that preceded it. As technologies, coal power and water power feature entirely incongruent profiles that have to do with the different natural forces they recruit as much as the social relations through which these natural forces are organized and developed; capitalist development selects from and eventually synthesizes these forces, based not only upon their ability to meet human needs but upon their fit with the imperatives of accumulation. Steam power cannot be made to do what water power can do, nor vice versa. The limits these technologies present to those who would adapt them are double: they have to do with their social character but also the material character of the powers and forces they use. The natural and the social are not two separate layers, one base and the other superstructure, but intermixed. In Moore’s account, capitalism is a way of “organizing nature”; capitalist reproduction involves the reproduction of certain social relations and institutions as well as the reproduction of nature in forms conducive to capitalist accumulation. Moore for his part emphasizes what he calls “the double internality” of “humanity-in-nature/nature-in-humanity.”13 Reprising Marx’s own dialectical understanding of human labor, where “man acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way… simultaneously changes his own nature,” Moore reminds us that humans are animals, whose social and cultural forms regulate a constant transformation of the material world, including themselves.14 An attentive reader of Justus Von Liebig’s works on soil chemistry, Marx borrowed from Liebig the term stoffwechsel (metabolism) and used it to describe human activity in the most expansive sense.15 The Belly of the Revolution 337 Liebig’s term helped Marx to think about the transformative character of human activity, “a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates, and controls the metabolism between himself and nature.”16 Largely associated now with biological processes internal to human bodies, metabolism is a particularly salutary concept for thinking the double internality. Metabolism captures the connection between the social belly and the belly as such. Neither Malm nor Moore put things in exactly this way but the implications are clear: the productive forces of capital are natural forces, their productivity derives not only from the organization of people and processes but also from the characteristics of various material elements, from powers of water, earth, air, and fire, from biological, chemical, and physical processes, from gravity, electro-magnetism, and the forces internal to atoms. Town, Country, and the Double Internality The romantic or post-romantic perspective on these matters opposes nature and technology — the machine in the garden and against the garden, the tractor as leveler of wilderness.17 But the garden is also a machine, a way of organizing nature. In a certain sense, the difference between these views is semantic. If nature means a forest, then it makes sense to see it as opposed to technology. If nature means something like fire, though, then it is easy enough to see it as both a spontaneously emerging extra-human force and a human technology. Agriculture and the food system mediate between these different meanings of the word “nature,” since a farm is a collection of living things organized toward human needs, and unlike an oil refinery much more clearly both social and natural. Agriculture is also the place where the relationship between capitalist social relations and labor-saving innovation is first established, as Robert Brenner’s persuasive account makes clear. Brenner’s writing on the transition to capitalism is, among many things, an argument against technicism and against the fettering thesis.18 The emergence of capitalism in the English countryside 338 Materialism and the Critique of Energy did not naturally evolve through the increase-seeking decisions of peasants and lords, such that the underlying productivity gains in agriculture made feudal property rights into “fetters.” All things being equal, the direct producers and their exploiters under feudalism would struggle against each other in ways that stabilized feudal relations and inhibited increased productivity. Only a shock to this system could introduce a new set of specifically capitalist property relations in which producers were compelled to exchange their product on a competitive market in order to reproduce themselves. Medieval agriculture relied on fallowing to restore soil fertility, but in the sixteenth century a new agricultural regime emerged, chiefly in the Netherlands and England, based on crop rotation rather than fallowing. Planting of fodder crops would follow the planting of cereals, with no rest for the land. This had two advantages for soil fertility — the fodder crops, such as clover and alfalfa, were nitrogenfixing rather than depleting, but they also fed animals that produced manure and thus fertilized the soil. Peasants were unable to adopt the system, however, given the open field system of property rights, where fallow lands were common property on which anyone could graze their animals. If anyone tried to plant fodder crops there, they would run the risk of having them eaten by someone else’s animals. Furthermore, the new system required more animals, not only to graze on and fertilize the newly cultivated lands, but also to replace human labor, since the activity required per cultivated acre increased massively in the crowded calendar of the crop rotation system, with more animals and lands requiring care and work.19 Most peasant producers were without these resources, relying on the labor of a single family and, at most, one or two animals. For all these reasons, crop rotation was adopted in the sixteenth century only when common lands were enclosed and the peasants turned into wage laborers who could then be set to work on larger, non-fallowing farms involving increased animal power and new tools. As yields per acre and per worker increased, the peasants whose lands had been enclosed were no longer needed as agricultural wage laborers. This provided the The Belly of the Revolution 339 engine for development elsewhere. As the productivity of labor in the countryside increased, ex-peasants dispossessed of their right to the land migrated to the towns, forming the labor pool for industry. Fed by the surplus of grain and meat, the towns fattened into cities. The takeaway here is that the reorganization of human society prompts a reorganization of nature. Changes in the relations of production prompt a change in the productive forces, whereas the fettering thesis imagines the reverse. Agriculture is a complicated area of study in part because it is easy to confuse two important forms of technical change — landsaving innovations, which increase yield per acre, and the more familiar labor-saving innovations which increase yield per worker. The first agricultural revolution involved both types, but the chief importance of the crop rotation system was in land-saving. Afterward, and until the twentieth century, land-saving innovations were few and far between. Most of the important agricultural innovations of the nineteenth century were labor-saving and involved better use of draft animals through new tools and motorless machines for plowing, cultivating, and harvesting.20 Moore argues that nineteenth-century increases in yields came primarily from aggressive farming on heretofore uncultivated land in the Americas, stripping it of nutrients and then moving on to new plots once the fertility plummeted.21 The nineteenth century also saw a scramble for fertilizer imports — first guano from South American islands, then saltpeter from South American deserts, but these extractable deposits were scarce and the imminent depletion of these resources formed the context for Marx’s reading of Von Liebig and his critical commentary about the self-undermining character of capitalist agriculture. For Marx, the nineteenth-century crisis of soil fertility originated first and foremost from the division between town and country, which the transition to capitalism from agrarian society deepened rather than overcame. By concentrating workers and the natural fertilizers they produce in cities, capitalism “disturbs the metabolic interaction between the man and the earth, i.e., it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent 340 Materialism and the Critique of Energy elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal condition for the natural resource of the soil.”22 As Marx saw it, the solution to this problem, the rebalancing of the metabolic interaction between humans and the land, involved a revolutionary project that has largely been forgotten despite its centrality to most nineteenth-century conceptions of society after capitalism: the overcoming of the division between town and country, returning human excrement to the land from whence it came. People forget that this was one of the revolutionary measures (many of them comparatively modest, and easily incorporated by liberal reformism) outlined by Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto: “Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equable distribution of the population over the country.”23 The first part has already been achieved by today’s factory farms and industrialized food systems, but once we read on we see that Marx and Engels imagined something very different: the breaking up of big cities, the localization and dispersal of food production, so that it was close to where people actually lived, and the dispersal of industry throughout the countryside, so that its polluting effects were mitigated. This was not a passing fancy but something that Marx and Engels referred to continuously from 1848 on, taken up by many of the socialists they influenced. Today, questioning urbanization or imagining the destruction of cities as part of a communist revolution is seen by accelerationists and other proponents of the fettering thesis as concomitant with primitivism, despite the centrality of these objectives to the nineteenth-century radical tradition. Finding agreement on this point with the utopian socialists he typically criticizes, Engels puts it rather pointedly in Anti-Dühring: The abolition of the antithesis between town and country is not merely possible. It has become a direct necessity of industrial production itself, just as it has become a necessity of agricultural production and, The Belly of the Revolution 341 besides, of public health. The present poisoning of the air, water and land can be put an end to only by the fusion of town and country; and only such fusion will change the situation of the masses now languishing in the towns, and enable their excrement to be used for the production of plants instead of for the production of disease.24 For Engels, this does not mean isolated, autarkic villages. He remains a proponent of decentralizing some productive processes and centralizing others. Bebel, discussing the same thematic in his book Women and Socialism, notes that it is “due to the complete remodeling of the means of communication and transportation… that the city populations will be enabled to transfer to the county all their acquired habits of culture, to find there their museums, theaters, concerts halls, reading rooms, libraries.”25 The abolition of town and country requires extensive coordination, and the communication of both goods and information. However, some things do not need to be and should not be so communicated. He continues: Each community will, in a way, constitute a zone of culture; it will, to a large extent, itself raise the necessaries of life. Horticulture, perhaps the most agreeable of all occupations, will then reach the fullest bloom. The cultivation of vegetables, fruit trees, and bushes of all nature, ornamental flowers and shrubs — all offer an inexhaustible field for human activity, a field, moreover, whose nature excludes machinery almost wholly. Thanks to the decentralization of the population, the existing contrast and antagonism between the country and the city will also vanish.26 On this point, contrary to received opinion, the Second International writers share a good deal with anarchist communists such as Piotr Kropotkin and Elisée Reclus, who also imagined an intermingling of industry and agriculture and, contrary to later mischaracterizations, saw need for balance between self-sufficiency and communist distribution among productive sites.27 The difference between the 342 Materialism and the Critique of Energy anarchists and the Marxists will of course concern the mechanisms whereby such coordination is achieved. Even on this point, however, Marx and Engels were less statist than many supposed, locating the ultimate power of decision in the hands of the people themselves, though both did have more faith in the possibility of a layer of administrators and technicians who could decide what goes where.28 Moore argues that interpreters of Marx’s writings on metabolism have reinstantiated a Cartesian duality (society vs. nature) that the concept was meant to transcend.29 In places, Marx describes an “irreparable rift in interdependent processes of social metabolism,” a formulation that has sometimes been read as describing a rift between nature and humans rather than, as Moore has it, a rift within “singular metabolism.”30 The split between town and country becomes, in this dualist reading, an ontological split between humanity and nature. What Moore proposes in the place of this cloven understanding is a picture of human and extra-human nature as a “flow of flows of matter and life.”31 Humans are biological organisms, Moore reminds us, whose activity, building up matter into bodies and transforming living and nonliving things, is regulated by language and culture and other oddly powerful mediations such as value. But thinking the unity of humanity and nature does not overcome the practical rifts in this flow of flows; it does not overcome the division between town and country, which is a real break within matter, not merely a theoretical one. For Marx, there was no contradiction between thinking humanity as a part of nature and separate from nature; this was because, at a practical level, humans were a part of nature that had separated itself from nature. Through labor “man regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature” and at same time “confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature.”32 This is not an epistemological division so much as a real one, and dealing with its effects requires practical reorganization of the relationship between humans and nature, not a mere rethinking of the problematic. Moore has little to say about this practical reorganization, and misses what is a fundamental point for those of us investigating these matters from a The Belly of the Revolution 343 revolutionary perspective: the abolition of the division between town and country and the metabolic rift stands as part of the realization of the double internality, the instantiation of a state of affairs in which humans no longer stand over and against external or internal nature. Filling in the Rift The union of industry and agriculture that Marx and Engels and others advocated has happened, but not at all in the way they imagined. In one sense, the old oppositions between town and country have vanished in the developed world and in most of the developing world too. One can browse the web via smartphone from many a backcountry road. Farms operate with million-dollar machines as complex as those in any factory. And yet, the rifts remain, widening every year; our food travels ever-greater distances from farm to table and undergoes complex industrial processes before being digested by us. The fundamental issue which Marx and Engels identified, that the resources which are taken from the soil are not returned to it, remains with us in a transmuted form. Soil fertility is limited first and foremost by the amount of biologically available nitrogen; such nitrates and ammonia are produced regularly from atmospheric nitrogen by bacteria, a process that can be sped up by certain crops, such as legumes. Biologically available nitrogen is also found in decaying plant material and in manure and human waste. The rate at which nitrogen can be converted to a usable form is limited, however, and even the most careful management of inputs and waste material runs the risk of depleting the soil. Without nitrogen, plants cannot produce protein, and without plant protein humans and other animals cannot produce themselves.33 The nitrogen cycle is “singular metabolism” in a very basic sense, a chain of biochemical reactions moving from the air to soil and back to air, passing through the bodies and bodily excretions of plants, animals, and humans. In the twentieth century, the limits of various systems of managed organic inputs, such as the crop rotation discussed above, were radically transcended by the invention of the Haber-Bosch process, which uses natural gas to 344 Materialism and the Critique of Energy convert atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia. As such, the amount of nitrogen now available is constrained only by the supply of natural gas. The invention of nitrogen-fixing technology averted the imminent crisis of soil fertility Marx and Engels identified, obviating the need to return organic wastes to the land, and therefore widening the metabolic rift while filling it in with megatons of synthetic fertilizer. One of the most intriguing moments in Malm’s Fossil Capital (2015) may help us theorize the shift to synthetic nitrogen, developing our sense of the ways in which productive technologies incorporate both social and natural forces whose character strongly determines their possible use. Malm helpfully extends Marx’s categories of formal and real subsumption in order to explain the difference between water power and steam power.34 Most attempts to expand these important categories misconstrue their original meaning for Marx, or attempt to make them the basis of an impossible periodization.35 Subsumption is often seen as identical to commodification — that is, producers are subsumed when they are made market dependent and begin to produce for exchange. Subsumption as Marx defines it, however, has to do with the labor process and with capital’s control over workers. Formal subsumption occurs when capitalists take over an existing labor process, owning the means of production that peasants or artisans formerly possessed as well as the products generated by those means of production, and paying wages out of the revenue they earn. Yeoman farmers or artisans who produce for the market using their own labor are not in this sense formally subsumed, even though the products of their labor were commodified. Real subsumption occurs when capitalists not only own but reorganize and materially transform the means of production, in order to increase productivity and profit. Malm’s extension of these categories works because it concerns the labor process and direct capitalist control. For Malm, nature is formally subsumed in the case of energy sources, like water power, derived from what he calls “the flow” — a category that also includes solar and wind power. The flow is curiously resistant to commodification; it can be appropriated but not exactly owned, since The Belly of the Revolution 345 it does not have a precise location, diffused throughout the landscape and atmosphere in ways that resist contract. It is also unpredictable; levels of rivers swell and subside in ways that cannot be controlled, clouds cover the sun for days, and wind rises and falls.36 This makes water power inferior to things like coal, despite the fact that it is free as a result of its uncommodifiability. Coal and other energy sources like it form what Malm calls “the stock,” and these things can be really subsumed by capital, meaning that, with coal, capital can produce energy when and where it wants it, disciplining and regulating nature’s provision of motive power. In the context of the early nineteenth-century class struggle, Malm argues, the turn to the stock was necessary — capitalists who used water power were exposed to destabilizing class struggle by their need to stay close to water sources, where workers were in short supply and could thus drive up wages. Furthermore, water power displayed great seasonal variation. The mills would capture water in a mill pond overnight and then let it out during the day; in the summertime when water was low, this could power only a short working day, such that mill owners made up for lost time when the water returned in the autumn, driving their workers toward very long days. When the Factory Acts of the 1830s were passed, limiting the working day, this latter practice was rendered impossible, further compromising the ability of water power to compete with steam. Despite being cheaper, the unpredictability of water power combined with the resistance of labor to render water capitalists less competitive. Only steam power could deliver the needed predictability. Water mills did, of course, involve complicated mechanisms unavailable before capitalism and therefore featured a really subsumed labor power, but Malm argues that really subsumed labor is incompatible with an only formally subsumed nature. Factories need a steady energy source that can be increased or decreased at will.37 Jason Moore would perhaps critique Malm’s use of these categories for their latent Cartesianism. If nature is seen as something that can be subsumed, formally or really, then it is treated as something 346 Materialism and the Critique of Energy external to humans that is only brought under human control through technology. But as I argue above, this terminological precision risks occluding very real differences in different types of relationship between human and extra-human nature, making it difficult to gauge how much extra-human nature is or is not radically reorganized by humans. Perhaps the useful term, in addition to subsumption, is synthesis: in the case of coal power, gasoline, electricity, and nuclear power, natural forces are not simply appropriated by humans but actively synthesized by them. The implications of synthesis and real subsumption for the discussion of the nitrogen cycle above are, I would hope, obvious: in the system of managed inputs, the lifemaking powers of nitrogen are formally appropriated through the conservation and recycling of organic wastes, crop rotation, mixed farming, and the planting of legumes. With the Haber-Bosch process, these powers are actively synthesized by humans. Food and Logistics after the Green Counterrevolution Malm’s use of the terms “stock” and “flow” is an interesting modification of their standard usage by economists, where the first refers to a simple mass of value (or commodity units) and the second to a rate, given in value or commodity units over time. Joan Robinson, quoting Michał Kalecki in conversation, is remembered for her acerbic description of economics as “the science of confusing stocks with flows,” because people tend to treat these two measures as commensurable, comparing GDP (a flow) to national debt (a stock), for example.38 Though not commensurable, one can make the two things into a ratio: debt to GDP, for instance, or the profit rate. Stock is simply what builds up where inflows, into a bank account or a factory, are greater than outflows, and thus the relationship between the incommensurables can be modeled mathematically, as one can model the relationship between the depth of a river in feet and its rate of flow.39 Malm’s use of the terms means to indicate a distinction between energy flows that build up into a meaningful stock and those that do not. The inflows of wind and solar energy are always passing The Belly of the Revolution 347 into outflows in ways that never form a stock, unlike the chemical energy of former biomass contained in coal deposits. In political economy, the concepts offer ways of thinking about the relationship between revenue, investment, costs, and value transferred. The fixed capital invested in a waterworks would typically be measured as a stock, an initial outlay sunk into machinery at a particular date in time, but one might also calculate its depreciation as a flow of value transferred to the goods the mill produces. Likewise, the coal used by a steam-powered plant will typically be measured as a flow (of value or tons per year or day), but one might also measure it as a stock, by taking its level at a particular moment or its average level over the course of the year. This is where Malm’s usage gets interesting, and perhaps confusing, since the turn to coal and the stock that Malm describes was a turn to an increased flow of circulating commodities, traveling ever-further distances, and requiring a vast transportation network, itself powered by coal and itself requiring the very coal flows it made possible. Conversely, the waterworks that preceded the turn to steam required no circulating energy inputs but did involve costly fixed capital investment. The free use of the flow was a way of avoiding cost flows for energy inputs but involved fixed capital stock, and the turn to the stock was a turn to flows of energy inputs. In the postindustrial era, the so-called “logistics revolution” has focused on reducing stocks through a careful management of flows. The goal of “just-in-time” production is to reduce standing inventory as much as possible, by making sure that inputs arrive at the plant exactly when they are needed. Since stock is usually treated as the average level of inventory, this kind of distribution system ends up being “capital saving,” inasmuch as it reduces the level of capital tied up in production, freeing it for other uses. Capitalists measure their profit rate as flow of net profit over capital invested for a given period of time, taking the average level of circulating capital; therefore, by reducing the latter, the rate rises (though there is the question of what happens to the capital freed up and whether capitalists can find productive uses for it, which is no easy matter). But inventory is not 348 Materialism and the Critique of Energy the only cost that capitalists seek to reduce. Fixed capital is inferior to circulating capital because it must be paid for far in advance of its use, making accurate prediction difficult. If demand for the product that a factory produces falls precipitously, one cannot go back in time and change the size of the factory one built, whereas circulating capital can be adjusted as one goes in order to correspond to existing demand. Labor costs are similar, given the difficulty of firing workers, either because workers will strike and shut down plants when fired or there is legislation preventing arbitrary dismissal. By making the circulation and coordination of various inputs easier, the contemporary logistics revolution should really be understood as an outsourcing and contract-production revolution. Instead of producing goods or services directly themselves, many firms reduce their permanent employees as well as their fixed capital investments to the lowest level possible, engaging a network of contract producers and service providers as needed and according to changing market conditions. The result is that capital’s power over labor — now fragmented and dispersed across the logistical grid — increases massively. As I have argued, such logistical restructuring cannot in any way be understood as a simple increase in efficiency. Though costs of circulation and transportation are reduced through more efficient technologies, the gains wrought from these restructurings come largely from their ability to drive wages to the floor and force workers to accept the greatest possible insecurity. This critical understanding of logistics extends the critique of technicism and productive force determinism one finds in Malm. Indeed, the turn to logistics and the turn to steam are remarkably parallel, undertaken in both cases in order to disarm an insurgent laboring population. Food is logistical now, too. Under the coordinative power of the supermarket system, food travels farther than ever before. But even where source and destination are proximate, the logistics of agricultural inputs — from seeds, to fertilizers, to machinery — are themselves complex and likewise dependent upon long supply chains for their production. And so on and so forth, until after a dozen The Belly of the Revolution 349 iterations, the commodity circuit more or less turns back in on itself. Grain and other stable agricultural products have been traded across vast distances since at least the first millennium BC, but in the postwar period international agricultural trade has expanded massively not just by volume but by type of good traded. From 1973 to 2013, the volume of agricultural exports grew by 250 percent. Some of this can be attributed to the underlying growth in agricultural output during the height of the Green Revolution, as chemical fertilizers and pesticides began to be used in great volume. But total output only grew by 142 percent during this period.40 In money terms, the increase was sharper still: the real value of exports grew 1,364 percent. Part of that astronomical increase derives from the commodity and energy boom that occurs from 2002 to 2012. The real value of agricultural exports increased six times more quickly from 2001 to 2013 than it did from 1973 to 2001, but the steeper increase also reflects a shift in the type of agricultural products imported and exported during this period, from bulk goods to “high-value products” such as fruits and vegetables, enabled by new refrigeration technologies and long-range transportation and logistic networks. By 2013, 19 percent of the food that Americans consumed was imported.41 As indices of international travel, these numbers are only partly useful in estimating the extent to which logistics has canalized the food system and with it the productive flows of the earth. A tomato may travel farther from farm to refrigerator when grown in California and sold in Washington, DC than when grown in Mexico and sold in Colorado. The effect of all this has been a reorganization of agriculture in many areas toward high-value cash crops and away from staples and cereals, which are now imported from places where they can be grown with the most capital-intensive, high-yield techniques, such as the American Midwest. One of the reasons for the logistics revolution is that productivity increases are not uniform across different sectors, and even today, there are many activities that remain unmechanized. For example, while the manufacture of components in electronics is highly automated, the assembly of these components is not, and so 350 Materialism and the Critique of Energy assembly companies, Foxconn being the most notorious, are located in places where wages are lowest. Similar processes hold in the garment industry, where textile production is automated but sewing is not. In agriculture, most of the labor takes place during harvesting but this work has only been automated through more or less crop-specific and highly expensive machines, leaving a number of fruits and vegetables to be harvested by hand, despite the near-total automation of other crops. What Bebel says about the machinery-exclusive nature of horticulture still holds true in many areas 135 years later. Harvesting is seasonal, too, meaning that the labor needs of modern farms fluctuate massively, shrinking to zero for much of the year and then ballooning at harvest times. Under capitalist social relations, only a population of marginally employed and underpaid workers, dismissible for any reason, can satisfy the fluctuating labor demand of farms. In the U.S. and Europe these needs are met by populations of informally employed immigrant laborers, though often logistics enables retailers and distributors to go directly to zones and countries with large unemployed populations and low wages to purchase labor-intensive foods. The result is that the distribution of agricultural capacity over the crust of the earth has little to do with the direct food needs of the nearby population, and everything to do with the antagonistic conditions of production for profit. Malm argues that the real subsumption of nature, and the need for consistent, predictable energy sources has to do with the imperative to really subsume labor, to create massive machine works that can be run at all hours and at any speed and that will determine the discipline, pace, and quality of work by the character of their material design. But the unpredictability of labor, he notes, is constitutive and impossible to extirpate fully. No technology yet exists whereby capital can control the human nervous system and compel motion directly; there is still need for coercion and incentive of one form or another. Even in slavery, with the most violent coercion imaginable, the laborers have the power to refuse work and suffer the consequences. Indiscipline can only be controlled, not eliminated. The unpredictability of nature The Belly of the Revolution 351 is, also, difficult to eliminate completely. However much the nitrogen cycle is really subsumed in modern agriculture, the productive powers of the earth analyzed and manipulated at the molecular level, agriculture remains a high-risk business, dependent upon climactic factors that are impossible to anticipate let alone control. Like labor, the weather can only be managed indirectly. The result is that few small- or medium-sized farmers producing for market can survive without relying on complex forms of credit, insurance, state subsidy, price control, or other support. The prices of agricultural products fluctuate wildly, and the intervention of powerful distribution and supply monopolies has the effect of imposing terms on producers. After the final and total defeat of the global peasantry, meaning that nearly all farmers are market-dependent, food prices always run the risk of being sent to the floor by competitive forces. The result is that states often intervene in the market. (The U.S. has for decades, as many know, paid its cereal producers to destroy excess grain in order to maintain market conditions, such that the price of U.S. grain is often far below its actual production cost). Given such interventions, and the effect of profit taking at every level of the chain from farmer to consumer as well as complex forms of credit, there is often little relation between the prices that consumers see and the actual production costs of agriculture. For example, the expansion of commodity futures and other agricultural derivatives means that small rises in cost due to changing conditions can be amplified into massive price explosions, as seems to be partly the case for the nowdeflating commodity and food boom of 2003–2012. This has the effect of creating massive overinvestment with the ultimately perverse result that, once conditions settle down, such strong deflationary pressures emerge that revenue can no longer cover costs, initiating a wave of bankruptcies that bring down costs for the next generation of producers. Production for profit stamps agriculture, with growers changing the crops they offer according to the shifting winds of the market and a series of complex guarantees from states. What is grown first is money, and only then food for human needs. 352 Materialism and the Critique of Energy The rise of contemporary logistics has enabled a shift from socalled “push production” models. In push production, suppliers build out capacity and output, first, and then subsequently clear the market through promotions and sales. In “pull production,” output is linked directly to demand signals, with retailers replacing inventories as they are sold. The limit case, and the ideal for firms like Walmart and the network of suppliers, is one where items aren’t produced until they have already been purchased. Inventory never builds up anywhere, and stocks are kept near zero. Pull productions effect a shift in power from producers to retailers or, in some cases, distributors. In agriculture, one notices that distributors such as Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland have enormous power, but retailers or producers for consumption such as Walmart and McDonald’s can also cut out distributors and go directly to farmers. Under logistics, supermarkets become a new locus of power. The combination of the logistics and green revolutions has led to an increasingly wasteful food supply system. One might think that elimination of standing inventories from retailers and distributors would make for less waste, but unlike manufacturers, food producers have far less ability to alter their output. Agriculture has relatively long turnover times, and farmers have to make decisions about output levels far in advance of actual sale, all while anticipating the possibility of a bad harvest due to uncontrollable factors. They often make advance contracts with distributors and retailers, but given unpredictability, find it more profitable to overproduce, as the costs of producing too much are lower than the opportunity costs of producing too little. In other words, push production remains the norm in agriculture, despite the demand-side dominance of the industry, and thus producers are often left with more food than they can sell at decent prices. Supermarkets also have stringent aesthetic and quality standards, rejecting agricultural products that do not conform to rather superficial consumer values. And because retailers and distributors now dominate, their contracting allows them to switch from supplier to supplier, forcing the costs of compelled The Belly of the Revolution 353 overproduction further down the value chain. This dynamic results in a staggering scale of food wastage, with somewhere between 29 percent and 34 percent of all food produced globally not consumed.42 In industrialized countries, a good portion of food wastage happens during consumption, as food rots in refrigerators or pantries. But the relative power that logistics has given retailers and distributors over farmers is a big part of the problem. As the edges and vertices of the food system multiply, so too do the cracks into which food might fall, never reaching human bodies. The reorganization of the food supply by the green revolution has doubtless led to increased output per acre, but it has done so while massively amplifying waste and severely compromising its ability to meet human needs. The system looks highly inefficient even before we begin to consider energy-intensive and water-intensive methods for production and distribution, and how much they contribute to total carbon emissions and, in turn, destructive climate change that will adversely affect food production. In Moore’s account, the ratio of energy calories to food calories has almost doubled since the 1970s and grown by almost ten times since the 1930s under “petro-farming” conditions. 43 Scaling up such a system to meet the needs of nine or ten billion people will be difficult, to say the least. Doing so while reducing overall emissions and energy use will be impossible. Revolution and Agriculture With a few important exceptions, the social revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were agrarian revolutions, undertaken in societies that had not yet fully transitioned to capitalism and where agricultural production was still mediated by the conflict between peasants and landlords. Some of these revolutions were led by peasants, as in China, or by alliances between peasants and workers, as in Russia and Spain. In many cases, the rebellious workers were newly proletarianized and still retained some connection to peasant traditions and values. The question of land reform was central in all these cases, as the peasantry was squeezed by the encroachment 354 Materialism and the Critique of Energy of capitalism on one side and the rapacity of the old regime on the other. To say that these social revolutions were agrarian means that their dubious successes had the effect of accomplishing, through various processes of expropriation and violence, what the normal development of capitalism in many other countries could not: in Russia and China, the landlords were eliminated and the productive use of the land entirely reorganized. In other parts of the developing world, the old landed powers retained their hold for much longer, even after the peasantry had been more or less dispossessed, and as a result reorganization of agriculture there has been much more slow going. Yevgeni Preobrazhensky, one of the most clear-sighted of the economists that the Bolsheviks had on their side, explicitly describes what needed to happen in the Soviet Union as a form of “primitive socialist accumulation,” displacing the peasantry and converting the land to new use, though he doubtless imagined something different than Stalin’s genocidal collectivizations.44 By 1936, the Soviet Union was producing 112,000 tractors per year, nearly double the number of 1933 and only slightly below the number of motor vehicles produced, part of a massive push to industrialize agriculture.45 By the 1970s, the Soviet Union was the world’s second largest producer of both potassium and nitrogen fertilizers.46 Though the Soviet food system was mired by chronic shortages and inefficiencies in production and distribution, something that derived from the contradictions of what Hillel Ticktin called its “non-mode of production,” this was not for want of industrializing nature. Indeed, the peculiarities of Soviet accumulation made it particularly wasteful, even judged by the standards set by capitalism.47 Since defects marred nearly all final goods, the system tended to overproduce raw inputs (steel, coal, or cement) in enormous quantities, and to generate stockpiles of intermediate goods that could not be utilized because of bottlenecks in the supply system.48 The fact that the Soviet system could produce things like fertilizer more easily than it could produce wristwatches or radios no doubt contributed to its high utilization. An authentic twenty-first century revolution, breaking with The Belly of the Revolution 355 capitalism and all class society, will likewise have to be an agrarian revolution, though in a far different sense than those described above. It will have to radically transform the way food is produced and distributed, not only because the present food system is wasteful, toxic to humans, and environmentally destructive, and not only because climate change stands to radically alter what can be grown and how and where it can be grown, but also because, even more importantly, the capitalist organization of nature as agriculture will, if relied on, entirely incapacitate such revolutions, guaranteeing the restoration of class society. Agriculture as we know it now is saturated with market relations; the distribution of various domesticated organisms across the surface of the planet, as well as the inputs which make their cultivation possible, has been undertaken with an eye toward the maximization of profits first and satisfaction of human needs second. Based on the historical record, we must assume that revolution will break through — that is, defeat the reigning powers, and find itself in possession of the means of production — in isolated zones first, as part of a global revolutionary wave. The partisans in such situations will find among their most immediate tasks the maintenance of an adequate food supply, most likely under conditions of civil war. In modern societies, maintaining the food supply depends, in turn, on several other essential industries and infrastructures: for water and energy, for transport, and for the manufacture of the goods used directly or indirectly by agriculture. Revolutions cannot survive persistent food shortages, inasmuch as the absence of food activates the most powerful forms of selfinterested and survival-oriented activity, even among those who are committed to the revolution — pilfering, hoarding, marketeering. Exhorting people to sacrifice and discipline will only work for so long; eventually a split will emerge, between the activist minority fanatically devoted to the revolution, even unto the point of death, and those masses whose attachments are weaker, who want the revolution to succeed but will withdraw their support when the risks are too high, the prospects uncertain, and the miseries unbearable. In most 356 Materialism and the Critique of Energy revolutions, the activist minority turns, at this point, from moral exhortation to violent coercion, inducing even more demoralization, distrust, and disaffection. The Bolsheviks provide an object lesson; having earned the distrust of a partially sympathetic peasantry during the war years, when the Red Army was in the practice of seizing grain, they encountered intractable underproduction and hoarding of grain during the 1920s. The Bolsheviks concluded that they could regain control over agricultural production only by violently dispossessing the peasants, arrogating to themselves a degree of state power that assured the revolution was definitively dead, albeit a better-fed sort of dead. In Civil War Spain, where many of the partisans were significantly more skeptical of state power and violent coercion, and committed to democratic ideals and participatory, locally controlled organization of agriculture, the fact that the Francoist rebels controlled the rich grainlands and cattle-grazing areas of the Southwest meant that the Republic and its armies were continuously undersupplied. The predicament induced all manner of cynical, opportunist, and survival-oriented behavior among peasants and townspeople that only increased as the militants betrayed their democratic ideals and instituted forms of military policing and punishment in order compel compliance.49 Revolutions that rely on such police action in order to insure compliance — which is not at all to argue against the use of violence as defense against counterrevolutionary forces — effectively sign their own death warrant. Fortunately, twenty-first-century revolutions will not have to reckon with the problem of the peasantry, especially if we define peasants as those who produce for their own subsistence first and for the market second. Almost all global agricultural production is market-oriented now. In developed countries like the U.S., while the number of farms has stayed the same for decades at around a few million, many owner-operator enterprises generate negligible output (with the owners usually working elsewhere); a few hundred thousand farms generate most output, a number that has fallen decade after decade as average farm size rises. As such, the number of people The Belly of the Revolution 357 who control the land differs from that of Russia or Spain by a few orders of magnitude, and most of these farms are highly capitalized if also noncorporate enterprises that employ significant numbers of workers. These people will need to be won over to the cause or expropriated, but they form an incredibly tiny minority compared to the great masses of people that would be involved in such an undertaking. In less-developed countries, control over agricultural resources is more fragmented and involves a higher number of underclass people, but still fewer people than the thoroughly peasantbased societies of old.50 More significant will be the problem, seen already in the Spanish case, that revolutions confront when they discover that neither the necessary means of subsistence, nor the means to produce such means of subsistence, exist within the revolutionary zone. In such conditions, partisans will have to decide between, on one hand, trading with capitalist partners for necessaries and therefore organizing production for export or, on the other hand, radically reorganizing agriculture in order to meet endogenous need. If the partisans choose trade, they expose themselves to the powerful disciplinary effects of the global market and the law of value, needing to produce at competitive levels, even when they do not confront more active intervention in the form of embargo and blockade. Capital flight happens immediately in conditions of political instability, and in all likelihood, by the time the reigning powers have been deposed, international capital markets will have exerted profound disciplinary pressure, offering credit under the most punitive terms. Since exchange rates are connected to the credit system, everything imported will cost much more. Unless revolutionaries try to go it slow and not freak the credit markets, guaranteeing their total ineffectiveness (see, for instance, the sad fate of SYRIZA), the only solution that import-dependent revolutions will discover is to hyperexploit their producers in order to maintain competitive terms. But revolutions generate conditions in which managerial control over the workplace breaks down entirely; productivity levels will certainly fall, especially if wages and money 358 Materialism and the Critique of Energy continue to be used, fostering antagonistic relations in the workplace. The only way to raise productivity for partisans in such conditions will be through indirect and direct violence — instituting systems of incentive and punishment that will run, probably very quickly, from the use of piece rates to the establishment of work camps. This is precisely what happened in Spain, accepted as baleful necessity even by the erstwhile libertarians. The result: massive demoralization, insubordination, and all but the most fanatical turned against the revolution as a matter of survival. Recognizing that this way lies certain failure and that revolution will not break through globally in the short time frames that would be necessary to prevent the relative isolation of revolutionary zones, one can only hope that partisans will try a different way, reorganizing agriculture (and everything else) in order to meet existing needs independent of trade with capitalist enterprises and powers, or with, at the very least, a very small amount of such trade, not large enough to induce the crippling effects described above. I take as my framework here a view that the horizon of revolution in our time involves “communization” of all resources and relations: that is, the immediate abolition of money and wages, of state power, and of administrative centralization, and the organization of social activity without these mediations on the basis of direct, personal, or immediate social relations.51 The inherited impasses of the logistical reorganization of production are one of the reasons why I think revolutionaries will turn to communization, but they will do so in situations in which various factions are trying out different paths and in which state power and trade may continue to exist at the same time as people are breaking with them, inaugurating a revolution within the revolution and attempting to organize in order to meet their needs directly.52 As far as food production goes, this will mean, by necessity, a return to the old nineteenth-century project of abolishing the division between town and country and recognizing more clearly Moore’s double internality, a project that will involve everything The Belly of the Revolution 359 from neighborhood gardens and urban farms to large-scale farming projects at the suburban perimeters of various towns and cities as well as the replanting and reorganization of vast tracts in agricultural heartlands. Even when the revolutionary zone is rather large and production at a distance of thousands of miles is possible, the sensible path will be to localize food production as much as possible, not only in order to cut down on energy use in transportation but also to establish a situation in which some large portion of people’s food needs is immediately available and ready to hand, within some reasonable distance, making it much harder for them to be subjugated by a bureaucratic layer, a hostile power, or an emergent attempt at capitalist restoration. Partially localizing the production of foodstuffs and other necessaries would obviate the need for money or pseudomoney, wages or labor tickets, allowing the ready-to-hand goods to be distributed on demand, with a relatively low level of administration. Production and distribution of the fruits of social activity could, on this basis, happen voluntarily and freely; even if money and exchange persisted on the fringes for a time — most likely due to the presence of different factions, pursuing different revolutionary paths — if most of what people needed to live were organized this way successfully, on a communist basis, communism would stabilize. And if it stabilized it would spread, as the existence of people meeting their own needs and thriving without the mediation of money, wages, or violent compulsion would be enormously destructive for capitalism and class society elsewhere. It would mean either the beginning of the end for class society or the moment at which class powers gathered their forces to extirpate the threat. Although the aspiration of communism is to be global and universal (if also full of endless internal variation) and to establish a situation in which everything belongs to everyone and no human has more of a claim on the necessaries of life than any other, it must begin somewhere. Previous generations of communist theorists have misunderstood the transition to communism as temporal in nature, passing through the intermediate stage of socialism, when it is in fact better thought of as spatial transition: the geographical 360 Materialism and the Critique of Energy spread of an immediately social communism that is contagious for the precise reason that it is fully realized. Such geographical extension will itself take time, however, and even though communization means the establishment of immediately communist relations, the material basis of such relations as well as the processes through which they are effected will no doubt develop, deepen, and stabilize in time. In a thoughtful essay on contemporary logistics, Alberto Toscano asserts, contra my views here and elsewhere, that “the world market remains, in however arduous a way, a presupposition (not a framework!) for any transition out of capitalism.”53 Toscano suggests that I am more right than I know: the reorganization of global production has made breaking from the world market not only difficult but impossible. On one aspect of the problem, we agree: revolutionaries will undoubtedly use, when possible, the technologies of transportation and storage upon which the world market depends. But they will find such resources inadequate and even, in some cases, inimical to their needs: located in the wrong place, designed in the wrong way, and so on. The world market is a presupposition, inasmuch as it is the world revolutionaries inherit, but it is a presupposition that will provoke, by its very inadequacy, new techniques and methods. The market is more than a means for distributing necessary goods in space; it is the circulation of such goods as mediated by exchange, stamped by the contortions of the law of value. Markets involve numerous activities — banking, retailing, advertising — that have no reason for being aside from exchange and no purpose except for the reproduction of the commodity form, that is, production for exchange. Many of these counterarguments derive their force from a commitment to Marxist modernism, a belief not only in the progressive character of technological development but the “civilizing” effects of the world market, which, for all its violence, breaks down national and cultural barriers and provides the basis for international proletarian solidarity. For many, the scenarios described above violate a deeply held commitment to “internationalism” and an allergy to “socialism in The Belly of the Revolution 361 one country.” Evaluating the contemporary conjuncture with a crudely dogmatic schema inherited from the 1917 revolutionary sequence, these critics confuse a set of normative positions on international proletarian organization and solidarity with a description of the actual conditions in which revolutions will unfold. Obviously, it would be better if revolution could break through in several parts of the world all at once. But revolutions occur on the basis of what is, not what ought to be. The problems described here depend very little on the character of organizing; even if there are proletarian organizations linking struggles in different parts of the world, proletarians in zones where they do not control the resources will be limited in their ability to help the revolutionary zones, except inasmuch as they force revolutionary breakthrough where they are. This should not in any way be seen as an acceptance of the framework of national boundaries and the nation state as the basis for a revolutionary unfolding. On the contrary, the immediate establishment of communist reproduction and relations, making it easy for people to feed themselves directly and without money or centralized administration, dissolves state control and national designation, producing rifts within and across national boundaries. The opposition of “internationalism” to “nationalism” discounts the ways in which Marxist internationalism was, in practice and as far as the Second and Third Internationals were concerned, something that proceeded through nation states and on the basis of nationally coordinated blocs of proletarian power mediated by the world market. The necessary turn to communization described above would do more to destabilize the nation and state power than those forms of “internationalism” that take these institutions as their basic presuppositions. Neither would this revolutionary trajectory involve what Toscano calls a “re-ruralization, where social form is based on comradeship, friendship, or some kind of band of brothers bond.”54 Overcoming the division of town and country would mean the end of the rural, through processes involving at a minimum tens of millions of people and probably hundreds of millions if not billions; it would involve 362 Materialism and the Critique of Energy the coordinated distribution of necessary and useful things at all sorts of scales from the immediately local to the intercommunal and across the revolutionary zone. The salient distinction, however, is that such coordination would take place under conditions in which as many basic and necessary goods as possible are generated close to those who need them, making it much more difficult to dispossess or disempower people, who would both understand and have control over the processes that matter for them. This is what is at stake in the abolition of the division between town and country. Nonetheless, one need not fear a retreat into autarkic, isolated communities, which is as impossible as remaining tied to the world market. Many infrastructures, such as those for water or energy, will require coordination at scale, as will the generation of many necessary and useful goods. Furthermore, not all food production can be shifted close to where people live, nor can people be quickly shifted to the places where food is grown without great suffering, and until a reorganization of towns and cities through processes of voluntary resettlement can take place, people will no doubt rotate seasonally out to the agricultural heartlands where food is currently produced. In the scenarios described above nearly everyone would have some hand in growing the food they eat. In such a state of affairs, agriculture would doubtless become more effort intensive in the developed world, as breaking with the world market will leave many without access to the machines and fertilizers and pesticides that industrialized agriculture uses today. This is not such a problem: as a share of total human effort, the amount of time devoted to agriculture in countries such as the U.S. could increase by a factor of ten and still not account for a very large part of people’s overall activity. In the developing world, agriculture would no doubt become less effort intensive by eliminating the need for the poorest producers to work the most marginal plots of land with the worst techniques and equipment. This is not to imagine anywhere some regression to premodern techniques and relations. Agriculture will be immediately social, rather than organized by family or clan (or capitalist firm), and people The Belly of the Revolution 363 will doubtless continue to employ many of the technologies, if not the chemicals, used to grow food today. There will surely be tractors and other machines for working the earth and harvesting its fruits, trucks for the transport of produce, but these will, I suspect, exist alongside methods that rely more on the human hand, associated with permaculture, mixed planting, and other “traditional” techniques. In certain areas, people may find it impossible to meet their food needs without synthetic fertilizers and as such will have to figure out, for instance, how to run the ammonia plants and supply them with natural gas or track down phosphorus and potassium deposits. In any case, the use of such fertilizers will surely decline, if they are not eliminated altogether. Agriculture under such situations will involve a mix of high and low technique, where methods are selected for their suitability for human needs and their ecological imprint rather than their usefulness in production for profit.55 Though many like to imagine “planning” as only referring to centrally administered production occurring at national or international scales, any activity that is social at any sort of scale will involve planning — though not central planning — and partisans in the scenarios I imagine will need to engage in various infrastructure projects: for irrigation, for the recycling of organic wastes, and for energy generation and transmission. Revolution and its Motive Forces Speculation of the sort I engage in here is essentially impossible without making assumptions about the kinds of choices people might make in such a scenario, and this implies speculating, as well, about the reasons for those choices. I take as my baseline an assumption that people organize their lives with an eye to their own survival and well-being and the survival and well-being of those they care about, where the radius of care can be as small as the family nucleus or “friend group” but far more expansive as well. This makes thinking about a less destructive organization of nature both human and extrahuman extremely difficult. Most attempts by anti-capitalists to think 364 Materialism and the Critique of Energy through meaningful political response to the ongoing ecological catastrophe that is capital fail because of their inability to reckon with human motives and with the fundamentally human-centered character of human action. The absence of significant response to the mass extinction wave sweeping the planet, not to mention the mounting certainty that anthropogenic ecological change will have profoundly negative impacts on human life in the near future indicates that, unless their immediate well-being is at stake, people are unlikely to engage in the risky, difficult action that revolutionary change requires. The exceptions to this comparative quiescence almost always occur in the case of groups, such as Indigenous or agricultural communities, whose livelihood and social forms are endangered by ecological destruction. Those who would point to the radically different conceptions of human nature and its relationship to extra-human nature that occur in various cultural formations are no doubt correct, but these conceptions usually articulate the interdependence of human and extra-human forces and therefore do not provide exceptions to the rule of human-centered action, only an awareness that valuing human life means valuing extra-human life as well. Revolutions emerge when human reproduction is at stake, though in some cases people are more aware that human reproduction is also the reproduction of nature. To summarize, the argument of the preceding pages might be understood thus: if twenty-first century proletarians communize the food supply and reorganize agriculture, overcoming the division between town and country, they will do so not because this accords with their ideals but because these communist measures will emerge as the best, and indeed only, way to meet their needs in a revolutionary conjuncture, given the path dependencies of productive resources they inherit from capitalism. Seen from the vantage of the ideal, however, these measures will fortunately also involve a profound break with the toxifying food regimes of capitalism, dumping less carbon into the air and less nitrogen into the oceans and fewer poisons into the groundwater. These ecological benefits will emerge, however, as a result of choices that are more or The Belly of the Revolution 365 less anthropocentric.56 Despite its lucid account of the path dependencies fossil fuel technology engenders, when Malm turns to the present crisis of fossil energy, he ends up relying on a normative theory of motives or perhaps no theory whatsoever, giving us an account of what we must do or should do rather than what we can do. In the first pages of the book, he illuminates nicely the strange temporality of anthropogenic climate change. The consequences of fossil energy use present a singularly difficult problem for collective action: by the time their effects are felt most pressingly, obliging people to act in order to preserve their well-being, it will already be too late. In a phrase in which we can hear echoes of Marx’s discussion of rising organic composition — that is, the rising relative weight of dead labor to living labor — Malm tells us that, with fossil energy, “the causal power of the past inexorably rises.”57 At a certain point, the moment of “too late,” one witnesses the “falling in of history on the present,” as the weight of past action breaks through the ceiling. Unfortunately, Malm’s answer to this predicament leaves much to be desired, relying on wishful thinking rather than sober realism. Malm rejects the “revolutionary” response to ecological destruction — that is, the response which says capitalism is incapable of averting ecological disaster — for the simple reason that revolution will not come quick enough to stop a temperature rise of two degrees Celsius. But deciding that two degrees is your line in the sand does not necessarily mean that anything will be done to stop it. And, of course, too late is relative. There is, when it comes to these matters, bad and worse. We appear to have long missed our chance to avert the bad, if not the worst, and sober analysis may require accepting this fact and preparing accordingly. Malm’s own account of the origins of fossil capitalism and the turn to steam appears to put in question his confidence that climate change can be averted from within capitalism simply because it has to be. His central claim is that capitalism can return to the flow as an energy source, leaving behind the carboniferous stock. However, as he knows, the very properties of the flow which led capital to turn away from 366 Materialism and the Critique of Energy it remain a powerful obstacle to such a transition, haunting wind and solar power just as much as they did the streams of the English midlands. The flow is unpredictable; it cannot be turned on and off at will. This causes a problem for industrialized societies that run on the premise that energy is available on demand, part of an “abstract spatiotemporality” in which neither distance from energy source nor the variable rhythms of natural forces matter at all. One can store the electricity generated but doing so requires manufacture of energyintensive batteries, such that the ultimate environmental benefits of such a switch are unclear. In confronting this problem, Malm returns to an intriguing counterfactual account he developed when examining the decline of water power: it might have been possible, he tells us, to build massive waterworks, capable of delivering steady, reliable energy to various factories, across large distances, had capitalists been able to solve their coordination problem. The competitive urgencies of production for profit, however, made this impossible. If it were the twentieth century, the state might have undertaken such projects, as it would eventually with the highways, railroads, utilities, and other vital infrastructures individual capitalists could not fund on their own. Now, however, it is not the nineteenth century but the twentyfirst, and Malm argues that we might “return to the flow” through a massively coordinated global effort, led by states and international organizations, in which the variability of flow energy (due to diurnal rhythms and weather) is rendered predictable through a planetary network of energy transmission from flow sources. Since the sun is always shining and the wind always blowing somewhere, longdistance transmission can, potentially, overcome the unpredictability of the flow, rendering it as homogeneous as stock energy and as capable of meeting the abstract spatiotemporality of capitalist production. It is not at all clear, however, that the energy and emissions accounting will really work in the favor of such scheme — even with high-voltage direct current, much electricity is lost in transmission and those losses increase as a function of distance traveled. Second, the transformers, power lines, and wind and solar fields will themselves require massive The Belly of the Revolution 367 energy outlays to build and install and those costs will also increase as a function of transmission distances. To build clean and cheap energy generation, one will almost certainly have to use dirtier, less-efficient energy, and this may render any benefits nil.58 Even if we were to allow for the possibility of producing the materials in such a way that net emissions fall, why would states engage in such a process? As Malm indicates, the resources mobilized by such an undertaking would be massive, on the order of tens of trillions of dollars at least. He makes a comparison with World War II, which is a good benchmark. World wars, however, represent immediate existential threats for states and capitalists and also offer strong opportunities for capital to profit; they also involve alliances that, because of the antagonistic character of warfare, are actually less extensive than the sorts of alliances Malm envisions. The temporality of future threats still obtains in the case of states, and, furthermore, the hurdle is much higher, since a significant fraction of capitalists (petro-capitalists, in particular) will be ruined by such a turn. One must imagine, then, either an international political elite willing and able to act in the interest of human life in general, or a social movement capable of exerting massive pressure on the state. The first scenario is absurd, and the second returns us to the question of motives and the belatedness of action. Such a social movement will appear only when severe consequences of anthropogenic climate change have already begun to manifest. Even if such a turn were likely in the next decade, these states would face the problem of social democratic governments everywhere: infrastructure projects of this sort require, as their primary condition, that states first ensure general conditions of profitability. Otherwise, they will find themselves without sufficient credit or tax revenues. How does one maintain conditions of profitability while ruining a large sector of the capitalist economy and spending trillions of dollars on unprofitable utilities? And how does one do this with a stagnating world economy, mired by low profit rates and high debt overhangs? Here and elsewhere, latter-day social democracy depends on scenarios far less 368 Materialism and the Critique of Energy plausible than the revolutionary ones. Malm might be said to offer a strange inversion of the fettering thesis; instead of attempting to overturn the social relations of capitalism in order to accord with the underlying technical possibilities, he imagines reconfiguring those technologies to suit the requirements of abstract spatiotemporality. Both approaches capitulate to the extortionist logic of the parable of the belly, and therefore preserve, in one form of another, the very forces which will ensure their failure. In short, we have to accept that our only hope of averting the worst effects of the present ecological crisis lies in the rekindling of revolutionary class struggle in our time, either in response to the first effects of climate change or the continuing meltdown of the world economy. Belatedness, however, is at this point a given, and such a revolution will be forced to reckon with the problems of a warming planet, rising sea levels, acidifying oceans, creeping deserts, depleted water supplies, and the human displacements to follow. The biggest problem for such revolutions will concern energy: how to continue to supply electricity? How to run or replace the motorized machines which require refined petroleum? Answers to these questions will vary from place to place. For the next couple of decades, few areas will find it possible to break free from the stock completely, but by the same measure they will also find themselves compelled to conserve energy sources massively, devoting energy to the most important human needs, in ways that capitalism never could. Renewables will likely form a part of this, though people will need to reckon with the mining processes that some of these technologies involve. The so-called “rare earth” minerals that solar panels and wind turbines require are not actually very rare at all; the extraction processes they involve are, however, so environmentally destructive and toxic at present that they are currently confined to countries, such as China and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, willing to convert hundreds of square miles into toxic “sacrifice zones.” In any case, without profit or price mechanisms and without a need for continuous growth, diurnal or seasonal variability of energy supply would be much less The Belly of the Revolution 369 of a problem. Though certain systems will require continuous energy, communism will prove itself much better able to adapt to the rhythms of flow energy, turning machines off and encouraging afternoon naps, perhaps, when the clouds cover the sun or the wind dies. There are no guarantees, it should be clear: the revolutionary horizons described in the preceding pages are happy outcomes surrounded by tragedy and affliction on every side. The obstacles that capitalism has placed in the path of revolution, defeating all half-measures and vacillations, are formidable indeed. This is a cause for optimism as much as pessimism: because of capital’s total transformation of the earth, an immediately communist reorganization of human society makes rational sense today in a way that it did not in 1917. In any case, these are the futures visible from here. Not what must happen, but what can. Notes I am grateful to Jeff Diamanti and Brent Ryan Bellamy for their encouragement and editorial rigor, and to Alden Wood, Joshua Clover, Amanda Armstrong-Price, John Clegg, Juliana Spahr, Aaron Benanav, Jason Smith, and Ali Bektaş for reading and commenting on earlier drafts. 1. In Livy’s history of the Roman republic, patrician Menenius Agrippa relays this older Greek fable of the body politic to the plebeians who have seceded from Rome in protest and encamped on a nearby mountain. Livy, History of Rome: Books 1-2, trans. B. O. Foster, Loeb Classical Library, no. 114 (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1948) 253. 2. G.A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978) 326–341. For a critical response to the technicism of Cohen, see chapters 2 and 3 of Derek Sayer, The Violence of Abstraction: The Analytic Foundations of Historical Materialism (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1987). 370 3. Materialism and the Critique of Energy Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume I, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books, 1976 [1867]) 929. 4. 5. Marx, Capital Vol. I 549. Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975); Raniero Panzieri, “The Capitalist Use of Machinery: Marx Versus the Objectivists,” Outlines of a Critique of Technology (London: Ink Links, 1980) 44–69; Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991). 6. Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2015). See in particular the section “Repurposing Technology” at the end of Chapter 7, which engages with my argument in Jasper Bernes, “Logistics, Counterlogistics, and the Communist Prospect,” Endnotes 3 (September 2013) 172–201. 7. Bernes, “Logistics, Counterlogistics, and the Communist Prospect.” 8. I am thinking here of the concept, in evolutionary game theory, of “evolutionarily irrelevant equilibria.” While most neoclassical microeconomics and game theory model situations of equilibrium, these disciplines rarely consider how such stable states may be arrived at from an out-of-equilibrium situation. Evolutionary game theory tries to distinguish between equilibria that are viable, that might emerge from an out-of-equilibrium situation, and those that are not. Samuel Bowles, Microeconomics: Behavior, Institutions, and Evolution (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004) 63. 9. Srnicek and Williams, Inventing the Future 5. 10. Capital Vol. I 481–2. 11. Notice how, for Marx, capital’s power is a scientific organization of natural forces against labor, establishing a ternary rather than purely binary relation: “The special skill of each individual machineoperator, who has now been deprived of all significance, vanishes as an infinitesimal quantity in the face of the science, the gigantic natural forces and the mass of social labour embodied in the system of machinery, which, together with these three forces, constitutes the power of the ‘master.’”(Capital Volume I 548.) The Belly of the Revolution 12. 371 Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam-Power and the Roots of Global Warming (Brooklyn: Verso, 2016), and Jason W Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (Brooklyn: Verso, 2015). 13. 14. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life 5. Karl Marx, Capital: Volume II: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. David Fernbach (New York: Penguin, 1993) 283. 15. For a fascinating history of the metabolism concept, see Hannah Landecker, “The Biology of History: From the Body as Machine to the Metabolic Community,” (Talk, IAH, Boundaries of the Human in the Age of Life Sciences, November 6, 2015). Parts of this essay began as a response to Landecker’s talk: http://sites.psu.edu/iahboundaries/ jasper-bernes/. Many thanks to Heather Davis and Michael Berubé for the invitation. 16. Capital Vol. I 283. 17. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, 35th anniversary ed. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000). 18. Robert Brenner, “Property and Progress: Where Adam Smith Went Wrong,” Marxist History-Writing for the Twenty-First Century, ed. Chris Wickham (London: British Academy, 2007), 49–111. 19. Marcel Mazoyer and Laurence Roudart, A History of World Agriculture: From the Neolithic Age to the Current Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006) 313–353. 20. Mazoyer and Roudart, A History of World Agriculture 355–372. 21. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life 248. 22. Capital Vol. I 637. 23. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: Penguin Books, 2002) 244. 24. Quoted in CDW, “The Transformation of Social Relations,” International Review 14.25 (1996). 25. August Bebel, Woman Under Socialism (New York: New York Labor News 26. Quoted in CDW, “The Transformation of Social Relations.” 27. Marshall S. Shatz, Kropotkin: “The Conquest of Bread” and Other Writings Press, 1904) 316. 372 Materialism and the Critique of Energy (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995) 68–74, and Elisée Reclus, The Evolution of Cities (Petersham: Jura Books, 1995), https://libcom.org/files/ Reclus%20-%20The%20Evolution%20of%20Cities.pdf. 28. See Kristin Ross’s writings on the aftermath of the Commune for an account of the way these themes cut across the lines drawn between anarchists and Marxists. Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune (Brooklyn: Verso, 2015). 29. Capitalism in the Web of Life 75–91. 30. Karl Marx, Capital Volume III, trans. David Fernbach (New York: Penguin, 1991) 949. 31. Capitalism in the Web of Life 84. 32. Capital Vol. I 283. For a dialectical exploration of these themes, see Alfred Schmidt, The Concept of Nature In Marx (Brooklyn: Verso, 2014). 33. For a discussion of the nitrogen cycle and its manipulation by humans throughout history, see Vaclav Smil, Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food Production (Cambridge: MIT P, 2001). Nearly every agriculture system has emerged as an attempt to conserve or, in the case of slash and burn, gain biologically available nitrogen, as well as other important nutrients (phosphorus, potassium). For a history of these systems, see Mazoyer and Roudart, A History of World Agriculture. 34. Malm, Fossil Capital 309–315. 35. For a corrective account, see “History of Subsumption,” Endnotes 3 (April 36. See Hitchcock in this volume. 37. Intriguingly the argument formally resembles the fettering thesis with 2010) 130–54. its idea of mismatch between energy source and labor process. Unlike the fettering thesis, though, Malm’s argument describes a mismatch between different technical regimes, rather than between technique on the one hand and social relations on the other. 38. Joan Robinson, “Shedding Darkness,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 6.3 (September 1, 1982) 295. 39. For a lucid, though technical, treatment of simple and expanded capitalist reproduction in terms of stocks and flows in time, see Duncan The Belly of the Revolution 373 K. Foley, Understanding Capital: Marx’s Economic Theory (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1986) 62–90. 40. Calculated from Table A1A WTO, “International Trade Statistics 2014,” 2014, https://www.wto.org/english/res_e/statis_e/its2014_e/its14_ appendix_e.htm. 41. Alberto Jerardo, “Import Share of Consumption,” United States Department of Agriculture (2016), Economic Research Service, http:// www.ers.usda.gov/topics/international-markets-trade/us-agriculturaltrade/import-share-of-consumption.aspx. 42. Calculated from Jenny Gustavsson et al, Global Food Losses and Food Waste: Extent, Causes and Prevention (Rome: Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, 2011) 5. 43. 44. Capitalism in the Web of Life 252. Eugenii A. Preobrazhensky, The Crisis of Soviet Industrialization (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1980) 20–30. 45. Donald A. Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Stalinist Industrialization: The Formation of Modern Soviet Production Relations, 1928-1941 (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1986) 126. 46. CIA, “Soviet Fertilizer: Expansion of Output and Exports,” March 1975, CIA Reading Room, https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/ DOC_0000316269.pdf 47. Hillel Ticktin, Origins of the Crisis in the USSR: Essays on the Political Economy of a Disintegrating System (Albany: M.E. Sharpe, 1992) 33. 48. Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Stalinist Industrialization 254–271. 49. Michael Seidman, Republic of Egos: A Social History of the Spanish Civil War (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2002), and Michael Seidman, Workers against Work: Labor in Paris and Barcelona during the Popular Fronts (Berkeley: U of California P, 1991). 50. Many of these semi-peasants are forced by the overproduction of the market elsewhere to farm with the most rudimentary of techniques on the most marginal land, contributing very little to overall output, which is to say that overproduction in certain countries leads to underutilization of the land elsewhere, and a large population of people who remain in the countryside but are more or less dispossessed. Mazoyer and 374 Materialism and the Critique of Energy Roudart, for instance, argue that problems of undernourishment in the developing countries and not at all technical but in fact social (History of World Agriculture 440–491). 51. For a good description of communization as practice, see Gilles Dauvé and Karl Nesic’s explanation from Troploin: https://libcom.org/library/ communisation. 52. I borrow this conception of communization as revolution within revolution from Theorie Communiste: R.S., “Self-Organisation Is the First Act of the Revolution; It Then Becomes an Obstacle Which the Revolution Has to Overcome,” Revue Internationale Pour La Communisation, September 2005, http://meeting.communisation.net/ spip.php?page=imprimir_articulo&id_article=72. 53. Alberto Toscano, “Lineaments of the Logistical State,” Viewpoint Magazine 4 (Fall 2014) https://viewpointmag.com/2014/09/28/lineaments-of-thelogistical-state/. 54. Toscano, “Lineaments of the Logistical State” 4. 55. For an account of the necessary mixture of high- and low-tech in future agriculture under conditions of climate change, see the article “Contemporary Agriculture: Climate, Capital, and Cyborg Ecology,” Out of the Woods, July 27, 2015. They emphasize the plasticity of “traditional” farming systems and their ability to incorporate practical, modern technologies where useful. 56. This is a difficult point, and one that requires more attention than I can give it here, not least because of the difficulty of speculating about human motives in general. While revolutions are ineluctably humancentered, not all action is, and people are for the most part not simply indifferent to their effect on extra-human nature. Given a choice between two ways of arranging their lives that seem more or less equally acceptable, where one will lead to the degradation of ecosystems, the death or diminishment of species, most people will choose the kinder path. They will even, in many cases, give up substantial comforts for the sake of the birds, rivers, and forests. But these values are, for the majority of people at least, too weak on their own to provide the motive force for revolutionary change. One way to think about a classless The Belly of the Revolution 375 society of the sort described above is as a situation where, inasmuch as everyone’s needs are met, people can value the flourishing of life as such for its own sake. Furthermore, once people are no longer driven by the day-to-day demands of survival, on the one hand, or the imperatives of accumulation on the other, they can begin to think about the generational effects of their actions and may care about human effects on extra-human nature for reasons that are, in the end, humancentered. I hope to develop a theory of revolutionary motives adequate to these questions elsewhere. 57. Fossil Capital 9. 58. For a more pessimistic take, see this piece by former researchers at a Google-sponsored initiative to develop cheap renewable energy. They argue that even if one could develop renewables to replace all electricity, it would still be impossible to reduce emissions significantly, partly because capitalist producers would not switch over quickly enough. Their argument assumes, like Malm, transition within capitalism. Ross Konigstein and David Fork, “What It Would Really Take to Reverse Climate Change,” IEEE Spectrum, November 18, 2014, http://spectrum. ieee.org/energy/renewables/what-it-would-really-take-to-reverseclimate-change. Energy Imaginaries: Feminist and Decolonial Futures Sheena Wilson We understand nothing about impasses of the political without having an account of the production of the present.1 One of the many radical changes inaugurated in the United States on January 20, 2017, was an environmental vision dramatically at odds with the COP21 agreement, which had dominated headlines only a year earlier.2 Under the banner of “The Most Important Climate Stories in 2015,” Wired magazine led with “The Paris Agreement” and an image of the Eiffel Tower, explaining the significance of the fact that after twenty-one years of trying, 194 countries had come together to agree not only to a climate target but to the rather “lofty goal” of “keeping average global temperatures well below 2 degrees Celsius, and as close to 1.5 degrees Celsius as possible.”3 Now, with the Trump administration’s position on climate change, the commitments of the other 195 signatories to the climate agreement become all the more urgent. The competing interests articulated in these two moments of media spectacle can be read as figures for the ongoing impasse that defines current climate politics in North America and beyond — what I see as a result of an atrophy of the imagination that blockades transformative action. In this chapter, I explicitly relate the affective impasse of the politics of energy to its material production, reproduction, and uneven distribution, to ask: What does energy do? What is energy for? What from the age of oil is not working? And, most critically, for whom is it not working? More specifically, this chapter 378 Materialism and the Critique of Energy triangulates the historically specific confluence of cultural, affective, and economic imaginaries by grounding this discussion in the worldafter-oil that Jonathon Porritt creatively, albeit polemically, sketches out in his book The World We Made: Alex McKay’s Story from 2050 (2013). Through an intersectional feminist reading of this text, I illustrate the limits of current mainstream imaginaries, and I argue that taking leave of oil as our main energy source could provide opportunities to develop more socially just ways of living that put the concerns of those most exploited — women, people of color, and the global 99 percent — at the core of energy transition politics. What is required to achieve this is an energy transition that confronts and comes to terms with the systemic violences of the age of oil that rely on logics of white-supremacist-cis-heteropatriarchal-neoliberal-setter-colonialpetro capitalism deployed in the names of development, economic growth, energy security, and a host of other seemingly innocuous terms, which abstract the ongoing pillage of natural resources and the exploitation of bodies marked by race, class, and gender around the world. The antidote to these ways of thinking and being in the world is, to my mind, the reintroduction of Other knowledge systems and world views, including but not limited to feminist and Indigenous, which can help us collaboratively imagine and collectively move toward socially just — decolonized and feminist — energy futures. Energy Impasse We currently find ourselves at an impasse, unsure about how to transition to less carbon-intensive energy systems on the scale and within the timeframes required by the climate crisis. This energy impasse is the political, economic, and environmental deadlock created by the limits of Western ontologies and epistemologies that need to be newly thought. The task ahead is daunting, but is also rich with possibility. Instead of thinking of impasse as simply a “foreclosure of possibility,” it can be understood (as we in the After Oil collective have argued) as a moment of “radical indeterminacy... in which we might activate the potential obscured by business-as Feminist and Decolonial Futures 379 usual.... This moment is the transition to a society after oil.”4 A society “after oil” does not imagine a world without any oil products, but rather a world that is not predominantly powered by fossil fuels; in other words a world whose social systems and cultures are no longer shaped by the relations of petro-capitalism but by alternative configurations of energy and political economy. Which energies power future economic and political systems, and how they give form to our lives, depend on how we think and mobilize through this impasse. The impasse is the outcome of a complex set of contradictions inherent to the political economy of fossil fuels. In short, the path to transition is laden with political blockades, largely of our own making, as we confront infrastructures and superstructures of a society mired in and largely committed to ways of being and doing that are, in and of themselves, the root cause of the current crisis: imperial extractivist cultural values and their related economic valuation. Creative energy solutions of all varieties — social, economic, political, techno-scientific — are being stymied by Western worldviews, which inevitably define the contours of our systems, social realities, and, therefore, in many cases, the limits of our imaginaries. How people embark on an energy transition in different local communities and at a global scale has the potential to either intensify the inequities that have been generated by oil-fuelled capitalism, or allow for the reintroduction of other non-patriarchal, non-Western ontologies erased by histories of conquest and domination in the interest of profit. Feminist, Indigenous, decolonial, and anti-capitalist visions for caring newly and differently for our ecologies can in turn create ecologies of care. Many of the potential trajectories of the energy transition impasse are as yet unmapped and unmappable, as are their outcomes. To mobilize energy transition, therefore, demands the courage to act in the face of multiple unknowns. A transition away from fossil fuels has no template. There is insufficient knowledge of how we adopted earlier forms of energy and shaped our systems to suit those sources. Even when models of transition exist, they prove inadequate to the 380 Materialism and the Critique of Energy current challenge: never before in human history have we had to make an intentional energy transition on a global scale at such speed. We have an unreliable understanding of energy histories, and the ecologies of the future are taking shape in often unpredictable ways. These unknowns are disconcerting and destabilizing. But it’s precisely for these reasons that affect has an important role to play in energy transition, as it so clearly does in the many current efforts to resist or deny the need for change. Any materialist critique that fails to account for affective production will fail to fully conceptualize the impasse we find ourselves in. Without a comprehensive understanding of past energy transition, we must have, as Lauren Berlant counsels in Cruel Optimism, an “account of the production of the present” to imagine an alternate future.5 It is in this light that Porritt’s The World We Made is of interest, not for the vision of the future it promotes but for the fact that the future imagined in the book captures and illustrates the dangerous and irresponsible ideas that dominate our contemporary mainstream media and political discourses. Porritt’s future is grounded in the zeitgeist that promotes incremental technological and economic solutions as all that are needed to manage the current environmental crisis. It is a fantasy that promises those of us in the West that we will be able to conveniently replace one form of energy for another and continue to live as we always have. This self-serving vision is increasingly informing both right- and left-leaning political and economic corporate and government practices and policies, gaining support among leading capitalists and entrepreneurs around the world.6 The flawed fantasy of The World We Made is one of radical sameness — business as usual disguised as radical innovation — that does not account for the different paths that alternative energy production can and will necessarily forge. Nor does it express any self-awareness of how privately controlled paths constrain the ways that we might imagine commonly held alternative energy. It is urgent and necessary to identify and unmask those imaginaries, of which The World We Made is only one example, that Feminist and Decolonial Futures 381 limit the possibility of the moment by promising to salvage the “benefits” of the age of oil. The benefactors of such imaginaries are largely found in the Global North; thus the flip side of their promise is, of course, the perpetuation of the inequities of the age of oil suffered by the most precarious citizens (women, children, people of color, and those located in the Global South). In undertaking an analysis of these imaginaries, it is critical to interrogate successful visual and textual rhetorical strategies being deployed to dominate specific energy transition directives, in order to reorient them to promote other energy transition possibilities. These could help to build the interest and momentum necessary to trigger a more socially just energy transition informed by a range of feminist and Indigenous knowledges, and allow those 195 countries to realize not just a 1.5 degree target, but new futures organized differently around other energy sources. In so doing, we can begin to collaboratively uncover past stories and weave future narratives that reintegrate feminist (at times possibly Marxist-feminist) and Indigenous knowledges and histories that have been scrubbed from patriarchal capitalist accounts of the present. The ontologies of modernity that have shaped the global present limit our ability to imagine other futures. For women, Indigenous people, and for most in the Global South, these ways of thinking the world are not of our own making; they have been passed down to us and have now been proven obsolete. Prevailing modern logics have been, through time, sanitized of non-patriarchal modes of thinking and being, namely feminist and Indigenous modes. While some of these date back millennia, grounded in religious and cultural beliefs about what it means to be human and to live in society, much of what we have inherited are products of Western Enlightenment modes of relating to the world.7 Cartesian dualism nurtured a worldview that separated mind from body, human beings from nature and from one another, resulting in racial and gender subjugation, conquest, and colonialism. Adam Smith’s vision of social and moral harmony through self-interest was radicalized and formalized into Rational Choice 382 Materialism and the Critique of Energy theory. Then there are the scientific (and pseudo-scientific) notions of survival of the fittest that have fed notions of economic competition between individuals, classes, and nation states. Likewise, Keynesian models of utopian progress and economic growth are just some of the many theories and worldviews that inform our current Western realities, with our high standards of living and our excessive and consumption-heavy ways of being.8 Starting with Westphalia in 1648, modern humans have reproduced the nation-state structure rather than the historically small local communities organized through social obligations to family and community. These post-Westphalian logics were (and continue to be) organized around control of labor forces, nature, and resources. They were (and are) intended to strengthen the nation state and, at least at the level of ideology, to benefit the body politic. However, in a less abstracted sense, they also function for the profit of an elite few. These logics were never formulated to function cohesively on a planetary scale. Therefore, new logics are needed to address global governance within a generation or two from inside our current conundrum and without the luxury of objectivity or distance. Art, Research Creation, and Positive Affect: Strategies for the Impasse As both members of local communities and as part of a larger global network of systems, we must aim to collectively move from knowledge to transformation (knowledge => transformation) before all of our creative energy and will to transform has burned out or, as Lauren Berlant says, before “the situation destroys its subjects or finds a way to appear as merely a steady hum of livable crisis.”9 In an effort to motivate change, environmental campaigns have presented us with endless facts, stories, and images of climate crisis and our own destructive potential. Despite herculean efforts on the part of many progressive individuals and organizations around the world, nations and their populations seem incapacitated to (re)act. The significant shifts required of us at the scale necessary — from global governance (both in terms of the policies produced, as well as the role of the Feminist and Decolonial Futures 383 nation state, which is proving inadequate to the challenge) to the reproduction of daily life — have simply not occurred. Business as usual carries on and, in fact, economic crisis is exploited as profitable opportunity, manufacturing endless needs/desires and greenhouse gases. These grim realities and our failure to respond adequately have provided a heightened awareness of the disjuncture between knowledge and transformation. As Slavoj Žižek has articulated so brutally, riffing on Fredric Jameson, “it seems easier to imagine the ‘end of the world’ than a far more modest change in the mode of production, as if liberal capitalism is the ‘real’ that will somehow survive even under conditions of a global ecological catastrophe.”10 However, I’d argue that doomsday eco-narratives are not working to produce fundamental change. In “It’s Not Climate Change, It’s Everything Change,” Margaret Atwood, one of Canada’s greatest living novelists and an avid advocate for the environment, creatively outlines a range of competing optimistic and pessimistic future narratives. Positioning hopeful and foreboding visions against one another, and in relationship to what is needed next, Atwood’s essay taps into potential solutions — some of which already exist and others that are emerging.11 Similarly, scholar Stephanie LeMenager rightly articulates, in theoretical terms in Living Oil, “the relay of media → empathy → action.”12 From a feminist or Indigenous perspective, empathy, not just knowledge, clearly plays a role in action or stasis. In fact, the potential of positive affect (such as empathy), deployed from a right-of-center perspective, has been instrumental in creating the current moment, whether for ideological and political ends or as part of advertising campaigns promoting consumer lifestyle as the key to happiness and satisfaction. Recent strategies by environmental activists and artists have, likewise, experimented with more positive affective visual and textual narratives that allow room to imagine our way out of the current conundrum. One of the first and most extensive examples of this tactic — to mobilize optimism and happiness in relationship to climate change 384 Materialism and the Critique of Energy — is Jonathon Porritt’s fiscally and politically conservative vision for environmental mitigation and sustainable capitalism in The World We Made.13 In a 2013 CBS interview, Porritt claims that through this book he has attempted to engage people’s affect to make environmental issues “personal” (that is, accessible).14 Indeed, Porritt’s fictional scrapbook aims at moving us through the impasse caused, in part, by what LeMenager has termed “petromelancholia”: the grief felt for the end of (petro-)modernity and our collective mourning for the loss of cheap and easily accessible oil (in a time before tar sands extraction, ultra-deep ocean and ice/Arctic drilling, and fracking). As a creative research project of the future, The World We Made aims to creatively bridge the gap between knowledge and transformation by addressing the petromelancholia that leaves us immobilized: subverting these feelings with positive affect — with optimism. As a variation on what Naomi Oreskes and Eric M. Conway have termed a science-fiction historical novel — or more specifically a collective science-fiction historical scrapbook — this book makes full use of visual and textual rhetoric, addressing both the age of oil and arguably the age of the image, as photography is itself a product of oil.15 Published by Phaidon, this research-creation piece also aims to attract an audience interested in art and high culture. The story is narrated by fictional character Alex McKay and his students, reaching from 2050 all the way back to the year of McKay’s birth in 2000, but focusing on the last nineteen years of his career.16 It makes use of its multi-genre platform of text/story and artwork. A bright sunny yellow cover that parallels the positive science-based vision of the future wraps around graphs, maps, hand-drawn sketches, aerial photography, microphotography, handwritten notes, blueprints, copies of posters, magazine covers, manifestos, and other political materials. The combination of text and image not only narrates but visualizes for readers and audiences a future already physically mapped out in vivid color. Published in October 2013, the story flirts with nonfiction, including endnotes and an index of researched materials, weaving together seamlessly the speculative elements Feminist and Decolonial Futures 385 with existing technological experiments around the world. At this level, the book plays a game with readers: it allows for — demands even — an interactive engagement with a wide range of issues related to environmental reform. Porritt creates a sense of urgency around addressing the looming environmental crisis through the insertion of fictional responses, critical to achieving eventual success, which are integrated into the near future of the story’s chronology (almost simultaneous to the book’s publication in 2013). On one hand, this book creates a space for us to imagine something other than a blind destructive forward march toward apocalypse. There is much to be learned from this book, in terms of form, and its use of art, photography, creative research, and positive affect — techniques that might ideally be employed to other more progressive ends, to help readers imagine other futures. On the other hand, while this book is a model for what art and creativity can contribute to imagining and driving change, it is simultaneously a cautionary tale. The World We Made: Flawed Imaginaries of Life After Oil The impasse demands new imaginaries. Futurecasting, in whatever form it takes — art, literature, film, the mainstream media — often illustrates the limits of our imaginaries. What poses as innovation in energy and environmental discourses is too often, upon closer reading, a mere repackaged/re-glossaried perpetuation of petro-capitalist relations greenwashed with tech solutions, fulfilling Jameson’s claim that narratives of the future are actually rearticulations of the present. In “Progress Versus Utopia, Or, Can We Imagine the Future?” he explains that science fiction’s “deepest vocation is over and over again to demonstrate and to dramatize our incapacity to imagine the future... the atrophy in our time of what Marcuse has called the utopian imagination, the imagination of otherness and radical difference.” He goes on to conclude that science fiction ends up becoming a mediation, willingly or not, “of our own absolute limits.”17 Read critically, The World We Made exposes the limitations of the increasingly accepted, if misguided, vision of the future whereby 386 Materialism and the Critique of Energy anxiety around the disappearance of oil is turned on its head and supplanted with fetishized notions of alternative energy, aiming to sustain the webs of relations, as though alternative energies will cause very few disruptions to the middle-class standard of living, worldviews, or ways of being. What we must be careful to remember in our rush to implement alternative energy systems, as though they in and of themselves hold the key to cleaner and therefore more socially just futures, is that energy itself does not create transformation. It is the valuation of energy sources and the ways in which they are socially, economically, and politically integrated that will be transformative. Oil did not create climate change, although it is often fetishized as the “stuff ” of life that produces not only wealth but also war and a host of other dehumanizing outcomes.18 Moreover, according to David Harvey, “‘resources’ can be defined only in relationship to the mode of production which seeks to make use of them, and which simultaneously ‘produces’ them through both the physical and mental activity of the users.”19 In short, capitalist practices that use oil to fuel growth, and not oil in and of itself, have created greenhouse gas emissions on a scale sufficient to alter the climate. In Porritt’s imagined future, solar and wind farms fuel the “good life.” Technological solutions are promoted as the main way to address climate change in The World We Made, much as in popular discourse and in the halls of power, despite the inadequacy of tech alone to address the core causes of climate change. In the book, air travel caps are in place and “slow travel air cruisers” exist. Virtual tourism is a $500 billion dollar industry that provides a full sensory experience through internet and second life platforms. In this future, the virtual is described as augmenting the real.20 Communications technologies, in fact, feature as the solution to the restrictions on mobility described in the book, without accounting for their resource intensive materiality. Alex McKay’s home, for example, includes a media room with two video walls that serve multiple purposes: one a background to suit the mood, the other a means to communicate with and maintain relationships with friends Feminist and Decolonial Futures 387 and family.21 This vision of the future is troubling at several levels: it reproduces the social atomization of early twenty-first century life, rather than designing more communal ways of being; it sustains people’s distance from the outer world including nature, rather than developing more intimate relationships with the environment; but at a basic environmental level, the energy intensity required to sustain this type of virtual life is problematic.22 Popular conceptions of wireless communication technologies render them immaterial and invisible, when in reality the infrastructure of servers and cable networks that power and disseminate virtual worlds are resource intensive, using enormous amounts of energy and water. In an ironic reversal, the sci-fi nightmares of isolation in Ray Bradbury, E.M. Forster, Kurt Vonnegut, and Philip K. Dick and the sociological anomie of the theorists of alienation (especially Herbert Marcuse) are here presented as positive and, indeed, not only desirable but ecological. The social-atomization-presented-as-luxury is a naïve fetish of the commodity à la Debord. Screens and communications equipment are taken to be wondrous manifestations of social relations, while they actually inhibit the formation of community-based relationships. Porritt mistakes the symptoms of the worldwide division of labor for the solution to globalization’s problems. Furthermore, as Mél Hogan’s research explicitly details, virtual realities and big data, not to mention surveillance and privacy, “can never be disconnected from the material infrastructures that allow and render natural the epistemological state of mass surveillance.”23 As her analyses make blatant, social media companies, surveillance, and big data are all “deeply material.”24 The greening of big data is part of a particular worldview invested in solving the problem of our carbon-intensive (auto)mobile lives through communications technology, without recognizing the corresponding footprint. This is just one example of how technological solutions allow for a sleight of hand, whereby those aspects of daily life we associate with high emissions (daily commutes and air travel) are replaced by what we assume are lowenergy solutions (paperless practices and wireless communication), 388 Materialism and the Critique of Energy without accounting for the energy required to sustain these tech habits at the level of manufacturing — which is the largest cause of global emissions. Even if alternative energy could fuel all of the energy demands of this high-tech virtual life, the production, distribution, and maintenance of solar panels on the scale needed would be a massive industrial project, not without a significant environmental footprint.25 All energy sources have their limits, which puts a fine point on the fact that even a transition to more renewable energy sources still requires radical social and cultural adjustments in regards to our relationship with energy: how much we use and for what purposes. The issue at stake is not our energy sources but our excessive and unabating appetite for energy consumption. I argue that Porritt’s optimistic future falls under the category of “cruel optimism.” This is Berlant’s term for “the condition of maintaining an attachment to a significantly problematic object,” which looks optimistic but in reality limits our ability to flourish.26 For Porritt, the object of attachment is capitalism, with its high-tech immaterial fetishes that disavow labor as the ongoing source of value, which are bound up in what Berlant defines as the good-life fantasy. This fantasy harks back to Aristotelian notions of a moral and happy life over the long term; in Berlant’s analysis, however, the fantasy is gutted of its authenticity, and we are living in constant pursuit of a dream that remains somehow out of reach. In her critique, she details how this chimera of late monopoly capitalism has produced precarity and disparity, the very antithesis of the promise of the American Dream: the twentieth-century mirage, made possible by fossil-fueled capitalism. Practices of lending and borrowing have created a new class able to own cars and homes. Oil’s energy density facilitated mobility, (sub)urban sprawl, and high-speed communication, all of which have reified the illusion of individual autonomy. Perhaps most important to this fantasy is the illusion that the successes of the “self-made man” are the result of his own choices — with little regard for the ways that the conditions for his success are entirely facilitated by the collective infrastructures of cities, roadways, and Feminist and Decolonial Futures 389 telecommunication networks intended to support a vision of white middle-class America (and Canada), built on the heteronormative nuclear family. Porritt’s imagined future sustains the American Dream into the mid-twenty-first century — Capitalism 2.0 — by imagining ways to salvage capitalism and the environment as though the survival of one is not reliant on the destruction of the other. Instead, Porritt’s text touts these technology fixes to the way we live and move about the world as not only sufficient to mitigate climate change, but as positive in other respects, such as contributing to “Gross Domestic Happiness.”27 On the inside cover, the character Alex McKay writes that, in 2050, “the world’s countries are both more stable and more content.” Overall, happiness is a pervasive message throughout the book that affirms the future is generally a more fair and happier place, linked to more cooperative models of capitalism. The chapter, “Work, Wealth and Wellbeing” includes a chart illustrating how the hours of work demanded each week in the European Union have been significantly reduced from 38.2 in 1995 to 24.8 in 2045.28 As a result, the future is a generally happier place.29 McKay says, “By the early 2020s that age of selfish consumerism was over, personal ownership became much less important, while renting, sharing, swapping and bartering became the new norm.”30 This rhetoric, however, is not upheld by events as played out in the narrative. For example, the carshare program, which suggests a cooperative initiative, is, in fact, run by a capitalist for-profit organization. The work McKay does in the community garden is also part of a for-profit TimeBank project that pays through local currency. On first read, this TimeBank suggests a renegotiation of social-economic relations: a contribution of time to communal projects for the collective good. But exchanging labor for a local currency (wages) maintains a specific capitalist relation, rendering moot a shortened workweek, if a second job at the community garden is an imperative: McKay does “25 hours of work each week as a teacher, another 5 hours (unpaid) as a governor of another school, and then about 10 hours a week on different activities — coordinated through our very active local TimeBank and paid in 390 Materialism and the Critique of Energy local pound — including working on our Community Farm.”31 Porritt proclaims the value of the shortened workweek, only to elaborate that citizens in 2050 are actually working more or less the same amount of hours, simply being paid less in regular currencies and more in local currencies, which ideally supports local economies, but which, of course, would forcibly limit mobility for certain members of society, while other more affluent members would be able to convert surplus local dollars to more widely accepted currencies. Furthermore, this exploration of a secondary local economy, where value is linked to labor time, fails in that it continues to reproduce capitalist relations. The capitalist mantra “time is money” literally becomes formalized through this imagined time-based currency: it is a solution not dissimilar from the nineteenth-century Proudhonist time-chits that Marx himself critiqued.32 This future vision of labor, however, is further complicated by the fact that certain types of labor (that is, those performed outside the twenty-five-hour workweek), are reframed as leisure. And, ironically, it is some of the most labor intensive forms of classical labor — gardening and farming — that are reinvented. It was this very labor that the promise of technology was meant to save people from having to perform. Once again, the status quo is sold as innovation. This future text imagines an idyllic relationship to the land and to food-systems. This fantasy remobilizes eighteenth-century romantic notions of nature that grew out of the first industrial revolution. Porritt’s future — like many imaginaries of the future driven by capitalist imperatives to maintain as much as possible of existing systems of domination and extraction of resources and labor — feeds into notions of the entrepreneurial spirit of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries that leave the majority of the world’s population living more precarious lives, working more for less remuneration, striving to claim as their prize not only greater material comfort but the everelusive promise of more free time. But free time is on the decline in the present and seems not really to exist in this future imaginary either; despite the narrator’s assertions to the contrary, simple mathematics Feminist and Decolonial Futures 391 unravel this claim. Porritt’s vision greenwashes an invocation of present employment conditions in the West that are increasingly contractual, precarious, and inadequate. In short, the concepts of high-speed communication and slow travel technologies are mobilized as solutions to the energy and environmental climate crisis in very specific ways that protect what is really at stake: capitalism itself. Porritt’s future world is founded on an ideological belief that capitalism is the only economic system that can address the current crisis, what he calls “the least worst economic system we have.”33 His claim is that the current system merely needs to be tamed (which is the title of one of the later chapters “Taming our Capital Markets”). In his nonfiction book called Capitalism: As if the World Matters (2005), he uses the term “sustainable capitalism” to define a tamer version of existing market dynamics. However, Porritt’s representation of the relationship between the cooperative commons and capitalism are conflicted. There is an uneasy relationship between the loyalty that he maintains to the capitalist paradigm, his desire to expose its failings, and the extreme injustices it has created in our time — if not the future. In the future world of Alex McKay, capitalism’s failings are mitigated at the local level through community-based sharing initiatives. Multinational corporations are disciplined by the market when entrepreneurs realize it is profitable to behave in environmentally sustainable ways. McKay explains that There are still plenty of very successful multinationals — although fewer and fewer every year, it has to be said, as people around the world show their preference for more local and national businesses…. So capitalism is still thriving, but in a very different way from 30 or 40 years ago. Nobody planned it that way... [but] given where we are now, something about today’s more sustainable version of capitalism must be working.34 In this future narrative, a reconfiguration of the market is represented as a “natural” outcome of the self-regulating mechanisms of 392 Materialism and the Critique of Energy capitalism — the invisible hand — rather than as part of political will.35 Meanwhile, the inequities of the future are reported rather unselfconsciously as imperfections of the system that we can all feel guilty about, but which are inevitably part of a common-sense understanding of reality under capitalism. Much like combined and uneven development in the present, Porritt’s vision relies upon the erasure, or at best subsistence, of large parts of the planet to ensure safe, quiet (almost pastoral) lives within cities in the disambiguated West.36 What Porritt’s book illustrates best are the ways an uncritically affective, cruelly optimistic loyalty to capitalism will limit our possibility to imagine new systems. The optimism of cooperative capitalism sustains itself on innovations as no more novel than private property, entrepreneurism, profit, and perhaps most strikingly, the unselfconscious need to maintain the inequities inherent to capitalist relations. For example, in The World We Made, solar energy is considered a source of capital. It is described in terms that fall under private capture of solar energy, much like existing systems in California, where solar panel owners are able to manage their own energy needs and sell any excess energy back to the grid. This is not a social commons model for energy management. Rather, it is an enterprising system where those with capital — in this case privately owned solar panels — can benefit and enclose, develop and exploit what could otherwise become common solar resources as a revenue generating initiative to subsidize privileged lives, while others are shut out. In twenty-first century North America, energy commons project (or publicly owned utilities) are often discussed as impossible, or even radical.37 This is, however, symptomatic of our ahistorical posture — trying to make change from within a system that we cannot step out of — because until quite recently (into the 1980s and 1990s in Canada, for example), utilities were largely government owned. Profits fed back into social programming: roads, schools, and so on. Porritt’s future plays on a worldview that takes as a given that solutions are found in free markets. While it might appear optimistic to readers of the “rich Feminist and Decolonial Futures 393 world” to believe that the current climate crisis provides opportunities to be seized, it is a vision sustained on the grim miseries of resource shortages, displacement, and ultimately death for a vast percentage of the world population.38 As Porritt puts his theories into practical — if imagined — application, the world that unfolds reveals the contours and limits of a vision that brushes over but fundamentally relies on the slow violence of environmental devastation, particularly as they manifest under capitalism (cooperative or not), exposing upon closer reading the cruelty of his optimism. The coming energy transition will demand much more of us than simply the use of alternative energies. Neither can it be solved with technical or economic solutions alone. What does energy do? It shapes the societies we build, create, and live in; an energy transition is therefore also social and cultural. As such, it is not solely the responsibility of individuals. Transformation demands collective political action and an associated social movement that will hold industry and government to task — not to mention individual citizens who will have to radically transform their habits and ways of being. An energy transition adequate to the challenges of climate change demands of us the complete reinvention of daily-lived reality. We must rethink everything from the clothes we wear, to where those clothes are manufactured, to what we eat and where it is grown, to how we wash those clothes and dishes, to how we collect and use natural resources including water, solar, and wind — and ultimately how, and how fast (or slow), we move about in the world and how we live together in community: sharing our food, energy, shelter, labor, and lives. In short, an energy transition requires us to exchange what Ruth Irwin has described as our solipsistic, modernist, and consumerist worldview, which “foreshortens our imagination and ability to find alternatives,” for an “integrated, embodied, future oriented ‘world-scape.’”39 Imaginaries of a future, where technology allows for only modestly transformed lives, are part of a larger project concerned with maintaining capitalism. While Porritt might have intended his book as a contribution to the 394 Materialism and the Critique of Energy deployment of optimism as a strategy, this book should be seen as a lens onto the present that exposes the cruelty of the optimistic sales pitch of sustainable capitalism, which relies on unevenly distributed slow violences of capitalism and climate crisis. This fictional account illustrates beautifully (the text itself something of an objet d’art) that the fulcrum of sustainable capitalism is capitalism itself — sustaining capitalism — not the environment or even human life. Wasted Lives and Troubling Erasures: Decolonization and Feminism40 In the future world of Alex McKay, capitalism’s failings are mitigated or managed.41 Within the book’s global context, gender and racial inequities are unselfconsciously reproduced as the outcomes of national mismanagement. There is some acknowledgement, to be fair, of the environmental struggles that will be faced by people in developing nations as a result of climate change, but the issues of race, class, and gender in the West are largely absent, with only a passing (troubling) reference to Canada’s oil sands. The book foretells a rather unimaginative re-invocation of the past as future, through a neocolonial project that demands that African countries again reclaim their sovereignty: Initially, this expansion was driven by what was described as “the worst resurgence of colonialism since the time of slavery,” as both the big agri-tech companies and the land-hungry countries like China and Saudi Arabia bought up vast tracts of productive land in Africa.… But all that “land-grabbing” came to a dramatic end after the Great Famine in 2025, as one African country after another took back control of its own land.42 In the scrapbook, poverty is mitigated but not eliminated. In fact, the numbers of the poor have increased, “but the lives they lead today are very much more comfortable than 30 years ago and fewer than half a billion are now living in absolute poverty.”43 A Solar Salvation scheme Feminist and Decolonial Futures 395 in Nigeria is described as “an extraordinarily generous commitment,” and so, while Porritt claims elsewhere in the book that the need for charity has been eliminated, the economic relations of the rich world and poor world maintain very similar geographies to the present, and the language of aid and “generosity” reproduce current global power relations.44 Nigeria is no less short of sunlight than it is of oil and yet the country is clearly not thriving within the continued capitalist relations of the mid-twenty-first century. The narrator acknowledges the injustice of these events, but accepts these as historical struggles that have been resolved. This narrative strategy leapfrogs the impasse of the present, in all its complexities and potential for building knowledge toward other outcomes that has not yet been imagined. What’s skipped over is precisely what Berlant articulates as an activity of living that demands “a wandering absorptive awareness and a hypervigilance that collects material that might help to clarify things, maintain one’s sea legs, and coordinate the standard melodramatic crises with those processes that have not yet found their genre of event.”45 This leapfrogging leads to the enclosure of other possibilities that might be produced by thoughtfully exploring decolonialization and reintegrating feminist thinking into future systems. When the narrator does mention the tar sands, the foreclosures of Porritt’s sustainable capitalist future are violently articulated as the ecocidal and genocidal project of extractivist Canadian politics. McKay describes “a disastrous release of waste water from one of the largest tar sands operations, contaminated with mercury, lead and other toxic elements, killed off almost every living creature along a 160-kilometre stretch of the Athabasca river. It’s taken the Athabasca a full 30 years to recover.”46 What such “recovery” after death looks like in the landscape after thirty years is not detailed. This ambiguous vision for the future feeds into concepts of “reclamation” that are part of larger discourses of scientific and managerial control. Such techniques are grounded in the colonial worldview of terra nullius that continue to justify the claiming and settling of land in what is now recognized as Canada. Just as a wetland cannot be reconstituted, 396 Materialism and the Critique of Energy neither can there be ‘recovery’ from death and genocide, whether it is the extermination of flora, fauna, or human species. Furthermore, the concept of claiming or reclaiming the land raises the question: claiming for whom? Given the historical context, it is only wise to be skeptical of any project that claims or reclaims territory. Many real-world reclamation projects in Northern Alberta take what were once wetlands belonging to Indigenous communities and transforms them first by extracting the oil and then by landscaping them into new environments much better suited for living and building on — settling — than the original wetlands. In the fictional rendition provided by the story, the deadly tailingspond breech compromises 160 kilometers of downstream territory that includes Indigenous communities such as Fort McKay, Fort Chipewyan, and others beyond, many of which are using treaty rights as a mechanism to resist the ongoing colonization of their lands by government and industry. Rather than acknowledging the historical and ongoing struggles of these communities, who are being brutally impacted by the violences of late capitalist oil production right now, the book enacts an eco-genocide of Indigenous communities, mentioning only their erasure as part of the inevitable fallout of oil extraction and petro-politics — not as a result of ongoing capitalist relations. No mentions of land and treaty issues or pipeline blockades are raised. Instead, dissenting Indigenous voices are silenced through exclusion from the text overall, erased from the land by a tailings bond breech. Capitalism and the project of modernity (mobilized by the modern nation state) require as their prerequisite the erasure of certain bodies. In Canada, for example, colonial logics have produced and continue to perpetuate cultural genocide, displacing Indigenous peoples to reserves, forcibly removing their children from homes and communities (first in the form of residential schools and later as part of the Sixties Scoop and ongoingly through child protective services and policies) and by continuously disregarding land and treaty rights into the present in the rush to “develop” minerals and resources. In recent years, over twelve hundred Missing and Feminist and Decolonial Futures 397 Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) have been documented. The mere existence of Indigenous women, argues Audra Simpson, is an affront to the colonial project, since they are the historical owners/ guardians of the resource and oil-rich lands now occupied by settler Canadians. In short, the exploitations of the age of oil fueled by carbon intensive energy are not simply the result of a disconnect from the environment and other species. These exploitative attitudes are reified in the relationships between people as well, whereby some classes and cultures of people believe themselves to be superior to others, resulting in the extraction of labor for surplus value, and ultimately the dehumanization of those who become a barrier to profit margins — which in its most extreme form results in the murder and genocide of those deemed superfluous. Porritt’s storified version of the future exemplifies a dominant strand in environmentalism. Many green capitalists of his ilk are unwilling to muddy accepted narratives of progress. As such, they gloss over the systemic violences intrinsic to any colonial project that, by definition, demands territorial takeover and the displacement of peoples. Porritt fetishizes the systemic violence of the past (our present) as the outcomes of oil and not as intrinsic to logics he aspires to maintain, namely capitalism; meanwhile Porritt imagines the violences of the future as being in the service of progress toward greater equality among those who survive — a perpetually elusive promise. The logics of colonialism that are evidently still in operation in these imagined futures cannot be resolved under capitalism, because one is dependent on the other in its reliance on the exploitation of labor and resources for the accumulation of capital. The World We Made illustrates our failure to imagine new futures, given that these futures mirror post–World War II independence movements that failed to achieve autonomy, as nineteenth- and twentieth-century nation-to-nation (colony-to-empire) relationships were replaced by alliances with multinational corporations. 398 Materialism and the Critique of Energy Oil is a Feminist Issue. Energy Transition is a Feminist Issue In The World We Made one of the few references to women is in relationship to population control — a strategy aimed at controlling the bodies of women, largely women of color in developing nations. In omitting women and their perspectives, the book reproduces the marginalized status of women around the world, along with the many ongoing struggles of race, class, and Indigenous rights. Porritt writes these issues out of the historical account of sustainable capitalism, much as these perspectives have been written out of the official historical record. The category of “woman” is, of course, diverse and fraught, given the “viscous porosity” unacknowledged by classic dualistic ontologies of nature/culture, sex/gender, and so on that require a rematerialization of the social that “takes seriously the agency of the natural.”47 All of this means that different categories of women are impacted differently by the networks of oil. However, Porritt’s text lacks even a basic awareness of how the culturally constructed relationships between women and things — many of them either products of the petrochemical industry and/or powered by oil — directly shaped women’s lives in the early twenty-first century: the ways in which spectacles of resistance continue to be performed by or draped on the female body. From the runways of high fashion to the hallways of high schools in popular culture and late capitalism, women’s images, and women as a concept, are widely recuperated to drive consumerism and to serve national petropolitics and imperial expansionist aims.48 Porritt’s text also fails to acknowledge eco-feminist theories that aim for greater gains in a post-oil culture. The discussion of population control becomes a key moment for the text to redefine the term environmentalist, reclaiming it for fiscal conservatives invested in mitigating environmental damage as an opportunity to reinvent and sustain capitalism. In the text, abusive language is used to deride the “not just stupid, but cruel” approach of that “great army of environmentalists and left-wing Feminist and Decolonial Futures 399 politicians in Western countries... [who thought] the real issues were poverty, injustice and overconsumption” — not population control.49 Through this naïve pop-Malthusianism, the book project, and the project of sustainable capitalism are de-linked from other “radical” environmental movements. In the context of this story, radical comes to name any movement interested in transforming the social and power relations of late capitalism, making it quite explicit that sustainable capitalism is about redirecting environmental concerns away from any vision of the future that will disrupt not only capitalist accumulation, but its patriarchal, heteronormative, white racialized bedrock. For important historical reasons, many feminist environmentalists resist discourses around population control, refusing to accept that women’s sexuality be controlled by patriarchal logics, institutions, and socially held values that limit a woman’s control over her own body without first demanding social changes on the part of both men and women. Population control discourses perpetuate women’s alienation from their bodies, imposed by patriarchal cultural values and norms.50 It has been over a quarter of a century since Marxistfeminist scholars Vandana Shiva and Maria Mies articulated ecological concerns as feminist issues. They challenged ecofeminists to “see the devastation of the earth and her beings by the corporate warriors, as feminist concerns,” since “it is the same masculinist mentality which would deny” women the right to their “own bodies and [their] our own sexuality, and which depends on multiple systems of dominance and state power to have its way.”51 The thinking of Shiva and Mies, combined with Berlant’s more recent theorization of cruel optimism — which analyses how people adapt to crisis over time, seeing it as ordinary and integrating the contradictions into their own social relations as part of a new normal — demand that as twenty-first century moderns we step away from current reality to take a long hard look at how we have adapted ourselves to ideas that in themselves are so contradictory that they can do nothing but perpetuate the status quo, while we continue to act as if these same ideas have the 400 Materialism and the Critique of Energy potential to mobilize radical transformations. Once again, promises of innovation are used to sell the status quo; the emperor has no clothes. This myopia requires that the world be assessed from new perspectives, namely feminist ones. The environmental movement has, in fact, been identified as a women’s rights and feminist movement.52 However, the blanket identification in Porritt’s book of Other perspectives as radical strategically undermines both feminist movements and progressive environmental resistance movements, many of which are led by women activists and Indigenous communities around the world. In short, women and feminists are virtually absent from this history of the future — exactly as they are from the historical accounts to date: those stories and records that have disrupted our ability to archive and build feminist knowledges across generations and cultures. To reinvigorate feminist knowledge in the present and future, we can look to examples of other feminist cultures, such as the traditional (historical) feminist practices within European cultures largely erased by the witch hunts, the enclosures of the commons, colonization, and capitalism. 53 Many Indigenous communities also provide other models of thinking through gender identities, kinship, and community relationships. These knowledges working symbiotically will provide new entryways to rethinking our relationships to each other, to our communities, to other species and the planet. Donna Haraway makes a call to consider as kin all life on earth. Earthlings, she says, “are kin in the deepest sense, and it is past time to practic