C.H.U.D. is a movie that has a newfound relevance in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling that governments can “ban” homeless people from simply existing in the public sphere. It’s one of the most egregious, dehumanizing holdings to roll down from Washington in quite some time — a patently inhumane edict that smacks of the cruel pro-eugenics social engineering movement of the early 20th century (which likewise had the high court’s judicial blessing.) It’s a ruling that essentially legalizes ethnic cleansing, just as long as you’re using “economic standing” as a stand-in for the “ethnic” part. It’s the most sadistic indictment of capitalism I can imagine: a social order where one’s value and civil rights hinge entirely on how much money they have to their name. You’d think there would be more outrage over such a Nazi-like SCOTUS decision, but let’s be real — Americans, as an amorphous throng, have never really given a shit about what happens to the homeless.
Which circles back to C.H.U.D. Here’s a movie from the middle of the ‘80s where the powers that are in New York City let untold numbers of homeless people die — and turn into irradiated creatures — simply because no one gives a damn if destitute people sleep in toxic waste. If anything, the people that wrote the movie probably overstate how much public blowback the nuclear waste dumping scandal would actually generate. There are multiple scenes where would-be whistleblowers tell the bureaucrats they’re gonna’ blab to the press — today, I’m not even sure the New York Times would bother covering it, unless they can somehow use it to benefit the Trump campaign. A couple of bag ladies get turned into toxic zombies, so what? As long as they’re not stealing shampoo from the shelves of Walgreens, I don’t see the Facebook Boomers coming out in droves to protest.
Considering more recent events, it’s certainly interesting to go back and watch this movie 40 years later — and see just how little progress we’ve made, as a nation, on addressing the issue of coast to coast homelessness in America. Maybe C.H.U.D. was meant to be a stinging political allegory, but in execution it comes off as more of a straight B-monster movie — we all know the city big wigs that cover everything up are the REAL bad guys of the movie, but when you’ve got turd-covered atomic panhandlers stomping around eating puppies and stuck up middle aged broads, it’s only a matter of time until you HAVE to default to the exploitative camp school of filmmaking.
And on that front, there are quite a few things to dig about C.H.U.D. — even stuff outside of its obvious social commentary …
Those funky, phat-ass synth beats!
It was pretty much an unwritten but universally observed rule that if someone made a horror film in the early 1980s, it had to have a spooky-yet-groovy synthesizer score. Composers Martin Cooper and David Hughes obviously got that memo, as C.H.U.D. features some of the most underrated genre movie synth music of the entire decade. Furthermore, it’s a pretty novel score, too, with an emphasis on slower, chunkier and more downbeat tunes. You can easily envision a buncha’ contemporary SoundCloud rappers using the soundtrack as a baseline for beats — especially that dismal but funky ass opening scene theme!
Daniel Stern!
Daniel Stern is easily the best thing about this entire movie. While everybody else in the film turns in rather staid and unremarkable performances (including leading man John Heard, who would reunite with Stern for Home Alone five years later), Danny absolutely chews the scenery throughout C.H.U.D., whether he’s taking NYC bureaucrats to task for (poorly) trying to cover their paper trail or shouting the fact that he’s a reverend in addition to heading up the neighborhood soup kitchen at every available opportunity. His cracked out hairdo has more personality than just about any other fully developed character in the whole movie, really.
The cameo appearance by John Goodman!
Well, maybe calling it a “cameo appearance” is a bit of a stretch, since Goodman was far from a household name at the point he appeared in this movie. Fittingly enough, that same year he starred as the sleaze ball head football coach in Revenge of the Nerds, so he definitely covered his bases well in ‘84. Goodman is literally only in the movie for about three minutes — his cop characters shows up at a diner, orders a cheesburger, kinda’ sexually harasses a waitress and then he gets eaten (offscreen) by a gaggle of rampaging C.H.U.D.s. He certainly made the most of his limited screen time here — wonder if he ever had flashbacks to filming this one on the set of King Ralph or The Babe?
The monster design!
It’s not easy coming up with a unique design for a horror movie monster. Thankfully, the design for the titular Cannibal Humanoid Underground Dwellers is a bit more inspired than most mainstream-ish genre flicks from its time. Rather brilliantly, the eyes of the monsters are neon yellow, which gives a nice offset to the rather bland dark-green zombie flesh look of the rest of the creature. But just you wait! The creatures also have the ability to elongate their necks until they look like zombie brontasauri! It might not be as nightmare-inducing as the practical effects on The Thing, but it’s unsettling stuff all the same.
The authentic early ‘80s NYC sleaze!
And this might be the best overall thing about the entire movie. The scum-tasting negative utopia of early ‘80s NYC just doesn’t exist anymore, so this film depicts a long lost civilization in all of its grandiose grossness and griminess. Cinematographer Peter Stein certainly had a knack for showcasing New York City’s seedy underbelly at its absolute sleaziest and slimiest. Amazingly, the sewer scenes aren’t even the nastiest and scuzziest locales in the movie: from disgusting soup kitchens to police stations in dire need of a top to bottom mopping, virtually every scene in this movie just screams “pass the hand sanitizer, will you?”
Extermination works. At first. This is the terrible lesson of history. If Israel is not stopped — and no outside power appears willing to halt the genocide in Gaza or the destruction of Lebanon — it will achieve its goals of depopulating and annexing northern Gaza and turning southern Gaza into a charnel house where Palestinians are burned alive, decimated by bombs and die from starvation and infectious diseases, until they are driven out. It will achieve its goal of destroying Lebanon — 2,255 people have been killed and over one million Lebanese have been displaced — in an attempt to turn it into a failed state. And, it may soon realize its long cherished dream of forcing the United States into war with Iran. Israeli leaders are publicly salivating over proposals to assassinate Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei and carry out airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear installations and oil facilities.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet, like those driving Middle East policy in the White House — Antony Blinken, raised in a staunch Zionist family, Brett McGurk, Amos Hochstein, who was born in Israel and served in the Israeli military, and Jake Sullivan — are true believers in the doctrine that violence can mold the world to fit their demented vision. That this doctrine has been a spectacular failure in Israel’s occupied territories, and did not work in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, and a generation earlier in Vietnam, does not deter them. This time, they assure us, it will succeed.
In the short term they are right. This is not good news for Palestinians or the Lebanese. The U.S. and Israel will continue to use their arsenal of industrial weapons to kill huge numbers of people and turn cities into rubble. But in the long term, this indiscriminate violence sows dragon’s teeth. It creates adversaries that, sometimes a generation later, outdo in savagery — we call it terrorism — what was done to those slain in the previous generation.
Hate and a lust of vengeance, as I learned covering the war in the former Yugoslavia, are passed down like a poisonous elixir from one generation to the next. Our disastrous interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen, along with Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which created Hezbollah, should have taught us this.
Those of us who covered the Middle East were stunned that the Bush administration imagined it would be greeted as liberators in Iraq when the U.S. had spent over a decade imposing sanctions that resulted in severe shortages of food and medicine, causing the deaths of at least one million Iraqis, including 500,000 children. Denis Halliday, the United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq, resigned in 1998 over U.S.-imposed sanctions, calling them “genocidal” because they represented “a deliberate policy to destroy the people of Iraq.”
Israel’s occupation of Palestine and its saturation bombing of Lebanon in 1982, were the catalyst for Osama bin Laden’s attack on the Twin Towers in New York City in 2001, along with U.S. support for attacks on Muslims in Somalia, Chechnya, Kashmir and the South of the Philippines, U.S. military assistance to Israel and the sanctions on Iraq.
Will the international community continue to stand by passively and allow Israel to carry out a mass extermination campaign? Will there ever be limits? Or will war with Lebanon and Iran provide a smokescreen — Israel’s worst campaigns of ethnic cleansing and mass murder have always been done under the cover of war — to turn what is happening in Palestine into an updated version of the Armenian genocide?
I fear, given that the Israel lobby has bought and paid for Congress and the two ruling parties, as well as cowed the media and universities, the rivers of blood will continue to swell. There is money to be made in war. A lot of it. And the influence of the war industry, buttressed by hundreds of millions of dollars spent on political campaigns by the Zionists, will be a formidable barrier to peace, not to mention sanity.
Unless, as Chalmers Johnson writes in “Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic,” “we abolish the CIA, restore intelligence gathering to the State Department, and remove all but purely military functions from the Pentagon” we will “never again know peace, nor in all probability survive very long as a nation.”
Genocide is done by attrition. Once a targeted group is stripped of its rights the next steps are the displacement of the population, destruction of the infrastructure and the wholesale killing of civilians. Israel is also attacking and killing international monitors, human rights organizations, aid workers and United Nations staff, a feature of most genocides. Foreign journalists are being arrested and accused of “aiding the enemy,” while Palestinian journalists are being assassinated and their families wiped out. Israel carries out continuous assaults in Gaza on the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), where two-thirds of its facilities have been damaged or destroyed, and 223 of its staff have been killed. It has attacked the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), where peacekeepers have been fired upon, tear gassed and wounded. This tactic replicates the Bosnian Serb attacks in July 1995, which I covered, on the U.N. Protection Force outposts in Srebrenica. The Serbs, who had cut off food deliveries to the Bosnian enclave, resulting in severe malnutrition and starvation, overran the U.N. outposts and took 30 U.N. troops hostage before massacring more than 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys.
These initial phases are complete in Gaza. The final stage is mass death, not only from bullets and bombs, but famine and disease. No food has entered northern Gaza since the beginning of this month.
Israel has been dropping leaflets demanding everyone in the north evacuate. 400,000 Palestinians in northern Gaza must leave or die. It has ordered the evacuation of hospitals — Israel is also targeting hospitals in Lebanon — deployed drones to fire indiscriminately on civilians, including those attempting to take the wounded for treatment, bombed schools that serve as shelters and turned the Jabaliya refugee camp into a free fire zone. As usual, Israel continues to target journalists, including Al Jazeera’s Fadi Al-Wahidi, who was shot in the neck and remains in critical condition. At least 175 journalists and media workers are estimated to have been killed by Israeli troops in Gaza since Oct. 7, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs warns that aid shipments to all of Gaza are at their lowest level in months. “People have run out of ways to cope, food systems have collapsed, and the risk of famine persists,” it notes.
The total siege imposed on northern Gaza will, in the next stage, be imposed on southern Gaza. Incremental death. And the primary weapon, as in the north, will be famine.
Egypt and the other Arab states have refused to consider accepting Palestinian refugees. But Israel is banking on creating a humanitarian disaster of such catastrophic proportions that these countries, or other countries, will relent so they can depopulate Gaza and turn their attention to ethnically cleansing the West Bank. That is the plan, although no one, including Israel, knows if it will work.
Israeli Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich, in August complained openly that international pressure is preventing Israel from starving the Palestinians, “even though it might be justified and moral, until our hostages are returned.”
What is happening in Gaza is not unprecedented. Indonesia’s military, backed by the U.S., carried out a year-long campaign in 1965 to exterminate those accused of being communist leaders, functionaries, party members and sympathizers. The bloodbath — much of it carried out by rogue death squads and paramilitary gangs — decimated the labor union movement along with the intellectual and artistic class, opposition parties, university student leaders, journalists and ethnic Chinese. A million people were slaughtered. Many of the bodies were dumped into rivers, hastily buried or left to rot on roadsides.
This campaign of mass murder is today mythologized in Indonesia, as it will be in Israel. It is portrayed as an epic battle against the forces of evil, just as Israel equates the Palestinians with Nazis.
The killers in the Indonesian war against “communism” are cheered at political rallies. They are lionized for saving the country. They are interviewed on television about their “heroic” battles. The three-million-strong Pancasila Youth — Indonesia’s equivalent of the “Brownshirts” or the Hitler Youth — in 1965, joined in the genocidal mayhem and are held up as the pillars of the nation.
Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary “The Act of Killing,” which took eight years to make, exposes the dark psychology of a society that engages in genocide and venerates mass murderers.
We are as depraved as the killers in Indonesia and Israel. We mythologize our genocide of Native Americans, romanticizing our killers, gunmen, outlaws, militias and cavalry units. We, like Israel, fetishize the military.
Our mass killing in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq – what the sociologist James William Gibson calls “technowar”— defines Israel’s assault on Gaza and Lebanon. Technowar is centered on the concept of “overkill.” Overkill, with its intentionally large numbers of civilian casualties, is justified as an effective form of deterrence.
The slaughters, Turse writes, “were the inevitable outcome of deliberate policies, dictated at the highest levels of the military.”
Many of the Vietnamese — like Palestinians — who were murdered, Turse relates, were first subjected to degrading forms of public abuse. They were, Turse writes, when first detained “confined to tiny barbed wire ‘cow cages’ and sometimes jabbed with sharpened bamboo sticks while inside them.” Other detainees “were placed in large drums filled with water; the containers were then struck with great force, which caused internal injuries but left no scars.” Some were “suspended by ropes for hours on end or hung upside down and beaten, a practice called ‘the plane ride.’” They were subjected to electric shocks from crank-operated field telephones, battery-powered devices, or even cattle prods.” Soles of feet were beaten. Fingers were dismembered. Detainees were slashed with knives, “suffocated, burned by cigarettes, or beaten with truncheons, clubs, sticks, bamboo flails, baseball bats, and other objects. Many were threatened with death or even subjected to mock executions.” Turse found — again like Israel — that “detained civilians and captured guerrillas were often used as human mine detectors and regularly died in the process.” And while soldiers and Marines were engaged in daily acts of brutality and murder, the CIA “organized, coordinated, and paid for” a clandestine program of targeted assassinations “of specific individuals without any attempt to capture them alive or any thought of a legal trial.”
“After the war,” Turse concludes, “most scholars wrote off the accounts of widespread war crimes that recur throughout Vietnamese revolutionary publications and American antiwar literature as merely so much propaganda. Few academic historians even thought to cite such sources, and almost none did so extensively. Meanwhile, My Lai came to stand for — and thus blot out — all other American atrocities. Vietnam War bookshelves are now filled with big-picture histories, sober studies of diplomacy and military tactics, and combat memoirs told from the soldiers’ perspective. Buried in forgotten U.S. government archives, locked away in the memories of atrocity survivors, the real American war in Vietnam has all but vanished from public consciousness.”
There is no difference between us and Israel. This is why we do not halt the genocide. Israel is doing exactly what we would do in its place. Israel’s bloodlust is our own. As ProPublica reported, “Israel Deliberately Blocked Humanitarian Aid to Gaza, Two Government Bodies Concluded. Antony Blinken Rejected Them.”
U.S. law requires the government to suspend weapons shipments to countries that prevent the delivery of U.S.-backed humanitarian aid.
Historical amnesia is a vital part of extermination campaigns once they end, at least for the victors. But for the victims, the memory of genocide, along with a yearning for retribution, is a sacred calling. The vanquished reappear in ways the genocidal killers cannot predict, fueling new conflicts and new animosities. The physical eradication of all Palestinians, the only way genocide works, is an impossibility given that six million Palestinians alone live in the diaspora. Over five million live in Gaza and the West Bank.
Israel’s genocide has enraged the 1.9 billion Muslims worldwide, as well as most of the Global South. It has discredited and weakened the corrupt and fragile regimes of the dictatorships and monarchies in the Arab world, home to 456 million Muslims, who collaborate with the U.S. and Israel. It has fueled the ranks of the Palestinian resistance. And it has turned Israel and the U.S. into despised pariahs.
Israel and the U.S. will probably win this round. But ultimately, they have signed their own death warrants.
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Chris Hedges
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.
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For reasons apparent in the context of the rest of my work, my key question has been, How does fuel fit into the Marxist framework? Strictly speaking, Marx treats it as an ancillary substance, ancillary, that is, to the means of production, and therefore a part of the means of production. But that only became clear and consistently applied in the third volume; throughout the first, substances like coal and oil seem to shift between categories. And so the answer to my question emerged in stages as I read along, and I believe that evolution in understanding has led to a revision of Marx that makes it most relevant in an age to be defined by fueled and catastrophic heat. Petrocommunism.
That question rests on a more basic question: What is fuel?Whether or not it is sentient, that is surely not its defining characteristic. Rather, I will argue, fuel should be understood as a commodity sold with a particular use value: to do work by combustion. Compare this to the definition of labour: a commodity sold to do work by metabolism.
Some words are confusing because they have multiple meanings, but work is confusing because it only has one meaning: the force applied to an object in order to move it through space. “The use of labour-power is labour itself. The purchaser of labour-power consumes it by setting the seller of it to work” (vol. 1, 283 — the first lines of Chapter 7). The specific definition of work as the force necessary to move an object had already been well established by the physical sciences by Marx’s time. He cites a figure from 1861 (Chapter 15, footnote 11), who measures labour across modes (somatic, steam, hydro) in the force required to lift 33,000 lbs in one minute.
Perhaps today there would be workers (readers) who feel that their work is not reducible to the simple moving of objects — there is something more cognitive, creative in your vocation. If that is you, I challenge you to produce any value without moving something, even the inputs on a machine. The truth is, we ‘creative workers’ do work, just very little of it, applied in highly particularized ways. Work is always pushing something, pulling something, manipulating something.
Nonetheless, Marx exclusively attributes labour to humans in a passage I find challenging and philosophically problematic: “We presuppose labour in a form in which it is an exclusively human characteristic. A spider conducts operations which resemble those of the weaver, and a bee would put many a human architect to shame by the construction of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax. At the end of every labour process, a result emerges which had already been conceived by the worker at the beginning, hence already existed ideally.” (Vol. 1, 284). That seems wrong, and it’s not at all clear that the beehive as a collective consciousness has no awareness of its own creation as an ideal form.
Marxism is not a religion and Marx is not a prophet; here, as in other places, I will argue that Marx is wrong. Within a cooperative production process, a single worker does not need to have any conception of the end product in order to do his labour; imagine a worker on an assembly line who screws in a single screw. He is a part of a larger cooperative hive-mind that is very similar to that of the beehive, which is actually a good model for human labour. No substantial part of his theory rests on the intention behind the work; except for in this passage, he is concerned with work itself. Therefore, my argument is that human workers sell labour harvested from metabolism, and fuel sells labour harvested from combustion, does not compromise his larger theory. His assertion that only humans do labour is not a weight-bearing part of his argument, and it can be discarded without consequence. Which is important, because:
Marxism is right, and all other modes of analysis are wrong. This is proven by history, and by the repeated failures of bourgeoise economics to reflect reality or guide policy in an effective direction. Marxism is the only science of capitalism that doesn’t twist itself into knots trying to justify or hide the inequities and injustices of the capitalist system.
Therefore, if my revisions to his thought result in different answers, at the end of the day, different bottom lines, I’d be wrong. My revisions enhance rather than reverse Marxism’s ultimate conclusions. Think of “show your work” in math class: I’m revising the work, but we both get the same answers, except in the ways in which petromarxism shows how the dynamics at play in classical Marxism have accelerated greatly.
In the end, I hope we arrive at a political philosophy that can oppose oil and its influences — thereby staging a meaningful fight to claw back every tenth of degree of warming we can — without falling into the ideological traps of liberal environmentalism.
How does fuel fit into the Marxist framework?
Not exactly (or exclusively) where Marx thought it did. That fuel was not a major point of emphasis for him makes complete sense given the historical moment at which he wrote, and given the enormity of his main and only topic, Capitalism. It cannot be a surprise to you that fuel is fluid. And so it appears in the following (overlapping) forms.
In Marxism, land is a metonym for everything we inherit from the earth and its systems, which are vastly older and of a much larger scope than what mere human minds can comprehend. The first act of capitalism, the “original sin” or rather primitive accumulation, is the enclosure of land, which though it was a precondition for commodity production, today continues in different forms that can be grouped under the term “Imperialism.” These words describe the process of appropriating land into the world capitalist system. As land is appropriated for use by capital, human beings are forcibly removed from the land, severing their connection with their traditional means of subsistence and forcing them onto the labour market. Whatever form it takes, this is open theft perpetrated by overwhelming violence.
This precondition of capitalism, this original sin, is why capitalism is fundamentally incompatible with an ecological or sustainable approach to natural resources. Before it can begin exploiting workers, capital must insure total control over the land that freely yields its benefits.
“The land (and this, economically speaking, includes water) in its original state in which it supplies man with necessaries or means of subsistence ready to hand is available without any effort on his part as the universal material for human labour. All those things which labour merely separates from immediate connection with their environment are objects of labour spontaneously provided by nature, such as fish caught and separated from their natural element, namely water, timber felled in virgin forests, and ores extracted from their veins. On the other hand, the object of labour counts as raw material when it has already undergone some alteration by means of labour.” (Vol. 1, 284)
When it remains in the depths of a mountain or in a reservoir, raw crude, coal, and biogenic methane are gifts the earth gives to corporations, who pay workers to gather or extract it. This labour turns it into a raw material, the first form of any natural commodity. Crude oil is the raw material of the oil refinery, which is a manufacturing concern. If the extracted product comes out of the ground ready to burn — like biogenic methane and coal — then it becomes the raw material for the transportation industry that is set in motion to deliver the fuel to its consumer. Fuels remain commodities as they run up the value chain, until the moment they are burned, which is when their use-value is realized in work.
“Labour is, first of all, 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. He confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature. He sets in motion the natural forces which belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head and hands, in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adapted to his own needs.” (Vol 1 283).
Here, “first of all” means that this is what labor is in the first instance, at the beginning of the process of extracting something from land and turning it into a commodity. In my reading, it doesn’t mean that labour is exclusively a process between man and nature — it can be a process between two parts of nature, as indeed is reflected in Marx’s understanding of “man” as a part of nature.
Oil’s kinship with the land was realized in the early legal regime of rule of capture, which had to be reversed for the oil industry to grow into absolute domination. As you may know, this was a precept of English common law that stated that a lord could keep whatever game he killed on his own land, even if the animal made its home on a rival’s land. This was a part of the feudal legal regime that had to be overthrown as a precondition for the development of early capitalism; future petrocapitalists fought instead for their right to own the oil when it was still in the ground. This allows the industry to use the oil still underground as a collateral for advanced capital, among other financializations of proven reservoirs. The prorating system that replaced the rule of capture allowed capitalists, a small group of them in close coordination, to autocratically control the rate of the flow of the oil out of the ground and into the economy. This was a necessary precondition because, as was proven time and again in the early 20th century, when competition demands that each firm pull oil out of the ground as quickly as possible, the market floods and what was supposed to become a font of new wealth becomes a massive financial liability.
Marx’s recognition that capitalist accumulation begins by stealing from the land makes the term “ecosocialist” redundant. Protecting the land starts with socialism. Marx gives us an analysis that ties capitalist production to the exploitation of the earth’s systems as much as to the exploitation of labour. “For all its stinginess, capitalist production is thoroughly wasteful with human material, just as its way of distributing its products through trade, and its manner of competition, make it very wasteful of material resources, so that it loses for society what it gains for the individual capitalist” (vol 3, 180).
B. Fuel Is A Raw Material & A Commodity
i. Raw Material
A raw material is a commodity, but it is specifically the commodity to be transformed by the labour process. It is reproduced and transformed in the finished commodity. Crude oil is the raw material of the refinery. However, gasoline is not the raw material to a lawn mower: the fuel is combusted, not reproduced bodily in the cut grass, which is the objectification of labour. Therefore, fuel, after its initial gathering, refining, and sale to its end user, is not and never will be a raw material. The same substances (chemicals) that are sold for use as fuel can also be elsewhere sold as a raw material (plastics, industrial chemicals). But fuel sold to be fuel is no longer a raw material, which makes it less obvious that fuel is clearly a part of the means of production as a whole.
Speaking of the refinery, it is clear that some forms of oil can skip these intermediate processing steps, but even those must still be transported. For the railroads, the pipelines, the tankers, fuel is a raw material, as it is for the refineries. Until recently, pipelines bought the fuel at the origin, sold it at the destination, and owned it between, and so were able to act not only as transporters but as brokers, playing the margins for advantage. For these businesses–for the oil business as a whole (in parallel with the gas and coal businesses–fuel is a raw material commodity. But not for the rest of the economy.
For Marx, a raw material does not by itself create value — its value is reproduced in the finished product, but no more. This is why it is common even for capitalists doing their accounting to subtract the cost of their raw materials from their revenue along with the other costs of the means of production to calculate their net profit.
Oil — petroleum derived chemicals — does act as a raw material for the plastics industry. As we know, such materials were originally unavoidable waste products that got incorporated into capitalism. Marx analyzes this situation:
“As the capitalist mode of production extends, so also does the utilization of the refuse left behind by production and consumption. Under the heading of production we have the waste products of industry and agriculture, under that of consumption we have both the excrement produced by man’s natural metabolism and the form in which useful articles survive after their use has been made of them. Refuse of production is, therefore, in the chemical industry, the by-product which gets lost if production is only on a small scale…But there is a colossal wastage in the capitalist economy in proportion to their actual use.” (Vol 3, pg 195)
However, in this situation, these petrochemicals cannot be considered “fuel,” a word which connotes its combustible use-value.
ii. Commodity
The entire archive of this substack is about fuel as a commodity. This is the domain of the Industry proper. It is obviously not the only branch of Industry that exists, but it is the one upon whom all the others depend. Therefore anyone invested in anything has an interest in maintaining an oil industry that can produce at all cost, at any cost. This is why the energy sector commands the fierce loyalty of capitalists everywhere in the economy. The guys in energy need to get rich in order for anyone else to get rich. This is the basic tenet of petrocaptialism. Timothy Mitchell, building on Michael Serres, theorizes the relationship between the corporation and the oil itself as one of parasitism; the economic entity that sucks value out of the flow of coal, oil, and gas. This helpfully gives conceptual primacy and agency to the flow of materials itself. But we must also consider that the oilmen see themselves as the masters of their substance. It’s much less clear to the rest of us.
At a minimum, it is clear that fuel’s specific attributes determine the character of its industry and thereby its relationship to capital and to the working class. Take, for instance, its state of matter: solid (coal), liquid (oil) and gas (gas). One of Mitchell’s key contributions to energy history is to show how the solid nature of coal gave workers a key point of leverage in their ongoing and accelerating conflict with Capital. As the century progressed, this became a key incentive to move the economy from coal onto oil. Mitchell says that with
“the concentration of energy supplies in large amounts at specific sites led to the creation of an apparatus of energy supply with which the democratic politics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would be built. Large stores of high-quality coal were discovered and developed in relatively few areas: in central and northern England and south Wales, along the belt running from northern France through Belgium to the Ruhr Valley and Upper Silesia, and in the Appalachian coal belt in North America…Great volumes of energy now flowed along narrow, purpose-built channels. Specialised bodies of workers were concentrated at the end-points and main junctions of these conduits, operating the cutting equipment, lifting machinery, switches, locomotives and other devices that allowed stores of energy to move along them. Their position and concentration gave them opportunities, at certain moments, to forge a new kind of political power. The power derived not just from the organisations they formed, the ideas they began to share or the political alliances they built, but from the extraordinary quantities of carbon energy that could be used to assemble political agency, by employing the ability to slow, disrupt or cut off its supply.” (Carbon Democracy, 18)
Somatic labour was firmly bound up in the sale and use of coal, and this is why “coal miners played a leading role in contesting work regimes and the private powers of employers” from the 1880s onward. Think of Ludlow and Matewan. Crucially, Stalin was an organizer in the coalfields of Georgia, which was a key contributor to the victory of 1917. Marx wrote during the buildup to the dramatic confrontations of the coal age, and he saw how coal-fired industrialism gathered workers together in key points, from whence they could challenge Capital. Since the machinery itself was in an early stage of technological development, coal’s use or function as a competitor to human labour appeared less salient than its material alignment with proletarian power. Nonetheless, I think Marx saw both sides, and we can, as well.
The second–or third, etc., — Industrial Revolution was the unfolding replacement of coal with oil over the course of the first half of the 20th century. As a liquid, oil does not require shoveling; engines don’t require stoking; it only needs to be pumped, not mined. It requires much less human labour per unit of energy than coal, to produce and to ship. The payroll–variable capital–is greatly streamlined, profits increased, and the working class has lost one of its key points of leverage over the entire structure of capitalism. It’s not clear that Marx could have or should have seen that coming.
In the world of coal, carbon consumption, total payroll, and surplus value were tightly positively correlated within any industrial concern. As technology became more efficient and as the hydrocarbons moved into liquid and gas forms, payroll fell out of that relationship, to stagnate far below the embiggening fuel consumption, which was overwhelming the complex system of the atmosphere above us with new carbon, pushing it towards tipping points to be realized decades (but not centuries) hence.
With the labour intensity of its production largely (but never absolutely) stripped away, today fuel provides a low-cost alternative to human labour, and so an increased fuel purchase generates more surplus value per dollar than the purchase of more costly somatic labour. So fuel, as it moves into its liquid and gas forms, decouples the proportional relationship that says the more variable capital you put in, the more surplus value comes out. Instead, energy consumption becomes correlated with surplus value. Compare Google’s workforce to its energy consumption (or “carbon footprint” as the environmentalists would like me to call it).
C. Fuel Is Money
Fuels, and particularly liquid fuels both in their raw material and finished states, have become key money-commodities in use by the financial system today, famously attached to the dollar to make the combined Petrodollar the universal world currency. Marx essentially predicted that eventually currencies would become unmoored from their representational relationship with specific quantities of mineral value. He recognized that money is not required to be gold, or gold-equivalent. This implicit prophecy only came true well into the oil energy regime in the 2nd half of the 20th century. Already, when the dollar finally left gold, oil had become deeply intertwined with the very centers of finance globally. In fact, the American oil interests ran on financed debt from its earliest days, which is why Patillo Higgens owned none of the oil that was produced from “his” Spindletop well. Even in those earliest days, oil was owned by the banks even before it came out of the ground.
This is because the physical properties of oil predetermined its alignment with financial capital. The fact that oil, at least by the geologic understanding of the day, was heavily concentrated in remote and rare underground reservoirs that could be quite immense, meant that exploring for oil a very risky gamble that attracted a noticeably lumpen group of men who were comfortable living on the knife’s edge between abject poverty and striking it rich: Wildcatters. These men depended on finance capital to loan them the funds to buy a lease, often on nothing more than a hunch or a dream, and to finance the drilling. Most of the time–data aren’t reliably preserved–the only result was a very deep dry hole. Most of them found it more profitable to sell the prospect of oil drilling to investors and then keep the money. One archetypical such man was Dad Joiner, born Columbus Joiner, but known as Dad of the East Texas oil industry. Before he struck big, “Dad Joiner was virtually invisible, just another of the thousands of threadbare promoters, each with an idea, the promise of riches, and the gift of gab. For three years, beginning in 1927, while the industry’s leaders carried on their furious debate about shortage and glut and regulation, Joiner–the poorest of the poor boys–and his motley crew were drilling mid the dense pine trees of East Texas with rusted, third-hand equipment, constantly tormented by breakdowns and accidents, always short of even the barest cash.” (Yergin 246) “He had been very cavalier in his promotion, to put it generously. He had sold more “interests” than there were interests to sell. Some leases had been sold several times over, and in at least one lease eleven separate times.” The lawyers and the bankers owned the oil he discovered, from the first gurgle heard from the Daisy Bradford Well Number 3. He got nothing, and neither did his motley crew of drillers. This allowed HL Hunt to take over the whole enterprise on the cheap. As the capital flows centralized, Houston grew as a center of American finance, and oil was forever bound up with the industry of money itself. The truly big oilmen are bankers, and very few exploration companies turn a profit, even today when fracking has ended the risk of drilling a dry hole. You want to own the debt, not owe it.
During the age of the American empire–which we’re still in, but set to leave soon–the dominant currency was the petrodollar, which was guaranteed not only by the American government, but also by the Texan company, Aramco, which, along with the other oil majors, agreed to only sell oil around the world in dollars. Most of this story should be told within the actual petrohistorical narrative that comprises the bulk of this project. What we must keep an eye on is the fact that though oil sells labour, it is intimately tied to capital itself, to the point where it functions as capital and can replace currency itself. Therefore its own interests lie aligned with the Western ruling class.
The means of production itself is of (at least) two types: raw material, and the conditions of production. We’ve already discussed the former. For the most part, the conditions of production are the necessary upfront capital investments that must be paid in full, and therefore are beyond the reach of private citizens: factories, machines. Trucks. These things depreciate over time: that is, they reproduce a tiny part of their own value in the value of the final commodity. In Volume II, Marx explains that these things embody “fixed capital,” as opposed to “circulating capital” which are ongoing costs that must be paid out month after month, like wages and the purchase of raw materials. This is the only separation in the type of capital recognized by the capitalist himself, but Marx points to a more fundamental differentiation between “constant capital” which is what is invested into the means of production, and “variable capital” which buys labour.
Since the means of production reproduces its value as an ‘aliquot part’ of the value of the produced commodity, either all at once as in the case of raw materials, or slowly over time, as in the case of the conditions of production, all of the extra value that makes up the rest of the value of the finished commodity, arises from variable capital, which always pays less for labour than the work it actually receives, since workers always produce more value than the cost of their wages. This is why it is consequential to ascertain whether oil falls into the category of means of production or labour. This essay is here to argue, both: but it should be counted on the variable capital side of the ledger. Which is perhaps contrary to what Marx himself thought.
If we continue with the traditional practice of considering fuel as an element of the means of production, then this passage applies to it: “means of production never transfer more value to the product than they themselves lose during the labour process by the destruction of their own use-value. If an instrument of production has no value to lose, i.e., if it is not the product of human labour, it transfers no value to the product. It helps to create a use-value without contributing tot he formation of exchange-value. This is true of all those means of production supplied by nature without human assistance, such as land, wind, water, metals in the form of ore, and timber in virgin forests.” Oil only has value insofar as human labour is required to extract it, refine it, and ship it. If that value is $4/gallon and ¼ gallon is used in the production of one widget, the oil contributes $1 to the exchange value of the finished product, and the capitalist who burned that oil in his own production process makes no surplus on that dollar. “If we look at the creation and the alteration of value for themselves, i.e. in their pure form, then the means of production, this physical shape taken on by constant capital, provides only the material in which fluid, value-creating labour power has to be incorporated” (vol. 1, 323).
Marx wrote around the question of fuel without ever addressing it directly (had he, there would be little need for this essay). In a previous post, I referred to fuel as a part of the means of production. This is clearly the category into which it belongs in the text of Capital. At different points in the text, he lists both coal and oil as overhead costs, like ground rent, and, elsewhere, as a component part of the machinery that drives industrial capitalism, and elsewhere as an auxiliary substance. So within the text of Capital, fuel is:
a) Ground Rent
When fuel, coal specifically, is referred to as ground rent, Marx has in mind the context of the pre-industrial manufacturing period, when coal was primarily used to heat buildings, including workshops. This first practice, where energy (especially in the form of heat for climate control) is a utility that comes with a piece of property, maintains dominance today. We often think of utilities as a part of our rent. This makes sense, but is obviously not an exhaustive treatment of the issue.
b) An Auxiliary or Ancillary Substance
When the dust settles by volume 3 of Capital, coal gets most consistently categorized along with lubricating oils and other substances that get consumed by the production process, for example, flour which was used in weaving textiles, as substances that are auxiliary or ancillary to the means of production.
“Both in the case of the machine and of the tool, we find that after allowing for their average daily cost, that is, for the value they transmit to the product by their average daily wear and tear, and for their consumption of auxiliary substances like oil, coal, and so on, they do their work for nothing, like the natural forces which are already available without the intervention of human labour” vol 1, 510. Tellingly, this category here appears as a second exception to a rule that would otherwise be true: that machines work for nothing. But they don’t do their work for nothing,they cost money in at least these two different ways. The auxiliary costs may be considered as costs of the machine itself, it would seem. Elsewhere, these substances are referred to as “accessories to be consumed by the instruments of labour” vol 1, 288.
After Marx clarifies the difference between fixed and circulating constant capital, it is clear that ancillary materials are paid out of circulating capital. From the point of view of the capitalist, the difference between fixed and circulating capital is of daily importance, but to Marxist economists who can see the big picture, the meaningful difference is between variable and constant capital. Nonetheless, I find it significant that fuel (and other ancillary substances) appear to the capitalist to be of the same category as wages: circulating capital.
My only comment on the categorization of fuel as an ancillary substance is that it erases the differences in the use values of ancillary substances.
c) A Part of the Machine
At times Marx understands coal to be a part of a machine, and therefore quite clearly a part of the conditions of production, and therefore clearly constant capital. Marx takes the example of an industrial steam-hammer: “Since its daily wear and tear, its coal consumption, &tc., are spread over the stupendous masses of iron hammered by it in a day, only a small value is added to a hundredweight of iron.” vol 1, 511. (I think the wear and tear counts differently from its coal consumption. The cost of its coal consumption is passed on in full to the commodity in whose production it was expended, but that cost is so tiny that it barely registers in the value it adds to a hundredweight of cotton. It is a very small cost, even in comparison to the depreciation of the machinery, which is spread over the stupendous masses of iron. But this argument will be taken up in a later section.)
He explains that a machine is an apparatus for turning motive power into specialized forms of labour. Machines have three parts: the motive power itself, the transmitting mechanism, and the tool. Marx has historical memory of both the great waterwheel factories of English industrialism, but also firsthand experience with industrial machines who used somatic motive power, especially in handloom weaving. As Andreas Malm documents in Fossil Capital, although the power loom was invented in 1784, economic conditions conspired to make handloom weaving much more prevalent in the English textile industry through the 1830s. Handloom weavers were distributed throughout the countryside as a “domestic industry” where work was done in households that owned their own looms. “In 1829 there were roughly 240,000 handloom weavers [in England] (each presumably equipped with at least one loom) as opposed to 55,000 power looms… the hand-loom weavers were the largest group of workers connected to any British industry, their lifestyle and experience far more typical than those of the mule-spinners.” And yet it is the story of the mule-spinners that Marx writes about, as he is able to document the transition from foot-powered spinning wheels to steam-powered mills:
“In many manual implements the distinction between man as mere motive power and man as worker or operator properly so called is very striking indeed. For instance, the foot is merely the prime mover of the spinning-wheel, while the hand, working with the spindle, and drawing and twisting, performs the real operation of spinning. It is the second part of the handicraftman’s implement, in this case the spindle, which is first seized on by the industrial revolution, leaving to the worker, in addition to his new labour of watching the machine with his eyes and correcting its mistakes with its hands, the merely mechanical role of acting as the motive power. On the other hand, in cases where man has always acted as a simple motive power, as for instance by turning the crank of a mill, by pumping, by moving the arm of a bellows up and down, by ounding with a mortar, etc., there is soon a call for the application of animals, water and wind as motive powers. Here and there, long before the period of manufacture, and also to some extent during that period, these implements attain the stature of machines, but without creating any revolution in the mode of production.” vol. 1, 496
It is only with the application of steam (coal) that it does rise to the level of a revolution in a mode of production. So although Marx sees that motive power originates outside the machine itself, he nonetheless sees it as a part of the machine, at least at the moment of its combustion or expenditure. And this is why, for Marx, fuel appears a part of the technological apparatus for increasing productivity. Machines increase productivity, and so its component, motive power, must be merely a part of that project.
I don’t think fuel is a part of the machine. Perhaps only at the moment of its combustion, but prior to that it clearly had a life as a commodity outside the machine, and a natural one before that. Correspondingly, I think that machines can increase productivity, but fuel has the ability to create value, and therefore, surplus value. But we’ll get into what I think later — for now, we must first understand productivity as a consequence of machinery.
Both fuel and workers operate machinery, but are not parts of the machine itself, except as considered within the larger apparatuses in which all three are embedded.
D) ii. Fuel Is a Part of the Technical Apparatus for Increasing Productivity
On the level of appearances, fuel appears as a part of the technological apparatus for increasing productivity. It appears as a part of the machine, and machines increase productivity. Marx defines a machine as an apparatus consisting of three parts: motive power, means of transmitting power to a tool, and a tool. I argue that if motive power is a part of the machine, it’s source isn’t: it needs to be poured or shoveled into the machine continuously, so it is also its own thing: fuel.
In Marxism, productivity is the measure of how much product can be produced with a given amount of labour. Intensification of labour is the measure of how much labour can be expended within a given time. Productivity is therefore seen as the efficiency of labour. The two other variable here is the quantity of labour (in terms of length of the working day). In Capital, Marx explains each of these variables by holding the other two constant and determines that “A working day of a given length and intensity always creates the same amount of value no matter the productivity of labour.” (vol. 1, 656). This is why when an industry as a whole becomes more productive, the social value of the commodity it produces decreases, sometimes rapidly. The market becomes swamped and the price of the commodity can dip below the cost of its production; as we have seen, this is a chronic problem in the oil industry: the problem that most dictates the Industry’s behavior and history.
When the amount of labour, both in quantity and quality, remains constant, more raw material can be worked up in a working day by more efficient means: steam-driven spindles consume more cotton and produce more yarn than the earlier somatic machines. The absolute mass of stuff goes up in a day. However, since such conditions are independent of the labour market, increasing efficiency does not by itself affect the social value created in a day (or any other amount of time). That same value is simply spread over a larger quantity of saleable commodities, making each one cheaper, as each one represents a smaller amount of socially necessary labour. Efficiency makes for cheaper commodities, creating a supply that can be the impetus to find new demand, pushing the boundaries of the market as a whole ever outward.
Fuel, specifically oil during the second industrial revolution, added to the intensity of labour expended at sites of production. More labour is exerted per unit of the working day when fuel is burned during that time. It did set into motion machines that also increased productivity. But not just that. But, along with productivity, there ballooned a massive pile of surplus value, increasingly controlled by capitalists, as industrialization proceeded through its first and second phases. The existence of that surplus value can only be understood when we see fuel as labour.
Nonetheless there is the consequential question of whether fossil energy is replacing human labour or augmenting it. If the former it should be considered as labour, if the latter, it should be considered a means of production. Marx says, “what exclusively determines the magnitude of the value of any article is the amount of labour socially necessary, or the labour-time socially necessary for its production.” So in classical Marxism, the introduction of technology is said to merely reduce the amount of labour time necessary to produce a commodity and therefore decrease the commodity’s value. Indeed, we have seen a radical cheapening of everything since the introduction of industry. A machine does not really do labour itself, but rather just makes human labour more efficient.
But does technology actually save labour time? Extensive experience now shows, No, it increases production without decreasing socially necessary labour time. Thereby it is additive, not augmentative, with human labour. So it should be considered as labour, even while we also consider it a part of the means of production. We will again have to live with ambiguity.
Capitalists are always hoping to extract the most efficient or productive work that they can out of their workers. If they become the first in their sector to adopt more productive working methods, then they will likely be able to sell their commodities on the market at the old, higher prices, before one of their competitors adopts the new techniques and the competition between the two pushes the price down towards a commodity’s true value. The dynamics of this lie in the sphere of competitive markets and circulation, and not production, and is therefore left by Marx to Volume 2.
This competitive dynamic, along with the fact that increased productivity in the areas of industry that produce the working class’s means of subsistence can make labour cheaper, makes increased productivity highly sought-after by capitalists even though it does not produce extra surplus value, strictly speaking. As industrial petrocapitalism unfolded after WWII, it created a general cheapening of everything, which did increase the quality of life of the working middle class, which was racially segregated, and those benefits were very inequitably distributed through society.
But I have a problem with this. What I think I’ve seen in the last seventy years is a vast expansion in the mass of value that exists in our economy, Hoarded in almost all cases by the craven rich, who are richer as individuals than entire national public sectors. Productivity alone cannot explain this growth in the pile of wealth, not when it creates no real value. There must be more labour in the system, if the system is more profitable: human labour is added and added, of course, but there is a hidden font of cheap labour that has not been hitherto acknowledged: fuel. Machines do not create value but fuel does, because fuel does work.
It appears to me that the absolute amount of total value in our economy, along with the amount of surplus value, has rapidly grown in size especially during the age of full-blown petrocapitalism after the second world war. This is true however you want to measure value, but it is important for us to reconcile the numbers of the environmentalist historians with our account: people who track the mass of inputs, outputs, and waste products involved in our total economic project. Admittedly, comparing wealth across historical societies in different periods is not easy or straightforward; although we can adjust to inflation to some extent, much of the accounting is relative to the total wealth of a particular society, not absolute. For instance, people have said that John D Rockefeller was the richest man in history because he had the greatest proportion of the total wealth of his society. However, when we are concerned with the total material footprint of the Standard Oil of old and the oil majors today, it is the absolute scale of the enterprise that concerns us.
One such environmental historian, J.R. McNeill provides the following data for world GDP. I am not asserting that GDP represents the actual value of an economy, but one would expect the two to be positively correlated (Figures given in index numbers relative to A.D. 1500)
If anyone has better numbers, or can extend this data set beyond 1992, email me.
And so the world’s economy in the late twentieth century was about 120 times larger than that of 1500. Any historical plot you can make of this time period will have the same type of line: exponential asymptotic increase, taking off in 1950: coal production, oil production, timber production, carbon dioxide accumulation, global temperature. All these charts have that same signature asymptotic line. All of them show that the economy — the total value that it produces, along with the corresponding toll that production takes upon the earth and its natural systems–has rapidly accelerated since 1850, but much more so since 1945. To me, this can’t all be explained by increasing productivity, and we must note that it happened well after Marx wrote, and it makes sense we should have to evolve our thinking to acknowledge and account for it.
The counterargument is that value is the only thing we don’t have more of, but that the same total value is now distributed amongst more commodities, and so everything is cheaper. But although plastication does result in a general cheapening, things haven’t gotten that cheap–cost of living is high. Alternatively, one could argue that value is tied to money and therefore was only allowed to expand beyond the world’s stores of gold after it was taken off the gold standard. These explanations are unsatisfactory compared to mine: All of this excess wealth comes from the labour done by fuel. Now that the length of the working day cannot be materially increased in developed societies, the intensity of labour grows. This extra work done per hour is done by harnessing exosomatic energies, not by ‘increased efficiency.’
(People tend to look at population growth as the cause and not the effect of the great acceleration. In this they are wrong, population growth is just another effect of the exosomatic energy regime.)
In Marx’s account, increased productivity or efficiency does benefit the capitalist class as a whole, but it does not value the capitalist who makes his own production system more efficient. This benefit is always displaced one step on the value chain, as the increased productivity in a preceding industry results in a cheaper raw material for the next:
“The increased profit that a capitalist [who has invested in textile spinning mills] obtains through a fall in the cost of cotton and spinning machinery, for example, is the result of an increase in labour productivity, and indeed not in the spinning mill, but rather in the production of machines and cotton. A smaller amount of expenditure on the conditions of labour is needed in order to objectify a given quantity of labour, and thus appropriate a given quantity of surplus labour. The costs of appropriating a certain quantity of surplus labour therefore fall.”
Improved machinery then is seen as increasing profit not directly by driving production of a greater amount of commodity, but by saving money on constant capital. This raises the rate of surplus value and the rate of profit, and the fact that the value is realized by the company after you on the production chain provides powerful incentive for vertical integration. This type of savings on the means of production, economizing on constant capital, can affect the rate of surplus value, but not the absolute amount of surplus value, which can only be increased by adding labour. Nonetheless, the fact that savings on constant capital greatly improves the rate of surplus value and the rate of profit, capitalists will go to any length to economize on the means of production: “This economy extends to crowding workers into confined and unhealthy premises, a practice which in capitalist parlance is called saving on buildings; squeezing dangerous machines into the same premises and dispensing with any means of protection against these dangers; neglect of precautionary measures in those production processes whose very nature is harmful to health or involves risk, as in mining, etc. Not to speak of the absence of all provisions that would make the production process humane, comfortable or simply bearable for the worker. From the standpoint of the capitalist this would be a senseless and purposeless waste. Yet for all its stinginess, capitalist production is thoroughly wasteful with human material, just as its way of distributing its products through trade, and its manner of competition, make it very wasteful of material resources, so that it loses for society what it gains for the individual capitalist” (vol 3, 180). Marx goes on in the same passage:
“If the value of commodities is determined by the necessary labour-time contained in them and not simply by labour-time as such, it is capital that first makes a reality of this mode of determination and immediately goes on to reduce continually the labour socially necessary for the production of a commodity. The price of the commodity is therefore reduced to a minimum through reducing to a minimum each part of the labour required to produce it.”
In this reading then, fuel does not increase total value but is a part of the mechanism by which commodities are reduced to their cheapest possible prices. My problem is that there is more than cheapness to today’s economy — there is also great excess that needs to be wasted; a huge mountain of accumulation that is not explained merely by an increase of productivity.
E) i. Fuel Is Labor
Fuel is a commodity, but it is a commodity with a unique use-value: work. In this, it is the same as the human being who sells their labour for a wage. Both humans and fuel set the means of production into motion, are operators of machines. For most processes of production, both motive powers are needed, but this is not a universal law. Fuel, specifically oil during the second industrial revolution, added to the intensity of labour expended at sites of production, including the sites of the production of oil itself. More labour is exerted per unit of the working day when fuel is burned during that time.
Understanding work in the sense it is used in the physical sciences, and thereby asserting the fuel does work, appears as a semantic argument, but it is not. In his book Fossil Power, Andreas Malm comments on the dual meaning of the word power — the political and the caloric. That is a linguistic coincidence that does not extend to other languages. But the singular meaning of the word work, a meaning that accommodates both somatic and exosomatic energy, is not a semantic or linguistic coincidence. When it can be measured, work is measured in units of horsepower, calories, watts. Joules.
The appearance of fuel as a component of a machine hides a key distinction: the machine increases productivity, but the fuel uses the machine to produce. Fuel operates the machine. Usually this process proceeds with the (for now) indispensable collaboration of human labour: a worker also operates a machine. But that very interdependence between fuel and worker is also the field of the intense and perpetual competition to reduce and eventually eliminate the human share.
Following the second industrial revolution, fuel has been in league with capital to decrease demand for human labour. Competition for what meager jobs are available allows them to discipline the workers that do have jobs, to further depress wages, and so on. This is why, in the West, the dead god has found a firm and unshakeable ally in capital. In the Communist world, when there was one, where the state was/is charged with defending the interests of workers, fuel as a massive source of cheap labour was used to materially equip the country with the means of subsistence necessary to first defeat Hitler and then eliminate poverty and suffering. With an empowered workers’ state, therefore, fossil energy can be used for good, but it is not under today’s political regime in the West.
You may not be prepared to accept that all your work can be measured in horsepower. Your work is highly specialised (due to the division of labour in society) and therefore requires knowledge of techniques you have inherited from past iterations of work. However, when you look at any one of those techniques, what it is doing is channelling a flow of power along a specific path. Pure horsepower must be exerted, things must be moved, but only at the right time and place, and so your time is spent managing and correcting the flow of horsepower.
This then gives us two dimensions along which work is performed: the main stream of motive power that is brought to bear in a productive capacity, and the secondary regulatory work that precisely directs the power where to go and what to do.
Marx: “In many manual implements the distinction between man as mere motive power and man as worker or operator properly soc called is very striking indeed. For instance, the foot is merely the prime mover of the spinning-wheel, while the hand, working with the spindle, and drawing and twisting, performs the real operation of spinning.” (vol 1 496)
All work has these two components: the foot and the hand. The power and its manipulation. Both of these types of work are, importantly, clearly work in the sense that they both require moving objects in space (and in some cases require moving movement, or moving energy, moving work itself).
It is clear that this is how a computer works: by channelling current through on/off gates. That then covers the vast portion of the economic sphere wherein we are all engaged with staring into a screen. In earlier technical regimes, for example in steam, the worker used their somatic energy to shovel fuel as well as to guide, direct, and regulate machines. The function of the foot was first and most easily assumed by exosomatic power, but as machines get more autonomous and self-correcting, they gradually take over the work of the hand as well; no type of somatic labour is safe from being replaced by technology. Rather than a firm division between worker and machine, we arrive at a spectrum in which the work is distributed between the two types of workers, somatic and combustive. We see again the reason for the constant antagonistic competition between the two for access to capital.
“A machine which is not active in the labour process is useless. In addition, it falls prey to the destructive power of natural processes. Iron rusts; wood rots. … Living labour must seize on these things, awaken them from the dead, change them from merely possible into real and effective use-values. Bathed in the fire of labour, appropriated as part of its organism, and infused with vital energy for the performance of functions appropriate to their concept and to their vocation in the process, they are indeed consumed, but to some purpose, as elements in the formation of new use-values, new products, which are capable of entering into individual consumption as means of subsistence or into a new labour process as means of production.”
Today, you could also say, a machine which is not plugged in is useless. Exosomatic power and labour power are equally necessary to the process of production. Without these two inputs, the means of production lie still. It may be that the lack of other ancillary materials would also grind the process to a halt, but fuel/electricity is universally necessary in the same way as human work is, for now. The foot and the hand is today the engine and the worker, but we know that capitalists hope for and are working to create a future where the engine can do both types of work in their entireties. Without socialism, such a future will unfold in the form of a series of miserable and ongoing catastrophes which will eventually significantly reduce the human population, along with taking a massive toll on nonhuman lives.
Therefore, it would be interesting to see what happens if we consider the cost of fuel a part of variable capital, rather than as a component of constant capital.
i) Increasing Intensity of Labour
Marx places the beginning of the process of intensification of the working day at the moment when legislation began to regulate the length of the working day — prior to the workers’-led movements that resulted in the Factory Acts, capitalists captured increasing quantities of surplus value mostly by forcing their workers to work increasingly long and grueling hours. At the moment in which the length of the working day could expand no further, it became necessary to increase the quantity of labour that could be expended within the limited working day — a quantity named by Marx the intensity of labour. It is this intensification of labour, not an increase in productivity, that results in the growing piles of surplus value that accelerates the valorization of capital.
Industrialism produced more per day but not per joule. The source of the great acceleration was in the cheapness and availability of work, in the scientific sense of the word. The transition from coal to oil greatly reduced the dead god’s reliance on human labour; many more workers per joule were employed by the coal industry of Marx’s day than the lean, subcontracted workforce of the oil industry today. (which is not to imply that energy workers are not proletarian; they certainly are.)
In this way, along with thousands of parallel processes in motion, all of which tended towards using greater and greater quantities of exosomatic energy to augment and, at the ever-growing margins, replace human labour, or somatic energy. All of Marx’s analysis of machinery and large-scale industry (chapter 15) stands, but now we need to add to it an understanding of what drives the machines:
“Machinery produces relative surplus-value, not only by directly reducing the value of labour-power, and indirectly by cheapening the commodities that enter into its reproduction, but also, when it is first introduced sporadically into an industry, by converting the labour employed by the owner of that machinery into labour of a higher degree, by raising the social value of the article produced above its individual value, and thus enabling the capitalist to replace the value of a day’s labour-power by a smaller portion of the day’s product.” i.e. to reduce the necessary labour time, increasing the proportion of surplus labour in the working day. Also, replacing labour that is valued by the necessary means of subsistence with labour that is valued by pure commodities markets. This is why, as Marx notes, machinery and workers have always been in competition with each other. This advantage that the owner captures — Marx here says by raising the social value of the article, but what he means is by temporarily decreasing the individual value beneath the price, which represents the social value — exists only at the margins; as soon as all companies in an industry are equally mechanized, the capitalist must already be off trying to find a new way to increase profits through new schemes of mechanization and/or new ways to increase exploitation of their workers.
By simultaneously cheapening everything and increasing the intensity of labour within a capitalist enterprise, fuel hypercharges the dynamics and contradictions of capitalism that Marx identified. The necessary part of the working day is shrunk to miniscule proportions by the relative cheapness of the means of subsistence in the industrial age; leaving mountains of surplus value to be expropriated, placing capitalists ever higher in the stratospheres of Power and Influence, while workers become cheaper, more expendable, and more desperate. Add to this the lottery ideology of capitalism, its appeal to the fantasy of a gambler, its elusive promise that there is some way to Get Rich — to graduate from a worker to an owner — and you have created a working class willing to do anything and everything for a wage, and who are extremely hesitant to organize. All for the low price of $100/barrel. Out of all of this, you get a capitalist class even more powerful than what Marx could have envisioned, which strangles in its crib the possibility, sometimes even considered an inevitability, of Revolution. Now, late in the story, we find out that oil actually costs a good deal more than $100/barrel — it costs us the future, the liveability of our only home, the earth. Already, by the time this became clear to everyone, the capitalists had completely overrun global political systems, and there was never any other plan than to continue to socialize the costs and privatize the profits.
ii) How Does Work Generate Surplus Value?
In many ways, this is Marx’s core insight: workers are paid based on what they need to survive–the cost of their means of subsistence and reproduction–but they always generate more value than that. Marx divides up the working day (or any other period of waged labour) into two pieces of time: the time it takes them to produce enough value for the capitalist for the capitalist to recover the cost of the worker’s wages, and then the time he spends at work beyond that point. See this from the worker’s point of view: “Since his work forms part of a system based on the social division of labour, he does not directly produce his own means of subsistence. Instead of this, he produces a particular commodity, yarn for example, with a value equal to the value of his means of subsistence, or of the money for it….If the value of his daily means of subsistence represents an average of 6 hours’ objectified labour, the worker must work an average of 6 hours to reproduce that value….I call the portion of the working day during which this reproduction takes place necessary labour-time, and the labour expended during this time necessary labour….During the second period of the labour process, that in which his labour is no longer necessary labour, he does work, but his labour is no longer necessary labour, and he creates no value for himself. He creates surplus-value which, for the capitalist, has all the charms of something created out of nothing” (vol. 1 324–5).
The definition of the rate of surplus value, then, is expressed in the ratio between the value of the surplus labour and the total variable capital: s/v. In most of Marx’s examples, the rate of surplus value he chooses is 100%, which means that the total variable capital is split evenly into necessary and surplus labour. During a 12 hour day, this worker would perform 6 hours of necessary labour and 6 hours surplus. In the morning he works for himself, in the afternoon, for his boss. Not only is this arithmetically convenient, but it must be seen as a generally reasonable s/v ratio in the industries he observed (more specific numbers can be found in the appendix to Volume 1, “Results of the Immediate Process of Production,” in which he examines cases in which s/v ratios range from 100%-150%.
To distinguish it from the rate of surplus value, the rate of profit is the ratio of the surplus value to the total capital (variable and constant), whereas the rate of surplus value is the ratio of surplus value to variable capital. The rate of surplus value can expand even while the rate of profit falls if the amount of constant capital invested accelerates.
The rate of surplus value is grown by paying as little as possible for as much labour as possible, which has the effect of shrinking the necessary part of the day and expanding the surplus part. All other things (conditions of production) being absolutely equal, a capitalist can grow his surplus value by adding more workers, and correspondingly expanding their means of production to absorb the extra labour: more is more, bigger is better. But all other things aren’t equal, and they are constantly looking for ways to pay less for more work, which is the cause of their inherently antagonistic relationship with the working class.
In 2019, the Tricontinental found that the s/v ratio of the iPhone production process was 2458%. So those workers are 25 times more exploited than the ones Marx studied. Did all this extra free work come only from making the existing somatic work that is bought with wages more efficient? At first this appears reasonable, but at some nebulous point, maybe between 10x-15x, all attributable to efficiency, it begins to look like we are saying that something has been created from nothing. Marx acknowledges and even emphasises that a quantitative change can become so great that we are left in a whole new qualitative environment; a new regime takes hold wherein technology is actively augmenting human and replacing labour with its own, rather than simply assisting humans in their labour. Classical capitalism has accelerated into petrocapitalism, which can only be fought with petrocommunism.
iii) What changes if we consider fuel to be a part of variable capital?
The average price for a unit of labour plummets. It is as if wages have decreased drastically: the owner gets more work for less money. Marx examined the scenario in which wages fall, but it did not mark a signature dynamic of the capitalism of his day. In this scenario, “there is a release of variable capital…the same quantity of labour is set in motion with less money than before, and in this way the unpaid portion of labour is increased at the cost of the paid portion.” The decrease in the cost of labour becomes an increase in surplus value. “Variable capital can also be set free if the development of productivity leads to a reduction in the number of workers required to set the same amount of constant capital in motion, with the rate of wages remaining the same” (vol. 3, pg 212).
The cost of human labour is determined by the worker’s needs of sustenance, his cost of reproducing his own labour. Similarly, the cost of oil is determined by the oil industry’s cost of reproducing itself, the cost required to replace the burned fuel with fresh fuel, to keep the flow constant. However, the amount of that cost is determined in this case by oil executives, a smaller cabal of people who are much more able to coordinate with each other than the working class is able to coordinate with itself. And so it is, that by trickery and politics, that they are sometimes able to nudge the price of oil into the upper pricing tiers where their companies not only subsist, but become fonts of wealth. And barely ever approach the cost of human labour, which almost always will be more expensive than fuel. Since the natural supply of crude is rarely if ever truly in shortage, the cartel can collectively decide the price of oil in cartel format, and there is a wide field on which they play.
Therefore, the decrease in the average cost of labour accelerates the capitalist’s accumulation at the cost of the workers’ livelihoods. This reflects the reality of the capitalist world in which we live. As industrialization proceeds, the part of capital that goes to workers has gotten smaller and smaller, while the constant capital portion has gotten larger. Marx, as the process of accumulation and centralization of capital proceeds, the relative amount of variable capital decreases relative to the amount of constant capital: that is, the bigger an industrial concern, the more it needs to invest in means of production.. This does, indeed, describe what has happened in the economy since Marx. My clarification of this is that this process is assisted by the accelerating dependence upon fuel. By powering the machines bought by constant capital, of course. But also by replacing expensive labour with cheap labour. The cost of fuel does come out of the variable portion of capital, but that cost is so small relative to the value of human labour that its use shrinks the payroll. This accelerates the accumulation of capital tremendously. And it holds as true within the oil industry as it does in all other industries. “The higher the productivity of labour, the greater is the pressure of the worker on the means of employment, the more precarious therefore becomes the condition for their existence, namely the sale of their own labour power for the increase of alien wealth.” (Vol. 1, 798).
Fuel accelerates the capitalists’ perpetual antagonism with their own employees and subcontractors by accelerating the process of accumulation. And it aggravates the enmity between businesses and society because society is forced to bear the true costs of catastrophic warming and ecosystem collapse. Just as the coalfields were the major battlefield of the organizers and revolutionaries of the 19th century, so today, control of the energy industry ought to be a key site of contestation by Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries. Of course, if we ever attain that power over the energy sector, we would radically shrink the industry to a trickle of what it is today, to allow economic energy (capital) be directed toward building a decentralized grid of opportunistic energy (wind and solar) over a base load provided by nuclear thorium reactors.
E) ii. Fuel is Only Sometimes Socially Necessary Labor
It is one thing to argue that fuel does labour; it is quite another to argue that it is socially necessary labour, or that it counts as socially necessary labor in any one circumstance. To review, for Marx, a commodity’s value represents the amount of socially necessary labor that it embodies. If one producer uses a less efficient process than the social standard at any one time, they do not get paid for the extra labor required by an inefficient process. When a commodity is sold at its market value (i.e., when market forces like supply and demand are in equilibrium), “the total quantity of social labour which is applied to produce the overall amount of this kind of commodity must correspond to the quantity of the social need for it, i.e., the social need with the money to back it up.” Volume 3, 294.
Social labour is determinative of value because it is dear to us. A human only has so many hours of work to give in their lives, and since we are human, we understand that. Fuel, by contrast, is cheap by any economic measure, and so it doesn’t contribute anything at all to the social value of a commodity except by way of expanding the size of the society as a whole, which it does, furiously, thereby increasing the social need for any one type of useful commodity.
Its’ cheapness is how fuel replaces socially necessary labor with socially unnecessary labor, which hurts the working class. We have known this back to the luddites; machines compete with workers for their means of subsistence, and they do it by changing the composition of capital so that constant or fixed capital is a greater and greater proportion of the whole. Automation takes our jobs because it’s cheaper to do something by machine than by hand.
Except. We know now — we’ve known for a long time — that fuel is not actually socially cheap. Its cheapness is only an appearance, both in the sense that it looks cheap and that it appears in the earth in massive quantities, allowing it to appear or arrive upon the economy cheaply. This appearance masks a deeper truth: fuel is socially costly, because each tank of gas burned contributes quantitatively to our collective doom, which, as of now, we are living through rather than merely predicting. It materially threatens millions of the processes which comprise social reproduction. In the language of political economy (here used as derisively as Marx did), capitalism’s biggest failure has been to “internalize its externalities.” That is to say, it does not properly value fuel — or any other environmentally harmful material — on the market, leading to the liberals’ argument that if only they could carbon-tax the cost of externalities into the energy sector, the contradiction would be resolved. If we could only make it more expensive, goes the thinking. However, in the real world, this would only accelerate the widening gulf of inequality between the owners and the rest of us: the rich would be able to burn fuel with abandon while poor people would have to cook over wood fires, trash fires, plastic fires.
It would require instead much more collective intervention into the economy, such as the seizure of the energy sector as a whole. The goal is not simply to make fuel cost more, but to make it more socially precious, to conserve the amount of fuel we use while still guaranteeing power to hospitals and refugee camps, which are the critical infrastructure of the 21st century. To limit its use even though there is no and likely will never be a shortage of the natural wealth that buried fuels represent.
So what I’m saying is that fuel, for the most part, is not counted to be socially necessary labour, but it should be. This should be a key objective of revolutionary movements. When we attain power (by any means necessary), we will treat fuel as a source of necessary labor, which if used improperly can compete against and devalue human labor, and which inherently can cause a great deal of harm to people and their surroundings. This would reflect the true nature of fuel, a nature that capitalism obscures and alienates. A parallel argument could then be developed for plastics and all the other petrochemicals.
Again it must be said that theory can only speak in general terms, and I must leave the specifics of that project to the revolutionaries who will make policy based on their own context — a context which will, from here on out, always include catastrophic climate regimes.
In that context, they will not be able to eliminate use of fossil fuels. There will be a growing need for emergency power. Hospitals need to stay on, and backup generators will become primary infrastructure as the grid fails. We’re going to have to build structures out of concrete in order to protect our cities. Nonetheless, the collective desire to mitigate carbon emissions will become stronger and stronger in our hearts, and in our political will — we will become disabled by the cognitive dissonance of continued reliance on fossil fuels for everything — and we will seek to finally limit our emissions by any means necessary. Only a government led by a communist party can realize that desire.
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In political economy, there has been no conceptual division between the socially necessary use of fuel and the unnecessary or wasteful use of fuel, even while Twitter users track Elon’s private jet.
This has allowed our class enemies to point to the social usefulness of fuel to justify their whole project of energy extraction and sale. Take for example Alex Epstein, who has a substack and also a book, “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels.” His whole argument is, “look at all the benefits we get from fossil fuels. Those outweigh the costs which I think are only small.” These “benefits” are the usefulness of fuel to society. Epstein cannot conceive of a world where both refugee camps and hospitals have access to reliable electric power, and yet at the same time, he doesn’t get to fly a private jet if he wants to, much less buy the profits of an oil company on the stock market. The logic of capitalism does not allow a poor person to have even a small quantity of something that a capitalist can’t have in bloated quantities.
They — as well as their liberal opponents — assume that access to fossil energy is universal or it is completely shut off and cannot imagine a regime for regulating access to fossil energy for everyone’s benefit. Meanwhile, they can imagine baroque and ornate structures to regulate speech and cultural production to stop people from criticizing the Zionist regime.
Under a petrosocialist regime, fuel would become the first major post-commodity: a thing that was once a commodity and is now recognized to be something more special and valuable than that. A thing that is precious but not expensive, and therefore that needs to be safeguarded by a public apparatus. Even if that apparatus requires certain “authoritarian” qualities, it will fundamentally be led by a more-democratic-democracy of the proletariat. Actual majority rule. It will allow us to use small amounts of fossil fuels where the need is greatest, while we simultaneously build thousands of un-meltdownable, zero waste thorium reactors.
Petromarxism was originally published in The Spouter Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
A liberated Palestine means a liberated Middle East. A liberated Middle East means capitalism in the core really faces a crisis, and they will not let that happen. It’s funny, like I’m always asked to talk about ecology, when really what I want to talk about is capitalist imperialism, and the two are just are a piece of the same problem, right? The ecological crisis is ultimately playing out along colonial lines, right? We know that it is the countries of the imperial core that are overwhelmingly responsible, and specifically their ruling classes, who control the means of production and energy systems and investment, et cetera, et cetera, are overwhelmingly responsible for the excess emissions that are driving climate breakdown, right? We know that’s a fact. We also know it’s a fact that the Global South suffers the overwhelming majority of the impacts of climate breakdown, right?
The people who have contributed literally nothing to the crisis whatsoever, not contributed a small amount, contributed nothing, right? And it’s not just, of course, climate breakdown that we face. There’s also other dimensions of the ecological crisis, and here too, we see the same thing playing out. When it comes to excess material use in the world economy, overwhelmingly, it’s due to excess material use and accumulation in the imperial core. Half of the material that’s used in the core is net appropriated from the periphery, from the territories of the Global South, right? Which causes severe damage. You don’t see this damage in Sussex or in Finland. You see it in the Congo, you see it in Indonesia, right? You see it in Bolivia, in the frontiers of extraction. The core benefits and everyone else suffers.
The ecological crisis represents processes of colonization and appropriation, and also is a disaster that’s playing out along colonial lines. I think that’s really important to spell out. And if we’re not attentive to those colonial dimensions, I really think we’re fundamentally missing the point. We’re fundamentally missing the point. The other thing I want to point out here is that we were in this incredible paradox, right, where the world economy, we know, is just massively productive, like our productive capacities are incredible. Think of the scale of the labor that humanity has at its disposal, the resources, the technology, the factories, the energy, the materials. Incredible amounts of production to the point of breaking past ecological limits, and yet, the vast majority of the human population lives in conditions of massive deprivation. 80% of the population can’t meet basic needs. So what explains this incredible paradox?
It’s ultimately our system of production, the social and ecological crisis that we face, which appears unresolvable, is ultimately a symptom of our system of production, capitalism, where our productive capacities, our incredible productive capacities, are organized overwhelmingly around what is most profitable to capital and what can most facilitate accumulation in the core, rather than what is obviously necessary to meet human needs and achieve our ecological objectives. And so we’re in this wild place where it’s like, oh, solving poverty is just going to take generations, right? If we’re lucky, we’ll get people above $1.90 a day by the end of the century, right? The climate crisis, who can figure out how to solve this? It seems intractable. None of this is true. It’s lies. These are problems that can be very easily solved and very quickly.
The problem is that we don’t have control over our own productive capacities, because we don’t have an economic democracy, right? Some of us live in political democracies, where, from time to time, we get to elect government officials, but when it comes to the economic system, not even the pretense of democracy is allowed to exist, and that is ultimately the contradiction we face, I think, right? This is a crisis that, at its root, is about capitalism, and can only be resolved by overcoming that fact. And the antidote to capitalism is economic democracy, that we should have collective democratic control over what we are producing, what the goals of our production are, who benefits from our production, and so on. And when we do, we can solve these problems quickly, right? We know exactly what to do.
The problem is we don’t have the power. And so I think that, in the face of this crisis, we have to have clarity about what has to be achieved, and we have to start building the movements that are capable of achieving that. For the South, there’s another element I think we have to pay attention to, which is that they need economic sovereignty, right? They need economic liberation at a national level first. The Global North is overwhelmingly responsible for the crisis, but the Global South, we know, also needs to engage in ecological planning, energy transition, et cetera, et cetera. How does anyone expect them to do that when they do not have sovereign control over their own resources, their own labor, their own lands, their own energy, right? Under the thumb of structural adjustment programs that prevent them from using progressive industrial policy, prevent them from using progressive fiscal policy, prevent them from using progressive monetary policy, basic tools that we know can allow them to achieve developments and ecological transition, they are effectively denied from using.
What is the solution to that for the South is struggles for economic liberation right? Now, I think we have to be cognizant of the facts that a struggle for economic liberation in the South is fundamentally antithetical to the capitalist world economy, because accumulation in the core depends utterly on the cheapening of labor and resources in the Global South. It depends utterly on that and has for the past 500 years. And so any attempt by liberation struggles in the periphery to achieve economic independence, to use their own resources for their own development, for their own ecological transition, for their own human needs, is destabilizing for capital in the core, and capital reacts with the most extraordinary violent backlashes. We see it happening all the time. Now, it is Palestine before it was Libya, before it was Iraq, before it was Chile, before it was Indonesia, before it was the Congo. It will never stop. It’s over and over again.
And I think the situation in Palestine right now, we have to understand, is not primarily a moral one. That’s how we think of it. That is not how capital thinks of it. For them, it is a matter of suppressing and crushing liberation movements, because a liberated Palestine means a liberated Middle East. A liberated Middle East means capitalism in the core really faces a crisis, and they will not let that happen, and they’re unleashing the full violence of their extraordinary power to ensure it doesn’t. And so I think that’s really what we face, right? It’s the world system, dimension of the violence that we’re seeing, and we have to be cognizant of that, and our struggles and our resistance have to be in proportion.
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Jason Hickel
Jason Hickel is ICREA Professor at the Institute for Environmental Science & Technology (ICTA-UAB) at the University of Barcelona, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He is Visiting Professor at the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics, Chair Professor of Global Justice and the Environment at the University of Oslo, and Associate Editor for the journal World Development. He serves on the Climate and Macroeconomics Roundtable of the US National Academy of Sciences, the advisory board of the Green New Deal for Europe, the RodneyCommission on Reparations and Redistributive Justice, and the Lancet Commission on Sustainable Health.
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A friend in England, a dweller in bucolic Somerset along with the Black Angus herds and the sheep, forwards a piece by a Times of London columnist that merits careful consideration. Matthew Syed, who has distinguished himself as a ping–pong champion, titles his commentary, “Israel–Hezbollah conflict hinges on a crude question: Who do you want to win?” Syed, who has also done well writing high-end self-help books (You Are Awesome, 2018; Dare to Be You, 2020) has posed a crude question. He is right about this, if little else. And because it is crude, an essentially unserious question, we must take it seriously.
As I read Syed’s column it seemed to me symptomatic of logical deficiencies—deficiencies encouraged by those shaping and executing the West’s collective foreign policies—such that most of us have very little grasp of the world in which we live. Ours is a world, so we are urged to think, divided eternally into two. There are good guys and bad, the benevolent and the malevolent—democrats and autocrats in the Biden regime’s terms. And so there must be winners and losers, just as Matthew Syed supposes.
It is hopeless, or nearly. Such a view of our world misses the point most of humanity, 24 years in, wishes to make about the 21st century. Two points, actually. One, the 20th century, a century of binary enmities, is indeed over. We must finally leave it behind. Two, the thought of winners and losers is beyond retrograde. In our time we will all win or we will all lose. Matthew Syed is wholly representative of those who simply cannot grasp these realities. Israel must win, Hezbollah must lose. And as Israel’s long-running hostility toward Iran drifts toward the war the Zionist state has long sought, the Israelis must win, the Iranians lose.
To dispense quickly with a minor matter of logic, the intensifying conflict between terrorist Israel and Hezbollah, the Lebanese political party and armed resistance movement, does not hinge in the slightest on which side you or I want to emerge the victor. The outcome depends on the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Israeli and Lebanese forces, the wisdom or otherwise of their political leaders, the sense or otherwise of their military and diplomatic strategies, and, not least, the extent to which either side has the support of other powers. To suggest the great “you” Matthew Syed addresses will determine how Israel’s regional confrontations will turn out is the very height of narcissism. And the narcissism prevalent in the West is one of the problems Syed’s commentary requires us to confront.
Syed is unambivalently a clash-of-civilizations man. And like others of this persuasion, he does not think we ought to look at matters too closely. He proposes we consider Israel’s barbarities—in Lebanon, Gaza, the Occupied Territories, who knows where next—as another case of the West against the rest. Russia will invade Europe when it finishes in Ukraine. China is “an ancient and impressive civilization now run by a totalitarian clique.” Hezbollah is a terrorist organization. This is all we need to know as we address the question Syed’s headline poses, who do we want to win?
He writes:
“So perhaps you’ll forgive me for saying something that doesn’t get into the details of any single dispute, doesn’t opine on the precise logic of Israel’s killing of Hassan Nasrallah or its broader response to the October 7 attacks, doesn’t get into the weeds of Western policy over Ukraine; instead, it makes a simpler but, I hope, not simplistic point. In the conflagration that is coming, I back Israel 100 per cent, the West 100 per cent, civilization 100 per cent, progress 100 per cent.
“There are hinge moments in history,” Syed writes to round off his point, “where simplicity is an asset.”
What a perfectly ridiculous thought in our current circumstances. Maybe the self-help books are a better read.
I am not much interested in Matthew Syed, and it is not my intent to single him out in any kind of ad hominem fashion. It is his argument, altogether his way of looking at the world in 2024, that concerns me. Syed reflects a pernicious perspective that seems nearly ubiquitous in the Western post-democracies, especially but not only in the Anglosphere. We are everywhere encouraged to eschew the complexity that always, no exceptions, informs human affairs. We cannot, in consequence, see others as they are—precisely the condition preferred by those in power. And so we resort to gross, often juvenile simplifications, just as we are meant to do. We are left backing Israel 100%, the West 100%, and so on.
■
Matthew Syed’s question, “Who do you want to win?’ has been posed more or less daily since Hamas’s assault in southern Israel last Oct. 7 and the attack the Israel Defense Forces began against the Palestinians of Gaza the next day. If you oppose the IDF’s campaign of genocide and ethnic-cleansing, you are supporting Hamas, you stand with terrorists: This is the standard charge among Israel’s apologists. We are all familiar with it. We get the same now that the IDF has assassinated Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s longtime leader, and escalates its attacks in Lebanon. And we will be in for it yet again as Israel’s animosity toward Iran tips over into open conflict.
“I don’t think anyone is mourning the loss of Hassan Nasrallah,” John Kirby, the Biden regime’s national-security spokesman, told Jake Tapper on CNN last weekend. “Having decimated the command structure of Hezbollah is good for the region, good for the world.” Lots of people accept this as so. Matthew Syed buys into Kirby’s perspective “100%.”
What is Kirby selling here? What is it Syed encourages us to accept as… as the simple truth? Let us enter upon a few of those complexities both of these people forbid us.
Straight off the top, the project here is to make Israeli aggression appear normal and to transform genocide, ethnic-cleansing, assassinations, and terrorist operations — “Israel has a right to defend itself” — from crimes against humanity into acceptable conduct. It defies all logic, of course, to depict the bombing of apartment buildings and the sniper-murders of children, innocent men and women, aid workers, journalists, and others as self-defense, but this is as it should be: We are meant to leave logic behind as we reduce our understanding of these events to simplicities that border on the idiotic. Matthew Syed puts Israel’s barbarities in the same sentence as “civilization” and “progress.” What is more logical? Or less?
John Kirby doesn’t think anyone is mourning the loss of Hassan Nasrallah. This is a very striking assertion. Many, many thousands of people in Lebanon, Iran, the West Bank, and as far away as Pakistan and India have publicly mourned Nasrallah’s death since last Friday. But these people must not count as “anyone.” They are “no one.” Can you think of a clearer assumption, altogether unconscious, of the West’s superiority over those of the non–West — of those who count over those who do not? I can’t. As striking as this primitive thought is the extent, so far as I can tell complete, to which this kind of talk goes unnoted. This is what I mean by the narcissism abroad in the West.
Now you know why the non–West urges as we speak that it is time for humanity to leave the 20th century behind. Or the past 500 years, better put.
The murder of Nasrallah was good for the region and the world, was it? This is brutishly insensitive, the very inverse of insightful. But the American government calls Hezbollah a terrorist organization and, as John Kirby asserted plainly and very simply, its leader was a terrorist, and so the judgment holds. Atop this, there is the imagery. Nasrallah had a full beard and wore the traditional turban of Shi`ite officials. The photographs of the reaction in various West Asian cities as featured in Western newspapers: Most showed distressed people in disorderly gatherings. These people live beyond the boundaries of “civilization,” we are meant to conclude. “Progress” left them behind.
Tell me, I would love to know: How much does anyone who accepts these cartoon renderings of Hassan Nasrallah and those who mourn his passing actually know about the man the Israelis just murdered and what he meant?
Nasrallah assumed leadership of Hezbollah in 1992, a decade after its founding. He never dropped his opposition to Israel as a threat to Lebanon, but he was in his political milieu unquestionably a measured, moderating force. As Alastair Crooke pointed out Monday on Andrew Napolitano’s Judging Freedom podcast, Nasrallah had long earlier emerged, for millions of people well beyond Lebanon, as “a symbol of national liberation, of anticolonialism, of justice.”
In November 2009 Nasrallah advanced a new party manifesto that was perfectly forthright as to dangers of American hegemony and the hostility of the Zionist state, while also moving the organization in a decidedly pluralistic direction. “People evolve. The whole world changed over the past 24 years. Lebanon changed. The world order changed,” Nasrallah said as he read out the new document during a national broadcast. Hezbollah’s objection to the Israelis, he said, “is not that they are Jews, but that they are occupiers who are raping our land and holy places.”
A lot of Islamophobia — again, unconscious Islamophobia, undeclared but evident Islamophobia — lies behind Kirby’s flippant dismissal of Nasrallah and Matthew Syed’s “100 per cent” for Israel. As they exemplify, the complexities of politics and culture in the Islamic world are almost entirely invisible in the West, so thoroughly are these nations fenced off from view. The nuanced relationships between church and state, the mosque as an institution—religious, social, political, economic—around which much of life is arranged: There is no room for any of this in the wholesale simplifications people such as Kirby and Syed urge upon us.
Who do I want to win? I decline the question because it is unserious, nothing more than a propagandist’s parlor game. I am well prepared to say who I want to lose, and my reply to this ought to be obvious.
“We can’t afford to doubt the West’s moral legitimacy,” Matthew Syed writes in his comment for The Times. “It is the steel we need to face down enemies of liberty.” What is he saying here? The West’s moral legitimacy? Wow. The West dares not question itself or this legitimacy? Why is this some kind of imperative, and why now? Is this an expression of confidence or of weakness?
These are serious questions. And as I often find, in the questions lie the answers.
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Patrick Lawrence
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a media critic, essayist, author and lecturer. His new book, Journalists and Their Shadows, is out now from Clarity Press. His website is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site.
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