Econ paper/ 6 pages/ 24 hrs

Carbon Democracy

Timothy Mitchell

Version: April 16, 2008

Under review at Economy and Society

Abstract States that depend upon oil revenues appear to be less democratic than other states. Yet oil presents a much larger problem for democracy: faced with the threats of oil depletion and catastrophic climate change, the democratic machineries that emerged to govern the age of carbon energy seem to be unable to address the processes that may end it. This paper explores these multiple dimensions of carbon democracy, by examining the intersecting histories of coal, oil, and democracy in the twentieth century. Following closely the methods by which fossil fuels were produced, distributed, and converted into other forms of socio-technical organization, financial circulation, and political power, the paper traces ways in which the concentration and control of energy flows could open up democratic possibilities or close them down; how in the postwar period connections were engineered between the flow of oil and the flows of international finance, on which democratic stability was thought to depend; how these same circulations made possible the emergence of the economy and its unlimited growth as the main object of democratic politics; and how the relations among forms of energy, finance, economic knowledge, democracy, and violence were transformed in the 1967-74 oil-dollar-Middle East crises.

Fossil fuels helped create both the possibility of twentieth-century democracy and its

limits. To understand the limits, I propose to explore what made the emergence of a

certain kind of democratic politics possible, the kind I will call carbon democracy. Before

turning to the past, however, let me mention some of the contemporary limits I have in

mind.

In the wake of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, one of those limits has been widely

discussed. A distinctive feature of the Middle East, many have said, is the region’s lack

of democracy. In several of the scholarly accounts, the lack has something to do with

oil. Countries that depend upon petroleum resources for a large part of their earnings

2

from exports tend to be less democratic.1 However, most of those who write about the

question of the “rentier state” or the “oil curse,” as the problem is known, have little to

say about the nature of oil and how it is produced, distributed and used.2 They merely

discuss the oil rents, the income that accrues after the petroleum is converted into

government revenue.3 So the reasons proposed for the anti-democratic properties of

oil—it gives government the resources to relieve social pressures, buy political support,

or repress dissent—have nothing to do with the ways oil is extracted, processed,

shipped, and consumed, the forms of agency and control these processes involve, or

the powers of oil as a concentrated source of energy.

Ignoring the properties of oil itself reflects an underlying conception of

democracy. This is the conception shared by the American democracy expert who

addressed a local council in southern Iraq: “Welcome to your new democracy,” he said.

1 Michael L. Ross, “Does Oil Hinder Democracy?” World Politics 53 (April 2001), 325–61, demonstrates a negative correlation between oil exports as a percentage of GDP and degree of democracy, as estimated in the Polity data set compiled by Keith Jaggers and Ted Robert Gurr. (The data are derived from an evaluation of the institutional procedures by which the candidate for chief executive is selected, elected, and held accountable. [Keith Jaggers and Ted Robert Gurr, “Tracking Democracy's Third Wave with the Polity III Data,” Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 32, Issue 4, (1995): 469-82.] The narrowness of this conception of democracy, the unreliability of its measurement, and the assumption that diverse institutional arrangements can be compared and ranked as differing degrees of a universal principle of democracy are among the many problems presented by the data.) Ross in unable to establish reasons for the statistical relationship between oil exports and Polity data ranking. 2 The problem of the rentier state was first formulated in Hussein Mahdavy, “The Patterns and Problems of Economic Development in Rentier States: The Case of Iran,” in M. A. Cook, ed., Studies in Economic History of the Middle East (London: Oxford University Press, 1970); subsequent contributions on the Middle East include Hazem Beblawi and Giacomo Luciani, eds., The Rentier State (New York: Croom Helm, 1987), Ghassan Salame, ed., Democracy Without Democrats: The Renewal of Politics in the Muslim World (London: I.B. Tauris, 1994), and Isam al-Khafaji, Tormented Births: Passages to Modernity in Europe and the Middle East (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004), 309-325. For other regions, see Terry Lynn Karl, The Paradox of Plenty: Oil Booms and Petro-States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Douglas A. Yates, The Rentier State in Africa: Oil Rent Dependency and Neocolonialism in the Republic of Gabon (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1996); Leonard Wantchekon, “Why do Resource Dependent Countries Have Authoritarian Governments?” Journal of African Finance and Economic Development, 2002; Andrew Rosser, "Escaping the Resource Curse: The Case of Indonesia," Journal of Contemporary Asia, 37/1 (2007). Among economists, the problem of natural resources is posed in terms of obstacles to economic growth rather than democracy: Jeffrey D. Sachs and Andrew M. Warner, “Natural Resource Abundance and Economic Growth,” Development Discussion Paper no. 517a (Cambridge: Harvard Institute for International Development, 1995). 3 An important exception to this tendency to ignore the materiality of oil in discussions of the rentier state is Fernando Coronil, The Magical State: Nature, Money and Modernity in Venezuela (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), where the problem is connected to a wider erasure of nature in understanding the formation of wealth. See also Michael Watt’s discussion of “the oil complex” and the “governable spaces” it requires, in “Resource Curse? Governmentality, Oil and Power in the Niger Delta, Nigeria,” Geopolitics, 9:1 (2004), 50 – 80; and Robert Vitalis’s examination of the labor regime and image making that organized the production of oil in Saudi Arabia, in America’s Kingdom Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2006).

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“I have met you before. I have met you in Cambodia. I have met you in Russia. I have

met you in Nigeria.” At which point, we are told, two members of the council walked

out.4 It is to see democracy as fundamentally the same everywhere, defined by

universal principles that are to be reproduced in every successful instance of

democratization, as though democracy occurs only as a carbon copy of itself. If it fails,

as it seems to in oil states, the reason must be that some universal element is missing

or malfunctioning.

Failing to follow the oil itself, accounts of the oil curse diagnose it as a malady

located within only one set of nodes of the networks through which oil flows and is

converted into energy, profits, and political power—in the decision-making organs of

individual producer states. Its etiology involves isolating the symptoms found in

producer states that are not found in non-oil states. But what if democracies have not

been carbon copies, but carbon based? Are they tied in specific ways to the history of

carbon fuels? Can we follow the carbon itself, the oil, so as to connect the problem

afflicting oil producing states to other limits of carbon democracy?

The leading industrialized countries are also oil states. Without the energy they

derive from oil their current forms of political and economic life would not exist. Their

citizens have developed ways of eating, traveling, housing themselves, and consuming

other goods and services that require very large amounts of energy from oil and other

fossil fuels. These ways of life are not sustainable, and they now face the twin crises

that will end them: although calculating reserves of fossil fuels is a political process

involving rival calculative techniques, there is substantial evidence that those reserves

are running out;5 and in the process of using them up we have taken carbon that was

4 Rory Stewart, Occupational Hazards: My Time Governing in Iraq (London: Picador, 2006), p.280. 5 M. King Hubbert, “Nuclear Energy and the Fossil Fuels,” Exploration and Production Research Division, Shell Development Co., Publication no. 95, June 1956; Kjell Aleklett and Colin J. Campbell, “The Peak and Decline of World Oil and Gas Production,” Minerals and Energy, vol. 18, no 1 (2003): 5-20; Kenneth S. Deffeyes, Beyond Oil:

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previously stored underground and placed it in the atmosphere, where it is causing

increases in global temperatures that may lead to catastrophic climate change.6 A

larger limit that oil represents for democracy is that the political machinery that emerg

to govern the age of fossil fuels may be incapable of addressing the events that will end

ed

it.

ed

f

To follow the carbon does not mean substituting a materialist account for the

idealist schemes of the democracy experts, or tracing political outcomes back to the

forms of energy that determine them—as though the powers of carbon were transmitt

unchanged from the oil well or coal face to the hands of those who control the state.

The carbon itself must be transformed, beginning with the work done by those who

bring it out of the ground. The transformations involve establishing connections and

building alliances—connections and alliances that do not respect any divide between

material and ideal, economic and political, natural and social, human and nonhuman, or

violence and representation. The connections make it possible to translate one form o

power into another. Understanding the relations between fossil fuels and democracy

requires tracing how these connections are built, the vulnerabilities and opportunities

they create, and the narrow points of passage where control is particularly effective.7

Political possibilities were opened up or narrowed down by different ways of organizing

The View from Hubbert's Peak (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005); Fredrik Robelius, “Giant Oil Fields – The Highway to Oil: Giant Oil Fields and Their Importance for Future Oil Production,” Ph.D. Dissertation, Teknisk- naturvetenskapliga vetenskapsområdet, Department of Nuclear and Particle Physics, Uppsala University, March 2007 (Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, available at http://publications.uu.se/abstract.xsql?dbid=7625); on the history of peak oil estimates, see Michael Aaron Dennis, “Drilling for Dollars: The Making of US Petroleum Reserve Estimates, 1921-25,” Social Studies of Science, Vol. 15, No. 2, (May, 1985), pp. 241-265, and Gary Bowden, “The Social Construction of Validity in Estimates of US Crude Oil Reserves,” Social Studies of Science, Vol. 15, No. 2, (1985): 207-240. 6 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Fourth Assessment Report (2007), available at http://www.ipcc.ch. Research by James Hansen and his colleagues on paleoclimate data suggests that feedback loops in the melting of ice can cause a rapid acceleration in the loss of ice cover, forcing much more extreme climate change with potentially cataclysmic consequences. These findings make even the dire warnings from the IPCC look absurdly optimistic. James Hansen, Makiko Sato, Pushker Kharecha, Gary Russell, David W. Lea, and Mark Siddall, “Climate Change and Trace Gases,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, vol. 365, (2007): 1925– 1954. 7 On the sociology of translation, and “obligatory passage points” see Callon (1986). See also Mitchell, Rule of Experts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), chapter 1.

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the flow and concentration of energy, and these possibilities were enhanced or limited

by arrangements of people, finance, expertise, and vi

olence that were assembled in

relationship to the distribution and control of energy.

uried Sunshine

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to 350 million years ago when the decay of peat bog forests and of marine organisms in

B

Like mass democracy, fossil fuels are a relatively recent phenomenon. The histories o

the two kinds of forces have been connected, in several ways. This paper traces fou

sets of connections. The first is that fossil fuel allowed the reorganization of energy

systems that made possible, in conjunction with other changes, the novel form

ive life out of which late-nineteenth century mass politics developed.

Until two hundred years ago, the energy needed to sustain human existence

came almost entirely from renewable sources, which obtain their force from the sun.

Solar energy was converted into grain and other crops to provide fuel for humans, into

grasslands to raise animals for labor and further human fuel, into woodlands to pro

d, and into wind and water power to drive transportation and machinery.8

For most of the world, the capture of solar radiation in replenishable forms

continued to be the main source of energy until perhaps the mid-twentieth century.9

From around 1800, however, these renewable sources were steadily replaced with

highly concentrated stores of buried solar energy, the deposits of carbon laid down 150

8 Rolf Peter Sieferle, The Subterranean Forest: Energy Systems and the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, UK: The White Horse Press, 2001). 9 Bruce Podobnik, Global Energy Shifts: Fostering Sustainability in a Turbulent Age (2006), p.5, calculates that coal replaced wood and other biomass materials as the main source of the world’s commercial energy as early as the 1880s. But until well into the twentieth century the bulk of this fossil energy was consumed by just a handful of countries.

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particular oxygen-deficient environments converted biomass into the relatively rare but

extraordinarily potent deposits of coal and oil.10

The earth’s stock of this “capital bequeathed to mankind by other living beings,”

as Sartre once described it,11 will be exhausted in a remarkably short period—most of it

in the one hundred years between 1950 and 2050.12 To give an idea of the

concentration of energy we will be exhausting, compared to the plant-based and other

forms of captured solar energy that preceded the hydrocarbon age: a single litre of

petrol used today needed about twenty-five metric tons of ancient marine life as

precursor material; and organic matter the equivalent of the earth’s entire production of

plant and animal life for four hundred years was required to produce the fossil fuels we

burn in a single year.13

Compared to these concentrated hydrocarbon stores, solar radiation is a weak

form of energy. However, it is very widely distributed. Historically its use encouraged

relatively dispersed forms of human settlement – along rivers, close to pastureland, and

within reach of large reserves of land set aside as woods to provide fuel. The switch to

coal over the last two centuries enabled the concentration of populations in cities, in part

because it freed urban populations from the need for adjacent pastures and woods. In

10 The use of coal (as well as peat, another fossil fuel) was already known in antiquity. But its use was generally restricted to the localities where it was found, and to particular trades that required large quantities of process heat, such as limestone burning and metal smithing. Shortages of wood, especially in Britain, led to a gradual rise in the use of coal as a general substitute for wood from the sixteenth century. Sieferle, Subterranean Forest, 78-89. 11 Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1, Theory of Practical Ensembles (London: Verso 1977), p. 154. 12 On depletion of oil reserves see Aleklett and Campbell, “Peak and Decline” and Kenneth S. Deffeyes, Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert's Peak. Until recently it was assumed that coal reserves would long outlast oil, with plentiful supplies for hundreds of years. Recent studies suggest that estimates of coal reserves are even less reliable than those for oil, that production in the U.S, the country with the largest reserves, has already peaked and begun to decline, and that global production may peak as early as 2025. Werner Zittel and Jörg Schindler, “Coal: Resources and Future Production” EWG Paper no. 1/01, July 10, 2007, available at http://www.energywatchgroup.org/files/Coalreport.pdf. See also debates on the construction of reserve estimates: Gary Bowden, “The Social Construction of Validity in Estimates of US Crude Oil Reserves,” Social Studies of Science (1985); and Iain Boal’s warnings about risks of Malthusianism in discussions of oil depletion, in Iain Boal and David Martinez, “Feast and Famine: A Conversation with Iain Boal on Scarcity and Catastrophe,” January 3, 2006, available at http://www.word-power.co.uk/platform/Feast-and-Famine-A-Conversation. 13 Jeffrey S. Dukes, “Burning Buried Sunshine: Human Consumption of Ancient Solar Energy,” Climatic Change, vol. 61, nos 1-2 (Nov 2003): 33-41 (figures from 1997); Helmut Haberl, “The Global Socioeconomic Energetic Metabolism as a Sustainability Problem,” Energy, vol. 31, no. 1 (January 2006): 87-99.

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Great Britain, substitution of wood by coal created a quantity of energy that would have

required forests many times the size of existing wooded areas if energy had still

depended on solar radiation. By the 1820s, coal “freed”, as it were, an area of land

equivalent to the total surface area of the country. By the 1840s, coal was providing

energy that to obtain from timber would have required forests covering twice the

country’s area, double that amount by the 1860s, and double again by the 1890s.14

Thanks to coal, Great Britain, the United States, Germany and other coal producing

regions could be catapulted into a new “energetic metabolism,” based on cities and

large scale manufacturing.15

We associate industrialization with the growth of cities, but it was equally an

agrarian phenomenon. It required access to extensive new crop-producing territories,

both to supply the increased food supplies on which the growth of cities and

manufacturing depended and to produce the raw materials for industry, especially

cotton. By freeing land previously reserved as woodland for the supply of fuel, fossil

energy contributed to this agrarian transformation. As Pomeranz argues, the switch to

coal in northwest Europe interacted with another land-releasing factor: the acquisition of

colonial territories, which could be converted into plantations for the production of

additional food and of cotton and other industrial crops.16 Europe now controlled surplus

land that could be used to produce agricultural goods in quantities that, together with

novel ways of governing labor—slavery, share cropping, and debt bondage--allowed the

development of coal-based mass production, centered in cities.

14 Sieferle, Subterranean Forrest; Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 15 Haberl, “Energetic metabolism.” Sidney Pollard, Peaceful Conquest: The Industrialization of Europe, 1760-1970 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), documents the link between coal producing regions (rather than states) and industrial development in Europe. 16 Pomeranz, The Great Divergence.

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This points to the first set of connections between fossil fuels and democracy.

Limited forms of representative government had developed in parts of Europe and its

settler colonies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. From the 1870s, however,

the emergence of mass political movements and organized political parties shaped the

period that Hobsbawm calls both “the age of democratization” and “the age of

empire.”17 The mobilization of new political forces depended upon the concentration of

population in cities and in manufacturing, made possible in part by the control of

colonized territories and enslaved or coerced labor forces, but equally associated with

the forms of mass collective life made possible by organizing the flow of unp

concentrations of non-renewable stores of carbon.

recedented

Controlling Carbon Channels

Fossil fuels are connected with the mass democracy of the late nineteenth and early

twentieth century in a second way. Large stores of high-quality coal were discovered

and developed in relatively few sites—the central and northern England, South Wales,

the Ruhr Valley, Upper Silesia, Appalachia, and the Powder River Basin of Montana

and Wyoming.18 Most of the world’s industrial regions lay above or adjacent to supplies

of coal.19 However, coal was so concentrated in carbon content that it became cost

effective to transport energy overland or on waterways across greater distances than

timber or other renewable fuel supplies. In Britain, the first canal acts were passed to

17 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875-1914 (New York: Vintage, 1989), p. 88. As Hobsbawm points out, democratization came slowly. In most countries with systems of representative rule, property qualifications and registration procedures restricted the electorate to between thirty and forty percent of adult males. Voting rights for the majority of men, and for women, were won only in the twentieth century. For the restrictions in the British case, see Neal Blewett, “The Franchise in the United Kingdom 1885-1918,” Past and Present, No. 32 (Dec. 1965), pp. 27-56. 18 Britain also developed coal resources in the colonies—Natal and the Transvaal, parts of Queensland and New South Wales, and West Bengal. Coal production was also developed in the Donets Basin in Russia, and in China. 19 Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Belknap Press, 1998), p. 45.

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dig canals for the movement of coal.20 The development of steam transport, whose

original function was to serve coal mining and which in turn was fuelled by coal,

facilitated this movement. Large urban and industrial populations could now accumulate

at sites that were no longer adjacent to sources of energy. By the end of the nineteenth

century, industrialized regions had built networks that moved concentrated carbon

stores from the underground coal face to the surface, to railways, to ports, to cities and

to sites of manufacturing and electrical power generation.

Great quantities of energy now flowed along very narrow channels. Large

numbers of workers had to be concentrated at the main junctions of these channels.

Their position and concentration gave them, at certain moments, a new kind of political

power. The power derived not just from the organizations they formed, the ideas they

began to share, or the political alliances they built, but from the extraordinary

concentrations of carbon energy whose flow they could now slow, disrupt, or cut off.

Coal miners played a leading role in contesting labor regimes and the powers of

employers in the labor activism and political mobilization of the 1880s onwards.

Between 1881 and 1905, coal miners in the United States went on strike at a rate about

three times the average for workers in all major industries, and double the rate of the

next highest industry, tobacco manufacturing. Coal mining strikes also lasted much

longer than strikes in other industries.21 The same pattern existed in Europe.22

20 William Stanley Jevons, The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal-Mines (London and Cambridge: Macmillan and Co., 1865), pp. 87-88. 21 The strike rate per 1000 employees for coal mining and for all industries was, respectively, 134 and 72.0 (1881- 86); 241 and 73.3 (1887-99); 215 and 66.4 (1894-1900); and 208 and 86.9 (1901-05). P.K. Edwards, Strikes in the United States, 1881-1974 (St. Martin's Press New York, 1981), p. 106 22 Coal was also associated with labor militancy beyond the main centers of the industrialized world. Quataert notes the repeated strikes among the workers of the Zonguldak coalfield on the Black Sea coast of Ottoman Anatolia, in Miners and the State in the Ottoman Empire: The Zonguldak Coalfield, 1822-1920 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006). In Egypt, a strike by the coal heavers at Port Said, the world’s largest coaling station, in April 1882 is recorded as the first collective action by indigenous workers in the country. See Joel Beinin and Zachary Lockman, Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Communism, Islam, and the Egyptian Working Class, 1882-1954 (Princeton: Princeton University press, 1987), 23, 27-31. However, without the linkages that connected coal to centers of

10

Podobnik has documented the wave of industrial action that swept across the world’s

coal mining regions in the later nineteenth century and early twentieth century, and

again after World War I.23

The militancy of the miners can be attributed in part to the fact that moving

carbon stores from the coal seam to the surface created unusually autonomous places

and methods of work. The old argument that mining communities enjoyed a special

isolation compared to other industrial workers, making their militancy “a kind of colonial

revolt against far-removed authority,” misrepresents this autonomy.24 More recent

accounts stress the diversity of mining communities and the complexity of their political

engagements with other groups, with mine owners, and with state authorities.25 As

Goodrich argued in 1925, “the miner’s freedom” was a product not of the geographical

isolation of coal mining regions from political authority but of “the very geography of the

working places inside a mine.”26 In the traditional room-and-pillar method of mining, a

pair of miners worked a section of the coal seam, leaving pillars or walls of coal in place

between their own chamber and adjacent chambers to support the roof. They usually

made their own decisions about where to cut and how much rock to leave in place to

prevent cave-ins. Before the widespread mechanization of mining, “the miner’s freedom

industrial production within the country, these actions could not paralyze local energy systems and gain the political force they enjoyed in northern Europe and the United States. 23 Bruce Podobnik, Global Energy Shifts: Fostering Sustainability in a Turbulent Age. On the central role of the left in creating democracy in Europe, see Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 24 Clark Kerr and Abraham Siegel, "The Interindustry Propensity to Strike: An International Comparison,'' in Arthur Kornhauser, Robert Dubin, and Arthur M. Ross, Industrial Conflict (New York, 1934), 189-212, at p. 192. 25 Royden Harrison, ed., Independent Collier: The Coal Miner as Archetypal Proletarian Reconsidered (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978); Roger Fagge, Power, Culture, and Conflict; John H.M. Laslett, Colliers Across the Sea: A Comparative Study of Class Formation in Scotland and the American Midwest, 1830-1924 (Champaign, Ill: University of Illinois Press, 2000); Roy A. Church, Quentin Outram, and David N. Smith, “The Militancy of British Miners, 1893-1986: Interdisciplinary Problems and Perspectives,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Summer, 1991), pp. 49-66. 26 Carter Goodrich, The Miner’s Freedom: A Study of the Working Life in a Changing Industry (Boston: Marshall Jones Co., 1925), 19.

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from supervision is at the opposite extreme from the carefully ordered and regimented

work of the modern machine-feeder.”27

The militancy that formed in these work places was typically an effort to defend

this autonomy against the threats of mechanization, or against the pressure to accept

more dangerous work practices, longer working hours, or lower rates of pay. Strikes

were effective, not because of mining’s colonial isolation, but on the contrary because of

the flows of carbon that connected chambers beneath the ground to every factory,

office, home, or means of transportation that depended on steam or electric power.

Large coal strikes could trigger wider mobilizations, as with the violent strike that

followed the Courrières colliery disaster of 1906 in northern France, which helped

provoke a general strike that paralyzed Paris.28 The most common pattern, however,

was for strikes to spread through the interconnected industries of coal mining, railways,

dock workers, and shipping.29 During World War I, U.S. and British coalfields and

railroads were placed under the direction of government administrators, and coal and

rail workers were in some cases excused conscription and integrated into the war effort.

Strikes were reduced, but the critical role of these energy networks became more

visible.30 After the war, from the West Virginia coal strikes of 1919 to the British

General Strike of 1926, one can trace the development of the “triple alliance” of mine

workers, dockers, and railway men, with the power to shut down energy nodes. The

27 Carter Goodrich, The Miner’s Freedom, 14; Podobnik, 82-85. Other discussions of relative autonomy of coal miners and its loss under mechanization include: Dix, K.: What’s a Coal Miner to Do? The Mechanization of Coal Mining (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988); see also Chris Tilly and Charles Tilly, Work Under Capitalism, 43-51. 28 In one of world's worst pit disasters, a gas explosion destroyed the Courrières mine on March 10, 1906, leaving 1100 dead. Robert G. Neville, "The Courrières Colliery Disaster, 1906,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 13, No. 1. (Jan., 1978), pp. 33-52. 29 Beverly J. Silver, Forces of Labor: Workers’ Movements and Globalization Since 1870 (Cambridge University Press, 2003), figure 3.3, p. 98, shows that strikes were concentrated in these industries rather than in manufacturing. 30 David Corbin, Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields: The Southern West Virginia Miners, 1880-1922 (University of Illinois Press, 1981). Reifer, Thomas E. (2004). “Labor, Race & Empire: Transport Workers & Transnational Empires of Trade, Production, and Finance,” in Gilbert G. Gonzalez, Raul Fernandez et al (eds.). Labor versus Empire: Race, Gender, and Migration. Routledge: London and New York: 17-36.

12

dispersed energy systems of solar radiation had never allowed groups of workers th

kind of p

is

ower.

The strikes were not always successful, but the new vulnerability experienced by

the owners of mines, railways, and docks, together with the steel mills and other large

manufacturing enterprises dependent on coal, had its effects. In 1914, the massacre of

striking coal miners in Ludlow, Colorado, caused a political crisis that threatened the

power of the Rockefeller family, which owned the mines.31 Rockefeller hired Mackenzie

King, a Harvard-trained political economist who had helped resolve more then forty

coal, railway, shipping and other strikes as Canadian Minister of Labour, to devise a

new method of managing workers.32 King’s report on the crisis, Industry and Humanity:

A Study in The Principles Underlying Industrial Reconstruction (1918), explained the

new vulnerability:

If the recent past has revealed the frightful consequences of industrial strife, do

not present developments all over the world afford indications of possibilities

infinitely worse? Syndicalism aims at the destruction by force of existing

organization, and the transfer of industrial capital from present possessors to

syndicates or revolutionary trades unions. This it seeks to accomplish by the

“general strike.” What might not happen, in America or in England, if upon a few

days’ or a few weeks’ notice, the coal mines were suddenly to shut down, and

the railways to stop running! …Here is power which, once exercised, would

paralyze the ….nation more effectively than any blockade in time of war.33

King’s report provided a blueprint for the corporate management of labor. After working

as an industrial relations consultant to Rockefeller and other firms, he returned to

31 Ron Chernow, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (New York: Random House, 1998), 571-90. 32 William Lyon Mackenzie King, Industry and Humanity: A Study in The Principles Underlying Industrial Reconstruction (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1918), p.13. 33 King, Industry and Humanity, pp. 494-5.

13

politics in Canada, where he served as prime minister for twenty-two years and became

the architect of the country’s welfare state.34 The difficult fight against the resources of a

labor movement that, for the period of a few decades, could threaten a country’s carbon

energy networks helped impel the owners of the new large industrial firms and their

political allies into accepting the forms of welfare democracy and universal suffrage that

would weaken working class mobilization.

From coal to oil

After World War II, the coal miners of Europe again appeared as the core of a militant

threat to corporatist democratic politics. As U.S. planners worked to engineer the

postwar political order in Europe, they came up with a new mechanism to defeat the

coal miners: to convert Europe’s energy system from one based on coal to one based

predominantly on oil. Scarce supplies of steel and construction equipment were shipped

from the U.S. to the Persian Gulf, to build a pipeline from eastern Saudi Arabia to the

Mediterranean, to enable a rapid increase in oil supplies to Europe. The diversion of

steel and of Marshall Plan funds for this purpose was justified in part by the need to

undermine the political power of Europe’s coal miners.35

Like coal, oil gave workers new kinds of power. Decisive industrial action was

organized at Baku in 1905 in the Russian-controlled Caucasus, in the Maracaibo strike

of 1922 in Venezuela, in the 1937 Mexican oil strike, and in the 1945-46 strike in Iran.

34 Chernow, Titan, 581-90; “William Lyon Mackenzie King,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online, available at http://www.biographi.ca/EN/ShowBio.asp?BioId=42131. 35 David Painter, “Oil and the Marshall Plan,” p. 361; James Forrestal, Diaries, Volume 9-10, Nov 1947 – Apr 1948, January 6, 1948. James V. Forrestal Papers, 1941-1949, Public Policy Papers, Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton, p. 2005. See also Diaries, Volume 7-8, 1947 Apr-1947 0ct, May 2, 1947 [get p.no]. See also Nathan Citino, “Postwar US Oil Policy;” and Fred Block, The Origins of International Economic Disorder: A Study of United States International Monetary Policy from World War II to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977).

14

These conflicts were a training ground for later confrontations. A young labor activist in

Baku, Joseph Stalin, later said that the advanced organizing skills of the Azeri oil

workers and the intensity of their conflict with the oil industrialists gave him an

experience that qualified him as “a journeyman for the revolution.”36

However, the material qualities and physical locations of oil made things different

from coal. Since it comes to the surface driven by underground pressure, either from the

water trapped beneath it or the gas above it, oil required a smaller workforce than coal

in relation to the quantity of energy produced. Workers remained on the surface, under

continuous supervision and surveillance. Since the carbon occurs in liquid form,

pumping stations and pipelines could replace railways as a means of transporting

energy from the site of production to the places where it was used or shipped abroad.

Pipelines were vulnerable, as we will see, but not as easy to incapacitate through strike

actions as were the railways that carried coal.37 Diesel oil and petrol are also lighter

than coal and vaporize more easily, and their combustion leaves little residue compared

to the burning of coal. For these reasons, as Lewis Mumford noted in 1934,

they could be stowed away easily, in odds and ends of space where coal could

not be placed or reached: being fed by gravity or pressure the engine had no

need for a stoker. The effect of introducing liquid fuel and of mechanical stokers

for coal, in electric steam plants, and on steamships, was to emancipate a race

of galley slaves, the stokers.38

36 Stalin’s words, from a 1926 speech to railway workers, are cited in Ronald Grigor Suny, “A Journeyman for the Revolution: Stalin and the Labour Movement in Baku, June 1907-May 1908,” Soviet Studies, Vol. 23, No. 3. (Jan., 1972), pp. 373-394, at p. 373. 37 See Andrew Barry, Michael Watts, on some of the more recent politics of pipelines. 38 Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt Brace and company, 1934), p. 235

15

The relative lightness and fluidity of oil made it feasible to ship it in large quantities

across oceans. Historically, very little coal crossed oceans.39 In 1912, Britain exported

one-third of its coal and was responsible for two-thirds of the world’s seaborne exported

coal. But almost ninety percent of its exports went to the adjacent regions of Europe and

the Mediterranean.40 Over the course of the twentieth century, the proportion of coal

exported internationally stabilized at about 15 percent. By contrast, from the 1920s

onwards about sixty to eighty percent of oil was exported.41 So much oil was moved

across oceans that by 1970, sixty per cent of all seaborne cargo consisted of oil.42

Compared to carrying coal by rail, moving oil by sea eliminated the labor of coal

heavers and stokers, and thus the power of organized workers to withdraw their labor

from a critical point in the energy system. Transoceanic shipping operated beyond the

territorial spaces governed by the labor regulations and democratic rights won in the era

of widespread coal and railway strikes. In fact shipping companies could escape the

regulation of labor laws all together (as well as the payment of taxes), by resorting to

international registry, or so-called “flags of convenience,” removing whatever limited

powers of labor organizing might have been left. 39 The main exception was high quality steam coal from South Wales, essential for the navy and fast liners, which was shipped to British coaling stations around the world. H. Stanley Jevons, The British Coal Trade, 1915. p. 684. Historically, long-distance coal shipments from Britain could be used as ballast or make-weight, and benefited from low rates for back-carriage. W.S. Jevons, The Coal Question, 227. 40 Jevons, The British Coal Trade, 676-84. Charles P. Kindleberger, an economist with the Office of Strategic Services in 1942-44, recalled that at the outbreak of World War II, “coal was regarded as something that didn't move across big bodies of water. It was shipped to British coaling stations but you wouldn't expect international transoceanic trade as a regular thing. And yet when the war came along, and we needed to get coal to Europe we started to move coal out. .. They were loading it in clam shell buckets on to barges in Puget Sound to go to Europe, a landing in Texas, Portland, Maine, everywhere. Coal was being loaded all over this United States to be shipped all over the area. It was a fantastic operation, expensive as hell; boy it was expensive, you know. It was just awful the price they paid for it, but price was no object in these matters, you see. This used up the available monetary resources very rapidly.” Richard D. McKinzie, Oral History Interview with Charles P. Kindleberger, Economist with the Office of Strategic Services, 1942-44, 1945; chief, Division German and Austrian Economic Affairs, Department of State, Washington, 1945-48; and Intelligence Officer, 12th U.S. Army group, 1944-45. July 16, 1973. Harry S. Truman Library, Independence. Missouri, pp. 108-109, http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/kindbrgr.htm. After World War II, Japan built a steel industry based on coal and ore shipped from Australia. Today, however, 80% of coal is consumed within the country of production. (Source). 41 Podobnik, Global Energy Shifts, p. 79. 42 UNCTAD, “Review of Maritime Transport” (since 1968). More than half of the freight carried by rail consisted of coal [See www.fearnleys.com for figures since 1960s.]

16

Unlike railways, ocean shipping was not constrained by the need to run on a

network of purpose-built tracks of a certain capacity, layout, and gauge. Oil tankers

frequently left port without knowing their final destination. They would steam to a

waypoint, and then receive a destination determined by the level of demand in different

regions. This flexibility carried risks (in March 1967 it was one of the causes of the

world’s first giant oil spill, the Torrey Canyon disaster, which helped trigger the

emergence of the environmental movement, a later threat to the carbon fuel industry),

but it further weakened the powers of local forces that tried to control sites of energy

production.43 If a labor strike, for example, or the nationalization of an industry affected

one production site, oil tankers could be quickly rerouted to supply oil from alternative

sites. In other words, whereas the movement of coal tended to follow dendritic

networks, with branches at each end but a single main channel, creating potential choke

points at several junctures, oil flowed along networks that often had the properties of a

grid, like an electrical grid, where there is more than one possible path and the flow of

energy can switch to avoid blockages or overcome breakdowns.

These changes in the way forms of fossil energy were extracted, transported,

and used made energy networks less vulnerable to the political claims of those whose

labor kept them running. At the same time, the fluidity and flexibility of oil presented new

problems for those who owned or managed the production sites and distribution

networks. It was no longer sufficient to control production and distribution in one

particular region. Since oil could move easily from one region to another, petroleum 43 The Torrey Canyon, an oil tanker owned by a Bermuda-based subsidiary of the Union Oil Company of California, registered in Liberia, chartered to BP, built in 1959 and rebuilt in 1966 in a Japanese shipyard to increase her size from 66,000 to 119,000 deadweight tons, ran aground off the coast of Cornwall, England, in March 1967. The tanker had set sail without knowing its final destination, and lacked detailed navigation charts for the coast of Southwest England. The environmental disaster was exacerbated by the lack of methods to handle large oil spills. The British government tried to set fire to the oil by having air defence forces bomb it with napalm, creating further damage and inadvertently revealing their possession of the controversial weapon and the inaccuracy of the bombers (more than a quarter of the bombs missed their target). John Sheail, “Torrey Canyon: The Political Dimension,” Journal of Contemporary History vol. 42, no. 3 (2007) 485-504; H.M.S.O. (1967). The Torrey Canyon. Cabinet Office Publication.

17

companies were always vulnerable to the arrival of cheaper oil from elsewhere. This

vulnerability, seldom recognized in accounts of the oil industry, set further limits to the

democratizing potential of petroleum.

Market competition destroyed profits and ruined companies and had if possible to

be prevented. The difficulty of transporting coal across oceans meant that coal

producers faced competition only within their own region. They prevented it either by

forming cartels, as in Germany and the United States, or creating new organizations to

regulate production, such as the postwar European Coal and Steel Community. In

Britain, producers were ruined by competition and taken over by the state. Oil

companies faced similar threats, but on a transoceanic scale. The two world wars

helped restrict the supply and movement of oil, but between the wars a new set of

devices was needed to limit the production and distribution of energy. The devices that

were developed included government quotas and price controls in the United States,

consortium agreements to restrict the development of new oil discoveries in the Middle

East, and cartel arrangements to govern the worldwide distribution and marketing of oil.

These techniques and controls shaped the development of the transnational oil

corporation, which emerged as a long-distance machinery for maintaining limits to the

supply of oil.44 One could think of this development as the formation of what Barry calls

a “technical zone,” a set of coordinated but widely dispersed regulations, calculative

arrangements, infrastructures, and technical procedures that render certain objects or

flows governable.45

After World War II, new devices were added to this machinery for the production

of scarcity. There were two important techniques for transforming postwar carbon

energy abundance into a system of limited supplies. The first was the new apparatus of

44 Mitchell, “McJihad: Islam in the U.S. Global Order.” Social Text no. 73 (Winter 2003): 1-18. 45 Andrew Barry, “Technological Zones.” European Journal of Social Theory, vol. 9 no. 2 (2006): 239-253.

18

peacetime “national security.”46 The war had given U.S. oil companies the opportunity

to reduce or shut down most of their production in the Middle East. In 1943, when Ib

Saud demanded funds to compensate for the loss of oil revenues, the oil companies

persuaded Washington to extend Lend Lease loans to the Saudi monarch. These

payments for not

n

producing oil were presented as something necessary for America’s

national security. They marked the start of a long relationship in which Saudi

collaboration in restricting the flow of oil was organized as though it were a system for

“protecting” the oil against others.

The second method of preventing energy abundance involved the rapid

construction of lifestyles in the U.S. organized around extraordinary levels of energy

consumption. In January 1948, James Forrestal, recently appointed as the country’s

first Secretary of Defense under the new National Security Act, discussed with Brewster

Jennings, President of Socony-Vacuum (later renamed Mobil Oil), how “unless we had

access to Middle East oil, American motorcar companies would have to design a four-

cylinder motorcar sometime within the next five years.”47 In the following years the U.S.

car companies helped out by replacing standard six-cylinder engines with the new V-8s

as the dream of every middle-class family. As Forrestal spoke, the Morris Motor

Company in Britain was preparing to challenge the successful four-cylinder Volkswagen

Beetle with the four-cylinder Morris Minor, Citroen to do the same with the two-cylinder

2CV, and the German engine maker BMW with its first postwar passenger car, the one-

cylinder Isetta 250. The European vehicles outsold and outlasted the badly engineered

American cars. But the latter helped engineer something larger – carbon-heavy forms of

46 On the ability of the US oil majors to frame their program in terms of “national security,” and the reproduction of this perspective in scholarship, see Vitalis, America’s Kingdom. 47 James Forrestal, Diaries Volume 9-10, 1947 Nov-1948 Apr, Jan 6 1948. James V. Forrestal Papers, 1941-1949, Public Policy Papers, Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton, p. 2005. He made the same argument at a Cabinet meeting on Jan 16, 1948 (p. 2026).

19

middle class American life that, combined with new political arrangements in the Middle

East, would help the oil companies keep oil scarce enough to allow their profits to thrive.

If the ability of organized workers to disrupt the networks and nodal points of a

coal-based energy system shaped the kinds of mass politics that emerged, or

threatened to emerge, in the first half of the twentieth century, this postwar

reorganization of fossil fuel networks altered the energetics of democracy.

Oil and Democracy

The points of vulnerability, where movements could organize and apply pressure, now

included a series of oil wells, pipelines, refineries, railways, docks, and shipping lanes

across the Middle East. The details of some of these struggles are worth recalling.

In Iraq, which Britain had reoccupied in 1941, less then a decade after granting

the country nominal independence, postwar protests culminated in the popular uprising

and student and worker strikes of 1948. The Communist Party of Iraq, one of the best

organized political movements in the region, demanded “the evacuation of foreign

troops, the unshackling of democratic freedoms, …[and] the provision of decent bread

to the people.”48 Batatu notes that the party had “concentrated the weight of its force in

the colossal enterprises that were … most vital to the country,” the railways, the port of

Basra, and the oil fields. This focus on the most vulnerable points in the technical

structures of a petroleum-based system of production “constituted the key to its basic

strategy.”49

In the railways, the party organized most of its resources at “the most

fundamental point in the entire system, the railway workshops at Schalchiyyah,” where 48 Prison letter from Comrade Fahd, early February 1948, cited Hanna Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq, p. 564. 49 Batatu, Old Social Classes, 616.

20

the main stores and all repair and maintenance work were concentrated. “Stoppage of

activity in this place for ten to fifteen days would have brought the movement of trains in

the whole of Iraq to a complete standstill.”50 In the British-controlled oil fields, the party

focused its activities at an even more vital site, “the point of bifurcation of the Kirkūk-

Haifa and the Kirkūk-Tripoli pipelines, the K3 pumping station near Hadīthah.”51 A strike

by oil workers in June 1946 demanding the right to a union, sickness and disability

insurance, and a pension, was crushed by force with ten workers killed and twenty-

seven injured.52 During the 1948 uprising, however, the oil workers succeeded in

shutting down K3. Since the pumping station supplied the gasoline for other pumping

stations, the union posted guards to ensure that not “even a pint of gasoline” got out.

The stoppage lasted two weeks, until the Company surrounded the site with machine

guns and armored cars and cut off supplies of food. Unable to risk an armed

confrontation, the strikers decided to march on Baghdad, 249 kilometers away. After

three days marching, and increasing support along the way, they “entered Fallujah and

fell into a police trap.”53 The oil workers were sent back to K3, and the strike leaders to

prison.

The other end of the Kirkuk-Haifa pipeline, in Palestine, provided another site of

struggle. In the 1936-39 Arab revolt, the most sustained anti-colonial uprising against

the British in the Middle East, a major target of the insurgency was the recently

completed pipeline from Iraq. Initial efforts to weaken the British in August 1936 by

organizing a strike at the oil refinery at Haifa, and at the port, the railway, and the Public

Works department, were defeated when the British brought in Royal Navy engineers to

50 Batatu, Old Social Classes, 617 51 Batatu Old Social Classes, 622 52 Batatu Old Social Classes, 624 53 Batatu Old Social Classes, 625

21

run the trains and Jewish workers to run the port and the refinery.54 The pipeline was

more vulnerable. Palestinian forces destroyed it for the first time near Irbid on 15 July

1936. They later blew it up several times near the villages of Kaukab al-Hawa, Mahane

Yisrael, and Iksal, between ‘Afula and Beisan, and at Tel ‘Adas, al-Bira, ‘Ard al-Marj,

Tamra, Kafr Misr, Jisr al-Majami’, Jinjar, Beisan, and Indur.55 Unable to protect the

pipeline, the British created of a force of armed Jewish settlers to assist with its defense,

and to protect the Haifa-Lydda railway line.56 This British-officered force became the

nucleus of the Zionist army that seized control of Palestine in 1948.

The construction of a pipeline to carry oil from the Saudi fields to the

Mediterranean produced another set of political calculations and opportunities. The

Trans-Arabian Pipeline Company, a joint venture by Exxon, Chevron, Texaco, and

Mobil, originally planned to terminate the pipeline near the British refinery at Haifa.57 In

1946 they altered the route to avoid Palestine and terminate instead on the Lebanese

coast near Sidon, passing through southern Syria. The reason given was the uncertain

political future of Palestine, but this uncertainty may have included more than just the

threat of Zionism. The British refinery, located at the terminus of the existing pipeline

from Iraq, was a site of the 1936 strike already mentioned, an earlier strike in February

1935, and of a thirteen-day strike for better wages in March 1947.58 In the summer of

54 Zachary Lockman, Comrades and Enemies, 243. 55 Ghassan Kanafani, "The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine" (New York: Committee for a Democratic Palestine, 1972), p. 109. http://www.newjerseysolidarity.org/resources/kanafani/kanafanicover.html. Kanafani twice mentions the place name Bashan, which is not shown on any historical maps. I assume this is a translator’s error and have corrected it to Beisan; I have also corrected Ain Dur to Indur. ‘Ard al-Marj is probably Marj ibn Amir, known in English as the Plain of Esdralon or the Jizreel Valley. 56 Kanafani, "The 1936-39 Revolt." On the British-Zionist collaboration in defending the pipeline, see David Ben- Gurion, “Our Friend: What Wingate Did for Us,” Jewish Observer and Middle East Review, September 27 1963, pp. 15-16, reprinted in Walid Khalidi, ed., From Haven to Conquest: Readings in Zionism and the Palestine Problem until 1948 (Washington D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1971), 382-87, and Leonard Mosely, Gideon Goes to War (London: Arthur Barker, 1955), chapter 4, excerpted as “Orde Wingate and Moshe Dayan,” in Khalidi, ed., From Haven to Conquest, 375-82. 57 The four corporations, then known as Standard Oil of New Jersey (Exxon), Standard Oil of California (Chevron), The Texas Company (Texaco) and Socony-Vacuum (Mobil), were [from 1947] the joint owners of Aramco, the company with exclusive rights to Saudi oil. 58 Lockman, Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, 327, 331.

22

1947, Samuel Mikunis, Secretary of the Communist Party of Palestine, testifying in

Jerusalem before the UN Special Committee on Palestine, raised a series of objections

to the local political powers that the oil companies exercised:

The oil refinery at Haifa (The Consolidated Refineries Limited) is a foreign

concern exempted from all payment of customs duties. Monopoly concessions

have been granted to the Iraq Petroleum Company and to the Trans-Arabian Oil

Company. These concessions include the right—free of royalties, taxes, import

duties or other payments, charges or compensations—to lay pipelines through

any part of the country, to expropriate land, to seize any wood, stone, water and

other local materials required, to import cheap labour regardless of existing

immigration laws, to pass freely the border of Palestine, to build and use their

own harbours, rail-roads, aerodromes and wireless stations, to exact port taxes

for harbouring and loading, and to keep their own police force. The population of

Palestine does not derive even cheaper oil and petrol from these concessions,

granted by the Government without any consultation of the people.59

Re-routing the pipeline through Syria provided a way to avoid this kind of political

contestation. When the Syrian parliament refused to ratify the terms of the agreement

with the pipeline company, arguing for improved transit fees and a less one-sided U.S.

position on Palestine, the oil companies had the CIA organize a coup to put a more

accommodating colonel in power. The new military government suspended parliament

59 Testimony of Samuel Mikunis (Secretary of the Communist Party of Palestine), to UN Special Committee on Palestine, Public Hearing, Held at the Y.M.C.A. Building, Jerusalem, Palestine, 13 July 1947, UN General Assembly, A/364/Add.2 PV. http://domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/99818751a6a4c9c6852560690077ef61/60ca40bbe73b539085256e920067ec29

23

and the constitution and completed the pipeline agreement.60 It was in events such as

these that the postwar relationship between oil and democracy was engineered.

In Lebanon, the U.S. pressured the government to sign a bilateral investment

treaty that would exempt the oil companies from local labor law.61 Labor protests

beginning in the winter of 1943-44 that demanded union rights and improved pay and

conditions had achieved the passage of a Labor Code in 1946.62 Kamal Junblat, the

Minister of National Economy, represented a reformist faction that opposed generous

concessions to foreign multinationals and favored the development of domestic

manufacturing industry. His deputy warned that an earlier pipeline and refinery, the

Kirkuk-Tripoli line that was the other branch from the K3 pumping station in Iraq, had

provided little employment or local development. “Two million tons of oil flow every year

through Tripoli, but what does the huge installation represent in the economy of the

town? Few perhaps know that a single cotton spinning and weaving plant in Tripoli itself

employs four times as much labour as the whole Iraq Petroleum terminal and refinery

together.”63 In the final negotiations over the pipeline concession, the Americans

secured Junblat’s removal from office.64 When the pipeline began operations, the U.S.

company used temporary employees and other measures to prevent the unionization of

the workforce.65

In the case of Saudi Arabia, Vitalis has brought to light the extensive efforts of

Aramco, the American-owned company with exclusive rights to the country’s oil, to

60 Douglas Little, “Cold War and Covert Action: The United States and Syria, 1945-1958,” Middle East Journal, 44 no. 1 (Winter 1990), 55-56; Irene Gendzier, Notes from the Minefield: United States Intervention in Lebanon, 1945- 1958, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 97-98. 61 Gendzier, Notes from the Minefield, 111-114, 131-2. 62 Irene C. Soltau, “Social Responsibility in the Lebanon,” International Affairs, Vol. 25, No. 3. (Jul., 1949), pp. 307-317; Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens, 277-81; Malek Abisaab, “‘Unruly’ Factory Women in Lebanon: Contesting French Colonialism and the National State, 1940–1946,” Journal of Women’s History, Vol. 16 No. 3 (2004), 55-82. 63 Na’im Amiouni [Amyuni], “A Short History of our Pre-War and Post-War Economic Problems,” July 3, 1946, cited in Gendzier, Notes from the Minefield, p. 48. 64 Gendzier, Notes from the Minefield, 47-48, 145. 65 Gendzier, Notes from the Minefield, pp. 112, 117 [check pp.].

24

suppress labor organizing and political action.66 The company imported the system of

racially segregated workforces and worker housing that were familiar features of oil and

other extractive enterprises in the U.S. In the mid-1940s a labor movement began to

emerge among the oil workers, demanding better treatment and an end to racial

discrimination in living conditions. A ten-day strike in 1953 led to a promise of reforms

and the imposition of martial law in the oil fields. When the promises were not kept, a

wave of protests, stoppages, and boycotts followed, culminating in a general strike in

July 1956. The workers’ demands included the introduction of a political constitution, the

right to form labor unions, political parties, and national organizations, an end to

Aramco’s interference in the country’s affairs, the closure of the U.S. military base, and

the release of imprisoned workers. Aramco’s security department identified the leaders

to the Saudi security forces, and the leadership was imprisoned or deported.

There were similar pressures in Iran. In 1945-6, struggles for better pay and

working conditions in the oil industry led to a series of strikes, including a three-day

general strike in the refinery at Abadan and across the oil fields. The government gave

in to the demands but then attempted to crush the union.67 In 1949-51 the union and its

allies in the Tudeh Party (the communist party of Iran) reemerged. As in Mexico in 1937,

a reformist government tried to defuse the oil workers’ power by nationalizing the

country’s oil industry, albeit on terms more favorable to the foreign oil company than

those demanded by the union and the communist party. There followed a violent

confrontation between the Mossadegh government and the oil workers, whose leaders

were arrested. But the international oil companies refused to accept the nationalization,

66 Vitalis, America’s Kingdom. See also Alexei Vassiliev, The History of Saudi Arabia (New York: NYU Press, 2000). 67 Ervand Abrahamian, Iran Between Two Revolutions (Princeton: Princeton University press, 1982); Fred Halliday, “Trade Unions and the Working Class Opposition,” MERIP Reports, No. 71. (Oct., 1978), pp. 7-13.

25

and in 1953 another CIA-organized coup reestablished foreign control over the

country’s oil.68

In Iraq, a similar pattern of events followed the overthrow of the British-backed

regime in 1958. The new leader, Abd al-Karim Qasim, survived the initial CIA attempts

to assassinate him, including the gift of a monogrammed handkerchief laced with

poison.69 As an uneasy alliance with the oil workers and the communist party broke

down, Qasim proceeded with plans to take back 99.5 percent of the concession area

granted to the foreign-owned Iraq Petroleum Company, leaving them only the currently

producing fields in the north.70 He was removed and assassinated in the CIA-supported

coup of 1963.71

If the construction of new energy networks replacing coal with oil was the basis

for building a particular form of postwar democracy in Europe, those networks had

different political properties from the coal-centered energy arrangements they replaced.

Although the oil fields, pumping stations, pipelines and refineries of the Middle East

became sites of intense political struggle, they did not offer those involved the same

powers to paralyze energy systems and build a more democratic order.

The Currency of Oil

68 Ervand Abrahamian, "The 1953 Coup in Iran," Science and Society, 65 no 2 (Summer 2001), 185-215. Explain terms of post-53 oil arrangements. 69 Thomas Powers, "Strategic Intelligence: Part One, An Isolated Man," The Atlantic Monthly, April 1979. See also the hearings and report of the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (the Church Committee), 1976, and Mitchell, Rule of Experts, p. 70 British Petroleum, the major shareholder in the Iraq Petroleum Company, had rejected Iraq’s earlier proposal that it relinquish 60 percent of the concession area (which covered the entire country) and give Iraq ownership of 20 percent of the company. Following Iraq’s decision to take back all non-producing parts of the concession, BP decided, in the words of the company historian, “to wait out Qasim, hoping for a change of government.” James Bamberg, British Petroleum and Global Oil, 1950-1975: The Challenge of Nationalism, The History of British Petroleum, Vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 163-71, quotation from p. 167. 71 Douglas Little, “Mission Impossible: The CIA and the Cult of Covert Action in the Middle East,” Diplomatic History.

26

When the heads of the Trans-Arabian Pipeline Company were deciding the route for the

transportation of oil from the Gulf to the Mediterranean, they briefly considered a

southerly route terminating on the northern coast of the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt. But

like Palestine, Egypt fell within the British sphere of influence. That raised a further

problem besides the issue of the troubles in Palestine. Egypt was a member of the

sterling area, the group of former British colonies that issued their own local currencies

but held their hard currency earnings in a central pool in London. In fact, Egypt and Iraq

were the only non-Commonwealth members of this exchange mechanism.72 The

American company wanted to use the route of the pipeline to undermine the sterling

area. A further advantage of running the pipeline through Syria and Lebanon was to

assist with this financial engineering.

This points to a third set of linkages that were constructed between fossil fuels

and the forms of mid-twentieth-century democracy: the mechanisms that tied together

democracy in the West, oil, and the U.S. dollar.

The collapse of democracy in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, the rise of

fascism, and the path towards world war were understood to have been caused by the

collapse of the international financial system. In central and eastern Europe, countries

were forced to abandon the attempt to base the value of their currencies on reserves of

gold, and one by one their domestic financial systems collapsed, middle classes were

pauperized, and interwar democracy was destroyed. “The breakdown of the

international gold standard,” Karl Polanyi wrote in 1944, was “the mechanism which

railroaded Europe to its doom.” (p. 20)

72 For an explanation of the currency mechanism see Elliot Zupnick, “The Sterling Area's Central Pooling System Re-Examined,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 69, No. 1. (February 1955), pp. 71-84. Egypt formally left the sterling area in 1948 [or 1947?], hoping to convert its sterling balances, accumulated in London during the Second World War, into dollars. Britain responded by imposing restrictions on the convertibility of sterling [source].

27

After World War II the global financial order was reconstructed—on the basis not

of reserves of gold, but flows of oil.73 Gold would no longer work, because the European

allies had been forced to send all their gold bullion to America, to pay for imports of

coal, oil, and other wartime supplies. By the end of the war the U.S. had accumulated

eighty percent of the world’s gold reserves. The Bretton Woods Agreements of 1944

fixed the value of the U.S. dollar on the basis of this gold, at $35 an ounce. Every other

country pegged the value of its currency to the dollar, and thus indirectly to the

American gold monopoly. In practice, however, what sustained the value of the dollar

was its convertibility not to gold but to oil. In 1945 the US produced two-thirds of the

world’s oil. As production in the Middle East was developed, and the routes of pipelines

plotted, much of this overseas oil was also under American control. The rest of the

world had to buy it using dollars.

The place of oil in postwar politics escapes most standard accounts of the

postwar financial system. Yet it was visible in the sequence of meetings that established

the new arrangements. Between the Bretton Woods talks in July 1944 that established

the postwar financial regime and those at Dumbarton Oaks from August through

October of the same year laying out the new international political order, a third meeting

was held: representatives of Britain and the United States met in Washington D.C. in

early August to draw up the postwar petroleum order.74 The Anglo-American Petroleum

Agreement established an International Petroleum Commission to allocate production

73 Standard economic histories typically ignore the question of oil. For example, Barry Eichengreen, “The British Economy Between the Wars,” in The Economic History of Britain Since 1700, edited by Rodrick Floud and Paul Johnson, makes no mention of oil. 74 Harry Dexter White, the chief architect of the two Bretton Woods institutions, the IMF and the World Bank, had argued for a third institution, an “international essential raw material development corporation” whose function would be “increasing the world supply of essential raw materials and assuring member countries of an adequate supply at reasonable prices.” Harry Dexter White, “United Nations Stabilization Fund and a Bank for Reconstruction and Development of the United and Associated Nations.” Preliminary Draft, March 1942, Chapter III, p. 30. Harry Dexter White Papers, 1920-1955, Box 6, Folder 6, Public Policy Papers, Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton.

28

quotas and manage prices, much as the International Monetary Fund, created at

Bretton Woods, would allocate borrowing quotas and manage the value of currencies.75

The Petroleum Agreement was an official version of the 1928 cartel arrangement

between U.S. and British oil corporations, concerned largely with limiting the flow,

managing the distribution, and dividing the profits from the new oil fields of the Middle

East.

Domestic U.S. oil companies used their influence in the Senate to kill the

Petroleum Agreement, preferring existing arrangements where the Texas Railroad

Commission and other local regulators set production quotas and prices to an

international scheme. The following February, however, Roosevelt met with Ibn Saud to

cement the arrangement that would replace the International Petroleum Commission for

Middle Eastern oil, American corporate control of Arabian oil in exchange for

Washington’s help in suppressing labor militancy and other populist threats to the

oligarchs Britain had helped bring to power. Subsequently, the Marshall Plan paid for

Europe to postpone plans to rebuild its battered coal fields and instead to purchase oil—

supplied from the Middle East but paid for in U.S. dollars.

Britain’s attempt to defend the pound sterling as a rival international currency

was a battle fought over oil fields. Oil was so large a component of its international trade

that a 1955 report on the treatment of oil in the country’s trade accounts suggested that

“the international ramifications of the oil industry (including its tanker operations) are so

large and so complex as almost to constitute oil a currency in itself.”76

75 Herbert Feis, “The Anglo-American Oil Agreement,” The Yale Law Journal, Vol. 55, No. 5. (Aug., 1946), pp. 1174-1190. Michael B. Stoff, “The Anglo-American Oil Agreement and the Wartime Search for Foreign Oil Policy,” The Business History Review, Vol. 55, No. 1. (Spring, 1981), pp. 59-74. 76 Galpern, “Britain, Middle East Oil, and the Struggle to Save Sterling, 1944-1971” University of Texas Ph.D. 2002: “In 1955, a paper prepared for the Working Party on the Treatment of Oil in the Balance of Payments, the Treasury and the Ministry of Fuel and Power wrote: ‘The international ramifications of the oil industry (including its tanker operations) are so large and so complex as almost to constitute oil a currency in itself. Its size and complexity, and the fact that the fullest statistics are those relating to currency movements, and that any other basis of treatment would mean very substantial corrections in a Balance of Payments account, are, in our view, sufficient

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Europe and other regions had to accumulate dollars, hold them, and then return

them to the US in payment for oil. Inflation in the U.S. slowly eroded the value of the

dollar, so that when these countries purchased U.S. oil, the dollars they used were

worth less than their value when they acquired them. These seigniorage privileges

enabled Washington to extract a tax from every other country in the world, keeping its

economy prosperous and thus its democracy popular.

If the working of carbon fuel networks helped engender certain concentrations of

power and points of political vulnerability in the coal era, and these were transformed

with the postwar transition to oil into new sites of democratic contestation and

vulnerability, postwar democracy in Europe was also built on international financial

exchanges organized upon the flow of oil. Postwar democracy in the West appeared to

require a stable financial order, an order engineered with the help of oil wells, pipelines,

tanker operations, and the increasingly difficult control of oil workers. The fact that flows

of oil were the basis for intersecting networks of global energy supply and global

currency movements helped introduce a disjuncture that would become increasingly

apparent by the end of the 1960s, leading to the 1971-74 energy/dollar/Middle East

crises. Before considering those interlocking crises, there is one more dimension of

carbon democracy to explore, a dimension that will also be transformed in the 1971-74

crises: the mid-twentieth century politics of “the economy.”

The Carbon Economy

In a memorable passage in The General Theory, John Maynard Keynes explains his

novel theory of the economy in terms of bank notes buried in disused coal mines. "If the reasons for treating oil differently from other trade.’” Pp. xix-xx, citing “Paper for the Working Party on the Treatment of Oil in the Balance of Payments,” Note by the Treasury and Ministry of Fuel and Power, T.O.(55)2, January 28, 1955, T 277/506.

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Treasury were to fill old bottles with bank notes, bury them at suitable depths in disused

coal mines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to

private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again…

there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real

income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a great

deal greater than it actually is."77 British coal production had passed its peak in the

1920s. By the time Keynes wrote The General Theory, coal mines were being

exhausted at an unprecedented rate.78 William Stanley Jevons, the author of an earlier

revolution in British economic thinking, marginalist theory of the 1870s, had published a

book warning of the coming exhaustion of coal reserves.79 Keynes was reading that

book as he published The General Theory, and gave a lecture on Jevons in 1936 to the

Royal Statistical Society.80 It is indicative of the transformation in economic thinking in

which Keynes played a role that the exhaustion of coal reserves no longer appeared as

a crisis. The management of coal reserves could now be replaced in the mind, and in

the textbooks of economics, with reserves of bank notes. In the era that Keynes’s

thinking helped to shape, the supply of carbon energy was no longer a practical limit to

economic possibility. What mattered was the proper circulation of bank notes.

A fourth set of connections between oil and mid-twentieth century democratic

politics concerns the role of economic expertise and the economy. Like twentieth-

77 Keynes, General Theory. (1936) [chap. 10, section 6] 78 On the peak of British coal production in the 1920s, see Bardi in https://aspo- ireland.org/newsletter/en/pdf/newsletter73_200701.pdf; Kirby, M. 1977, The British Coal Mining Industry 1870- 1946; Neuman, A.M. 1934, The Economic Organization of the British Coal Industry. 79 Jevons, The Coal Question: An Enquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal Mines (1865). Jevons’s son, H. Stanley Jevons, returned to the question of the exhaustion of coal reserves in The British Coal Trade. He revised his father’s estimate of the date of the possible exhaustion of British coal mines from one hundred years to “less then two hundred years” (756-7). 80 J. M. Keynes, “William Stanley Jevons 1835-1882: A Centenary Allocation on his Life and Work as Economist and Statistician,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Vol. 99, No. 3. (1936), pp. 516-555. Lecture delivered on April 21, 1936. The Coal Question quoted on p. 517.

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century democracy, twentieth-century economic expertise developed in a specific

relationship to the hydro-carbon age.

The shaping of Western democratic politics from the 1930s onwards was carried

out in part through the application of new kinds of economic expertise: the development

and deployment of Keynesian economic knowledge, its expansion into different areas of

policy and debate, its increasingly technical nature, and the efforts to claim an

increasing variety of topics as subject to determination not by democratic debate but by

economic planning and expertise.

The Keynesian and New Deal elaboration of economic knowledge was a

response to the threat of populist politics, especially in the wake of the 1929 financial

crisis and the labor militancy that accompanied the crisis and reemerged a decade later.

It provided a method of setting limits to democratic practice, and maintaining them.

The deployment of expertise requires, and encourages, the making of worlds that

it can master. In this case, what had to be made was “the economy.” This was an object

that no economist or planner prior to the 1930s spoke of or knew to exist. Of course the

term “economy” existed prior to the 1930s, but it referred to a process, not a thing. It

meant “government” or the proper management of people and resources, as in the

phrase “political economy.”81 The economy became the central object of democratic

politics in the West, (paralleled by the emergence of “development” outside the West):

an object whose management was the central task of government, and which required

the deployment of specialist knowledge.

The peculiar nature of the project of the “national economy” deployed by

Keynesian planners and colonial development officers and its relationship to forms of 81 Mitchell "Fixing the Economy," Cultural Studies, vol. 12, no.1, (1998), 82-101; Rule of Experts (2002); "Economists and the Economy in the Twentieth Century," in The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences: Positivism and its Epistemological Others, edited by George Steinmetz (Duke University Press), pp. 126-141; and “Culture and Economy,” in Handbook of Cultural Studies, edited by Tony Bennett and John Frow (Sage Publications, in press).

32

democracy can be seen by comparing it with a rival project, formulated at the same time

and destined to overtake it: neoliberalism. Launched at a colloquium in Paris organized

in August of 1938 to discuss the work of Walter Lippmann criticizing the New Deal, as a

movement against this new object of planning, the economy, and against planning itself

as a method of concentrating and deploying expert knowledge, neoliberalism proposed

an alternative ordering of knowledge, expertise, and political technology that it named

“the market.”82 This was not the market of Ricardo or Jevons, but a term that began to

take on new meanings in the hands of the nascent neoliberal movement. Drawing on

Lippmann’s warnings in The Phantom Public and The Good Society about the dangers

of public opinion and the need to expand the areas of concern that are reserved to the

decisions of experts, neoliberalism was launched by Hayek and his collaborators as an

alternative project to defeat the threat of populist democracy.

The development of neoliberalism was delayed by the war and the programs of

postwar reconstruction. Its political challenge to the Keynesian consensus got underway

a decade later, with the founding of a think tank called the Institute of Economic Affairs

in London in 1955. The launch was triggered by the first postwar crisis in the oil-

currency system: Britain’s attempt to preserve the sterling area as a mechanism of

currency regulation, despite losing its control of the hub of that mechanism, the Anglo-

Iranian Oil fields in Iran. The desperate measures with which London tried to retain the

pound’s value despite the loss of the oil wells through which its value had been

manufactured provided the point of vulnerability where the neoliberal movement first

aimed its weapons.83

82 François Denord, “Aux origines du néo-libéralisme en France: Louis Rougier et le Colloque Walter Lippmann de 1938,” Le mouvement social, no.195 (2001) pp. 9-34. [Add Hayek quote from SCA paper.] 83 “Fifty years ago this summer [in 1955] a little book was published in London. It was entitled The Free Convertibility of Sterling and was authored by an experienced financial journalist George Winder. In the front, Antony Fisher wrote as director of the Institute of Economic Affairs, ‘It [the book] is of vital concern to all those who are interested in their own freedom and the freedom of their country’. Henry Hazlitt gave the book a brilliant

33

Larger connections can be drawn between the assembling of “the economy” and

the transition from a coal-based to a predominantly oil-based energy system. One could

argue that the new era of abundant and low cost energy supplies undergirds the new

conception of the economy, and perhaps describe postwar Keynesian economics as a

form of “petroknowledge.”

The economy is conceived in a particular way. It is not the total of the nation’s

wealth—something that had proven impossible to calculate. (There seemed no way to

avoid continually counting everything twice, for example when wholesale goods were

resold as retail.) It is imagined and measured, rather simply, as the phenomenon of

bank notes changing hands. Even if it is the same money, every time it changes hands

it is measured as part of the economy. The economy is the sum total of those monetary

transactions.

This reconceptualization defined the main feature of the new object: it could

expand, without getting physically bigger. Older ways of thinking about wealth were

based upon physical processes that suggested limits to growth: the expansion of cities

and factories, the colonial enlargement of territory, the accumulation of gold reserves,

the growth of population and absorption of migrants, the exploitation of new mineral

reserves, increasing volumes of trade in commodities: all these were spatial and

material processes that had physical limits. By the 1930s, many of those limits seemed

to be approaching: population growth in the West was leveling off, the colonial

expansion of the U.S. and the European imperial powers had ended and was

threatened with reversal, coal mines were being exhausted, and agriculture and industry

review in Newsweek on July 25th 1955 and all 2,000 sold out. One can make a very good case for saying this was the start of the free market public policy institute movement that today encircles the world. That little book did so well that Fisher was emboldened to approach a young economist named Ralph Harris. Harris in turn saw a chance to do good by challenging the post World War II Keynesian consensus.” Blundell, “IEA Turns 50: Celebrating Fisher Meeting Hayek,” Atlas Investor Report, Spring 2005, p. 6 http://www.atlasusa.org/V2/files/pdfs/2005_Spring_IR.pdf

34

were facing gluts of overproduction. The economy, on the other hand, measured by the

new calculative device of national income accounting, had no obvious limit. National

income, later renamed the gross national product, was a measure not of the

accumulation of wealth but the speed and frequency with which paper money changed

hands. It could grow without any problem of physical or territorial limits.

Oil contributed to the new conception of the economy as an object that could

grow without limit in two ways. First, oil declined continuously in price. Adjusting for

inflation, the price of a barrel of oil in 1970 was one-third of what it sold for in 1920.84 So

although increasing quantities of energy were consumed, the cost of energy did not

appear to represent a limit to growth. Second, thanks to its relative abundance and the

ease of shipping it across oceans, oil could be treated as something inexhaustible. Its

cost included no calculation for the exhaustion of reserves. The growth of the economy,

measured in terms of GDP, had no need to account for the depletion of energy

resources. The leading contributions to the academic formulation of the economy—

Keynes’s General Theory, Hicks’s Value and Capital, Samuelson’s Foundations, and

the Arrow-Debreu model—gave no attention to the depletion of energy. The economics

of growth of the 1950s and 1960s could conceive of long-run growth as something

unrestrained by the availability of energy.85 Moreover, the costs of air pollution,

environmental disaster, climate change, and other negative consequences of using

fossil fuels were not deducted from the measurement of GDP. Since the measurement

of the economy made no distinction between beneficial and harmful costs, the

increased expenditure required to deal with the damage caused by fossil fuels appeared

84 The price of oil fell from $31 dollars a barrel in 1920 to $9 in 1970 (in 2006 prices). The average price per decade also declined, from $18 per barrel in the 1920s, to $15 per barrel in the 1930s and 1940s, $14 per barrel in the 1950s, and $12 per barrel in the 1960s. BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2007, available at ww.bp.com. 85 Geoffrey M. Heal and Partha S. Dasgupta, Economic Theory and Exhaustible Resources, p. 1.

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as an addition rather than an impediment to growth.86 In all these ways, the availability

and supply of oil contributed to the shaping of the economy and its growth as the new

object of mid-twentieth-century politics.

The oil wells and pipelines of the Middle East and the political arrangements that

were built with them helped make possible the idea of the Keynesian economy and the

forms of democracy in which it played a central part.

The 1967-74 Reorganization

With all this in mind, we can turn briefly to 1967-74 dollar-oil crisis, a pivotal episode in

the story of postwar carbon democracy.87 The linked crises of the dollar and the

nationalization of oil in the Middle East brought into play and reconfigured the

intersecting elements of carbon democracy.

Again, by following the oil one can trace how relations between oil production,

the gold standard, the circulation of dollars, and Keynesian economic expertise were all

transformed in the crisis, along with the possibilities for democratic politics in the Middle

East. Following the balance of payments crisis of the late 1950s, Washington had

introduced oil import quotas to protect the value of the dollar and later tried to support its

pegged gold price by interventions in the London gold market. When this scheme

collapsed in November 1968, the U.S. tried to transform Bretton Woods into a

mechanism that allowed the gold peg to float. In an effort to lower domestic oil prices,

Washington removed the controls on oil imports in 1970, but this caused more dollars to

flow abroad. By the following year, the U.S. had used up most of its non-gold reserves

and only twenty-two percent of its currency reserves were backed by gold. When 86 Herman Daly, Steady-State Economics, chap. 5. 87 This section summarizes a longer discussion in Timothy Mitchell, “Petroknowledge, or the Resources of Economics” (unpublished paper).

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European banks requested payment for their dollars in gold, the U.S. defaulted.

Described as “the abandoning of the gold standard,” it amounted to a declaration of

bankruptcy by the U.S. government.88

These developments coincided with the emergence of a politics of “the limits to

growth” as an alternative project to that of “the economy,” in which the oil companies

helped trigger the production of the environment as a rival object of politics. They did

this in part inadvertently, by adopting ways of drilling and transporting oil that led to

giant oil spills, around which environmentalists were able to organize. But they also

helped produce the environment as a matter of political concern, by changing the way

they calculated the world’s reserves of oil.

In 1971 the oil companies abruptly abandoned their cornucopian calculations of

oil as an almost limitless resource (calculations that had underpinned postwar theories

of the economy as an object capable of limitless growth), and began to forecast the end

of oil.89 The recalculations were needed to deal with the threat posed by the new

Ba`thist government of Iraq, which was developing the first major oil production in the

region independent of any Western oil company. When the oil majors tried to punish

Iraq by cutting their own production in the country, Baghdad responded by nationalizing

their assets.90 To dissuade other Gulf states from following Iraq’s lead, the oil

companies now sought to accommodate or even encourage their demand for an

88 Fred Block, The Origins of International Economic Disorder: A Study of United States International Monetary Policy from World War II to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 164-202. Block makes no mention of the oil dimension of the crisis. 89 Bowden, “The Social Construction of Validity in Estimates of US Crude Oil Reserves.” 90 In 1961 Iraq had reduced the concession area of the foreign-owned Iraq Petroleum Company to the fields currently in production, in the Kirkuk region in the north. In 1969 Iraq signed an agreement with the Soviet Union to help develop oil production in the south and to build a pipeline to a new refinery on the Persian Gulf. When production from the new field began in April 1972, IPC cut its production at Kirkuk by 50 percent. The government nationalized IPC in June. Charles Tripp, A History of Iraq, 3rd ed., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 200. James Bamberg, British Petroleum and Global Oil, 1950-1975: The Challenge of Nationalism (History of British Petroleum, Vol. 3) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 163-71. Algeria had taken 51 percent control of its French-owned oil industry in February 1971, and Libya began to nationalize foreign-owned oil production in December 1971. Syria had nationalized its small oil industry in 1964.

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unprecedented increase in the price of oil, a goal already supported by agencies of the

U.S. government.91 A doubling or tripling of the price of oil would enable the major oil

companies to survive the transition to a much lower percentage share of Middle Eastern

oil revenue, and would make it feasible to develop the less accessible, high-cost oil

fields of the North Sea and northern Alaska. No model of the economy or its future

growth could rationalize such an unprecedented transformation in costs of energy or

flows of finance. But if the world was reconfigured as a system of finite resources,

rapidly running out, then entirely new calculations became possible.

The need to conserve environmental resources and protect them for the long

term also helped with another calculation. For the oil companies, the large increase in

oil prices carried a risk. It threatened to make affordable a rival source of energy,

nuclear power. However, if the oil companies could force producers of nuclear power to

introduce into the price of the energy they sold a payment to cover its long-term

environmental effects -- the cost of decontaminating reactors when they went out of

service and of storing spent fuel for millennia – it would remain more expensive than oil.

To promote such calculations, the oil companies joined the effort to frame the

environment as a new object of politics, and to define it and calculate it in particular

ways. Like the economy, the environment was not simply an external reality principle –

against which the oil industry had to contend. It was a set of forces and calculations that

rival groups attempted to mobilize.

The role of oil companies in framing the politics of the environment suggests

another dimension of the relationship between oil and democracy: compared to the

production of coal, oil production has a different way of deploying and distributing

91 V. H. Oppenheim, “Why Oil Prices Go Up (1): The Past: We Pushed Them,” Foreign Policy, No. 25. (Winter, 1976-1977), pp. 24-57. John M. Blair, The Control of Oil (New York, Pantheon Books, 1976); Simon Bromley, American Hegemony and World Oil: The Industry, the State System and the World Economy (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991).

38

expertise. Earlier, I suggested that the democratic militancy of coal miners could be

traced in part to the autonomy that miners exercised at the coal face, especially prior to

the large-scale mechanization of production. The autonomy of those who mined the ore

placed a significant amount of expertise in their hands. Oil, in contrast, leaves its

workers on the surface and distributes more of the expertise of production into the

offices of managers and engineers.

This difference extends further. Once mined, coal is ready to use. It may require

cleaning and sorting, but it needs no chemical transformation. Oil comes out of the

ground in an unusable form, known as crude oil. The crude must be heated in a

furnace, separated into its different hydrocarbons by fractional distillation, and further

processed into useable and uniform products. Initially its main use was in the form of

heavy oils (kerosene) for domestic lighting and for lubrication. Gasoline and other lighter

by-products of the refining process were treated as waste. To increase their profit

margin, oil companies developed large research and development divisions to find uses

for these unused byproducts, distribution and marketing divisions to promote their use,

and political and public relations departments to help build the kinds of societies that

would demand them.92

Compared to coal companies, oil companies developed much larger and more

extended networks for the production of expertise, which became increasingly involved

in making of the wider world a place where its products could thrive. They also

collaborated to deny expertise to others, including the coal industry. The 1928 oil cartel,

as Nowell has shown, was actually a broader hydrocarbon cartel, because it was an

agreement not just to restrict the production of oil, but to prevent the use of patents that

92 Podobnik discusses this question of the differing expertise relating to coal and oil in Global Energy Shifts.

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would allow coal companies to move into the production of synthetic oils.93 After the

1967-74 crisis and the rise of environmentalist challenges to carbon democracy, the oil

companies are well equipped to meet the challenge.

Finally, drawing on the work of Nitzan and Bichler, one can note the emergence

of a new partner to the oil-democracy relationship: the arms industry. The export of

weapons by U.S. and other manufacturers, previously a relatively small trade financed

mostly through U.S. overseas development aid, was transformed into a highly profitable

commercial industry. The commercialization of weapons exports was made possible by

establishing a series of linkages between the Western import of oil from the Middle

East, the flow of dollars to the producer countries, the production of political

vulnerabilities and military threats to the further flow of oil, and the use of the

petrodollars to purchase arms from the West as protection against those threats.94 The

1967-74 crisis represented the work of connecting together these elements. The flow of

weapons, and related opportunities in construction, consulting, military assistance, and

banking, now depended on new levels of militarism, and indeed on a US policy of

prolonging and exacerbating local conflicts in the Middle East, and on an increasingly

disjunctive relationship with the Salafist forms of Islam that had helped defend the mid-

twentieth century oil order against nationalist and popular pressures in the region. The

tensions between militarism, Salafism, and armed conflict would render the prospects

for a more democratic politics of oil production even weaker in the post-1974 period.95

Conclusion

93 Gregory P. Nowell, Mercantile States and the World Oil Cartel, 1900-1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). 94 Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, “The Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition,” in The Global Political Economy of Israel (London: Pluto Press, 2002), 198-273 95 Subsequent developments are discussed in Mitchell, “McJihad: Islam in the U.S. Global Order,” Social Text, no. 73 (Winter 2003): 1-18.

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This paper has not attempted to draw up a general theory of democracy. General

theories of democracy, of which there are many, have no place for oil, except as an

exception. Rather, the goal has been to follow closely a particular set of connections

that were engineered between carbon fuels and certain kinds of democratic and

undemocratic politics.

The forms of democracy that emerged in leading industrialized countries by the

middle decades of the twentieth century were enabled and shaped by the extraordinary

concentrations of energy obtained from the world’s limited stores of hydrocarbons and

the socio-technical arrangements required for extracting and distributing that energy.

When the production of energy shifted to oil from the Middle East, however, the

transformation provided opportunities to weaken rather than extend, both in the West

and the Middle East, the forms of carbon-based political mobilization on which the

emergence of industrial democracy had depended. Exploring the properties of oil, the

networks along which it flowed, and the connections established between flows of

energy, finance, and other objects provides a way of understanding how the relations

among these different elements and forces were constructed. The relations we have

followed connected energy and politics, materials and ideas, humans and nonhumans,

calculations and the objects of calculation, representations and forms of violence, and

the present and the future.

Democratic politics developed, thanks to oil, with a peculiar orientation towards

the future: the future was a limitless horizon of growth. This horizon was not some

natural reflection of a time of plenty. It was the result of a particular way of organizing

expert knowledge and its objects, in terms of a novel world called “the economy.”

Innovations in methods of calculation, the use of money, the measurement of

41

transactions, and the compiling of national statistics made it possible to image the

central object of politics as an object that could expand without any form of ultimate

material constraint. In the 1967-74 crisis, the relations among these disparate elements

were all transformed. Those relations are being transformed again in the present.

In their book Afflicted Powers, Ian Boal and his colleagues have suggested that

understanding the contemporary politics of oil involves the difficult task of bringing

together the violence that has been repeatedly deployed to secure arrangements for the

production of oil and the forms of spectacle and representation that seem somehow an

equally effective aspect of the undemocratic politics of oil—not least the representation

of the latest rounds of U.S. militarism as a project to bring democracy to the Middle

East.96

We can better understand the relationship between spectacle and violence, and

between other apparently disparate or discordant features of the politics of oil, by

following closely the oil itself; not because the material properties or strategic necessity

of oil determine everything else (on the contrary, as I suggested, a lot of hard work went

into producing America’s “strategic dependence” on the control of Middle Eastern oil,

starting with those V8 engines); but because in tracing the connections that were made

between pipelines and pumping stations, refineries and shipping routes, road systems

and automobile cultures, dollar flows and economic knowledge, weapons experts and

militarism, one discovers how a peculiar set of relations was engineered among oil,

violence, finance, expertise, and democracy.

These relations are quite different from those of the coal age. If the emergence of

the mass politics of the early twentieth century, out of which certain sites and episodes

of welfare democracy were achieved, should be understood in relation to coal, the limits

96 Retort [Iain Boal, T. J. Clark, Joseph Matthews, and Michael Watts], Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (New York: Verso, 2005).

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of contemporary democratic politics can be traced in relation to oil. The possibility of

more democratic futures, in turn, depends on the political tools with which we address

the passing of the era of fossil fuel.