Re: Frank and Jones -- money and oil

>  Richard N Hutchinson wrote:

>There is no shortage of oil in nature?

Surely it's obvious that oil isn't a 'resource' and has no use value until 
it becomes a commodity. And qua commodity it cannot ever be in short 
supply, it can simply be priced out of the market and substituted by other 
'resources'. Obvious, no? As an energy-carrier (one among many) its 
attributes give it comparative utility in some contexts, (eg transport) not 
in others (eg power generation, bulk heating).

It's the political economy of oil which matters. The ultimate goal of 
analysis (for a marxist like me) remains the production, circulation and 
distribution of value in capitalist commodity-producing society. The motor 
of this process is class struggle, not petroleum, also ABC, no?

>That seems to be the opposite of all your postings and analysis, and in
>any event, I think it's not true.  To say otherwise sounds like good old
>Julian Simon the conservative economist and "cornucopian."

Eh? In what sense am I Julian Simon-like?

>I would like to hear your explanation of your alternative to "modern
>neomalthusian ricardianism," given your laserlike focus on oil.

What centrally interests me is the conjuncture, the functioning of 
hegemony, the crisis of imperialism and of the state-form, which latter I 
take to be the determining-last-instance of the conjunctural dynamic.

My alternative to "modern neomalthusian ricardianism," is socialism, which 
however I don't believe can be obtained by the methods you prescribe, ie by 
reforms however populist or well-intentioned. Contemporary capitalism is in 
a deep impasse, because of an accumulation crisis resulting from a secualr 
fall in the profit-rate -- *one of* the explanations for which is the 
radical contradiction within the technical composition of capital of which 
petroleum-dependency is one form of appearance.

There are no 'oil shortages', and I've repeatedly argued just this: and the 
current price of oil proves exactly this point. It has collapsed and is 
tending towards $10/bbl! Why is that? Because of a slump in production and 
the onset of general crisis. It's the political consequences of *this* 
crisis which should exercise us, analytically.

There *is* an argument which tries to account for endemic crisis in terms 
which are both physicalist, ie ricardian and/or physiocratic, and also 
malthusian, and this argument is very popular in certain circles as you 
know and is also as a matter of fact, well supported empirically. This 
argument bases itself on the premise that the crisis is not caused by the 
internal laws of motion of capital, ie by its contradictions, and nor is 
the crisis is an expression of class struggle, but it is instead caused by 
a major and critical resource suddenly running out just when we have become 
completely physically dependent on it. One of the strengths of this 
argument is precisely its strong empirical basis, ie the overwhelming 
evidence (a) of our civilisation's critical dependence on petroleum and (b) 
on the looming facts of rapid and potentially devastating depletion. 
However this argument, though strong, and though important, is NOT my argument.

Why is the neomalthusian argument powerful?

There are billions of people who are completely dependent on oil even 
though they have never made a phone call, never been inside an automobile, 
do not have electric light and cook with wood. This is because we are even 
more short of another commodity, water, and this shortage is absolutely 
critical in large parts of Africa and Asia and they way we have got round 
it, the way we have managed to support huge urban populations far in excess 
of any local carrying capacity, is by the export of wheat. There are facts 
and figures aplenty to show that the huge world trade in wheat is actually 
a trade in water: wheat is a substitute commodity. But this huge supply of 
grain is completely dependent on the petrochemical basis of agribiz and on 
the science and technology of gene modification etc, which is also a 
product of the complexity which is only possible with superabundant energy 
inpuits (no previous civilisation, eg the 'advanced organic societies 
discussed by Jack Goldstone and others, has ever remotely approached this 
degree of complexity, or of entropy either).

And this agribiz is also reliant on the use and exhaustion of such 
non-renewable water resources as the fossil water of the Ogallala aquifer. 
So if oil production peaks and declines rapidly and this is out of sync 
with the expected peak and decline in the world's population, then it means 
disaster. Now, this neomalthusian view is a powerful argument but 
nonetheless it ignores the real mechanisms at work, which are more complex 
and also politically harder for many people to take on board since these 
are ultimately arguments for social revolution, and for the utopian 
impossibility of prgrammes of *reform*.

The marxist argument says that actually the problems posed by oil peaking 
are not unresolvable, but they are only resolvable within the context of 
revolutionary social change. And equally that the form taken by the problem 
of peaking, and of general energy shortness of supply, will be not be price 
spikes, gas lines, energy famines etc. It will take the form instead of 
deflationary cycles compounding into generalised depressions. One effect of 
recessions is of course to mitigate supply bottlenecks by removing demand; 
so there may never be a shortage of oil, and the price may never rise very 
much. The effects of the peak shows itself in other ways, ones which the 
physicalists (modern physiocrats) do not understand and therefore are not 
prepared for.

The problem, as Henryk Grossmann pointed out, is that there is a 
simultaneous process of under-accumulation and over-accumulation of 
capital. Mattick put it this way: "because not enough surplus value has 
been produced, capital cannot expand at a rate which would allow for the 
full realization of what has been produced. the relative scarcity of 
surplus labour in the production process appears as an absolute abundance 
of commodities in circulation". Another way to put it is to show that 
general crisis occurs because of a previous and longstanding 
under-production of surplus-value during which time systemic bottlenecks 
have appeared and have not been overcome but instead have worsened; 
production has increased but not sufficiently to develop new technologies 
which can leapfrog the bottlenecks, so that eventual crisis is extremely 
sharp, deep and represents a step-change, a political impasse for the 
bourgeoisie as well as impasse in production. A higher rate of accumulation 
would have overcome the latent overproduction of unproductive capital. This 
is precisely the situation you have today. To take one random example, we 
have tied up huge amounts of capital in trawler fleets which have produced 
a resource (fish), turning the resource (natural capital) into a revenue 
stream and depleting it in the process.

This process of combined over- and under-accumulation of capital is endemic 
and the signs of it are visible in every sphere of production. This IS the 
mechanism which links together the materiality of the world with the 
process of social reproduction under capitalism. It's not over-population 
or climate change or resource depletion which is the problem and not even 
the visible, obvious, painful symptoms of these, but the fact that these 
processes are only the forms taken by the logic of accumulation itself, and 
therefore these surface forms, however existentially devastating, are not 
the real problem, which arises in the sphere of capital accumulation and 
production, and in its inability to overcome its own logic and its tendency 
to reproduce itself as ever more intense and explosive contradictions. This 
is why even (and especially) militant Islamism is a form of class struggle, 
a very contradictory form, but so what?

The Left in the Arab and Muslim world was smashed, closed down, humiliated, 
disgraced and exterminated. The dream of development was smashed in the 
same process, and this is the actual history of the postwar period, in 
which the USSR and the West equally participated and were equally 
responsible. When the US fostered fundamentalism as a way of controlling 
the left it also created the only force capable of embodying 
anti-imperialist aspirations and fighting effectively form them.

When imperialism took away the consolatory idea of socialism (opium of the 
masses) it opened the door for atavistic obscurantism as the only form of 
social release. Imperialism created its own enemy in its own image. Our 
attitude must be one of intransigent support for anti-imperialist struggles 
and equally intransigent propagation of the truth that ultimately 
liberation from imperialism also entails liberation from theological 
obscurantism and that freedom and emancipation can only be the creation of 
a self-conscious militant proletarian awareness, ie creation of a class 
'for-itself'.

That is exactly what we are doing in the process of these debates and 
discussions, or contributing to. But it is obvious that this development of 
a class for-itself requires a whole historical stage and many prerequisites 
which may not come into existence and therefore it cannot be taken for 
granted and its creation cannot be by an act of revolutionary will in 
abstraction from circumstances.

Islamic Fundamentalism has found fertile ground for its message because no 
other message makes sense to people rendered materially completely abject 
or who may not be abject materially but are completely disfranchised, not 
only politically, but culturally and historical as is the case with many 
Arab and Muslim intellectuals. It makes sense to them however not so much 
because they are abject or disfranchised but because it empowers them and 
makes resistance possible: the only possible kind of resistance, ie that of 
martyrdom made possible by clandestinity, terrorism and assassination, the 
traditional MO of chiliastic and self-sacrificial sects. Individuals thus 
empowered do not need and cannot anyway have, the mass solidarity of open 
struggle and do not seek the social solidarity of normal everyday life: the 
anonymity of their clandestine activity is perfectly complemented by the 
psychology of personal salvation and entry to paradise via acts of 
martyrdom. Their brotherhood is projected, not direct, is sublimated, not 
realised. But it is equally clear that one important sign of their success 
will be precisely to escalate the level of struggle beyond the stage when 
such methods (clandestinity, terror etc) are relevant, and they themselves 
anticipate this, their leaders seek wider wars and a general engulfing of 
not only the Islamic nations but the whole world, in common struggle. They 
may get their wish, and they too are conjuring up the enemy they need: a 
newly vengeful, more militarist infidel.

It is this intercalation of material and political processes which is 
important to analyse; this might help us to see, for example, that the war 
in Afghanistan is actually neither an 'oil' war no a civilisational 
conflict, but class struggle.

Mark Jones