Re: Ecology, Catastrophe, Capitalism

Sat, 28 Feb 1998 15:02:50 +0000
Mark Jones (Jones_M@netcomuk.co.uk)

Richard, your counter-scenario has its intuitive appeal but I'm not sure how
literally one can take the oil patch as a metaphor for world-capitalism.

Your version of a steady-state oil industry is not wholly correct and
insofar as it is correct, that has to do more with the unique specificities of
oil as a strategic commodity unlike any other, and one where as John D
Rockefeller was the first to notice, orderly markets and cartelised production
and distribution arrangements are indispensable and always have been, for the
industry to function at all.

To begin with, in the first Pennsylvania oilrush
and then again in Texas, this was indeed a perfectly competitive market, with
thousands of anonymous individual producers and markets alternately glutted and
starved. To impose order on that chaos -- 'the Big Hand of Rockefeller' -- was
an absolute necessity. That the first true monopolies emerged out of that
initial chaos says something very profound about the true nature of capitalism,
as Daniel Yergin, Anthony Sampson and many others have pointed out.

It could only be done by the conspiratorial methods for which the
industry is a legend. There had to be a stable pricing regime, stable supplies,
and long-term plans because the capital investments were huge and the payoffs
slow in coming. But, altho oil was a precursor of finance-monopoly capital, it
was and remains unique for two reasons. Firstly, if the Industrial Revolution
means anything, if Rostowan take-off means anything, it is about labour
productivity increasing thru the application of fossil-fuels. Western
capitalism was and still is a fossil-fuel based economy. Gunder Frank does not
reflect this adequately, in my view. It is at the heart of the true meaning of
TRANSIENT eurocentric world capitalism. Vaclav Smil and even David Landes are
relevant correctives here. It is not race, eugenics, European brutality or
European instrumental rationality, which has made the world eurocentric or
which birthed the self-sustaining word of accumulation documented by Marx. It
is (a) coal and (b) oil. Oil above all.

Oil is now such a strategic matter that US foreign policy is hostage to it. The
only parallel for contemporary US governmental and ruling class obsession with
this seemingly cheap and humble product, is Hitler Germany, for which oil
was also a crucial matter.

The parallels are exact, and ominous. And they mean that the
cartelisation of oil is not just a matter of a form of contemporary capitalism,
a model which might be generalised; it is something which is politically
overdetermined. The oil-nexus is at the heart of politics because, appearances
to the contrary, oil is, as well as totally indispensable and ireplaceable,
also SCARCE.

Tat's why there is something heroic about exploration and discovery. If the
early days were a Clark Gable/Spencer Tracy movie, today the heroism and
wildness of it is undiminished. Drills snake like serpents thousands of feet
below the surface, the drillbits rigged up with nuclear magnetic resonance
scanners to sniff out the last dregs of oil; and this is not happening in sunny
Texas, but in Force 10 gales off the Shetlands, or in the Arctic in conditions
which cannot be imagined if you've never been there. That heroism, and that
intrinsic scale of risk, is so fundamental to oil that the mysteries of
cartelisation are just absolutely necessary antidotes; the framework that is
bolted over the chaos of discovery, glut, famine, amid constant fears the stuff
is running out (and it is!).

This brings me to the second reason why oil is not like anything else.
Capitalism obeys Liebig's Law.

Justus, Baron von Liebig was the famous German agro-chemist who
influenced Marx more than any natural scientist, even Darwin, because it
was Liebig who persuaded Marx that capitalism has a long-run natural
resource problem, and that capitalist agriculture wrecks soil fertility.
Liebig's Law states: whatever necessity is least abundantly available
(relative to per capita requirements) sets an environment's carrying
capacity, or an economy's growth limit-point. And energy has ALWAYS
served that role in capitalism.

Oil production is self-limiting. Last year global prduction
was around 27bn bbls. Whatever level of potential demand exists, it
cannot rise much above that. This is an irony of capitalism, which to survive
must grow: yet which depends on a resource of which production is and always
will be subject to physical limitations.

This is why the 'oil model' cannot be generalised to some future
semi-feudal post-capitalism (and I agree that the feudalist insight is
particularly fruitful: how else can you explain contemporary Russia,
for example, except as a type of neo-feudalism?). The reason is clear:
capitalist accumulation is a discontinuous, open-ended historical
process which depends upon a secular rise in labour-productivity.
OIL IS THE ONLY PERMISSIBLE EXCEPTION TO THIS RULE.

'Replacement-only' equilibrium models are as old as capitalism itself;
Hilferding had a good one. But they are always wrong. Capitalism
obeys one iron law -- it has to continually revolutionise the means of
production. And it cannot 'regress' to feudalism. To do so would be to
risk politicising its fate in potentially catastrophic ways (the alternative
to autarkic national socialism, is always and can only be a revolutionary
demarche).

Even if its immanent laws of motion didn't make it like that, history gives
world-capitalism no room to manoeuvre: Wallerstein is right, and the system
is caught in a three-way scissors, between resource-depletion, environmental
degradation, and a burgeoning 'reserve army'.

The Final Crisis of Capitalism cannot have the inevitability that the
thinkers of the Second International imagined, an effortless growing-
over which the masses can calmly observe. Peter is right: we can get
catastrophes, we can get barbarism -- this will not be a new world order,
because let's face it, even feudalism, perhaps especially feudalism,
had its cultural eclat and brilliance, but this won't, this will be a feudalism
of gulags and camps, mind-control and cloning. It won't rank as a society,
or a mode of production, but as a *system* of production and a *technology*
of control. It can only be the antechamber of revolution.

Mark Jones

Richard K. Moore wrote:

> 2/27/98, Peter Grimes wrote:
> >1. I agree with both Mark & Carl that capitalism is a
> >SOCIAL RELATION of class exploitation, and could well survive a
> >major demographic contraction. Nevertheless, such a contraction
> >could certainly qualify as a "catastrophe." Hence one can
> >believe both in the survival of some form of capitalism AND a
> >global collapse of contemporary civilization.
>
> I'm going to re-post something I posted on this topic on 2 Feb, because it
> didn't get much response and the topic has resurfaced. Hope it gets more
> notice this time around...
>
> rkm
>
> ~=-=-=-=-=~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~-~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~=-=-=-=-=-=-=~
> I challenge this assumption of collapse. There indeed must be a dialectic
> transformation in the economic system, for the simple fact that eternal
> growth is not possible. But that does not necessarily mean the global
> enonomy must collapse in the process of transformation, nor that the
> successor economy will be determined by popular will or action.
>
> My counter-scenario is based, once again, on the petroleum industry
> microcosm. Here you have the first fully globalized markets, run by the
> first fully globalized corporations, and you can see what the capitalist
> endgame has been in this case.
>
> There is still competition, but it is entirely sisterly - they aren't
> trying to drive one another out of business. They collaborate in the
> global management of production, distribution, and pricing. After the
> first century or so of rapidly growing markets, expanding territories, and
> shakeout battles, the industry now operates by a "cash cow" ethos instead
> of a "growth" ethos. That is more like feudalism than capitalism. Each
> "sister" has its traditional sources and markets, just like lords had their
> own estates.
>
> The adjustment to a limited-growth environment did not involve collapse,
> and it has not led to a diminshment of corporate/elite ownership, control,
> or power.
>
> My claim then, is that we must seriously consider the possibility that
> coporate neo-feudalism, rather than socialism, may be the dialectic
> successor to capitalism, and that the transtion may not involve revolution.
> (Other than the revolution of globlization.) I believe, in fact, that
> the empirical evidence favors the neo-feudalist outcome.
>
> I'd be interested in responses to this analysis.
> ~=-=-=-=-=~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~-~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~=-=-=-=-=-=-=~