Re: [A-List] Oil-Led Development

["Macdonald Stainsby" <mstainsby@xxxxxxxxx>]

> I do not share Terry L. Karl's analysis below, nor the theory of
> so-called "resource curse" for that matter, but it is one that needs
> to be taken into account.  What might a historical materialist
> analysis of oil-led development look like? -- Yoshie

Well, I am certain the people of Iraq and Angola, Nigeria and indigenous
nations throughout Turtle Island definitely understand the "resource
curse". But you have asked a question at the end which is really part of
the problem. Oil, and the value of this hydro-carbon (with all it's
"collateral production" in petroleum by-products such as computers), has a
value that supercedes human labour. In energy terms, you would need to
have 12 people working full time for you with neither wages nor other
costs associated with their upkeep, to equal the energy of a single barrel
of oil.

Labour value cannot possibly be understood as what creates the value of
oil, and nor is this energy a standard issue "use value", either. It *is*
the energy input that gives most everything that makes yours and my lives
what they are the "use value" they have, whether computers or cars, or
even the food on your plate-- at least 2/3rds of which had to travel over
a hundred miles to get to you, much much more in most cases.

This unreplacable use-value-- the one everything else is dependent upon--
cannot be simply historically materialistically analyzed. It is an energy
value, a value that trumps human labour value by thousands of percentage
points-- one that needs to get worked into the very understanding of
everything else. It supercedes the rest. But when I see this in the header
for the article:


 But the
> experience of almost all oil-exporting countries to date illustrates
> few of these benefits.

Okay, this is a good starting point:

To the contrary, the consequences of oil-led
> development tend to be negative,

agreed.

 including slower than expected
> growth,

False, unless one is speaking of a periphery country-- the over-all
production of the resource, once undertaken, will grow faster than
anything else. What the "growth" problem this writer refers to must be in
the order of the financing of *other* development within the same borders,
based on the revenue of the oil.

> barriers to economic diversification,

Very, very true. All of the other forms of economic planning would be/are
completely dependent upon the oil/hydrocarbon energy anyhow, and as such
will never allow anything to exist on par.

> poor social welfare
> performance, and high levels of poverty, inequality and unemployment.

The example of Fort Muck bears this out in spades. As a result of the
astronomical speed of development going on and increasing, massive drug
and alcohol abuse takes place, and the people who get cut off the every
heightening bottom are move immiserated than anywhere else. Rent can be as
much as $1200 for a simple bedroom. If you are not working for oil, you
are not likely living indoors, unless it is cramped housing or otherwise
you have adjusted your living situation. Inequality is more stark than
anything I've ever seen in the first world. Unemployment, however, is not
a cause of oil development unless you are describing the absolute
destruction of *all* other non-oil associated forms of subsistence,
whether land or wage based.

> Furthermore, countries dependent on oil as their major resource for
> development are characterized by exceptionally poor governance and
> high corruption, a culture of rent-seeking, often devastating
> economic, health and environmental consequences at the local level,
> and high incidences of conflict and war.

No kidding.

In sum, countries that depend
> on oil for their livelihood eventually become among the most
> economically troubled, the most authoritarian, and the most
> conflict-ridden in the world.

Again, this is why reactionary right wing Texas-North Alberta is starting
to grumble in a major way-- Calgary's civic workers are on strike, there
is even a chance that the first trades strike may happen in the tar pits--
the first ever labour dispute in the oil-from-mud capital. This, alongside
huge backlashes all over the province against what has been done to both
housing and to health care, where nowhere near enough doctors exist.

They are re-writing the law to bring in thousands of "guest workers"
because there is no localized labour to get the work done-- migrant labour
that will destroy what little unionization exists in Alberta, and already
is a higher percentage of new arrivals to Alberta than landed
immigration-- along with the worst industrial environmental disaster on
the entirety of Turtle Island already, and you get the picture.

Canada is becoming a new petro-tyranny and is using this "oil" as a part
of the north American strategy of conquest in the Middle East.

Simple class analysis-- indispensable, no doubt-- cannot explain this. You
need an energy theory of value to understand this.



--
Macdonald Stainsby
Co-ordinator,
http://oilsandstruth.org
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In the contradiction lies the hope.
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