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Date: Sat, 7 Mar 1998 20:56:54 -0400
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From: caffentz@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (Constantine G. Caffentzis)
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Geology and the Oil Producing Proletariat

Ian Chambers, director of the Office for Central America of the ILO (of the
United Nations), declared that the indigenous population of the world,
estimated at 300 million, live in zones which have 60% of the natural
resources of the planet.
Therefore the "MULTIPLE CONFLICTS DUE TO THE USE AND FINAL DESTINATION OF
THEIR LANDS AS DETERMINED BY THE INTEREST OF GOVERNMENTS AND COMPANIES IS
NOT SURPRISING(...)THE EXPLOITATION OF NATURAL RESOURCES (OIL AND MINERALS)
AND TOURISM ARE THE PRINCIPAL INDUSTRIES WHICH THREATEN INDIGENOUS
TERRITORIES IN AMERICA" (interview with Martha Garcia in "La Jornada". May
28, 1997). Behind the investment projects comes the pollution, prostitution
and drugs. In other words, the reconstruction/reorganization of the
destruction/depopulation of the zone.
(Subcommendante Marcos 1997)

        The Iraqi people are not the only intended targets of the
threatened smart bombs. As in the previous Gulf War, all people around the
world involved in the production of oil and not totally subservient to the
plans of major oil companies and their US and British governmental allies
are also targeted.
        In the previous Gulf War this was obvious, but the political
situation of this oil producing proletariat is now different. In the late
1980s and early 1990s workers from Trinidad to Algeria to Nigeria to the
Middle East were in revolt against austerity and structural adjustment
policies imposed by the IMF and WB (Ryan 1991; Midnight Notes 1992;
Ihonbvere 1992; Walton and Seddon 1994). They refused to starve while
knowing that the most vital commodity on the planet was being extracted
from their land in front of their eyes without equivalent. They were also
inspired by the intifada which made it clear that a people's revolt cannot
be stopped by even the most technologically advanced oppressor. This revolt
was centered in the cities (from Port of Spain, to Algiers, to Lagos, to
Gaza) and the revolutionaries' demands were centered on their governments
and the IMF. At the center of this international intifada  against
austerity were the immigrant workers in the Middle East (especially the
Palestinians, but also the Egyptians and Yemanis), for they threatened to
upset the despotic regimes the US government still sees as its most
important allies and were important stockholders in the IMF.
        The Gulf War forced a total change in the composition of the
workforce in the Middle East. The Palestinian, Yemini and Egyptian workers
were expelled and along with them the threat of their demands for political
recognition in the states like Kuwait and the UAEs where they comprised the
majority of inhabitants. Similar defeats occurred elsewhere, e.g., the
anti-IMF movement in Algeria has been replaced by fundamentalist armed
groups exterminating whole towns and the Palestinian intifada has been
rigidified into the PLO's precarious control of a quasi-state in the West
Bank and Gaza. Consequently, the sources of insurgency the Gulf War was
directed towards are not to be found in the same places.
        The oil proletariat's revolt since the early 1990s has moved out of
the cities and into the countryside, e.g., in Chiapas in Mexico, in
Ogoniland in Nigeria, in Chechenya in Russia, and in the Caspian region
(Cecena and Barreda 1995). These people are demanding a return for the
suffering that oil exploration and extraction has and will impose on them.
They are beginning to put formidable roadblocks to the oil industry's
desperate advance to the last remaining oil areas of the planet . Shell,
Chevron, and Mobil are confronting "those who have been left behind," the
indigenous, the marginal. These are people that the Zapatista Subcommendate
Marcos speaks of when he refers to the protagonists of a "Fourth World
War." They are confronting the soldiers of their own governments as well as
the death squads of the transnational companies anxious to get at the oil
beneath them at any cost (Subcommendante Marcos 1997). They are the people
who are living on top of the most important commodity in the world and who
must be displaced and humiliated in order to make its extraction
profitable.
        These people, who have been living on the "margins" of industrial
development, have been forced to become protagonists in a new world war
because of the growing scientific consensus that world oil production will
peak in the next decade or two. Oil companies are now desperately trying to
position themselves to be able to stake out and possess the remaining oil
areas on the planet which invariably are in regions that had previously
been undeveloped. According to this reasoning, if the companies do not make
their claims now, they will be left out of the price boom in the first half
of the 21st century caused by a decline in production and an increase in
demand.
        This consensus is based on the work M. King Hubbert  in the 1950s
who accurately predicted that US non-Alaskan oil production would peak in
1969. Extrapolating Hubbert's work on the US to the whole planet,
geologists like Colin Campbell, Jean H. Laherrere and Craig Bond Hatfield
have noted that the number and size of new oil discoveries have been
falling since the 1960s and are rapidly heading to zero (Campbell and
Laherrere 1998; Hatfield 1997; Hartshorn 1993: 225-251). They also note
that the larger fields are usually found first, while there are diminishing
returns on new exploratory wells in the late period. Since oil consumption
is growing at approximately 2 percent per year, while the old oil fields
are drying up and new fields are expensive to find and exploit as well as
being objectively rare, a price hike of dramatic proportions looms.
        It follows that all the new profit to be made out of oil production
now lies in the geographical margins of the planet. But it is exactly in
this drive to the margins, all the horrors of the primitive period of the
oil industry are returning. Indigenous people must be driven from their
lands; previously uncontaminated waters and lands must be polluted;
cultures, peoples and ecologies must be exterminated. But these peoples are
resisting their extermination and are receiving the support of the world,
from the Chiapans to the Ogonis to the Papuans, and are stalling the final
advance of the oil industry.
        The US's ongoing threat to bomb of Baghdad at the slightest hint of
resistance makes it clear that any people that does not accept the
recolonization of the oil fields by the international oil companies and
their US and British government allies will likely suffer attack. As
Secretary Cohen paradoxically suggests, the Iraqi people have become the
objects of military assault because they have not overthrown the Baath
regime and on top of that would not accept the recolonization of their
country the US promises. This places them in the same position as the
Zapatistas in Mexico and the Ogoni in Nigeria.


The Gulf War and Globalization
        All the imagery used in the Gulf War to demonize the Iraqi state is
now being recycled to create the impression that the US government is
acting against Iraq in response to the exceptional evil  Saddam Hussein
embodies. But this planned attack is in line with the policy the US
government has pursued throughout the 1980s and 1990s under the guise of
"globalizaton" in every region of the world.
        In African and Latin American countries. globalization--which is
premised on the total control of the world's resources by transnational
corporations--requires low-intensity warfare, i.e., the use of lightly
armed groups (from death squads to "contras") whose aim is not to
militarily defeat the opponent, but to starve and terrorize a resisting
population that supports the opponent. We have seen its application in
Nicaragua, El Salvador, Mozambique and Angola. In Iraq, instead, the
dictates of globalization seem to call for a very high tech war. But the
logic is the same.
        The US prosecution of the Iraq war is best understood as the
contemporary equivalent of the British empire's Opium War against China
mid-19th century. The British saw their war as a crusade for "free trade"
and their major war objective was to break down the Chinese government's
perfectly reasonable (but "protectionist") resistance to opening up its
market to opium produced in the British colony of India (Rowling 1987:
80-84). At stake in Iraq is the right of the US government to control the
resources of the planet according to its desires as long as it presents
itself as the uniform of an international agency, be it the UN, the IMF,
the WTO or the WHO. This is the late 20th century version of an appeal to
the "natural law" of nations in the past that allowed propagandists like
John Locke to justify the colonization of the Americas in the 17th century
(Arneil 1996). This is the message the planned war conveys and not to the
Saddam Hussein regime alone.
        The Russian government is also deeply concerned, as indicated by
Yeltsin's remark that a US attack on Iraq could trigger "World War III"
(NYT 2/5/98). The planned attack on Iraq is an attack on its future as
well--it puts an end to the hope that the Russian state and capital may
draw some benefit from liberalization and that the oil resources of the
previous Soviet Union will not be monopolized by US and English oil
companies. With the intensification of its strategy of tension, the US
state is telling its Russian colleagues that their management of oil
resources must comply with the its schemes or else.
        The planned attack also sends a message to Asian governments. In
fact, there is a deep relation between Iraq and Indonesia, Thailand,
Malaysia, and South Korea. For all these states have tried to a
nation-state model of capitalist development in the 1970s and 1980s. The
Asian attempt proved tremendously successful capitalistically in the 1980s
and appeared to be an alternative development model for previously
colonized countries. But this alternative was thrown into crisis this last
year. In this case too, the US response to the crisis is to demand the
right of absolute surveillance. Just as the Iraqis have to show the US
government every secret nook in the country, similarly the Thais,
Indonesians and Koreans have to "open up their books" to show the IMF
(backed by the US government) all their dealings and, of course, gain their
approval in order to survive.
        The US government is proposing a global Panopticon ("all seeing")
regime, where everything that occurs on the planet has to been seen,
controlled and approved by the US government (or its representatives in an
international agency it controls). Thus, the US is not only aiming to be
the "cop" of the world, as it did in the 1960s, but at the dawn of the 21st
century it aspires to be the "investigator," "warden" and "executioner" of
the "world" as well.
        On the most general level, the issue at stake in the Gulf War is
the possibility of any nation-state charting a sovereign path to its
existence and of a people to actively (or even passively) resist the
dictates of the world market (as roughly guided by the US government and
its supranational proxies). This logic can be seen working not only in the
case of former colonial countries. It also applies to "advanced capitalist
countries" as well. Consider the case of the joy-riding US pilot who killed
20 people in Italy recently when the tail of his fighter cut the cable of
the sky-lift they were on while he was trying to fly under it. The Italian
authorities who came to investigate the plane at its home base in northern
Italy were turned away by the US military police and told that this was an
internal US military matter. When the Italians asked for an explanation of
the catastrophe, the US government claimed that it used only its own maps,
not the maps of the country the military is stationed in, even if the local
maps are better and more clearly marked features like the ski lift! The
US's imperial gaze only sees war in any attempt to keep a secret from it,
while its own secrets become divine maxims available only to the blessed.
        Our question is: how long will those of us in the US go along with
this program for eternal war? Can we call ourselves what Frantz Fanon
called the French people during the Algerian War, "Sleeping Beauty"? Can we
let Sleeping Beauty still sleep, while the rivers of blood shed in our name
are rising?

Conclusion
        Let me end with a summary of my argument. and its implications for
those who want to resist a new Gulf War.
        *First, the threatened bombs over Iraq are aimed at the workers
there, because even the threat of an attack will cause the UN to pull out
the "oil-for-food" inspection teams and bringing the sale of Iraqi oil to
an end. The bombs might kill thousands, but the continuation of sanctions
will kill millions. The Clinton regime is acting as a genocidal God who
plays with the lives of millions at the slightest turn of the political
wind. Any people who let monstrous things to be done in their name to
others, should not be surprised that this monster will turn upon them.
        *Second, the Clinton Administration's strategy of tension is aimed
at the control of the world oil market for the interests of the major oil
companies and its allies in the Middle East. The US goverment demands that
anyone who will trade in that market must accept its conditions. At the
moment its strategy is the stabilizing and/or increasing the price of oil
while forcing the privatization of nationalized oil companies throughout
the planet. But the Iraqi government has refused to privatize its oil
production and its entrance on to the market will severely depress the
price of oil. Consequently, US troops have become the world market's
guards, opening up an endless string of wars, of low, medium and high
intensity to protect profits and market shares. (4)
        *Third, if you believe that the New Economic Order, often called
"Globalization," is a threat to your well being, then you should oppose the
Clinton Administration's strategy of tension and war threats (Midnight
Notes 1997). For the war is being planned to threaten all those who refuse
Globalization, i.e., those who refuse to sell their nation's geological
patrimony for a song or to sell themselves for next to nothing to
transnational corporations and their supranational allies (the IMF, WB and
WTO).




Envoi
        The Clinton Administration aims to frighten us by giving us
nightmares about the secrets of Baghdad. But it might be wise to remember
the Rumi poem that provided this piece with its opening epigraph. The
person speaking in the poem is a spendthrift from Baghdad who dreamed that
there was a secret treasure buried under a so-and-so's house on
such-and-such street in Cairo. On the basis of this dream, he traveled to
Cairo. After many misadventures, he arrived at night in rags and tried to
find the house with the secret treasure. It just so happened that Cairo was
going through a law-and-order craze and everyone found on the street at
night without an explanation was to be arrested as a thief. As the epigraph
says, he told his tale to a patrolman who was on the verge of taking him to
jail. The patrolman was moved to tears not only because of the truth of the
story. He too had a dream of a secret treasure; but this treasure was in
Baghdad buried in so-and-so's house on such-and-such street. Once the
patrolman said the name of the owner and the name of street, the seeker
realized that his own house and his own street was the location of the
secret treasure.

So it came quietly
to the seeker, though he didn't say it out loud,
"What I'm longing for lived in my house in Baghdad!"

But the same insight applies to secret horrors as well as to secret
treasures: though you look for them elsewhere, exhausting yourself and your
resources, they are in your own home! Stop the war! End the sanctions!



Endnotes
(1) I do not want to suggest that Saddam Hussein's Baath Party should be
defended for itself. It is not guided by the ideals of working class
solidarity or anti-capitalism. It has tortured political dissidents and
used chemical weapons against Kurdish insurrectionaries. For a discussion
of these activities as well as the transformation of the Iraqi Baath
Party's original pan-Arabic socialist ideology into a nationalist party
imbued by a cult of personality see (CARDRI 1989). No wonder the US state
has not been interested in deposing it!

(2) The genocidal intent of the Gulf War began to be known immediately at
the end of the bombing. For early data on the medical effects of the war on
children see The Harvard Study Team's report (Armijo-Hussein, et al. 1991).


(3) The impact of the threat of US military action on the work of "the
oil-for-food" inspection teams and the oil price has been widely noted by
oil analysts. For example, Geoff Pyne, oil market analyst at UBS Ltd.,
London, was quoted in the Oil and Gas Journal as having said that "the
threat of miliatry action introduces a huge amount of uncertainty to the
market. It also makes the future of the UN oil-for-food deal uncertain. If
the US is going to have military action, UN could not have its aid
districution teams on the ground. It could be that the oil-for-food deal,
which was supposedly to be increase, could be stopped. This is why the oil
price rallied [in late January 1998]" (Knott 1998).

(4) The US military's guard duty on the world oil market is going to be
even more complex and volatile than in the past. For after the Gulf War, a
"new guard" has entered into an oil market previously dominated by OPEC and
the major oil companies: traders from the financial markets. "[They] have
no innate respect for anything in the fundamental market, oil or
otherwise,...[they] profit by systematically taking short positions in
crude futures markets," said Edward N. Krapels, president of Energy
Security Analysis, Inc., Washington (West 1995: 9-10). These futures market
players thrive on volatility and the quantum shifts of uncertainty. This is
not to say that the long-run price of oil is actually determined simply by
the supply and demand curves of the neoclassical economists. For other
(though conflicting) Marxist perspectives on the value and price of crude
oil see (Massarrat 1980) and (Caffentzis 1992).



Bibliography
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Beck, Robert J 1998. "Growth in World Demand for Oil to Ease in 1998." Oil
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Caffentzis, George 1992. "The Work/Energy Crisis and the Apocalypse." In
(Midnight Notes 1992).

Campbell, Colin J and Laherrere, Jean H. 1998. "The End of Cheap Oil."
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Cecena, Ana Esther and Barreda, Andres 1995. "Chiapas y sus recursos
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Rumi 1996. The Essential Rumi. Translated by Coleman Barks. San Francisco:
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Ryan, Selwyn 1991. The Muslimeen Grab for Power: Race, Religion and
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Subcommendante Marcos 1997. "The Seven Useless Pieces of the Global Jigsaw
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Walton, John and Seddon, David 1994. Free Markets and Food Riots: The
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West, Jim (ed.) 1995. International Petroleum Encyclopedia. Vol. 28. Tulsa,
Okla.: PennWell Pub.



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