RE: Hummers

["bon moun" <sherrynstan@xxxxxxx>]

Forgive me if I seem presumptuous.  I have never worked in the petroleum
sector, and I don't have letters behind my name, but I still haven't
seen a real rebuttal of the point some of us have been trying to make
about oil.

Appeals to competing authorities notwithstanding, I am reminded that
Marx, I can't remember chapter and verse, noted in his analysis of gold
as money that the gold itself could not be reduced to a symbol and that
it retained its materiality even as it took on all its social
characteristics as universal equivalent.

I don't want to get wound around a speculative academic axle here on
exactly how scarce oil might be, and how we define scarcity.  I don't
think anyone has ever suggested we adopt the neomalthusian point of view
wholesale - with its input/output interpretation of this commodity.
Certainly there are countless variables that will impact the rate of
extraction, the price, etc, of petroleum.  Deep, synchronized, worldwide
depression would be a very effective conservation mechanism, eg.

But the substance oil is finite, and that is unarguable.  The actually
existing amount of oil in the earth's crust is not a function of any
social dynamic except for its extraction.

It is also different in a fundamental way from other commodities,
because it provides an irreplaceable physical energetic basis for the
(profoundly social, as Hornborg points out) technology that defines
society.  I don't personally regard this as an anti-marxian heresy, but
a logical and necessary development of historical materialism as a
method.

The price of oil is determinative in ways also too numerous to recount
here, but there is absolutely not one shred of doubt that some kind of
Hubbert-like peak actually lies latent in every oil patch, which might
be shifted by the introduction of one or another technology (ALSO
circumscribed by the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics), but a halfway point
exists, defined not by quantity but by the amount of energy it will take
to lift it out and refine it, and that mediated to some extent by
socio-economic factors.

US reserves have been in permanent decline for some decades now, as are
Russian, and probably Chinese.  It was an Achilles heel for the Soviet
challenge, and it is emerging as one for the Chinese challenge, too.
The US relation to Gulf states was the basis of the post-70s upwave by
the US, and a restructured relation to the Gulf states is what is being
attempted now.  Oil is central to this.

And even though currency issues related to petroleum since the crisis of
accumulation in the mid-70s, abandonment of gold standard, etc, etc, are
surface forms and manifestations of the motive forces at work in the
core of global capitalism, these are nonetheless real, and they transmit
real signals, if you will, back to the core, where the class struggle is
being fought out.  The exploitation of the global south by the northern
capitalist metropoles has devolved yet again into a form of
inter-imperialist rivalry combined with fresh regional and national
challenges to US hegemony in a period when the trickery of neoliberalism
is losing its efficacy and the deferred crisis of the mid-70s is back
with a vengeance - in a world grown even larger and more energy
dependent.  The euro challenge to dollar hegemony is one weapon being
deployed in this struggle.  And the very basis of dollar hegemony -
behind its status as global reserve currency - is oil.

This new period has confronted capitalism with an internal AND external
contradiction.  The latter has been in the making for over a century;
the thermodynamic wall.

The current conjuncture is certainly well-overdetermined.  I don't think
anyone has suggested some kind of oil essentialism in seeking the roots
of the war.

But when overproduction, deflationary challenges from China to the US,
dollar hegemony challenges, regional challenges like the EU, rebellion
in the Western hemisphere, etc, etc, etc, concentrate the focus of this
dangerous and dying empire on Iraq, of all the places in the world, we
should be asking why in very concrete ways.

My sense is that there is a recognition of the exceptional nature of oil
as a commodity, and it reflects, albeit not totally consciously, this
deeper-than-merely-social material reality that is energy-matter, and
that the struggle over control of this commodity points us to some real
questions about an aspect of capitalism that Marx only just obliquely
glimpsed in his inquiries of soil fertility - and that is an impregnable
thermodynamic wall that surrounds capitalism.

I think some of differ about how close we are to that wall, but I for
one am absolutely convinced that it exists, and that it influences the
present period.

Forgive me if this doesn't hang together as coherently as it should, but
we are underslept hereabouts due to some outside issues.