Re: Hummers

["lvnadal" <lvnadal@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "bon moun" <sherrynstan@xxxxxxx>
To: <marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, April 06, 2003 2:55 PM
Subject: RE: Hummers
> Forgive me if I seem presumptuous.  I have never worked in the petroleum
> sector, and I don't have letters behind my name
___________________________________________
No apologies necessary comrade.  And, having dropped out of college, and
never dropped back in, letters after the name are not important to me.
___________________________________________-

, >
> 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.
__________________________________________

I try to practice heresy as much as possible and never criticize others for
what I enjoy doing myself.  Oil is indeed finite.  The question is, is its
finiteness determining the current actions of the bourgeois order.  I
suggest it is not.  I think if we examine rates of capital formation and
rates of return on investment we will get a better, more comprehensive, more
revolutionary analysis of the situation.
__________________________________________


> 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.
__________________________________________

For the bourgeoisie, however, for capital, it is not the AMOUNT of energy
required to lift  oil, but the COST of that energy.  This is how the
fundamental distinction, and interpenetration, of use and exchange value
manifests itself in capitalism.

We may run out of oil in ten or 20 years.  The bourgeoisie will still be
concerned only with the profit from the last barrel and the hell with
everything else. My point is that the terms of capitalist production of oil
as a commodity overwhelm all other terms and consequently we must find the
cause for these current actions within the structure itself of commodity
production.
___________________________________________
>
> 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.
________________________________________

Disagreement as to points of fact.  China is largely unexplored, and with
little production.  Reserves are a cipher, an empty cipher.  Russia's
reserve estimates depend on the level of investment and profit-- ergo
British Petroleum's entry.  Russian production is up since 1998, with
significant bottlenecks appearing, not in extraction, but in transportation.
I don't like repeating things, but reserves exist as a relation to capital,
not to geology.
__________________________________________

> 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.
____________________________________________

Hangs together quite well, actually.  I disagree about hitting the
thermodynamic wall.  And disagree about the Euro challenge, but then I would
have to repeat myself.

Finally, I could go on with this for awhile, but the real point is to have
others think out loud.  I would love to pass the torch, (petroleum based,
obviously) if someone else is willing to take up my side.