Re: Oil

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

dms wrote:
> I think it's amazing that we you can bring this up about coal and ignore
> it's implications for your own arguments.  Coal reserves left underground
> and the decline in production of coal have nothing to do with the
> "geological reserves"  the pre-existing supply.  It has everything to do
> with the internal logic of capitalist production. A more profitable, cheaper
> source, in production and use, was found, oil
>
> That's economics, social logic.  Not science.

However, the key to the substitution of oil for coal is not that it is 
cheap, but that it lends itself to mass transportation of the sort that 
revolutionized modern industry and warfare. A coal powered jet plane is 
not very feasible.

What is missing entirely from DMS's calculations is the *use value* of 
oil, which far transcends its value as a commodity. In the latest issue 
of Monthly Review (http://www.monthlyreview.org), which is devoted to 
papers presented at a conference on imperialism in honor of Harry 
Magdoff, there is one titled "The New Geopolitics" by Michael Klare, who 
is something of an expert on the relationship between oil and 
imperialism. He calls attention to the importance of oil as a sine qua 
non for military and industrial hegemony. Whether the price of oil is 
going up this year or next would shrink in importance compared to the 
following considerations:

The war against Iraq was intended to provide the United States with a 
dominant position in the Persian Gulf region, and to serve as a 
springboard for further conquests and assertion of power in the region. 
It was aimed as much, if not more, at China, Russia, and Europe as at 
Syria or Iran. It is part of a larger process of asserting dominant U.S. 
power in south-central Eurasia, in the very heartland of this 
mega-continent.

But why specifically the Persian Gulf/Caspian Sea area, and why now? In 
part, this is so because this is where most of the world’s remaining oil 
is located—approximately 70 percent of known petroleum reserves. And you 
have to think of oil not just as a source of fuel—although that’s very 
important—but as a source of power. As U.S. strategists see it, whoever 
controls Persian Gulf oil controls the world’s economy and, therefore, 
has the ultimate lever over all competing powers.

In September 1990, then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney told the Senate 
Armed Services Committee that Saddam Hussein would acquire a 
“stranglehold” over the U.S. and world economy if he captured Saudi 
Arabia’s oilfields along with those of Kuwait. This was the main reason, 
he testified, why the United States must send troops to the area and 
repel Hussein’s forces. He used much the same language in a speech last 
August to the Veterans of Foreign Wars. I believe that in his mind it is 
clear that the United States must retain a stranglehold on the world 
economy by controlling this area. This is just as important, in the 
administration’s view, as retaining America’s advantage in military 
technology.

Ten years from now, China is expected to be totally dependent on the 
Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea area for the oil it will need to 
sustain its economic growth. Europe, Japan, and South Korea will be in 
much the same position. Control over the oil spigot may be a somewhat 
cartoonish image, but it is an image that has motivated U.S. policy 
since the end of the Cold War and has gained even more prominence in the 
Bush-Cheney administration.

This region is also the only area in the world where the interests of 
the putative great powers collide. In the hotly-contested Caspian Sea 
area, Russia is an expanding power, China is an expanding power, and the 
United States is an expanding power. There is no other place in the 
world like this. They are struggling with one another consciously and 
actively. The Bush administration is determined to dominate this area 
and to subordinate these two potential challengers and prevent them from 
forming a common front against the United States. (For more on the 
emerging power struggle in the Caspian Sea basin, see my Resource Wars: 
The New Landscape of Global Conflict [Henry Holt/Metropolitan, 2001].)


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