60 pages • 2 hours read
Timothy MitchellCarbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2011A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Introduction-Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Introduction Summary
Oil is often viewed as a curse. Conventional wisdom holds that countries that are economically dependent on oil, especially those in the Middle East, are often less democratic. Proponents of the “oil curse,” the name sometimes given to this problem, argue that surplus revenue from oil sales provides governments in oil-producing countries with the resources to “repress dissent, buy political support, or relieve pressures for a more equal sharing of prosperity” (2). The oil curse blames governments that depend on oil sales for the instability, corruption, and inequality seen in their country and surrounding region and ignores the role that demand for this type of energy has on these societal afflictions.
As a political scientist and historian of the Middle East, Timothy Mitchell sets out to provide evidence that will reveal that the conventional wisdom about the relationship between democracy and oil—that oil and democracy are separate ideas—is simply not accurate. Mitchell argues that there is an intricate linkage between carbon energy and modern democratic principles. Mitchell notes that his book is a study of “democracy as oil—as a form of politics whose mechanisms on multiple levels involve the processes of producing and using carbon energy” (5). He believes that democracies are “carbon-based” (5), meaning that the flow of and demand for carbon energy dictates democratic principles. Citizens in industrialized countries have developed ways of traveling, housing themselves, and eating that requires oil. Oil shapes their political and economic lives, leading these industrialized countries to also be oil states themselves.
This current consumption of oil is not sustainable. New oil “discoveries” are not frequent or sufficient enough to replace the current, dwindling oil reserves. The use of carbon energy has also injected huge quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, negatively impacting the planet’s climate. Mitchell also worries that the current form of democracy “that emerged to govern the age of fossil fuels” (7) may not be able to handle the end of carbon energy usage. For this reason, he believes it is even more important to trace the building of connections between fossil fuels and democratic principles. By understanding this connection, Mitchell believes that people may be able to craft a better political framework capable of navigating the end of the fossil fuel age.
Chapter 1 Summary: “Machines of Democracy”
Chapter 1 traces the link between coal and the rise of mass politics in Europe and the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Humans have exploited coal since ancient times, but this exploitation was on a small scale. Human capacity—such as the ability to extract coal from the ground and produce enough iron for pumps and other mining machinery—and energy—such as the use of animals to pump ground water out of mines and waterways to transport the coal—limited coal’s exploitation until the invention of high-pressure steam engines. Steam power replaced animal- and water-power, allowed iron to be smelted more easily, enabled miners to access coal buried deep underground, and helped in the construction of steam railways, which enabled easier transportation of coal from the mines to industrial plants. These changes gave rise to the usage of coal as a major source of energy.
This increase in the usage of coal enabled the development of large-scale industrial mines, factories, and the modern city. While large numbers of people moved to urban areas and worked in manufacturing, they still needed food (e.g., sugar) and industrial raw materials (e.g., cotton). Urban areas still depended on rural areas.
There are several key characteristics of coal-based energy. First, a large percentage of the population “in industrialized countries became consumers of energy generated by others” (19). Second, only a small portion of the population oversaw the production and distribution of coal-energy, but they handled it in enormous quantities. Third, only a few areas in Europe and North America had large concentrations of high-quality coal. Industrial areas assembled near these supplies of coal. People built water and rail networks “that moved concentrated carbon stores from the underground coalface to the surface, to railways, to ports, to cities and to sites of manufacturing and electrical power generation” (19). As a result, these large volumes of energy now flowed within these narrow channels. Finally, coal-based energy created specialized workers. Some operated the mining equipment, others operated the locomotives, switches, and other devices that transported the coal-energy, and others worked in the industrial centers.
Mitchell argues that the concentration of specialized workers at specific points along the coal-energy production and distribution processes allowed these workers to “forge a new kind of political power” (19). These workers could now slow, disrupt, or cut-off the supply of coal energy to make political statements, such as to contest their working conditions. This political agency led to the struggle for democracy.
Strikes and sabotage became common methods to “disrupt the flow of energy and the critical functions it supplied” (22). Often, strikes spread through the related railways, docks and shipping, and coal mining industries, and became known as “general strikes.” For example, miners, railway workers, and transport workers in Britain organized three nationwide strikes between 1911-1912. They formed the Triple Alliance in early 1914, which was an alliance between all three trade unions in Britain (the National Transport Workers’ Federation, the National Union of Railwaymen, and the Miners Federation of Great Britain).
Politicians of the time, including the British Statesman Winston Churchill—who at that time was First Lord of the Admiralty—strongly believed that strikes and sabotage needed to be dealt with severely. However, the duration and destructiveness of World War I (1914-1918), driven partly by energy from coal, undermined political order all over the world. Mitchell explains how “in central and eastern Europe these forces overthrew the older order; in western and northern Europe and the US they were accommodated within it” (25). General strikes in West Virginia, Germany, and Britain between 1919-1926 reaffirmed workers’ ability to shut down energy production and distribution.
After World War II (1939-1945), Mitchell notes that “the leading industrialised countries began to reorganize the relations between labour forces and energy flows” (27). Strikes drove this change. Countries, such as the US, replaced company unions with industrial management. Industrial management focuses on increasing productivity. Workers no longer received improved pay and work conditions unless they agreed to closer supervision, increased physical exhaustion from increased productivity, and the elimination of some jobs. This model of industry became known as the “American model”. As part of the post-war rebuilding efforts, the US exported this model to Europe. Both Europe and the US, in part driven by this new model, began to switch their reliance from coal to oil.
Mitchell notes that oil production and distribution is much different than that of coal. Oil more easily comes to the surface, which means its production requires a smaller workforce compared to coal. Workers also remained above ground, making them more easily supervised. New means of transporting oil replaced railways, such as pumping stations and pipelines. Mitchell suggests that “oil pipelines were invented as a means of reducing the ability of humans to interrupt the flow of energy” (36). Oil, especially when compared to coal, was light and could be shipped in large quantities across oceans. The invention of oil tankers in the late 19th century also reduced shipping costs of oil. Shipping oil by ocean required fewer workers.
Oil-energy did raise a unique problem for oil companies compared to coal companies. It was much easier for companies to compete over oil than it was for coal. Since coal was expensive to transport, competition occurred regionally, and coal companies avoided competition by creating cartels (organizations that collude with one another to set prices and ensure their dominance in the market) or organizations that regulated prices and production. Oil companies used their own form of sabotage as a solution to the competition problem.
Introduction-Chapter 1 Analysis
Mitchell’s goal in Carbon Democracy is to trace the creation and expansion of the oil industry, including “the ways in which people had explored for oil, built pipelines and terminals, transformed the petroleum into forms of heat energy and transportation, converted the income from those process into profits, and sought ways to circulate and govern those flows of money” (5). He argues that traditional studies of oil and democracy typically gloss over the oil production and distribution processes. Mitchell finds this problematic because it leads to scholars blaming profits from oil sales and their corrupting power on why governments in oil-producing states are often corrupt and undemocratic. These scholars ignore the particular ways that oil companies and western governments created political relations out of the flows of and demand for energy.
Mitchell also critiques how many experts, including many American experts, view democracy. The fundamental viewpoint of experts on democracy is that democratic politics is the same everywhere around the world:
[I]t consists of a set of procedures and political forms that are to be reproduced in every successful instance of democratization, in one variant or another, as though democracy occurs only as a carbon copy of itself. (2)
Experts of democracy argue that when democracy fails, as it often does in oil-producing states, then some part of the model is missing or not working properly. Often experts place blame on citizens of the country for not understanding or committing to the idea of democracy. The solution to this problem of democracy is to “manufacture a new model of the citizen,” (3) one who understands and commits themselves to the idea of democracy.
Mitchell staunchly disagrees with this view of democracy. He argues that there is no reliable evidence that the presence of belief or commitment to democratic principles, including attitudes of tolerance, mutual respect, trust, and other liberal virtues, leads to the emergence of democracy. Rather, there are numerous examples of “tolerant, educated, liberal political classes” (4) in Western democratic countries that opposed the extension of democratic rights to minorities and women. The political class in power would often use their own so-called civility and reasonableness to claim that only they were uniquely qualified to speak for minorities and women, or those who were not yet ready to exercise their own voices.
Within this section, Mitchell introduces a key theme of the book: Fossil Fuels Create Both the Possibility and Limitations of Modern Democracy. In Chapter 1, Mitchell illustrates how mines, factories, and urban life led to the emergence of forces that created the struggle for democracy. For the first time ever, workers across industries, such as mining, railway, and manufacturing, could use the vulnerabilities of coal production and distribution to disrupt the processes. Workers used this newfound political power to acquire or extend the right to vote, create an eight-hour workday and various social insurance programs (e.g., provisions against sickness, accidents on the job, and unemployment), form labor unions, create political organizations, and take collective actions through strikes and sabotage.
In the beginning, the political power of workers forced large industrial employers, like the Rockefeller Foundation in New York, to work with their employees. The Rockefeller Foundation created the first company unions, which allowed workers to negotiate their pay and working conditions. These company unions, however, prevented workers from joining independent unions. While company unions initially seemed like a benefit to workers, large industrial employers used company unions to weaken union power and thus erode some of the democratic rights workers fought for. Company unions were eventually made illegal through labor movements in the US and other countries. However, large industrial employers and industrialized countries never stopped looking for ways to reduce the political power of their workers.
The US, through its industrial “American model,” helped further weaken the power of workers after WWII. One of the key aspects of this model was to move both the US and Europe’s energy systems away from coal and towards oil. The US could force Europe to follow through with this idea since the US was helping to fund the rebuilding of Europe after the war. Mitchell suggests that:
[An] important goal of the conversion to oil was to permanently weaken the coal miners, whose ability to interrupt the flow of energy had given organised labour the power to demand the improvements to collective life that had democratized Europe. (29)
Thus, Mitchell argues that US government officials were intentionally trying to undermine the collective rights that workers in both the US and Europe had won through manipulating coal energy’s vulnerability.
Workers were able to use the vulnerabilities within the coal-energy system to push for collective rights. However, oil did not initially have these same vulnerabilities. Prior to the 1900s, oil distribution occurred in mostly small amounts for oil lamps and as lubricant for factory machines. As a result, oil was not yet concentrated in certain locations, oil regions did not become industrial or urban centers, and oil’s production and distribution did not rely on various channels (e.g., waterways, railways, etc.). These weaknesses restricted the political power of oil workers compared to their coal counterparts. Large oil companies exploited these weaknesses, further undermining the local oil workforce and oil firms. One example is with Standard Oil in the Austrian province of Galicia (part of Poland and Ukraine). After local oil firms refused to meet the demands of oil workers for better pay and working conditions, the oil workers sabotaged the fields. The Austrian government sent in troops to protect the oil fields. Standard Oil, which likely financed the strike, used the opportunity to both defeat the workers and put the smaller oil companies out of business.
Mitchell concludes this section with one final example of how oil limited democratic tendencies. Oil companies, in contrast to coal companies, faced far greater difficulty in avoiding competition due to the fluid nature of oil and its ease of transportation. Oil companies employed sabotage to solve this problem. Large oil companies made sure to control every single process through which oil flowed. In doing so, they were able to restrict the development of rival companies. By preventing and constraining oil production, large oil companies created a scarcity of oil. This helped keep them in control of oil prices and quotas. Oil companies and their home countries (i.e., Europe and US), rather than the workers, now held all the political power.
