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.
Themes
Western Countries and Fossil Fuel Companies are Complicit in Global Subjugation and Violence
From the beginning of Carbon Democracy, Mitchell details how Western (or industrialized) countries and fossil fuel companies are complicit in global subjugation and violence. The mining and transportation of coal created the first urban and industrial centers. These centers still needed food and raw materials, “such as cotton, sugar, rubber and gold” (85). Mitchell notes that trade could not supply Europeans with these items for two reasons. First, rural populations “typically preferred to use their land and labour to produce materials largely for their own needs, making only a small surplus available for export” (16). Second, once a place in the world invented a new technology, this technology was adopted elsewhere.
Coal-based energy did not follow this pattern because it “was both more difficult to emulate and more dependent on not being imitated” (17). Concentrations of large reserves of coal and iron occurred only in a few places around the world. The exponential increase in energy due to coal also gave Europeans a head start compared to other regions. Europeans also had an incentive to ensure that these other regions did not come to rely on coal since they needed these regions to produce their food and other industrial raw materials. Rather than relying on trade, Europeans implemented colonial rule over these regions. As Mitchell notes, “the industrialised world brought into being with the energy from coal was also a colonising world” (84).
After WWI, imperial powers needed a new way to control non-European countries and especially the Middle East and the region’s oil. Given the cost and brutality of the war, many everyday Europeans and anti-imperialist government officials did not want to see military forces deployed in other countries. Anti-imperialists government officials and the public also wanted to see more democratic foreign policies. The principle of self-determination and the doctrine of self-development, both of which the League of Nations endorsed, provided a solution for pro-imperialists. Europeans and Americans simply used a form of indirect rule to continue subjugating people around the world, including the Middle East. Indirect rule, coupled with violence or the threat of violence, allowed foreign oil companies and Western government officials to maintain control of the oil industry in the Middle East until the early 1970s.
As one example, the CIA in 1960 attempted to assassinate Qasim, who had helped overthrow the British-backed monarch in Iraq and was trying to take back control of the oil industry for his country. Qasim was in a bitter fight with the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC), a consortium of four of the world’s major foreign oil firms (today’s Shell, ExxonMobil, BP, and Total), over oil rights. Oil companies and US and British government officials likely plotted this assassination attempt.
While this assassination attempt failed, Qasim was murdered in the military coup of 1963. As part of this coup, the US provided “the new [Iraqi] government with the names of more than one hundred leftists for its death squads to hunt down, many of them prominent intellectuals, and Britain reported within a week that the ‘winking out’ of the Communists was succeeding and ‘the army has the situation under control” (149-150). Despite the murder of Qasim and many of his allies, IPC still refused to negotiate with the Iraqi government. The “method of provoking a crisis and delaying its resolution” (150) became standard practice for many foreign oil companies in the Middle East. The willingness of home countries to topple governments further helped foreign oil companies maintain control.
Mitchell also argues that the US was one of the most meddlesome actors in the politics of the Middle East. In fact, he suggests, using examples from Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Israel and Palestine, that the US intentionally created and supported enduring conflicts in the region. Mitchell believes that the US promoted instability to keep as much control as it could over the region’s oil supply. In addition, many US-based military contractors relied on this instability for their own profits. After a string of failures in conflict, the US was spending less on military weapons than in the past. These contractors needed to turn elsewhere to maintain and enlarge their profits. Many turned to arms sales to other countries, particularly those run by autocratic governments in the Middle East. The proliferation of weapons in these countries further worsened the region’s overall stability.
Fossil Fuels Create Both the Possibility and Limitations of Modern Democracy
In pre-industrial times, energy from the sun powered life. People lived in more dispersed forms of settlements near rivers, pasturelands, and farmlands as well as close to woods for fuel. Energy production depended on the rate of photosynthesis in crops, the lifespan of livestock and other animals used for food and clothing, and the length of time it took for woods, farmland, and grazing land to naturally replenish. Humans depended on large areas of land to meet their energy needs.
The transition from sun-power to the use of fossil fuels “released populations from dependence on the large areas of land previously required for primary energy production” (15). Coal and oil represent the compression of large quantities of space and time into a “concentrated form.” For example, the energy created by coal “would have required forests many times the size of existing wooded areas if energy had still depended on solar radiation” (15). People could now settle in towns far from rivers, woods, pasturelands, and farmlands and towns could grow much larger since they no longer relied on solar power.
Mitchell argues that the constantly accelerating supply of first coal and then oil “altered human relations in space and time in ways that were to enable new forms of mass politics” (14). The rise of coal facilitated large-scale manufacturing and helped to create the modern city. The struggle for democracy stemmed from the emergence of mines, factories, and urban life. Mitchell argues that “the socio-technical worlds built with the vast new energy from coal were vulnerable in a particular way, and it was the movement of concentrated stores of carbon energy that provided the means for assembling effective democratic claims” (8). The unique aspects of the coal industry, including the fact that high-quality coal was concentrated only in a few places around the world and that workers were stationed at key points along coal’s production and distribution processes (e.g., mines, railways, and factories), created a vulnerability. Workers could exploit this vulnerability, giving themselves immense political power. Workers used this political power to advocate for better pay and working conditions and voting rights. Coal-energy created numerous possibilities of modern democracy.
Workers’ power began to weaken as industrialized countries and large fossil fuel companies switched from coal to oil. However, there were two points in Carbon Democracy where it seemed like oil might be an instrument for building political freedom. The first was in the early 1900s. Around this time period, oil switched from illumination (i.e., oil lamps) to a source of mechanical power (e.g., gas for lightweight gasoline engines and diesel engines). Oil workers in Russia in the early 1900s especially benefited from this shift. The production and distribution of oil from Baku, a place in modern Azerbaijan but was part of Russia at this time, followed that of contemporary coal industries. As a result, oil workers were successfully “able to paralyse transportation networks and industrial activity across the Empire, much as coal strikes could in north-western Europe” (35).
The second is in the Middle East after WWI. Local government officials and workers in Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Iran, and Saudi Arabia pushed back against the refusal of foreign oil companies to develop the oil industry. These locals successfully stopped oil pumping stations, destroyed major oil pipelines, and refused to ratify agreements that did not give them the same access to oil profits as foreign oil companies.
In both cases, however, imperial powers and foreign oil companies brutally suppressed the political protests. The Russian imperial government crushed the oil workers by unleashing mob violence against ethnic minorities (or those workers in the Baku). British and American government officials and oil companies also used this tactic in the Middle East in addition to using guns and toppling governments to reassert their control over the oil industry. These actions weakened the power of workers in oil-energy, especially compared to their counterparts in coal.
Mitchell argues that the very nature of oil’s extraction, transportation, and use is what made it more limiting to democracy than coal. While oil is easier to extract than coal, it requires far greater “technical, political, and economic expertise to support the discovery of new deposits” (193). The geology of coal deposits makes the location of coal more readily known, whereas oil is buried deep underground. Coal workers work underground farther from their managers, whereas oil workers remain above ground closer to their managers. This makes the supervision of oil workers much easier. Rather than the workers themselves, engineers and managers control much of the oil production expertise. Railways typically transported coal. Tankers and shipping by sea replaced railways for oil transportation, reducing transportation costs and extending the oil distribution network. These changes to the production and distribution of oil reduced the number of workers involved in all the various processes and dispersed many of these processes over greater distances.
These sociotechnical aspects of the oil industry made it much more difficult for those involved in the oil production and distribution processes to disrupt or halt oil energy flows, reducing the political power of these workers. Industrialized countries and large companies exploited these weaknesses of the oil-energy system alongside using violence to begin chipping away at the collective rights that coal workers had won.
The rise of oil did not just impact workers’ own collective rights. Rather, Mitchell underscores that “the possibilities for making democratic claims were altered in both the countries that depended on the production of petroleum and those that most depended on its use” (42). The concepts of self-determination and self-development, as one example, support this claim. Imperial governments used these two concepts to maintain indirect rule over non-Western countries, particularly those in the Middle East. Their goal was to control production and distribution of oil-energy, while also reducing local objection to imperial rule. Imperial powers brutally suppressed instances of local objection, further undermining many people’s attempts to democratize their country. These two concepts further weakened domestic pressure in Britain to democratize foreign policy since the pro-imperialist government officials could simply say that the League of Nations mandated their indirect rule in another country and not that they were simply exercising colonial (imperial) rule. Thus, the principles of self-determination and self-development, which came out of a desire to control oil, inhibited the growth of democratic tendencies in both oil-producing and oil-dependent countries.
Relationship Between Fossil Fuel Production, the Economy, and Market
Conventional wisdom holds that “the economy emerged as an institutional sphere separate from the rest of society in the nineteenth century” (125). Those who support this idea believe that, prior to this period, the economy was part of wider social relationships. When market exchanges began to dominate social relations, the economy came into being. Mitchell notes that this idea ignores the fact that economists of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did not refer “to an object called ‘the economy’” (125). Rather, he argues that the economy, which refers to “the self-contained structure or totality of relations of production, distribution and consumption of goods and services within a given geographical space” (125), came into common use only around the time of WWII.
Mitchell argues that fossil fuels, and especially oil, played a role in turning the economy into something that was both measurable and governable. During the age of coal, the focus of economists and governments was on material calculation. By measuring the production and distribution of coal-energy processes, economists became increasingly concerned with the finite nature of natural resources. This led to a debate in the early decades of the twentieth century between economists. As Mitchell details, “one side wanted economists to start from natural resources and flows of energy, the other to organise the discipline around the study of prices and flows of money” (131). The second group won this battle, creating “out of the measurement of money and prices a new object: the economy” (131).
Oil made the appearance of the economy possible. The availability of abundant, low-cost oil enabled economists to abandon previous concerns about the exhaustion of natural resources. Instead, economists now “represent material life instead as a system of monetary circulation – a circulation that could expand indefinitely without any problems of physical limits” (234). This economic theory also keeps nature and human society and culture separate, an idea which Mitchell argues against in the Conclusion. Governance of populations occurred through the economy since each nation-state now had its own economy.
Mitchell shows the unraveling of this new form of government in Chapter 6. The transformations in control of oil flows and international finances weakened governments’ ability to govern their populace through the economy. The crisis of 1973-1974 paved the way for new forms of government, specifically the “‘the market’ (177; Chapter 7). Any conflict between rival political entities, including over oil, were now framed as a matter of “simple supply and demand” (177). Mitchell is critical of the market, largely because he views it as limiting democracy (many proponents of the market perspective argue that this is a good thing). It turns items that should be of public concern, such as environmental destruction, into matters of private concern. Think tanks, especially those funded by oil money, often control how these matters of private concern are addressed. Thus, the market is simply another way for oil companies and their allies to retain control and limit democracy.
