I’ve been a Marxist since I read the Communist Manifesto in high school. I had an anthology of political philosophy – supposed to be like all the classic and most influential texts as determined by Oxford, so Hobbes, Hume, Rousseau, John Stuart Mills. For Debate – LD of course – I resolved to work my way through the book looking for value criteria. After slogging through hundreds of pages of truly incoherent, archaic thinking, when I turned the page to the Manifesto, it was like a light had suddenly come on. It was the only text in the book that appeared to be even talking about actual politics.
The problem was, my society did not encourage me to linger on the foundational texts of my newfound intellectual tradition. My English teacher provided, out of class, a photocopy of Althusser on Ideology. So it was that my Marxism skipped Marx, skipped Lenin and Mao, and landed me in the Frankfurt school where I stayed throughout college, as one does. For me, Marxism worked on the level of representation and the manufacture of culture. Only recently have I realized that there were historical reasons for this, which can be summarized in the phrase, “Congress for Cultural Freedom.”
But writing this thing that I’m writing–I’m trying to start calling it The Dead God Project, but it’s not catching on, even with me—and especially writing the historical narrative part of it, has required me to ask more basic questions. It’s become clear to me that oil (as well as its correlates coal and gas) have been undertheorized, their functions misunderstood. This thing is, after all, an object, a material, and we feel we should understand all objects as a class; either the philosophers tell us the world is a simulation and all objects are creations of our subjectivity, or we study the ontology and epistemology of all the objects together. They’re all sentient, or none of them are, and therefore the only reasonable way for me to make the assertion I want to, that oil is sentient, is to argue that everything is. But that’s not what I’m really after; there’s something special about hydrocarbons.
Particular objects are agents of massive global change, while others are much more well-behaved. Oil has a big personality. This is because of its importance within the capitalist mode of production, and the only way to properly understand this was to appropriate my wife’s copy of Capital (she’s the actual, legit Marxist scholar in my house), and dig in. Hopefully, you don’t need to have read Capital to follow along with my thinking – I tried to explain things as I went. But I’m not sure I succeeded in that. I’m also not sure that this essay is good, or well-written: I’m trying to think my way through a thing.
After I complete this task, I’ll have two different but compatible theoretical frameworks to place around the central petrohistorical narrative. How to frame the book becomes an interesting question. It is clear that the sentient oil conceptual framework is compelling to people, and most likely help to bring a larger audience to the work – it’s the part that got me started, as well, so surely it deserves primacy. But my values are more aligned with the Marxist framework, which is ultimately more useful for understanding history. So I have some decisions to make about how to structure the book, when I go back and try to reintegrate the following essay into the rest of the project.
And so I was required to begin at the beginning of Volume 1. If you are like I was, a self-identified Marxist who just hadn’t gotten around to Capital because it was never assigned to me and there are so many other books to read, I encourage you to join me in returning to the ur-text. Nobody else covers the basics in the way Marx does; everyone subsequent assumes the reader has the shared baseline understanding of capitalism as Marx describes it.
I think people know this, but: Capital is not at all about the society we wish to build; it is not at all about communism. In fact, I only know of two sentences in the whole three volumes that imagine an alternative, more just system. The text is about what is, not what can be. It is not speculative, but descriptive. And it describes the capitalism of our time even better than it described the capitalism of 1865. This essay is similarly about petrocapitalism, not the petrocommunist alternative I’ve previously presented.
Longtime readers know that my writing process is to type drafts and notes on the typewriters and then type it into cyberspace, revising as I go. This time, I did that and then printed it out and retyped the whole thing on my typewriters, and then typed that in afresh into the Cloud. While in some respects this process has created a leaner but more meaning-dense text, it also has opened me up to the possibility of repetitions. It took me a lot of work to figure out just what it is that I am saying here.
David Harvey analyzes the first sentence of Capital, which is “The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears an ‘immense collection of commodities’; the individual commodity appears as its elementary form.” (vol. 1, 125): “Notice something about the language. “Appears” occurs twice in the passage, and, plainly, ‘appears’ is not the same as ‘is.’ The choice of this word–and watch out for it, because Marx makes frequent use of it throughout Capital–signals that something else is going on beneath the surface appearance.” In fact, this is only one of two meanings of the word appears as Marx uses it throughout the work: it also is the manner in which something arrives onto the scene, into existence; i.e., how does surplus value appear? Out of what is it made? In this essay, I am inspired to use the word appears as thoughtfully as Marx did. Had I been Harvey, I would have written: “‘Appears’ appears twice.”
Also I’m going to spell Labour with a u because I can’t keep mentally translating between British and American.
My aspiration, as I load this up onto Substack, is to drop a section every three days – hopefully long enough for you to absorb, but not long enough for you to forget what I’m talking about, from one installment to the next. However, the last installment here will not be the end of this essay — I’m still reading Vol 3. It just stops when I ran out of text.
Please give me any feedback you can – comments are open, and also you can email me at thespouter@substack.com