B) Fuel Is a Raw Material & a Commodity

Petromarxism

[{Intro}, {A}, {B}, {C}, {D)i.}, {D)ii.}, {E)i.}, {E)ii. Conclusion}]

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i. Raw Material

A raw material is a commodity, but it is specifically the commodity to be transformed by the labour process. It is reproduced and transformed in the finished commodity. Crude oil is the raw material of the refinery. However, gasoline is not the raw material to a lawn mower: the fuel is combusted, not reproduced bodily in the cut grass, which is the objectification of labour. Therefore, fuel, after its initial gathering, refining, and sale to its end user, is not and never will be a raw material. The same substances (chemicals) that are sold for use as fuel can also be elsewhere sold as a raw material (plastics, industrial chemicals). But fuel sold to be fuel is no longer a raw material, which makes it less obvious that fuel is clearly a part of the means of production as a whole. 

Speaking of the refinery, it is clear that some forms of oil can skip these intermediate processing steps, but even those must still be transported. For the railroads, the pipelines, the tankers, fuel is a raw material, as it is for the refineries. Until recently, pipelines bought the fuel at the origin, sold it at the destination, and owned it between, and so were able to act not only as transporters but as brokers, playing the margins for advantage. For these businesses–for the oil business as a whole (in parallel with the gas and coal businesses–fuel is a raw material commodity. But not for the rest of the economy. 

For Marx, a raw material does not by itself create value – its value is reproduced in the finished product, but no more. This is why it is common even for capitalists doing their accounting to subtract the cost of their raw materials from their revenue along with the other costs of the means of production to calculate their net profit. 

Oil—petroleum derived chemicals—does act as a raw material for the plastics industry. As we know, such materials were originally unavoidable waste products that got incorporated into capitalism. Marx analyzes this situation:

“As the capitalist mode of production extends, so also does the utilization of the refuse left behind by production and consumption. Under the heading of production we have the waste products of industry and agriculture, under that of consumption we have both the excrement produced by man’s natural metabolism and the form in which useful articles survive after their use has been made of them. Refuse of production is, therefore, in the chemical industry, the by-product which gets lost if production is only on a small scale…But there is a colossal wastage in the capitalist economy in proportion to their actual use.” (Vol 3, pg 195)

However, in this situation, these petrochemicals cannot be considered “fuel,” a word which connotes its combustible use-value.

ii. Commodity

The entire archive of this substack is about fuel as a commodity. This is the domain of the Industry proper. It is obviously not the only branch of Industry that exists, but it is the one upon whom all the others depend. Therefore anyone invested in anything has an interest in maintaining an oil industry that can produce at all cost, at any cost. This is why the energy sector commands the fierce loyalty of capitalists everywhere in the economy. The guys in energy need to get rich in order for anyone else to get rich. This is the basic tenet of petrocaptialism. Timothy Mitchell, building on Michel Serres theorizes the relationship between the corporation and the oil itself as that of a parasite; the economic entity that sucks value out of the flow of coal, oil, and gas. This helpfully gives conceptual primacy and agency to the flow of materials itself. But we must also consider that the oilmen see themselves as the masters of their substance. It’s much less clear to the rest of us. 

At a minimum, it is clear that fuel’s specific attributes determine the character of its industry and thereby its relationship to capital and to the working class. Take, for instance, its state of matter: solid (coal), liquid (oil) and gas (gas). One of Mitchell’s key contributions to energy history is to show how the solid nature of coal gave workers a key point of leverage in their ongoing and accelerating conflict with Capital. As the century progressed, this became a key incentive to move the economy from coal onto oil.  Mitchell says that with 

“the concentration of energy supplies in large amounts at specific sites led to the creation of an apparatus of energy supply with which the democratic politics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would be built. Large stores of high-quality coal were discovered and developed in relatively few areas: in central and northern England and south Wales, along the belt running from northern France through Belgium to the Ruhr Valley and Upper Silesia, and in the Appalachian coal belt in North America…Great volumes of energy now flowed along narrow, purpose-built channels. Specialised bodies of workers were concentrated at the end-points and main junctions of these conduits, operating the cutting equipment, lifting machinery, switches, locomotives and other devices that allowed stores of energy to move along them. Their position and concentration gave them opportunities, at certain moments, to forge a new kind of political power. The power derived not just from the organisations they formed, the ideas they began to share or the political alliances they built, but from the extraordinary quantities of carbon energy that could be used to assemble political agency, by employing the ability to slow, disrupt or cut off its supply.” (Carbon Democracy, 18)

Somatic labour was firmly bound up in the sale and use of coal, and this is why “coal miners played a leading role in contesting work regimes and the private powers of employers” from the 1880s onward. Think of Ludlow and Matewan. Crucially, Stalin was an organizer in the coalfields of Georgia, which was a key contributor to the victory of 1917. Marx wrote during the buildup to the dramatic confrontations of the coal age, and he saw how coal-fired industrialism gathered workers together in key points, from whence they could challenge Capital. Since the machinery itself was in an early stage of technological development, coal’s use or function as a competitor to human labour appeared less salient than its material alignment with proletarian power. Nonetheless, I think Marx saw both sides, and we can, as well.

The second–or third, etc.,--Industrial Revolution was the unfolding replacement of coal with oil over the course of the first half of the 20th century. As a liquid, oil does not require shoveling; engines don’t require stoking; it only needs to be pumped, not mined. It requires much less human labour per unit of energy than coal, to produce and to ship. The payroll–variable capital–is greatly streamlined, profits increased, and the working class has lost one of its key points of leverage over the entire structure of capitalism. It’s not clear that Marx could have or should have seen that coming. 

In the world of coal, carbon consumption, total payroll, and surplus value were tightly positively correlated within any industrial concern. As technology became more efficient and as the hydrocarbons moved into liquid and gas forms, payroll fell out of that relationship, to stagnate far below the embiggening fuel consumption, which was overwhelming the complex system of the atmosphere above us with new carbon, pushing it towards tipping points to be realized decades (but not centuries) hence. 

With the labour intensity of its production largely (but never absolutely) stripped away, today fuel provides a low-cost alternative to human labour, and so an increased fuel purchase generates more surplus value per dollar than the purchase of more costly somatic labour. So fuel, as it moves into its liquid and gas forms, decouples the proportional relationship that says the more variable capital you put in, the more surplus value comes out. Instead, energy consumption becomes correlated with surplus value. Compare Google’s workforce to its energy consumption (or “carbon footprint” as the environmentalists would like me to call it).