D) ii. Fuel is a Part of the Technical Apparatus for Increasing Productivity

Petromarxism

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

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On the level of appearances, fuel appears as a part of the technological apparatus for increasing productivity. It appears as a part of the machine, and machines increase productivity. Marx defines a machine as an apparatus consisting of three parts: motive power, means of transmitting power to a tool, and a tool. I argue that if motive power is a part of the machine, it’s source isn’t: it needs to be poured or shoveled into the machine continuously, so it is also its own thing: fuel. 

In Marxism, productivity is the measure of how much product can be produced with a given amount of labour. Intensification of labour is the measure of how much labour can be expended within a given time.  Productivity is therefore seen as the efficiency of labour. The two other variable here is the quantity of labour (in terms of length of the working day). In Capital, Marx explains each of these variables by holding the other two constant and determines that “A working day of a given length and intensity always creates the same amount of value no matter the productivity of labour.” (vol. 1, 656). This is why when an industry as a whole becomes more productive, the social value of the commodity it produces decreases, sometimes rapidly. The market becomes swamped and the price of the commodity can dip below the cost of its production; as we have seen, this is a chronic problem in the oil industry: the problem that most dictates the Industry’s behavior and history. 

When the amount of labour, both in quantity and quality, remains constant, more raw material can be worked up in a working day by more efficient means: steam-driven spindles consume more cotton and produce more yarn than the earlier somatic machines. The absolute mass of stuff goes up in a day. However, since such conditions are independent of the labour market, increasing efficiency does not by itself affect the social value created in a day (or any other amount of time). That same value is simply spread over a larger quantity of saleable commodities, making each one cheaper, as each one represents a smaller amount of socially necessary labour. Efficiency makes for cheaper commodities, creating a supply that can be the impetus to find new demand, pushing the boundaries of the market as a whole ever outward. 

Fuel, specifically oil during the second industrial revolution, added to the intensity of labour expended at sites of production. More labour is exerted per unit of the working day when fuel is burned during that time. It did set into motion machines that also increased productivity. But not just that.  But, along with productivity, there ballooned a massive pile of surplus value, increasingly controlled by capitalists, as industrialization proceeded through its first and second phases. The existence of that surplus value can only be understood when we see fuel as labour. 

Nonetheless there is the consequential question of whether fossil energy is replacing human labour or augmenting it. If the former it should be considered as labour, if the latter, it should be considered a means of production. Marx says, “what exclusively determines the magnitude of the value of any article is the amount of labour socially necessary, or the labour-time socially necessary for its production.” So in classical Marxism, the introduction of technology is said to merely reduce the amount of labour time necessary to produce a commodity and therefore decrease the commodity’s value. Indeed, we have seen a radical cheapening of everything since the introduction of industry. A machine does not really do labour itself, but rather just makes human labour more efficient. 

But does technology actually save labour time? Extensive experience now shows, No, it increases production without decreasing socially necessary labour time. Thereby it is additive, not augmentative, with human labour. So it should be considered as labour, even while we also consider it a part of the means of production.  We will again have to live with ambiguity. 

Capitalists are always hoping to extract the most efficient or productive work that they can out of their workers. If they become the first in their sector to adopt more productive working methods, then they will likely be able to sell their commodities on the market at the old, higher prices, before one of their competitors adopts the new techniques and the competition between the two pushes the price down towards a commodity’s true value. The dynamics of this lie in the sphere of competitive markets and circulation, and not production, and is therefore left by Marx to Volume 2. 

This competitive dynamic, along with the fact that increased productivity in the areas of industry that produce the working class’s means of subsistence can make labour cheaper, makes increased productivity highly sought-after by capitalists even though it does not produce extra surplus value, strictly speaking. As industrial petrocapitalism unfolded after WWII, it created a general cheapening of everything, which did increase the quality of life of the working middle class, which was racially segregated, and those benefits were very inequitably distributed through society. 

But I have a problem with this. What I think I’ve seen in the last seventy years is a vast expansion in the mass of value that exists in our economy, Hoarded in almost all cases by the craven rich, who are richer as individuals than entire national public sectors. Productivity alone cannot explain this growth in the pile of wealth, not when it creates no real value. There must be more labour in the system, if the system is more profitable: human labour is added and added, of course, but there is a hidden font of cheap labour that has not been hitherto acknowledged: fuel. Machines do not create value but fuel does, because fuel does work. 

 It appears to me that the absolute amount of total value in our economy, along with the amount of surplus value, has rapidly grown in size especially during the age of full-blown petrocapitalism after the second world war. This is true however you want to measure value, but it is important for us to reconcile the numbers of the environmentalist historians with our account: people who track the mass of inputs, outputs, and waste products involved in our total economic project. Admittedly, comparing wealth across historical societies in different periods is not easy or straightforward; although we can adjust to inflation to some extent, much of the accounting is relative to the total wealth of a particular society, not absolute. For instance, people have said that John D Rockefeller was the richest man in history because he had the greatest proportion of the total wealth of his society. However, when we are concerned with the total material footprint of the Standard Oil of old and the oil majors today, it is the absolute scale of the enterprise that concerns us.  

 One such environmental historian, J.R. McNeill provides the following data for world GDP. I am not asserting that GDP represents the actual value of an economy, but one would expect the two to be positively correlated (Figures given in index numbers relative to A.D. 1500)

If anyone has better numbers, or can extend this data set beyond 1992, email me.

And so the world’s economy in the late twentieth century was about 120 times larger than that of 1500. Any historical plot you can make of this time period will have the same type of line: exponential asymptotic increase, taking off in 1950: coal production, oil production, timber production, carbon dioxide accumulation, global temperature. All these charts have that same signature asymptotic line. All of them show that the economy – the total value that it produces, along with the corresponding toll that production takes upon the earth and its natural systems–has rapidly accelerated since 1850, but much more so since 1945. To me, this can’t all be explained by increasing productivity, and we must note that it happened well after Marx wrote, and it makes sense we should have to evolve our thinking to acknowledge and account for it. 

The counterargument is that value is the only thing we don’t have more of, but that the same total value is now distributed amongst more commodities, and so everything is cheaper. But although plastication does result in a general cheapening, things haven’t gotten that cheap–cost of living is high. Alternatively, one could argue that value is tied to money and therefore was only allowed to expand beyond the world’s stores of gold after it was taken off the gold standard. These explanations are unsatisfactory compared to mine: All of this excess wealth comes from the labour done by fuel. Now that the length of the working day cannot be materially increased in developed societies, the intensity of labour grows. This extra work done per hour is done by harnessing exosomatic energies, not by ‘increased efficiency.’

(People tend to look at population growth as the cause and not the effect of the great acceleration. In this they are wrong, population growth is just another effect of the exosomatic energy regime.)

In Marx’s account, increased productivity or efficiency does benefit the capitalist class as a whole, but it does not value the capitalist who makes his own production system more efficient. This benefit is always displaced one step on the value chain, as the increased productivity in a preceding industry results in a cheaper raw material for the next:

“The increased profit that a capitalist [who has invested in textile spinning mills]  obtains through a fall in the cost of cotton and spinning machinery, for example, is the result of an increase in labour productivity, and indeed not in the spinning mill, but rather in the production of machines and cotton. A smaller amount of expenditure on the conditions of labour is needed in order to objectify a given quantity of labour, and thus appropriate a given quantity of surplus labour. The costs of appropriating a certain quantity of surplus labour therefore fall.”

Improved machinery then is seen as increasing profit not directly by driving production of a greater amount of commodity, but by saving money on constant capital. This raises the rate of surplus value and the rate of profit, and the fact that the value is realized by the company after you on the production chain provides powerful incentive for vertical integration. This type of savings on the means of production, economizing on constant capital, can affect the rate of surplus value, but not the absolute amount of surplus value, which can only be increased by adding labour. Nonetheless, the fact that savings on constant capital greatly improves the rate of surplus value and the rate of profit, capitalists will go to any length to economize on the means of production: “This economy extends to crowding workers into confined and unhealthy premises, a practice which in capitalist parlance is called saving on buildings; squeezing dangerous machines into the same premises and dispensing with any means of protection against these dangers; neglect of precautionary measures in those production processes whose very nature is harmful to health or involves risk, as in mining, etc. Not to speak of the absence of all provisions that would make the production process humane, comfortable or simply bearable for the worker. From the standpoint of the capitalist this would be a senseless and purposeless waste. Yet for all its stinginess, capitalist production is thoroughly wasteful with human material, just as its way of distributing its products through trade, and its manner of competition, make it very wasteful of material resources, so that it loses for society what it gains for the individual capitalist” (vol 3, 180). Marx goes on in the same passage:

“If the value of commodities is determined by the necessary labour-time contained in them and not simply by labour-time as such, it is capital that first makes a reality of this mode of determination and immediately goes on to reduce continually the labour socially necessary for the production of a commodity. The price of the commodity is therefore reduced to a minimum through reducing to a minimum each part of the labour required to produce it.”

In this reading then, fuel does not increase total value but is a part of the mechanism by which commodities are reduced to their cheapest possible prices. My problem is that there is more than cheapness to today’s economy – there is also great excess that needs to be wasted; a huge mountain of accumulation that is not explained merely by an increase of productivity.