I have been transparent that my thinking on the role of fuel in Capital has been an evolving, dialectical process. After reading
’s evocative treatment of Marx, work, and the oil industry, I needed to remind myself what I thought.I went back and revised a clarifying statement to the section of my manuscript which will deal with this (Part I: Coal). It was a question of looking back at the end of the essay, seeing where I landed, and summarizing that up top.
Fuel was not the topic on which Marx wrote extensively. He was describing the main structure of capitalist production, which includes questions of energy but extends far beyond. It looked, to him and everyone in his historical moment, like steam. Steam power was visibly important to the development of industrial capitalism that motivated Marx’s pen, but the technology alone couldn’t explain the whole picture. We now have the luxury to zoom in on energy—after all, a huge amount of ink has been spilled on other ancillary topics in Marx, such as cultural production.
Though it feels rough and stolid today, fuel, in the form of coal appears as a slippery substance that shifts between categories in Capital. But fuel ultimately lands in the class of “ancillary substances,” that is, substances that are ancillary to the means of production.
Andreas Malm did very good work in Fossil Capital to describe the adoption of steam power in England.1 The main consideration for capitalists in this era was how to get leverage over their workforce, not how to become most efficient. Workshops that had captured motive power from waterwheels near rivers were geographically disadvantaged because many were forced to operate in rural areas with a limited population, thereby creating a scarcity of somatic labor and driving up wages.
After the steam engine was patented, it was easy to plug the rotating end in to the motive-power end of existing hydro technologies, and move the whole thing to the city, where the workers were cheaper. This incentive, however, was felt unevenly throughout different industries; weaving, for example required only somatic power and so could be done inside of households, and so the domestic organization of that end of the textile industry remained well past its point of technical obsolescence.
That didn’t answer my core question about the role of energy commodities in Marxist analysis. After staring so long at the potential actancy within fossil fuels, it had become impossible for me to ignore the fact that the use value of coal was, to some extent at least, interchangeable with work. Could this have been something that Marx understood?
Already, by Marx’s time, the word work had a clear meaning in the physical sciences: the force required to move an object in space.2 On that basis, I could define fuel as, a commodity that has the use value of doing work by combustion. This would imply a parallel definition of labor: a commodity sold to do work by metabolism. These are two different things, but it is easy to see why they would compete against each other on the market. For Marx, labor power was the capacity to do work. But did he mean work in the physical sense? Unlikely—it’s more likely he didn’t want to just say “labor power is the capacity to do labor” since that’s manifestly circular. If the words “labor” and “work” mean two different things, it is that labor is something that can only be done by a human, because Marx defined it as such:
“We presuppose labour in a form in which it is an exclusively human characteristic. A spider conducts operations which resemble those of the weaver, and a bee would put many a human architect to shame by the construction of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax. At the end of every labour process, a result emerges which had already been conceived by the worker at the beginning, hence already existed ideally.” (Vol. 1, 284).
To my understanding of the world, there’s no bright line between human and animal. A human is a species of animal, and all species have a dialectical relationship with the rest of what Barry Commoner calls the circle of life. Bees are brilliant architects and there’s no reason for me to believe that a hive doesn’t have its own collective consciousness.
It’s OK for Marx to be wrong about such a detail, the question of whether animals can have intentionality. It seems like that should not be a load-bearing piece of his analysis of capitalism. Marx is not a religion and Marx is not a prophet. His logic does not convince me: I think bees may well build their hive in their collective mind before they build it. And, as individual workers we may not have a better view of the end goal of the capitalist who puts us to work than the bees have of the entire hive. Each worker only needs the specialized skill put upon him by the social process of the division of labor. Seems very beelike.
But I was left with a problem. That felt like a small and semantic disagreement with Marx, though the stakes of the question were higher: if fuel does work, and labor power is the capacity to do work, can fuel be an alternative source of value? Perhaps it merely reproduces its value—its cost becomes a part of the value of the finished commodity. But perhaps it is creating more value than that, above its low cost.
This would reinterpret a plank upon which Marx built his theory, and so it must be wrong. Must it?
If it were true, how could I look for it in the world? Where would I find that value hidden away? What would the consequences be, and where in history would they be detectible? Just how heretical would this variation on Marx be? To answer that question, I had to begin at the beginning (of the three volumes of Capital, which I’d always been meaning to read anyway) and look at all the roles that coal has within the capitalist structure. At the risk of spoiling the ending, I realized that Yes, coal creates value by intensifying labor. Intensification of labor is the amount of work done within a given time, it can be increased by adding more workers, but it can also be increased or decreased by other factors, conditions of production, including machines which can be run by/operated by fuel. This way, if you are not comfortable with the idea that labor can be reduced to physical work (moving objects in space), you can still view the introduction of coal-driven production processes as an augmentation of human labor, which always accompanies the productive use of technology until some science-fiction version of “the singularity” allows fuel-powered machines total autonomy. Despite the propaganda coming from the power elite, we are still very far away from that day.
Intensification of labor is different than increasing productivity. Machines increase productivity, their fuel intensifies labor. Productivity only spreads the same value between more finished commodities, resulting in a cheapening of things. An intensification of labor creates more value for the capitalist to steal per working day. Since coal costs so little, only negligible amounts of its work are “necessary” to reproduce its own value, all of its work above that is surplus for the capitalist to steal.
My intention is that when seen this way, this is a mere extension or clarification of Marx’s logic, not a revision to anything.
Just using money to buy and sell things does not constitute capitalism; capitalism begins when you use money to buy something with the intention of modifying it with labor and reselling it at a profit. This is the activity whereby money becomes capital. In order to do this, money must be used to buy two types of things: means of production, and labor. The factory and the people who work in the factory. The former represents “constant capital” and the latter “variable capital,” which we can think of as payroll, the wages paid to workers.
Marx defines labor:
“Labour is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates, and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. He confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature. He sets in motion the natural forces which belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head and hands, in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adapted to his own needs.”3
Here, “first of all” means that this is what labor is in the first instance, at the beginning of the process of extracting something from nature and turning it into a commodity. Although this is more than the physical definition of “work” as “the force required to move an object,” motion is still at the foundation of this concept. It is far from difficult for me to imagine other “forces of nature” that confront “the materials of nature,” and it’s not obvious to me what is exceptional about man as a force of nature. At a minimum, the gendered 19th century language demands to be expanded to include women and indeed all gender expressions. But can it be expanded beyond that? Where must we draw the boundary between labor and work, and can coal do work?
Ignoring, as always, the screaming across the sky, except to say, Free Palestine
Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. London and Brooklyn: Verso, 2016.
Marx demonstrates his comprehension of this in Chapter 15, footnote 11.
Vol I, Page 283 (Penguin edition)