E) i. Fuel Is Labor
[{Intro}, {A}, {B}, {C}, {D)i.}, {D)ii.}, {E)i.}, {E)ii. Conclusion}]
Fuel is a commodity, but it is a commodity with a unique use-value: work. In this, it is the same as the human being who sells their labour for a wage. Both humans and fuel set the means of production into motion, are operators of machines. For most processes of production, both motive powers are needed, but this is not a universal law. Fuel, specifically oil during the second industrial revolution, added to the intensity of labour expended at sites of production, including the sites of the production of oil itself. More labour is exerted per unit of the working day when fuel is burned during that time.
Understanding work in the sense it is used in the physical sciences, and thereby asserting the fuel does work, appears as a semantic argument, but it is not. In his book Fossil Capital, Andreas Malm comments on the dual meaning of the word power—the political and the caloric. That is a linguistic coincidence that does not extend to other languages. But the singular meaning of the word work, a meaning that accommodates both somatic and exosomatic energy, is not a semantic or linguistic coincidence. When it can be measured, work is measured in units of horsepower, calories, watts. Joules.
The appearance of fuel as a component of a machine hides a key distinction: the machine increases productivity, but the fuel uses the machine to produce. Fuel operates the machine. Usually this process proceeds with the (for now) indispensable collaboration of human labour: a worker also operates a machine. But that very interdependence between fuel and worker is also the field of the intense and perpetual competition to reduce and eventually eliminate the human share.
Following the second industrial revolution, fuel has been in league with capital to decrease demand for human labour. Competition for what meager jobs are available allows them to discipline the workers that do have jobs, to further depress wages, and so on. This is why, in the West, the dead god has found a firm and unshakeable ally in capital. In the Communist world, when there was one, where the state was/is charged with defending the interests of workers, fuel as a massive source of cheap labour was used to materially equip the country with the means of subsistence necessary to first defeat Hitler and then eliminate poverty and suffering. With an empowered workers’ state, therefore, fossil energy can be used for good, but it is not under today’s political regime in the West.
You may not be prepared to accept that all your work can be measured in horsepower. Your work is highly specialised (due to the division of labour in society) and therefore requires knowledge of techniques you have inherited from past iterations of work. However, when you look at any one of those techniques, what it is doing is channelling a flow of power along a specific path. Pure horsepower must be exerted, things must be moved, but only at the right time and place, and so your time is spent managing and correcting the flow of horsepower.
This then gives us two dimensions along which work is performed: the main stream of motive power that is brought to bear in a productive capacity, and the secondary regulatory work that precisely directs the power where to go and what to do.
Marx: “In many manual implements the distinction between man as mere motive power and man as worker or operator properly soc called is very striking indeed. For instance, the foot is merely the prime mover of the spinning-wheel, while the hand, working with the spindle, and drawing and twisting, performs the real operation of spinning.” (vol 1 496)
All work has these two components: the foot and the hand. The power and its manipulation. Both of these types of work are, importantly, clearly work in the sense that they both require moving objects in space (and in some cases require moving movement, or moving energy, moving work itself).
It is clear that this is how a computer works: by channelling current through on/off gates. That then covers the vast portion of the economic sphere wherein we are all engaged with staring into a screen. In earlier technical regimes, for example in steam, the worker used their somatic energy to shovel fuel as well as to guide, direct, and regulate machines. The function of the foot was first and most easily assumed by exosomatic power, but as machines get more autonomous and self-correcting, they gradually take over the work of the hand as well; no type of somatic labour is safe from being replaced by technology. Rather than a firm division between worker and machine, we arrive at a spectrum in which the work is distributed between the two types of workers, somatic and combustive. We see again the reason for the constant antagonistic competition between the two for access to capital.
“A machine which is not active in the labour process is useless. In addition, it falls prey to the destructive power of natural processes. Iron rusts; wood rots. … Living labour must seize on these things, awaken them from the dead, change them from merely possible into real and effective use-values. Bathed in the fire of labour, appropriated as part of its organism, and infused with vital energy for the performance of functions appropriate to their concept and to their vocation in the process, they are indeed consumed, but to some purpose, as elements in the formation of new use-values, new products, which are capable of entering into individual consumption as means of subsistence or into a new labour process as means of production.”
Today, you could also say, a machine which is not plugged in is useless. Exosomatic power and labour power are equally necessary to the process of production. Without these two inputs, the means of production lie still. It may be that the lack of other ancillary materials would also grind the process to a halt, but fuel/electricity is universally necessary in the same way as human work is, for now. The foot and the hand is today the engine and the worker, but we know that capitalists hope for and are working to create a future where the engine can do both types of work in their entireties. Without socialism, such a future will unfold in the form of a series of miserable and ongoing catastrophes which will eventually significantly reduce the human population, along with taking a massive toll on nonhuman lives.
Therefore, it would be interesting to see what happens if we consider the cost of fuel a part of variable capital, rather than as a component of constant capital.
i) Increasing Intensity of Labour
Marx places the beginning of the process of intensification of the working day at the moment when legislation began to regulate the length of the working day — prior to the workers’-led movements that resulted in the Factory Acts, capitalists captured increasing quantities of surplus value mostly by forcing their workers to work increasingly long and grueling hours. At the moment in which the length of the working day could expand no further, it became necessary to increase the quantity of labour that could be expended within the limited working day — a quantity named by Marx the intensity of labour. It is this intensification of labour, not an increase in productivity, that results in the growing piles of surplus value that accelerates the valorization of capital.
Industrialism produced more per day but not per joule. The source of the great acceleration was in the cheapness and availability of work, in the scientific sense of the word. The transition from coal to oil greatly reduced the dead god’s reliance on human labour; many more workers per joule were employed by the coal industry of Marx’s day than the lean, subcontracted workforce of the oil industry today. (which is not to imply that energy workers are not proletarian; they certainly are.)
In this way, along with thousands of parallel processes in motion, all of which tended towards using greater and greater quantities of exosomatic energy to augment and, at the ever-growing margins, replace human labour, or somatic energy. All of Marx’s analysis of machinery and large-scale industry (chapter 15) stands, but now we need to add to it an understanding of what drives the machines:
“Machinery produces relative surplus-value, not only by directly reducing the value of labour-power, and indirectly by cheapening the commodities that enter into its reproduction, but also, when it is first introduced sporadically into an industry, by converting the labour employed by the owner of that machinery into labour of a higher degree, by raising the social value of the article produced above its individual value, and thus enabling the capitalist to replace the value of a day’s labour-power by a smaller portion of the day’s product.” i.e. to reduce the necessary labour time, increasing the proportion of surplus labour in the working day. Also, replacing labour that is valued by the necessary means of subsistence with labour that is valued by pure commodities markets. This is why, as Marx notes, machinery and workers have always been in competition with each other. This advantage that the owner captures—Marx here says by raising the social value of the article, but what he means is by temporarily decreasing the individual value beneath the price, which represents the social value—exists only at the margins; as soon as all companies in an industry are equally mechanized, the capitalist must already be off trying to find a new way to increase profits through new schemes of mechanization and/or new ways to increase exploitation of their workers.
By simultaneously cheapening everything and increasing the intensity of labour within a capitalist enterprise, fuel hypercharges the dynamics and contradictions of capitalism that Marx identified. The necessary part of the working day is shrunk to miniscule proportions by the relative cheapness of the means of subsistence in the industrial age; leaving mountains of surplus value to be expropriated, placing capitalists ever higher in the stratospheres of Power and Influence, while workers become cheaper, more expendable, and more desperate. Add to this the lottery ideology of capitalism, its appeal to the fantasy of a gambler, its elusive promise that there is some way to Get Rich – to graduate from a worker to an owner – and you have created a working class willing to do anything and everything for a wage, and who are extremely hesitant to organize. All for the low price of $100/barrel. Out of all of this, you get a capitalist class even more powerful than what Marx could have envisioned, which strangles in its crib the possibility, sometimes even considered an inevitability, of Revolution. Now, late in the story, we find out that oil actually costs a good deal more than $100/barrel – it costs us the future, the liveability of our only home, the earth. Already, by the time this became clear to everyone, the capitalists had completely overrun global political systems, and there was never any other plan than to continue to socialize the costs and privatize the profits.
ii) How Does Work Generate Surplus Value?
In many ways, this is Marx’s core insight: workers are paid based on what they need to survive–the cost of their means of subsistence and reproduction–but they always generate more value than that. Marx divides up the working day (or any other period of waged labour) into two pieces of time: the time it takes them to produce enough value for the capitalist for the capitalist to recover the cost of the worker’s wages, and then the time he spends at work beyond that point. See this from the worker’s point of view: “Since his work forms part of a system based on the social division of labour, he does not directly produce his own means of subsistence. Instead of this, he produces a particular commodity, yarn for example, with a value equal to the value of his means of subsistence, or of the money for it….If the value of his daily means of subsistence represents an average of 6 hours’ objectified labour, the worker must work an average of 6 hours to reproduce that value….I call the portion of the working day during which this reproduction takes place necessary labour-time, and the labour expended during this time necessary labour….During the second period of the labour process, that in which his labour is no longer necessary labour, he does work, but his labour is no longer necessary labour, and he creates no value for himself. He creates surplus-value which, for the capitalist, has all the charms of something created out of nothing” (vol. 1 324-5).
The definition of the rate of surplus value, then, is expressed in the ratio between the value of the surplus labour and the total variable capital: s/v. In most of Marx’s examples, the rate of surplus value he chooses is 100%, which means that the total variable capital is split evenly into necessary and surplus labour. During a 12 hour day, this worker would perform 6 hours of necessary labour and 6 hours surplus. In the morning he works for himself, in the afternoon, for his boss. Not only is this arithmetically convenient, but it must be seen as a generally reasonable s/v ratio in the industries he observed (more specific numbers can be found in the appendix to Volume 1, “Results of the Immediate Process of Production,” in which he examines cases in which s/v ratios range from 100%-150%.
To distinguish it from the rate of surplus value, the rate of profit is the ratio of the surplus value to the total capital (variable and constant), whereas the rate of surplus value is the ratio of surplus value to variable capital. The rate of surplus value can expand even while the rate of profit falls if the amount of constant capital invested accelerates.
The rate of surplus value is grown by paying as little as possible for as much labour as possible, which has the effect of shrinking the necessary part of the day and expanding the surplus part. All other things (conditions of production) being absolutely equal, a capitalist can grow his surplus value by adding more workers, and correspondingly expanding their means of production to absorb the extra labour: more is more, bigger is better. But all other things aren’t equal, and they are constantly looking for ways to pay less for more work, which is the cause of their inherently antagonistic relationship with the working class.
In 2019, the Tricontinental found that the s/v ratio of the iPhone production process was 2458%. So those workers are 25 times more exploited than the ones Marx studied. Did all this extra free work come only from making the existing somatic work that is bought with wages more efficient? At first this appears reasonable, but at some nebulous point, maybe between 10x-15x, all attributable to efficiency, it begins to look like we are saying that something has been created from nothing. Marx acknowledges and even emphasises that a quantitative change can become so great that we are left in a whole new qualitative environment; a new regime takes hold wherein technology is actively augmenting human and replacing labour with its own, rather than simply assisting humans in their labour. Classical capitalism has accelerated into petrocapitalism, which can only be fought with petrocommunism.
iii) What changes if we consider fuel to be a part of variable capital?
The average price for a unit of labour plummets. It is as if wages have decreased drastically: the owner gets more work for less money. Marx examined the scenario in which wages fall, but it did not mark a signature dynamic of the capitalism of his day. In this scenario, “there is a release of variable capital…the same quantity of labour is set in motion with less money than before, and in this way the unpaid portion of labour is increased at the cost of the paid portion.” The decrease in the cost of labour becomes an increase in surplus value. “Variable capital can also be set free if the development of productivity leads to a reduction in the number of workers required to set the same amount of constant capital in motion, with the rate of wages remaining the same” (vol. 3, pg 212).
The cost of human labour is determined by the worker’s needs of sustenance, his cost of reproducing his own labour. Similarly, the cost of oil is determined by the oil industry’s cost of reproducing itself, the cost required to replace the burned fuel with fresh fuel, to keep the flow constant. However, the amount of that cost is determined in this case by oil executives, a smaller cabal of people who are much more able to coordinate with each other than the working class is able to coordinate with itself. And so it is, that by trickery and politics, that they are sometimes able to nudge the price of oil into the upper pricing tiers where their companies not only subsist, but become fonts of wealth. And barely ever approach the cost of human labour, which almost always will be more expensive than fuel. Since the natural supply of crude is rarely if ever truly in shortage, the cartel can collectively decide the price of oil in cartel format, and there is a wide field on which they play.
Therefore, the decrease in the average cost of labour accelerates the capitalist’s accumulation at the cost of the workers’ livelihoods. This reflects the reality of the capitalist world in which we live. As industrialization proceeds, the part of capital that goes to workers has gotten smaller and smaller, while the constant capital portion has gotten larger. Marx, as the process of accumulation and centralization of capital proceeds, the relative amount of variable capital decreases relative to the amount of constant capital: that is, the bigger an industrial concern, the more it needs to invest in means of production.. This does, indeed, describe what has happened in the economy since Marx. My clarification of this is that this process is assisted by the accelerating dependence upon fuel. By powering the machines bought by constant capital, of course. But also by replacing expensive labour with cheap labour. The cost of fuel does come out of the variable portion of capital, but that cost is so small relative to the value of human labour that its use shrinks the payroll. This accelerates the accumulation of capital tremendously. And it holds as true within the oil industry as it does in all other industries. “The higher the productivity of labour, the greater is the pressure of the worker on the means of employment, the more precarious therefore becomes the condition for their existence, namely the sale of their own labour power for the increase of alien wealth.” (Vol. 1, 798).
Fuel accelerates the capitalists’ perpetual antagonism with their own employees and subcontractors by accelerating the process of accumulation. And it aggravates the enmity between businesses and society because society is forced to bear the true costs of catastrophic warming and ecosystem collapse. Just as the coalfields were the major battlefield of the organizers and revolutionaries of the 19th century, so today, control of the energy industry ought to be a key site of contestation by Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries. Of course, if we ever attain that power over the energy sector, we would radically shrink the industry to a trickle of what it is today, to allow economic energy (capital) be directed toward building a decentralized grid of opportunistic energy (wind and solar) over a base load provided by nuclear thorium reactors.