E) ii. Fuel is Only Sometimes Socially Necessary Labor
Petromarxism Conclusion (for now)
[{Intro}, {A}, {B}, {C}, {D)i.}, {D)ii.}, {E)i.}, {E)ii. Conclusion}]
It is one thing to argue that fuel does labour; it is quite another to argue that it is socially necessary labour, or that it counts as socially necessary labor in any one circumstance. To review, for Marx, a commodity’s value represents the amount of socially necessary labor that it embodies. If one producer uses a less efficient process than the social standard at any one time, they do not get paid for the extra labor required by an inefficient process. When a commodity is sold at its market value (i.e., when market forces like supply and demand are in equilibrium), “the total quantity of social labour which is applied to produce the overall amount of this kind of commodity must correspond to the quantity of the social need for it, i.e., the social need with the money to back it up.” Volume 3, 294.
Social labour is determinative of value because it is dear to us. A human only has so many hours of work to give in their lives, and since we are human, we understand that. Fuel, by contrast, is cheap by any economic measure, and so it doesn’t contribute anything at all to the social value of a commodity except by way of expanding the size of the society as a whole, which it does, furiously, thereby increasing the social need for any one type of useful commodity.
Its’ cheapness is how fuel replaces socially necessary labor with socially unnecessary labor, which hurts the working class. We have known this back to the luddites; machines compete with workers for their means of subsistence, and they do it by changing the composition of capital so that constant or fixed capital is a greater and greater proportion of the whole. Automation takes our jobs because it’s cheaper to do something by machine than by hand.
Except. We know now—we’ve known for a long time—that fuel is not actually socially cheap. Its cheapness is only an appearance, both in the sense that it looks cheap and that it appears in the earth in massive quantities, allowing it to appear or arrive upon the economy cheaply. This appearance masks a deeper truth: fuel is socially costly, because each tank of gas burned contributes quantitatively to our collective doom, which, as of now, we are living through rather than merely predicting. It materially threatens millions of the processes which comprise social reproduction. In the language of political economy (here used as derisively as Marx did), capitalism’s biggest failure has been to “internalize its externalities.” That is to say, it does not properly value fuel—or any other environmentally harmful material—on the market, leading to the liberals’ argument that if only they could carbon-tax the cost of externalities into the energy sector, the contradiction would be resolved. If we could only make it more expensive, goes the thinking. However, in the real world, this would only accelerate the widening gulf of inequality between the owners and the rest of us: the rich would be able to burn fuel with abandon while poor people would have to cook over wood fires, trash fires, plastic fires.
It would require instead much more collective intervention into the economy, such as the seizure of the energy sector as a whole. The goal is not simply to make fuel cost more, but to make it more socially precious, to conserve the amount of fuel we use while still guaranteeing power to hospitals and refugee camps, which are the critical infrastructure of the 21st century. To limit its use even though there is no and likely will never be a shortage of the natural wealth that buried fuels represent.
So what I’m saying is that fuel, for the most part, is not counted to be socially necessary labour, but it should be. This should be a key objective of revolutionary movements. When we attain power (by any means necessary), we will treat fuel as a source of necessary labor, which if used improperly can compete against and devalue human labor, and which inherently can cause a great deal of harm to people and their surroundings. This would reflect the true nature of fuel, a nature that capitalism obscures and alienates. A parallel argument could then be developed for plastics and all the other petrochemicals.
Again it must be said that theory can only speak in general terms, and I must leave the specifics of that project to the revolutionaries who will make policy based on their own context—a context which will, from here on out, always include catastrophic climate regimes.
In that context, they will not be able to eliminate use of fossil fuels. There will be a growing need for emergency power. Hospitals need to stay on, and backup generators will become primary infrastructure as the grid fails. We’re going to have to build structures out of concrete in order to protect our cities. Nonetheless, the collective desire to mitigate carbon emissions will become stronger and stronger in our hearts, and in our political will—we will become disabled by the cognitive dissonance of continued reliance on fossil fuels for everything—and we will seek to finally limit our emissions by any means necessary. Only a government led by a communist party can realize that desire.
—
In political economy, there has been no conceptual division between the socially necessary use of fuel and the unnecessary or wasteful use of fuel, even while Twitter users track Elon’s private jet.
This has allowed our class enemies to point to the social usefulness of fuel to justify their whole project of energy extraction and sale. Take for example Alex Epstein, who has a substack and also a book, “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels.” His whole argument is, “look at all the benefits we get from fossil fuels. Those outweigh the costs which I think are only small.” These “benefits” are the usefulness of fuel to society. Epstein cannot conceive of a world where both refugee camps and hospitals have access to reliable electric power, and yet at the same time, he doesn’t get to fly a private jet if he wants to, much less buy the profits of an oil company on the stock market. The logic of capitalism does not allow a poor person to have even a small quantity of something that a capitalist can’t have in bloated quantities.
They—as well as their liberal opponents—assume that access to fossil energy is universal or it is completely shut off and cannot imagine a regime for regulating access to fossil energy for everyone’s benefit. Meanwhile, they can imagine baroque and ornate structures to regulate speech and cultural production to stop people from criticizing the Zionist regime.
Under a petrosocialist regime, fuel would become the first major post-commodity: a thing that was once a commodity and is now recognized to be something more special and valuable than that. A thing that is precious but not expensive, and therefore that needs to be safeguarded by a public apparatus. Even if that apparatus requires certain “authoritarian” qualities, it will fundamentally be led by a more-democratic-democracy of the proletariat. Actual majority rule. It will allow us to use small amounts of fossil fuels where the need is greatest, while we simultaneously build thousands of un-meltdownable, zero waste thorium reactors.
Substack Housekeeping
The deal with the paid subscription is this: I don’t have any extra content and want to make all my online stuff available to everyone. At the same time, I also do want to make a list of people who will definitely buy the book if I publish it, whatever it turns out to be,1 (and capture some of that love in advance).
Also, I respond to all reader feedback (email thespouter@substack.com), but if you are a paid subscriber, I will respond to you on one of my typewriters and, should you so desire, mail you that letter. I may use some of that content elsewhere, but you’ll know it was for you. You do need to ask a question to spark the dialog, though.
However, if you subscribe now, be aware that there may not be any new content on The Spouter for a long time; I started this one in January, so apparently it takes me ten months to write something. I’ve got a lot going on in my life that isn’t this.
I am a very niche product; still under 1K free subscribers. It takes a special kind of person to pick up what I’m laying down. I’m offering long-form, very dense prose about abstract things, while also frontloading very unpopular concepts including communism. But the core of my readers who have found me have been amazing and very supportive, and I extremely appreciate and respect them. Thank you.
I do not know whether this petrocommunism piece will be a part of the book. I might do a sentient oil book and then a followup petrocommunism one. You’ll get both. You’ll get everything, forever, as long as I have your mailing address.